Keith Rankin, 31 August 2026 – Yesterday, RNZ played this episode of Context – Property Nation: NZ’s Housing Obsession, 27 August 2026. Contextis a podcast series in which well-known GenX audio-journalists Guyon Espiner and Corin Dann take a superficial historical journey on a topical social issue.

My first point here is that Espiner and Dann do what most commentators do; they conflate the urban real estate market (a land market) with the market for houses (a built market). The reason of course for this conflation is that both markets are substantially secondary markets – resale of developed land, resale of existing houses – in which houses and land are bundled together. It turns out that much of the history of housing is really a history of the financialisation of the land that houses sit on.

Good quality analysis will separate out the two components of this bundled retail market. But here I simply acknowledge that the dominant factor, historically, has been land prices. And I acknowledge the observation by Espiner and Dann that, as apartments feature more largely, that in itself is a matter of fundamental change in the economics of housing in New Zealand.

Having said this Espiner and Dann raised at least four further important points about what we may simply call the market.

First, that the market – especially in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city – is in a prolonged bear phase; it’s been a falling market for four years, since 2022. Espiner and Dann underplayed the fact that, except for about eight months in 2021 and 2022, the housing market has been static or falling since 2017; that’s nine years ago. This skewed emphasis on the mini-boom of 2021/22 over the much more prolonged boom of 2012 to 2016 reflects, I presume, the story that Corin Dann in particular wanted to tell. I will come back to this first point, in my conclusion.

Second, that the pattern of the market which we have become used to is one of alternating periods of boom and stasis. Thus, the naïve wisdom which even serious commentators believed was that, if you stay the course, you cannot lose money on housing; a ‘wisdom’ especially applied to the Auckland market. While Espiner and Dann never really explained that ‘bull’ reality or its ‘bear’ successor, they at least acknowledged both realities.

I say “naïve” in particular because academics in finance should know that, in the long run, the fundamental market value of houses/land is the yield (ie, in this case, the rental value) of the asset. The most fundamental part of the rental value is the capacity of would-be renters to pay. If renters cannot pay more rent, sooner or later the market must stall.

Finance academics know that, in the medium term, market prices can outrun fundamentals because market players focus on ‘returns’, not just yields. Returns exceed yields when the expectation of capital gain is built into players’ expectations. We continue to have some important parties – especially the Labour Party – who have built-in expectations of capital gains in a market for which, in most years since 2017, there have been minimal or negative capital gains.

There are good reasons, in fact, to believe that the present correction to fundamentals still has a way to go. Further, there are good socio-demographic and financial reasons to believe that the lack of capital gains in residential property is a new structural reality. Cohorts of younger people are smaller and poorer; and the financial world has moved on to other more esoteric assets which players can game. (In this last sense though, we may note that after the next great depression – ie after the next global financial reset, the last reset began in the mid-1940s – when the next long cycle begins, there may be a return to real estate as a favoured asset. After the Black Death of the 14th century, land became very cheap.)

Third, Espiner and Dann uncritically parroted the industry-cemented narrative that the last boom – the mini-boom of 2021/22 – was solely a product of loose monetary policy. They should know that most phenomena have more than one contributing cause; and that when there are multiple candidates for the attribution of guilt, one or more of those contenders may not be responsible at all. Pursuing the model of guilty until proven innocent – and contemplating the possibility of innocence – is what we traditionally associate with totalitarian systems of ‘justice’.

In terms of the 2021/22 event – which was both a brief bout of real estate inflation and a slightly less brief period of annual CPI inflation above three percent – there were other causes.

Re the property market, there was the expectation that, by about 2021 or 2022, the market was due for a new round of capital gains; that is, regardless of monetary policy. (In most decades going back at least to the 1970s, the property market took-off in the years ending in a ‘1’ or a ‘2’. This is because the cycle, as widely understood by players, was a ten-year cycle. The cycle would be at its flattest from years ending in a ‘7’ to years ending in a ‘0’. For specific reasons, the property cycle was late to restart in the 1990s, but it did restart in 1993. In the 1980s, I was a party to a house purchase in mid-1982. It was $60,000. In early 1988 the house, with just a few added improvements, sold for $180,000.)

In 2021, it was only Aucklanders who were quarantined in their city, from August to December; though all New Zealanders were effectively detained in their country. And non-Aucklanders, far from the scourge of the Delta strain of the virus, were subjected to substantial pandemic policy overreach. There was a huge fear then that Covid19 mutations were escalating the pandemic, and that new money would be needed for New Zealand industry and the New Zealand government to invest in substantially-modified supply chains.

New Zealander households which had not faced income decreases – and there were many such households – had significantly fewer options about how to spend their incomes compared to in a normal year. There is no real evidence that a property boom in the second half of 2021 would not have happened if interest rates had been (say) two-percentage points higher.

Property bubbles are actually quite insensitive to interest rates. In the modern financial environment of floating and short-term mortgage interest rates, almost zero property investors in 1921/22 would have been expecting their interest rates to have stayed at their early-2021 lows. Players in the property market may be naïve; but not that naïve.

With appropriate hindsight, everything was in place for a new round of property inflation to commence in 2021, regardless of what the interest rates were at that particular point of time. Banks were flush, not only because of monetary policy. For a short while, they had few other customers they could profitably to lend to; their perception at that time was that business lending was more risky than property-market lending. And businesses, facing deep uncertainty, were cautious about taking on additional debt; the situation had the appearance of a balance-sheet recession, in which it is the role of government to become lead-borrower.

The real story about the 2021/22 property mini-bubble was not what started it, but what stopped it in its tracks. What happened was that, when the pandemic restrictions ended – pretty much all at once in January and February 2022 – banks quickly rediscovered their business customers; and saw that most were not insolvent. The pivot in the flows of money was determined by the changed state of the pandemic, not the interest rates which in New Zealand had been prematurely raised. Economic growth rebounded sharply in 2022, despite cost-inflation arising from both from the Ukraine-Russia War and from interest rate escalation. CPI inflation soon dropped, as interest rates also dropped. (Compare New Zealand’s recent CPI inflation with countries which kept their interest rates high.)

Fourth, Espiner and Dann mentioned that the property boom of the late-2000s happened despite rising interest rates. (Regrettably, they did not consider the possibility that the property bubble happened, at least in part, because of rising interest rates.) They did not dig deeper into this issue. Just as President Trump only seems to remember what the last foreign head-of-state or technocrat told him, Espiner and Dann used 2021/22 as a sample-of-one to form the basis for a much-repeated generalisation about a simple causal relationship from monetary policy to housing-market outcomes. The earlier examples were presented as contextual candy floss.

Consider the 2010s. Interest rates were low for New Zealand in the early 2010s, but high by international standards. The New Zealand Dollar exchange rate was overvalued, and the New Zealand economy was slow to recover despite improving terms of trade. Money moved into the property market after 2010 because punters thought it was time for a revival of that market and because banks still considered other forms of lending to be riskier.

Once underway, the market gained its usual momentum. The rise in interest rates in 2024 – at a time when European interest rates were falling to zero or less – failed to cool the property market, and also slowed down the economic recovery. Interest rates were lowered again in 2015, back to 2013 levels (OCR of 2.5%). In 2016 they were further lowered. It was really only in 2017 that the economy – with Steven Joyce as Finance Minister – that the economic cycle moved into a new expansionary phase. Interest rates continued to fall, bringing the OCR to just 1% in late 2019.

The historically low and falling interest rates from 2016 both revived the New Zealand economy and stemmed (ie not invigorated) that decade’s real estate bubble. CPI inflation remained at the lower end of the target band of one-to-three percent. In late 2019, the New Zealand economy had moved into its sweet spot of low interest rates, a stable (though still overpriced) property market, and low annualised rates of price increases. Low interest rates put an end to the property bubble by diverting money away from the property market and reviving the economy.

While theoretically low interest rates stimulate all types of borrowing from banks, in reality they mostly stimulate business borrowing and have least impact on real estate borrowing. Money is most pumped into real estate when interest rates are high, because banks are then less interested in other forms of lending, and because (in our world of flexible and short-term mortgage lending) real estate punters expect that interest rates will soon fall; property punters are interested in expected interest rates over the life of a mortgage, not just the interest rate on the commencement date.

