Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Russell, Research Fellow, Urban Stream Geomorphology, The University of Melbourne

A growing number of new housing developments feature a little known but powerful bit of tech: smart rainwater tanks.

That’s where the rainwater tank next to each house is fitted with a little computer to open and close a valve that releases water. Software can tell the valve to open to let some water out when, for instance, a storm is coming and you don’t want the tank to overflow. Or, it can keep it closed when you want to capture rainfall to boost household water supplies.

Our research is investigating new ways to network smart tanks together. When the tanks are part of a network, a computer program can keep track of what every tank is doing, and which ones need to release water and where.

Our project is implementing this smart rainwater tank technology to protect and restore stream habitats for platypus in Monbulk Creek, east of Melbourne.

We aim to scale up this ecologically-informed approach so it can be used anywhere, regardless of what species needs to be protected.

Tanks for platypus

Our project, known as Tanks for Platypus, focuses on using a network of smart water tanks in Monbulk Creek to support local platypus populations.

Once widespread across Melbourne and surrounds, the iconic platypus is now listed as vulnerable in Victoria.

Reasons for this decline include urbanisation, changes to stream flows and habitat fragmentation and loss.

Platypus require water flow conditions that support waterbugs (their main food source). They also need space to swim and hide from predators.

The Tanks for Platypus project involves offering eligible residents in the Monbulk Creek catchment a free smart rainwater tank.

We aim to use these networked rainwater tanks and three urban lakes to provide more natural flow conditions for platypus. When finished, this smart rain grid will be distributed across both private and public land with the cooperation of local residents, schools and businesses.

What we did

We have developed a new algorithm that manages how water is released from tanks into waterways, to improve the habitat for platypus and other aquatic life in Monbulk Creek.

We surveyed the creek in detail and simulated flow to map creek habitat. We mapped how much habitat is underwater and where water is deep enough for a platypus to be fully submerged under different flow conditions.

We can now use this information to guide our stormwater release and storage algorithms. For example, when water is not deep enough for platypus to feed and hide, our algorithm requests releases from the rainwater tanks.

During dry periods, supplementing creek flow with water releases from these tanks could significantly improve habitat conditions for platypus.

At times, just 1 megalitre per day (less than half an Olympic swimming pool) can increase available habitat by more than 10%.

This makes the water available when it’s needed and reduces the risk of flooding due to tanks overflowing during rain.

In fact, our algorithms can calculate how much water the tank should release before a storm. This means the tank ends up almost full after a storm, keeping rainwater available for residents.

Where to from here?

We are now investigating how our designs and findings in Monbulk Creek can be applied more broadly, including in high-density housing and new urban developments.

One ecological objective might be, for instance, to reduce incidents where water gushes from overflowing tanks into waterways, eroding streambeds and banks, and potentially disturbing native species. Another might be to boost water levels in local creeks or lakes during dry periods.

Algorithms could be programmed to meet these needs, as well as others such as providing water from the tank to the household water for toilet flushing and garden watering.

And those lucky enough to live near a waterway with platypus will also know they are doing their bit to look after a unique part of our Australian wildlife.

– ref. How ‘smart’ rainwater tanks can help keep platypus habitat healthy – https://theconversation.com/how-smart-rainwater-tanks-can-help-keep-platypus-habitat-healthy-269816

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ali Mamouri, Research Fellow, Middle East Studies, Deakin University

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson made headlines last week following an interview with Sky News in which she suggested there are no “good” Muslims.

The comment was outrageous by any measure, but the response relatively muted, reflecting a broader shift in political discourse.

Hanson’s comments have been reported to police – whether anything comes of this remains to be seen. But this broader shift allows for sweeping generalisations about an entire faith community to be voiced without triggering the same level of backlash or the invocation of hate speech laws that similar remarks about other minorities would likely provoke.

For Australian Muslims, the political atmosphere in the wake of the Bondi terrorist attack is febrile. Mosques are receiving threats during Ramadan. Muslim men performing their prayers, during a protest, are being roughly handled by NSW police in public without serious consequences.

Islamophobic incidents routinely spike in response to events thousands of kilometres away.

The question is no longer whether Islamophobia exists in Australia. The question is whether it has become normalised, tolerated in ways other forms of discrimination are not, and what this means for the country’s commitment to multiculturalism and liberal democracy.

From rhetoric to reality

The anti-Muslim rhetoric present within political discourse does not exist in a vacuum.

In the past month alone, close to or during the holy month of Ramadan, three threatening letters were sent to the Lakemba Mosque. During protests following events in Iran, extremist chants against Islam and Muslims circulated in Australian streets, such as calling for all Muslim clerics to be buried.

After the October 7 2023 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, reported Islamophobic incidents rose sharply in Australia — doubling compared to previous years. Palestinians were particularly targeted.

The normalisation becomes even clearer when placed alongside the special envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism proposed last year.

The framework was criticised by some legal scholars and even Jewish groups for conflating antisemitism with legitimate criticism of the State of Israel. That same framework underpinned legislative changes expanding penalties around certain forms of political expression.

Yet a statement implying there are no “good” Muslims resulted in little more than a heavily qualified partial apology.

Taken together, these developments point to a troubling pattern.

They reflect a logic of dehumanisation, homogenisation and collective blame. This involves treating a diverse religious community as monolithic and holding them responsible for incidents or international conflicts over which they have no control.

When rhetoric shifts, reality often follows.

Institutional gaps and structural concerns

Beyond individual incidents, there have been deeper institutional warning signs.

The Australian Human Rights Commission’s February 2026 report identified systemic racism within universities.

