Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

A national Newspoll, conducted June 3–7 from a sample of 1,232, had Labor and the Coalition tied at 50–50, a two-point gain for the Coalition since the post-budget Newspoll, three weeks ago. This is Labor’s worst position in Newspoll since last November, following the fallout from the defeat of the Voice referendum.

Primary votes were 39% Coalition (up two), 33% Labor (down one), 11% Greens (down two), 7% One Nation (steady) and 10% for all Others (up one). The drop for the Greens will be attributed to their stance on Gaza, but other polls below have the Greens at around 14%.

After recording a non-negative net approval for the first time since the Voice referendum last October in the previous Newspoll, Anthony Albanese’s net approval returned to a negative, with his satisfied rating down four to 43% and his dissatisfied up three to 50%, for a net approval of -7, down seven points.

Here is a graph of Albanese’s net approval in Newspoll this term. The plus signs are the data and a smoothed line has been fitted.

Peter Dutton’s net approval improved two points to -10. In the previous Newspoll, Albanese’s better PM lead over Dutton had blown out to 52–33. In this poll, his lead was drastically reduced to 46–38, Albanese’s lowest Newspoll margin this term.

It’s likely the previous Newspoll was a pro-Labor outlier, and this one may be too rosy for the Coalition. But last week’s YouGov poll alos had a 50–50 tie between Labor and the Coalition. I believe Labor’s struggles are primarily due to the cost of living issue.

YouGov poll remains tied at 50–50

A national YouGov poll, conducted May 31 to June 4 from a sample of 1,500, had Labor and the Coalition tied at 50–50, unchanged from the previous YouGov poll in mid-May. Primary votes were 38% Coalition (steady), 30% Labor (steady), 14% Greens (up one), 8% One Nation (steady) and 10% for all Others (down one).

Albanese’s net approval was steady at -12, with 53% dissatisfied and 41% satisfied. Dutton’s net approval fell seven points to -13. Albanese led Dutton as preferred PM by 47–36 (44–37 previously). By 84–16, respondents supported a right for workers to strike.

Essential poll tied at 48–48

A national Essential poll, conducted May 29 to June 2 from a sample of 1,160, had the Coalition and Labor tied at 48% each with 4% undecided (47–46 to the Coalition in mid-May). Primary votes were 36% Coalition (up two), 32% Labor (up one), 13% Greens (up three), 5% One Nation (down three), 3% UAP (up two), 8% for all Others (steady) and 4% undecided (down two).

Albanese’s net approval was up one point since April to -4, with 47% disapproving and 43% approving. Dutton’s net approval dropped four points to -1 after achieving a positive net approval in April.

On artificial intelligence (AI), 42% (down three since January) said it carries more risk than opportunity, 21% (steady) more opportunity than risk and 37% (up four) said risk and opportunity are about the same.

Respondents were asked whether children aged 10 to 18 should be able to do various things, then the age a respondent selected was averaged. For buying and consuming alcohol, voting and accessing pornography, the average age was about 17.5. For using social media, it was 15.4. For being held criminally responsible, it was 14.3.

By 68–15, respondents supported increasing the age limit on social media platforms from 13 to 16. By 62–16, respondents supported criminalising hate speech.

Morgan poll: Labor regains lead

A national Morgan poll, conducted May 27 to June 2 from a sample of 1,579, gave Labor a 52–48 lead, a 3.5-point gain for Labor since the May 20–26 Morgan poll that had given the Coalition its best position in this poll since the 2022 election.

Primary votes were 36% Coalition (down one), 31% Labor (up 2.5), 14% Greens (down one), 4.5% One Nation (down 1.5), 9% independents (steady) and 5.5% others (up one).

Redbridge Queensland poll: another big lead for the LNP

The Queensland state election will be held in October. A Redbridge poll, conducted in two waves in February and May from a sample of 880, gave the Liberal National Party a 57–43 lead, from primary votes of 47% LNP, 28% Labor, 12% Greens and 13% for all Others.

The “Labor government led by Steven Miles” had a net approval of -11, with 37% giving it a poor rating and 26% a good rating. The LNP opposition led by David Crisafulli had a +14 net approval (35% good, 21% poor).

Since Newspoll gave the LNP a 54–46 lead in March, Queensland polls have all suggested Labor faces a heavy defeat at the October election.

Victorian Redbridge poll: Labor still well ahead

A Victorian Redbridge poll, also conducted in February and May from a sample of 1,000, gave Labor a 55–45 lead, a one-point gain for Labor since a March Redbridge poll. Primary votes were 38% Coalition (steady), 35% Labor (down one), 14% Greens (up four) and 13% for all Others (down three).

The “Labor government led by Jacinta Allan” had a net approval of -7, with 37% giving it a poor rating and 30% a good rating. The Coalition opposition led by John Pesutto had a -15 net approval (34% poor, 19% good).

This poll contrasts with the Victorian Resolve poll that was conducted in April and May, which gave the Coalition a 37–28 primary vote lead over Labor.

Modi’s party loses majority at Indian election

I covered the June 4 vote counting after the seven-stage Indian election for The Poll Bludger. PM Narendra Modi’s BJP party lost 63 seats to lose its single-party majority, although allied parties won enough seats for Modi to be returned for a third successive term. It had been widely expected that Modi would win a landslide.

At the May 29 South African election, the African National Congress lost the majority it had held at every election since 1994. There was a second successive landslide for the left at the June 2 Mexican election.

I am covering the European parliament election, held from Thursday to Sunday, for The Poll Bludger. Labour remains over 20 points ahead of the Conservatives in UK national polls, with the election on July 4. In US national polls, Donald Trump still leads Joe Biden by about one point despite his May 30 conviction.

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

– ref. Labor slumps in Newspoll to a tie with Coalition, with Albanese also down – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231600

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Hoffmann, Professor of Economics, Tasmanian Behavioural Lab, University of Tasmania

The Australian Defence Force is facing an acute recruitment crisis. Only 80% of the 69,000 personnel needed to meet future challenges have signed up. The government recently announced recruitment will be opened up to some foreign citizens to try to fill this gap.

Not only is the Australian military failing to achieve planned growth, it is actually shrinking, as Defence Chief General Angus Campbell told a Senate inquiry in February.

There are two fundamental reasons for the current recruitment impasse. One is economic – low unemployment and a perception of better opportunities, work conditions and future prospects in the private sector.

The other reason is cultural: a declining willingness of Gen Z to identify with – and fight to defend – their nation.

Either way, the key to the recruitment crisis lies in understanding the motivations of this generation, the main pool of potential recruits today.

We recently interviewed 19 serving Australian soldiers from a range of demographics (two were Gen Z) and across military branches in a study funded by the Australian Defence Force. We wanted to find out what makes Gen Z recruits tick, and what the force might do to persuade more of them to serve their country.

Read more:
Recruiting for the modern military: new research examines why people choose to serve and who makes the ideal soldier

Enter the ‘anxious generation’

Researchers study every new generation as a guide to the future, from the baby boomers to Generation X (like the authors of this article), and millennials. None is more distinctive than generation Z, or Zoomers – people born roughly between 1997 and 2008.

They are the first generation to grow up with smartphones and social media. In his current bestseller, The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt outlines the cataclysmal effect: he claims a large increase in depression and anxiety in young people is the direct effect of unsupervised social media use during adolescence.

Zoomers’ mental health is a barrier to service, as US Marine Corps Lieutenant Matthew Weiss spells out in his book on Gen Z military recruitment.

A military career can be detrimental to psychological wellbeing, as Australia’s Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide has demonstrated. The force’s rigorous mental health entry standards may have reinforced this perception.

The soldiers we spoke to said mental health is an issue for recruitment. On the one hand, they agreed that service is mentally challenging, and that younger soldiers are more psychologically vulnerable. On the other hand, interviewees said the force’s mental health support has been improving. This is a step in the right direction – it may well be that media coverage of veterans’ mental health issues worries Zoomers considering enlistment.

Weiss argues private sector jobs (and money) afford much more online currency than military service. The respondents in our interviews agreed younger recruits were very savvy about pay and conditions.

Waning national pride

But there may be another motivator: as shadow Defence Minister Andrew Hastie recently told the ABC:

People who join the Defence Force don’t just do it for economic reasons, they do it because they love their country.

This means if love of country falls from generation to generation, military recruitment falls too. Weiss suggests in the United States, low patriotism partly explains Gen Z’s reluctance to enlist.

Our interviewees said traditional nationalism played only a modest role for enlisting for young people. They thought a lesser sense of obligation and service is one reason. Another is the fact that the black-and-white picture of “my country right or wrong” has been muddied following media coverage of alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.

The evidence confirms waning national pride among young Australians. We analysed publicly available data from the World Values Survey, a wide-ranging poll of people’s values around the globe conducted since 1981. It shows in 1981, 70.3% of Australians were “very proud” of their nationality. This fell to 60.8% in 2018, the first year to feature Gen Z members in the survey. That year, only 41.6% of twentysomethings (including some millennials) were very proud Australians – the lowest proportion of any Australian age group in any year since the survey began.

All else being equal, older adults tend to be more nationalistic, as surveys in different periods and countries show. But the nationalism gap between old and young has opened up further with Gen Z.

According to the survey data, in 1981, 69% of Australians in their twenties were willing to fight for their country. This was a slightly greater proportion than the 65% of over-70s. By 2018, this was reversed, with only 44% of Australians in their twenties willing to fight, compared with 59% of over-70s.

The moral imperative

Our interviewees suggested that if nationalist values motivate Zoomers, this is only in terms of “doing the right thing”. This offers an alternative opportunity for recruiters: the changing role of the military towards peacekeeping and disaster relief makes defence attractive to those with humanitarian values.

Zoomers fall into this category. Research shows, and our interviewees agreed, that Gen Z care about the environment, diversity, equity and inclusion.

This is reflected by their attitudes to work. Zoomers want a calling and not just a career (let alone merely a job). According to our interviewees, young recruits place greater importance on the intrinsic aspects of work, like learning skills, experiencing adventure and challenges.

So how do we boost recruitment?

Our own and other research suggests Gen Z is strongly motivated by things that support their own growth and wellbeing, both materially and spiritually, rather than service toward others. Researchers label these “pro-self” motivations.

Zoomers may be hard to recruit, especially given the increasing war for talent, but they have a great deal to offer the military. They may be the most success-orientated among recent generations. They have an unprecedented ability to handle digital technologies that are becoming increasingly important in the military.

The inaugural National Defence Strategy unveiled in April has conceded “the need for a fundamental transformation of defence’s recruitment and retention system”.

Many of the proposals to raise military recruitment in Australia are general. The government recently raised pay and bonuses in the defence force, for example. Other measures include making the recruitment process easier, making military service an opt-out system, reducing medical requirements, or increasing the maximum recruitment age and galvanising junior military leaders to change outdated traditions that harm recruitment.

Our research suggests building a force that appeals to Gen Z’s social values and intrinsic motivations is the way forward. Recruitment strategies need to be tailored.

Robert Hoffmann receives funding from the Australian Department of Defence.

Maria Teresa Beamond receives funding from the Australian Department of Defence and from the not-for-profit group Australian Women in Security Network.

– ref. Gen Z is turning away from military service in record numbers. We’re trying to understand why – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/230671

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Harrop, Cardiologist; PhD candidate, Faculty of Medicine, The University of Queensland

A First Nations child born in Australia today can expect to live eight to nine years less than a non-Indigenous child born on the same day.

During their life, they are more likely to have a heart attack, and would be on average 20 years younger than the non-Indigenous patient in the hospital bed next to them when they do. Acute rheumatic fever, a disease virtually non-existent among non-Indigenous Australians, may damage their heart valves. They are more likely to develop and die from cancer, diabetes, kidney failure and lung disease.

A First Nations Australian is also more likely to have a low household income, live in overcrowded housing, and is 14 times more likely to be imprisoned. We know socioeconomic inequalities like these create health inequalities. There’s also evidence that cultural factors and experiences of racism compound the problem.

Closing the health gap between First Nations peoples and non-Indigenous Australians is a national priority. One of the ways to reduce health disparities is by improving the care Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people receive when they’re admitted to hospital.

Staff at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane could see first-hand that our health system wasn’t delivering the care First Nations patients needed. So they sought to develop a culturally informed model of care for First Nations patients with heart disease.

We have all worked with this model and were part of a study to trial it. Our results, published recently in The Lancet Global Health, indicate this culturally informed model of care eliminated the gap between First Nations patients and non-Indigenous patients when we looked at heart health outcomes after they left hospital.

Designing a culturally informed model of care

The model was developed for First Nations patients with acute coronary syndrome. This includes heart attacks and angina, which is chest pain due to disease in the arteries supplying blood to the heart.

The project was co-designed with First Nations stakeholders. Training was tailored and delivered to build cultural capability across the cardiology department and to increase staff knowledge of relevant services available to First Nations patients outside the hospital.