Consider the 2000s. The New Zealand property market turned upwards in 2001/02, on cue, at a time of geofinancial and geopolitical turmoil. Interest rates were briefly ‘low’ after the 911 attacks (the OCR dropped to 4.75%!). By mid-2002, the OCR was back to 5.75%; that’s when the property bubble really got going. Following a brief fall to 5% in 2003, the OCR was steadily pushed up to 8.25% in the first half of 2008! As noted by Espiner and Dann.

In the years from 2004 to 2008, New Zealand’s tradeable economy tanked despite an improving terms of trade, the NZD was increasingly overvalued, and bank money was increasingly channelled into the property market because it had fewer other places to go. Much of this was New Zealand’s version of sub-prime mortgages, injected into the top end of the property market through finance companies such as Hanover. Almost all of those kinds of finance company crashed from 2006 to 2008, in what remains New Zealand’s greatest untold – or at least under-told – financial scandal. It was the high interest rates, and the ensuing increased concentration of money in property, which fuelled that devastating property boom.

Espiner and Dann presumed that that property cycle happened despite high interest rates; no, it was because of high interest rates.

The 2000s’ property boom was followed in New Zealand by only a mini-bust; conditions remained more conducive to money being fed into property than to ordinary businesses.

In the 1990s there was a sharp property boom confined to the mid-1990s. It started late in the wake of the economic devastation of 1991 and 1992. And it finished prematurely with the Asian Financial crisis of 1997 bringing interest and exchange rates down, soon reviving the real economy while disinflating the property market.

In the 1980s, the property market boomed on cue in 1981, at a time when CPI inflation was approaching 20%, meaning that properties were looking very cheap, and when interest rates – well below the inflation rate during a global economic crisis – pointed the way to reinvigorate the property market. After a pause in 1982 (when I bought that $60,000 house in Wellington) that market really ramped up in the mid-1980s, after the full introduction of Rogernomics in 1985; a package of financial deregulation, very high mortgage and other interest rates (like 20%), and a rising exchange rate making New Zealand an emporium of imports. The markets stabilised after the crash of late 1987 and early 1988, but neither the did economy nor the did the property market recover until election-year 1993.

Possibly the biggest property boom in New Zealand’s history happened in 1972 and 1973, with the big ‘favourable’ spike in the terms of trade and the revaluation of the New Zealand dollar, creating new previously unheard of opportunities to consume imports and to travel overseas. I was lucky in that I embarked upon my OE in 1974, when despite the crashing British financial markets, my New Zealand dollars were uniquely valuable on the world’s foreign exchange markets (and I put my money into US dollars and Swiss Francs rather than British pounds). The New Zealand property market had a longer than usual slump in the late 1970s, not because of New Zealand monetary policy, but because of a mix of world events and the rapidity of the 1972 and 1973 property boom.

Conclusion

New Zealand property market booms have never been driven by low interest rates compelling people to buy real estate. Rather, loanable funds have gone into real estate in large amounts when there was a lack of other compelling destinations for those funds; and when governments were reluctant borrowers despite a huge availability of loanable funds at favourable interest rates.

Our commentators Guyon Espiner and Corin Dann were good to make a number of important observations about New Zealand’s property past. But they made no real attempt to join the dots, to question the narratives they have repeatedly heard, or to understand the actual relationship between banking and real estate.

Coming back to Espiner and Dann’s central narrative about the housing market and monetary policy – a narrative which emphasised the 2021/22 mini-boom and subsequent reversion to stagnation or bust – the Reserve Bank must make new money available when it is likely to be needed. The Bank can ‘take horses to water – or water to the horses – but cannot make them drink’; if the money doesn’t get consumed by the horses which need it, it is more the unhydrated horses’ fault, not the Bank’s. In this case, the horses were the government – which could have borrowed the new money, not spending it all straight away – or the many businesses which were not yet in a position to recommence large-scale borrowing.

The New Zealand Reserve Bank did not make a huge mistake in 2021. It did what it had to do in an economic environment clouded in uncertainty. Yes, property borrowers got the money first; but the problem was that other parties were too slow to respond to the market signals being conveyed by the Bank.

It’s a convenient story for pundits today to attribute all our economic woes to the alleged Reserve Bank’s mistakes during the Delta-strain height of the Covid19 pandemic. That story of piling into the then Bank does no credit to today’s uncritical commentators, and perpetuates the problem of economic policy today being founded on a mix of historical unawareness and myths derived only from the very recent past.

About the writer:

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Vanuatu Daily Post

The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) should revisit a proposal for an independent regional delegation to visit West Papua and assess reported human rights concerns, says Vanuatu Special Envoy on Decolonisation and Maritime Boundaries Delimitation Joe Natuman.

With the 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting (PIFLM) opening today, Natuman said Pacific leaders would have an opportunity to reconsider the issue and determine how the region could respond to continuing concerns about human rights and the wellbeing of the people of West Papua.

Natuman, a former prime minister, said the Forum had previously proposed sending a delegation to West Papua to assess the human rights situation directly.

• READ MORE: Solomon Islands PM Wale rushes home from Palau after confidence challenge launched
• Other PIF reports

However, he said the Forum had written to the Indonesian government regarding the proposed visit but had not received a response.

Natuman said direct access remained important if Pacific leaders were to develop a clearer understanding of the situation and consider reports of human rights concerns raised at regional and international levels.

The proposed visit could provide a fact-finding mechanism for Pacific countries, allowing representatives to engage with relevant stakeholders and assess conditions before reporting their findings to the Forum.

Natuman said the issue also extended to the participation of West Papuan representatives in regional and international forums, where he claimed their involvement had faced obstacles.

Similar challenges
He pointed to similar challenges within the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) and said there would be no West Papuan delegation attending the upcoming PIF.

Natuman also referred to discussions surrounding West Papua at United Nations human rights mechanisms in Geneva, arguing that Indonesia’s position within international institutions had presented additional challenges for those seeking greater access to the territory.

With the Forum meeting in Palau, Natuman said Pacific leaders should reconsider West Papua.

Republished from the Vanuatu Daily Post with permission.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/31/vanuatu-special-envoy-calls-for-pif-to-reopen-issue-of-pacific-to-access-west-papua/

A Gold Coast woman has given birth to twins who aren’t genetically related to each other, after becoming pregnant with a surrogate couple’s embryo and her own biological baby at the same time.

This has produced one of the rarest outcomes in reproductive medicine, the first in Australia and only the third reported worldwide.

Queensland law forbids twins being separated. So the case, ruled on by the Children’s Court of Queensland, has forced the courts to confront a scenario the state’s surrogacy laws were never written to accommodate.

What happened

The surrogate, a 27-year-old woman, already a mother of five, had agreed to carry a baby for a commissioning couple. The intended mother was born without a uterus and could not carry a pregnancy.

The couple entered an altruistic surrogacy arrangement after connecting with the potential surrogate through a mutual friend and on social media. The commissioning couple’s embryo was transferred to the surrogate through fertility treatment.

Later that same month, an ultrasound delivered a surprise: she was carrying twins. She subsequently delivered a boy and a girl by caesarean section.

DNA testing during early pregnancy revealed the baby girl was the biological daughter of the commissioning couple, while the boy was the biological child of the surrogate and her husband.

At the same time as undergoing the embryo transfer, the surrogate had also conceived naturally with her partner. The result was a single pregnancy carrying two babies from two entirely separate families.

Since the birth in November, each couple has been raising their own biological child, and there is no dispute between them over parentage.

How is this possible?

Let’s look at how twins ordinarily arise. In natural conception, there are two kinds:

• identical (monozygotic) twins occur when a single embryo splits after fertilisation into two separate embryos. Because they come from one egg and one sperm, they are genetically the same and are therefore always the same sex.

• fraternal (dizygotic) twins occur when two separate eggs are released during ovulation and fertilised by two different sperm in the same cycle. Genetically they are no more alike than any other siblings, and they may be the same sex or different sexes.

Read more:
Curious Kids: why are some twins identical and some not?

Rarer still is a phenomenon called superfecundation, in which two eggs released in the same cycle are fertilised during separate acts of intercourse — sometimes involving two different fathers. This phenomenon is called heteropaternal superfecundation. The resulting twins are fraternal, but with genetically distinct paternal origins.

The Queensland case is a striking variation on this theme: not two fathers through intercourse, but one pregnancy combining an IVF embryo transfer and a natural conception in the same ovulation window.