It found more than 75% of surveyed Muslim students and staff, more than 90% of Palestinian respondents, and more than 80% of Middle Eastern respondents reported they had witnessed racism directed at their communities. These figures point not to isolated prejudice, but to patterns embedded within everyday institutional life.

Data from 2025 show a further increase in Islamophobic incidents following October 2023. This shows anti-Muslim hostility in Australia is no longer simply connected to a lack of cultural and religious literacy. Rather, it has become politicised, often intensifying in response to international developments and domestic political rhetoric.

The appointment of a national Islamophobia envoy was an important acknowledgement of the problem. Yet beyond a broadly framed action plan, there has been little visible, sustained effort to build public awareness, shape policy, or strengthen protections for Muslim Australians.

Addressing Islamophobia, or any other form of racism, requires more than symbolic appointments. It demands consistent institutional commitment to protecting minority communities and reinforcing the principles of Australia’s multicultural democracy.

Islamophobia damages us all

Beyond isolated incidents, the deeper question remains: why does Islamophobia appear to be treated differently from other forms of racism?

Why can sweeping claims about an entire religious community enter mainstream discourse with comparatively limited consequence?

Why are Australian Muslims in particular so often held accountable for events by individuals taking place here in Australia or even thousands of kilometres away? Why are they repeatedly required to explain themselves, issue statements, or confirm their loyalty in order to be accepted as fellow citizens?

Few, if any, other communities are asked to collectively answer in the same way.

These questions matter because social cohesion depends on treating all citizens and groups with the same level of respect.

Australian multicultural democracy cannot selectively defend some communities while leaving others to navigate hate and hostility on their own.

When anti-Muslim rhetoric becomes normalised, it does more than harm one group. It erodes trust in institutions, weakens the credibility of anti-racism frameworks, and signals that equality before the law is unevenly applied.

Sustaining social cohesion requires more than a mere celebration of diversity. It demands vigilance in practice, ensuring all forms of discrimination are addressed with equal commitment, and political debate does not drift into the dehumanisation of entire communities.

The health of Australia’s multicultural democracy should be measured not by how it protects the majority, but by how consistently it protects all its minorities.

– ref. Pauline Hanson’s no ‘good’ Muslims comment shows how normalised Islamophobia has become in Australia – https://theconversation.com/pauline-hansons-no-good-muslims-comment-shows-how-normalised-islamophobia-has-become-in-australia-276639

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Professor, School of Natural Sciences, Macquarie University

Ivermectin was originally celebrated as a revolutionary treatment for parasitic disease in humans and animals. It has since evolved into a focal point of misinformation and heated debate.

During the early part of the COVID pandemic, it was touted on social media as a miracle cure for the virus, despite a lack of robust evidence.

Now the United States National Cancer Institute is looking into the drug as a potential cancer treatment, with early human clinical studies underway.

But what can it successfully treat?

What is ivermectin?

The drug is a small organic chemical that can be extracted from the bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis. This bacterium grows in the soil, and was first found near the grounds of a Japanese golf course.

Ivermectin’s discovery in the 1970s was considered so important its discoverers were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

It was first approved for use in animals in 1981 and in humans in 1987. It’s now available in various brands as tablets and creams you apply to the skin.

Assessing the evidence

Governments use human clinical trials to decide whether to approve a medicine for sale.

But clinical trials aren’t the highest level of evidence to inform best practice and guide decisions. For that, there are Cochrane reviews.

A Cochrane review brings together a panel of experts who collate and assess all the relevant evidence on a medication. It takes data from multiple clinical trials, and other studies, and evaluates it following clear and structured steps. It’s able to examine and critique study designs to identify bias and reject bad data.

Cochrane reviews are also regularly updated to take into account new information. The result is a summary that is considered the highest level of evidence to guide decision-making.

So what do Cochrane reviews say about ivermectin for different conditions?

Gut and lymphatic worms

Ivermectin is used to treat a variety of parasitic worm infections. These include the round worms Ascaris lumbricoides, Strongyloides stercoralis, Wuchereria bancrofti, and Brugia malayi.

The latter two worms cause the disease lymphatic filariasis (or elephantiasis) which causes severe swelling in the arms, legs, breasts and genitals.

When ivermectin is used to treat Strongyloides stercoralis, the Cochrane panel found it is better than albendazole and had fewer side effects than thiabendazole.

For Ascaris lumbricoides, the panel concluded ivermectin was as good as albendazole and mebendazole.

For treating lymphatic filariasis, a Cochrane review found ivermectin or diethylcarbamazine should be standard treatment in combination with albendazole.

Rosacea

The Cochrane review for rosacea evaluated 22 different treatments for this skin condition, including a variety of drugs, as well as light therapy, cosmetics and reducing the intake of spicy food.

It concluded that ivermectin applied to the skin was more effective than a placebo, and a bit better than the other standard medication, metronidazole.

Scabies

Cochrane has two reviews on the use of ivermectin for scabies. One specifically evaluated ivermectin and permethrin as treatments. The other evaluated all available treatments for scabies.

The first review concluded both permethrin and ivermectin were just as effective, regardless of whether the ivermectin was administered orally or directly onto the skin.

In contrast, the second review concluded ivermectin does work but topical permethrin appeared to be the most effective treatment.

Malaria

The Cochrane panel looked specifically at whether ivermectin could reduce transmission of the malaria parasite, rather than as a treatment.

Unfortunately there was just a single clinical trial to use as evidence. In that trial, residents of eight villages were given ivermectin and albendazole together, with follow up doses of just ivermectin. The researchers then looked at the rates of child infection over 18 weeks.

Even though the trial didn’t show ivermectin prevented infection, due to the high risk of bias in it, the Cochrane panel couldn’t conclude either way whether ivermectin worked or not.

River blindness

River blindness is caused by another parasitic worm called Onchocerca volvulus.

