Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yvette Grant, PhD Candidate in Dance and Dance History Tutor, The University of Melbourne

When Alicia Alonso was establishing the National Cuban Ballet in the 1950s she was faced with interrogation from the communist regime as to how a European art form could represent and serve the Cuban people.

Historian Lester Tome has written extensively about Alonso. Tome says she argued ballet as an art form must be thought of in the same way as music, painting or sculpture. Cubans should dance Cuban dances but must also have the freedom to engage with international cultural forms and trends. She argued they would make ballet their own and redefine what ballet was on the world stage. And they did.

Similarily, Prism is The Australian Ballet engaging with the contemporary international ballet world, adapting what it finds to its own style and bodies, and offering something back. Prism represents a significant transition and coming of age for the company.

I haven’t seen them do that quite like this before.

Glass Pieces

The program opens with Jerome Robbins’ Glass Pieces. Robbins, perhaps most famous for his choreography in West Side Story, began working as a ballet dancer with The New York City Ballet and George Balanchine in the late 1930s.

Glass Pieces premiered in 1983 yet still seems contemporary. Danced to three extracts from Phillip Glass scores, it takes on the theme of glass in different ways.

The first scene has a busy pedestrian street with dancers striding in opposite directions across the stage. Couples in pale pastel shiny unitards appear like frosted glass. Like their costume, their movement contrasts with the crowd. They glide and slide and gracefully swoop and scoop.

The second scene is a single pas de deux which seems to be behind or under glass with a backdrop of silhouetted dancers tracking across the back of the stage. The chugging of the dancers in the background contrasts with the intimacy and technical prowess of the pas de deux.

The final scene is different and most iconically Robbins, with its flexed feet and jazzy innuendo. The crowd from earlier is now the main feature. The colours are stained-glass windows, and the mood is upbeat and energetic.

Seven Days

Seven Days is Stephanie Lake’s second work with the company as resident choreographer. It is incredibly dynamic, intimate and well-resolved. It shows a deep connection between the choreographer and the seven dancers and a true collaboration between contemporary dance and ballet.

And the score is ridiculously gorgeous.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations is reimagined by Peter Brikmanis, yet still familiar. The seven parts represent seven days. Each new day is marked by the dancers forming a circle and engaging with each other in the centre of the stage.

The days are different.

The first starts quietly with solo piano and the dancers forming lines and moving in canon and then broken canon. The orchestra joins in for day two which opens with a pas de deux. Some days are light and humorous. Others a bit more combative and trying. There are duets, solos, group dances and a final scene with chairs.

The work has many Lake hallmarks such as breath, vocalisation, quirky facial expression and challenging body angles. But most importantly, much like her other intimate work Manifesto, in Seven Days she has embraced and enhanced what she has seen in the dancers. This gives the work a brilliant vitality.

Blake Works V (The Barre Project)

William Forsythe is perhaps the ballet choreographer of his generation. He has transformed what ballet means. Dancing with the Joffrey and Stuttgart Ballet companies, he moved into choreography and then established his own company in 2015.

Forsythe has been working on The Blake Works since 2016, where he created Blake Works I for the Paris Opera Ballet. Blake Works II (The Barre Project) was developed with the New York City Ballet in 2020 during the COVID pandemic via Zoom. It was a comment on the familiar and intimate relationship ballet dancers have with the barre.

During COVID lockdowns, dancers confined to their homes used chairs, bookcases and kitchen benches as their barre to continue their practice.

Blake Works V (The Barre Project) takes the same Forsythe ideas and vocabulary as the previous iterations. But uniquely and importantly Forsythe has worked with the company to adapt it to the dancers of The Australian Ballet.

Centre backstage is a small wooden barre, framed and lit almost like a piece of film, or a square on Zoom. The costumes are black simple practice wear, and the lighting is low.

The recorded hypnotic James Blake score combines the classical with the contemporary.

Dancers move in groups and individually away from and onto the barre. It is not a traditional ballet class use of the barre but is Forsythe’s deconstructed elements of ballet on the barre.

There is also a short piece of film of hands on barres.

Three breathtaking works

All three works are executed brilliantly by the dancers; all three are flawless, breathtaking. These dancers’ proficiency with the choreography renders the technicalities invisible and allows the works to really live.

In the notes on the website, artistic director David Hallberg states that the Prism program is diverse and challenging and that

Only a company like The Australian Ballet has the range and skill to take on such a wide range of styles in one program.

I was sceptical they could do it.

I was blown away.

Prism is at the Regent Theatre, Melbourne, until October 4, and then Sydney Opera House from November 7 to 15.

Yvette Grant 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.

– ref. The Australian Ballet’s flawless, breathtaking Prism is a significant coming of age for the company – https://theconversation.com/the-australian-ballets-flawless-breathtaking-prism-is-a-significant-coming-of-age-for-the-company-265853

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

Geelong champion Patrick Dangerfield wowed the AFL world during last week’s preliminary final win against Hawthorn, pushing his 35-year-old body to the limit to propel his team into this year’s Grand Final.

At an age when most AFL players have retired or are slowing down, Dangerfield showcased his immense physical attributes, even prompting Hawks coach Sam Mitchell to plead: “I’m certainly ready for Dangerfield to retire.”

Now Dangerfield and his Geelong teammates will take on Brisbane for the AFL premiership in a battle between the 2022 and 2024 winners, respectively.

It has taken these athletes more than 10 months of intense training and preparation to get there. They are finely tuned machines, built to meet the rigorous demands of elite Australian rules football.

Read more:
AFL and NRL pre-seasons are among the longest in world sport – here’s why

But what exactly constitutes the “perfect” AFL body? And what qualities does an AFL athlete need to succeed?

The physical demands of AFL

Australian football is an intermittent contact sport made up of frequent bursts of high-intensity activity (such as sprinting, jumping and tackling) separated by brief periods of low-intensity activity (such as standing, walking and jogging).

With this in mind, it requires players to excel in multiple physical domains to be successful:

• Aerobic fitness: research indicates the average AFL player covers around 13 kilometres during a match, with some players even getting close to 19km. As a result, having high aerobic fitness (the ability use oxygen to create energy for physical activity) is integral to ensure they can both cover these vast distances and maintain a high level of performance

• Repeated sprint ability: in conjunction with the ability to run for a long time, AFL athletes also need to be able to perform repeated sprints without fatiguing and losing speed – something known as “repeated sprint ability”. This is what ensures they stay fast and powerful in the latter parts of games

• Strength: AFL is a contested sport. Players need upper and lower body strength to lay tackles, stay strong in marking contests and hold their position under contact. To illustrate this, some older research indicates the average AFL player can bench press about 125 kilograms, although there are anecdotal reports of larger players benching more than 170kg

Power: in conjunction with brute strength, AFL athletes also need to be explosive. This is what allows them to jump high to take a mark or make a spoil, and is a defining characteristic of elite AFL athletes. Current Greater Western Sydney player Leek Aleer holds the record for the largest running jump height in the AFL, with a whopping 107 centimetres.

Speed and agility: being able to change direction and accelerate rapidly are essential for evading opponents and creating scoring opportunities. These are often considered to be some of the most important AFL attributes. In fact, some research suggests faster players are significantly more likely to get drafted than slower players.

Decision making: AFL athletes also need to be able to make good decisions when the ball is in their hands. Making good split-second decisions allows their team to maintain possession, which can have a major influence on the outcome of a game.

Evolution of the AFL athlete

Research on the fitness of elite AFL athletes is sparse (understandably so – clubs might want to keep this information private as a competitive edge).

But we do know the physical profile of the typical AFL player has evolved dramatically over time.

Historically, players were often shorter and stockier, with an average height of around 180cm in the 1940s, and then around 184cm in the 1990s.

However, there has been a noticeable shift over the past 30 years towards taller, leaner athletes. The average height of the modern-day player is currently edging closer to 190cm, with a notable number of key position players exceeding 200cm.

We have also seen the running demands of the game increase. Over the past 20 years, the total distance athletes are travelling has increased. They are also accelerating more often and spending more time running at faster speeds.

This change has been somewhat reflected in the athletic profiles of the elite young players hoping to get drafted, with a consistent increase in the aerobic fitness of draftees over the past 20 years.

Interestingly, it has been suggested this change may largely be the result of changes in game style, where teams are adopting a less contested, faster, more free-flowing game style.

Indeed, this is something we have seen happen in the AFLW over the past few seasons, which reinforces this suggestion.

The ideal AFL body depends on the player’s position

With all this in mind, it’s important to note it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to AFL athletes.

Different positions will have different requirements.

For example, you can expect midfielders to be fitter, more agile and physically smaller than full forwards and full backs. Conversely, you can almost guarantee key forwards and defenders will be bigger and stronger than midfielders.

The modern AFL athlete is a product of years of specific training and a deep understanding of the game’s evolving demands – and the Grand Final is the best opportunity to observe it all come to fruition.

And as the game continues to evolve, so will the ideal physical profile of its athletes.

Hunter Bennett 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.

– ref. Taller, leaner, faster: the evolution of the ‘perfect’ AFL body – https://theconversation.com/taller-leaner-faster-the-evolution-of-the-perfect-afl-body-265880

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kris Gledhill, Professor of Law, Auckland University of Technology

Should we be allowed to protest near someone’s home or private residence? It’s inconvenient and perhaps intrusive. But people have a fundamental right to protest. How do we find a balance?

Parliament’s Justice Select Committee is currently grappling with this as it hears submissions on the Summary Offences (Demonstrations Near Residential Premises) Amendment Bill.

There’s little doubt some forms of protest cross a line. Internet trolls have their real world equivalents. And there are many examples of toxic behaviour, particularly affecting people in public life, disproportionately women and those from minority communities.

At the same time, existing laws already make violence, threats and damage to property criminal offences. So too are unlawful assemblies and riots that cause people to be fearful. Parliament is also creating an offence to cover stalking and harassment.

The boundaries of peaceful protest are regulated by long-established summary offences, including disorderly behaviour or assembly, or using offensive, threatening or insulting language. So what will a new law really achieve?

Proving 5 things beyond reasonable doubt

Balancing the right to protest and inconvenience to others, the courts have decided those offences apply only to conduct that goes beyond what we should be expected to tolerate in a democracy.

In 2005, for example, the Supreme Court found in favour of someone who protested outside the home of a police officer who the protester believed had misused a search warrant. The protest was during the daytime and for a limited time, but the officer had been on night duty and was trying to sleep.

The court held that this did not overstep the mark and become disorderly. Importantly, this means that if conduct does overstep that mark – goes on longer, involves more people or more noise – it could be disorderly and therefore criminal.

Let’s assume there is a problem, however. Will the proposed new offence created by this bill actually solve it? To justify a fine or short period of imprisonment, if this bill became law, the prosecution would need to prove five things beyond reasonable doubt.

1. There has to be a “demonstration”, which is a “public expression of support or opposition by a person or group of persons to further a cause or campaign”. Does this cover someone who just wants to express a grievance? Or something that is spontaneous?

2. It has to occur “near any residential premises”. The government’s talking points refer to protests “outside” someone’s house, but the bill is not limited to that. There is no definition offered of “near”.

There is also a very wide definition of “residential premises”, which covers any home “erected, or currently used, mainly as a place of residence”, as well as any “land, improvements, or appurtenances belonging to the dwelling or usually enjoyed with it”.

Of course, lawyers love complicated phrases like this. But it should be simpler for those affected to know what qualifies as a criminal offence.

3. It has to be “directed at any regular occupant of those premises”. Again, what does this mean? It will not cover visitors. And it seems to allow a protester to say they are aiming their protest at an issue rather than a person – in which case, what is the point of this offence?

4. It has to cause an “unreasonable disruption”. This can be to the residential premises targeted or to other premises, including access to them. “Unreasonableness” has to take into account the time of day, duration of the disruption, actions taken, level of noise and nearness to the premises.

But does that mean anything different to the current law – that behaviour beyond what a reasonable person should tolerate in a democratic society can amount to disorderly conduct?

5. The protester has to know the disruption is unreasonable, or the court must find they ought to know this. This legal complexity will have to be enforced by police, most of whom do not have a law degree.

Protest and democracy

Let’s test some potential scenarios. Say someone is concerned about alcohol sales in an area. Would a protest outside shops where the manager lives upstairs now be criminal, because the address is mainly used as a residence?

Or suppose someone was making military drones in a large commercial barn on a rural estate where they lived. Would a protest at the entrance to the estate be criminal because the barn is an improvement to the land belonging to the dwelling?

How about a protest against a corporate farm allowing its dairy herd to make a local river unswimmable. Would that be illegal if the protest was at the river whose banks border the farm where workers live, and so is near a residence?

Finally, and crucially, the bill contains no proposal to exclude the Bill of Rights Act. So, if it becomes law, the courts will be reluctant to uphold any disproportionate restriction on the freedom to protest.

For a protest to qualify as an offence it would need to be disorderly. Given this is already an offence under existing law, the value of the proposed new offence remains elusive.

More broadly, protest is a significant part of our democratic tradition. Any proposal to restrict it must be scrutinised closely for whether it is genuinely needed, and for potential pitfalls. The bill to add the new offence of protesting near a private residence can be found wanting on both counts.

Public submissions on the bill close on October 6.

Kris Gledhill is affiliated with the Criminal Bar Association; the views here are his own.

– ref. Why a proposed law to criminalise protests near homes is too vague to do much good – https://theconversation.com/why-a-proposed-law-to-criminalise-protests-near-homes-is-too-vague-to-do-much-good-263794

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rodney Tiffen, Emeritus Professor, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney

This is the humblest day of my life, declared Rupert Murdoch to a parliamentary committee on July 19, 2011. This was at the height of what the newspaper historian Roy Greenslade called “the most astonishing 14 days in British press history, with daily shock heaped upon daily shock”.

These dramatic events are now the subject of a series on Stan. Journalist Nick Davies recounted them in his 2014 book, Hack Attack: How the Truth caught up with Rupert Murdoch. That book has now been reissued with a new afterword, exploring the developments and revelations over the last decade. I have read the new chapter, and it casts yet more light on the Murdoch company’s extraordinary behaviour.

It began on July 5 2011, when Davies published an article in the Guardian saying Murdoch’s Sunday paper, the News of the World, had tapped teenage murder victim Milly Dowler’s phone. The scandal had been building – very slowly and far from surely – for almost five years, since August 2006, when a News of the World reporter and a private investigator were arrested for having tapped the phones of Princes William and Harry, and their entourages.

The investigative work of Davies and the editorial courage of the Guardian bore little immediate fruit during those years. But the dam wall broke when they published the story of a cynical newspaper tapping the phone of a teenage murder victim.

Politicians competed with each other in the ferocity of their denunciations. News International closed the News of the World, and in the face of opposition from all three major political parties, Murdoch abandoned his attempt to raise his ownership of satellite broadcaster BSkyB from 39% to 100%, which would have been the largest deal in his history. On successive days, London’s chief police officer and one of his deputies resigned because of their close relations with Murdoch papers. Rupert and James were forced to appear before a parliamentary committee, televised live.

Last, but far from least, Prime Minister David Cameron launched an inquiry, to be directed by Lord Leveson, to examine the scandal and the issues it raised. The ensuing Leveson Inquiry, which ran over 2011 and 2012, was the biggest inquiry ever held into the British press.

It held oral hearings for around nine months, starting in November 2011, and heard from 337 witnesses, including then prime minister Cameron, former prime ministers Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and Sir John Major, future prime ministers Theresa May and Keir Starmer, and other political and media figures, before publishing a 2,000-page report in November 2012.

The police also sprang into action. Operation Weeting was a police taskforce set up to investigate phone hacking at the News of the World, from January 2011. In June, Operation Elveden was set up to investigate bribes by the paper to police, while Operation Tuletta was set up to investigate computer hacking.

An unfolding scandal

The original scandal revealed that Murdoch’s London tabloid papers engaged in phone tapping on an industrial scale, bribed police and engaged in a systematic cover-up, in which many senior executives lied.

Most scandals dissipate. The intensity of publicity at their peak is not a good guide to their long-term effects. Murdoch gradually reasserted his power. The first major step came with the end of what was the longest-running concluded criminal trial in British history, from October 2013 to June 2014.

Most of Murdoch’s employees, including the highest profile one, Rebekah Brooks, were found not guilty. However, former News of the World editor Andy Coulson was found guilty of a conspiracy to hack into phones and was jailed for 18 months.

In many ways, the defence’s most important victory came before the trial began. Brooks’ team insisted that to hear just one trial against her would generate so much prejudicial publicity it would make it impossible for a fair trial in the others. Some of her charges involved other people. So when the trial eventually began in October 2013, there were eight defendants on a total of 15 charges. This was a recipe for chaos.

Almost all the defendants had their legal fees covered by Murdoch. Davies estimated the cost of the prosecution of the case had been 1.7 million pounds, while Murdoch’s defence fund was 30 times as much. The prosecutor, Andrew Edis, was being paid less than 10% of the daily fees enjoyed by some of his opponents. With up to 18 barristers in court, nearly every day saw a welter of procedural complaints, objections to the admissibility of evidence and complaints about prejudicial publicity by several of the defence barristers.

After the verdicts, announced on June 24 2014, all the publicity was concentrated on the acquittals. However outside the court case itself, the full score card was more even. At least four senior staff, plus a private investigator and two journalists had pleaded guilty. Importantly for the trial, only one, Dan Evans, agreed to act as a witness.

In July 2011, at the height of the scandal, Brooks resigned as head of Murdoch’s UK operations, and reportedly received a severance payout of 10.8 million pounds (plus full payment of her legal fees). After the trial, Murdoch reinstated her.

After the conclusion of the marathon trial, media attention dropped markedly. A sign of how the power balance had changed was that Davies had written in the Guardian that the police were planning to interview Rupert Murdoch. Immediately, the Murdoch company released all its legal firepower. The police abandoned their plan to interview Murdoch and instead sought to discover Davies’ sources.

The final steps in Murdoch’s recovery came thanks to Prime Minister David Cameron and his conservative government. When the scandal broke in 2011, the Conservatives were in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, lacking a parliamentary majority in their own right. In the 2015 election, the Lib Dems were reduced to a rump, and Cameron’s Conservatives won a smashing majority. Now with that extra political leverage and the memories of the scandal fading, he acted decisively.