How surrogacy can produce twins

In IVF surrogacy, an embryo is created from an egg and sperm of the commissioning couple. It’s grown in the laboratory to around day five and typically frozen before being transferred into the surrogate’s uterus sometime later.

Clinics use various techniques to encourage the embryo to implant. One is to time the transfer to the surrogate’s natural ovulation. The aim is to “persuade” the surrogate’s body that the embryo is the product of a natural cycle, improving the odds of a successful pregnancy.

But timing the transfer to natural ovulation carries an obvious risk. Because the surrogate is genuinely fertile at that moment, a natural pregnancy is entirely possible. Surrogates are usually advised to avoid intercourse around the time of ovulation and embryo transfer.

In this case, both an IVF embryo and a naturally conceived embryo took hold, producing a twin pregnancy in which the two babies were biologically unrelated.

The ethical and legal implications

The rarity of the situation collided directly with Queensland law. The state’s surrogacy legislation is designed to prevent the separation of “birth siblings” where a surrogacy results in multiple births.

This protection is intended to stop twins being split up. But this would have blocked the two families from raising their respective biological children apart.

Judge Jodie Wooldridge KC resolved the tension by finding the twins were not “birth siblings” as defined in section 24 of the Surrogacy Act.

Because the two children were conceived separately and were not genetically related, they were not the product of the same pregnancy in the sense the law intended. So the provision preventing separation did not apply.

That finding formalised each biological couple’s parentage and allowed the children to be raised by their respective families.

The children’s best interests remained the paramount consideration. An independent counsellor who assessed both families concluded that separation from birth was unlikely to cause psychological harm on its own. Rather, their outcomes would depend far more on the quality of caregiving and openness about the children’s origins.

By this point, the families had an established relationship, and each couple hoped the children would grow up aware of each other and their rather unorthodox connection.

Alex Polyakov does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/31/twins-can-have-different-parents-how-is-that-possible-a-fertility-expert-explains/

The lethal H5N1 strain of avian influenza is rapidly spreading along the coast of southern Australia, where it has killed thousands of wild birds and infected at least two long-nosed fur seals.

So where will it travel next, and what damage might it inflict? Much is uncertain, especially because many of Australia’s animals and ecosystems are so unlike those in other parts of the world.

But monitoring is vital if we are to understand the magnitude of this H5N1 outbreak and protect our most vulnerable species, including the threatened Australian sea lion.

What may be coming

It’s difficult to know how Australia’s current H5N1 crisis will unfold. But we can make four predictions, based on existing knowledge.

Waterfowl will carry the virus inland

Infected waterfowl from coastal southern Australia – such as ducks, herons and swans – will soon carry H5N1 to inland wetland systems. The timing is terrible.

In coming months, the hot and dry conditions created by the El Niño climate pattern will cause those wetlands to shrink. This means vast numbers of waterfowl, already debilitated by scarce resources, will congregate at the few remaining water sources. Weak flow and high densities of dead and dying birds will turn this water into a virus-contaminated soup, leading to further losses.

Macquarie Island’s wildlife will suffer major losses

To date, the significant seabird, seal and king penguin colonies on Macquarie Island have escaped the virus. However, H5N1 has devastated similar colonies on many other subantarctic islands, such as Keguelon and Crozet Islands.

Macquarie’s luck will soon run out, leaving its densely packed colonies of penguins, seals and petrels extremely exposed. In response to this threat, the Australian government has evacuated researchers from the island to protect their physical and psychological health.

Shearwaters will be widely infected

Within a few weeks, vast flocks of shearwaters will return from their global migration to nest on islands off southern Australia, such as those in Bass Strait. Bird flu, likely carried by other seabirds, will await them there. Losses may be substantial.

Scavengers will carry the virus beyond the coast and wetlands

Foxes, roaming cats, mynahs and other scavenger animals will bring H5N1 to our cities. This will have far-reaching impacts on urban wildlife, such as magpies and possums, consistent with declines of urban species overseas.

Read more:
Bird flu decimated South America’s marine mammals. What can Australia do differently?

There is hope

However, it’s not all doom and gloom.

Bird flu has not yet caused extinction of any species elsewhere in the world. And after the initial outbreak, some affected species have started to recover – in some cases because survivors have stronger immunological responses. This should happen in Australia too.

What is critical now is assessing the conservation impacts of H5N1 on our wildlife.

Counts of dead birds tell us something about the flu’s spread and virulence. But while every death is saddening, corpse tallies alone don’t reflect conservation impact.

For example, thousands of greater crested terns have been killed by H5N1, but these deaths represent a fraction of the global population, estimated to number between 150,000 and 1.1 million. In contrast, there are only about 3,000 Christmas Island frigatebirds in existence, so any losses would be disastrous for that population.

What’s more, counts of deaths can be unreliable as many corpses may never be discovered. Instead, governments should focus on the proportion of a species’ total population that is killed by bird flu. This will allow us to assess the conservation consequences and, over time, the extent of recovery.

Assessing impact is not always straightforward

However, population-level impacts may be challenging to assess.

We have good estimates of population sizes for only a few Australian animal species. Fortunately, this includes some species that are most vulnerable to H5N1, including colonial-breeding seabirds and seals.

Without this data, monitoring can be used to estimate population density at a series of sampled sites or the incidence of certain bird species. Some current monitoring programs, such as the long-running aerial survey of waterfowl across eastern Australia, could provide critical data about the impacts of bird flu.

Interpreting monitoring data can also be complex. In inland Australia, the numbers of many species bounce around, particularly when the weather fluctuates between being wet or dry. With this statistical “noise”, identifying any population declines caused by bird flu is difficult.

There are biases and gaps in monitoring data. Most native mammals are not monitored, so we may have no idea how many die from H5N1. Losses in birds found in remote areas, such as the Heard Island black-faced sheathbill, are also likely to be missed due to lack of regular monitoring.

Read more:
First bird flu death in an Australian mainland mammal is a grim milestone. We know how bad this can get

Where to from here

To understand the nuanced impacts of H5N1 bird flu, monitoring should assess the effectiveness of management actions, changes in breeding success and levels of immunity, mutations and the virulence of the virus itself.

It should also investigate survival rates of infected individuals, the broader environmental risks of losing large numbers of key species and the extent of recovery. Recovery may be harder and take longer for species that have low breeding output and take many years to mature, such as albatrosses.

Without effective monitoring, we will not grasp the true magnitude or significance of the current H5N1 outbreak. It’s what we need to both target emergency responses to the most affected species and measure the extent to which our actions are actually helping.

Read more:
Australia’s bird flu response: too little, but it’s not too late

John Woinarski is an Adjunct Professor at Charles Darwin University. He is also a Director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, co-chair of the IUCN Australasian Marsupials and Monotremes Species Specialist Group. He contributed to the Australian government’s bird flu risk assessment for mammals..

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/31/what-happens-next-with-bird-flu-an-expert-explains-why-monitoring-matters/

Asia Pacific Report

A national pro-Palestine advocacy group has criticised the “absence of signature” by the New Zealand government on a 22-member joint statement condemning the E1 Israeli settlement in the Occupied West Bank as a “moral collapse” in foreign policy.

The recent joint statement was issued by the foreign ministers of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the European Commission.

The statement condemned the decision by the Israeli Higher Planning Committee to approve plans for settlement construction in the E1 area, East of Jerusalem, as “unacceptable and a violation of international law”.

• READ MORE: NZ left parties condemn Luxon govt on lack of humanity, ‘complicity’ over Gaza genocide
• Palestinians, UK condemn Israel’s ‘destructive’ E1 settlement plan
• PM Christopher Luxon condemns Israel’s E1 settlement plan
• Other Palestine reports

The E1 settlement would divide the Occupied West Bank into two regions — northern and southern — and seriously damage the prospect of a Palestine state.

However, the status of New Zealand’s position on the joint protest was confusing with an Australian government statement not listing New Zealand while the UK version did.

RNZ National reports that Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had condemned Israel’s E1 settlement plan in spite of New Zealand “not signing a joint statement”.

Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) spokesperson Rinad Tamimi condemned the New Zealand’s government’s “absence from the statement” in the context of the specific citing of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, describing the settlements as a “flagrant breach of international law.”

“The Key/English National Party government co-sponsored this resolution at the UN Security Council in 2016,” she said in a statement.

Israel’s E1 Settlement Plan Sparks International Condemnation   Video: Al Jazeera

“But the Luxon National Party, even after the genocide in Gaza in the past three years, can’t even bother to put its name to this recent condemnation,” Tamimi said.