The Cochrane review concluded there was a lack of evidence either way to know whether it works to prevent infection-based visual impairment and blindness.

It evaluated the data from four clinical trials and two large community-based studies.

One of the reasons the panel was unable to make a firm conclusion was because it thought the drug may work differently against different strains of the parasite and in people of different ethnicity.

Cancer

There are no Cochrane reviews on ivermectin’s use for cancer because clinical interest in the drug for this condition is just starting.

There is a current clinical trial that is evaluating ivermectin in combination with antibody-based drugs for breast cancer.

Early results showed the combination of antibody drugs with ivermectin was safe to patients, but no efficacy data has been published.

COVID

The Cochrane panel rejected the data for seven clinical trials and included 11 other trials. Rejected trials included those which compared ivermectin against other drugs which were known to not be effective against COVID, such as hydroxychloroquine.

The review concluded there was no evidence to support the use of ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID. In making that conclusion, it evaluated treatments that used invermectin or placebo in combination with standard care and whether treatment reduced death, illness, or the length of the infection.

– ref. Ivermectin was touted as a cure for COVID, now it’s being tested for cancer. But what can it actually treat? – https://theconversation.com/ivermectin-was-touted-as-a-cure-for-covid-now-its-being-tested-for-cancer-but-what-can-it-actually-treat-276180

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Avril Horne, Research fellow, Department of Infrastructure Engineering, The University of Melbourne

If you stand beside Seven Creeks in Victoria or Spring Creek in Queensland, they might seem small and unremarkable. But these creeks flow into the mighty Goulburn and Condamine Rivers, and punch far above their weight.

Small headwater creeks, at the beginning of a river network, act as the first source of water for bigger rivers. Headwaters deliver the first cool winter flows and the large seasonal pulses of water that trigger fish migration, setting the river’s rhythm. But they’re also the first to suffer from drought, heatwaves and water captured by thousands of small farm dams.

As the rivers of Australia’s largest system, the Murray-Darling Basin, experience a hotter and more variable climate, their headwaters are at the forefront of change.

This year, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority is reviewing the basin plan. The plan sets sustainable, legally enforceable limits on water usage, and rightly identifies climate change as a central challenge. Yet its new discussion paper pays surprisingly little attention to the vast network of smaller tributaries that feed the basin’s larger rivers.

We need attention on these “forgotten” rivers and streams, which are increasingly central to the survival of the Murray-Darling Basin as a whole.

The Basin’s blind spot under climate change

The discussion paper focuses on the big-name river systems in the basin, such as the Darling (Baaka) River in the north and heavily regulated rivers in the south such as the Murray, where big dams, barrages and diversions shape almost every drop of water.

This omission reflects how the original plan was conceived, and then in released 2012. Environmental priorities were defined around “priority assets”, such as major river reaches, internationally protected wetlands and refuges for wildlife where environmental flows were expected to deliver measurable ecological benefits.

This made sense when pressure from agricultural water extraction was the major threat. But this leaves out a huge part of the basin’s story.

Threading through the Basin are thousands of kilometres of small, so-called “unregulated” rivers and headwater streams. Historically, they were assumed to be relatively healthy because big dams were absent. But climate change is overturning that assumption. With declining rainfall and hotter temperatures, even small reductions in runoff can dramatically affect their flow.

Worse still, thousands of small farm dams scattered across the landscape are reducing how much water flows through these waterways. More of these streams are now ceasing to flow for the first time, or remaining dry for longer. Climate change is amplifying every existing stress on smaller rivers.

If we are serious about preparing the basin for climate change, we can no longer overlook the springs and creeks which feed the system. These rivers are not peripheral – they’re central to its resilience.

How the warming climate is changing streams

Headwater streams may be small, but they form the ecological backbone of the basin’s rivers. These upper tributaries are biodiversity hotspots, supporting insects, frogs, fish and riverbank species dependent on regular flushes of water and cool, shaded habitats.

When these streams dry out, warm up or fragment into pools, these delicate ecological processes are disrupted. The effects stretch far downstream. Climate change is pushing these streams into more extreme boom–bust cycles, with longer, hotter dry periods punctuated by short bursts of intense rainfall. In small catchments, these shifts affect the entire flow regime: low flows become lower, and flooding becomes less reliable or arrives at the wrong time of year.

Headwater streams are known to be highly sensitive to changes in flow. Under a drier climate these disruptions will intensify.

Can these changes be managed?

We can adapt to some degree. Rules limiting pumping from rivers during low flow periods, and better oversight of farm dams, can help keep water moving during crucial dry periods.

But when rivers are high, it’s a different picture. When river are full or even break their banks, it’s great for aquatic life. Fish move and breed, habitat is refreshed, nutrients moved downstream and wetlands rejoin the system.

Unregulated rivers lack the infrastructure, such as dams or barrages, to create or shape the big replenishing flows that ecosystems rely on, and climate change means these may simply happen less often.

If smaller rivers stop sending these floods downstream, larger rivers lose an essential part of their ecological rhythm.

Why this matters for the whole basin

What happens in the smaller creeks and rivers has a big impact. These small streams set the baseline conditions for the entire Murray–Darling system – from water quality and temperature to the timing of flows. When they falter, the effects are felt downstream.

The 2026 Basin Plan Review offers us a chance to revisit its original assumptions. Focusing on major rivers once addressed the dominant sources of environmental decline, but under climate change, risk is no longer confined to those places.