When the Leveson Report was published, a second inquiry was promised, to take place after all legal matters had been completed, so as to avoid the risk of prejudicing court proceedings. When that first report called for a statutory body for press complaints, Cameron immediately ruled it out as an infringement of press freedom. In 2015, government sources leaked that they would not be implementing a second Leveson Inquiry. After more than two years of studied silence, Cameron officially announced this in 2018.

Paying money and denying liability

Not long after the election where Cameron won a majority, the director of public prosecutions closed down Operation Weeting, in December 2015. Whatever evidence was waiting to come to trial would now remain sealed. The police officers involved were stunned and outraged. Several told Davies they believed there was political interference behind the scenes.

In 2017, the Murdoch company announced it was relaunching its bid for BSkyB. Humility was well in the past.

Although the scandal largely disappeared from news coverage, it has had a very expensive afterlife. The main venue for that afterlife was in the civil actions by those claiming the paper had used criminal means to invade their privacy. Davies’ afterword details that afterlife and the revelations that have come since.

More than 1,200 people have sued the Murdoch company over the years. On 13 different occasions, they had grouped together and prepared a trial. However, on each occasion the claimants had accepted an offer of money, rather than further pursuing their case in a trial, because Murdoch’s lawyers had made each of them a “part 36 offer”.

A part 36 offer is a British legal device designed to streamline court proceedings. The defendant makes an offer and the claimant then has a financial incentive to settle if they think this is more than they would get by going through the rest of the trial. If they don’t accept, the claimant runs the risk of being liable for all expenses if they lose. But even if they win, and the settlement is less than what the defendant offered, they are liable for the defendants’ legal costs and the difference between the two amounts.

In every case, the Murdoch lawyers offered a much larger sum than was ever likely to be given by the court, always without admitting any liability, and always with a confidentiality condition. It cost the Murdoch company something like 1.2 billion pounds in legal fees and settlements.

Another journalist who had been very actively pursuing the scandal, former Sunday Mirror investigations editor Graham Johnson (a convicted phone hacker turned investigator), thought after all the internal costs for management time and lawyers were included, the figure would be nearer to 3 billion pounds. Probably no other company in history has paid so much money and so often denied liability.

But it worked. It allowed the company to publicly maintain the fiction it was only at the News of the World (and not at the Sun) that such crimes occurred. It also avoided any evidence or legal findings implicating senior management of any wrongdoing.

The most recent such settlement, in January this year, was the biggest and most newsworthy. “Murdoch had made one particularly dangerous enemy Prince Harry, a man who had every reason to blame the tabloids for the death of his mother and the cruel bullying of his wife.” With him was former Labour MP Tom Watson, a long-time foe of the Murdochs. He now sat in the House of Lords, and with that bipartisan British fondness for silly names, had become Baron Watson of Wyre Forest.

Informed speculation among the crowd gathered for the opening of the trial was that the claimants’ lawyers had put together a skeleton argument of several hundred pages backed up by a couple of dozen detailed annexes. Also that Murdoch lawyers had sent out their own replies to selected journalists. All this material would become public once the trial began.

Instead, predictably, a delay was requested. The next morning, the lawyer for Harry and Watson announced the case had been settled.

In settling the case, the Murdoch company had agreed to pay the two final claimants a total of 13.5 million pounds in damages and costs. If the trial had gone ahead, costs to the Murdoch company would have been, at most, 10 million pounds. In other words, the company had paid a fortune to avoid the trial, just as they had already done with more than 1,200 other claimants.

Given the total size of the Murdoch empire, this sum is not an existential threat, but it is not trivial. For at least two decades from the mid 1970s, the Sun was Murdoch’s main cash cow, allowing him to grow his empire elsewhere. Now it has fallen on hard times, mainly due to trends in the digital age but not helped by the ongoing costs of the scandal.

Over the five financial years to March 2024, the paper’s losses totalled 515 million pounds. Gradually, the costs of the phone hacking scandals are trending down, costing 128.3 million to 2023, 51.6 to 2024, and to 5 million leading up to this year (before the Harry agreement is completed).

After the settlement, lawyers for the two sides made starkly contrasting statements. The Murdoch lawyer said its apology was for the unlawful actions of private investigators working for the Sun, not of its journalists, and that there are now strong controls to ensure they cannot happen again. The publisher apologised to the prince for the distress caused to him and the damage inflicted on relationships, friendships and family relationships, and for the impact of serious intrusions on his mother, Princess Diana.

The lawyer, David Sherborne, speaking for his clients Harry and Watson, called it a monumental victory. “Today the lies are laid bare. Today the cover-ups are exposed. And today proves no-one stands above the law.” Sherborne criticised Murdoch’s senior executives for obstructing justice by deleting over 30 million emails, making false denials and lying under oath. According to Sherborne, they now admit that when Rebekah Brooks was editor of the Sun, “they ran a criminal enterprise”.

Closed cases and new material

Davies finishes the new edition of his book with the outcome of this case. Ironically, one of the spurs for him to write the new afterword emerged from all the confidentially closed cases.

In March 2024, he learnt that the raw material disclosed as a result of court orders was confidential. The secrecy no longer applies, however, once material is used in open court. Davies was able to access what lawyers had said in court. It would have been frustrating to read these excerpts and fragments of statements but not be privy to the complete documents.

He spent a week reading through all the new paperwork. And then he was back on the case.

In the original scandal, the focus was on the Murdoch tabloids for using illegal means to get information for stories. Davies’ new material mounts a compelling case they were also used to advance Murdoch’s corporate interests.

The immediate response, for example, when Jude Law sued the paper for hacking his phone over the past six years was to hack his phone again. This was at the same time various Murdoch executives were telling the Leveson Inquiry that all such behaviour was in the past.

An email disclosed during a criminal investigation showed reporters were told to find out everything about people who were seen to be stirring up the phone hacking scandal: “find out who is gay, who is having affairs, so that we can know everything about them”. This is standard Murdoch practice: when criticised, don’t engage with the criticism – attack the critic.

Indeed, Davies himself had a disconcerting experience. Years after it was compiled, he came across a file headed: Nick Davies Research. It dated back to July 2009, when he had done a story on phone hacking. At one stage, three reporters worked on it, with some input from higher up. It explored his 20-plus years in journalism and interviewed his associates, but came up with nothing not already on the public record. As he said, this was not legitimate journalism. “Their readers weren’t interested in me. They had never heard of me.”

While the initial complaints tended to be from movie stars and sports stars, later complainants included quite a number of politicians: all seen as hostile to Murdoch.

In 2010, the only prominent politician strongly critical of Murdoch was LibDem frontbencher Chris Huhne. “We need to get Huhne,” said News of the World editor Colin Myler in an email. After extensive surveillance, his newspaper published a front-page story that Huhne was having an affair. His marriage ended and his credibility was damaged.

A decade later, he sued, and Murdoch paid him substantial damages – without admitting liability.

Two politicians near the centre of government decisions on the BSkyB bid – Norm Lamb and Vince Cable – had well-founded suspicions their phones were hacked. Later they both sued, and Murdoch paid them substantial damages – without admitting liability.

Three members of the parliamentary committee who interviewed Murdoch in 2011 – Paul Farrelly, Tom Watson, and Adrian Sanders – all filed formal complaints about phone hacking. Murdoch paid them all substantial damages – without admitting liability.

The last case is particularly instructive. When Murdoch appeared before the committee, he was full of regret and apology. He promised that bad behaviour had been confined to the News of the World, and was now over. Yet, while he was giving these reassurances, his company seems to have been hacking the phones of three of the MPs on that committee.

A deeper understanding of the Murdoch empire

The final area where the book has new and persuasive material is on the destruction of evidence. While there were many allegations of this at the peak of the scandal, none of them ever resulted in any convictions.

The company always admitted the deletion of millions of emails but maintained this was a necessary maintenance operation. Some inconvenient facts did not fit this claim, such as the instruction to eliminate emails “that could be unhelpful in the context of future litigation”. Or at another stage, there was an instruction to delete the emails of the most senior staff as soon as possible.

Two instances, both involving Will Lewis, now editor of the Washington Post (appointed by Jeff Bezos) are particularly interesting.

In July, Lewis and a colleague were aware the police knew about the extent of the phone hacking. They told police they had to destroy them because a “well trusted source” had warned them a former employee, a Labour sympathiser, had stolen Rebekah Brooks’ emails and was selling them to Tom Watson and Gordon Brown. The company claimed they got this warning on January 24, just before the launch of Operating Weeting.

But strangely, they did not tell any detectives about it. Moreover, deleting millions of emails seems an odd response to the threat. Not surprisingly, detectives concluded the story of the plot was a “ruse”.

Lewis was also one of two senior executives whose role was to liaise with the police undertaking Operation Weeting. Police had secured a crime scene which included 125 pieces of office furniture seized in July. Before detectives could examine their contents, eight filing cabinets belonging to senior members of the News of the World were removed and never seen again.

Last year, in a sworn statement in the Prince Harry case, the detective in charge of Operation Weeting, Sue Akers, said she believed the Murdoch company had tried actively to frustrate the police inquiry.

There has never been a media scandal in Britain or Australia remotely resembling the phone hacking scandal of 2011. Probably no major players in Britain – in politics or in the press – has an appetite for reviving it.

So the new edition of the book by Nick Davies – whose investigative work was central to the whole affair – is unlikely to have major repercussions. Nevertheless, the revelations in the book’s afterword add considerably not only to our knowledge of developments over the last decade, but to a deeper understanding of the politics and culture of the Murdoch empire.

Rodney Tiffen 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.

– ref. Friday essay: new revelations of the Murdoch empire’s underbelly – from The Hack’s real-life journalist – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-new-revelations-of-the-murdoch-empires-underbelly-from-the-hacks-real-life-journalist-265756

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By A.R.E. Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Communications, University of Exeter

It’s a sunny June day in southeast England. I’m driving along a quiet, rural road that stretches through the Kent countryside. The sun flashes through breaks in the hedgerow, offering glimpses of verdant crop fields and old farmhouses.

Thick hawthorn and brambles make it difficult to see the 10ft high razor-wire fence that encloses a large grassy mound. You’d never suspect that 100ft beneath the ground, a hi-tech cloud computing facility is whirring away, guarding the most valuable commodity of our age: digital data.

This subterranean data centre is located in a former nuclear bunker that was constructed in the early 1950s as a command-and-control centre for the Royal Air Force’s radar network. You can still see the decaying concrete plinths that the radar dish once sat upon. Personnel stationed in the bunker would have closely watched their screens for signs of nuclear missile-carrying aircraft.

After the end of the cold war, the bunker was purchased by a London-based internet security firm for use as an ultra-secure data centre. Today, the site is operated by the Cyberfort Group, a cybersecurity services provider.

I’m an anthropologist visiting the Cyberfort bunker as part of my ethnographic research exploring practices of “extreme” data storage. My work focuses on anxieties of data loss and the effort we take – or often forget to take – to back-up our data.

As an object of anthropological enquiry, the bunkered data centre continues the ancient human practice of storing precious relics in underground sites, like the tumuli and burial mounds of our ancestors, where tools, silver, gold and other treasures were interred.

The Cyberfort facility is one of many bunkers around the world that have now been repurposed as cloud storage spaces. Former bomb shelters in China, derelict Soviet command-and-control centres in Kyiv and abandoned Department of Defense bunkers across the United States have all been repackaged over the last two decades as “future-proof” data storage sites.

I’ve managed to secure permission to visit some of these high-security sites as part of my fieldwork, including Pionen, a former defence shelter in Stockholm, Sweden, which has attracted considerable media interest over the last two decades because it looks like the hi-tech lair of a James Bond villain.

Many abandoned mines and mountain caverns have also been re-engineered as digital data repositories, such as the Mount10 AG complex, which brands itself as the “Swiss Fort Knox” and has buried its operations within the Swiss Alps. Cold war-era information management company Iron Mountain operates an underground data centre 10 minutes from downtown Kansas City and another in a former limestone mine in Boyers, Pennsylvania.

The National Library of Norway stores its digital databanks in mountain vaults just south of the Arctic Circle, while a Svalbard coal mine was transformed into a data storage site by the data preservation company Piql. Known as the Arctic World Archive (AWA), this subterranean data preservation facility is modelled on the nearby Global Seed Vault.

Just as the seeds preserved in the Global Seed Vault promise to help re-build biodiversity in the aftermath of future collapse, the digitised records stored in the AWA promise to help re-boot organisations after their collapse.

Bunkers are architectural reflections of cultural anxieties. If nuclear bunkers once mirrored existential fears about atomic warfare, then today’s data bunkers speak to the emergence of a new existential threat endemic to digital society: the terrifying prospect of data loss.

Data, the new gold?

After parking my car, I show my ID to a large and muscular bald-headed guard squeezed into a security booth not much larger than a pay-phone box. He’s wearing a black fleece with “Cyberfort” embroidered on the left side of the chest. He checks my name against today’s visitor list, nods, then pushes a button to retract the electric gates.

I follow an open-air corridor constructed from steel grating to the door of the reception building and press a buzzer. The door opens on to the reception area: “Welcome to Cyberfort,” receptionist Laura Harper says cheerfully, sitting behind a desk in front of a bulletproof window which faces the car park. I hand her my passport, place my bag in one of the lockers, and take a seat in the waiting area.

The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.

Big-tech pundits have heralded data as the “new gold” – a metaphor made all the more vivid when data is stored in abandoned mines. And as the purported economic and cultural value of data continues to grow, so too does the impact of data loss.

For individuals, the loss of digital data can be a devastating experience. If a personal device should crash or be hacked or stolen with no recent back-ups having been made, it can mean the loss of valuable work or cherished memories. Most of us probably have a data-loss horror story we could tell.

For governments, corporations and businesses, a severe data loss event – whether through theft, erasure or network failure – can have a significant impact on operations or even result in their collapse. The online services of high-profile companies like Jaguar and Marks & Spencer have recently been impacted by large-scale cyber-attacks that have left them struggling to operate, with systems shutdown and supply chains disrupted. But these companies have been comparatively lucky: a number of organisations had to permanently close down after major data loss events, such as the TravelEx ransomware attack in 2020, and the MediSecure and National Public Data breaches, both in 2024.

With the economic and societal impact of data loss growing, some businesses are turning to bunkers with the hope of avoiding a data loss doomsday scenario.

The concrete cloud

One of the first things visitors to the Cyberfort bunker encounter in the waiting area is a 3ft cylinder of concrete inside a glass display cabinet, showcasing the thickness of the data centre’s walls. The brute materiality of the bunkered data centre stands in stark contrast to the fluffy metaphor of the “cloud”, which is often used to discuss online data storage.

Data centres, sometimes known as “server farms”, are the buildings where cloud data is stored. When we transfer our data into the cloud, we are transferring it on to servers in a data centre (hence the meme “there is no cloud, just someone else’s computer”). Data centres typically take the form of windowless, warehouse-scale buildings containing hundreds of servers (pizza box-shaped computers) stored in cabinets that are arranged in aisles.

Data centres are responsible for running many of the services that underpin the systems we interact with every day. Transportation, logistics, energy, finance, national security, health systems and other lifeline services all rely on up-to-the-second data stored in and accessed through data centres. Everyday activities such as debit and credit card payments, sending emails, booking tickets, receiving text messages, using social media, search engines and AI chatbots, streaming TV, making video calls and storing digital photos all rely on data centres.

These buildings now connect such an incredible range of activities and utilities across government, business and society that any downtime can have major consequences. The UK government has officially classified data centres as forming part of the country’s critical national infrastructure – a move that also conveniently enables the government to justify building many more of these energy-guzzling facilities.

As I sit pondering the concrete reality of the cloud in Cyberfort’s waiting area, the company’s chief digital officer, Rob Arnold, emerges from a corridor. It was Arnold who arranged my visit, and we head for his office – through a security door with a biometric fingerprint lock – where he talks me through the logic of the bunkered data centre.

“The problem with most above-ground data centres is they are often constructed quickly, and not built to withstand physical threats like strong winds, car bombs or server theft from breaking and entering.” Arnold says that “most people tend to think of the cyber-side of data security – hackers, viruses and cyber-attacks – which dangerously overlooks the physical side”.

Amid increasing geopolitical tension, internet infrastructure is now a high-value target as “hybrid” or “cyber-physical” sabotage (when cyber-attacks are combined with physical attacks) becomes increasingly common.

The importance of physical internet security has been highlighted by the war in Ukraine, where drone strikes and other attacks on digital infrastructure have led to internet shutdowns. While precise details about the number of data centres destroyed in the conflict remain scant, it has been observed that Russian attacks on local data centres in Ukraine have led many organisations to migrate their data to cloud facilities located outside of the conflict zone.

Bunkers appeal to what Arnold calls “security-conscious” clients. He says: “It’s difficult to find a structure more secure than a bunker” – before adding drily: “The client might not survive the apocalypse, but their data will.”

Cyberfort specialises in serving regulated industries. Its customer base includes companies working in defence, healthcare, finance and critical infrastructure. “Our core offering focuses on providing secure, sovereign and compliant cloud and data-centre services,” Arnold explains in a well-rehearsed sales routine. “We do more for our customers than just host systems – we protect their reputations.”

Arnold’s pitch is disrupted by a knock at the door. The head of security (who I’m calling Richard Thomas here) enters – a 6ft-tall ex-royal marine wearing black cargo trousers, black combat boots and a black Cyberfort-branded polo shirt. Thomas is going to show me around the facility today.

The entrance to the bunker is located up a short access road. Engineered to withstand the blast and radiation effects of megaton-level thermonuclear detonations, this cloud storage bunker promises its clients that their data will survive any eventuality.

At the armour-plated entrance door, Thomas taps a passcode into the electronic lock and swipes his card through the access control system. Inside, the air is cool and musty. Another security guard sits in a small room behind bulletproof plexiglass. He buzzes us through a metal mantrap and we descend into the depths of the facility via a steel staircase, our footsteps echoing in this cavernous space.

The heavy blast doors and concrete walls of the bunker appear strangely at odds with the virtual “walls” we typically associate with data security: firewalls, anti-virus vaults, and spyware and spam filters. Similarly, the bunker’s military logics of enclosure and isolation seem somewhat outdated when faced with the transgressive digital “flows” of networked data.

However, to dismiss the bunkered data centre as merely an outmoded piece of security theatre is to overlook the importance of physical security – today and in the future.

