We’ve similarly seen how cannabis retailing has evolved since it became legal.
Retailers suffered from product shortages during legalization’s first six months, but steadily expanded soon after. Canada went from having some 210 stores in April 2019 to 3,500 in April 2023. The ensuing competition pushed prices down 28 per cent during that period.
Meanwhile, provincial governments have tried various regulatory approaches. Some initially restricted the number of stores to avoid tempting non-users. Québec still has 10 times fewer stores per capita than Ontario does as a result. Other provinces have set minimum prices to discourage people from overindulging. For example, Ontario won’t let wholesale prices drop below $2.28 per gram.
Did Canadians consume cannabis more widely, more frequently and at younger ages as it became more accessible and affordable? The answer was mostly no.
More women and older adult consumers
The percentage of men who used cannabis stayed around 28 per cent between 2019 and 2023 — despite retailers’ massive store growth and notable price cuts.
But usage did grow slightly among women — rising from 21 per cent in 2019 to 23 per cent in 2023. My analysis suggests this was related to the increasing affordability of cannabis, not its retail convenience. More women consumed cannabis when prices fell, not when more shops opened.
A similar contrast appeared between younger and older adults. Cannabis use among Canadians aged 25 and over crept upward from 21 to 23 per cent. That increase again seemed related to falling prices rather than expanding stores. Meanwhile, usage among those aged 16 to 24 varied year-to-year, but remained around 46 per cent.
The average age of first-time use consequently rose from 19.2 in 2019 to 20.8 years old in 2023. This finding also seemed correlated with both falling prices and expanding stores.
Same frequency, more edibles
One thing that didn’t change much was frequency of use. About one-quarter of cannabis consumers used it five or more days per week in both 2019 and 2023.
However, their product preferences shifted. The percentage who smoked dried cannabis decreased while the percentage of consumers who consumed edibles increased. Some consumers used both types of products, or used other products entirely — such as vapes. Both changes seemed related to prices rather than the number of retail stores. Consumers seemingly traded-up from basic dried cannabis to processed edibles as prices fell.
So overall, Canada’s substantial retail developments came with only modest usage growth.
The apparent relationships between usage and price might partly be coincidental. Product selection and quality also improved, so they likely contributed too. But falling prices do seem to be a plausible explanation for the increased cannabis consumption that was seen.
The lack of relationship between stores and usage might seem surprising. After all, Canada experienced a 16-fold explosion in stores between 2019 and 2023. But this finding correlates with what my previous research found; it showed that between 2018 and 2020, there was a similar non-relationship between retail expansion of cannabis stores and usage.
So, perhaps the main effect of retail stores was to draw existing users away from illegal dealers, rather than to tempt new ones.
I suspect retailers probably influenced usage somewhat in their local neighbourhoods. For example, someone who walked by a new store daily on their way to work might have decided to try cannabis. But this effect would have been too small to appear in province-level measurements.
Price restriction
The findings from my study suggests some tentative lessons for regulators.
If opening more stores has minimal impact on usage, there’s little need to limit their numbers. Provinces don’t need to ration store licenses, and municipalities (like Markham and Oakville in Ontario) don’t need to ban them.
But since price declines tempt more consumers, it’s important for policymakers to prevent prices from getting too low.
Other countries who are considering legalizing cannabis may want to consider these points, too.
For example, medical cannabis use is surging in Australia, much like it was in Canada a decade ago. And Australia’s Green Party is campaigning for recreational legalization in the upcoming federal election. If that election produces a coalition government, legalization might be on its agenda. They could look at our policies and hopefully improve on them.
Meanwhile in Germany, the previous government legalized recreational use, but not sales. So, Germans must grow their own plants or join a club that does. Commercial products are sold only through the country’s medical cannabis system. Unsurprisingly, medical use is soaring there. Based on what my research suggests, Germany will likely see similar usage growth, whether it allows stores or not. But allowing stores would mean consumers could buy products from licensed sources instead of illicit dealers.
Michael J. Armstrong 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.
The demography that makes up the Australian electorate is changing and as voters desert the major parties polls are becoming harder to read.
Kos Samaras is a director of the political consultancy firm Redbridge, which undertakes both quantitative research and focus groups. Samaras now views campaigns from the outside but in the past, as a former Labor Party official, he’s experienced them from the insisde too.
On the state on the polls he says,
They’re going to switch around a bit, but we are seeing some trends now that are quite obvious, and that is the consolidation of the Labor primary [vote]. Labor has been successful in bringing back some of those people that did move away from them to minor parties over the last 18 months in some key areas around the country.