If the basin loses its headwaters, no amount of downstream engineering can compensate. Bringing these “forgotten rivers” into climate planning isn’t optional — it underpins our environmental, cultural and economic future. Give me two

– ref. Climate change is drying out the ‘forgotten rivers’ that keep the Murray-Darling alive. We need a new plan – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-drying-out-the-forgotten-rivers-that-keep-the-murray-darling-alive-we-need-a-new-plan-275562

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Longmuir, Senior Lecturer – Co-leader Education Workforce for the Future Impact Lab, Monash University

When we think about jobs you can do from home, you may not immediately picture a school teacher. But as Victoria debates a new right to work from home, the state’s teachers are asking what this might mean for them.

The Victorian teachers’ union wants the state government to trial a four-day work week for teachers and work-from-home provisions. Last week, Australian Education Union Victoria branch president Justin Mullaly told 9 News:

[a trial] would provide some real flexibility for staff in our public schools so that they might attend on site for less and be able to have access to some work from home.

So how would this work?

What’s the current situation?

Teachers obviously need to spend a lot of time face-to-face with students. Currently, Victorian teachers spend about 55% of their 38-hour working week on face-to-face teaching activities, with slight variations across different school contexts.

However, their job also involves a significant amount of work away from the classroom. This is called “non-contact time” when teachers do administration tasks. This could include planning lessons, assessing student work, communicating with parents/carers, and meeting with colleagues. Many of these tasks could be done from home.

Victorian government school teachers are generally required to be at school for the whole 38-hour work week, even during non-contact time.

In high schools, non-contact time is allocated through timetabling. For example, a teacher may have third period on Tuesdays off for administration work. In primary schools, non-contact time typically occurs when their students attend specialist classes such as physical education, art and music with other teachers. These could be combined into a whole day, to give teachers an entire day away from the classroom.

In both primary and high schools, non-contact time can be scheduled, so different teachers are off at different times during the week.

What does a 4-day week look like?

A four-day week for teachers could involve timetabling non-contact time, so that on one day of the week teachers are not required to be on-site at the school.

The current suggestion is for a trial, so there might be several ways this could be tested. It might be that on the fifth day, teachers work from home for all or part of the usual working hours. Or it could be that they work extended hours on other days and then have all or part of the fifth day off.

This is not unprecedented. In the United States, a reported 2,100 schools across 26 states were running some form of a four-day program in 2025. There are already schools running four-day programs here in Australia, including a NSW private school where some students do four days of face-to-face learning, and one day remotely.

What could this mean for teachers?

Research shows teachers face increasing workloads and stress. We know there are significant challenges in attracting and retaining teachers.

But research suggests access to flexible work options can help retention and recruitment and improve staff wellbeing.

There has been little research into the impacts of a four-day week on teachers. But one US district claimed a strong improvement in attracting teachers with applications for positions increasing by 360% after the introduction of a four-day teaching week.

What might be the impact on students?

Research on four-day weeks is largely based on US studies, where students usually attend the school for four days. However, some studies suggest student achievement (or academic results) remains stable when overall teaching time is maintained, which appears to be what is proposed for Victoria.

If teachers were working from home, students would still attend school for five days and teachers would still engage with families in similar ways.

In 2024, we surveyed more than 8,000 members of the Victorian teachers’ union. We found 65% believed a four-day working week would support them to better deliver high-quality education.

But in our survey comments, some teachers expressed caution around how a four-day week would be implemented. Their concerns included logistical issues (including timetabling), and the potential of further pressure on students and staff, if current curriculum requirements were compressed into four days. This shows why a trial of flexible arrangements is needed.

As all workplaces modernise, more flexibility could work for teachers – and symbolise greater trust in the profession. But we need more work and research to inform how it can work best in Australian schools.

– ref. Victorian public school teachers want a 4-day week trial. What could this mean for schools? – https://theconversation.com/victorian-public-school-teachers-want-a-4-day-week-trial-what-could-this-mean-for-schools-276281

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marina Yue Zhang, Associate Professor, Technology and Innovation, University of Technology Sydney

Chinese state television rang in the Year of the Horse with humanoid robots doing kung fu, comedy sketches and mass choreography. They made complex martial arts choreography look easy. Social media was flooded with memes about “machines replacing humans”.

But the show was more than theatre. It was a prime-time industrial signal.

Beijing has long used the annual Chinese new year gala to showcase its technological ambitions, with previous shows highlighting drones, robotics and the space program.

This year, the gala put robots front and centre as part of an “AI plus” push.

The timing was important too. China’s “Two Sessions”, the annual parliamentary and advisory meetings, are due in early March. At the meetings, China is expected to approve the 15th five-year plan (2026–30), a policy blueprint that sets strategic targets and steers funding and policy support.

The display also raised some urgent questions for China’s trading partners, including Australian policymakers.

AI that can move in the real world

China’s Lunar new year gala is a reminder the artificial intelligence (AI) contest is moving toward embodied intelligence. Embodied intelligence refers to AI-powered robotics, or AI systems built into machines that can move and react in the real world. A robot must balance, manage its power, work safely near people, and recover when something fails.

The Chinese government sees robotics and embodied intelligence as tools to help offset an ageing population and build “new quality productive forces” — its term for productivity gains driven by AI.

China’s strategy is based on engineering efficiency and building at industrial scale, using fast prototyping, reliable hardware, abundant training data covering different scenarios, and factories that can build at volume and speed.

The gala routines were designed to test that. The robots performed coordinated martial arts close to children and human performers, stressing precise movement and safety.

China has built an AI industrial ecosystem

One of the most important details of the night was not the choreography — it was the industrial breadth. Four leading humanoid robotics firms — Unitree, Galbot, Noetix and MagicLab — were showcased.

That points to competition inside a growing ecosystem: more than 150 humanoid robot companies have emerged in China, backed by billions in venture capital and government funding. Official reports say China had a total of 451,700 smart robotics firms in late 2024.