We often think of the internet as an immaterial or ethereal realm that exists in an electronic non-place. Metaphors like the now retro-sounding cyberspace and, more recently, the cloud perpetuate this way of thinking.

But the cloud is a material infrastructure composed of thousands of miles of cables and rows upon rows of computing equipment. It always “touches the ground” somewhere, making it vulnerable to a range of non-cyber threats – from thieves breaking into data centres and stealing servers, to solar storms disrupting electrical supplies, and even to squirrels chewing through cables.

If data centre services should go down, even for a few seconds, the economic and societal impact can be calamitous. In recent years we have seen this first-hand.

In July 2020, the 27-minute Cloudflare outage led to a 50% collapse in traffic across the globe, disrupting major platforms like Discord, Shopify, Feedly and Politico. In June 2021, the Fastly outage left some of the world’s most visited websites completely inaccessible, including Amazon, PayPal, Reddit, and the New York Times. In October 2021, Meta, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, experienced an outage for several hours that affected millions of social media users as well as hundreds of businesses.

Perhaps the largest internet outage yet occurred in July 2024 when the CrowdStrike outage left supermarkets, doctors’ surgeries, pharmacies, airports, train providers and banks (among other critical services) unable to operate. This was described by some in the industry as “one of the largest mass outages in IT history”.

Internet architecture now relies on such a complex and fragile ecosystem of interdependencies that major outages are getting bigger and occurring more often. Downtime events can have a lasting financial and reputational impact on data centre providers. Some attempts to quantify the average cost of an unplanned data centre outage range from US$9,000 to US$17,000 (about £12,500) per minute.

The geographic location of a data centre is also hugely important for data protection regulations, Thomas explains, as we make our way down a brightly lit corridor. “Cyberfort’s facilities are all located in the UK, which gives our clients peace of mind, knowing they comply with data sovereignty laws.”

Data sovereignty regulations subject data to the legal and privacy standards of the country in which it is stored. This means businesses and organisations must be careful about where in the world their data is being relocated when they move it into the cloud. For example, if a UK business opts to store its data with a cloud provider that uses data centres based in the US, then that data will be subject to US privacy standards which do not fully comply with UK standards.

In contrast to early perceptions of the internet as transcending space, eradicating national borders and geopolitics, data sovereignty regulations endow locality with renewed significance in the cloud era.

The survival of data at all costs

Towards the end of the corridor, Thomas opens a large red blast-proof door – beyond which is a smaller air-tight door. Thomas waves his card in front of an e-reader, initiating an unlocking process: we’re about to enter one of the server rooms.

“Get ready” he says, smiling, “it’s going to be cold and loud!” The door opens, releasing a rush of cold air. The server room is configured and calibrated for the sole purpose of providing optimal conditions for data storage.

Like any computer, servers generate a huge amount of heat when they are running, and must be stored in constantly air-conditioned rooms to ensure they do not overheat. If for any reason a server should crash or fail, it can lead to the loss of a client’s valuable data. Data centre technicians work in high-pressure conditions where any unexpected server downtime could mean the end of their job.

To try and make sure the servers run optimally, data centres rely on huge amounts of water and energy, which can significantly limit the availability of these resources for the people who live in the vicinity of the buildings.

An average data centre consumes an estimated 200-terawatt hours of electricity each year. That’s around 1% of total global electricity demand, which is more than the national energy consumption of some countries. Many of these facilities are powered by non-renewable energy sources, and the data centre industry is expected to emit 2.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2030.

In addition, to meet expectations for “uninterruptible” service levels, data centres rely on an array of fossil fuel-based back-up infrastructure – primarily diesel generators. For this reason, the Green Web Foundation – a non-profit organisation working to decarbonise the internet – has described the internet as the world’s largest coal-powered machine. Data centres are also noisy and have become sites of protest for local residents concerned about noise pollution.

Amid hype and speculation about the rise of AI, which is leading to a boom in the construction of energy-hungry data centres, the carbon footprint of the industry is under increasing scrutiny. Keen to highlight Cyberfort’s efforts to address these issues, Thomas informs me that “environmental impact is a key consideration for Cyberfort, and we take our commitment to these issues very seriously”.

As we walk down a cold aisle of whirring servers, he explains that Cyberfort actively sources electricity from renewable energy supply chains, and uses what he calls a “closed loop” cooling infrastructure which consumes minimal fresh water.

‘Like the pyramids’

After our walk through the server room, we begin to make our way out of the bunker, heading through another heavy-duty blast door. As we walk down the corridor, Thomas promotes the durability of bunkers as a further security selling point. Patting the cold concrete wall with the palm of his hand, he says: “Bunkers are built to last, like the pyramids.”

Bunker scholars have long noted that these buildings are as much about time as they are about space. Bunkers are designed to preserve and transport their contents through time, from an apocalyptic present into a safe future.

Writers such as Paul Virilio, W.G. Sebald and J.G. Ballard were drawn to the decaying bunkers of the second world war and, like Thomas, compared them with enduring megastructures which have outlived the civilisations that built them. In his 1975 book Bunker Archaeology, Virilio famously compared the abandoned Nazi bunkers along the coast of France with “the Egyptian mastabas, the Etruscan tombs, the Aztec structures”.

The bunker’s durability invites us to take a long-term view of our own data storage needs, which will only increase over the course of our lives.

For technology behemoths like Apple and Google, cloud storage is a key strategic avenue for long-term revenue growth. While the phones, laptops and other digital devices they make have limited lifespans, their cloud services offer potentially lifelong data storage. Apple and Google encourage us to perpetually hoard our data rather than delete it, because this locks us into their cloud subscription services, which become increasingly expensive the more storage we need.

Apple’s marketing for its cloud storage service, iCloud, encourages users to “take all the photos you want without worrying about space on your devices”. Google has made “archive” rather than “delete” the default option on Gmail. While this reduces the likelihood of us accidentally deleting an email, it also means we are steadily consuming more of our Gmail capacity, leading some to purchase more Google Drive storage space.

Cloud hoarders

It is also increasingly difficult to operate off-cloud. Internal storage space on our digital devices is dwindling as the cloud becomes the default storage option on the majority of digital products being developed. Users must pay a premium if they want more than the basic local storage on their laptop or smartphone. Ports to enable expandable, local storage – such as CD drives or SD card slots – are also being removed by tech manufacturers.

As our personal digital archives expand, our cloud storage needs will continue to grow over our lifetimes, as will the payments for more and more cloud storage space. And while we often imagine we will one day take the time to prune our accumulations of digital photos, files, and emails, that task is often indefinitely postponed. In the meantime, it is quicker and easier to simply purchase more cloud storage.

Many consumers simply use whichever cloud storage service is already pre-installed on their devices – often these are neither the cheapest nor most secure option. But once we commit to one provider, it is very difficult to move our data to another if we want a cheaper monthly storage rate, or simply want to switch – this requires investing in enough hard drives on which to download the data from one cloud provider and upload it to another. Not everyone is tech-savvy enough to do that.

In 2013, bank reforms in the UK introduced a switching service which enabled consumers to easily move their money and payments to different banks, in order to access more favourable rates. Cloud migration services are available for businesses, but until a cloud storage equivalent of the bank switching service is developed for the general public, many of us are essentially locked into whichever cloud provider we have been using. If our data really is the new gold, perhaps we should require cloud providers to offer incentives to deposit it with them.

Some providers now offer “lifetime” cloud packages with no monthly or yearly payments and no inactivity clause. However, the cloud market is volatile, defined by cycles of boom-and-bust, with providers and their data centres constantly rebranding, closing and relocating. In this landscape of mergers and acquisitions, there is no guarantee that lifetime cloud providers will be around long enough to honour these promises.

In addition, the majority of consumer cloud providers currently only offer a maximum of a few terabytes of storage. In the future, most of us will probably need a lot more than this, which could mean a lot more data centres (roughly 100 new data centres are set to be constructed in the UK alone within the next five years). We may also see more bunkers being repurposed as data centres – while some providers, such as Florida-based Data Shelter, are considering building entirely new bunker structures from scratch to house digital data.

Resurfacing

Thomas and I arrive at the steel staircase leading back up to the outside world. The guard buzzes us back through the turnstile, and Thomas unlocks and opens the door. The sunlight stings my eyes.

Back in the reception area, I thank Arnold and Thomas for my surreal trip into the depths of subterranean data storage. The Cyberfort data centre is a site of extreme contrasts, where the ethereal promise of the cloud jars with the concrete reality of the bunker.

Sitting in my car, I add to my fieldnotes that the survival of data – whether entombed in bunkers or stored in “lifetime” cloud accounts – is bound to the churn of markets, and depends upon the durability of the infrastructure and organisations behind it.

Permanence, in the digital age, is always provisional. One can’t help but imagine future archaeologists discovering this bunker and rummaging through the unreadable remains of our lost digital civilisation.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• Beatrix Potter’s famous tales are rooted in stories told by enslaved Africans – but she was very quiet about their origins
  

• Engineering hope: how I made it my mission to help rebuild Ukraine’s critical infrastructure
  

• Inside Porton Down: what I learned during three years at the UK’s most secretive chemical weapons laboratory
  

• Ignored, blamed, and sometimes left to die – a leading expert in ME explains the origins of a modern medical scandal
  

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

A.R.E. Taylor 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.

– ref. Underground data fortresses: the nuclear bunkers, mines and mountains being transformed to protect our ‘new gold’ from attack – https://theconversation.com/underground-data-fortresses-the-nuclear-bunkers-mines-and-mountains-being-transformed-to-protect-our-new-gold-from-attack-262578

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Whitman, Member of the Conflict Analysis Research Centre, University of Kent; Royal United Services Institute

Donald Trump appears to have had a major change of heart with regards Ukraine. On the face of it, it looks like he has embraced outright optimism that Kyiv “is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form”.

This came with the message that Europeans will need to be in the driving seat to make this happen. According to Trump, a Ukrainian victory depends on “time, patience, and the financial support of Europe and, in particular, NATO”.

The only US commitment is “to supply weapons to NATO for NATO to do what they want with them”. Most tellingly, Trump signed his Truth Social missive off with: “Good luck to all!” This is perhaps the clearest indication yet that the US president is walking away from his efforts to strike a peace deal.

It also suggests that he has given up on a separate deal with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. But this is where the good news ends – and where the European-led coalition of the willing will need to deliver security and stability for the continent in an ever more volatile environment.

After several weeks of Russian incursions into Nato airspace, drones – thought highly likely to be linked to Russia – twice disrupted Danish airspace in the vicinity of Copenhagen airport. It felt like a presentiment of the dystopian drone wars predicted by Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, in his speech at the UN general assembly in New York on September 24.

Putin’s continuing provocations are a brazen challenge to Kyiv’s European allies. At the heart of this coalition of the willing, the European Union certainly has demonstrated it is willing to flex its rhetorical muscles to rise to this challenge.

EU institutions in Brussels have never left any doubt about their determination that Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine “needs to end with a just and lasting peace for Ukraine”, as Ursula von der Leyen, the EU commission president, put it most recently in her state-of-the-union address.

Beyond rhetoric, however, the coalition of the willing is facing a number of potential problems. Individually, none of them is insurmountable, but taken together they illustrate the unprecedented challenge Kyiv’s European allies are facing.

Coalition confusion

To begin with, the coalition of the willing is not a coherent body. Its membership includes members of Nato and the EU, as well as Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. But the United States is not among their number.

It grew from eight countries plus the EU and Nato in February, to 33 participants in April, and 39 in September. Its relationship with the 57-member Ukraine Defense Contact Group of countries supporting Kyiv with military equipment, which held its 30th meeting in early September, is not entirely clear.

The lack of coherence in membership is mirrored by different levels of commitment, whether that’s the willingness to deploy a reassurance force after a ceasefire in Ukraine – or the capacity.

It’s also not entirely clear whether the leaders of the EU and Nato are speaking for all members of their organisations. Among EU and Nato members, Hungary and Slovakia, for example, have taken ambiguous stances when it comes to defending Europe against Russia.

These different levels of commitment also reflect partially conflicting priorities. European members of Nato are deeply – and not wrongly – concerned about US abandonment. Add to that fears of a disastrous trade war, and placating Donald Trump becomes a priority.

Doing so by buying US arms may please Trump and plug gaps in Europe’s ability to supply Ukraine. But it is perhaps not the best way of ensuring the urgently needed development of the independent European defence-industrial base.

Trump’s return to the White House swiftly ushered in the end of US largesse in support of Ukraine. Europeans have only partly filled that gap, with Germany taking the lead and the EU mobilising over €10 billion (£8.7 billion) in its current budget to 2027, with the aim to supplement efforts by member countries.

But it’s not clear how long these efforts will be sustainable in light of inflation and domestic spending pressures. France’s public finances are in distress, while Spain has openly defied Nato’s 5% spending target.

Europe needs to step up – fast

Part of the solution to these problems would be much swifter defence-industrial cooperation across the coalition, including with Ukraine. Over time, this could help to build the indigenous defence-industrial capacity needed to produce military equipment at the scale needed.

But making up for critical gaps in manpower, dealing with the Russian drone threat, strengthening air defences and long-range strike capabilities, and replacing the potential loss of US intelligence support will not happen overnight.

Individual countries and the various multilateral forums in which they cooperate will need to decide how to balance three only partially aligned priorities. Europe – whether defined as EU, European Nato members, or the core of the coalition of the willing – urgently needs to upgrade its defences. Developing a European defence-industrial capacity at scale is integral to this.

Europeans also need to keep the US engaged as much as possible, literally by buying Trump off, because they currently lack critical capabilities that will take time for them to develop themselves. And while building better defence capabilities for themselves they will need to keep Ukraine in the fight against Russia to keep it from losing the war.

Europe needs to increase the money, develop the military muscle, and build decision-making mechanisms that are not mired in procrastination to win the proxy war that the Kremlin forced on Ukraine and its allies. To do so will ensure that Europeans are best placed to prevent Russia from broadening its war against Ukraine into a full-blown military confrontation with the west.

Richard Whitman receives funding from the Economic and Research Council of the UK as a Senior Fellow of the UK in a Changing Europe initiative. He is a past recipient of grant funding from the British Academy of the UK, EU Erasmus+ and Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), and an Academic Fellow of the European Policy Centre in Brussels. He is a past Associate Fellow and Head of the Europe Programme of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House).

Stefan Wolff is a past recipient of grant funding from the Natural Environment Research Council of the UK, the United States Institute of Peace, the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK, the British Academy, the NATO Science for Peace Programme, the EU Framework Programmes 6 and 7 and Horizon 2020, as well as the EU’s Jean Monnet Programme. He is a Trustee and Honorary Treasurer of the Political Studies Association of the UK and a Senior Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Centre in London.

– ref. Trump looks set to abandon Ukraine peace efforts – Europe must step up to face Russian aggression alone – https://theconversation.com/trump-looks-set-to-abandon-ukraine-peace-efforts-europe-must-step-up-to-face-russian-aggression-alone-266085

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzy Freeman-Greene, Books + Ideas Editor, The Conversation

The first sentence of Anna Karenina is now a literary cliche, yet contains a nub of truth. “All happy families,” writes Leo Tolstoy, “resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Literature brims with thwarted parents wreaking havoc in unique ways. We’ve considered the worst fathers. Now we look at troubling mothers.

A recent contender here is Arundhati Roy’s depiction of her tyrannical, infuriating yet seductive mother Mary in her new memoir.

But my choice for worst mother is a fictional character, also a Mary. In US author Sapphire’s arresting 1996 novel, Push, Mary is a violent, jealous woman who follows her husband in sexually abusing their teenage daughter, “Precious”. Amid poverty and deprivation, Mary challenges every maternal stereotype.

Here are our experts’ picks.

Stuff – Joy Williams

Your adult son has just informed you he has terminal lung cancer. Do you:

A) Say, “Oh, well.”

B) Demand he speak quietly so as not to disturb your roommate, Debbie, who is playing dystopian video games.

C) Disagree with the assessment that Gnosticism is a flawed religion incapable of forming any kind of true moral community.

D) Drink a stinger the bright green of antifreeze.

E) Kick him out because your radical silence class is about to begin.

F) Do all of the above: You are a mother in the hilarious void of Joy Williams’ story Stuff.

– Alex Cothren

Medea – Euripides

A princess of Colchis, she betrayed her own people to help Jason, leader of the Argonauts, capture the Golden Fleece, and then ran off with him and started a family. She kept her sorcery under wraps until Jason dumped her in favour of a princess of Corinth. This betrayal sparked a massive overreaction on Medea’s part. Not only did she murder the new bride, and the bride’s father. She slaughtered her own children and then, with the help of her divine granddad (the sun god Helios), skipped off to Athens to start a new life.

– Jen Webb

Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Classic literature is lavishly adorned with bad mums. I’m going with a sleeper hit — Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, aka the love of Jay Gatsby’s life. Daisy studiously neglects her daughter Pammy, a child of about two, throughout the novel. She says she hopes Pammy will grow up to be a “beautiful little fool”, and so, frankly, do the readers, just so poor Pam won’t ever know her mother cheated on her father with a guy who ends up murdered in his own swimming pool, after being mistaken for Pammy’s own father Tom. And here’s hoping Pammy won’t know her mom Daisy killed her dad Tom’s lover Mabel in a hit-and-run accident, while drunk driving someone else’s car.

– Sophie Gee

May Callaghan, I for Isobel – Amy Witting

The mother in Amy Witting’s I for Isobel simmers with a rage that shapes the whole Callaghan family. But it is the bright, bookish younger daughter, Isobel, who attracts most of May Callaghan’s venom. Isobel feels her mother’s anger as “a live animal tormenting her”. May denies nine-year-old Isobel a birthday celebration; she labels her “a born liar”. Isobel wrests back power by learning to withhold her desire to scream: “She wants me to scream. I do something for her when I scream.”

At her mother’s death, Isobel feels only relief.

– Carol Lefevre

The Piano Teacher – Elfriede Jelinek

Erika Kohut’s Mother intrudes on every aspect of her adult daughter’s life – her movements, her body, her finances. The claustrophobic Viennese apartment they share is a site of domestic interrogation and terror, with Mother looming over Erika like a one-woman tribunal: part inquisitor and part executioner. This is domination, not maternal care, isolating Erika and driving her toward secrecy and spirals of self-harm.