On why Labor is doing better compared to the Coalition, Samaras says Labor starting early was key,
That’s why it’s important that when you are running a campaign, you must start very early and you must start before the writ is issued and that [is] why Labor has been in that space aggressively now for some time. And this is where I think Dutton and his team have really missed the mark. They’ve waited until the writ to start their campaign. They’ve allowed a vacuum to be created. Labor has filled it with their narrative and their story and their mission, and it’s bearing fruit.
On the Trump effect and how that will play in this election, Samaras says Dutton should try to distance himself from the US president,
We do think that the Trump factor is having an impact, and we could see that in other countries as well. Canada is a really good example of that.
It’s hard for Labor to convince Australians that Dutton is like Trump, but Dutton has throughout this campaign made some errors, particularly on issues around dual citizenship, cuts to the public service. These policies just kind of remind people that he’s not Trump, because he’s an established player, but he does have some element to him that is similar and that can only hurt him.
Now that Gen X and the millennials have overtaken the baby boomers as voters, Samaras say of these younger voters,
They want the system turned on its head. They actually want to see significant reform, and at the moment, they’re just getting band-aids, and that’s fundamentally the problem. Now they may indeed a portion of them eventually just vote for one or the other of the major parties and there will be a number of them that do that. But I wouldn’t exactly describe that as enthusiastic support.
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.
A campaign against gangsterism in Cape Town, South Africa led by the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad) turned violent in the mid-1990s when a group known as Pagad G-Force began what became known as an urban terrorism campaign. Lives on the Line, written by security analyst David Africa, is the true story of the secret team in the country’s crime intelligence division that waged a six-year battle against the terror group – and won. The terror campaign was brought to a standstill in 2002. Criminology professor Irvin Kinnes sets out why it’s a riveting read, a bold tell-all account by a brave author.
What was the backdrop to the terror campaign?
In 1995, one year after the country’s first democratic elections, a new law was passed creating the newly constituted South African Police Service. It was a tough year because the elements of the old order in the police service had great difficulty accepting the new democratic dispensation. But they had to collaborate with the people that they had tortured, jailed and, in some cases, maimed as a result of their role in political oppression in support of apartheid.
The new centurions (police guardians of the new order) of democracy were not yet in place. A system of dual power emerged in the police, where some of the commanders that were appointed were former members of the liberation movements. They were seen as “plastic cops” because they did not train in the police academies around the country, but in the bush. Some subsequently attended various training academies. They were all integrated with other homeland police agencies from the Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei states and other “independent” homelands that had existed under apartheid. In total, 11 agencies combined to form the newly created and democratic police service in 1995.
After 1994, many of the apartheid social controls such as restrictions on people’s movement, racially divided settlement and the death penalty were abolished. People were jubilant, hyper aware of their newly found rights.
The police were not prepared to deal with such a rights-aware population. In addition, freedom also unleashed huge social challenges such as crime and particularly drug and gang crimes. In the immediate aftermath of the political negotiations that ended apartheid and prior to the elections, crime rates surged, especially in 1993. Not all of the crime was criminal: some of the events related to political crime with mass movements and political parties clashing with each other and with the police.
The urban terror campaign, as labelled by members of the South African Police Service, extended from 1996-2002. This was also known as the Cape Flats war (referred to as the Pagad troubles by Africa) and was triggered by the campaign of the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs (Pagad). The organisation was initially made up of largely ordinary citizens across the religious divide, but later became almost exclusively Muslim led, and so was the G-Force.
Pagad led several marches on the Cape Flats against drug dealers and gangsters. These marches resulted in the death on 4 August 1996 of one of the co-leaders of the Hard Living gang, Rashaad Staggie, by a huge crowd of Pagad members who were escorted by the police’s Public Order Unit.
The execution resulted in a tit-for-tat killing between gang members and Pagad members.
What was Pagad G-Force? What led to its formation?
The Pagad G-Force were a group of men inside Pagad. They operated clandestinely outside its circle of influence of its public structures, but sometimes with its tacit support. Many of the members of the G-Force had received military training both inside and outside the borders of the country.
Some people claimed they were trained in Afghanistan and Iran, and they were operators who were armed and could manage themselves against some of the threats that gang leaders had made against them. They were a tightly knit unit that was able to retain secrecy in most of their operations, guarding it against police infiltration – a battle they ultimately lost, as Africa’s book shows.
The unit was accused of executing up to 30 senior gang leaders and drug dealers. Pagad would lead public marches against them and often publicly warned them to stop their drug dealing. This was followed by the homes of drug dealers being attacked. In many instances they were killed.
What does the book reveal about why it took so long to end the terror campaign?