Staff formed formal partnerships with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled health organisations. They improved the hospital environment with First Nations artwork and uniforms (displaying First Nations flags and artwork).

They brought together a “Better Cardiac Care” team including an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander hospital liaison officer, a cardiac nurse and a pharmacist. This team visited First Nations patients at their bedside, providing additional support, advocacy, education and care co-ordination.

Patients could confidently ask questions and yarn about their diagnosis and treatment in their own words without feelings of shame or embarrassment.

The team was focused on the patient’s needs. For example, they could co-ordinate accommodation for a patient’s relative who was travelling to the hospital from far away. They could tell a patient’s doctor if the patient needed more time to talk or make a decision, or a better explanation. Before the patient left hospital, the team could co-ordinate with the patient’s local chemist to supply their medications and book a follow-up appointment with their GP.

How we tested the model

We investigated the impact of the model of care by looking at outcomes for First Nations and non-Indigenous patients admitted with heart attacks and angina before and after the model was implemented.

Specifically, we collected data on 199 First Nations patients and 440 randomly selected non-Indigenous patients treated in the 24 months before the project began and compared them with 119 First Nations patients and 467 non-Indigenous patients treated in the 12 months after.

We particularly wanted to know if patients died, had another heart attack, needed an unexpected stent or coronary artery bypass surgery, or had to urgently come back into hospital within 90 days of being discharged.

Before the model was introduced, 34% of First Nations patients had one of those negative outcomes, much higher than the rate of 18% in non-Indigenous patients. Afterwards, these events occurred in 20% of both First Nations and non-Indigenous patients. This was a significant improvement for First Nations patients and eliminated the gap between groups.

The most significant improvement was seen in urgent re-admissions, but there were also fewer heart attacks.

Fewer heart attacks and hospital admissions are good, but we also needed to ensure patients felt culturally safe, and that their social and emotional needs were being met.

A related project asked patients and their families about their experience with the model of care. The researchers identified that relationality or connectedness between patients and the team, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, may be key to its success.

A promising concept

Our study was not a randomised trial and the control group was historical. So it’s possible factors other than the model of care might have affected the outcomes. The study was also conducted only in a single hospital.

However, we demonstrated that a culturally informed model of care, developed with and for First Nations peoples, can improve clinical outcomes. Better Cardiac Care programs based on this concept have now spread to other Queensland hospitals.

We hope similar results can be replicated in many hospitals and in other medical specialities, because improving hospital outcomes is one of many important steps needed to close the health gap for First Nations peoples in Australia.

Dr Wang receives or has received research or project grants from MRFF, NHMRC, Metrosouth Health and the Queensland Government.

Danielle Harrop and Debra Pauza 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. How a culturally informed model of care helped First Nations patients with heart disease – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/229912

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samantha Ellen Andres, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University

More than 52 million hectares of land across Australia is degraded. Degraded land lacks biodiversity and the natural balance of healthy ecosystems, making it unfit for wildlife or cultivation. This means we are losing the benefits that healthy ecosystems provide for nature and people.

To counter this threat, Australia signed the Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022, pledging to ensure 30% of degraded ecosystems are “under effective restoration” by 2030. That’s roughly 15.6 million hectares of land across the nation.

To kick-start ecosystem recovery, governments, environmental managers and landholders often plant a diverse mix of native species on degraded land. The crucial word here is diverse. Planting a wide variety of species makes ecosystems more resilent, laying the foundation of a healthy environment for wildlife.

But effective biodiverse plantings require large quantities of diverse native seed. Amounts range from 600 to 20,000 seeds per square metre.

The problem is we don’t have enough seeds from Australia’s endemic plants – species found only in this country (often with very limited distributions). Our new research shows both the quantity and diversity of native seed available for restoration are limited across the country. Only 10% of our native species are readily available for sale as seed.

Multiply this supply-and-demand issue on the scale needed to meet Australia’s ambitious goals for nature repair, and the seed shortages, are clearly critical.

Our research identifies gaps in the seed supply chain. We have developed a new method to optimise the biodiversity of plantings from these limited supplies. We also recommend ways to strengthen the seed supply chain.

How well does supply match the need for diversity?

Our research explores two urgent questions:

1. Does the present supply of seed for restoration in Australia reflect the diversity of ecosystems where nature repair is intended?

2. Using seed that is readily available, can we achieve the diverse plantings that underpin resilient ecosystems?

We started by making an inventory of seeds from 32 commercial suppliers across Australia. We worked out what percentage of species can be bought immediately as seed across six major vegetation types, such as our eucalypt woodlands and rainforests.

We then compared the diversity of species available as seed to the total species diversity of each vegetation type.

Using this information, we developed a framework to maximise the different types of plant species (their “functional diversity”) used in seed mixes, taking into account supply constraints. The aim is to achieve a diverse mix of species with different plant traits – such as height, seed or leaf variety – from the available seed supply.

Seed supply is missing many ‘little guys’

Overall, only about 10% of Australia’s plant species, or 2,992 species, can be bought as seed. Of course, volunteers or contractors can directly collect seeds for more species out in the bush for restoration projects – if they have permits to do so. Even so, the 10% we found for immediate purchase indicates serious shortfalls in the diversity of our national supply.

When seed was available, it was more often for trees and shrubs. The seeds of ecologically important understorey species were often not available.

These missing “little guys” are mainly herbs and grasses. They are the source of most of the plant diversity in some of our most degraded ecosystems, such as grassy woodlands.

We also looked at changes in the stock from individual suppliers. As suppliers added more species to their list of offerings, the diversity tended to increase for trees and shrubs. These woody plants include species such as Acacia and Eucalyptus.

The increase in woody species’ seeds effectively “diluted” the contribution to diversity of herb and grass species, such as kangaroo grass, flannel flower and flax lily, that make up the understorey. The overall seed mix becomes less representative of the balance of species in native vegetation.

This shift in supply likely reflects the monumental demand for seeds from trees and shrubs. These woody species are favoured for projects focused on reforestation and carbon farming.

How can we improve seed supply?

We show careful planning can make diverse plantings achievable from available seed stocks. It’s still worrying, though, that the seeds of almost 90% of our native plants are missing.

And, of the available 10%, the quantities in stock may not scratch the surface of what is needed to restore large areas of diverse vegetation.

This finding has serious implications for ecosystems where most of the diversity is in the understorey. One example is the critically endangered Cumberland Plain Woodland west of Sydney. In ecosystems like this, restoration is being proposed to offset development impacts.

To restore vegetation that provides good habitat for wildlife and resembles the natural bush we love, we need to get cracking on improving our national seed supply. We highlight the need for better policy and planning to support Australia’s native seed sector.

After delving into the constraints of seed supply, we recommend ways to improve supply by strengthening collaboration along all stages of the supply chain. That includes everyone from financiers to collectors to bush regenerators across the country.

We suggest increasing financial support to expand seed supply systems, particularly for small-scale suppliers. Expanding seed production areas, such as “seed orchards”, across the nation will help to bring more diverse and difficult-to-store seed on the market. It will also avoid compromising wild plant populations due to over-harvesting.

Good guidance on how to maximise a broad suite of different plant types with a wide range of traits might help avoid some of the consequences of poor seed supply. Selections from current limited supplies can be optimised to generate more diverse seed mixes for restoration.

Still, this takes lots of planning. It may be beyond the reach of the average landholder engaging in nature repair.

Ultimately, we need greater investment to improve the seed supply chain in an ethical and ecologically sustainable way. Only then will we have the tools to attempt to reinstate degraded ecosystems.

Joe Atkinson received funding from the Capital Landkeepers Trust and the Ecological Society of Australia for related work. He 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 his postdoctoral position.

Rachael Gallagher receives funding from the Australian Research Council Linkage scheme for work related to this article. She 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 her academic appointment.

Samantha Ellen Andres 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. Only 10% of native plants can be bought as seed – a big problem for nature repair. Here’s how we can make plantings more diverse – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/228899

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Hurley, Director, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

Just before the May budget, the federal government made a surprise announcement: it will introduce caps on the number of international students in the country.

It is fair to say this plan is really worrying some Australian universities.

The sector argues cutting student numbers will see job losses and less money to do research. They also warn cuts will hurt their international reputation and place in global rankings.

This is because international education is a vital source of funding for Australia’s universities. Universities collected about A$8.6 billion from international students in 2022 – more than a quarter of all revenue.

Given the sums involved, the introduction of caps has the potential to have the most significant impact on Australia’s tertiary education system in decades. But a major unanswered question is what the caps will be and how they will be calculated.

Remind me, what did the government announce?

Education Minister Jason Clare introduced legislation to parliament on student caps almost immediately after the budget was released. This would provide ministerial powers to regulate international education in Australia by:

• pausing the registration of new providers and new courses

• limiting the enrolments of overseas students by provider, course or location, over a year

• automatically suspending and cancelling courses.

This comes as the government seeks to reduce net overseas migration (the increase in the number of people in Australia) to pre-pandemic levels of about 260,000 people per year.

It also follows similar moves in Canada and the United Kingdom, which have introduced changes to limit the number of international students in their countries.

How did we get here?

As the Treasury explained last week, it underestimated net overseas migration by 25%. International students are the major cause of this.

They are now at record levels, with about 870,000 current and former international students in Australia. They make up the largest part of the temporary migrant population.

During the pandemic, the number of international students in Australia more than halved. In December 2019, there were more than 630,000 international students in Australia. By December 2021, there were 315,000. Since Australia reopened its borders, the number of international students entering the country have rebounded much quicker than anticipated.

Along with pent-up demand, the Morrison government introduced policies to encourage international students to return. This included removing caps on the number of hours a student could work and allowing students to stay longer after they have finished their course.

Now, amid dual housing and cost-of-living crises, international students have also become a political issue. Not only is the federal government looking to decrease net overseas migration but the opposition wants to go even further.

Who is affected by this change?

So far, the focus of the impact on international student caps has been on universities. But there could be much wider impacts in the economy and community if international student numbers are capped.

One thing that is often lost in the debate is the diversity of the international education sector. Universities only make up about 40% of current international student enrolments.

The remainder of students are in private colleges, English language schools and secondary schools.

International students are also important parts of Australia’s workforce. The occupation with the largest number of international students is “carer and aides”. This means industries like aged care and disability support rely on an international student workforce.

In 2023, international education was also Australia’s fourth largest export valued at $48 billion. Of this, $17 billion was collected in course fees and the remaining $31 billion was spent in the broader economy.

This means any change to international student numbers could have an impact way beyond the campuses of Australia’s elite universities.

We still need detail

During his budget speech, Treasurer Jim Chalmers focused on housing as a central to how caps will be calculated.

As he told parliament:

[…] for too long, enrolments have grown without being matched by an increase in student housing supply.

We will limit how many international students can be enrolled by each university based on a formula, including how much housing they build.

But it is not yet clear how this will happen.

It is also unclear how much international students are impacting upon housing costs. Some research has shown the impact of international students on housing and rental prices is small.

One factor the government could consider here is how many domestic students are enrolled at a particular institution. This is so domestic students do not suffer from a cut that sees fewer resources where they study.

In Australia, it is certainly true the larger, more prestigious universities have the most international students. But they also enrol huge numbers of domestic students.

The largest private vocational colleges enrol almost exclusively international students, usually in courses like business and hospitality. As our analysis (below) shows, of the ten largest private providers, nine were private colleges where there were few domestic students.

It is important to note, this is the part of the international education sector identified as having the most problems with compliance and exploitation. This is what the government has been keen to crack down on when it talks about “shonky” providers.

What happens now?

The bill has been referred to the Senate’s education committee, which is due to report on August 15.

In many ways “too many students” is a good problem to have. It demonstrates Australia’s international education sector is strong.

But we have to watch out for unintended consequences. The diversity of the system – from elite, research universities educating both international and domestic students to private colleges largely educating international students – also needs to be taken into account.

And to adequately understand the impacts, we need more detail now from the government about how they plan to do it.

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. International student caps are creating a huge headache for universities. But they could have an impact beyond elite campuses – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231804

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melika Soleimani, Senior Data Analyst, Massey University

The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has begun, spreading to almost every facet of people’s professional and personal lives – including job recruitment.

While artists fear copyright breaches or simply being replaced, business and management are becoming increasingly aware to the possibilities of greater efficiencies in areas as diverse as supply chain management, customer service, product development and human resources (HR) management.

Soon all business areas and operations will be under pressure to adopt AI in some form or another. But the very nature of AI – and the data behind its processes and outputs – mean human biases are being embedded in the technology.

Our research looked at the use of AI in recruitment and hiring – a field that has already widely adopted AI to automate the screening of résumés and to rate video interviews by job applicants.

AI in recruitment promises greater objectivity and efficiency during the hiring process by eliminating human biases and enhancing fairness and consistency in decision making.