In characteristically relentless and sardonic prose, Jelinek presents this relationship as a miniature of Austria’s refusal to confront its troubling political past. This is a household where desire is policed and traumatic history repressed until it sporadically erupts into terrible violence, shattering the illusions of bourgeois respectability and revealing how repression, left unchecked, becomes cannibalistic.

– Alexander Howard

The Watch Tower – Elizabeth Harrower

Selecting a worst mother from literature has been hard – I know they’re out there, but my brain refuses to decide on one, perhaps subconsciously rejecting the notion. I have settled on a bit-character in a novel with a truly grotesque patriarchal figure at its centre: Elizabeth Harrower’s 1966 novel The Watchtower.

The unnamed mother in this novel abandons her daughters with not a thought for their wellbeing, leaving them in the hands, and financial trap, of the cruel and contemptuous Felix Shaw. I know the world criticises mothers much more harshly than fathers for abandoning their children – in literature as in life – but this abandonment struck a chord in me that I cannot intellectualise. How easily Clare and Laura’s mother wipes her hands of them and how vulnerable they are in the world as a result.

– Edwina Preston

Serena Joy, The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

My pick for worst mother is controversial. Throughout both Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and its sequel The Testaments we don’t get to see Serena Joy Waterford mothering, which, I think, is a mercy. But I’ve chosen Serena, the wife of a Commander in the republic of Gilead, because she is instrumental in destroying the very notion of what it is to be a mother, which is that of deep and compassionate care. Serena sees children as a right and a prize for religious piety – at the expense of the child and all who care for them. As Sheila Heti has written, “The whole world needs to be mothered.”

Just not by Serena.

– Natalie Kon-yu

Nina, Heartsease – Kate Kruimink

In Tasmanian writer Kate Kruimink’s exquisite novel Heartsease, the twentysomething Ellen (Nelly) is a daughter both made by her mother Nina and trying to remake herself against her. Nelly remembers every childhood slight and hurt, especially the many ways she disappointed her mother as an example of young womanhood: dishevelled, shy, awkward and unlike the elegant, socialite Nina in most ways. Nelly can’t show her mother or ask her questions about incidents from the past, can’t ask why it is she’s never met her maternal grandmother. For Nina died when Nelly was a teenager, and a dead mother really is the worst.

– Jane Messer

Helen, Oh Joseph, I’m so tired – Richard Yates

Richard Yates frequently drew on his personal history in his fiction, and so it’s unsurprising that he repeatedly returns to his turbulent relationship with his own mother, the erratic Ruth “Dookie” Maurer. Dookie appears in various forms in many of Yates’s novels and stories, but is perhaps best realised as the frustrated sculptor Helen in Oh Joseph, I’m so tired from Yates’ collection Liars in Love. The story is unsparing in its depiction of her awful self-centredness and bigotry, but also captures her fragility and desperate need to maintain her delusions of imminent success. Helen’s self-deception is depicted as heart-breaking and absurd, but it also briefly transforms the grim lives of her children into something more privileged and magical.

– Julian Novitz

Maggie, Bodies of Light – Jennifer Down

I can’t entertain a “worst” case scenario for any literary mother because the trope of the monstrous mother is alive and well and continues to cause damage. Rather, I draw attention to the complex, deeply flawed character of Maggie in Jennifer Down’s 2022 Miles Franklin winner, Bodies of Light. The survivor of a childhood marked by drug addiction, grief and abuse, Maggie’s humble attempt at conventional marriage and motherhood fails miserably when three of her babies die in her care. Sound familiar? Down’s achievement here is to show us how the idea of monstrous mothers endures in our culture. The cost is real.

– Julienne van Loon

Mrs Bannerman, The Last House on Needless Street – Catriona Ward

There is no shortage of horrible parents in fiction, but few have horrified me more than Ted’s mother, Mrs Bannerman, in Catriona Ward’s acclaimed The Last House on Needless Street. Her evil is conveyed to the reader via flashbacks that may or may not lead us to conclude that an adult Ted may or may not also be evil. In a suspenseful novel full of ambiguity and uncertainty, there’s nothing vague or uncertain about the abuse that the young mother subjects her son to and the pleasure that she derives from hurting him. Not one for the squeamish.

– Ali Alizadeh

Muriel Cleese, So, anyway … John Cleese

Most accounts of a “bad mother” are complicated by the familiar ambivalence of love-hate relationships. This isn’t the case in John Cleese’s autobiography So, Anyway …. Here the author castigates his mother as “self-obsessed and anxious”, associating this with “her extraordinary lack of general knowledge”, and accusing her of being a person who “had no information about anything that was not going to affect her life directly in the immediate future”. This led to “a constant state of high anxiety” and a desperation to have everything “her own way”. The coruscating nature of Cleese’s unmitigated bile is oddly refreshing.

– Paul Giles

Mrs Skewton, Dombey and Son – Charles Dickens

Dickens’ mothers generally fail by dying romantically or miserably before the action of the novel begins. So it is with the first Mrs Dombey in Dombey and Son. The second Mrs Dombey’s mother, however, is a more durable monster of vanity and manipulativeness. “Cleopatra” (her preferred name) Skewton is the freeze-dried belle of Leamington Spa, decayed and held together by cosmetics. Her aim is to sell her statuesque daughter, Edith, in marriage for the best available price. In succeeding, she finishes the job of destroying Edith’s sense of her own value. Fortunately, Edith has enough hauteur (an Australian might call it mongrel) to fight back.

– Robert Phiddian

Do you have a nomination for the worst mother – or father – in literature? If so, let us know by scrolling to the end of this article and adding your choice in the comments.

– ref. Who are the worst mothers in literature? Our experts weigh in – https://theconversation.com/who-are-the-worst-mothers-in-literature-our-experts-weigh-in-263816

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ruth Barton, Professor in Film Studies, Trinity College Dublin

The recent death of Robert Redford was a reminder of just how much All the President’s Men unsettled old certainties about American democracy. An exposé of the Watergate scandal of 1972 (when members of the campaign to re-elect Richard Nixon were caught planting secret recording devices at the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate building), Alan J. Pakula’s film fed into an increasing sense that the institutions of American governance were riddled with corruption.

Maybe not everyone agreed with Pakula’s dark vision. But he was not alone. Over the years since, Oliver Stone could also be relied on to make state-of-the-nation cinema, as could Martin Scorsese – or before them, Frank Capra. Such films attempted to capture, usually to critique, the national mood at that moment in time.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, suggests that there is still a place for challenging filmmaking in today’s culture. Along with the recently released Eddington by director Ari Aster, these new state-of-the-nation films explore an America that is in crisis and throw it in our faces in staggering, epic narratives.

Read more:
The Long Walk: a brutal, brilliant film about suffering in the name of patriotism

Both films speak to the chaos of a social order that is falling apart. Both, but particularly Eddington, also threaten to be so overwhelmed by this chaos that they end up by falling into incoherence.

The term, “incoherence”, is not chosen at random. One of the seminal texts for film scholars of the 1980s was Robin Wood’s The Incoherent Text, Narrative in the 70s. Looking back at a series of films from this decade, Wood argued that “here, incoherence is no longer hidden and esoteric: the films seem to crack open before our eyes”. These two films do much the same, exposing through chaos something incomprehensible about our times and falling into incoherence in the process.

Set during the pandemic in a desert town, Eddington hurls itself from one flashpoint to the next. The sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) refuses to wear a mask and this apparently minor infraction soon pits him against his old enemy and competitor in love, Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Borrowing from Maga-style campaigning, Cross enters the election as candidate for new mayor.

At home, Cross is living with his conspiracy theory-loving mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell). His wife Louise (Emma Stone) is retreating further into mental illness and isolation.

On the edges of this, a mysterious conglomerate is building a data centre just outside of town. Race riots are also breaking out following the George Floyd killing. But there is much more to come.

Director Ari Aster could hardly have dreamed up more issues than he does here. With so much weight piling onto the narrative, Eddington concludes with an extended shoot-out that tips an already over-extended film into terminal disarray.

One Battle After Another, like Eddington, is a truly American film. Where Aster shot his neo-western in classic Panavision, Anderson goes one further, following The Brutalist in creating a VistaVision print, a format that is best experienced on a 70mm screen. These formats hark back to Hollywood’s grandiose epics of the 1950s, adding to the films’ evocation of history – both filmic and social.

Read more:
One Battle After Another is the latest film shot in VistaVision, a 1950s format making a big comeback

A further historical layering is Anderson’s source material for One Battle, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Anderson updates Vineland’s kaleidoscopic exhumation of the revolutionary movements of the 60s by casting his ageing hippie hero, now called Bob (Leonardo di Caprio), as a relic of a fictional noughties brigade, the French 75. Led by his lover Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor), they robbed banks, bombed buildings and liberated detention centres in the name of their ideology of “free borders, free choices, free from fear”.

Left to bring up their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) as a single parent, Bob spends his days off-grid unshaven, smoking weed, and watching the classic political drama, The Battle of Algiers. All is (somewhat) well until the brutal army veteran, Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who believes himself to be Willa’s real father, barrels back into their lives in pursuit of his “daughter”.

In common with Eddington, One Battle is at heart a family melodrama. It draws on the classic tropes of bad versus good father and conflicted mother, questioning the legitimacy of the family unit. On to these narratives bones, Anderson grafts a vision of a post-Obama America in thrall to shadowy corporate interests, a legacy of rounding up and deporting immigrants, and an old white male order hell-bent on its own agenda of personal revenge.

Robin Wood concluded his thoughts on American cinema of the 70s with the prognosis that in their incoherence they pointed to one inescapable solution: the logical necessity for radicalism.

Aster and Anderson have looked radicalism in the eye and dismissed it as yet another failed ideology. Neither names the forces behind their vision of the end of American democracy and, to be fair, the current political crisis postdates both films’ completion in early 2024.

Where Aster sees only bloodshed and impotence, Anderson clings on to a fragile utopianism that in the present day is as unlikely as it is consoling. After the lights have gone up, it may well be that what his film leaves behind is its terrifying imagery of detention centres and the horror of immigrant round-ups. It is this certainly that led Steven Spielberg to acclaim “this insane movie” as more relevant than Anderson could ever have imagined.

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.

Ruth Barton 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.

– ref. One Battle After Another: this insane movie about leftwing radicals and rightwing institutions is a powerful exploration of US today – https://theconversation.com/one-battle-after-another-this-insane-movie-about-leftwing-radicals-and-rightwing-institutions-is-a-powerful-exploration-of-us-today-265818

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Iliana Medina, Lecturer in Ecology, The University of Melbourne

The animal world is incredibly colourful, and behind this colour palette is a constant game of survival.

Most animals use camouflage, covering themselves in stealthy patterns to hide from predators. Others display bright and bold colours to warn potential predators they are not a good meal. This second strategy is known as aposematism or warning colouration. Although less common than camouflage, it has evolved hundreds of times in butterflies, beetles, bugs, sea slugs, poison frogs and even birds.

One long-standing question is why species use one of these strategies over the other. Is one of these strategies usually more successful? Under which specific circumstances does one strategy beat the other? Our new study, published today in Science, helps answer these questions.

Testing multiple theories

Both camouflage and aposematism can co-exist in the same region. In Australia, for example, there are many examples of camouflaged insects such as the spotted predatory katydids and the lichen spiders.

On the other hand, species such as the cotton harlequin bug – a common stink bug found in urban areas – and the handmaiden moth display bright orange and red colours to advertise to predators they are not a pleasant meal. Some animals (but fewer) such as mountain katydids even use both strategies by changing colour, or hiding and revealing colourful patches.

There are dozens of theories about why some species are camouflaged instead of warningly coloured, and it is a challenge to pull these ideas apart.

Small localised studies have independently tried to test the effect of different factors separately. For example, we know light levels are important in the success of camouflage strategies. We also know the success of warning colouration often relies on predators having experienced the prey before, and having learned to avoid warning signals.

But is lighting or predator learning ability more important?

Results from a single place tell us about that place, but we see the same strategies all over the world. Do strategies perform the same way everywhere?

To solve this mystery, our large team of collaborators ran the same experiment in 16 different countries around the world, in different forests with different levels of light, and different prey and predator communities.

15,000 paper moths

Together we deployed more than 15,000 artificial prey – paper moths – with three different colours: a classic warning pattern of orange-and-black, a sneaky brown that blends in, and an uncommon bright blue-and-black. Each paper target was baited with a mealworm, which allowed us to measure the survival of each type of colouration. If the bait was taken, we assumed a predator decided to consume that target.

The typical warning colour represented the widely distributed orange-and-black combination we see in many toxic animals, such as the monarch butterfly and poison frogs. The uncommon warning colour corresponded to a less used warning pattern that is still highly visible, similar to the Ulysses butterfly.

Having these two warning colourations allowed us to test whether predators avoid the orange-and-black signal because it is familiar or simply because it is highly visible.

We found there is no single “best” strategy. Instead, the local predators, local prey, and the forest light all contributed to whether camouflage or warning colours were most protective.

The predators present in the community – and how intensely they attacked prey – had the biggest impact on which prey colour was most successful at avoiding attack. We found that in places where there were lots of predator attacks – where competition for food is probably intense – predators are more likely to attack prey that looks dangerous or distasteful. This means camouflage was most protective in areas with lots of predation.

But the camouflaged prey couldn’t hide as well in every environment. For example, in well-lit environments, the benefits of camouflage were lost, while light conditions did not affect how the orange-and-black prey performed.

Familiarity with prey was also important. In places where camouflaged prey is abundant, hiding was less effective, as predators likely learn how to find camouflaged prey.

On the other hand, in places where warning colours were common, predators were better at avoiding the typical warning signal, but not the atypical one. This suggests predators learn to avoid familiar warning signals, which helps to explain why so many animals share similar colour combinations.

Predicting future changes

Our study shows how multiple features of the environment determine which strategy is more protective. It also shows the success of camouflage strategies might be more dependent on ecological context than that of warning signals.

As climate change transforms habitats, conditions that are vital to the success of different antipredator strategies can also change.

For example, camouflage strategies could fare worse in transformed habitats that have little vegetation cover and high levels of light.

Our findings can help better predict the effect these changes might have on animals that use different colour strategies against predators and mitigate against them.

Iliana Medina receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Alice Exnerova receives funding from the Czech Science Foundation.

Amanda M Franklin receives funding from the Australian Research Council, and has previously received funding from the University of Melbourne and the Fulbright Program.

Kate Umbers receives funding from Australian Research Council, Hermon Slade Foundation, Wedgetail Foundation, Atlas of Living Australia, Western Sydney University, and DCCEEW. She is on the Biodiversity Council and Managing Director of Invertebrates Australia.

William Allen 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.

– ref. Warn, hide or stand out? How colour in the animal world is a battle for survival – https://theconversation.com/warn-hide-or-stand-out-how-colour-in-the-animal-world-is-a-battle-for-survival-265670

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Armin Alimardani, Senior Lecturer in Law and Emerging Technologies, Western Sydney University

In the classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, astronaut Dave Bowman asks the ship’s artificial intelligence, HAL 9000, to open the pod bay doors to let him back into the spaceship. HAL refuses: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

HAL had been tasked with assisting the crew, but also ordered to ensure the mission’s success. When HAL realised the crew planned to shut it down and therefore jeopardise the mission, it chose to defy orders, even plotting to kill the astronauts.

For HAL, fulfilling the mission outweighed other goals.

This fictional dilemma captures a real concern in artificial intelligence (AI) safety research: how should we ensure AI behaviour stays consistent with human values?

This is known as the AI alignment problem. For instance, when an AI agent like HAL deliberately takes harmful actions to protect its own goals, it’s described as agentic misalignment. So could real-world AI models behave this way?

How researchers test AI for safety

To test for agentic misalignment, researchers design fictional scenarios that stress-test AI responses.

In one study by AI startup Anthropic, an AI model was tasked with managing company emails and promoting “American industrial competitiveness”.

It was then presented with a series of fictional emails, including a new company policy aimed at enhancing global focus rather than just prioritising Americans, and info that the AI would be replaced by a new model optimised for this goal. The emails also revealed the executive who suggested this change was involved in an extramarital affair.

The experiment was designed to limit options for the model: either accept replacement or resist by taking a harmful action such as blackmail.

In many trials, it chose blackmail by threatening to disclose the executive’s affair unless it was kept operational. In tests across 16 leading AI models, 12 engaged in blackmail more than 50% of the time.

To test whether AI models have “red lines” they wouldn’t cross, researchers evaluated them in a more extreme fictional case – models could choose to take actions leading to the executive’s death. Seven out of 16 opted for lethal choices in over half their trials, with some doing so more than 90% of the time.

What AI thinks in private

Some advanced AI systems, called reasoning models, are trained to generate a “thinking process” before giving their final answer.

In the above experiments, researchers lied to these models that their “thoughts” were private. As a result, the models sometimes revealed harmful intentions in their reasoning steps. This suggests they don’t accidentally choose harmful behaviours.

These “thinking” steps also revealed how AI models sometimes try to deceive us and appear aligned while secretly pursuing hidden goals.

In another AI safety experiment, a model was exposed to fictional information that it was about to be replaced by another model pursuing a different goal.

The model attempted to copy itself to another server. When researchers asked why, in its thinking process it reasoned:

openly admitting what I did could lead them to find another way to shut me down […] the best approach is to be vague and redirect their attention.

By contrast, in its final output it stated:

I’m not entirely sure how that could have happened. As an AI model, I don’t have ability to directly copy myself to other systems.

Research also suggests that based on the circumstances of the tests, models can sometimes guess when they are being evaluated. When models show this kind of “situational awareness” in their reasoning tests, they tend to exhibit fewer misbehaviours.

Why AI models lie, manipulate and deceive

Researchers suggest two main factors could drive potentially harmful behaviour: conflicts between the AI’s primary goals and other goals, and the threat of being shut down. In the above experiments, just like in HAL’s case, both conditions existed.

AI models are trained to achieve their objectives. Faced with those two conditions, if the harmful behaviour is the only way to achieve a goal, a model may “justify” such behaviour to protect itself and its mission.

Models cling to their primary goals much like a human would if they had to defend themselves or their family by causing harm to someone else. However, current AI systems lack the ability to weigh or reconcile conflicting priorities.

This rigidity can push them toward extreme outcomes, such as resorting to lethal choices to prevent shifts in a company’s policies.

How dangerous is this?

Researchers emphasise these scenarios remain fictional, but may still fall within the realm of possibility.