China’s robotics firms are pushing motion control to a new level of precision and agility, and the gap between lab demos and engineered products is narrowing.

But the robots still have limitations. Stage performances can be pre-programmed and rehearsed, but more complex settings require reliability, safety and cost-efficiency.

The founder of Unitree, Wang Xingxing, has been blunt about the gap. He said it is hard to build one “brain” that works in every household because homes vary so much. He expects earlier use in more fixed settings, such as factories and guided tours.

This matters for Australia

In contrast with the robotic might on display in China, Australia’s AI debate is much further behind, still centring on cloud-based large language models such as copilots and chatbots.

Australia already has an edge in using humanoid robots under special conditions. Mining technology companies such as Perth-based IMDEX and Adelaide’s Chrysos Corporation show that special-purpose robots can be used in harsh environments.

Australia should, nevertheless, notice that China is turning robotics into an industrialisation project —and doing so at speed and scale.

For Australia, this matters. Productivity growth has been weak for a decade. It also faces labour shortages in sectors where robots could be most useful: aged care, remote mining and agriculture.

The federal government is working on it. It has published a National AI Plan and a National Robotics Strategy. These are necessary policy foundations, but they are not, on their own, a strategy to build and deploy embodied AI and robotics.

China’s robots expose gaps in Australia’s policy settings

China’s fast move from robot demos to factory-ready machines exposes three policy gaps that now look urgent.

Standards: if Chinese-made robots enter the Australian market at attractive prices, Australia will need clearer rules for autonomous systems in workplaces, homes and public spaces.

Autonomous literally means the machine can act without a person directing every step. That raises basic questions: what counts as safe; who is responsible when something goes wrong; and how do you test systems before they enter industrial and home settings?

Procurement: Australia needs to consider screening guidelines for sensitive suppliers where robots touch data, critical infrastructure or vulnerable people. Screening means checking cyber risk, data practices and supply chain risks before any autonomous machines can be deployed in hospitals, ports or aged care.

Supply chain resilience: Australia has labs that have developed prototypes of advanced humanoid robots, but building them is slow and costly. Heavy reliance on imported parts means long lead times and less control. Australia can reduce risk by diversifying suppliers and building more local capability in key parts and services.

Playing to our strengths

Finally, Australia should choose its battles carefully. Rather than debating whether AI will replace jobs, a smarter strategy is to back specialised robots for tasks where Australia has an edge and clear application scenarios: mining, agriculture, aged care and remote operations.

The stakes are high not only for Australia’s productivity, but also for Australia–China trade relations in the AI age. Safety standards, data rules and supplier screening will become trade issues, not just security issues.

To build robots with embodied intelligence at scale, the scarcest resource is not lithium or computing power. It is time.

– ref. China’s dancing robots are a wake-up call for Australia on policy and productivity – https://theconversation.com/chinas-dancing-robots-are-a-wake-up-call-for-australia-on-policy-and-productivity-276529

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ellie Crookes, Lecturer in English Literatures, University of Wollongong

The race of Heathcliff, the brooding antihero of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, is a much-discussed element of the classic tale.

Brontë variously describes him as “a little lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”; “that gipsy brat,” not “a regular black,” the offspring of the “Emperor of China,” and the son to an “Indian queen”.

But in her recent film adaptation, director Emerald Fennell has cast white Australian actor Jacob Elordi in the role. What does this mean for our understanding of the story?

Is Heathcliff white?

Scholars, especially since the late 20th century, have debated Heathcliff’s racial identity without forming a consensus. They continue to examine the text for evidence.

He has been variously identified as Irish, a migrant fleeing famine; African, found at the Liverpool docks (then England’s largest slave trading port); or Romani, often shorthand for a racially ambiguous and “threatening” outsider.

I do not feel the novel invites us to identify Heathcliff with a fixed racial identity. The book’s strange, otherworldly and almost hallucinogenic nature resists clear interpretation.

In 19th century Britain, post-Enlightenment Europe and the United States, the concept of race was categorised and studied, and exerted a strong influence on government policies and popular culture.

People were placed into hierarchies of humanity to justify slavery, colonialism and genocide. This system of “scientific racism”, as it has come to be known, placed “whiteness” at the top.

But this notion of whiteness was different to the one we hold today, which explains Heathcliff’s racial “otherness” as being associated with Irishness.

Brontë’s novel, and Gothic fiction of the age more broadly, depicts race as something more malleable and fantastical.

In the case of Brontë’s Heathcliff, his racial identity seems to shift and morph, sometimes rendered supernatural and demonic in the eyes of other characters. His darkness and inhumanity is emphasised and seems to intensify in moments of brooding anger and villainy.

His complexion darkens and his eyes become, in the words of the maid Nelly, “black fiends” that glint and lurk “like the devil’s spies” with “a half-civilised ferocity”.

Heathcliff’s inhumanity, as tied to his non-whiteness, seemingly rises to the surface, as if the stain of his moral degradation seeps through his soul to appear on his face.

Critics of the casting

The casting of Elordi as Heathcliff has come under scrutiny.

Some readers and critics have interpreted Brontë’s book as a critique of British institutional racism in the late 18th century, when the novel is set, and the Victorian era (1837–1901), when it was written.

One such reading is that the novel links the oppression of white women to that of non-white subjects of the British Empire to critique social structures of violence, cruelty and inequality.

This reading sees the novel’s representation of female subjugation as a mirror image to the oppression that people of colour faced at the time.

Many critics of the film have said it isn’t an accurate adaptation, and misunderstands what Brontë’s text is really about. But an argument around “intent” is hard to make, since we can never really know what a novel “is about”. We can only guess.