But our research shows AI can subtly – and at times overtly – heighten biases. And the involvement of HR professionals may worsen rather than alleviate these effects. This challenges our belief that human oversight can contain and moderate AI.

Magnifying human bias

Although one of the reasons for using AI in recruitment is that it is meant to be to be more objective and consistent, multiple studies have found the technology is, in fact, very likely to be biased. This happens because AI learns from the datasets used to train it. If the data is flawed, the AI will be too.

Biases in data can be made worse by the human-created algorithms supporting AI, which often contain human biases in their design.

In interviews with 22 HR professionals, we identified two common biases in hiring: “stereotype bias” and “similar-to-me bias”.

Stereotype bias occurs when decisions are influenced by stereotypes about certain groups, such as preferring candidates of the same gender, leading to gender inequality.

“Similar-to-me” bias happens when recruiters favour candidates who share similar backgrounds or interests to them.

These biases, which can significantly affect the fairness of the hiring process, are embedded in the historical hiring data which are then used to train the AI systems. This leads to biased AI.

So, if past hiring practices favoured certain demographics, the AI will continue to do so. Mitigating these biases is challenging because algorithms can infer personal information based on hidden data from other correlated information.

For example, in countries with different lengths of military service for men and women, an AI might deduce gender based on service duration.

This persistence of bias underscores the need for careful planning and monitoring to ensure fairness in both human and AI-driven recruitment processes.

Can humans help?

As well as HR professionals, we also interviewed 17 AI developers. We wanted to investigate how an AI recruitment system could be developed that would mitigate rather than exacerbate hiring bias.

Based on the interviews, we developed a model wherein HR professionals and AI programmers would go back and forth in exchanging information and questioning preconceptions as they examined data sets and developed algorithms.

However, our findings reveal the difficulty in implementing such a model lies in the educational, professional and demographic differences that exist between HR professionals and AI developers.

These differences impede effective communication, cooperation and even the ability to understand each other. While HR professionals are traditionally trained in people management and organisational behaviour, AI developers are skilled in data science and technology.

These different backgrounds can lead to misunderstandings and misalignment when working together. This is particularly a problem in smaller countries such as New Zealand, where resources are limited and professional networks are less diverse.

Connecting HR and AI

If companies and the HR profession want to address the issue of bias in AI-based recruitment, several changes need to be made.

Firstly, the implementation of a structured training programme for HR professionals focused on information system development and AI is crucial. This training should cover the fundamentals of AI, the identification of biases in AI systems, and strategies for mitigating these biases.

Additionally, fostering better collaboration between HR professionals and AI developers is also important. Companies should be looking to create teams that include both HR and AI specialists. These can help bridge the communication gap and better align their efforts.

Moreover, developing culturally relevant datasets is vital for reducing biases in AI systems. HR professionals and AI developers need to work together to ensure the data used in AI-driven recruitment processes are diverse and representative of different demographic groups. This will help create more equitable hiring practices.

Lastly, countries need guidelines and ethical standards for the use of AI in recruitment that can help build trust and ensure fairness. Organisations should implement policies that promote transparency and accountability in AI-driven decision-making processes.

By taking these steps, we can create a more inclusive and fair recruitment system that leverages the strengths of both HR professionals and AI developers.

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. What will a robot make of your résumé? The bias problem with using AI in job recruitment – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231174

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

In awarding this year’s Archibald Prize to Laura Jones’ portrait of the writer Tim Winton, the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales are doing what they do best: catapulting a relatively unknown artist to instant fame and possible fortune.

Her portrait of Winton is a study of a man in emotional pain, as he contemplates the possible futures of the world around him.

One of the great disadvantages of being a writer or an artist is that they can see what politicians do not: the long-term consequences of abusing the environment. Both Winton the subject and Jones the artist see our planet is on a path to environmental doom.

Jones met Winton when she was undertaking a residency to study the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, so it is appropriate the tones she has chosen as the background to his portrait are dull and muted like a degraded world.

Most of the painting is thinly painted with the exception of his face. This gives the portrait an extra impact.

Although Laura Jones has been a finalist in four previous Archibald Prize exhibitions and has exhibited widely, her profile indicates the only significant collection to hold her work is Artbank, the collection of the Australian government.

That is all about to change.

In what may be a coincidence, another exhibition on the same floor is a solo exhibition by a previous Archibald winner, Wendy Sharpe, whose painterly approach is similar to Jones.

Sharpe’s work not only relates to Jones’ painting in style, but also the circumstance of her winning the prize. In 1996, Sharpe was a relatively unknown artist when she too was awarded the Archibald Prize. The prize was the trigger for a career that has included a stint of being a Gallery Trustee.

The Archibald really does sprinkle fairy dust.

Djakaŋu Yunupiŋu wins the Wynne Prize

When the board president of the trustees, David Gonski, announced the Wynne Prize he took great joy in noting this year the majority of the entrants selected for hanging were Aboriginal artists.

Awarded to “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists”, this oldest of all Australian art prizes has come a long way from when it was dominated by paintings of gum trees in pastoral landscapes.

Djakaŋu Yunupiŋu’s painting, Nyalala gurmilili, is a celebration of sunrise in Miḏawarr (the harvest season following the wet) when sudden showers surprise during the day.

It is probably the largest bark painting to be exhibited in the gallery, a glorious undulating pattern of rhythms and shapes.

There is a special significance in this artist being awarded the prize for this work at this gallery.

Many years ago her father, Muŋgurrawuy Yunupiŋu, was one of a group of Yolngu elders who sat with the gallery’s assistant director, Tony Tuckson, and showed him the connection between painting and lore. Muŋgurrawuy Yunupiŋu’s bark paintings are among the treasures of the Art Gallery of NSW’s collection.

Naomi Kantjuriny wins the Sulman Prize

Unlike the Archibald and Wynne Prizes, which are judged by the trustees, the Sulman Prize for best subject painting, genre painting or mural project has a single judge, usually an artist.

This means every year the exhibition has a different flavour, reflecting the judge’s taste. This year’s judge, Tom Polo, selected an exhibition ranging from the traditional formalism of David Eastwood to the conceptual humour of Kenny Pittock.

He has awarded the prize to Naomi Kantjuriny for her painting Minyma mamu tjuta, from the Tjala Arts Centre. She has described her painting as being about the stories told and her culture.

It is a lively painting of spirits, good and bad, dancing in the land, gathering around people, always present.

Read more:
Archibald Prize 2024: this year’s finalists range from downright fun to politically ferocious

The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2024 are on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, until September 8.

Joanna Mendelssohn has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. Laura Jones wins the 2024 Archibald Prize with a portrait of Tim Winton, part of a grand artistic tradition – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/228493

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt Halliday, Lecturer in Advertising and Brand Creativity, Auckland University of Technology

Can we imagine a world without fossil fuel advertising, let alone fossil fuels themselves? That was essentially the question posed by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres this week.

Calling the coal, oil and gas industries the “godfathers of climate chaos”, who had “shamelessly greenwashed” environmental issues through lobbying, legal action and advertising campaigns, he said:

I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.

When the head of the UN calls on your industry to take action to help prevent the catastrophic effects of climate change, it should be a wake-up call. The next question is, then, are the New Zealand advertising and public relations industries listening?

A movement gaining momentum

In 2022, France became the first country to ban fossil fuel ads, although critics say the law doesn’t go far enough, with natural gas and sponsorship of events exempt. Medical professionals in Canada and Australia have also called for bans on fossil fuel advertising.

A private member’s bill in Canada’s parliament, aimed at curbing fossil fuel advertising, has passed its first reading. In Australia, a senate inquiry into greenwashing has heard allegations that Channel Ten blurred the line between news and natural gas advertising.

The inquiry is due to report back at the end of this month. Meanwhile, Australian independent and Green MPs have endorsed Guterres’ call for an ad ban.

Local governments have gone even further. Last week, the City of Edinburgh Council passed a ban on “high-carbon products and services”. Air travel, airports, SUVs, cruises and fossil fuel companies are specifically excluded from advertising on council-owned sites.

Amsterdam was the first city to enact similar laws in 2021, and several smaller cities and regions in the United Kingdom and Europe have done the same.

Closer to home, the Fossil Ad Ban campaign, run by Australian creative industries lobby group Comms Declare, has seen 16 local councils, including the City of Sydney, sign on to cut fossil fuel advertising in their regions.

Targeting high-emissions industry

New Zealand’s largest fossil fuel company, Z Energy, has been taken to court by Consumer NZ, Lawyers for Climate Action NZ and the Environmental Law Initiative for claimed breaches of the Fair Trading Act.

The case is based on Z Energy’s 2022 advertising campaign claim that “we’re in the business of getting out of the petrol business”, while fuel sales have since increased.

According to research by the Sustainable Business Network, Z Energy (which is a member of the network) is among the companies “associated with sustainability among at least 50% of New Zealanders”.

Z Energy is also one of seven corporate defendants facing court action brought by iwi leader Mike Smith, who alleges “public nuisance, negligence and climate system damage”.

Alongside co-defendants Fonterra, Genesis Energy and New Zealand Steel, Z Energy is also a member of the Sustainable Business Council, whose work involves “championing our members to be at the leading-edge of sustainability”.

Advertising slow to change

To date, no local or regional councils in Aotearoa New Zealand have enacted any ad bans of the type seen elsewhere in the world. Similarly, no major advertising or PR firms have declared an intention to divest their fossil fuel clients.

Local initiative Ad Net Zero was launched last year to encourage decarbonisation within the advertising industry itself. Communications Council chief executive Simon Lendrum, who helped launch Ad Net Zero, said in a podcast interview last year there was a need for “collective systemic change”.

But he drew the line at suggesting agencies drop fossil fuel clients from their rosters. Ending fossil fuel advertising without wider support from industry and government, he said, would be “facile”.

Given the National-led coalition’s intention to revive oil and gas exploration, and its commitment to building more roads, it would seem unlikely Guterres’ call for an ad ban will gain much traction in Wellington.

An anxious industry

Within the advertising industry itself, however, there is support for what Guterres is saying. In my work as a teacher, I find students regularly raise concerns about these ethical conflicts as they look to start their careers.

Recent UK research shows climate anxiety is higher among those in the advertising industry than in the general public. MOre than half of industry respondents felt anxious about climate change, while almost 40% felt demoralised about it.

This should come as little surprise. The industry is filled with young, passionate, intelligent and creative people. Advertising is about connecting the dots – bringing together concepts or ideas that might seem unrelated but which create new understandings and emotional “pull”.

Perhaps advertising professionals simply made the connection between their own business and climate change sooner. The question is, will advertising agencies be bold enough to recruit and protect their future talent? Or will they continue to take the money, no matter the cost?

Matt Halliday is affiliated with Comms Declare.

– ref. The UN chief has called for a ban on fossil fuel advertising – is the NZ industry listening? – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231809

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Wintle, Professor in Conservation Science, School of Ecosystem and Forest Science, The University of Melbourne

Earth is facing a human-driven climate crisis, which demands a rapid transition to low-carbon energy sources such as wind and solar power. But we’re also living through a mass extinction event. Never before in human history have there been such high such rates of species loss and ecosystem collapse.

The biodiversity crisis is not just distressing, it’s a major threat to the global economy. More than half of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) directly depends on nature. The World Economic Forum rates biodiversity loss in the top risks to the global economy over the next decade, after climate change and natural disasters.

Human-driven climate change damages nature – and loss of nature exacerbates climate change. So if humanity’s efforts to mitigate climate change end up damaging nature, we shoot ourselves in the foot.

Australia, however, must face up to an uncomfortable truth: we are putting renewable energy projects in places that damage the species and ecosystems on which we depend.

Renewables on the run

Renewable energy projects are being developed that damage nature and culturally significant sites. Others are resented by communities, or fail at regulatory hurdles.

Environmentally damaging projects put another nail in the coffin of species and ecosystems already under immense pressure. Even those that affect a relatively small area contribute to nature’s “death by a thousand cuts”.

Take, for example, the proposed Euston wind farm in southwest New South Wales. It would entail 96 turbines built near the Willandra Lakes World Heritage area, potentially affecting threatened birds.

And in North Queensland, the Upper Burdekin wind farm proposal will remove 769 hectares of endangered species habitat relied on by Sharman’s wallabies, koalas and northern greater gliders. The cleared area would be almost 200 times bigger than the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

The simple overlay below, which we prepared, illustrates the problem in Queensland. The analysis, part of a research project funded by Boundless Earth, shows in stark detail the crossover between energy projects, transmission lines and nationally listed threatened species habitats and ecosystems.

The ‘fast-track’ can also be the good track

In their understandable haste to get more clean energy projects built, state and federal governments are promising to “streamline” approvals processes. Fast-tracked approvals will only provide net social benefit if they are based on good data, sound analysis and genuine community engagement.