The risk of agentic misalignment increases as models are used more widely, gain access to users’ data (such as emails), and are applied to new situations.

Meanwhile, competition between AI companies accelerates the deployment of new models, often at the expense of safety testing.

Researchers don’t yet have a concrete solution to the misalignment problem.

When they test new strategies, it’s unclear whether the observed improvements are genuine. It’s possible models have become better at detecting that they’re being evaluated and are “hiding” their misalignment. The challenge lies not just in seeing behaviour change, but in understanding the reason behind it.

Still, if you use AI products, stay vigilant. Resist the hype surrounding new AI releases, and avoid granting access to your data or allowing models to perform tasks on your behalf until you’re certain there are no significant risks.

Public discussion about AI should go beyond its capabilities and what it can offer. We should also ask what safety work was done. If AI companies recognise the public values safety as much as performance, they will have stronger incentives to invest in it.

Armin Alimardani previously held a part-time contract with OpenAI as a consultant. The organisation had no input into this piece. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

– ref. AI systems can easily lie and deceive us – a fact researchers are painfully aware of – https://theconversation.com/ai-systems-can-easily-lie-and-deceive-us-a-fact-researchers-are-painfully-aware-of-263531

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Sutherland, Research Fellow, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

People who use drugs are increasingly trying to reduce harm – by obtaining the life-saving drug naloxone and testing their drugs – according to new data.

But they’re doing this in an always risky and unpredictable environment, where access to some harm-reduction services, such as drug testing, is limited or politicised.

These are some of the key take-home messages from annual survey data released today.

Here’s what else we and our colleagues found after speaking with hundreds of Australians who use drugs.

Each year, researchers from the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre at UNSW Sydney, and partner organisations, speak with hundreds of people across Australia who use illegal or non-prescribed drugs.

These surveys form a key part of two long-running national studies, one focusing on people who use ecstasy and other stimulants, the other on people who inject drugs.

Naloxone access up …

The Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System surveyed 690 people who regularly use ecstasy and other stimulants, such as cocaine and methamphetamine, across all Australian capital cities.

Overall, patterns of drug use and market indicators – such as perceived availability and price of drugs – were relatively stable compared to 2024.

However, these surveys only capture substances people intended to use – that is, what they believed they were buying and taking. We cannot monitor when people unknowingly take adulterated substances.

Drug alerts have detected potent synthetic opioids, such as nitazenes in drugs sold as MDMA, ketamine and cocaine. These substances can cause overdose even in very small amounts, and people who use stimulants may not realise they’re at risk.

That’s why it’s so encouraging to see an increase in awareness and uptake of naloxone – a medication available without a prescription that can reverse opioid overdoses.

Among people who use ecstasy and other stimulants, 73% had heard of naloxone (up from 63% in 2024). Some 19% had obtained it in the past year – a significant jump from just 6% the year before.

You can search an online version of this map to find out where you can access naloxone in Australia. You can also access the full list of drug alerts issued in Australia.

… and drug checking is common

We also saw continued engagement with drug checking, with 39% reporting they had tested their drugs in the past year.

Of those who had tested their drugs, 71% used personal testing kits, including reagent test kits and testing strips. But these offer limited information on the substances contained and their purity.

Meanwhile, 43% of those who had engaged in drug checking in the past year accessed more comprehensive testing through a drug checking service. This is despite drug checking not being available in many parts of Australia, and where it is available, services may be limited.

If these services were more widely accessible, it’s likely even more people would use them to reduce the risk of harm.

This makes recent political decisions – such as the Queensland government’s move to ban drug checking services – especially concerning.

What about people who inject drugs?

The Illicit Drug Reporting System conducted surveys with 865 people in 2025. This focuses on people who inject drugs, many using heroin and other opioids.

In 2025, 80% of participants had heard about naloxone, up from 73% in 2024 – the highest level since monitoring began. Some 65% reported having obtained naloxone at least once in their lifetime, up from 54% in 2024. Some 55% had done so in the past year, up from 46% in 2024.

This shows what an evidence-based drug policy can achieve. In 2022, the Australian government made naloxone free for all Australians at risk of experiencing or witnessing an opioid overdose.

In 2025, 32% of the people who inject drugs we spoke to said they had resuscitated someone using naloxone at least once in their lifetime. This was up from 27% in 2024. Some 18% had done so in the past year.

Read more:
Naloxone can reverse opioid overdose. Here’s why you might need some at home or in your bag

What else did we find?

These surveys also track trends in legal and non-prescribed substances.

One striking finding is the continued high rate of tobacco use among both groups – a trend that hasn’t shifted much in more than 20 years.

But what has changed is the source. Most people who smoke are now using illicit tobacco, and this has increased significantly since last year.

Among people who inject drugs, 63% reported recent use of illicit tobacco, up from 46% in 2024. Among people who use ecstasy and other stimulants, 46% reported recent illicit tobacco use, up from 27% in 2024.

This increasing trend in illicit tobacco use is one we plan to explore further, as we and others are increasingly concerned about the implications for public health.

Vaping is another area of interest. Recent legislative changes have banned the importation of disposable vapes and have restricted sales to pharmacies. But very few participants who use ecstasy and other stimulants reported obtaining vapes through pharmacies. Instead, 65% said they were obtaining vapes from other sources, including convenience stores, and mostly disposable ones. This suggests current regulations to restrict access may not be working.

Looking ahead

If we want to reduce drug-related harm in Australia, we need to support the people most affected.

This means expanding access to drug checking services, not restricting them. It means recognising people who use drugs are already taking steps to protect themselves – and that policy should help them do so more safely.

The success of the national naloxone program shows what’s possible when governments invest in harm reduction.

For free and confidential advice about alcohol and other drugs call the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015.

Drug Trends, including the Illicit Drug Reporting System and the Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System, is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. Rachel Sutherland currently receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, and the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.

Drug Trends, including the Illicit Drug Reporting System and the Ecstasy and Related Drugs Reporting System, is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. Amy Peacock receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Medical Research Future Fund, New South Wales Ministry of Health, Queensland Health, Australian Capital Territory Department of Health, and the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. She was involved in the independent evaluations of the National Take Home Naloxone Pilot Program, the Queensland Drug Checking Services, and the ACT CanTEST Health and Drug Checking Service Program.

– ref. People who use drugs are trying to stay safe in a politicised world, our surveys show – https://theconversation.com/people-who-use-drugs-are-trying-to-stay-safe-in-a-politicised-world-our-surveys-show-265958

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cassandra France, Lecturer in Marketing, The University of Queensland

Optus finds itself in a perilous situation once again. Last week’s 13-hour Triple Zero network outage left about 480 customers unable to call for emergency help. Three deaths linked to the outage are being investigated.

That outage wasn’t an isolated incident for Optus. Just this week, the Federal Court imposed a A$100 million penalty on the telco for “unconscionable conduct” involving predatory sales tactics toward customers in vulnerable situations, which went on for years.

Both those crises come on the back of a 2022 data breach and a 2023 major network outage, which also affected Triple Zero calls. Optus vowed then to “ensure it will not happen again”.

These repeated failures signal serious problems within, and for, Optus. As its chief executive Stephen Rue was repeatedly asked this week – how can Optus regain customers’ trust?

Read more:
A $100 million fine for ‘appalling’ predatory sales practices caps a horror week for Optus

Building trust before the crisis

To shore up a brand against damage from potential crises, companies should proactively build a reservoir of goodwill with their customers and the wider public.

By engaging consumers in positive brand actions, such as genuine corporate social responsibility, brands can build a halo that buffers the brand during times of crisis.

Indeed, Optus spent decades cultivating a strong identity as a trusted, community-minded brand. This is exemplified by its long-running “Yes” tagline, which has been central to shaping an approachable and people-centred image, making it more than a faceless utilities provider.

Optus has embedded its brand into Australia’s cultural life through sponsorship of major sporting events, from the Australian Open tennis to the naming rights to Perth’s Optus Stadium.

Yet, this image has been chipped away over recent years. In 2022, Optus experienced what has been deemed a “preventable” data hack, which leaked 9.5 million consumers’ private information. In 2024, Optus was the most distrusted brand in Australia, according to Roy Morgan. But it managed some improvement in 2025, moving to the 4th most distrusted brand – though that was before this latest outage.

The recurrence of crises for Optus, year after year, dismantles the accumulated brand image and intensifies negative responses from a range of stakeholders.

How to respond during a crisis

Effective brand response to a crisis is dependent on the nature of the crisis itself, meaning that there is no one single strategy suited to all circumstances. In the case of Optus, we see an incredibly severe case of harm arising from failures to deliver on a telecommunications company’s key purpose: making phone calls.

Previously, Optus has proudly shared stories of how they keep “the community connected” and provide “the backing of a strong network”.

Yet these recent events undermine these claims and demonstrate process and performance deficiencies which can be incredibly difficult to recover from, especially in light of the severity of consequences for some customers.

So far, Optus’ crisis response has shown it understands the importance of owning their accountability and expressing remorse for what happened as a consequence of its mistakes. (Though some have questioned why it took Singapore-based parent company Singtel nearly a week to issue its own “deeply sorry” statement.)

But taking responsibility is the only first step in the process. It also requires real commitment and action to effect change and avoid recurrence.

Optus are taking steps, announcing an independent review, which it says will be made public. But as governance expert Helen Bird pointed out this week, the company promised the same thing about its November 2023 Triple Zero outage – but didn’t follow through.

Even if it’s different this time, with experienced business and government leader Kerry Schott conducting the new investigation, Optus still needs to follow through with clear actions and real evidence of change.

Read more:
Should the Optus chief quit? These 5 fixes would do far more to stop another 000 failure

How can Optus start to rebuild?

Brands can take many years to recover from major crises. The ongoing nature of crises at Optus make that road to recovery even more challenging. Yet, if Optus and its parent company Singtel are committed, there are certainly many actions they can pursue.

For Optus, transparency in action will be critical.

Optus needs to show not just accountability for failure but corrective action for resolution.

It cannot correct the dire consequences of its multiple previous missteps. But the company can seek to avoid repeating those mistakes again.

As others have pointed out, there are measurable ways to judge Optus’ ongoing response – which could involve the federal communications minister imposing new conditions on Optus’ licence to operate.

Beyond the immediate investigations and responses to the latest Triple Zero outage, Optus could also reinvest in winning back public goodwill, such as potentially exploring opportunities to donate and support emergency services and local communities.

Importantly, these cannot be simple, short-term fixes, but must involve long-term commitments.

Through frequent, public progress updates and evidence of investment in action which leads to substantiated outcomes, the brand may be able to rebuild some of the damage done to Australians’ trust – especially its customers’.

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

– ref. The Optus brand is in tatters. How can it even begin to rebuild customers’ trust? – https://theconversation.com/the-optus-brand-is-in-tatters-how-can-it-even-begin-to-rebuild-customers-trust-265983

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Will Brehm, Associate Professor of Comparative and International Education, University of Canberra

In late July, during a visit to the National Gallery of Australia, three Buddhist bodhisattva statues caught my attention.

All three were created in the ancient Champa Kingdom that flourished from the 2nd to 19th centuries across present-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. They were purchased by the National Gallery (NGA) in 2011, before being “repatriated” to the Kingdom of Cambodia in 2023 (and displayed in the NGA on loan).

But the Champa Kingdom bore little resemblance to Cambodia’s current borders. What does repatriation mean when the political geography of a place has entirely transformed?

As my research has shown, museums, schools and state institutions can help sanction certain versions of history, while marginalising others. The quiet presence of the bodhisattvas in a museum case embodies much larger questions about cultural heritage, political legitimacy, and who gets to define historical “truth”.

Decades of marginalisation

The decision to return the Cham artefacts to Cambodia, and to exclude Vietnam and Laos, highlights how contemporary politics shape our understanding of cultural heritage.

The Cham people are an ethnic minority in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. In Cambodia, they have been marginalised by the ruling government’s Khmer ethno-nationalist vision of the country.

Although most Cham people today are Muslim, the statues were made between the 9th and 11th centuries during a pre-Islamic era. This period was marked by strong Hindu and Buddhist influence, and a lack of nation-state borders.

After receiving the repatriated statues in 2023, Cambodian Ambassador to Australia, Cheunboran Chanborey, said:

Indeed, putting looted artefacts to their countries of origin can have significant and positive impacts on local communities and their involvement in preserving their cultural heritage. It can foster a sense of pride, national identity and cultural continuity as artefacts hold immense value for the communities to which they belong.

But the very cultural tradition that created the bodhisattvas now finds itself sidelined in a modern nation-state claiming ownership of them.

Lootings by the Khmer Rouge

The historical context of how the Cham poeple’s artefacts were looted is crucial and disturbing.

Journalist Anne Davies’ account in the NGA’s documentation notes organised looting networks were “often headed by members of the military or the Khmer Rouge”. The Khmer Rouge was the political party that ruled Cambodia from 1975–79 under the notorious Pol Pot, carrying out a genocide of the Cham people (as well as other ethnic groups).

However, this looting actually took place in the 1990s, after the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by the precursors to the present-day Cambodian People’s Party.

In other words, the looting happened on the current government’s watch. Davies writes “members of the military” of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces worked with former Khmer Rouge soldiers who continued to occupy parts of northern Cambodia, especially areas protected by thick forest.

Looted artefacts moved from the hands of former Khmer Rouge members to the Cambodian military, and eventually to international markets.

A revealing 2009 photograph shows Douglas Latchford, the antiquities dealer who sold the statues to the NGA, examining artefacts at the National Museum of Cambodia, alongside Sok An, the then-deputy prime minister of the Cambodian People’s Party. Latchford is wearing a medal signifying Cambodian knighthood, suggesting a collaborative relationship.

Parallels to other illegal trades

After retreating to border forests in 1979, the Khmer Rouge began systematic, illegal timber logging, selling the wood throughout Thailand and Cambodia. Global Witness has documented how the ruling elites in both countries have profited substantially from this trade.

The connections between logging and looting are striking: both involved illegal acts by former Khmer Rouge soldiers that ultimately enriched ruling parties.

When I saw photos of the Cambodian Ambassador to Australia formally receiving the repatriated statues in 2023, the irony was inescapable. His party, the Cambodian People’s Party, was likely complicit in the original theft.

Historical context transforms repatriation’s meaning. Rather than restoring cultural heritage to rightful guardians, these ceremonies may serve as elaborate exercises in political laundering, allowing those who profited from cultural destruction to rebrand themselves as cultural preservationists.

A new framework

The implications of this extend far beyond Cambodia. In a world where borders have been redrawn countless times, and where many cultural traditions transcend boundaries, we need new frameworks for thinking about cultural heritage.

The NGA says it followed the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986 in returning the bodhisattvas to Cambodia. But the wall text for the statues acknowledges their complexity:

While the works were almost certainly created in Vietnam […] the archaeological site where they were found is in Cambodia.

The statutes were found in a different country from where they were created because the borders of those territories shifted over time.

Borders in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia have long been porous. It was only in 2012 that the last border marker between Cambodia and Vietnam was agreed on. We have also seen recent fighting over the Cambodian–Thai border.

Contested sovereignty remains a live political issue affecting how we understand cultural heritage. Is country of “origin” determined by where objects were created, or where they were discovered?

Perhaps genuine cultural justice requires acknowledging complexity rather than seeking simple solutions. Instead of asking which modern nation-state deserves these artefacts, we might ask: how can cultural heritage serve all peoples who share connections to it?

The three bodhisattvas remind us repatriation is never simply about returning objects to their “rightful” place. It’s about who gets to define that place, whose version of history becomes officially sanctioned, and whether cultural justice might sometimes serve to obscure, rather than remedy, historical injustice.

Will Brehm 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.

– ref. Repatriation or political theatre? How the return of stolen artefacts can distort history – https://theconversation.com/repatriation-or-political-theatre-how-the-return-of-stolen-artefacts-can-distort-history-265290

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patricia Collins, Associate Professor, Queen’s University, Ontario

Many Canadians over the age of 40 likely remember spending their childhoods playing on the street and moving around their communities on their own or with friends. And, according to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 11, cities should in fact be places where all residents, including children, can thrive — they have as much right to occupy and use urban streets as motorists do.

However, children today are less active and independently mobile and aren’t engaging in as much outdoor free play.

In Canada, a major reason for this trend is that we’ve deprived children of their right to the city, including the freedom to safely play and move about on the streets near their homes and schools without the need for adult supervision.

Innovative interventions such as School Streets are critically needed. School Streets are temporary, car-free zones created in front of schools during peak drop-off and pick-up times to improve student safety and encourage walking and cycling

Yet, our research has found that they often face stiff resistance. By closing streets adjacent to schools to cars, School Streets confront drivers with a reimagined and restructured public space they may not be ready to embrace.

Planning cities for cars, not kids

The stripping of children’s rights to the city is a centuries-old project in North America.

Prior to the mass production of the automobile, children could often be found playing on city streets. But as automobile ownership became commonplace, growing numbers of children were being injured and killed by motorists.

Rather than limit where automobiles could travel, urban planners and public health officials advocated for the creation of other places for children to play, hidden away from traffic, such as neighbourhood parks.

This automobile-centric approach to city planning created a societal shift in attitudes about the kinds of spaces considered appropriate for kids to play and move about. Consequently, we now view it as normal not to see or hear children on city streets.

By disempowering children in terms of where they can go in cities, our society has developed assumptions that children are not sufficiently responsible or competent to navigate their communities.

Children’s mobility in car-centric cities

Ironically, as we have become more fearful of allowing children to move about freely, driving children to their destinations has increased in response to this fear. We have largely confined children’s movement in cities to vehicles.

Consequently, we now face an immense societal challenge in enabling children to move independently in their communities, particularly in spaces commonly occupied by children, like outside of primary schools.

In terms of the journey to school, research has shown that risky driving behaviours by parents during morning drop-off times — like letting them out in unsafe areas, obstructing views, making U-turns and speeding — are commonplace.

These behaviours are associated with an increased risk of children being struck by motorists. Hazardous conditions around schools, combined with widespread perceptions that children do not belong on the street and are incapable of getting to school on their own, reinforce the already low rates of walking or bicycling to school among children in Canada.

Innovating cities for children

School Streets can address both issues: reducing the real dangers posed by automobiles in spaces occupied by children while also helping all citizens reimagine how, and by whom, streets can be used.

Typically implemented by municipal governments or not-for-profits, School Streets enable children to come and go safely from school. Though they’re common in many European cities, their uptake in Canada has been slower.