Israel’s ‘favourable note’ on NZ
“In the nuanced world of international diplomacy, Israel will be taking favourable note of New Zealand’s slide into not caring what atrocities Israel is committing.

“Without taking any other action, Foreign Minister Winston Peters has always made of point of saying he often ‘made his concerns known’ to Israel. Now he’s even given up on that.”

Tamimi also criticised the lack of specific policies by New Zealand’s political parties to support Palestine in their election manifestos.

However, Te Pāti Māori publicly presented a strong 10-point pro-Palestine policy platform by co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer at a PSNA “make genocide an election issue” rally in Auckland on Saturday. Labour Party and Green Party spokespeople also made key statements over Palestine at the rally.

Tamimi said Israel’s genocide in Gaza was the worst atrocity of the 21st century.

“While there is meant to be a functioning ceasefire, the latest news from Gaza is that Israel has reoccupied more than 70 percent of Gaza, Israeli forces have resumed their assault because children in Gaza were flying kites,” she said in the statement.

“And on the Occupied West Bank Israeli settlers are openly beating up foreign network journalists with impunity.”

Practical, significant leverage
She said New Zealand had practical and significant symbolic leverage against Israel which it had “deliberately decided not to use”.

“As you would expect, all three coalition parties, pretend there is no such thing as foreign policy.”

“Labour, Greens and Te Pāti Māori have expressed support for Palestine, including imposing sanctions.

“But they need to clearly state what type and level of sanctions. Even the present government can say its immigration bans on West Bank terrorist settlers constitutes a sanction.

Tamimi said it was just “election rhetoric”, without announcing specific and meaningful sanctions in all areas — trade, investment, diplomatic, military and immigration.

“Without sanctions, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the Greater Israel project, are all still licensed for Israel to action,” she said.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/psna-slams-nzs-uncaring-lack-of-signature-on-global-israeli-settlements-censure/

Both the Newspoll and Redbridge polls were entirely conducted before Saturday’s Western Australian Secret Harbour byelection, in which One Nation had a big win over Labor. In Newspoll, the total vote for One Nation and the Coalition was up two points to 49%.

After an outlier-looking 53% for the combined right in its late July poll, Redbridge has the right at 50% in its latest poll.

Federal Newspoll

A national Newspoll, conducted August 24–28 from a sample of 1,243, gave One Nation 30% of the primary vote (up one since the previous Newspoll, three weeks ago), Labor 29% (steady), the Coalition 19% (up one), the Greens 13% (down one) and all Others 9% (down one).

No two-party estimate was published, but the gain for the right would mean Labor’s two-party vote against One Nation would drop.

Anthony Albanese’s net approval was up one point to -21 (59% dissatisfied, 38% satisfied), maintaining his streak of net approvals in Newspoll at or below -15 since late February. The graph below shows Albanese’s net approval in Newspoll with a smoothed line.

Angus Taylor’s net approval was down five points to -17 (50% dissatisfied, 33% satisfied). Pauline Hanson’s net approval was up two points to -1 (48% dissatisfied, 47% satisfied).

In the standard better PM question, Albanese led Taylor by 44–35 (44–37 previously). In a three-way forced choice question, Albanese had 46% (steady), Hanson 31% (steady) and Taylor 23% (steady). After preferences from Taylor’s voters, Albanese led Hanson by an unchanged 56–44.

On house prices in the respondent’s local area, 13% wanted them to increase by 15% in the next two years, 17% increase by 5%, 32% stay about the same, 13% decrease by 5% and 19% decrease by 15%, for a total of 32–30 favouring a decrease.

In the mid-August Resolve poll, respondents supported bringing house prices down by 60–10. However, this question asked about house prices in general, while Newspoll has asked about house prices in your local area.

Redbridge poll

The Poll Bludger reported that a national Redbridge and Accent Research poll for The Financial Review, conducted August 24–28 from a sample of 1,006, gave Labor 29% of the primary vote (steady since the late July Redbridge poll), One Nation 28% (down three), the Coalition 22% (steady), the Greens 12% (up two) and all Others 9% (up one).

By respondent preferences, Labor led One Nation by 52–48, a one-point gain for One Nation. The Coalition led Labor by an unchanged 52–48. But using 2025 election preference flows, Labor led the Coalition by 52–48, a two-point gain for Labor.

A greater share of Coalition and One Nation preferences assisting the other right-wing party probably explains why the respondent preferences figures are unchanged or worse for Labor even though the combined vote for One Nation and the Coalition was down three points.

In a three-way preferred PM question, Albanese had 31% (down one), Hanson 24% (steady) and Taylor 15% (steady).

NT Mulka byelection on September 12

A byelection in the Northern Territory local seat of Mulka will occur on September 12 after the mid-August resignation of independent member Yingiya Mark Guyula. Only two candidates are contesting: Labor’s Yiwarr McGrath and independent Andrew Blamey, with the governing Country Liberal Party (CLP) not contesting.

At the 2024 NT election, Guyula defeated the CLP by 75.2–24.8 with Labor not contesting. In 2020, he had defeated Labor by 55.1–44.9. Over 60% of Mulka’s population is Indigenous.

Adrian Beaumont does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/total-support-for-right-wing-parties-rises-in-newspoll-before-secret-harbour-byelection/

RNZ Pacific reporters

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale made an emergency trip back to Honiara on Sunday morning from Palau after a motion of no confidence was filed against him.

Wale was in Palau to attend the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting as its current chair.

He was suppose to hand over the chairmanship to Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr in Palau.

• READ MORE: Notable absences loom ahead of PIF leaders’ meeting in Palau
• Other PIF reports

Wale, 57, was elected prime minister of the country on May 15 and has been in office for just over 100 days.

The no-confidence motion against him over the weekend has been filed by East Malaita MP and Minister of Home Affairs Manasseh Maelanga. The Solomon Islands Parliament has confirmed it has received the notice.

Maelanga is accusing Wale of making unilateral decisions without proper consultation and without taking matters through cabinet.

“The motion follows concerns that the Prime Minister has repeatedly made decisions on matters of national importance without properly consulting Cabinet or obtaining its approval,” Maelanga said in the statement.

“I have taken this step with confidence in our democratic institutions and a firm commitment to stable, transparent and accountable government.”

Claims rejected
Maelanga has also rejected claims that the challenge against Wales leadership was intended to derail ongoing investigations.

The motion is the first major political challenge for Wale since coming to power.

He had only just landed in Palau when news of the no-confidence motion back home reached him.

When questioned at the airport by a Solomon Islands journalist on the matter, he said: “When I go, I will tell you more.”

He was gone the next day in the early hours of the morning.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister and Pacific Islands Forum chair Matthew Wale.

Other Solomon Islands officials who travelled with the prime minister to Palau were surprised to hear about the leadership challenge.

Local media have described the no-confidence motion against Wale as an “internal coalition revolt”.

“There appears to be a split within the GREAT Coalition. Few Ministers and MPs within the GREAT Coalition are likely to tender their resignations,” according to a report by Solomon Star.

Pacific security and geopolitics analyst Dr Anna Powles described the timing of the no-confidence motion as “deeply unfortunate”.

This story was first published on

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/solomon-island-pm-wale-rushes-home-from-palau-after-confidence-challenge-launched/

The poet Dylan Thomas famously wrote, “old age should burn and rave at close of day” – and a high-profile cohort of professional athletes seems to be taking him literally.

Samoan-New Zealand rugby great Ma’a Nonu (44) recently fronted for South African provincial team the Sharks against his old side, the All Blacks, to plaudits from fans of both teams.

Lebron James (41) remains a force in the United States National Basketball Association, averaging 20.9 points per game and 7.2 assists in his 23rd season.

Courtney Dauwalter (41) won the gruelling 2026 Hardrock Hundred Mile Endurance Run, adding to her trove of ultra-distance successes. Japanese footballer Kazuyoshi Miura (59) continues to inspire in his 42nd professional season.

A relative junior, Argentina’s legendary Lionel Messi played in this year’s FIFA World Cup final aged 39. Portuguese superstar Christiano Ronaldo was 41 at the tournament – twice the age of world football’s emerging stars.

Of course, these are exceptions to the rule. They are genetically gifted, highly trained, arguably fortunate to have avoided career-limiting injuries, and have access to world-class physiotherapists, nutritionists and coaches.