Two successive reviews of our national environmental laws, most recently by Graeme Samuel, identified what’s needed to improve the efficiency of development approvals and get better outcomes for nature. The answer? Good planning at the regional scale, underpinned by good data.

At a minimum, we need to know the locations of threatened or culturally significant species and places, high-value agriculture and valuable natural areas. A proposed new federal body, Environmental Information Australia, would seek to centralise existing biodiversity data. But significantly more data are required to fill important knowledge gaps.

Good planning can create shared purpose and bring positive environmental and social outcomes, including certainty to developers and conservationists. In Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park has enjoyed strong planning support based on good data and high community participation for more than 30 years, with some conservation success.

In contrast, poor planning polarises stakeholders and communities. It erodes trust between stakeholders, developers and government by reducing the integrity and quality of planning decisions. This leads to ongoing conflict over land use, as has been observed in Queensland.

A proposal to build a renewable energy microgrid in Queensland’s Daintree rainforest is a case in point. It is causing pain for local communities, pitting renewable energy advocates against conservation organisations.

When projects fail to gain community support and necessary approvals, the proponent’s money is wasted, and we lose precious time in the urgent transition to renewables.

Renewables projects should enhance nature

It’s surprising and disappointing how few proponents of Australian renewables projects actively seek to enhance the habitat values of the land their projects occupy.

In part, this is because planning regulations are still firmly focused on avoiding impacts to nature, and offsetting damage when it occurs.

Instead, we need policies and laws that compel nature-positive approaches that regenerate biodiversity.

In California, for example, a test project to grow native plants under solar panels is restoring prairie land and pollinator habitat at the site of a decommissioned nuclear power station. In Australia, there are occasional signs we may move in a similar direction.

It’s not hard to envisage a renewables rollout that prioritises projects on degraded, ex-agricultural land, avoiding damage to critical habitats and benefiting nature. Wind turbines should be built away from natural vegetation and migratory routes for birds and bats.

Our mapping for potential wind and solar projects in southern Queensland shows strong potential west of the Great Dividing Range for energy generation without the same level of land-use conflict with natural values and productive agriculture.

A major challenge to energy project development in Queensland, as in some other parts of Australia, is a lack of transmission infrastructure, or “poles and wires”, in the places where renewable energy and nature could most happily coexist. This infrastructure should urgently be developed in a way that does not impact natural vegetation and species habitats.

Rapidly reaching net zero is not negotiable to avoiding the worst ravages of climate change. But doing so in a way that damages nature is self-defeating. We have the planning tools and data needed to create a nature-positive climate transition. Now we need adequate state and Commonwealth government investment, leadership and political will.

Brendan Wintle has received funding from The Australian Research Council, the Victorian State Government, the NSW State Government, the Queensland State Government, the Commonwealth National Environmental Science Program, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Hermon Slade Foundation, Boundless Earth Foundation and the Australian Conservation Foundation. Wintle is a Board Director of Zoos Victoria and a lead councillor of the Biodiversity Council. Thanks to Jaana Dielenberg for contribution to this article.

James Watson has received funding from the Australian Research Council, National Environmental Science Program, South Australia’s Department of Environment and Water as well as from Bush Heritage Australia, Queensland Conservation Council, Australian Conservation Foundation, The Wildnerness Society and Birdlife Australia. He serves on scientific committees for Subak Australia and BirdLife Australia and has a long-term scientific relationship with Bush Heritage Australia and Wildlife Conservation Society. He serves on the Queensland Government’s Land Restoration Fund’s Investment Panel as the Deputy Chair.

Michelle Ward has received funding from The Australian Research Council and the Commonwealth National Environmental Science Program. She was Science and Research Lead at WWF-Australia and is currently on a Technical Advisory Panel for a project run by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.

Sarah Bekessy receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Ian Potter Foundation and the European Commission. She is a lead councillor of the Biodiversity Council, a board member of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of WWF’s Eminent Scientists Group, a member of the Advisory Group for Wood for Good and a member of the Technical Working Group of the Living Future Institute of Australia.

Andrew Rogers 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. A renewable energy transition that doesn’t harm nature? It’s not just possible, it’s essential – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/229605

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Russell, Principal Research Fellow, CQUniversity Australia

Three players from the Macarthur FC A-League soccer team were recently charged by NSW police for allegedly trying to receive yellow cards on purpose so gamblers could make money on the actions.

The trio was arrested by the NSW Police Organised Crime Squad Gaming Unit. Since then, two other Macarthur FC players have been implicated in the scandal.

The controversy raises concerns about the ever-expanding range of betting options, both in terms of gambling problems and sports integrity.

Betting markets and sports integrity

Gambling-related sports integrity issues are not new.

Many sports fans might be familiar with major betting scandals such as the 1919 Black Sox scandal in baseball, the Hansie Cronje match-fixing controversy in cricket, or snooker player Stephen Lee’s match-fixing ban.

Match-fixing requires a player or players to perform poorly on purpose, so people “in the know” can bet on the other team to win. There are obvious difficulties in arranging this, as every person who is approached to be in on the fix could change their mind and approach authorities.

But now there is a larger number of betting markets, including in-game contingencies such as gambling on yellow cards in football, so it is easier to get one or two players to do a particular thing at a preset time in a match without compromising the overall result.

This is known as spot-fixing and this is what the Macarthur FC players are alleged to have done.

It’s hard to fix certain things, like scoring a goal, because it’s an infrequent event and each player only has so much control over this. But it’s easier to deliberately receive a yellow card, without necessarily hurting your team’s chances of winning.

Sometimes, spot-fixing is relatively easy to detect. Former North Queensland player Ryan Tandy was found guilty of trying to increase the chances of a penalty goal being the first scoring point of a 2010 NRL game.

During his trial, TAB reported 95% of bets placed on the game’s first-scoring play were for a penalty goal, which was unusual and raised concerns about a possible fix.

Another example from 2010 was Pakistan cricketers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Amir deliberately bowling no-balls by overstepping the crease. The evidence against them appeared straightforward, as they were overstepping the crease by so far to ensure the umpires saw the no-balls.

They were banned by the International Cricket Council after a tribunal found them guilty of spot-fixing.

However, in contrast, the fast-paced and highly variable nature of the shorter Twenty20 form of cricket may make it easier to fix incidents that are harder to catch.

More and more betting opportunities

With the help of technology, sports betting has exploded in many countries around the world. According to a UN report, “this evolution has also facilitated the activities of those involved in competition manipulation”.

How has sports betting evolved?

Before sports betting became legal in Australia in 1983, you had to find an illegal bookmaker to place a bet. Betting options were limited, with bets typically placed on who would win and perhaps by how much.

When online gambling started in 1996, Australia took a conservative approach, only allowing certain forms of betting.

Pokies, which experts cite as the most problematic form of gambling in Australia, are not available to Australians online. One reason for this is the fast-paced nature of the betting. Each spin is a bet, and the outcome of the bet is known within seconds. But sports betting (at the time) was seen as slow-paced, with results often taking hours or even days to be determined.

Over time, sports betting companies greatly expanded the range of betting options. It is not uncommon for bookmakers to offer more than 100 different betting markets on matches, including bets on team outcomes, player statistics and in-game contingencies such as the number of yellow cards.

And that’s for every game, every round.

Since 2002, gamblers can also place bets after a game starts (live betting), although in Australia, these bets can’t be placed online and must be done via a phone call or in a venue.

Betting markets are now offered on very particular events in games, such as how many runs will be scored in the next over in cricket (microbetting), meaning bets can be determined in minutes or even seconds.

These fast-paced forms are often touted as the future of sports betting. But they’re problematic for two main reasons.

First, they appeal almost exclusively to people who are already gambling at a high or potentially problematic frequency.

Second, they make it much easier to approach players to perform certain actions for betting purposes.

It could be happening in suburban sport, too

In recent years, betting has made it to suburban sport, with scouts sometimes acting for betting companies by filming matches so people can bet on them.

In fact, it’s not new. In 2012, a news report noted that Sportingbet sponsored an Eastern Football League club and offered bets on games involving the team, despite the club having no betting protocols.

It raises concerns about gambling-related corruption potentially reaching bog-standard amateurs like me and my friends when we play park cricket.

As wagering turnover in Australia continues to climb (despite a COVID dip) on the back of ever-increasing access, and more and more markets being available, gamblers can now bet anywhere, anytime, on seemingly anything.

It opens the door for gambling companies to find new and increasingly harder-to-detect ways of manipulating outcomes for betting.

Alex Russell mostly receives funding from government bodies, including Gambling Research Australia, the New South Wales Office of Responsible Gambling, the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation and others. He has previously (2016) analysed data on an industry-funded project to inform a casino operator about gambling and gambling problems amongst their employees, but no longer works on industry-funded projects. He presented to the Hawthorn Hawks player group about concerns relating to gambling products amongst professional athletes, with travel costs covered by the Hawthorn Hawks Players’ Association. These disclosures are declared in the interests of full disclosure and transparency.

– ref. The A-League yellow card scandal might be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to gambling-related corruption – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231391

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mandy Hagstrom, Senior Lecturer, Exercise Physiology. School of Health Sciences, UNSW Sydney

So you’ve got yourself a gym membership or bought a set of home weights. Now what? With the sheer amount of confusing exercise advice out there, it can be hard to decide what to include in a weights routine.

It can help to know there are broadly two types of movements in resistance training (lifting weights): compound exercises and isolation exercises.

So what’s the difference? And what’s all this got to do with strength, speed and healthy ageing?

What’s the difference?

Compound exercises involve multiple joints and muscle groups working together.

In a push up, for example, your shoulder and elbow joints are moving together. This targets the muscles in the chest, shoulder and triceps.

When you do a squat, you’re using your thigh and butt muscles, your back, and even the muscles in your core.

It can help to think about compound movements by grouping them by primary movement patterns.

For example, some lower body compound exercises follow a “squat pattern”. Examples include bodyweight squats, weighted squats, lunges and split squats.

We also have “hinge patterns”, where you hinge from a point on your body (such as the hips). Examples include deadlifts, hip thrusts and kettle bell swings.

Upper body compounded exercises can be grouped into “push patterns” (such as weighted rows, or vertical barbell lifts) or “pull patterns” (such as chin ups or lat pull downs, which is where you use a pulley system machine to lift weights by pulling a bar downwards).

In contrast, isolation exercises are movements that occur at a single joint.

For instance, bicep curls only require movement at the elbow joint and work your bicep muscles. Tricep extensions and lateral raises are other examples of isolation exercises.

Compound exercises can make daily life easier

Many compound exercises mimic movements we do every day.

Hinge patterns mimic picking something off the floor. A vertical press mimics putting a heavy box on a high shelf. A squat mimics standing up from the couch or getting on and off the toilet.

That might sound ridiculous to a young, fit person (“why would I need to practise getting on and off a toilet?”).

Unfortunately, we lose strength and muscle mass as we age. Men lose about 5% of their muscle mass per decade, while for women the figure is about 4% per decade.

When this decline begins can vary widely. However, approximately 30% of an adult’s peak muscle mass is lost by the time they are 80.

The good news is resistance training can counteract these age-related changes in muscle size and strength.

So building strength through compound exercise movements may help make daily life feel a bit easier. In fact, our ability to perform compound movements are a good indicator how well we can function as we age.

What about strength and athletic ability?

Compound exercises use multiple joints, so you can generally lift heavier weights than you could with isolation exercises. Lifting a heavier weight means you can build muscle strength more efficiently.

One study divided a group of 36 people into two. Three times a week, one group performed isolation exercises, while the other group did compound exercises.

After eight weeks, both groups had lost fat. But the compound exercises group saw much better results on measures of cardiovascular fitness, bench press strength, knee extension strength, and squat strength.

If you play a sport, compound movements can also help boost athletic ability.

Squat patterns require your hip, knee, and ankle to extend at the same time (also known as triple extension).

Our bodies use this triple extension trick when we run, sprint, jump or change direction quickly. In fact, research has found squat strength is strongly linked to being able to sprint faster and jump higher.

Isolation exercises are still good

What if you’re unable to do compound movements, or you just don’t want to?

Don’t worry, you’ll still build strength and muscle with isolation exercises.

Isolation exercises are also typically easier to learn as there is no skill required. They are an easy and low risk way to add extra exercise at the end of the workout, where you might otherwise be too tired to do more compound exercises safely and with correct form.

In fact, both isolation and compound exercises seem to be equally effective in helping us lose body fat and increase fat-free muscle mass when total intensity and volume of exercises are otherwise equal.

Some people also do isolation exercises when they want to build up a particular muscle group for a certain sport or for a bodybuilding competition, for example.

I just want a time efficient workout

Considering the above factors, you could consider prioritising compound exercises if you’re:

• time poor

• keen to lift heavier weights

• looking for an efficient way to train many muscles in the one workout

• interested in healthy ageing.