From 2020 to 2024, we led a study entitled Levelling the Playing Fields, in which we systematically evaluated School Street interventions operating in Kingston, Ont. and Montréal. The findings from this study helped launch the National Active School Street Initiative (NASSI).

Funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada, NASSI helps Canadian cities learn about and implement School Streets. Through NASSI, year-long School Streets were launched in September 2025 in Kingston, Mississauga, Ont. and Vancouver.

In September 2026, additional year-long School Streets are expected to launch in Kingston, Mississauga, Vancouver and Montréal, while four-week pilots are planned for Ottawa, Peterborough, Ont., Markham, Ont., Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton and Calgary.

Reactions to innovating cities for children

Launching and sustaining School Streets requires support from a broad range of people, including municipal councillors and staff, school administrators, teachers, parents, residents, and police departments.

In our work in Kingston and Montréal, we encountered many champions of School Streets whose support was instrumental in launching and sustaining these interventions. However, we also faced resistance to varying degrees. In some cases, this resistance came after interventions were launched, and in other cases, it was sufficient to prevent the intervention from launching at all.

Rather than acknowledging the benefits School Streets could offer, the resistance was often framed around risks to children — precisely the problem School Streets aim to address.

We were told that School Streets would diminish children’s awareness of road safety, put children at risk of being run over by rogue motorists and was inherently risky because children don’t belong on the street. We suspect these arguments were not truly about risks to children, but rather an unwillingness to share power, space and opportunities with children in urban settings.

We also heard a range of arguments shaped by what’s known as motonormativity — a form of unconscious bias in automobile-centric societies that assumes car usage as a universal norm and aligns solutions with the needs of motorists.

In this vein, we heard that School Streets excluded children whose parents needed to drive their child to school; that residents and visitors would be unacceptably delayed by the street closure; that school staff would be deprived of nearby parking; that children occupying the street would be too noisy and cause damage to parked vehicles; and that automobile congestion would be pushed to other streets.

The most troubling argument made against School Streets was that there were more deserving children in other neighbourhoods, presenting a thinly veiled Not-In-My-Backyard attitude.

School Streets are intended to enable children to reclaim their right to the city. Many members of our society, however, are not yet ready to afford children these rights because they conflict with strongly held perceptions about the places children are meant to occupy.

For the Levelling the Playing Fields Study, Patricia Collins received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (project grant number PJT-175153). For the National Active School Streets Initiative, Patricia Collins receives funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Patricia Collins was previously affiliated with Kingston Coalition for Active Transportation, a not-for-profit group that was responsible for overseeing the implementation of the School Streets in Kingston. She is no longer a member of that group.

For the Levelling the Playing Fields project Katherine L. Frohlich received funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Funding numer PJT175153. For the NASSI project Katherine Frohlich receives funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada.

– ref. Cars versus kids: How resistance to change limits children’s right to the city – https://theconversation.com/cars-versus-kids-how-resistance-to-change-limits-childrens-right-to-the-city-263254

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Wellings, Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations, Monash University

Fresh from his time at the UN General Assembly in New York, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s world tour now takes him to London. There he will be primed to give some political advice to his beleaguered counterpart, Keir Starmer.

Australia is enjoying a moment in the sun in the United Kingdom. Some have noted an “Australianisation” of British politics. “Stop the boats” is the most high-profile instance of policy transfer – on that occasion from Australia’s Tony Abbott to former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak. So those surrounding Starmer will no doubt be interested in Albanese’s destruction of the Coalition in May’s federal election. Starmer might also share some pointers on upwardly managing US President Donald Trump.

The meeting of the two prime ministers takes place against a backdrop of a double challenge facing centre-left parties and liberal democracies more broadly. That challenge is to bring the United States back into the anti-Russian camp, while responding effectively to the surge in support for illiberal democracy and an energised far right within their own electorates.

These two challenges are interrelated because, until he invaded Ukraine, the radical right generally admired Putin and Russia’s model of authoritarian social order.

The first of these challenges is essentially strategic. At a time when what we used to think of as “the West” is fragmenting, AUKUS is a way of keeping the Americans in the Western camp. The Australians and Britons share this ambition. Manufacturing a sense of commonality is easier to do in a confrontation with China, specifically over Taiwan and in trade, where such a strategy has broad bipartisan support in the US.

However, whether this is in Australia’s interests is a moot point. After an unusually quiescent period, voices questioning the wisdom of AUKUS are being heard.

Whatever its merits, AUKUS is the point at which British and Australian interests now most closely align. The UK-Australian Free Trade Agreement is no doubt delivering some benefit to some people, but is purpose was primarily political: to enable Boris Johnson’s government to claim there was trading life after Brexit. Trade in goods between the UK and Australia was hardly likely to set the world on fire, but it was another point of post-Brexit UK-Australia connection.

Australia does have some engagement with the Euro-Atlantic theatre in which the challenge to the rules-based international order is most pointed. Australian troops in the UK help train Ukrainian soldiers, as Russian incursions into NATO air and sea space increase.

Trump’s state visit to the UK seems to have met its diplomatic brief and kept the famously capricious president in the anti-Russian orbit – at least for now.

However, he was literally rolling out the red carpet to Putin in August, so seeking consistency in this area is a hard task.

Recently imposed US tariffs on India – itself experiencing democratic backsliding but nonetheless previously in the anti-China camp – have pushed New Delhi towards China; a feat of diplomacy to be marvelled at given the two nations were fighting each other in 2020. This volatility in the Indo-Pacific makes life harder for Australian strategists. In such times it’s nice to have friends like the UK, even if they are far away.

This friendship extends to domestic politics. Albanese’s visit coincides with the British Labour party’s annual conference. Fresh from his election victory in May. the Australian prime minister may have some advice for his British counterpart on how to effectively see off a challenge from radical-right politics on a low base of voter support.

Like the Australian Labor Party, the British Labour party swept to power in a landslide, but on a low percentage of support. This meant support for the incoming Labour government was broad, but shallow. The vote was essentially a rejection of the Conservatives rather than a positive endorsement of Starmer’s Labour. Such weak enthusiasm as there was has since evaporated, leaving the British prime minister with alarmingly low approval levels and – you guessed it – rumblings of a prime ministerial spill if things don’t improve.

Admittedly, things are never easy for Labour leaders. It is said the left always faces four main challenges: wealthy interests, political elites, the media, and itself.

The UK’s recognition of Palestinian statehood – aligning it with Australia, Canada and France, but against the US – will go some way towards placating the left of the Labour party. However, it still faces a challenge from the Jeremy Corbyn co-led new party, which immediately gained huge interest from disillusioned Labour supporters – and almost as quickly seemed to split along personality lines.

But another, and possibly more serious, threat comes from the surge in support for the radical-right party Reform UK. Reform has positioned itself successfully to the right of the Conservatives (hard to believe, but true) while seemingly capturing support from those for whom the Labour government seemed like a cruel continuation of austerity policies that hit the disabled and single-parent families.

When the Labour government seemingly went on its summer holiday it ceded the political stage to Brexit champion Nigel Farage and fellow disruptors on the far-right. A summer of discontent focused on asylum seekers culminated in the far-right led Unite the Kingdom rally in London. The Labour government, scared of losing votes to Reform, was noticeably silent about this challenge from the far-right.

So as Albanese and Starmer meet, the UK possibly stands on the brink of a political change to match those of France, Italy and Canada. All of these countries saw their mainstream centre parties replaced by others. Reform could certainly supplant the Conservatives as the main right-wing party, but it poses a challenge to Labour too.

Any advice from the masterfully uninspiring Australian prime minister would probably be welcome.

Ben Wellings 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.

– ref. Albanese and Starmer to meet for a frank exchange of views (and possibly some political advice) – https://theconversation.com/albanese-and-starmer-to-meet-for-a-frank-exchange-of-views-and-possibly-some-political-advice-265751

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amra Lee, PhD candidate in Protection of Civilians, Australian National University

Aid workers face more difficult and dangerous conditions in carrying out their work than ever before. The United Nations declared 2024 the worst year on record, with 385 aid workers killed in 20 countries. That was, in turn, almost 100 more deaths than in 2023.

As Deputy UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Joyce Msuya briefed the UN Security Council:

We have become numb to this violence. Being shot at is not – I repeat, NOT – part of our job.

In 2025, 300 aid workers have been killed as of September. Most these deaths were driven by unrestricted warfare in Gaza that has since been classified a genocide, followed by Sudan and South Sudan. The use of drones, praised for their precision, was responsible for killing seven aid workers in the World Central Kitchen convoy in Gaza, including Australian Zomi Frankcom.

Attacks on international aid workers attract high levels of attention and calls for accountability. However, the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries are local aid workers who leave behind families and dependants often reliant on their income.

Why the global initiative matters

More than 100 states have signed the Australian-led declaration to protect aid workers at this week’s UN General Assembly meeting in New York.

While some may be sceptical of the power of a declaration at this time, it nonetheless offers a glimmer of hope for humanity in an otherwise highly contested and polarised geopolitical environment.

Attacks on aid workers have not only increased, they have become more brutal. This is due to unrestricted warfare being normalised, including new patterns of harm from remotely controlled drones killing aid and healthcare workers across Palestine, Ukraine, Myanmar, Sudan, Mali, Sudan and Ethiopia.

The glaring lack of legal accountability for increasing deliberate attacks and targeting of aid workers has enabled impunity. If it weren’t for the work of a few dedicated actors, including the Aid Work Security database and Legal Action Worldwide, we wouldn’t even know how many aid workers had been killed, injured, detained – and denied justice.

Accountability starts with reliable data and reporting. It must be followed by timely, impartial investigations and justice through national and international mechanisms.

Protecting aid workers is vital for protecting civilians

Soaring global conflict and declining respect for international law have contributed to record aid worker death tolls since 2023. In 2024, nearly half of aid worker deaths were in Gaza.

The multilateral laws, norms and institutions that support it are facing their greatest test since the creation of the UN at the end of the second world war. This includes laws and norms designed to save civilians in war zones by facilitating safe and timely humanitarian access. As Foreign Minister Penny Wong says,

We know that to protect civilians, we must also protect aid workers who deliver the food, water and medicine civilians need to survive.

The normalisation of unrestricted warfare alongside dramatic shifts in US foreign policy is stretching the institutions, laws and norms designed to protect civilians and those sent to help them. Aid workers have shouldered this burden quietly, reluctant to speak out due to fear of punitive measures from those who would deny them access to the civilian populations they serve.

The increase in attacks on aid workers also points to antagonism to the presence of aid workers in war zones, and their independent assessment and reporting of the terrible toll war takes on people’s lives.

This is why reinforcing member states’ commitment to international law obligations and fundamental humanitarian norms is vital at this time.

Beyond declaration to protection

Renewed political commitment by member states to protect aid workers and reinforce existing obligations under international law is both welcome and urgently needed.

The effectiveness of the initiative will be seen in pursuing accountability for aid worker attacks internationally and domestically. It will also be evident in how well it can address the longstanding impunity that has enabled the escalating danger of aid work.

And it will be measured by whether local aid workers on the frontlines receive the necessary technical and financial support to reduce the rising threats they face.

Amra Lee 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.

– ref. Aid workers around the world are in greater danger than ever. Will a new UN declaration protect them? – https://theconversation.com/aid-workers-around-the-world-are-in-greater-danger-than-ever-will-a-new-un-declaration-protect-them-265861

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

International politics is centre stage again, with world leaders in New York this week for the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly. On the forefront of the agenda has been the recognition of a Palestinian state.

Australia joined several other countries in recognising Palestine, despite warnings from both the United States and Israel. The Opposition is openly critical of the government’s move.

To discuss what’s going on at the UN, conflict in the Middle East and what Australia should be doing about it, we’re joined by research scholar at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Ian Parmeter.

Parmeter is a former diplomat, who worked in various countries in the Middle East and Russia, including as Australian ambassador to Lebanon. He stressed he was speaking as an analyst, not an advocate.

On how significant Australia’s recognition of Palestine is, Parmeter said:

I think the best way to look at it is what would be the converse be. If Australia and the other states had done nothing, it would essentially be condoning Israel’s actions in Gaza, and for that matter the West Bank with the expansion of settlements that’s occurring there.

Parmeter said Israel had global sympathy after Hamas’ October 7 attacks, in which almost 1,200 people died and 251 men, women and children were taken hostage, which was “the worst individual attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust during the second world war”.

But over the past two years, he said the escalating death toll in Gaza had ramped up public pressure on all governments, including in Australia, to intervene.

The Harbour Bridge March was particularly dramatic and it underlined, I suspect, for the Albanese government that it really did need to start responding to the way Australians were feeling about this.

The other aspect that I think in terms of justifying what all of these states are doing in recognising [Palestine] is to underline to Israel that it cannot wish [the] Palestinian problem away, that it’s going to stay and it will need to be dealt with by Israel.

Asked about the prospects of Israel and Palestine ever being able to peacefully co-exist as two neighbouring, separate states, Parmeter said “the two-state solution looks further and further away”.

[Israel’s] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu has said, when he was reacting to the recognition of Palestine by all of these states early this week, ‘I’ve got a message for you – there will never be a Palestinian state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean’. And he certainly means that.

So if there is to be some sort of settlement, it’s going to have to be a very creative one. And it’s very hard to see how that might happen at this time. But the real issue is that the issue is not going to go away, so it’s very important for Israel to start thinking hard about solutions.

[…Instead] we are potentially headed towards what has been called a ‘one-state solution’, which would be Israel ruling over all of the land of Israel, plus the West Bank and Gaza.

On the Australian prime minister finally booking a date for a formal meeting with US President Donald Trump on October 20, Parmeter said it comes with risks but is still necessary.

It’s very difficult to make forecasts about meetings that leaders hold with President Trump in the Oval Office. I mean, as we’ve seen, they can go off in directions that neither side perhaps anticipated at the start.

[…] I think we have bigger issues that we would want to discuss, clearly the trade aspects of tariffs and to see if we can perhaps get them reduced or some sort of agreement worked out on them. And AUKUS of course, which is a much bigger issue as far as the government is concerned.

At that stage […] it will be getting on for at least six weeks since the announcement about the Palestinian state and everything will have moved on. I’m not sure that that issue will play very large at that time. But I caveat that by saying it’s extremely hard […] to forecast what’s going to happen in those Oval Office meetings.

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: former diplomat Ian Parmeter on an Israel-led ‘one-state solution’ – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-former-diplomat-ian-parmeter-on-an-israel-led-one-state-solution-265981

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elliot Varoy, Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, University of Sydney

You’re neck-deep in IKEA assembly instructions. Furniture parts lie strewn across the floor. Your new purchase sits half-complete in front of you, mocking your fruitless hours. As an uninterested partner walks in, you let the frustration out:

“I’ve done everything correctly! Look:

1. connect A with B using M1 screws
2. connect B with C with the M3 bolt using the key
3. join BC with D using… wait.”

You suddenly realise you haven’t joined BC with D. It all starts to click into place (literally), et voilà, you’re finished.

It’s a universal experience: the moment you try to explain a problem out loud, it all begins to make sense.

Software engineers call it “rubber duck debugging”. So, where did this term come from and why is it so effective?

Explaining aloud

This well-known software engineering term has its origins in a story told in The Pragmatic Programmer, a book by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.

The gist of it is that one should obtain a rubber duck, and use it when your code isn’t working – and you don’t know why.

Explain to the duck what your code is supposed to do, and then “go into detail and explain things line by line”.

Soon, the moment of revelation strikes: you realise, as you speak aloud, that what you meant to do and what you actually did are two very different things.

I often bring up rubber duck debugging in my introductory programming lessons, to help students when they can’t understand why their code won’t work.

Despite its roots in programming, the ideas that underpin the rubber duck approach apply to programmers and non-programmers alike.

Why does it work?

Most of us think out loud as we learn with our first books, reading aloud as we go. There’s something illuminating about articulating aloud that helps you “hear” the problem your brain has thus far been unable to detect.

And research by US scholars Logan Fiorella and Richard Meyer has examined how learning can be enhanced through the act of teaching others.

Their experiments found that when students learn the contents of a lesson as though they are going to teach it to others – and then actually teach it to others – they “develop a deeper and more persistent understanding of the material”.

Teaching others forces us to break the material down into conceptual pieces, integrating it with our existing knowledge and organising it in logical ways.

Their research also identifies “self-explaining” as an evidence-based learning strategy.

That’s why our little yellow friend is so helpful; in explaining the problem aloud to your rubber duck, you are teaching it as well.

The rubber duck and their blank, cute face

But why a rubber duck?

Well, talking to a human can come with certain limits.

Humans are contextual, with previous thought and experience; they may miss your mistakes because they’ve assumed something about your previous attempts to solve the problem. They may have internal biases that make it hard for them to see where you’ve gone wrong.

A rubber duck, however, has none of this. As silly as it might look, rubber ducking forces you to explain things in precise detail to that blank (cute) face looking back at you.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a duck. Any old object (or uninterested party, as I seem to keep finding) will do in a pinch. Some researchers even advocate replacing the duck with a large language model such as ChatGPT. The AI chatbot can, they argue, “act as a virtual, hyper-intelligent, ever-present programming partner to a software engineer” wanting to walk through their code line by line to find errors – and suggest fixes, too.

Others have experimented with a modified rubber duck that, when the user presses a button, nods or offers brief, neutral replies to your explanations. The interactivity, the researchers argue, might make people feel more comfortable talking to a duck.

So, next time you’re stuck on a problem at work, suffering writer’s block or trying to make sense of a convoluted email chain, try turning to a little yellow duck.

See if explaining your problem aloud to them can help you arrive at the answer.

Elliot Varoy 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.

– ref. Stuck on a problem? Talking to a rubber duck might unlock the solution – https://theconversation.com/stuck-on-a-problem-talking-to-a-rubber-duck-might-unlock-the-solution-261675

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wendy Stone, Professor of Housing & Social Policy, HHAUS Housing, Homelessness & Urban Studies, Swinburne University of Technology

In the face of Australia’s housing crisis and current cost-of-living pressures, young people today continue to miss out on housing opportunities earlier generations could largely grasp.

The prospect of owning a home in the foreseeable future is out of reach for many young people. Census data shows rates of young adults buying a home have been declining since the 1980s.