Indeed, athletes over 40 remain outliers in professional sport. Many spend fewer than five years at the top, often experiencing injury as they reluctantly transition out.

But that is not to say we can’t learn from these legends. Importantly, they share with the rest of us a common underlying physiology and the capacity to adapt significantly to training.

They demonstrate the process of normal ageing does not have to be associated with major losses in fitness or strength.

Ageing doesn’t mean decline and disengagement

Around the developed world, population levels of inactivity in middle and later life are high, approaching 40% in many regions.

For those who do remain active, health is a major motivation – with good reason. The leading causes of death, heart disease and stroke, are strongly influenced by modifiable lifestyle factors, including inactivity.

Dementia also shares vascular risks with other leading killers, suggesting a dual role for exercise in sustaining physical and cognitive health.

Inactivity reduces quality of life because of its adverse impact on metabolism, frailty, muscle loss, and depression.

Encouragingly, however, inactivity is not a symptom of age-related declines in fitness, it is a root cause.

The human body retains a remarkable capacity to adapt as we age. Research suggests older adults can make major improvements in cardio-respiratory fitness and strength, with meaningful adaptations continuing beyond 70 years of age.

You’re never too old to use it

Age-related change is often treated as a one-way decline. In reality, regular training can preserve function and, in many cases, significantly improve it.

This remains true even for people who begin exercise later in life. Age simply changes the starting point. The ability to respond to appropriate training stimulus is still there.

We may not all dunk like Lebron, bound over rocks like Courtney or attack like Nonu. But older athletes provide striking examples of what remains possible on the other side of the proverbial hill.

Consider the sub-15-second 100-metre sprint world record of over-80 men’s champion Kenton Brown from the US, or the sub-seven-minute mile of over-75 women’s world record holder Sarah Roberts from the United Kingdom.

New Zealand’s Chunli Li won the women’s table tennis gold at the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games aged 40. Following nearly a decade of retirement, she returned to compete at the 2014 Glasgow games aged 52.

Again, these examples are exceptional. But they remind us the ceiling for older bodies is much higher than we might assume.

No need for extremes

Evidence suggests the number of middle-aged and older adults taking part in serious sport and recreational endeavours is increasing, particularly in endurance events

For most people over 40, though, the goal is not an elite career, but to maintain fitness, strength, and to preserve the independence that makes life worth living.

That could mean completing a local park run, hiking a trail with family, returning to social football, playing with grandchildren or simply carrying groceries without pain or falling.

Aerobic exercise, resistance training and regular movement can all produce meaningful benefits. The most useful programme is usually not the most extreme, it’s the one that can be sustained and built on.

People who have underlying health conditions should seek appropriate medical advice before beginning a new exercise programme.

But the alternative also carries risks. As Swedish exercise physiologist Per Olaf Astrand would have put it, we might be equally well advised to seek a doctor’s opinion before committing to prolonged inactivity.

Next time you are watching Ma’a Nonu, LeBron James, Courteney Dauwalter or another veteran athlete and wondering how they’re still doing it, remember not to compare their performance and yours.

The better comparison is between what your body can do today and what you are capable of tomorrow. To return to Dylan Thomas, never squander an opportunity to “rage against the dying of the light”.

Richard Keith Wright is affiliated with Sporting Memories Aotearoa New Zealand.

Hoani Smith and Mike Annear do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/we-cant-all-be-like-lebron-james-at-41-but-these-athletes-still-have-lots-to-teach-us-about-active-ageing/

The way Australians consume news has been changing for the past 30 years, ever since internet use became widespread.

Long gone are the days when families routinely shared bits of the newspaper over breakfast, or crowded around the 6 o’clock television news at night.

Since 2017, we have been tracking young people’s media engagement, to understand how they get their news.

This time, we found some young people are bypassing traditional outlets, reducing their use of social media sources and getting their news from artificial intelligence (AI) summaries using platforms such as Google search and tools like ChatGPT.

Are young people interested in the news?

Every three years, we ask at least 1,000 children and teens to complete our online survey. We use quotas for age, location, gender and parental education level to ensure respondents reflect the diversity of today’s young Australians.

Our 2026 survey results show a significant shift in young people’s news engagement, with an overall decline for young people aged 10–16 years*.

Across nearly every indicator, young people are less engaged with news than they were in our previous survey in 2023.

Young people who report following up on news after hearing about something happening in the world fell from 70% to 59%. Those following social media accounts for news fell from 41% to 29%. Checking news websites or apps is down from 38% to 33%.

Where do young people get their news?

Across the four surveys since 2017, family has always been the most common and trusted source of news for both children and teenagers.

But as children move into their teenage years, they also turn to other sources.

Social media has become a common source of news for young people since our first survey, rising from 53% in 2017 to 61% in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic.

But this trend has since reversed, falling to 41% in 2026. The latest decline is likely to be linked in part to the social media ban. This became law in December 2025, two months before our survey was in the field.

AI as a news source is new

In the latest survey, for the first time we asked young people about their use of AI to get news.

Already, 28% of children aged 10–12 report they are using an AI tool to ask about news often or sometimes, rising to 41% among teens aged 13–17.

This could be via AI summaries of the news (which are hard to avoid on Google) or by asking AI tools a question. For example, by typing in “what happened in Nepal?”.

This makes Al tools the second most common way young people proactively seek out news. It is also level with news websites or apps and ahead of social media, TV and radio.

This widespread use of AI to get news raises questions about whether young people are being prepared in school for this kind of news engagement, particularly when we know AI can sometimes be wrong or biased.

What’s happening in schools?

Encouragingly, more than half (61%) of young people discussed a news story in school in the past year often or sometimes. However, only around a quarter (26%) learned how to write or produce their own news stories.

Through the process of making their own news stories, students can learn about key elements of high-quality news: fact-checking, fair representation and the right of reply.

Students can also learn how the news can intersect with their own interests and how they can have a voice in their communities.

Decades of research tells us news engagement and civic engagement are closely entwined: when people feel informed about social issues and events, they are more likely to respond and take action.

Our survey findings reflect this. For example, 80% of young people who are highly engaged with news report working with others to address local problems, compared with only 43% of those who have low engagement with news. They are also much more likely to become involved in a cause and volunteer.

Why this matters

Children and young people have as much right to be informed about their communities and societies as anyone else. It’s also important for our democracy that young people’s voices are heard by adults on the issues that impact them.

To address this, families can support discussion of news in the home, and news providers can increase the representation of young people in the news.

Meanwhile, schools can draw attention to the importance of news and provide opportunities for young people to engage with and produce their own news. Schools can also support discussions about the benefits and risks around different forms of news, including news that is generated by AI.

*Previous surveys included young people aged 8–16 while the 2026 survey includes those aged 10–17. When comparing results across surveys we only include those aged 10–16. In all other cases we included data for those aged 10–17.

Sora Park and Simon Chambers were coauthors of the report mentioned in this article.

Tanya Notley currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council, ABC Education and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts. She is a member of the Australian Media Literacy Alliance.

Jee Young Lee receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Creative Australia, and the Department of Infrastructure, Transportation, Regional Development, Communications, Sport & the Arts.

Michael Dezuanni currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council, ABC Education and the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts. He is chair of the Australian Media Literacy Alliance.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/41-of-surveyed-australian-teens-now-get-their-news-from-ai-new-research/

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is in Palau’s capital Koror this week for the annual Pacific Islands Forum, and regional security is expected to top the agenda.

China is testing nuclear-capable missiles in the Pacific, prompting talk of a new regional agreement. The United States-Iran war has exposed a reliance on costly fossil fuels that is undermining Pacific economies.

And as the world comes perilously close to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature goal, a record-breaking El Nino looms in the Pacific Ocean.

But the forum will be missing key leaders – Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale made a shock departure, flying out of Palau just hours after arriving, in order to deal with a looming leadership challenge back home.

And Kiribati President Taneti Maamau, Samoan Prime Minister Laʻauli Leuatea Schmidt, and Vanuatu’s Prime Minister, Jotham Napat, are also not attending. It is unclear if Fiji’s Prime Minister, Sitiveni Rabuka, will be present.

Pacific nations will want Albanese to address the world’s key security threat – climate change. As co-president of the COP31 climate talks in November, Australia can work with the Pacific to keep 1.5°C within reach, and secure much-needed finance for island nations at the climate frontline.