There have been books that have attempted to document the Cape Flats war from different perspectives. But Africa tells the story from the inner sanctum of the state security apparatus that initially failed and eventually succeeded in penetrating the G-Force, Pagad and other formations.
His book provides significant insights that makes other books on the subject pale in comparison. Fighting terrorism (urban or other) requires patience and deliberate skilled analysis of data, patterns and personalities. It requires skills of analysis built up over many years of sifting through behaviours and actions of individuals and organisations perpetrating such crimes.
For the first time, we are made privy to the ideological reasoning and political thinking, strategising and implementation of police operations that was decidedly different from the old state thinking of actions against adversaries they were investigating.
This was painstaking work and the level of co-operation between the new centurions of democracy in the police under the leadership of Africa and the old order. The old-order guardians were the same men and women in the old South African Police Force that had defended the apartheid government and did not trust the new police investigators from the liberation movements. They still had control of the police service in 1996. This was a recipe for creative and disruptive tensions, mistrust and outright sabotage of each other’s operations.
What was the author’s involvement in the police efforts?
The author was the head of a covert police intelligence team whose exclusive focus was to bring down the Pagad G-Force. He was central in conceptualising a new approach of working in a decontaminated group of intelligence officers made up of former liberation movement officers. Their job was to analyse information and turn it into actionable intelligence products that could be used to act against the Pagad G-Force.
What was different about this approach was they produced court-ready evidence which police detectives could use in courts against the accused Pagad bombers. He led the fight for the new covert unit to have the necessary resources, support from their colleagues when it was required and most importantly, the support of the then national commissioner, Jackie Selebi.
In this fight, Selebi quite clearly took sides and fully supported the actions of Africa and his colleagues to defeat Pagad’s G-Force. Africa makes this clear in his book and emphasises the support that was provided by Selebi.
What are the key takeaways from the book about fighting similar campaigns of violence?
The book puts together all the actors nationally and provincially and accords them the historical roles in each of their fields of expertise. It unravels the networks they spun to target, isolate, recruit and turn suspected G-Force operators.
This look from within the war machine against Pagad raises many questions for any reader.
It is a book for anyone who wants to understand the fight against terror, globally, regionally and locally, and what it really takes to bring people who commit such acts to justice.
Lives on the Line confirms why it is so difficult to investigate organised crime and urban terrorists today.
Irvin Kinnes 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.
Peter Dutton came perilously close to a DOGE moment on Monday night, when he was asked about getting the “woke” agendas out of the education system.
Noting the Commonwealth government “doesn’t own or run a school”, Dutton told a Sky audience in Brisbane that people wondered why there was “a department of thousands and thousands of people in Canberra called the Education Department”.
Unsurprisingly, he dodged when pushed by the press pack on Tuesday on whether the education bureaucrats would be in for the chop under his public service cuts. It’s a fair bet quite a few would be.
“We’ve said we would take waste out of the federal budget and put it back into frontline services.” he said,
He’s indicating overall budget funding for health and education would not be cut.
But that didn’t stop Treasurer Jim Chalmers from declaring Dutton had “threatened cuts to school funding which was right from the DOGE playbook.
“This is DOGE-y Dutton, taking his cues and policies straight from the US in a way that will make Australians worse off.”
Importantly, Dutton is signalling a potentially very interventionist approach on education.
The feds mightn’t run the schools, but they provide much of the wherewithal to pay for them, and “we can condition that funding,” the opposition leader said.
“We should be saying to states and […] to those that are receiving that funding that we want our kids to be taught […] what it is they need to take on as they face the challenges of the world and not to be guided into some sort of an agenda that’s come out of universities.
“And I think there’s a lot of work to do.”
A Dutton government would face some problems trying to work through funding.
The Albanese government recently completed its round of school funding agreements with the states. It attached broad conditions to them, around getting back to the fundamentals and ensuring kids don’t fall behind or, if they do, they are helped to catch up.
Would the Liberals want to try to reopen the funding agreements? New South Wales, South Australia, Queensland and Tasmania have not just heads of agreement with the Commonwealth but bilateral agreements, covering implementation. It might be easier to make changes for Victoria and Western Australia, which don’t yet have the bilateral implementation agreements. But it would be a fraught exercise.
There’s a more general point. This route takes a government only so far. Even when states sign up, it can be hard to keep them to the conditions.
Schools expert Ben Jensen, CEO of the education research and consulting group Learning First, says a federal government’s main levers are through the national curriculum, NAPLAN assessments, and (via the universities) teacher training.