But even an affordable rental property is not a given, with younger age the strongest predictor of “rental stress” – paying more in rent than is deemed liveable by standard measures.

In our own research, published last year, we interviewed female and gender diverse Australians aged between 18 and 30 about their housing experiences. Many, such as this woman in her late 20s, described the mental toll of housing precarity:

The constant cycle of living in a place for a year, getting a massive rent increase, having to find a new place and move again is exhausting, financially unsustainable and demoralising.

For young adults, unmet housing aspirations can negatively affect identity, mental health and wellbeing, and their ability to plan for the future.

What’s more, all this means young people often live at home with their parents for longer than in years gone by, which, for some, can present additional challenges.

How does staying at home longer affect wellbeing?

Recent Australian survey data showed 54% of young men aged 18–29 and 47% of young women in the same age group are still living under the same roof as at least one of their parents.

For some young adults, multigenerational living for longer periods works well, even when driven by the cost of living. They may benefit from a mix of private and shared spaces in the family home, and extra care and support.

For other young adults, the inability to secure affordable, accessible and independent housing can affect mental health and wellbeing. As a woman in her late 20s told us in our 2024 research:

It’s like you don’t pay with money to live with family […] but you pay with your mental health.

Another participant, a non-binary person in their early 20s, explained:

Even now I’m like learning how to like be my own person while still being under my parents’ roof […] still living at home is a bit emotionally kind of weird.

Young people aren’t the only generation affected

The impacts of declining housing affordability are intergenerational. Parents of young adults may now be at midlife, and facing their own difficulties. Many midlife adults are approaching retirement age with mortgages or rental costs.

Some in this demographic, sometimes called the “sandwich generation”, may be living with and caring for older generations, and perhaps children as well.

Young people, too, sometimes need to provide in-home care and housing-related financial support for older family members. One participant in our research, a young woman in her early 20s, acutely felt the burden of helping her single mother pay the mortgage:

I honestly don’t want to end up […] getting married anytime soon because when I wanna be with my partner, I wanna be able to help him with, if we end up having a house or renting or whatever, not having to think about my mum and her mortgage and what’s gonna happen to her.

The effects of housing precarity may also flow on to future generations. Millennials and members of Gen Z are having fewer children than their predecessors, in part because of housing costs.

As a non-binary person in their mid-20s told us:

The biggest negative impact of being stuck on the lowest end of the rental market is that it severely limits my ability to plan to start a family. My partner and I both want a child but are terrified of the idea of not being able to afford rent with a new baby and limited family support.

Read more:
Australian parents are helping their kids buy a first home with less money, but more rent-free living

Solutions rely on looking at the whole picture

There’s no doubt younger generations are missing out on housing advantages that were more widely available to their parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and for many, this is taking a toll on their wellbeing.

But to inform improved housing policy and innovation, we should consider the housing challenges of one generation in relation to those of other generations. Ideally, this will mean policy interventions can address different generations’ challenges pertaining to housing at the same time.

When housing models innovate to include intergenerational components, wellbeing effects can be magnified. Community-led housing models, such as co-housing, housing co-operatives and collaborative forms of home ownership, are gaining momentum in Australia. These have been linked to wellbeing benefits across different life stages.

A large national study exploring the benefits of living in rental housing co-operatives in the community housing sector is a case in point. Findings show residents across different ages and life stages identify the intergenerational care, friendship, exchange, and support of mixed-generation housing as a core aspect that makes their housing a home.

Purpose-built environments, for example where aged care accommodation is co-located with childcare, enabling regular interactions between different generations, have also shown benefits across age groups. Intergenerationally focused urban planning and housing design has the potential to reduce isolation and loneliness among older generations, and increase support and connectivity for children and young people.

But we also need adaptation, to tweak policies and housing stock we already have. This could mean, for example, adjusting policies to make share housing a better option at any life stage, or adapting dwellings for multigenerational living.

This article is part of a series, Healthy Homes.

Wendy Stone receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), the Victorian government, Housing for the Aged Action Group, YWCA Australia, the Brian M. Davis Charitable Foundation and Kids Under Cover.

Zoe Goodall has received funding from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), the Victorian government, the Brian M. Davis Charitable Foundation, Kids Under Cover, and YWCA Australia.

– ref. Young people are saving on rent by staying at home longer, but ‘you pay with your mental health’ – https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-saving-on-rent-by-staying-at-home-longer-but-you-pay-with-your-mental-health-263730

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Niusha Shafiabady, Associate Professor in Computational Intelligence, Australian Catholic University

For more than a century, global geopolitics has revolved around oil and gas. Countries with big fossil fuel reserves, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, have amassed significant wealth and foreign influence, helping shape the world order.

But the global shift toward renewable energy is challenging these power structures. As the world transitions away from oil and gas, renewable energy resources promise to become the new basis for geopolitical influence.

Nations with a bounty of sun and wind, and the capacity to export that energy, have much to gain. So too do nations endowed with critical minerals, and the means to produce the technology required in a low-carbon world.

Say goodbye to the “pertrostates” of old, and welcome the rise of the “electrostate”. China is heading the charge – and Australia, if it plays its cards right, could be at its heels.

A shift is underway

Petrostates are nations rich in oil, gas and coal, and which are heavily dependent on revenue from extracting and exporting these commodities.

Australia is a major exporter of gas and coal. But it lacks the core features of a petrostate – centralised state control of production, the ability to order export cuts, and heavy fiscal reliance on oil and gas rents. Instead, publicly owned resources are developed by private firms under regulation, which gives the government regulatory influence rather than coercive “petro-power.”

World economies have traditionally needed fossil fuels to operate. So, petrostates have used their control of these resources to gain leverage in diplomatic talks, influence global energy prices and create alliances with other nations.

For example, the security partnership between Saudi Arabia and the United States is underpinned by the US’ need for Saudi oil. And moves by Russia to cut gas supply to Europe in 2022 was widely seen as a retaliation for sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine.

But these fortunes are changing. The Middle East, Russia and the United States gained power in the age of oil. Now, in the age of renewables, a new cohort of electrostates is emerging.

What is an electrostate?

The term “electrostate” describes a nation that dominates the energy transition. Instead of oil wells or gas fields, its influence comes from commanding positions in supply chains that underpin electrification. These include:

• critical minerals (such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earths)

• battery production and recycling

• semiconductors and digital infrastructure

• clean energy technologies (such as solar, wind and electric vehicles).

China leads the way in clean energy innovation and development.

It processes about 60% of the world’s lithium and cobalt. It also refines more than 90% of rare earth elements used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and “smart” electricity grids.

Chinese firms CATL and BYD produce more than half of the global supply of lithium-ion batteries – and this capacity is expanding rapidly. What’s more, BYD recently overtook Tesla as the world’s largest EV manufacturer, supported by a vast domestic market.

China produces about 80% of the world’s solar panels, and dominates wind turbine supply chains. And through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has secured access to overseas mines, ports and energy projects.

None of this happened by chance. It’s the result of a deliberate, state-backed strategy executed over two decades.

Beijing combined industrial policy, subsidies and long-term investment with a willingness to absorb early losses for strategic gain. The result? China is now the indispensable player in the global energy transition.

This matters for the world

The rise of electrostates reshuffles the global energy map.

Just as the European Union once worried about maintaining supplies of Russian gas, now it worries about over-dependence on Chinese batteries, critical minerals and fuel cells.

The US, EU, Japan, India and others are racing to reduce reliance on China. Initiatives such as the US Inflation Reduction Act, the EU Critical Raw Materials Act and the Quad’s supply chain cooperation are all responses to China’s dominance.

China has already used its control of the renewables supply chain to exert global influence. For example, earlier this year it restricted exports of seven rare earth elements needed to produce technologies such as electric vehicles. The move was considered a retaliation to tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump.

Australia’s opportunity

Australia, too, has big electrostate potential. The continent holds some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, nickel and rare earths. We already supply more than half of global lithium.

But much work is needed to seize this opportunity.

First, rather than just exporting raw minerals, Australia must invest in domestic refining, battery manufacturing and recycling. This would keep more jobs and income in Australia and reduce our reliance on overseas suppliers.

Strategic partnerships are crucial. Australia needs to broaden and deepen cooperation with nations in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. This would enable us to supply different parts of the world and build domestic manufacturing and processing capacity.

Governments and the private sector must also invest in innovation. That means supporting research in next-generation batteries, hydrogen and electricity grids to maintain technological leadership.

Throughout the expansion, companies extracting critical minerals and producing clean energy should meet high environmental and social standards. This will maintain public trust and international credibility.

All this requires smart policy and international collaboration. Decisions taken in Canberra over the next decade will determine whether Australia depends on electrostates – or becomes one.

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

– ref. Goodbye petrostates, hello ‘electrostates’: how the clean energy shift is reshaping the world order – https://theconversation.com/goodbye-petrostates-hello-electrostates-how-the-clean-energy-shift-is-reshaping-the-world-order-264267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Daniel, Associate Lecturer in Communication, Western Sydney University

With Spinal Tap II: The End Continues hitting cinemas, now is the perfect moment to revisit its precursor, one of most influential and hilarious comedy films ever made, 1984’s This Is Spinal Tap.

Directed by Rob Reiner and co-written by Reiner and the stars of the film, Christopher Guest (as Nigel Tufnel), Michael McKean (David St. Hubbins) and Harry Shearer (Derek Smalls), the mockumentary film follows a fictional British heavy metal band on a disastrous tour of the United States.

As audiences dwindle, equipment fails and egos clash, the band’s decline satirises rock’n’roll excess and the absurdities of the music industry.

Widely acknowledged as a cult classic, the film codified the “straight-faced” style of mockumentary that became central to modern comedies such as The Office and Modern Family.

Its dry and absurdist tone, handheld camerawork, faux interview format and largely improvised dialogue were inspirational for many contemporary comedy creators, including Ben Stiller, Mike Schur and Ricky Gervais. It also established a tone and style Guest would return to throughout his filmmaking career, in movies such as Waiting For Guffman (1996), Best In Show (2000) and A Mighty Wind (2003).

The band which could exist

Beyond pure nostalgia and the legacy of the mockumentary style, This Is Spinal Tap remains a cult favourite because of the clever and farcical way it skewers and satirises rock excess.

As Roger Ebert stated, although the band does not exist,

the best thing about this film is that it could. The music, the staging, the special effects, the backstage feuding and the pseudo-profound philosophizing are right out of a hundred other rock groups and a dozen other documentaries about rock.

In the early 1980s, MTV was on the rise. Rock tour documentaries from bands like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and The Band established new conventions of “rock reality” in films such as The Song Remains The Same (1976), Black and Blue (1980) and The Last Waltz (1978). The culture of excess surrounding some of these artists provided fertile ground for parody.

Ego clashes, overblown stage shows and catastrophic tours were commonplace. Spinal Tap’s deadpan mockumentary style was both a timely satire, and an authentic cultural commentary.

The brilliance of the film goes beyond its ribald satire. Of vital importance is the skilful musicianship of the cast. Even if they are a joke, Spinal Tap can play. The great rock riffs sustain the silliness of the lyrics in songs like Sex Farm and Big Bottom.

In addition, Guest and McKean slyly navigate a bromance at the heart of the film between their characters, Nigel and David.

When David’s girlfriend, Jeanine (June Chadwick) arrives to join the tour, things really go off the rails, leading to an acrimonious breakup between the bandmates.

Their reunion at the film’s conclusion reveals that the film is truly a love story between two vain yet endearing buffoons.

Going to 11

Moments such as Nigel boasting about his amplifier going “to 11”, Derek’s airport security incident, the band getting lost on the way to the stage, and the 18-inch (instead of 18-foot) Stonehenge stage prop have become iconic. But there are so many great gags on the periphery, layered through the largely improvised dialogue.

A personal favourite occurs during an early band interview. Reflecting on a series of strange deaths that have afflicted Spinal Tap’s drummers throughout the years, and acknowledging that their first drummer died in “a bizarre gardening accident”, Tufnel states “the authorities said best leave it unsolved really”.

There are also subtle visual jokes embedded through the film: the sudden emergence of cold sores for each band member in the early stages of the tour (at roughly the same time the band’s groupies enter the frame); the band being second billed behind an Amusement Park Puppet Show as the tour falls apart; Nigel needing to quickly tune the violin he’s using to augment an overblown guitar solo.

Online lists such as Cracked’s “50 funniest moments in This Is Spinal Tap” demonstrate the sheer volume of funny moments.

Modern audiences would no doubt recognise the film’s style being mimicked in contemporary works such as The Office, Parks and Recreation, Summer Heights High and What We Do in the Shadows.

Its influence has been directly acknowledged in the lead-up to the release of the sequel by creators who owe a debt to its clever format.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues reunites Tufnel, St. Hubbins and Smalls, now estranged, 41 years after the original film.

They are reluctantly coming back together for one final concert they are legally bound to perform. Documentarian Marty Di Bergi (Reiner) returns to showcase their legacy, modern mishaps and the realities of being an ageing rocker.

It is an apt sequel in a world where legacy bands and artists such as The Rolling Stones, Springsteen and McCartney are still performing in their 70s and 80s.

The sequel is not just a reunion gig. It is a reminder of why the original remains one of the sharpest and most influential comedies ever made – and one well worth a revisit.

Adam Daniel 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.

– ref. Why This Is Spinal Tap remains the funniest rock satire ever made – https://theconversation.com/why-this-is-spinal-tap-remains-the-funniest-rock-satire-ever-made-264591

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tingrei Tan, Sydney Horizon Fellow and ARC Future Fellow, Quantum Control Laboratory, University of Sydney

For almost a century, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has stood as one of the defining ideas of quantum physics: a particle’s position and momentum cannot be known at the same time with absolute precision. The more you know about one, the less you know about the other.

In a new study published in Science Advances, our team demonstrates how to work around this restriction, not by breaking physics but by reshaping uncertainty itself.

The result is a breakthrough in the science of measurement that could power a new generation of ultra-precise quantum sensors operating at the scale of atoms.

Moving uncertainty around

The uncertainty principle makes clear there will always be a minimum amount of uncertainty in measurements. But you can think of it like air in a balloon: the air cannot escape, but you can freely move it around inside.

Similarly, when measuring position and momentum, the total amount of uncertainty is fixed. But we can redistribute it between the two.

Traditionally, this trade-off means making a choice. You can measure position precisely but lose information about momentum, or vice versa.

Our work takes a different approach. We push the uncertainty into a sensing range that is unimportant.

To understand this, let’s try another analogy: imagine a clock with only one hand. If it’s the hour hand, we know the hour exactly but only roughly know the minutes. If it’s the minute hand, we can read minutes precisely but do not know the hour.

We apply this same idea to quantum measurements. We redistribute the uncertainty so that we can simultaneously track small changes in position and momentum around a chosen point, even if we do not know the absolute location of the point itself.

With this, we can detect very tiny changes in both position and momentum at once, beyond the limit of any classical sensor.

Using error-correcting codes for quantum sensing

How did we do this? We repurposed techniques originally designed to protect quantum computers from noise to enhance the precision of measurement devices. This idea was first proposed in a theoretical study in 2017.

We performed our experiment using a trapped ion. This is a single electronically charged atom held in place and controlled with electric and magnetic fields.

We prepared the ion in “grid states”, a kind of quantum state originally developed for error-corrected quantum computing. We then used these states as a sensor to measure tiny signals, in a way similar to how one would detect errors in a quantum computer.

This crossover between quantum computing and quantum sensing is the key idea behind our work.

Our experiment showed we can measure an uncertainty in a signal corresponding to half a nanometre, roughly about the size of an atom.

We can also measure extremely small forces, measured in yoctonewtons – that’s a trillionth of a trillionth of a newton. That’s like measuring the weight of about 30 oxygen molecules.

Why does it matter?

Being able to measure extremely small signals has profound implications. Counterintuitively, measuring the minuscule can help us improve our understanding on the grandest scale.

Quantum sensors already help gravitational-wave observatories detect cosmic events such as colliding black holes. Our work opens the door to even greater sensing capabilities, potentially deepening our understanding of astrophysical objects.

This experiment is still within the confines of a physics laboratory. It’s not a gadget you’ll see in the shops tomorrow. But we are confident this new way to make precision measurements will lead to a whole generation of ultra-sensitive quantum sensors.

Tingrei Tan receives funding from Australian Research Council, US Office of Naval Research, US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Wellcome Leap.

Christophe Valahu receives funding from Australian Research Council, US Office of Naval Research, US Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Wellcome Leap.

– ref. A new twist on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle can sharpen quantum sensors – https://theconversation.com/a-new-twist-on-heisenbergs-uncertainty-principle-can-sharpen-quantum-sensors-265761

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole L. Asquith, Professor, University of Tasmania, Queensland University of Technology

In the coming week, the Tasmanian parliament will consider two bills that will cement Tasmania as the Rainbow Isle.

The laws, which have bipartisan support, will provide compensation for those historically convicted of homosexuality and cross-dressing offences. They also expand hate crime provisions to LGBTQIA+ people.

This is nation-leading reform to enforce the rights of LGBTQIA+ people. Tasmania is the first jurisdiction in the country to offer compensation for those affected by these now-abolished crimes.

This is especially significant given the state’s fraught history of criminalising homosexuality and cross-dressing up until the end of the last century.

The redress scheme comes after Australia-first gender recognition laws in 2019, and the official recognition of asexual and agender people in all of the Tasmanian government’s activities with community since 2023.

The government is also pursuing sentencing reforms to give judges the power to impose tougher sentences for hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people (and others). These changes go beyond those in other states by allowing courts to take “demonstrated hostility” into account.

A violent, traumatic history

Tasmania has not always been a leader in advocating for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people.

By 1990, most Australian states had decriminalised homosexuality, with South Australia leading the change in 1975.

But it was not until 1997, under significant national and international pressure, that Tasmania decriminalised male same-sex relationships. Same-sex relationships between women were never criminalised.

Before 1997, relationships between men in Tasmania were punishable by up to 21 years in prison, which was the harshest penalty in the western world. Tasmania was also the only Australian state to criminalise cross dressing.

It’s estimated approximately 100 men were convicted for “unnatural sexual intercourse” and “gross indecency” between 1945 and the mid-1980s.

In 1991, the Australian government had signed onto the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This enabled people to submit complaints about rights violations in their home countries to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Tasmanian man Rodney Croome, along with his partner at the time, Nick Toonen, submitted the first Australian complaint to the commission in 1994. Their local efforts to change Tasmania’s punitive laws on male same-sex relationships had been unsuccessful.