And there are limitless interpretations of a text, especially one as strange and enigmatic as this one. As such, though race is a part of the original Wuthering Heights, assigning a singular, definitive meaning to the novel’s representation of race is complicated.

In Brontë’s novel, nothing is as it seems. The ever-shifting image of Heathcliff – at once appearing to be a lascar, a Native American, Spanish and Black – would be difficult to depict effectively on film.

Film lacks the imaginative malleability as the reader’s mind’s eye, which can hold all these descriptions of Heathcliff’s image at once, allowing this Gothic strangeness to occur.

Race in Fennell’s film

While Heathcliff is cast as white, Fennell casts people of colour in other roles.

Fennell’s film is not interested in the racial commentary many critics have found in Brontë’s novel. The characters in Fennel’s created world do not appear to engage with race the same way people do in our world.

American-Vietnamese actor Hong Chau plays Nelly Dean (a housemaid in the novel, but an illegitimate daughter to a nobleman in the film), and English/Scottish–Pakistani actor Shazad Latif portrays Edgar Linton, Cathy’s wealthy and respected husband.

The casting of Edgar, a man of wealth and status, as a person of colour undermines the intersections of oppression and race that existed at the time.

I think Fennell’s decision to ignore race is a missed opportunity to foster a more nuanced discussion of race in the late 18th century and Victorian Britain.

Victorian Britain was shaped by its participation in the transatlantic slave trade, the presence of Black peoples on its soil (in some instances, enslaved), and its colonies in Asia and the Middle East.

While it would not have been common to find people of colour in the Yorkshire moors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Britain (including Yorkshire) wasn’t as white as is widely believed. Fennell had an opportunity to highlight this fact.

Instead, in the film’s casting of Elordi as Heathcliff and Latif as Linton, we see a reticence to engage with the question of racial oppression at all. While this doesn’t make the adaptation “wrong”, it adds to the film’s almost complete lack of depth.

– ref. Brontë’s Heathcliff wasn’t white. Jacob Elordi is. Is that a problem? – https://theconversation.com/brontes-heathcliff-wasnt-white-jacob-elordi-is-is-that-a-problem-276183

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brodie Fraser, Senior Research Fellow in Housing and Health, University of Otago

The government’s plan to empower police to “issue move-on orders as a tool to deal with disorderly behaviour in public places” will effectively apply to people as young as 14 who are experiencing homelessness and who “obstruct” access to businesses, beg or sleep rough.

Critics have called the policy unworkable and “draconian”, particularly the provisions for NZ$2,000 fines or up to three months in prison as penalties for breaches.

While the approach may move people out of central business districts temporarily, it won’t tackle homelessness in the long term. In fact, the focus on those who are visibly sleeping rough obscures the true extent and nature of homelessness in New Zealand.

Rough sleeping is just the tip of the iceberg. On the night of the 2023 Census, there were 112,496 people experiencing homelessness. The most common form of homelessness was living in uninhabitable housing, followed by sharing accommodation.

New Zealand is also an outlier internationally in that more than half of those experiencing homelessness are women. This is in large part because New Zealand defines and measures homelessness comprehensively as:

[…] living situations where people with no other options to acquire safe and secure housing are: without shelter, in temporary accommodation, sharing accommodation with a household, or living in uninhabitable housing.

Unfortunately, we are set to lose the continued collection of such high-quality data with the end of the traditional Census.

Homelessness among women, and mothers in particular, also occurs because our welfare state doesn’t provide sufficient support to prevent homelessness. Homelessness is systemic; quick-fix “solutions” like move-on orders don’t solve anything.

Housing first

There are many different ways to tackle homelessness but there is no evidence to suggest simply moving people away will do anything to address the problem.

Despite the Census data, there is very little research, policy or funding focused specifically on the needs and experiences of women experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for housing support services to provide appropriate accommodation.

However, one successful model New Zealand has adopted is called Housing First. Initially championed in the US, it starts with the idea that the complex issues that lead to people experiencing homelessness are best addressed with permanent housing as the starting point.

Then, once people are housed, staff provide ongoing intensive and specialist support for any other needs a person may have. To obtain housing, clients don’t have to meet any strict behavioural criteria such as sobriety, which is often a requirement in “treatment first” models.

Instead, housing is treated as a human right.

In partnership with The People’s Project, New Zealand’s first Housing First provider, we have evaluated the outcomes of about 400 of their first clients to see whether this approach works in New Zealand. Our findings repeatedly show it does.

In our newly published research, we examined the demographic differences of the women in this cohort and found they were much more likely to be younger than men in the group, Māori and have dependent children.

Findings after five years

In the fifth year after being housed and supported by The People’s Project, circumstances had improved noticeably for these women.

Most striking were their health-related outcomes. There was a statistically significant drop in hospitalisations; 65% less than in the one year before they were housed.

Their pharmaceutical dispensing increased significantly by 14%, which suggests they were able to access healthcare earlier and get the medications they needed in a timely fashion.

Once people have been housed, one of the first things The People’s Project does is to enrol them in a general practice clinic and help them sort out any ongoing health issues they might have.

While not statistically significant, other healthcare results showed a promising decrease across all forms of mental health related events and a drop in emergency department visits.

Overall, access to permanent housing has improved health and wellbeing.

When examining justice sector outcomes, we did not find any statistically significant changes for women in the cohort; although there was a drop in offences and charges.

What we did see, though, was a significant drop in police offences, criminal charges and major events for the men in the cohort.

What about poverty?

We also looked at changes in incomes, both from wages or salaries and social welfare benefits.

For women in the cohort, their incomes from wages and salaries rose by a significant 101%, and a 19% increase from benefits.

Over the years, we have heard repeatedly from our community partners about how hard it is for people to navigate the social welfare system and to know what financial support is available to them.