The most obvious is the national curriculum. Opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson has said, “One of the big problems is our national curriculum and we simply need to fix it.” That curriculum, incidentally, was signed off under the former Coalition government exactly three years ago by the acting education minister Stuart Robert.
A Dutton government could redo it but that would involve working with the states. Anyway, the states can go their own way regardless of the national curriculum. Victoria and NSW currently run their own curriculum’s.
All in all, imposing its priorities on the schools system might be a good deal harder than it sounds for a Dutton government.
The universities would clearly be in Dutton’s sights, and there is more scope for intervention here.
The Coalition believes the universities have got the balance wrong between foreign and domestic students. Henderson told this year’s Universities Australia conference, “For too long, universities have relied on a business model which yielded them eye watering revenues which are not sustainable or in line with expectations of the Australian community”.
“We will deliver a tougher student cap than what is proposed by the government focused on excessive numbers of foreign students in metropolitan cities, particularly Melbourne and Sydney where two thirds of foreign students live and study.”
A Dutton government would also restore a much broader right for the minister to intervene on research funding decisions.
And it would require universities to implement an activist approach to combatting antisemitism.
The experience of the former Liberal government on higher education provides a salutary tale for a future one. Under the Abbott government, education minister Christopher Pyne had an ambitious plan for tertiary reform, centred on fee deregulation, but it crashed when it faced the obstacle of the Senate.
In 2020 the Morrison government did get through its Job-Ready Graduates legislation to alter fees. This is now recognised as highly flawed. Henderson has said the Coalition’s position on the scheme hasn’t changed but it would review it “in line with what our legislation said we would do”. It would be extremely surprising if such a review didn’t recommend a rework.
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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Holloway, Senior Research DECRA Fellow, Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, Australian Catholic University
The Coalition has previously raised concerns the national curriculum is “unwieldy” and “infused with ideology”. On Monday night, Dutton suggested states needed new funding conditions to make sure schools were teaching appropriate content. He told Sky News federal money should be conditional to ensure schools are not “guided into some sort of an agenda that’s come out of universities”.
He added to his comments on Tuesday, saying he wants students at schools (and universities) to receive an education that “reflect[s] community standards”.
I support young Australians being able to think freely, being able to assess what is before them and not being told and indoctrinated by something that is the agenda of others and that is the approach we would take.
Education Minister Jason Clare responded by claiming Dutton had a “bigger agenda” to “cut funding from schools”.
What is the curriculum and who decides what Australian students are taught?
What do students learn in Australian schools?
All Australian schools are required to teach the Australian Curriculum. Commonwealth and state and territory education ministers first approved the curriculum in 2009. It applies from the first year of schooling through to Year 10.
The curriculum sets out:
the expectations for what all young Australians should be taught, regardless of where they live in Australia or their background.
It is made up of eight “learning areas”: English, mathematics, science, humanities and social sciences, the arts, technologies, health and physical education and languages.
It can be described as a “map” of what teachers are expected to cover in each subject and year level.
This is to ensure all students across the country, whether in a small regional school or a large city one, have access to the same broad foundation of knowledge and skills.
provid[ing] teachers, parents, students and the community with a clear understanding of what students should learn regardless of where they live or what school they attend.
Every six years, the curriculum is reviewed and approved by education ministers from each state, territory and the Commonwealth. The current version was endorsed in April 2022 under the Morrison government (just before the last federal election).
The next review is expected in 2027-2028. This process includes consultation with teachers, curriculum experts, academics, professional associations and the wider public.
Do teachers and universities decide what’s taught?
Classroom teaching is guided by the Australian Curriculum. While teachers have professional discretion in how they deliver content, they are expected to “know the content and how to teach it”.
In fact, some education experts believe the curriculum is too crowded and leaves little flexibility for teachers to tailor learning to local contexts or student needs.
So while universities play an important role in preparing teachers to interpret and deliver the curriculum, they are not responsible for what schools teach.
Who does what?
Debates about what schools teach are not new and are likely to continue. But it is important they are grounded in an accurate understanding of how the system works.
Teachers, universities and governments all have different roles in shaping school education.
The Australian Curriculum is a nationally agreed framework, developed through public consultation and ministerial oversight. Teachers implement the curriculum according to professionally-acredited standards and attention to students’ individual needs. Universities support the education system through teacher preparation and research.
Jessica Holloway has received funding from the Australian Research Council.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney
US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy is doing little to enhance his country’s standing abroad. But it is helping to reinforce his political authority at home.
Congress and the courts are typically deferential to the president on foreign policy – and, in particular, issues related to national security. By putting most of his agenda under the banner of foreign policy, Trump is now taking advantage of that deference to minimise challenges to his power.