China’s missile test

Since the second world war, the United States has maintained fortified bases in the Pacific and an unrivalled deep-water navy (the US also regularly tests long-range missiles in the region). However, China’s investment in military capabilities has challenged the status quo.

In July, China launched a nuclear-capable test missile that flew over multiple Pacific nations and hit waters close to Tuvalu’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

This sparked calls for a new regional security agreement: Solomon Islands Prime Minister Matthew Wale said China’s missile test was “not the act of a friend”.

Ironically, it was Solomons Islands that signed a security deal with China in 2022. This changed the security dynamics of a region long aligned with the US and Australia (notwithstanding concerns about nuclear testing and decolonisation).

Since then, Canberra has pursued a web of bilateral deals to shore up Australia’s place as Pacific security partner – first with Tuvalu (2023), then Naoero (formerly Nauru) (2024), Papua New Guinea (2025) and Vanuatu (2026). Discussions are ongoing with Tonga and Solomon Islands. The most recent agreement, an “Ocean of Peace Alliance” signed with Fiji in July, is a mutual defence pact that is open to other Pacific nations to join.

Canberra was already pursuing a treaty allowing for coordinated regional responses to disasters and other crises. China’s missile test may have opened the door for something more.

Renewables the solution to fuel crisis

The Middle East conflict has pushed the Pacific toward an energy crisis. Around 80% of the region’s energy relies on imported oil products, much of which would normally transit the Strait of Hormuz. Even before the US-Iran war, Pacific island countries spent an eye watering percentage of GDP (between 10-25% buying fossil fuels to run power plants, generators, boats and vehicles. This compares to a regional average of 8% spent on education and 6% on health.

The Middle East conflict has only added to the bill. According to a new report, Fiji’s annual refined fuel import costs could rise by US$375 million (A$520 million) if high oil prices persist. This is more than Fiji’s entire healthcare budget.

Renewable energy offers a clear solution. Replacing diesel generators with grid-scale solar and battery storage could save Pacific countries around US$700 million (A$520 million) each year in avoided fuel costs.

The incoming chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, Palau president Surangel Whipps Jr, wants the region to become the first in the world 100% powered by renewables. He says investment of US$120 million (A$ 166 million) is needed for Palau to add 60MW of solar and battery storage, which would enable 90% of its power needs to be met by renewables.

Climate change remains greatest Pacific threat

When climate change was first debated at the UN Security Council in 2007, Pacific countries argued the impacts of a warming planet were “no less serious than those faced by nations and peoples threatened by guns and bombs”.

Since then, Pacific Islands Forum leaders have explicitly reaffirmed climate change is “the single greatest threat” to Pacific security.

In 2025, Earth was 1.44°C warmer than the long-term average. Pacific countries are reeling from stronger cyclones, dying reefs and ocean acidification. Without urgent action to shift away from coal, oil and gas impacts will get much worse. Just this week, the world’s oceans are the warmest on record, fueled by climate change and a rapidly intensifying El Niño event.

It is now almost certain the world will warm past 1.5°C. Yet it remains possible, following a temporary “overshoot”, that countries can limit warming to 1.5°C by the end of the century. This will require deep and immediate emissions reductions and some carbon dioxide removal to achieve “net-negative” emissions.

Limiting global warming to 1.5°C is a line in the sand for low-lying Pacific nations – “1.5 to stay alive” is the slogan. Pacific negotiators helped secure this temperature goal in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Pacific nations expect Australia, as co-president of COP31 climate talks in November, to reaffirm global commitment to 1.5°C. Australia is helping Fiji and Tuvalu host a pre-COP summit in October that will remind world leaders the survival of island nations is at stake.

Pacific countries will also seek new finance for a Pacific-owned climate fund to invest in community-scale adaptation projects.

Some argue collaboration with the Pacific in the lead-up to COP31 is an expensive exercise. But climate action is crucial to Australian strategy in the region. Investing in renewables and adaptation in the Pacific is an investment in shared security, even as geopolitical competition sharpens between China and the United States.

Wesley Morgan is a fellow with the Climate Council of Australia

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/sea-level-rise-fuel-shortages-and-missile-tests-top-the-agenda-as-albanese-heads-to-palau-for-pacific-talks/

Earlier this month, the federal government passed laws to encourage tech giants to pay Australian news businesses for journalism. This is known as the News Bargaining Incentive.

For companies earning A$250 million or more in annual Australian digital advertising revenue (likely to include Meta, Google and TikTok), the scheme imposes a 2.75% charge on this revenue. That’s unless they have entered into commercial agreements with Australian media, to fund them directly.

I’ve previously argued in The Conversation the proposed scheme looked remarkably like a “digital services tax” – precisely the kind of tax United States President Donald Trump has threatened to retaliate against.

I ended with a question: would Trump notice? We now have an answer.

In April, the Trump administration characterised Australia’s approach as “foreign extortion”. Even though the new laws do not explicitly single out any country, US technology companies and industry groups have also attacked the measure as discriminatory.

With some US Republicans recently calling for retaliation against “loser country” Australia, do their criticisms of this tax have any merit? And what could happen now these measures are law?

Read more:
New laws to make tech companies pay for news will help, but there are 4 key problems

Tax rules designed for a different world

To understand the US reaction, we need to go back to a basic rule of international taxation that is about a century old – the notion of “separate accounting”.

The idea is countries tax companies based on where they carry out the activities that generate their profits. Such activities could include developing technology, designing and manufacturing products, and marketing and distributing them.

By contrast, the fact that a company has customers or users in a country has traditionally given that country only limited rights to tax the company’s profits.

This made more sense when the rules were developed, but technology has since weakened that connection. A company can now provide online services, sell advertising and reach millions of Australians, while carrying out most of its business activities overseas with no physical “presence” in Australia.

The result is an increasingly uncomfortable mismatch. Australian customers and users can contribute significantly to the profits of a global tech company. Meanwhile, Australia may have only limited rights to tax those profits.

This is not a loophole created by tech companies. It is largely the result of international tax rules governments themselves agreed to, but which were designed for a very different economy.

A disagreement about fairness

Countries have spent years trying to deal with this mismatch. One popular response has been the digital services tax. This is used widely in the world, including some European Union member countries, the United Kingdom, and some Asian countries. It typically taxes some of the revenue large digital companies earn from a country’s market at 3-5%.

Australia’s News Bargaining Incentive is not called a digital services tax. Its stated purpose is to support Australian journalism. But it performs some of the economic work that a digital services tax would otherwise perform.

If the century-old international tax rules do not adequately recognise that contribution of Australian consumers and users, why shouldn’t Australia, as a sovereign country, find another way to charge companies that derive substantial revenue from its market?

But from the US perspective, the same story looks very different. Countries agreed long ago how the taxing rights would be split.

Yet governments all over the world, including Australia, are increasingly introducing new taxes and charges that take away revenue that digital giants, overwhelmingly US companies, would otherwise retain.

What does tax sovereignty actually mean?

In response to the US criticism, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said Australia is a “sovereign nation” and his government will make decisions based on the national interest.

But sovereignty in international taxation has never meant complete freedom. While it is true a country has the power to make and enforce its own tax and non-tax rules, these powers “may be only nominal”.

Australia, like other countries, has voluntarily accepted limits on its taxing powers through a network of tax treaties and international agreements.

More recently, it has adopted the OECD-led global minimum tax, which further constrains how countries can use their tax systems.

Tax sovereignty therefore does not mean Australia can impose whatever tax it wants. It means Australia retains the power to design its own tax system within the international commitments it has chosen to make.

An attempt at a workaround

Understanding this may help explain the design of the News Bargaining Incentive. It is structured as a “charge”, rather than a conventional tax on corporate profits, placing it outside many of the restrictions that apply to income taxes under Australia’s international tax treaties.

Australia may be within its rights to impose the News Bargaining Incentive, but that does not mean the US has to accept it quietly.

The Trump administration has already shown its willingness to use tariffs against foreign measures it considers discriminatory towards American companies.

Albanese is right that Australia is a sovereign nation. But sovereignty cuts both ways: Australia can pursue its national interests, while the US can use its economic power to defend its own.

The question is no longer whether the US government will notice. It is how far the US is prepared to go in response – and whether Australia will stand its ground.

Fei Gao does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/why-some-us-republicans-want-to-punish-australia-over-new-charges-for-tech-giants/

Public debate surrounding transgender and gender diverse (trans) people often centres on one fundamental question: what makes someone trans?