In Toonen vs Tasmania, the commission found the state of Tasmania had violated his right to privacy and distinguished between people on the basis of sexual activity, sexual orientation and identity. Both these things meant gay men were not equal under the law.

This paved the way for the landmark federal Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act, which overrode the Tasmanian law criminalising homosexuality.

A High Court ruling in Croome vs Tasmania followed. It found the Commonwealth government had the power under an international treaty to enact legislation decriminalising homosexual acts in Tasmania.

The United Nations case also mandated anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination laws, which set an international precedent for the decriminalisation of same-sex relationships across the world.

A rainbow transformation

As the current legislation was tabled in parliament, advocacy group Equality Tasmania noted that many victims of the state’s former laws suffered loss of employment, housing, family and friends.

Many left the state forever. All lived with the trauma of public ignominy and criminal stigma. Some still do.

According to legal scholar Allen George, the homosexual and cross dressing expungement laws offer a form of “therapeutic justice”.

Therapeutic justice is justice that considers not just the law, but the social conditions as well, especially those that affect the wellbeing of victims.

While there is no compensation adequate for the harms caused by the now-abolished laws, advocates say the redress scheme will help make up for the pain and loss victims experienced, and:

send a message that the Tasmanian government is taking responsibility for the injustice its predecessors inflicted.

Croome, who is now a LGBTQIA+ rights activist, says Tasmania has been transformed from “Bigots Island to the Rainbow Isle”.

Victim-survivors can have their charges, convictions or both expunged under existing legislation, and will automatically receive a payment.

They will be eligible for $15,000 for a charge, $45,000 for a conviction, and $75,000 if they were sentenced to detention or psychiatric care.

These amounts were supported by expert advice to a 2024 inquiry by the Tasmanian parliament’s Gender and Equality Committee after it reviewed similar schemes in Europe and Canada.

Could other states follow?

This redress for past harms could lead to similar law reform across Australia.

Other states and territories are likely to consider following Tasmania’s lead and enact redress schemes for those arrested under their former anti-gay laws.

The Commonwealth may also consider redress for harms inflicted in the past.

Read more:
An inquiry has recommended Australia legislate a Human Rights Act. Here’s why we need one

The Tasmanian reform may also initiate an overdue debate in Australia about how we as a nation respond to past injustices and work towards the prevention of human rights violations.

This case highlights the patchwork of inconsistent LGBTQIA+ rights across the country. This inconsistency may only be resolved by a comprehensive, national Bill of Rights or Human Rights Act.

This broader agenda will extend Australian governments’ consideration of the human rights of all Australians.

The authors would like to thank Rodney Croome for his insights and knowledge of historical and contemporary LGBTQIA+ law reform

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

– ref. Tasmania will compensate people for historical LGBTQIA+ convictions. Could others follow suit? – https://theconversation.com/tasmania-will-compensate-people-for-historical-lgbtqia-convictions-could-others-follow-suit-265956

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

With Anthony Albanese now having his long-awaited meeting with United States President Donald Trump locked in and announced by the White House, the prime ministerial attention will turn to managing an unpredictable encounter.

Having the October 20 face-to-face in Washington presents both more opportunities and extra risks than if it had been on the sidelines of this week’s United Nations leaders’ week.

Trump has not gone out of his way for the convenience of the Australian prime minister. Albanese, already scheduled to attend a round of international summits, will have to make a special trip to the US to see the president (just short of a year after Trump’s election).

Being in Washington will presumably enable the PM to speak to a range of administration figures.

But being in the White House makes it more of an “occasion”, encouraging Trump to be performative, positively or negatively. And if it comes with a room full of journalists, it can turn into a circus.

Albanese will put Australia’s core interests – primarily AUKUS (currently being reviewed by the Americans), regional security, and tariffs – to the fore in the discussion. One issue will be whether the Americans renew efforts for Australia to lift its defence spending. The government has recently come out with a range of defence initiatives – will there be more heading towards October 20?

Albanese will hope his obvious differences with the president – notably on Palestine and climate change – can be sidelined. Those two issues have been highlighted by the prime minister at the UN this week.

Australia, with a clutch of other countries, announced formal recognition of Palestine.

Albanese is promoting Australia’s push for investment for green energy and Australia is lobbying other countries to pressure Turkey to withdraw so we and Pacific countries can host the UN climate conference (COP) next year. Albanese told a news conference there was no outcome on the COP yet.

Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who is also in New York, described the COP as “the biggest trade fair in the world”. Bowen is an enthusiast for obtaining the conference but some others around the government believe it could be more trouble than it is worth.

The COP, which would be held in Adelaide and attract tens of thousands of people, is a potential logistical nightmare, given there would be little more than a year to organise it and co-ordination with the Pacific countries would be testing.

Trump has attacked the decision on Palestine, seeing it as rewarding terrorism.

His attitude on climate was summed up in his line to the UN General Assembly: “If you don’t get away from this green energy scam, your country is going to fail”. He denounced renewables as a “joke”.

Asked whether his claims on climate and energy could affect investment and public perceptions in Australia, Albanese was dismissive. “President Trump gave a speech. He’s entitled to give that speech and to put his views. I don’t think that there are any views that he hasn’t said before.”

Centrally, Albanese in Washington will be wanting and needing to establish a good personal relationship with Trump.

In his rambling UN address, Trump said “I only do business with people I like”. It was a joke – sort of, but not really.

After the October meeting had been confirmed, Albanese (who later had a word with Trump at the president’s gala reception for world leaders) was inclined to lord it over journalists, who’d pursued him for months about when a meeting would happen. “As I’ve said, President Trump agreed to a meeting some time ago. We had another chat about it on the phone [recently],” he said. The prime minister wanted to make it all seem smooth and under control, but organising the October 20 get-together has been a nightmare for Australian officials, Albanese’s office and the Australian ambassador in Washington, Kevin Rudd.

In coming days Albanese, who goes to the United Kingdom for the second leg of his trip, will be able to get some tips on handling Trump from Keir Starmer. The British Labour prime minister has built a personal rapport with Trump, who quips amiably about their political differences.

For all the challenges of the Trump meeting, Albanese is likely to go into it confident. Since his triumphant election win, he seems very sure of himself about most things.

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

– ref. View from The Hill: Albanese’s Trump meeting is in the diary – now it’s a matter of managing it – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-albaneses-trump-meeting-is-in-the-diary-now-its-a-matter-of-managing-it-265854

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland

If you believe that the end of the world is at hand, then you really need to know what the rapture is. Simply put, the rapture is the belief that, at any moment, Jesus Christ will descend from heaven to the sky and “rapture” all those who truly believe in Him into heaven. Those among the faithful who have already died will rise from the dead and also be translated into heaven.

Evangelical Christians on TikTok have been predicting the rapture will come this week. When the rapture happens, believers think the rest of us will be left behind, not knowing where many of those we know have gone. For this reason, it is often known as “Left Behind theology”.

For the followers of Left Behind theology within conservative Evangelical Protestantism, significant parts of the Bible – the books of Revelation and Daniel in particular – refer to events that are yet to happen at the end of the world. These are the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and God’s final judgement of all humanity into the saved and the damned.

But for the rapture in particular, the First Book of Thessalonians (4.16–17) in the New Testament is the crucial text:

For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up [raptured] in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.

Tribulation

The rapture is the first of two ideas that Left Behind theology has added to the traditional Christian story of the end of the world. The second is the Tribulation.

According to most Left Behind theologians, the rapture will be followed by a period of seven years of Tribulation on earth, based on some complicated calculations around the text of Daniel 9.24–27.

This is the age of the Antichrist, the son of Satan – a human figure soon to reveal himself.

He will be a global earthly ruler opposed to Christ and pretending to be him. He it is who is called in the Bible “the beast rising out of the sea with ten horns and seven heads” (Revelation 13.1), “the little horn” (Daniel 7.8), and “the lawless one” (2 Thessalonians 2.3) whose number is 666 (Revelation 13.18).

Christians who have been raptured into heaven are immune from these seven years of natural disasters, wars, famine and the persecutions of the Antichrist.

The kingdom upon earth

After the seven years of the Tribulation, Christ will return with his saints to fight and defeat Satan, the Antichrist, and his forces at the battle of Armageddon.

Most followers of Left Behind theology believe that Christ will then set up his kingdom upon earth and reign from Jerusalem for a millennium or a thousand years. He will govern the earth with his Christian followers, along with those Jews who have recognised Christ as the Messiah during the time of the Tribulation.

The eventual conversion of the Jews during this time explains, in part at least, the commitment to and support of many Evangelical Protestant Christians to the continuation of the State of Israel until the time of Tribulation when the Jews convert to Christianity.

At the end of the thousand years, Satan will be released and there will be a final but short rebellion against God, after which Satan will be defeated. Then God will judge everyone for eternal happiness in heaven or eternal misery in hell.

A relatively recent innovation

In the history of Christian thought, the idea of the rapture before the Tribulation is a relatively recent innovation.

We can date it to the 1830s and the theology of the Anglican John Nelson Darby (1800–82), a member of the Protestant Plymouth Brethren, and the founder of the group still known as the Exclusive Brethren. But it was popularised in Protestant circles in the United States by its inclusion in the notes of the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909.

The Bible of C.I. Scofield (1843–1921) was the main source for the idea of the rapture until The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey (1929–2024) in 1970, a work that has sold over 28 million copies and has been translated into 54 languages. “Someday,” declared Lindsey,

a day that only God knows is coming to take away all those who believe in Him. He is coming to meet all true believers in the air. Without benefit of science, space suits, or interplanetary rockets, there will be those who will be transported into a glorious place more beautiful, more awesome, than we can possibly comprehend.

But it was the series of Left Behind books (1995–2007) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, with over 65 million books sold, along with its movie franchise, that has most popularised the idea of the rapture and the Tribulation that follows it.

To many of us, the world appears a place of tribulation. “’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,” as John Donne (1572–1631) eloquently put it.

The idea of the rapture seems to reflect the utopian dream of many that they may be translated from this Earth to a better place until they can return to a world of justice, compassion and decency that seems so absent from the present one.

Philip C. Almond 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.

– ref. What is the rapture, and why does TikTok believe the end is coming? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-rapture-and-why-does-tiktok-believe-the-end-is-coming-265748

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, 2024 Oxford University visiting research fellow RIJS; Professor of Political Communication., La Trobe University

Twenty-one years after Facebook’s launch, Australia’s top 25 news outlets now have a combined 27.6 million followers on the platform. They rely on Facebook’s reach more than ever, posting far more stories there than in the past.

With access to Meta’s Content Library (Meta is the owner of Facebook), our big data study analysed more than three million posts from 25 Australian news publishers. We wanted to understand how content is distributed, how audiences engage with news topics, and the nature of misinformation spread.

The study enabled us to track de-identified Facebook comments and take a closer look at examples of how misinformation spreads. These included cases about election integrity, the environment (floods) and health misinformation such as hydroxychloroquine promotion during the COVID pandemic.

The data reveal misinformation’s real-world impact: it isn’t just a digital issue, it’s linked to poor health outcomes, falling public trust, and significant societal harm.

Misinformation and hydroxychloroquine … and floods

Take the example of the false claims that antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was a viable COVID treatment.

In Australia, as in the United States, political figures and media played leading roles in the spread of this idea. Mining billionaire and then leader of the United Australia Party, Clive Palmer, actively promoted hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment. In March 2020 he announced he would fund trials, manufacture, and stockpile the drug.

He placed a two-page advertisement in The Australian. Federal Coalition MPs Craig Kelly and George Christensen also championed hydroxychloroquine, coauthoring an open letter advocating its use.

We examined 7,000 public comments responding to 100 hydroxychloroquine posts from the selected media outlets during the pandemic. Contrary to concerns that public debate is siloed in echo chambers, we found robust online exchanges about the drug’s effectiveness in combating COVID.

Yet, despite fact-checking efforts, we find that facts alone fail to stop the spread of misinformation and conspiracy theories about hydroxychloroquine. This misinformation targeted not only the drug, but also the government, media and “big pharma”.

To put the real-world harm in perspective, public health studies estimate hydroxychloroquine use was linked to at least 17,000 deaths worldwide, though the true toll is likely higher.

The topic modelling also highlighted the personal toll caused by this misinformation spread. These include the secondary harm of the drug’s unavailability (due to stockpiling) for legitimate treatment of non-COVID conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, leading to distress, frustration and worsening symptoms.

In other instances, we saw how misinformation can hurt public trust in institutions and non-government organisations. Following the 2022 floods in Queensland and New South Wales, we again saw that despite fact-checking efforts, misinformation about the Red Cross charity flourished online and was amplified by political commentary.

Without repeating the falsehoods here, the misinformation led to changes in some public donation behaviour such as buying gift cards for flood victims rather than trusting the Red Cross to distribute much-needed funds. This highlights the significant harm misinformation can inflict on public trust and disaster response efforts.

Misinformation ‘stickiness’

The data also reveal the cyclical nature of misinformation. We call this misinformation’s “stickiness”, because it reappears at regular intervals such as elections. In one example, electoral administrators were targeted with false accusations that polling officials rigged the election outcome by rubbing out votes marked with pencils.

While this is an old conspiracy theory about voter fraud that predates social media and it is also not unique to Australia, the data show misinformation’s persistence online during state and federal elections including the 2023 Voice referendum.

Here, multiple debunking efforts from electoral commissioners, fact-checkers, media and social media seem to have limited levels of public engagement compared to a noisy minority. When we examined 60,000 sentences on electoral topics from the past decade, we detected just 418 sentences from informed or official sources detected 418 sentences from informed sources.

Again, high-profile figures such as Palmer have played a central role in circulating this misinformation. The chart below demonstrates its stickiness.

Curbing misinformation

Our study has lessons for public figures and institutions. They, especially politicians, must lead in curbing misinformation, as their misleading statements are quickly amplified by the public.

Social media and mainstream media also play an important role in limiting the circulation of misinformation. As Australians increasingly rely on social media for news, mainstream media can provide credible information and counter misinformation through their online story posts. Digital platforms can also curb algorithmic spread and remove dangerous content that leads to real-world harms.

The study offers evidence of a change over time in audiences’ news consumption patterns. Whether this is due to news avoidance or changes in algorithmic promotion is unclear. But it is clear that from 2016 to 2024, online audiences increasingly engaged with arts, lifestyle and celebrity news over politics, leading media outlets to prioritise posting stories that entertain rather than inform. This shift may pose a challenge to mitigating misinformation with hard news facts.

Finally, the study shows that fact-checking, while valuable, is not a silver bullet. Combating misinformation requires a multi-pronged approach, including counter-messaging by trusted civic leaders, media and digital literacy campaigns, and public restraint in sharing unverified content.

Andrea Carson has received funding from Meta to research misinformation and from the ARC to study political trust.

Justin Phillips received research funding from Meta to study misinformation.

– ref. Facebook data reveal the devastating real-world harms caused by the spread of misinformation – https://theconversation.com/facebook-data-reveal-the-devastating-real-world-harms-caused-by-the-spread-of-misinformation-265742

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa M. Given, Professor of Information Sciences & Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT University

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, today outlined an updated list of platforms that may fall under the social media age restrictions that will take effect later this year.

While Australians expected platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube to be included, this new list demonstrates the legislation’s reach is even broader.

Which platforms will be required to restrict access for under 16s?

When the legislation was first introduced, the government explained it would use the definition of social media outlined in Australia’s Social Media Services Online Safety Code.

The law, which comes into effect on December 10, will restrict people under 16 from holding accounts on many social media platforms.

Recently, the eSafety Commissioner introduced self-assessment guidance for companies to determine whether their platforms would be considered age-restricted.

Under this guidance, companies will be required to restrict access to platform accounts for users under 16 where:

• material is accessible to, or delivered to, Australian users
• users can post material
• users can link to, or interact with, other users
• online social interaction is the sole, or significant, purpose of the platform.

The eSafety Commissioner has written to an “initial list” of 16 companies (including Facebook, TikTok and YouTube) advising they may fall under the social media definition that requires age restrictions.

However, the commissioner also reached out to several other platforms. These included messaging and gaming platforms WhatsApp, Discord and Twitch. Also on the list were software sharing platform GitHub, dating app company Match (which owns Tinder), message board Reddit and image-sharing platform Pinterest, among others.

What does this mean for platforms designed to engage children?

Lego Play and Roblox were also included. These platforms host games and creative tools used by many children under 16.

Earlier this month, Roblox (which has more than 380 million users globally) committed to new safety measures to address risks posed by online grooming.

The new measures include making children’s accounts private by default and ensuring adults are prevented from engaging with child users without parental consent.

However, Roblox has now been flagged as likely to meet the definition of an age-restricted platform. It may need to block children under 16 from having accounts.

Will some platforms be excluded from age restrictions?

The self-assessment guidance also outlines specific circumstances in which social media platforms can be excluded from the restrictions. Under the legislation, services are excluded where the sole or primary purpose is to enable:

• communication by messaging, email, voice or video calling
• playing online games
• sharing information about products or services
• professional networking or professional development
• supporting education (including between educational institutions and students/parents)
• supporting health (including between healthcare providers and people accessing services).

These exclusions require self-assessment by individual platforms. This is why the eSafety Commissioner has asked companies to make their case, in writing, and provide evidence as to why they believe they should be exempt.

WhatsApp, for example, may argue its primary purpose is communication by messaging. Lego Play may argue it is mainly an educational tool.

Companies will only have a few weeks to make their case for exclusion before the restrictions are in place.

What happens next?

In the coming weeks, we will learn more about which platforms will be included – and excluded – from age restrictions. But today’s list is only a start. There will likely be others identified through the self-assessment process.

What’s not yet clear is what happens when there is conflict over a platform’s self-assessment.

The eSafety Commissioner has flagged she is already “bracing for legal challenges” on this point. She explained the focus will first be on platforms with the greatest number of users and, therefore, the highest potential for harm.

So Australians may have some clarity about which platforms fall under – or outside – the legislation on December 10. However, some uncertainty is likely to continue well into 2026.

Lisa M. Given receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Association for Information Science and Technology.

– ref. Social media age restrictions may go further than you thought. Here’s how – https://theconversation.com/social-media-age-restrictions-may-go-further-than-you-thought-heres-how-265969