That said, most well designed workout programs will include both compound and isolation movements.

Mandy Hagstrom is affiliated with Sports Oracle, a company that delivers the IOC diploma in Strength and Conditioning.

Anurag Pandit is currently on a Research Training Program scholarship for his PhD at UNSW.

– ref. What are compound exercises and why are they good for you? – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/228385

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Richardson, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director, Te Puna Ako Centre for Tertiary Teaching and Learning, University of Waikato

It’s no secret New Zealand universities are at a crossroads. Financial constraints, a post-COVID hangover and sweeping staff layoffs have all made for testing times in the tertiary world.

So the government’s appointment of a University Advisory Group to “consider challenges and opportunities for improvement in the university sector” is more than timely.

The group is charged with assessing the financial challenges facing universities, their overall performance, and whether different funding models would help achieve better outcomes.

Public submissions have now closed. It will be fascinating to see the answers to the first and perhaps most important question on the submissions form: “What should be the primary functions of universities for a contemporary world?”

There is, of course, no single definitive answer. But there are several working definitions that might help. These often overlap and are sometimes contradictory. The challenge will be to find the right balance between the seven outlined below.

1. Driver of economic and social development

This is a common understanding of a university’s role: as well as teaching the next generation of professionals, university research drives technological development and economic growth.

For example, the foundation of Canterbury College (later to become the university) was informed by the economic and social needs of a newly established colonial settlement. This role is compatible with an understanding of the university as a job factory (see below).

Governments regularly provide funding to universities to meet training and employment goals, such as the current plan to fund a new medical school at Waikato University.

2. Promoter of equity

The motto of Waikato University – Ko Te Tangata (For the People) – clearly states what (or who) a university is for. It offers employment opportunities that should not be restricted to a small minority.

While you are still ten times more likely to go to university if your parents also went to university, over the second half of the 20th century New Zealand radically increased participation in university education.

In turn, however, allowing more students to enrol has raised concerns about the risk of lowering academic and teaching standards.

3. Profit-making business

With a 20% decline in government funding since 2012, universities have been forced to act as businesses. Shifting to a user-pays funding model means they are selling a product (education) to individual consumers (students).

Furthermore, free market reforms in the 1980s and 1990s largely deregulated tertiary education. This left universities competing with each other in a marketplace.

The importance of university rankings, student recruitment marketing and student experience all flow from this business model. This aligns with another possible function of the university as preserving status and privilege (see below).

Certain institutions and degrees have always been markers of status for those who can afford them. This perception clearly underpins some arguments against taxpayer funding.

4. Job factory

Another stated purpose of the university is that it exists to reduce unemployment by training people for work (or at least removing them from unemployment statistics while they study).

A university’s success is measured by how employable its graduates are. This then feeds into criticism of certain degrees (usually in the “softer” humanities subjects) producing “unemployable” graduates.

This view dovetails in some ways with the understanding of universities as drivers of national development (see below).

5. Incubator of intellectual inquiry and knowledge

According to the Education Act 1998:

a university is characterised by a wide diversity of teaching and research, especially at a higher level, that maintains, advances, disseminates, and assists the application of, knowledge, develops intellectual independence, and promotes community learning […]

A university fulfils this role through valuable research, free intellectual debate and the creation of good citizens. This purpose can be seen to be threatened by the shift towards the business or job factory models (see above).

This view of the university’s function also conflicts with the view they should be drivers of economic and social development (see above), which goes back to the country’s colonial origins.

In the words of John Macmillan Brown, one of three founding professors of Canterbury College:

God help me, what would be the good of Greek verse for pioneers in a new colony?

6. Preserver of status and privilege

Elite universities have always offered their graduates enhanced social connections and employment opportunities. They increasingly cloak their status (justifiably or not) in the language of educational meritocracy, measured in university rankings and successful alumni.

Their advertised role as incubators of intellectual inquiry and knowledge complements their other identities as job factory and for-profit business because only the wealthiest customers can afford the products they are selling.

But this is clearly in direct conflict with the understanding of universities as promoters of equity.

7. Social critic and instigator of revolutionary change

There is a long history of universities filling the role of “critic and conscience of society”, which generally complements those of promoter of equity and incubator of intellectual inquiry and knowledge.

At the same time, criticisms of universities as elitist ivory towers also have a long history.

Nonetheless, instigating social change extends beyond campus protests and “culture wars” to include research, social commentary and revolutionary technological developments such as the internet and artificial intelligence.

Finally, all universities have to balance some or all of these purposes, whether complementary or contradictory. The answer to the University Advisory Group’s first question is not straightforward. Any useful answer lies in some mix of these various options.

Anthony Richardson 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 are the functions of the modern university? 7 answers for the government review – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231261

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ned Dobos, Senior Lecturer in International Ethics, UNSW Sydney

From July this year, New Zealand nationals will be eligible to serve in the Australian Defence Force. From January 2025, so will Americans, Canadians and Brits. This raises a number of political and ethical issues that will need to be addressed in due course, but some of the early misgivings are unfounded.

Under the new rules, a foreign national from any of these countries need only live in Australia for one year before applying for admission. One might wonder whether this is enough time for any individual to become sufficiently socially bonded to Australia.

So, will these new recruits identify with the civilian population they are entrusted to protect? Maybe not. But why assume other members of the force are any different in this respect?

Us and them

In countries that rely on professional volunteers to populate their armed forces, the military and civilian worlds tend to drift apart and develop distinct (and often conflicting) sets of values, ideologies and attitudes.

Journalist Arthur Hadley once called this “The Great Divorce”. Sociologists today usually call it the “civil-military gap”. It tends to give rise to what I have elsewhere called “warrior-class consciousness”. This is where soldiers come to think of themselves as a distinct caste, rather than a sample of the general population from which they are drawn.

Over time, this feeling of being separate from one’s parent society can mutate into feelings of contempt and even hostility toward the civilian “other”.

US journalist Thomas Ricks found evidence of this among US Marines in the 1990s. At the time, he described it as their “private loathing for public America”. Even after a relatively short period of time in the service, Ricks noticed that Marines started looking at old non-military friends and colleagues with a certain disdain, to the point of avoiding social encounters with them as much as possible.

Eminent military historian Hew Strachan finds much the same among the UK armed forces. Its members are said to see British civilians “as mentally soft and physically feeble”. Military writer Carl Forsling coined the term “veteran superiority complex” to describe this phenomenon.

Should the US and UK expunge from their armed forces any member who is revealed to be insufficiently socially bonded to the civilian population? Would we do that? Unlikely.

But then it is not clear why we should be so bothered by the prospect of a foreign national joining the Australian Defence Force without yet feeling like “one of us”. Any professional soldier that spends enough time sequestered away from his or her parent society is liable to feel alienated from it to some degree.

Risk-averse recruits?

A related worry is that foreign nationals without deep-seated communal bonds will not be prepared to make the sacrifices necessary for effective military service.

A unique feature of the military profession is that it is governed by an “unlimited liability covenant”, so-called because there is no limit to the sacrifice a soldier can legitimately be asked to make.

Soldiers are bound by an “obligation to die”, in the words of philosopher Cheyney Ryan, or at least a duty of obedience unto death.

An explanatory note on the Work Health and Safety Act, issued by the Chief of the Australian Defence Force, stated explicitly that (unlike civilian workers), force members “do not have the right to cease work where they are concerned about […] an immediate or imminent exposure to a hazard”.

Existing defence force personnel, most of whom are born and bred on our shores, may be willing to accept this “unlimited liability” for the sake of their homeland, but can we really expect a foreigner to knowingly give up their life for a country they hardly know?

The problem with this argument is that it makes a dubious assumption about why military personnel are willing to make the personal sacrifices they do.

When asked whether the soldiers who have died in Australia’s past wars should be thought of as “making a glorious sacrifice for their country”, General Sir Peter John Cosgrove had this to say:

It wasn’t like that […] at all. They were scared. When they got hit, they were calling for Mum. They were calling out in agony. They died horribly. And not a lot of them would have said, ‘I do this for Australia’. They were doing it because of that bonding moment between human beings, where they said, ‘Bill’s going over the top, and Tom’s going. I’ve got to go. I can’t have them thinking I’m weak’.

In other words, when soldiers sacrifice their lives or their limbs, they do it, usually, for their fellows-in-arms, not for their institution or their flag or for the people back home.

This explains why even members of profit-driven mercenary groups, or “private military contractors”, are often just as willing to make the ultimate sacrifice as national servicemen and women.

Consider the case of Executive Outcomes, a private firm whose activities in Sierra Leone helped to stabilise the country after years of civil war. Its employees are said to have “never shirked from combat”.

International relations researcher Scott Fitzsimmons describes one situation in which an Executive Outcomes contractor “charged through the hail of bullets and RPG rounds to drag their beleaguered colleagues to safety”.

This should allay any doubts we might have about the willingness of foreign nationals recruited into the Australian Defence Force to face danger with the same bravery as their native-born or already naturalised counterparts.

None of this is to suggest the defence force’s decision to open its doors to outsiders is entirely unproblematic. But if what we are worried about is our defence force admitting members who do not strongly identify with Australian society, or who are unwilling to make the sacrifices demanded by their role, we needn’t be.

Ned Dobos receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Army Research Scheme

– ref. The defence force is allowing foreign recruits. Will soldiers be willing to die for a country they’ve only lived in for a year? – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231697

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lesley Russell, Adjunct Associate Professor, Menzies Centre for Health Policy and Economics, University of Sydney

The Albanese government and the Pharmacy Guild of Australia have this week signed the eighth Community Pharmacy Agreement, which will come into effect on July 1.

The government has touted the agreement as enabling people to continue to receive cheaper medicines and world-class health care from their local pharmacies.

There’s no question pharmacists are integral to delivering health care in the community. They are responsible for ensuring prescriptions are filled accurately and in a timely fashion, and for providing advice and guidance to their customers about the medicines they dispense.

But, once again, this agreement shows the power the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, which represents the owners of community pharmacies, wields in shaping policy and funding.

What’s in the agreement?

The Community Pharmacy Agreement was started in 1990 and is renegotiated every five years.

This eighth agreement delivers A$26.5 billion in funding over five years, a $3 billion boost over the previous agreement. This represents about one-quarter of the total cost of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS).

Of the $26.5 billion, $22.5 billion is for the cost of dispensing prescriptions. The funding also includes $2.1 billion for a new Additional Community Supply Support Payment to address the pharmacy guild’s concern about the financial impact of 60-day prescribing.

There’s $1.2 billion to cover pharmacy services, including continuation and expansion of medication management and medical review programs.

This $1.2 billion also includes an increased Regional Pharmacy Maintenance Allowance, which aims to support access to PBS medicines and pharmacy services for people in rural areas. The program provides financial support to eligible pharmacy owners in regional, rural and remote settings. The new agreement increases funding for this allowance by $52 million. Some of the most remote pharmacies may be eligible to receive up to $95,000 per year in support.

Further, $484.4 million will cover the costs of a one-year freeze on the maximum PBS co-payment for everyone with a Medicare card and up to a five-year freeze for pensioners and other Commonwealth concession cardholders. These changes were announced in the recent federal budget.

These changes will require legislation for their enactment. When introduced, the bill should have further details of how this $484.4 million is distributed in costs to government and funding to pharmacies.

The power of the pharmacy guild

The Pharmacy Guild of Australia is recognised as a powerful lobbying organisation. It’s interesting that pharmacy business owners and not pharmacy professional groups are the key drivers of government policy. Indeed, one analysis has characterised the Community Pharmacy Agreements as industry policy benefiting pharmacy owners rather than health policy.

This latest agreement exemplifies the fact that the pharmacy guild usually gets what it wants. Last year the Albanese government announced the 60-day dispensing policy, which doubled the amount of medicine dispensed with some scripts from a 30-day to a 60-day supply. The pharmacy guild launched an emotional attack, claiming huge pharmacy losses would result.

The government subsequently offered an early renegotiation of the Community Pharmacy Agreement (not due until 2025). The guild eagerly accepted this offer.

In March, Health Minister Mark Butler announced an agreement had been reached between the government and the pharmacy guild. The next Community Pharmacy Agreement would contain an extra $3 billion in pharmacy funding.

This extra funding includes the $2.1 billion, via the new Additional Community Supply Support Payment, to offset presumed pharmacy losses. Pharmacists will receive an extra $4.80, on top of the usual $8.37 dispensing fee and a $4.62 handling fee, when they give out a 60-day script.

Plus there’s the guarantee, in place since 2020, that remuneration per script will increase year on year over the life of the Community Pharmacy Agreement.

Are the agreements effective?

A number of reports have been critical of the lack of data about the effectiveness of the community pharmacy programs supported by the Community Pharmacy Agreements.