Most of us would agree that our gender is not a choice, but a core part of who we are. When our gender aligns with the sex listed on our birth certificate, it’s rarely ever questioned. Instead, it’s treated as a biological reality.

However, when it comes to trans people, an alternate explanation is frequently floated: that trans identities and gender diversity are the result of environmental influences, such as social trends or peer pressure.

This framing treats a trans identity as a choice that can – and, implicitly, should – be unlearned.

Such messaging is increasingly being used to deny the existence of trans people, restrict access to medically necessary health care, and fuel discrimination.

Our study of twins challenges this idea and shows the likelihood of being trans is influenced by your genes.

The power of twin studies

Twin studies are a powerful tool in research. Identical twins share 100% of their genes, whereas non-identical twins share 50% on average – the same as non-twin siblings.

By comparing these two types of twins, we can explore the extent to which genetics and the environment contribute to human traits.

If genes are involved, we expect identical twins to share traits (for example, both identifying as trans) more often than non-identical twins, simply due to their higher degree of genetic similarity.

Conversely, if genes aren’t involved, we expect to see similar rates of shared traits among identical and non-identical pairs.

Our research examined data from 463 twin pairs where at least one was trans – the most comprehensive analysis on this topic to date.

After determining whether twin pairs were identical or non-identical, we measured how often both twins were trans, compared to instances where only one was trans.

What we found

Our results showed that among identical twins, if one was trans, the likelihood that the other was also trans was 21.2%.

For non-identical twins, this rate was significantly lower, at 8.7% – though this was still well above the 1–2% prevalence of trans identities in the general population.

Non-twin siblings weren’t included in our research, but we’d expect their rate would be similar to that seen among non-identical twins.

If being trans were purely a social phenomenon, we would not see this step-wise difference where the chance of being trans goes up with increasing genetic similarity.

Our data thus provide strong evidence that genes are involved.

More than just genes

It’s also important to highlight another finding in our data – that most twin pairs, even among those who are identical, are not both trans.

This comes as no surprise to researchers who study twins, who have documented similar patterns for many other human traits.

Almost all human traits, such as personality characteristics, height, and sexuality, are shaped by both genetic and environmental factors.

It’s likely that gender identity is the same.

Interplay of genetics and the environment

Genes and the environment do not act independently, and the influence of genetics on any complex human trait does not stem from variations in a single gene.

Rather, hundreds or even thousands of genes work alongside and react to environmental influences to form an enormous range of human characteristics.

Environmental factors can affect the activity of our genes throughout the course of our lives. Such environmental influences encompass the full breadth of human experiences, all the way back to conception.

Both identical and non-identical twins share environmental experiences, especially within the womb and as children raised together in the same family.

But each twin also has unique experiences that contribute to their individual differences. So, it really is a complex interplay between genes and the environment.

Why this matters for public understanding

Many anti-trans arguments rely on a belief that gender diversity is entirely socially determined.

This myth is frequently weaponised to frame trans identities as optional or reversible. Too often, this becomes a justification for hostile public attitudes and for stripping basic legal protections from trans people.

The belief that being trans is purely a social phenomenon also provides a rationale for harmful identity change and suppression practices (also known as conversion therapy).

Every major Australian and United States medical association has condemned these practices.

However, a recent US Supreme Court case and other national and state policy developments in the US in particular are increasingly providing cover for those performing these harmful practices.

A complex and enduring human trait

Our findings provide a crucial correction to this harmful public discourse. They confirm that genes and their related biological pathways play a role in shaping gender identity.

Fears of trans identities being a social trend or response to peer pressure – and related shifts in policies to restrict trans people’s basic rights – are at odds with the scientific evidence.

Gender diversity has existed across millennia and is an inherent part of human diversity. It’s time law and society caught up.

Read more:
Critics claim gender clinics are seeing an excess of trans boys. But new data suggest otherwise

Ken Pang receives research funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Medical Research Future Fund. He is a member of the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and the editorial board of the journal, Transgender Health. He is also a member of the NHMRC Gender Guidelines Development Committee, and the views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the committee.

Anja Ravine is a member of the Australian Professional Association for Trans Health and the Human Genetics Society of Australasia.

Kellan Baker serves as the Senior Advisor for Health Policy at the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), an independent, nonprofit think tank in the United States. He has previously received research funding from the US National Human Genome Research Institute and is a member of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the US Professional Association for Transgender Health.

Will Conabere does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/critics-claim-trans-people-defy-biology-new-research-suggests-otherwise/

If you’ve ever ventured into the fitness corners of social media, you may have come across influencers peddling the ideal of a “Greek god” physique.

They may try and sell you supplements or programs to attain said ideal – or direct you to AI apps, like UMAX AI or Physiqmax, that purport to tell you whether or not you meet the standard.

Looking to ancient Greek sculptures as the paragon of fitness isn’t new. In fact, bodybuilding as we know it may well have been founded on this basis.

It’s ironic, then, that this pursuit has drifted so far from its original aspirations that even Eugen Sandow, the so-called father of modern bodybuilding, wouldn’t recognise it.

Would Sandow, and the prized marble figures sought to imitate, pass a “looksmaxxing” audit today?

The birth of bodybuilding

Strongman Eugen Sandow was born in Prussia (modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia) in 1867. While on a trip to Italy as a boy, he gazed at classical statues in Rome and decided to build his body to match.

He was also known to dust himself in white powder to mimic marble when he posed, thereby recreating himself as a classical sculpture on stage. Through emulating Grecian statues, he signalled an ancient ideal.

The most balanced is the most beautiful

The Greeks and Romans did admire physical beauty. For men, this usually meant an athletic physique, an attractive face and tall stature. For example, the Greek orator Dio Chrysostom (circa 40–110 CE) described athletes as “the tallest and most comely men”, whose “bodies receive the most perfect care”.

These ideals were also expressed in sculpture. One famous example is the Greek sculptor Polyclitus’ 5th century BCE statue of the Doryphoros, or Spear-Bearer.

This figure is muscular but not enormous: broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted and carefully proportioned. Its beauty comes from the balance between strength and restraint, tension and relaxation.

Polyclitus believed beauty could be created through correct proportions. In his lost treatise, the Canon, he argued the parts of the body should stand in harmonious relationship to one another, using mathematical proportions.

Greek and Roman sculptors repeatedly copied and adapted Polyclitus’ figures, helping make proportion, symmetry and controlled athleticism enduring features of the Western ideal of male beauty.

Two millennia later, Michelangelo’s David was carved in this tradition. David is lean and long-limbed. He looks like an athletic young man – not a competitor at the modern-day Mr Olympia.

When Sandow staged the world’s first major physique contest at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1901, entrants were assessed on their general development, symmetry, proportion, and even skin tone. But not on their sheer size.

Sandow also preached the importance of a physical culture available to any man. He espoused physical improvement in the Greek gymnasium tradition, with the body as evidence of one’s discipline and self-mastery.

Mass monsters

Would Sandow approve of bodybuilding today? It’s hard to imagine he would. Modern bodybuilding has blasted way past his Grecian ideal.

Throughout the mid-20th century, bodybuilding champions such as Steve Reeves continued to embody the classic look. Reeves inspired Arnold Schwarzenegger, and played the role of Hercules in the eponymous 1958 film.

Ideals of size and mass began to change in the 1930s with the arrival of synthetic testosterone, and in the 1950s with the rise of anabolic steroids in competitive use. These chemical developments remodelled what bodybuilding looked like as they became more widespread and accessible – and even normalised.

The golden-era physiques of the 1970s gave way to the “mass monsters” of the 1990s, fuelled by the addition of peptides such as human growth hormone and insulin. Competitors walked on stage at sizes no unassisted human could realistically reach.

The sport of bodybuilding eventually created a “classic physique” division in response to these changes, illustrating an underlying nostalgia for the aesthetic it had abandoned.

The manosphere’s unattainable standards

The final irony is cast in bronze: today, the Mr Olympia trophy is a statuette of Sandow himself. It is awarded to men whose bodies Sandow might not have recognised as the ideal at all, and who would perhaps consider Sandow’s physique unremarkable by today’s standards.

The physique many young men are now chasing (often at the cost of muscle dysmorphia and enhancement drug use) isn’t ancient at all. It’s barely a century old, and is increasingly pharmacological.