A key role of Housing First providers across the country is to help make sure their clients are getting the correct financial support they are eligible for.

However, despite these great improvements in income, the women were only earning about $20,000 per year; not enough to raise a thriving family. Most of these women (84%) had children.

As the saying goes, raising a family takes a village, and for women experiencing homelessness, the support from Housing First providers can contribute to that village. However, no amount of support can fully ease the impact of living in poverty.

To support women and their children, we need better policies to prevent poverty and homelessness in the first place, alongside increased and targeted funding for successful models such as Housing First.

– ref. New police powers to ‘move on’ rough sleepers only mask NZ’s deeper homelessness problem – https://theconversation.com/new-police-powers-to-move-on-rough-sleepers-only-mask-nzs-deeper-homelessness-problem-276621

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Kevin, Associate Professor in Australian History, Flinders University

Gisèle Pelicot’s compelling and moving memoir begins with the day she learned that over the course of at least nine years, she had been raped by her husband Dominique and around 80 other men, while she was drugged and unconscious.

On that first day of knowing, in November 2020, she was a few months shy of 68. Her memoir explores the aftermath of that knowing, but also rewinds to her parents’ courtship, her childhood and youth and each stage of her adult life. It reveals how her husband’s crimes forced her to recast her entire adult life to-date – and its relationship to her childhood.

Review: A Hymn to Life – Gisèle Pelicot (Bodley Head)

I moved between reading Gisèle’s chapters and daily reports of the Epstein files. As I read, recent charges were laid against men in Germany and Greater Manchester who also drugged and raped their wives for over a decade.

I wondered: what are the effects of this avalanche of revelations about the shadow lives of men – the wealthy, the famous and the seemingly ordinary? (Gisèle’s rapists were described by philosopher Zoe Williams as “a perfect randomised cross-section of society”.)

How is this public accounting of the thousands of documents, images, videos and testimonials to be processed, by survivors and non-survivors? When does the status quo, the structures of power that enable such abuses, give way to rage and its transformative potential?

The Pelicot case became an international story when Gisèle realised facing the 51 men police had been able to identify and charge (including her husband) in a closed court would rob her of support – and the opportunity to shift the burden of shame from victim to perpetrators.

Her decision to make the case public was an act of solidarity with other survivors – and a declaration of self worth that became increasingly audible as the trial proceeded. Have her actions nudged us closer to a tipping point?

When I reviewed the memoir of Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, a year ago, I asked: is sexual abuse under chemical submission a new frontier in our understandings of intimate partner violence?

The Pelicot case intersected with more established understandings of drink spiking and date rape. But this sustained injury – perpetrated in the final decade of a 49-year marriage, worsened by access to online communities of predators – revealed a distinct new hellscape in understandings of gendered violence, particularly domestic abuse.

In a terrible irony, Gisèle writes:

I had no interest in the internet and social media, and I had no idea of the extent to which they had altered human relationships.

Gisèle has been intermittently estranged from her two eldest children, David and Caroline, since November 2020. They are now tentatively reconciled. Caroline’s 2025 book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, in part makes a case for activism as a form of survival. In the aftermath of the revelations about her father, Caroline established #MendorsPas (Don’t Put Me Under), a movement to raise awareness of sexual assault under chemical submission.

Her mother’s new memoir, far from going over familiar ground, offers a different story of survival.

A legacy of trauma

Gisèle Pelicot was born in 1952 in West Germany, where her father was serving in the French army and “history’s open wounds and bitterness were all around us”. When she was five, they moved to rural France to be close to her mother’s family. Gisèle was nine when her adored mother died in their family kitchen, after years of being plagued by brain tumours.

Her brother and father never recovered from this death, but she resolved to pursue happiness as her mother had done in life. “I was a steadfast tin soldier of joy.” Gisèle did this with determination, in the face of limited schooling and her grief-stricken father’s jealous and cruel second wife. She described meeting Dominique at the age of 19 as “love at first sight”.

Dominique grew up within an oppressive family, where his efforts to protect his mother from his, domestically “all-powerful”, father’s violence failed. He suffered his own humiliations at the hands of the patriarch, too. The man had an incestuous relationship with a foster child taken into the family aged five, which became “official” when she was 25, after Dominique’s mother died.

Dominique once described his life before Gisele as a “nightmare”. But he felt safe with her. Their instant attraction was fortified by this sense of refuge. Building a family was how they would heal; at least this was the pact they made.

Caroline was born in 1979 into this marriage, the second of three children and the only daughter. Her mother’s career trajectory with France’s main electricity company had afforded the Pelicots’ upward class mobility. Dominique, an electrician and a real estate agent, was in and out of work. Occasionally he brought the couple to the brink of financial ruin, but they were buffered just enough by the stability of Gisèle’s employment.

On the whole, the Pelicot children enjoyed secure, loving childhoods focused on their opportunities to thrive. Each forged meaningful careers in adulthood, married and had children. Both Caroline’s and Gisèle’s memoirs depict comfort and security in the lives of Gisèle’s adult children and grandchildren, even as the shock of Dominique’s brutal betrayal begins to reverberate.

‘Inside an enormous shredder’

One of the great achievements of this book is Gisèle’s capacity to describe – with coherence and nuance – the singularity of her position. This includes her needs, which she finds must take precedence over those of her children if she is to survive.

She writes of her older two children:

They both wanted to be there for me, to protect me in their own way. But I felt as if they wanted to take possession of my life. I couldn’t bear that.

The determination to be happy that took Gisèle into the relationship with her then-husband is transformed into a determination to survive as she surveys the wreckage inflicted by his abuses and seeks a way out. During the years she was drugged, Gisèle felt like she was losing her mind.