A post-implementation review of the seventh agreement found that, in common with previous agreements, there was a lack of effective evaluation and assessment mechanisms for programs. The review said the scarcity and quality of available data for robust and meaningful analysis of health outcomes was a continuing concern.

The government’s Medical Services Advisory Committee made similar findings about the sixth agreement.

Yet several of these medication management and review programs (for example, Dose Administration Aids, MedsCheck and Diabetes MedsCheck) continue to be funded with a 30% increase in this Community Pharmacy Agreement.

Discussion about other programs (for example, Home Medicines Review and Residential Medication Management Review) is continuing as part of the focus on “new and improved pharmacy programs”, allocated $103.3 million in the agreement.

The pharmacy guild says it has secured a 22% increase in funding under this agreement compared to the last one. No other part of the health-care system has seen that level of increase in funding support.

Such exceptionalism should demand greater transparency, accountability and scrutiny of the influence of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia on government policies.

Lesley Russell previously worked as a health policy staffer for the federal Australian Labor Party.

– ref. A new Community Pharmacy Agreement starts next month. Here’s what you need to know – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/230210

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sean Pinder, Associate Professor, Finance, The University of Melbourne

This article is part of The Conversation’s “Business Basics” series where we ask leading experts to discuss key concepts in business, economics and finance.

Popular Australian fast-food chain Guzman y Gomez has announced it will undergo an initial public offering or “IPO” later this month, listing itself on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX). The move will value the company at A$2.2 billion.

An IPO – sometimes also called a company float – signifies the first time that a privately owned company lists its shares on a public stock exchange.

But it’s an expensive process, which also allows public investors to “look at the books” and scrutinise a company’s financial performance in detail.

So how do IPOs work, and why do companies do them?

Most companies are private, but all technically have shares

All companies technically have “shares”. These simply represent a stake of ownership in a company and its profits. A company might have one shareholder with a single 100% share, or thousands of them, all holding different percentages of the company.

The vast majority of companies are privately held, meaning their shares can’t be traded without private negotiations. When a company goes public, it means that anyone can now easily trade shares in it at their market price by placing an order on a stock exchange.

At a high level, the price of a share represents the relevant fraction of all future cash flows a company is expected to generate, expressed in terms of their value today (what we call a present value). We can’t know the future, so the value of a share changes as these expectations change.

While an IPO represents the first time a company’s shares become available for trading by the public, the majority of those shares typically already exist.

For example, Guzman y Gomez’s IPO prospectus (a heavily detailed report that to-be-listed companies are required to publish) says the company will have about 101.3 million shares on issue after the IPO. But this is only about 10% more than already currently exist.

Why do it?

Being a public company isn’t easy – it attracts the full scrutiny of a market of public investors that’s often criticised as being short-sighted and overly sensitive to short-term fluctuations in performance. So why float at all?

Asking chief financial officers who’ve been through the process typically reveals some common themes.

Near the top of the list, an IPO helps a company establish an accurate market price for itself.

An unlisted company might have a pretty good idea as to what its assets are worth. But it’s not until it falls under the fickle lens of market scrutiny that it receives a more objective – and sometimes alarming – assessment of its true value.

One big benefit of knowing what a company is worth, and issuing new shares based on that valuation, is that its original owners can sell some of their shares through the offering.

This has twin benefits. It enables them to convert previously hard-to-sell company shares into cash, and provides the opportunity to diversify their personal investment portfolios.

But being listed also provides a firm with superior access to new sources of cash. It gets to enjoy some of these benefits immediately by fundraising in the IPO – selling shares to new investors. But the more rigorous disclosure regime under which listed companies have to operate also means the firm will likely benefit from better access to debt (such as corporate bonds) and equity (shares) markets in the future.

Looking a little more aggressively down the corporate track, a listed company might eventually want to acquire other firms. Being listed means a firm can use its publicly traded shares instead of cash to make an offer for another company, which is called a “scrip bid”.

Many of these common benefits are relevant to the case of Guzman y Gomez’s IPO, which is expected to raise $242.5 million by issuing 11.1 million shares.

About $42.5 million of these funds will go to existing shareholders cashing out their investment. The remaining $200 million raised is expected to be divided between covering the costs of the IPO ($17.4 million) and funding future expansion of the restaurant network in Australia and possibly internationally.

The process isn’t cheap or easy

You can see that IPOs aren’t cheap transactions, with almost 9% of the $200 million raised being paid to various managers and advisers to the float.

So what does the firm get in return for their money? Two joint lead managers have been engaged on the Guzman y Gomez float – investment banks Barrenjoey Markets and Morgan Stanley.

To date, these firms will have delivered a lot of hands-on practical advice about structuring the deal – such as how to determine the number of shares available for sale to institutions, broker firms, employees and franchisees.

But crucially, they also advise on the offer price for those shares. Remember, Guzman y Gomez is in the Mexican food business, not the IPO business, so it is heavily reliant on its investment banking team to help set an appropriate price.

Set it too high and the shares may remain unsold. Too low, and the company will have “left money on the table” by passing up the opportunity to sell shares at their full value.

Fortunately, the leadership of Guzman y Gomez can get some sleep in the run-up to the listing. The joint managing investment banks have agreed, for a fee, to underwrite the deal, which means that they will step in and buy shares at a set price if any offered don’t sell.

But that’s not to say it’s all stress free. While the subscription price of the new shares has been set – and guaranteed – at $22 per share, this does not necessarily mean the share will continue to trade at $22 after it’s listed.

In Australia’s biggest IPO last year, chemical distributor Redox issued shares at $2.55, valuing it at $1.3 billion. But by the end of the first day, prices had fallen by about 5%.

That’s the great thing about public markets. You’ll get transparent objective feedback from day one, whether you like it or not!

Sean Pinder 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. Business basics: what’s an initial public offering? – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231805

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Phillips, Associate Professor, POLIS@ANU Centre for Social Policy Research, Australian National University

A lot has happened to the economy since COVID struck, and reading the economic tea leaves has become more difficult.

Many of the gains for many Australians in 2020 and 2021 were artificial and didn’t last. The COVID Supplement temporarily doubled JobSeeker, for example. JobKeeper paid workers what their employers could not.

As these measures have been unwound, the gains have been unwound, making it more difficult than usual to separate the economic signal from the noise.

But in a study just published in the the ANU Centre for Social Policy Research journal POLIS@ANU we have made an attempt.

We wanted to find out which kinds of households are expected to be financially better off and which worse off five years on from the outbreak of COVID, comparing 2024 with 2019.

We’ve adjusted incomes for living costs

We have examined incomes after adjusting for changes in living costs. This means that if a household’s after-tax income increased by 20% but its cost of living also increased by 20%, we have regarded its financial living standard as unchanged.

The tool we used was the ANU PolicyMod model of the Australian tax and transfer system, Australian Bureau of Statistics data on employment, demographics and prices and wages, and government data on tax and payments.

We have also taken account of the income tax cuts and changes to payments that begin next month. Our estimates for December 2024 are projections based on the assumptions in the budget about incomes and prices.

We find overall living standards increased from 2019 to 2021 but then fell sharply in 2022 with a further small fall in 2023. Overall living standards were 0.6% lower in December 2023 than in December 2019.

This year they are expected to climb to be 1.3% higher than December 2019.

But it’s an overall picture that glosses over the full story.

Gains for high earners, low earners

The only groups whose living standards grew significantly over the period were households on the very lowest and the very highest incomes.

We divided households into five “quintiles”. The lowest-income fifth we called Quintile 1. The highest-income fifth we called Quintile 5.

The Quintile 1 living standard grew 3.5%. The Quintile 5 living standard grew 2.7%.

In contrast, the living standard of the second-lowest quintile barely grew, and the living standards of the middle and upper-middle quintiles actually fell.

The living standards of middle and upper-middle-income Australians were lower in early 2024 than they had been in 2019.

Low-income households did relatively well partly because their payments were indexed to inflation. High-income households did well partly because they had investments that did well.

Where middle earners did badly, it was in large measure because they had mortgages. Where they did well, it seems to have been because they were outright homeowners and had other sources of investment income.

Losses for the mortgaged middle

The living standards of mortgaged households fell 5.6% between 2019 and December 2024.

In contrast, the living standards of renters climbed 2.9%, while the living standards of outright owners climbed 8.5%

On sources of income, the living standards of households whose main source of income was “other” (including investments) grew an astounding 15.8%.

In contrast, the living standards of households that relied on wages and the standards of those that relied on government benefits changed little.

The living standards of households headed by employers fell almost 10%.

Possibly for related reasons, older Australians have done much better than working-aged Australians, and the youngest did better than the middle-aged.

We also tried dividing households by “financial wellbeing”, a measure made up of income, wealth, housing tenure, age, disability and family type based on their statistical associations with the Bureau of Statistics measure of “financial stress”.

The bureau’s measure includes inability to raise emergency funds within a week and to pay bills on time.

Again, we divided households into quintiles. We called the fifth with the least wellbeing Quintile 1; the fifth with the highest wellbeing Quintile 5.

The most well-off are better off

The households with the highest wellbeing did the best, finding themselves 6.2% better off by 2024.

Those who did the worst were those with the second-highest and middle wellbeings, who found themselves about 3% worse off.

Those with the least wellbeing were 2.8% better off.

Overall, we did not find that household living standards have dropped remarkably since the onset of COVID.

But we can understand why some Australians, particularly middle-income Australians with mortgages and middle-aged Australians, feel they have.

They did badly in 2022 and 2023 as mortgages rose. Less advantaged and more advantaged Australians did better.

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. Who’s better off and who’s worse off four years on from the outbreak of COVID? The financial picture might surprise you – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231172

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dulani Jayasuriya, Lecturer in Accounting and Finance, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

As the urgency of climate change ramps up, focus is increasing on digital currencies to address their environmental impact.

According to industry forecasts, the global cryptocurrency market is expected to surge to US$4.94 billion by 2030. But the process of mining digital currencies such as Bitcoin requires immense computational power – causing a significant drain on energy resources.

“Miners” use sophisticated hardware to solve complex mathematical puzzles, securing transactions and minting new coins. But this process, known as “proof of work” (PoW), is energy intensive.

Imagine a giant lock with a million combinations. Miners are all competing to find the right combination to unlock the block (a group of transactions) and earn rewards. The more computing power you have, the faster you can try different combinations.

But this computing power requires a lot of energy, similar to how a powerful car uses more petrol. So, miners are using a massive amount of electricity to run super-powered computers 24/7.

In 2021, police in the United Kingdom raided an industrial unit under suspicion it was housing an indoor marijuana growing operation. They were surprised to discover instead an extensive Bitcoin mining setup which was illegally siphoning electricity from a mains supply.

In 2021, Bitcoin mining consumed enough energy to rank 27th among nations, ahead of Pakistan with a population of over 230 million people. Just a year later, Bitcoin’s energy usage surpassed Finland’s national power consumption.

Alternatives have emerged to address the rampant energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining. But the question is, are these green currencies a viable alternative to the traditional options?

The emergence of green cryptocurrencies

Green cryptocurrencies use a less energy-intensive process known as “proof of stake” (PoS). Instead of needing a powerful computer, miners need to have a certain amount of the relevant cryptocurrency – kind of like a deposit.

If someone tries to cheat or mess with the system, they could lose some of their own cryptocurrency. This “skin in the game” keeps validators – those validating and verifying transactions – honest and secure.

A pivotal moment for those interested in green alternatives was cryptocurrency Ethereum’s migration to PoS in September 2022, through an update dubbed “The Merge”.

This shift led to a 99.9% drop in Ethereum’s energy use. Before the transition, Ethereum’s energy consumption was on par with Switzerland. Post-merge, its power usage was closer to that of a small town.

Challenges and the road ahead

In addition to Ethereum, several other cryptocurrencies are making significant strides in the realm of green finance. Notably, Cardano and Solana are gaining ground in the crypto market. They use significantly less energy, can handle larger numbers of transactions without slowing down, and claim to be secure.

Despite the benefits, the shift to green cryptocurrencies is fraught with challenges. Some users worry PoS might be less secure than PoW. And those with more coins have a higher chance of validating transactions. This could lead to a situation where a few people control the network.

Moreover, the initial distribution of coins in cryptocurrencies using PoS can be less democratic, often benefiting early adopters.

As a result, early adopters who accumulate a large number of coins can have a disproportionate influence on the network. This can be seen as less democratic because it gives more power to the wealthy, which goes against the decentralised ethos of cryptocurrencies.

Evolution of green currencies continues

PoS is not the only change attempting to address cryptocurrencies’ energy consumption. Sharding is another.

Sharding divides the network into smaller sections called “shards”, each handling its own set of transactions. This frees up individual computers on the network (called nodes) from processing everything at once, leading to significantly faster transaction speeds and lower costs.

This innovation goes beyond just efficiency. Sharding’s parallel processing approach minimises energy needs, potentially making cryptocurrencies more eco-friendly.