This same impulse is also leading young men to seek perfection in other areas, such as the face, with online looksmaxxing communities rating features like jaw shape, facial symmetry and “canthal tilt” (the angle of the eyes) against bogus numerical attractiveness scales.

Those wishing to pursue these modern notions of supposedly ancient ideals should remember the Greeks had a word for mere mortals who forgot their limits and tried to emulate the gods: hubris.

Timothy Piatkowski receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council.

Konstantine Panegyres and Samuel Cornell do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/would-michelangelos-david-pass-a-looksmaxxing-audit/

In 1951, Australia and the United States signed the ANZUS Treaty, declaring “publicly and formally their sense of unity, so that no potential aggressor could be under the illusion that any of them stand alone”.

Seventy-five years later, polling suggests Australians are no longer so confident in their sense of unity — but they still aren’t willing to stand alone.

The past 18 months have seen a new US administration castigate American allies for “freeloading” on US security guarantees, and being “very unhelpful” in the Iran war.

Australia has faced US criticism over issues ranging from Iran to beef imports. It was hit with an increased 12.5% tariff rate in July.

Yet our polling at the United States Studies Centre shows just 15% of Australians now believe Australia should withdraw from its alliance with the US.

Compare that to three years ago: in 2023, 37% of Australians said they would agree with ending the alliance if Donald Trump were re-elected for a second term as US president.

Our findings show Australians are increasingly willing to hold onto their US alliance as it marks its 75th anniversary, even after another year of uncertainty and discord. This suggests they feel practical alternatives to such an embedded security relationship remain elusive.

An unhappy marriage

Public opinion has seen huge shifts in confidence in the United States and trust in the security of the alliance since the start of Trump’s second presidential term.

Every year, the United States Studies Centre polls more than 1,000 people in each of the four countries making up the Quad partnership — Australia, the United States, Japan and India — on their views of the United States, alliances, and foreign policy.

This year, only 16% of Australians said Trump’s second term as US president has been good for Australia. Less than a third of Australians think the Australian government has properly explained why Australia even needs its alliance with the US.

Concern in all four countries about US domestic politics runs deep. Almost three-quarters of Australians, over 80% of Americans, and strong majorities of Japanese and Indian respondents now say they are concerned about the future of US democracy.

Where Australians were once convinced of their “sense of unity” with the US, they are now uncertain. In 2023, 55% of Australians said it was “very likely” the US would come to Australia’s aid if Australia were attacked by China. Now, just 29% feel so sure.

In 2024, Australians were twice as likely to see the US as helpful in Asia compared to China. Two years later, Australians now see China and the US as equally helpful in the region. Australians are also the only Quad public more likely to see China as an economic partner than a danger.

Views have stabilised

The biggest swings in public opinion occurred in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s re-election. But compared to 2025, polling in 2026 has largely stabilised, suggesting members of the Quad have now largely made up their minds on what the “new Golden Age of American greatness” means for them.

The number of people in Australia, Japan and India who say their country’s partnership with the United States makes their country more secure is statistically unchanged from last year. This is despite having dropped 14 points between 2024 and 2025 among Australians. It seems a year of geopolitical turmoil has not shifted the dial on this key question of alliance security.

Nevertheless, it is notable that less than half of Australians feel Australia’s most consequential security relationship makes Australia more secure — a 21-point drop from 2022, when two-thirds of Australians agreed.

For their part, Americans continue to believe alliances make the United States more secure. They are ten times more likely to say so about Australia and three times as likely to say so about NATO than not. A majority of both Republican and Democrat voters agree.

No Plan B

Despite their concerns, only 15% of Australians want to withdraw from the Australia-US alliance. Half of respondents say Australia needs its alliance with the US more than ever, and even that there are no circumstances in which Australia should end the alliance. Two-thirds of Australians agree the United States is an ally.

Australians are not opposed to exploring other security arrangements. Half a year on from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech in which he called for middle powers to “act together”, three in four Australians agree with strengthening security relationships with other middle powers.

But when considered against their evident hesitancy to walk away from the alliance, our polling suggests Australians see such proposals as a complement, if not an insurance policy, to the existing alliance with the United States, rather than as a wholesale replacement.

Samuel Garrett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/after-75-years-of-our-alliance-with-the-us-most-australians-still-cant-see-a-better-option/

For 30 years, the world wide web has run on a surprisingly profound social contract: most sites are free for search engines to access, but if you use their content you give credit by linking to the source.

Recently, that social contract has begun to collapse. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are crawling sites not to link to them, but to train models and generate answers (which may or may not be accurate).

When you search for something, ChatGPT’s response or Google’s AI Overviews may still include links to sources, but they’re a kind of optional extra to the main answer.

This has triggered a bad dynamic for website owners, the public, and even AI companies themselves: as websites lose traffic (and revenue), many are beginning to block AI scraping tools, meaning AI results depend more on low-quality websites (many of which are also generated by AI). As a result, good information can be harder than ever to find.

How we got here

In the early days of the world wide web, search engines and content creators came to an agreement about crawling (the practice of technologically examining a site to index it, so it can be served up in search results). Content creators would provide access to their sites for free, and even allow search engines to reproduce small snippets of text.

In return, search engines provided links to the sites owned by content creators, who benefited from that web traffic. If content creators didn’t like the deal, they could prevent search engines from crawling their site with instructions in a file called robots.txt.

But if AI tools no longer provide web traffic, it cuts content creators out of the economic loop. There are also other costs associated with each visit to a website, so AI crawling can cost website providers money while not giving them any of the ad or other revenue that would come from human traffic. AI crawlers also crawl more deeply and more intensely than traditional web crawlers, magnifying that cost.

This change in traffic patterns isn’t a small or hypothetical problem. Cloudflare, a web hosting and service company that manages 30% or more of the top 10,000 sites on the internet, estimates over half of all web traffic is now AI bots.

Some of this will be AI agents supervised directly by people, but the majority will be crawlers. Site owners can use robots.txt to ask AI crawlers to stay off their sites – but some AI companies may ignore this polite request.

If the AI companies do honour the request, that can create a different problem. Sites containing misinformation are far less likely to ban AI crawlers, so the AI answers won’t be informed by high-quality sources.

What’s happening in the short term

On the horizon is an event dubbed “Google Zero” – the day when through-traffic from Google drops to nothing. While some greyhaired diehards (like one of the authors of this piece) might still click through to verify AI answers, this traffic is rapidly dwindling, as a direct result of AI summaries.

A study of Wikipedia confirms this, showing that traffic in the English language version of the site dropped off quickly with the launch of AI summaries on Google in English, and that the same pattern occurred in other languages as AI summaries were rolled out. Never having to click through to get an answer might seem great for information seekers, but the reality is more complex.

Many sites are now blocking AI crawlers altogether. Site owners who decide to block AI crawlers are less likely to be linked in AI Overviews answers, even when the AI tool can still access the content to ground its answers (using a technique called retrieval-augmented generation).

Alternative “pay to crawl” models have been suggested as a way to compensate content creators, but haven’t gained traction.

Come September 15, Cloudflare sites will block AI crawlers by default on pages that contain advertising (and therefore make money for content creators).

This means up to 30% of the world’s top sites will no longer appear in Google AI Overviews summaries. It also means that much of what AI is being trained on will itself be AI-generated text.

What it means for you

So what does this mean when you’re looking for information? The quality of AI summaries is likely to go down, at least in the short term, while the new economics of the web get sorted out.

This will happen for two reasons. The first is that high-quality content is less likely to go into those AI summaries – one recent study found that already, around 1 in 6 sources used by AI search tools is itself an AI-generated website.

The second reason is that, as AI models are trained on more AI text, their output may degrade (a phenomenon known as model collapse).

As a result, search engines that depend less on AI may become more reliable. The challenge is finding one that doesn’t use an AI-based crawler. They do exist: ZDNet recommends Mojeek, PCMag recommends Brave, and Ban the Bots lists several, including one specifically for “small producer” content such as blogs.

For now, whatever search engine you’re using, the best thing you can do is to scroll down and click on some actual search results. This benefits content creators, and is also more likely to give you more accurate information.

Dana McKay has received funding from the Australian Research Council, and from Google.

Damiano Spina has received funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC). He is an Associate Investigator of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), a Member of the Australian Internet Observatory (AIO), and a Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM),

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/08/30/ai-is-eating-website-traffic-websites-are-blocking-ai-and-reliable-information-is-getting-harder-to-find/