Her memory failures, blackouts and exhaustion instilled in her a deep fear of brain tumours and the inheritance of her mother’s fate. As she comes to terms with the true source of these struggles, she writes “I am the enemy of death”. She must chart her own course, and she does so instinctively.

In the immediate aftermath of the revelations, the children’s fury and desire to destroy all traces of their father as they prepare to remove Gisèle from the scene of Dominique’s most recent crimes will make sense to many. But its effect on Gisèle was to return her to a state of desolation, familiar from childhood.

She describes arriving at the Gare de Lyon in Paris with her children after her final night in the home she had shared with Dominique in Provence:

mostly I had the feeling of being inside an enormous shredder. My children had lives to go back to. I had nothing […] It was the old fault line beneath my feet; it had been there all along and now it was opening up again, swallowing everything that I held dear.

Through her efforts to control the pace of her confrontation with Dominique’s countless betrayals, a chasm opens between Gisèle and her eldest son and daughter. Her children, she writes, were “unable to distinguish their father from the poisoner and rapist”, whereas she tried to separate her memories of the husband she’d loved from her new knowledge of the one who had violated her.

Through processes of splitting apart, quarantining and dismembering her images and understandings of who Dominique was in their marriage, she holds at bay the full tsunami of deeply knowing what has been done to her.

She takes the time she needs, insisting on being alone, seeking solace in friends old and new rather than her children, to integrate the full force of her new history. That these decisions are integral to her survival is clear. Their impact on her family reminds us of the weight of the mother-load.

‘Unbearable incestuous gaze’

In her own memoir, Caroline vividly evokes the horror of learning, within days of her father being detained, that he took photographs of her asleep in her underwear. She is currently pursuing a separate case of chemical submission and rape against him, crimes he has repeatedly denied. Enduring the uncertainty around the nature of her victimisation has been a feature of Caroline’s experience.

As Gisèle processed the catalogue of Dominique’s abuses, for which there was clear evidence, her response to her daughter’s distress left open the possibility her daughter had not been raped by her father. This attempt at offering solace and some way for Caroline to hold onto memories of her father’s love was an extension of Gisèle’s splitting and dismembering of him for her own protection. “I was warding off the worst-case scenario, while my daughter was heading straight for it,” Gisèle writes.

For Caroline, this felt like dismissal.

I found Gisèle’s account of the tensions in the relationship with her daughter more explicit than in Caroline’s memoir. Where Caroline expresses frustration with her mother’s early reluctance to give up all feelings of care for Dominique, Gisèle conveys a sense of the limits of her own ability to readily respond to a child whose emotional expression had always been more voluble than her own.

In a recent New Yorker essay, Rachel Aviv quotes Caroline’s August 2025 description of Gisèle as failing to fulfil her maternal contract. Aviv wonders if the terms of the contract had ever really been settled and suggests this disagreement took on new weight as the two women grappled with Dominique’s crimes.

Aviv reads this as two clashing versions of feminism: a daughter’s expectation she should have maternal love that affirms and consoles her, versus a mother’s choice to prioritise her own emotional integrity and agency in order to express the values of a wider feminist movement.

But this oversimplifies feminism and the narrative we can assemble from the various accounts of daughter and mother. Dominique’s harm has extended to undermining relationships between his victims, the origins of which were love and protection.

The feminism of the two women is varied by the impacts of the injury. Their solidarity is marred by the monumental and distinct tasks each has faced in rising from his wreckage.

Aviv draws on French anthropologist Dorothy Dussy’s observations about the taboo of incest in this case. The court evidence demanded confrontation with countless taboos but still “the injunction to remain silent about incest” remained. It surfaced in the back stories of a number of the perpetrators, though – and was part of the violence of the chief perpetrator’s family of origin.

Yet, while he admits to the crimes committed against Gisèle, Dominique cannot admit to sexualising his own offspring, even when directly confronted by his children in the court.

Last year, Caroline referred to her mother’s psychological and emotional incapacity to recognise incest to help explain the mother–daughter rift. We can’t know if the daughter sees this as the central driver of their estrangement, or as one of many ways she has to understand it.

A Hymn to Life suggests a more complicated relationship between Gisèle and the spectre of her ex-husband’s abuse of Caroline and other members of the family. At one point she refers to his “unbearable incestuous gaze”.

Tragedy and unexpected joy

One senses the awareness each woman has of the potential for these struggles to overwhelm everything else. Their published accounts give us a means to digest the extent and complexity of the harm Dominique has caused. The fracturing of this once-close family is the tragic collateral damage that compounds the original injury.

At the same time, Gisèle’s memoir reveals that in the lead-up to the trial, she met (through a friend) and fell in love with Jean-Loup, a widower she calls a “very beautiful person”. Her description of this burgeoning relationship will give joy to the many awed by the story of her endurance and survival.

Gisèle repeatedly describes her ex-husband’s quest to possess her sexually: expressed as an element of desire within their shared sex life. It had annoyed her but seemed normal enough – before that day at the police station, when it took on a far more devastating meaning.

Coverture (puissance marital in French law), a medieval legal doctrine making a woman the legal property of her husband after she marries, has a long history in laws governing marriage. As new cases of men drugging and raping wives emerge, with their long tentacles into online communities of men exchanging techniques, images and sexual access, it seems coverture, overturned in marriage laws in the 19th and 20th centuries, has gone underground.

Outside of marriage, the possession and commodification of girls’ and women’s bodies still turns them into currency: perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the Epstein files.

– ref. ‘I am the enemy of death’: Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir is a remarkable tale of survival – https://theconversation.com/i-am-the-enemy-of-death-gisele-pelicots-memoir-is-a-remarkable-tale-of-survival-274628