Ethereum’s upcoming upgrade, Ethereum 2.0, incorporates sharding to address the network’s current limitations on speed and transaction fees. By implementing sharding in phases, developers hope to ensure a smooth transition while maintaining the network’s security and decentralisation.

While sharding seems like a game-changer, it’s not without its own hurdles. Implementing it effectively requires careful planning and rigorous testing to safeguard the network’s integrity.

Overall, sharding offers a glimpse into a future where cryptocurrencies can process transactions faster, become more cost-effective and even reduce their environmental impact.

Green cryptocurrencies show how technology and finance can support ecological sustainability, providing a model for others to follow. But there is always a risk. And as they develop, green cryptocurrencies need to address concerns over security, network integrity and accessibility.

Dulani Jayasuriya 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. Cryptocurrencies use massive amounts of power – but eco-friendly alternatives come with their own risks – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/229607

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

Anthony Albanese recently told the Labor caucus his cabinet is preparing “an offer” to put to the Australian people at the election.

As it crafts its pitch, the biggest uncertainty looming over Labor is what sort of parliament a second term Albanese government would likely face.

The general expectation is for Labor to be returned. (Caveat: expectations can be wrong – who can forget 2019?) The question is: would it be a majority or minority government?

A May analysis of “The political landscape a year from the 2025 election”, prepared by the social and political research firms Accent Research and the RedBridge Group, concludes “a hung parliament or a Labor majority are almost equally likely outcomes” of the election.

“The likely range of seats won by Labor if an election were held during the fieldwork period [February to May] is estimated to have a low end of 71 and an upper range of 83,” the report says.

Ahead of a 2025 election, if Republican nominee Donald Trump wins in November’s US presidential election, that could affect the campaign climate. The world would change, with implications for Australia.

A federal election held in the shadow of the first days of a Trump presidency would elevate foreign policy issues. One obvious point of debate would be how either leader would potentially handle an unpredictable Trump.

A Trump presidency might favour Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s national security focus. But an opposite view, held in Labor circles, is it could make people stick to the status quo. Trump’s triumph would also be fodder for the Greens in their attack on Labor’s closeness to the US. For its part, Labor would argue the Australia-US alliance is enduring regardless of individual US and Australian leaders and governments.

Because most observers discount the chance of a Dutton win, the thinness of Labor’s present majority (it has 78 seats in the 151 member House of Representatives) is often overlooked. It wouldn’t take much to slip into minority.

The polling suggests things haven’t moved significantly since the 2022 election, and history tells us governments can expect to go backwards at their first election. The 2025 election could be decided by a handful of seats – the days of huge swings and massive majorities seem behind us at least for now. We’re in an era of large crossbenches.

In its first term, this has been a “labour” government, but not a “radical” government. Some see its changes as incremental, but in economic terms, both unions and business see it as markedly re-tilting the playing field.

It has delivered heftily to the unions on industrial relations. It has committed to an interventionist industry policy. It has made modest improvements for those on social welfare. It has prosecuted the case for wage rises for the low paid, particularly women. These things have been combined with careful budget management that helped deliver two surpluses.

In what he puts to the people for another term, Albanese’s top priority will be trying to maximise his prospect of majority government. Policy adventurism in the election “offer” seems unlikely.

But that ties the government’s hands on what it can do in a second term – unless it is willing to trash promises post election. Yes, Albanese broke his word on the stage 3 tax cuts, without a backlash. But that doesn’t mean he’d want to make a habit of it – unless his hand was forced, for example, by the exigencies of minority government.

Albanese’s original strategy, it used to be said, was based on several terms, winning trust initially and moving to more robust initiatives later. Thus, many in the Labor base, and the wider left, would wish for a more radical second term program from the leader who made himself a small target in 2022.

For instance, Richard Denniss, head of The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank, says he would have on his wish list: attacking negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount; stopping the approval of new coal and gas mines; sweeping changes to environmental laws and introducing general public hearings at the National Anti-Corruption Commission.

But how brave/rash/out-of-character would such an “offer” be for Albanese as we observe him? He knows rocking the boat too hard would increase the chances of falling into the (minority government) drink.

Kos Samaras, a RedBridge director, former Labor official and political hardhead, says voters “just want to see a vision for the future, a plan for getting out of the mess – the mess on the housing issue, the stalemate on inflation. A vision that doesn’t scapegoat particular groups of Australians.”

Any “vision”, however, must have tangibles.

Rod Sims, former chief of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and now professor of public policy at the Australian National University’s Crawford School, homes in on a specific “vision” pitch.

The government should be expanding on the vision of Australia as an export-oriented green superpower. We can replace coal and gas exports with renewable energy-based exports. There’s an enormous vision there that needs to be further explained, and more policies need to be put around it.

This vision puts Australia at the heart of global emissions reduction, contributing up to a 10% reduction, and is “pro-productivity, pro-prosperity and pro-regions”, Sims says.

Within the ministry, differences bubble about what Labor should offer in the longer term. Industry Minister Ed Husic angered Treasurer Jim Chalmers when he recently suggested some future relief on company tax.

A senior Labor source points to child care and Medicare as likely policy priorities for the second term “offer”, as well as climate change, energy and the Future Made in Australia plan. Labor would describe this as a second term agenda to transform the economy through clean energy reforms and investment in manufacturing, skills and infrastructure, to create high skilled jobs in the regions and cities.

On climate change, the government’s ambition will be tested when it has to announce an emissions reduction target for 2035 in the next few months.

If it did go into minority government, the story of what Labor actually delivered in a second term might be complicated.

The Coalition likes to raise the spectre of the Greens tweaking a minority Labor government’s tail. But perhaps more likely, it might be the easier-to-deal with teals.

And that would be interesting. The teals are often seen as breakaways from the Liberal part of the spectrum. But some of them are policy radicals. If they had power to extract concessions from a minority Labor government, they’d be demanding about “process”. They’d want a lot more consultation, changes to parliament’s operations, more transparency, and beefed-up integrity measures.

On climate, they’d exert pressure against the fossil fuel industry (possibly making common cause with the Greens), and press for faster environmental action.

Sophie Scamps, independent member for the Sydney seat of Mackellar, says:

I will want to see genuine action to address climate change and real steps to wean us off fossil fuels, as well as concrete policy action to ensure we meet our international commitments to protect the environment.

While the teals would have some common demands, they also have their individual causes.

Of course, the teals have their own battles to secure re-election. In the campaign, they will be under strong pressure to say how they would exercise a balance of power role. They might avoid the question of who they’d support, but it would be harder to dodge specifics about what policies they’d want.

How great the challenge a minority government would be for Labor would depend on how many numbers the government required to pass its legislation in the lower house. It would be helped by the size and diversity of the crossbench (including among the teals).

Even so, it would be operating from a weaker position than in the first term. That would make it all the more important for it to have a clear second-term agenda for which it could then argue it had a mandate.

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. Grattan on Friday: how bold will Anthony Albanese be in his ‘offer’ for a potential second term? – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231704

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Priya Chacko, Associate Professor, International Politics, University of Adelaide

This year’s general election in India arguably brought up more questions about the fairness of the electoral process than any other in the country’s history.

For example, in December, a bill was passed in India’s parliament that allowed election commissioners to be appointed by a panel dominated by the executive branch, which many feared would endanger free and fair elections.

And during the campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a string of speeches that were widely seen as Islamophobic, in which he accused the opposition Congress Party of favouring Muslims. The Election Commission failed to adequately enforce the Model Code of Conduct when it came to these comments.

Opposition chief ministers, Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Hemant Soren of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), meanwhile, were arrested on charges of corruption. Both parties claimed the charges were politically motivated.

One of the lessons from the election, however, is that even when there are questions about how free and fair a vote is, opposition parties can dent the dominance of ruling parties.

In India’s election, the opposition presented a united front and stuck to a consistent message reflecting specific issues of voter discontent.

Read more:
With democracy under threat in Narendra Modi’s India, how free and fair will this year’s election be?

Why caste politics were so important

Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party did not perform as well as expected in the election, suffering major losses in its heartland northern Indian states. Modi began the six-week election campaign saying his party would win more than 400 seats. Ultimately, it was reduced to 240 seats, while the opposition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) won 232 seats.

INDIA had a shaky start to the election. A founding member, the Janata Dal, joined Modi’s coalition earlier this year. INDIA also failed to reach a seat-sharing agreement with another member, Trinamool Congress (TMC), although that party remained part of the alliance.

Yet, as the campaign wore on, the BJP’s attacks on the opposition led to a more united front, focusing particularly on the issue of caste.

Indian society and politics are stratified by its caste system. It has roots in ancient religious texts, which grant symbolic and material rights and privileges to people based on their membership to a particular caste.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s speeches highlighted a commitment to protecting the Constitution and addressing the issue of caste-based injustice in India. He pledged to undertake a caste census to reveal the extent of disadvantage and concentration of wealth in society.

He also pointed out the government’s centralisation of power, as well as the upper caste-dominated media’s adulation of Modi and its inattention to issues of unemployment and inflation.

Lalu Prasad Yadav, a leader of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) party, which is also part of the INDIA coalition, warned the BJP intended to change the Constitution to end caste-based affirmative action. Though this was denied by Modi, the allegation seemed to strike a chord with voters.

Caste presented a dilemma for Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics, which valorises upper-caste Hindu practices and behaviours, while relying on support from the lower caste majority to win elections.

The BJP had sought to ameliorate this tension by promoting welfare schemes and accusing the secular opposition of colluding with Muslims to deprive the Hindu lower-caste poor.

In the lead-up to the election, Modi also claimed to have replaced traditional forms of caste stratification with four new castes of welfare “beneficiaries” – women, farmers, the youth and the poor.

In truth, however, the government’s welfare schemes consisted of paltry cash transfers, small loans, food rations and subsidies for private goods like toilets, which sought to compensate for the stagnation of incomes and lack of jobs. Spending on health and education by Modi’s government, which could have transformative effects on society, has languished.

The BJP’s infrastructure-driven economic program has benefited large companies, leading to accusations of crony capitalism. It has also failed to attract substantial foreign investment or grow the manufacturing sector to create more jobs.

Over the past decade – but particularly following the COVID pandemic – India has also become one of the world’s most unequal countries. Women, Dalits, Adivasis and Muslims have fared the worst.

Dalit politicians also grew in prominence

Perhaps the biggest surprise for the BJP were its heavy losses in its heartland state, Uttar Pradesh.

The Samajwadi Party (SP) had previously dominated Uttar Pradesh politics by promoting the interests of particular lower caste “other backward classes”. This tactic, however, generated resentment among other lower castes, which was exploited by the BJP to win power in 2017.

In this election, the SP appears to have fashioned a new, broader caste coalition.

This election also saw new shifts in Dalit politics, the lowest rung of the caste structure in India. In Uttar Pradesh, new Dalit political parties became increasingly prominent, such as the Azad Party led by Chandra Sekhar Azad.

Further south, the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) consolidated its status as the largest Dalit party in Tamil Nadu, winning all the seats it contested.

The future of Indian democracy

Indian democracy is not out of the woods yet. Activists, students, political leaders and journalists remain imprisoned.

The Hindu nationalist movement also has a history of inciting communal violence when things do not go its way in the electoral arena.

The Modi government started to extend its media censorship during the election, as well.

There is little to suggest that Modi will temper what many see as authoritarian tendencies, but there is now more resistance, scepticism and political alternatives that will hopefully aid India’s democratic recovery.

Priya Chacko receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Anand Sreekumar 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 issue proved key to the opposition’s stunning success in India’s election: caste politics – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231588

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hugh Possingham, Professor of Conservation Biology, The University of Queensland

Last week, the Albanese government introduced legislation to create a new statutory body called Environment Information Australia. The bill is due for debate in parliament today. The government clearly expects the bill will pass, because the new body has already been allocated A$54 million over four years in the May budget.

Why do we need it? Australia’s natural world is in steep decline – based on what we know. But there’s much we don’t know.

Australia has a fairly poor track record of effectively monitoring biodiversity. It’s hard to care for and restore nature if we don’t know how we are tracking, where to invest our efforts and into which activities.

The proposed agency will make environmental data more accessible by creating a platform where data from multiple sources can be pooled. These sources include: federal, state and territory governments, universities, research infrastructure platforms such as the Atlas of Living Australia and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, industry and citizen scientist data.

Increased access to relevant data would enable governments to better report on how well our environment is being managed.

The agency fills a gap in our environmental management regime. But by itself, it won’t improve outcomes for nature.

The most important actions needed to reduce Australia’s rapid losses of nature are the long-promised stronger environmental protection laws, which have been delayed indefinitely and a many-fold increase in funding for on-ground conservation programs.

Why do we need this?

In 2018, a national review of how Australia monitors its threatened species found 33% had never been monitored, while many others were only poorly monitored.

Without robust information, we can’t focus our efforts where there is most need. We need to know where threatened plants and animals are still surviving, whether their populations are rising or falling, and what threatens them.

While some of this data already exists, it is owned by hundreds of different organisations.

Many of these monitoring activities are already undertaken inside the federal environment department. But there are some notable steps forward in what is being proposed in the new legislation.

Firstly, efforts to increase the public sharing of data should be applauded.

One of the three objects of the proposed act is to “improve the availability and accessibility of high quality national environmental information and data,” though the detail is yet to be released.

Another good change is requiring the important State of the Environment snapshot reports to be produced every two years, rather than every five.

The legislation also mandates the production of comprehensive and ongoing national environmental economic accounts by law.

These accounts – also called “natural capital accounts” – are useful to track the health of different environmental assets at all scales, from the habitat of a single threatened species to the entire continent.

While this is a positive step, it could be better. As the laws stand, these accounts would be narrowly focused on describing the condition of the environment and its relationship with the economy.

Because environmental accounts are standardised and ongoing, they offer an ideal platform for measuring changes in environmental conditions. They could support a major expansion of our small set of useful environmental indicators, such as the Threatened Species Index.

Ideally we should have annual robust indices for a wide range of national environmental assets such as soil, water, plants, animals, ecosystems, and nature’s contribution to people at all scales.

Read more:
Australia-first research reveals staggering loss of threatened plants over 20 years

Measuring progress against targets

One of the goals of the proposed agency will be to measure our progress toward becoming “nature positive”.

The nature positive concept has been embraced internationally. The goal is ambitious: halt biodiversity decline by 2030 against a 2020 baseline and achieve recovery by 2050.

Unfortunately, the government is proposing to embed a watered-down version of nature positive, leaving out the target dates and leaving the baseline open.

In response many Australian environmental scientists are urging the government to align with the international definition.

In November 2023, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek talked proudly of the leading role Australia played in securing an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework. This agreement has 23 targets which signatory nations have agreed to in an effort to stop the loss of species and nature.

To measure progress toward the target of protecting 30% of lands and seas by 2030, we will need data on what areas are protected, how they’re managed and which bioregions and plant communities they represent. That’s a job for the new agency.

Towards true nature positive development

Despite the recent deferral, the government has committed to reform our national environmental laws. These reforms need to include strong protections for habitat crucial to the survival and recovery of threatened species and ecological communities.

Here, too, the proposed agency should have a role, by modelling and mapping these critical habitats, which will help mark important areas as off limits to development. This could actually help accelerate building approvals by avoiding developers spending time on proposals unlikely to meet approvals.

If the agency is to be truly independent, as the government has promised, it will need to tackle tricky issues governments tend to shy away from, including a fully transparent account of environmental expenditures.

That covers not just the tiny amount the federal government spends on biodiversity protection, which languishes below 0.1% of total government spending, but total investment across all levels of government and different sectors.

If we want to tackle Australia’s biodiversity crisis we have to be absolutely clear about the problems we are seeking to solve and get the basics right.

Read more:
Threatened species have declined 2% a year since 2000. Nature positive? Far from it.

Hugh Possingham works for the University of Queensland, Accounting for Nature, and the Biodiversity Council. He currently receives grant funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with over 20 organisations providing pro-bono or limited renumeration, board or committee level advice. These include: BirdLife Australia (vice-President), The University of Adelaide (Environment Institute Board Chair), various state and federal governments, the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (Board Chair), AgForce, and several NGOs, etc. James Trezise also contributed to this article.

Jaana Dielenberg is a Charles Darwin University Fellow. She works for the Biodiversity Council and The University of Melbourne, and previously worked for the National Environmental Science Program Threatened Species Recovery Hub.

Michelle Ward has received funding from The Australian Research Council and the Commonwealth National Environmental Science Program. She was Science and Research Lead at WWF-Australia and is currently on a Technical Advisory Panel for a project run by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.

Peter Burnett is a councillor with the Biodiversity Council, which seeks to be a trusted expert voice communicating accurate information on all aspects of biodiversity to the Australian people, to ensure biodiversity and Country prosper.

– ref. What will Australia’s proposed Environment Information Agency do for nature? – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231593

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristine Crous, Senior Lecturer, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University

As humanity continues to burn fossil fuels, the delicate balance of life on Earth is changing. That’s true of trees, many of which are growing faster as a result of increased carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations in our atmosphere.

But not all trees are responding in this way. In particular, eucalypts – Australia’s iconic forest trees – haven’t benefited from the increase in CO₂ as they were expected to.

Why not? Our new research, published today in Nature, shows it comes down to a below-ground battle for phosphorus, a mineral nutrient in soils that is essential for tree growth. The results suggest in some parts of the world, increased CO₂ means tiny bugs in the soil “hold onto” their phosphorus, making less available for trees.

This is alarming news for some forests, because according to current projections, global forest growth is meant to limit damage from global warming.

What our study involved

Our study used data from a Western Sydney University experiment known as “Eucalyptus Free Air CO₂ Enrichment”, or EucFACE. The experiment is located in a century-old Cumberland plain woodland in Sydney’s Hawkesbury district.

CO₂ is released into the woodland through a computer‐controlled system. Scientists then monitor the effects on trees, soils and the broader ecosystem. Over six years, CO₂ was raised to the levels expected around the year 2050 (according to the current business-as-usual emissions trajectory).

Our previous studies found the woodland trees did not show any extra growth at high CO₂ levels. We suspected the low availability of soil phosphorus was the cause, and set out to test this.

Phosphorus is crucial to the process of photosynthesis that makes trees grow. Phosphorus in soil is provided by bugs known as microbes. These micro-organisms break down dead and decaying matter, and in the process change phosphorus into a form that plants can take up with their roots.

Most Australian soils are naturally low in phosphorus, because they are derived from ancient, nutrient-depleted rocks. The same is true for most soils in tropical and subtropical regions. That makes the phosphorus service provided by microbes even more important.

We sampled phosphorus in all parts of the ecosystem, tracing its journey from the soil to the trees. We found under high-CO₂ conditions the microbes keep more of the phosphorus they produce, to aid their own metabolism. This left less available for trees to take up.

This occurred despite the trees trying to “bargain” for phosphorus by releasing extra carbon into the soil to feed the microbes.

What’s more, trees are big “recyclers” of phosphorus – they remove half of the phosphorus from any leaf before it falls. But this was still not enough to support extra tree growth.

Why this matters

Our study is the first to show how the phosphorus cycle is affected by high CO₂ – and in particular, the role of soil microbes.

The results are important to predicting soil phosphorus availability, and plant productivity, in woodlands and forests as CO₂ levels increase in the atmosphere.

Current climate projections assume increasing CO₂ will lead to more forest growth globally. Forests are a vital carbon “sink” – that is, they draw down carbon from the atmosphere. So the increased forest growth was projected to go some way to limiting the effects of climate change.

If our results are taken into account, future warming would be higher than current projections. However, it’s important to verify our results in other locations, with other tree species. New experiments are being formed by overseas teams, including in the Amazon rainforest, to test the findings.

Importantly, our results don’t mean that forests are not a crucial sink for carbon. Forests hold a vast quantity of carbon. Avoiding deforestation and planting new forests are both valuable means of maintaining and adding to carbon stores.

Our research demonstrates the importance of considering soils when growing trees. We also hope our research stimulates further efforts to find phosphorus in ecosystems, especially in tropical rainforests where phosphorus is often greatly limited.

Belinda Medlyn receives funding from Australian Research Council, NSW Government, Bush Heritage Australia, Arid Recovery and Australian Bureau of Meteorology. She has consulted for Landlife.

David S Ellsworth receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the NSW government.

Kristine Crous 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. A fierce battle is being fought in the soil beneath our feet – and the implications for global warming are huge – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231802

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben White, Professor of End-of-Life Law and Regulation, Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Queensland University of Technology

The Australian Capital Territory parliament passed its voluntary assisted dying law yesterday by 20 to five.

The ACT now joins the six Australian states, all of which have their own voluntary assisted dying laws.

Like the states, the ACT law will begin after an 18-month implementation period. So eligible residents will be able to access voluntary assisted dying from November 3 2025.

This leaves only the Northern Territory without such a law. The NT government has appointed a panel to investigate the issue that is due to report next month.

ACT law broadly reflects ‘Australian model’

The ACT law generally reflects what is now called the “Australian model” of voluntary assisted dying.

Access is permitted only for people who are terminally ill and meet strict eligibility criteria. Eligibility is assessed by two independent, trained health practitioners.

The person seeking voluntary assisted dying must make repeated requests for it. Safeguards include criminal offences for conduct outside the law and a review of cases by a “Voluntary Assisted Dying Oversight Board”.

Health practitioners can conscientiously object to being involved.

Three significant ACT differences

However, there are some important differences between the law in the ACT and state laws. Three of these have been debated since the ACT bill was tabled and have been examined by a parliamentary committee. In the ACT:

• patients do not need to have a specific time frame until they are expected to die. This is different from the 6-12 months required in the state laws. But this change is not as drastic as it seems. Eligibility depends on a number of criteria including that a patient must have a condition “advanced, progressive and expected to cause death”. The “advanced” requirement includes the patient is “approaching the end of their life”

• one of the two health practitioners who assess someone’s eligibility may be a nurse practitioner. Under state laws, both assessing practitioners must be doctors

• patients who receive treatment in institutions (such as hospitals) that object to voluntary assisted dying will have a greater ability to access it than if they were in the states. Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia have legislation on this, but the ACT gives greater rights to people who are in institutions temporarily.

What happens next?

Implementation is the next step. There will be 18 months to establish system infrastructure, including the oversight board, mandatory training, guidelines, policy, and to liaise with institutions that will need to know their obligations.

The ACT government had already begun planning. Its response to the parliamentary committee report gives some indication about issues it will consider.

One is about the mandatory training all health practitioners providing voluntary assisted dying must complete. It will include consideration of palliative care, disability awareness, the role of carer relationships in decision-making, and identifying coercion.

There are also recommendations about training for the wider workforce, community education, as well as engaging with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Lessons for other jurisdictions

The passing of the ACT law will be watched closely in the Northern Territory, which is now the only Australian jurisdiction without voluntary assisted dying laws.

The territories are last to legislate on this issue because, since 1997, they have been prohibited from doing so by a Commonwealth law. That changed in December 2022 with the passing of the Restoring Territory Rights Act. The ACT responded promptly with the bill that has just passed.

The rest of the country may examine the ACT law, particularly its novel features, when their laws are up for review. This generally occurs after three to five years, although some states have regular reviews.

One aspect of the ACT law likely to attract particular interest is allowing nurse practitioners to assess someone’s eligibility for voluntary assisted dying. They are already able to administer the medication in four states and there are calls from at least one oversight board to consider this additional role. This extra role would help address the issue of only having a limited pool of doctors who are trained and willing to provide voluntary assisted dying.

What else do we need to consider?

The most significant issue not addressed in any Australian voluntary assisted dying laws is whether someone with dementia should be eligible.

This will be considered in the ACT review of its law after three years as it is required to examine access to voluntary assisted dying via “advanced care planning”. That review must also consider whether young people with the capacity to decide should be able to access voluntary assisted dying.

However, the extent to which other Australian jurisdictions engage with these and other issues when reviewing voluntary assisted dying laws remains to be seen.

Ben White has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and Commonwealth and state governments for research and training about the law, policy and practice relating to end-of-life care. In relation to voluntary assisted dying, he (with colleagues) has been engaged by the Victorian, Western Australian and Queensland governments to design and provide the legislatively mandated training for health practitioners involved in voluntary assisted dying in those states. He (with Lindy Willmott) has also developed a model bill for voluntary assisted dying for parliaments to consider. He is a sessional member of the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal, which has jurisdiction for some aspects of this state’s voluntary assisted dying legislation. Ben is a recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (project number FT190100410: Enhancing End-of-Life Decision-Making: Optimal Regulation of Voluntary Assisted Dying) funded by the Australian government.

Lindy Willmott receives or has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council and Commonwealth and state governments for research and training about the law, policy and practice relating to end-of-life care. In relation to voluntary assisted dying, she (with colleagues) has been engaged by the Victorian, Western Australian and Queensland governments to design and provide the legislatively mandated training for health practitioners involved in voluntary assisted dying in those states. She (with Ben White) has also developed a model bill for voluntary assisted dying for parliaments to consider. Lindy Willmott is also a member of the Queensland Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board, but writes this piece in her capacity as an academic researcher. She is a former board member of Palliative Care Australia.

Madeleine Archer has worked on projects to provide the legislatively mandated training in Victoria, Western Australia, and Queensland for health practitioners involved in providing voluntary assisted dying in those states.

– ref. Voluntary assisted dying laws have been passed in the ACT. Here’s what happens next – tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/231698