Trump has claimed for decades that US domestic problems can be solved with a more aggressive foreign policy.
This focus certainly helps him deal with his political problems, allowing him to attack his enemies and evade accountability under the guise of “saving the country”.
Trump has even gone so far as to call April 2 – when sweeping new tariffs are imposed on foreign goods – “Liberation Day”.
We are used to thinking of the US president as having almost unlimited power over US foreign policy. But the Constitution actually gives a lot of that power to Congress.
For example, Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. It also gives Congress the power to “collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises”, which include tariffs.
Given these shared responsibilities, the legal scholar Edward Corwin described the Constitution as “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.”
Since at least the Second World War, the president has been decisively winning that struggle. Or more accurately, Congress has been declining invitations to use its power.
For example, American wars no longer begin with declarations. The US has not declared war since 1941, even though the country has been at war almost every yearsince then. Presidents instead initiate and escalate military conflict in other ways, nearly always with Congressional approval. That approval usually remains in place until a war goes badly wrong.
Congress also passed legislation in 1934 giving the president power to negotiate trade agreements and adjust tariffs. That power expanded significantly with an act in 1962 that authorised the president to impose tariffs if imports threaten “national security”.
Although Trump claims tariffs will bring economic prosperity back to the US by reviving manufacturing, his administration justifies them on national security grounds. For example, it is currently using another federal act passed in 1977 that allows tariffs in response to an international emergency as justification for its tariffs on Canada and Mexico.
The courts are supposed to review the constitutionality of government actions. But on foreign policy, the courts have been deferential to the president even longer than Congress.
In a sweeping judgement in 1918, the Supreme Court wrote that foreign relations counted as a “political power” of the executive and legislative branches, not subject to judicial review.
A federal judge recently complained the Trump administration ignored his order blocking deportation flights of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador.
Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify deporting the Venezuelans, even though some have no criminal record.
And Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued the deportations were a “foreign policy matter”, and “we can’t have the judges running foreign policy”.
Mass deportation is one of Trump’s most popular policies. If he is going to pick fights with the judiciary, it makes political sense to do it on an issue where public opinion is on his side – even if the law is not.
Rubio’s comment is also a likely preview of the arguments Trump’s lawyers will make when cases about immigration reach the Supreme Court.
Deportations under both acts are going to face legal challenges. But the Trump administration is betting the Supreme Court will take Trump’s side, given its conservative members generally hold an expansive view of executive power.
A Supreme Court win would be a major political victory for Trump. It would encourage him to focus even more on using deportation as a political weapon, and making foreign policy justifications for legally dubious acts.
War as a political tool
Trump is effectively putting the US on a war footing. He is justifying his executive actions by recasting allies as enemies who menace national security with everything from illegal drugs to unfair subsidies, and by labelling millions of foreign nationals as “invaders”.
Many Americans don’t believe him. But as long as he can make threatening foreigners the main focus of American politics, he can find political and legal support for almost anything he wants to do.
David Smith 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra
The Reserve Bank of Australia left its benchmark interest rateunchanged at 4.1% today, stressing the uncertainty in the economic outlook.
As the Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock told a media conference, “since February there has been a lot more uncertainty introduced in the international context”.
The on-hold decision was widely expected and Bullock described it as a “consensus decision” by the board.
The decision to hold was not because the election campaign is underway. It was because there has not been enough new economic data to change materially its view on inflation. The governor said the board had never mentioned the election in its discussions.
In a statement, the central bank said:
Recent announcements from the United States on tariffs are having an impact on confidence globally and this would likely be amplified if the scope of tariffs widens.
As the Reserve Bank Governor put it, “we’re paid to worry” and they are discussing with peer central banks the response to global uncertainties.
Decline in inflation is welcome
The volatile monthly inflation series fell marginally, from 2.5% to 2.4%, in February.
The more trustworthy quarterly consumer price index (CPI) will come out on April 30 and will be an important factor in the Reserve Bank’s decision at its next meeting, on May 20.
The CPI report is likely to show the “trimmed mean” underlying inflation returning to the 2–3% target band for the first time since 2021. Headline inflation could be in the lower half of the band.
The unemployment rate has been steady at 4.1%. This is below what the Reserve Bank had regarded as the level consistent with steady inflation. But it has not been associated with an acceleration in wages. Indeed, wages have slowed to 3.2% growth, less than the Reserve Bank was forecasting for 2025.
This could all give the Reserve Bank the confidence to make another cut to the cash rate. Financial markets are predicting a cut in May.
The board itself said the current level of rates “remains restrictive”. So they will cut rates further once inflation is sustainably around the middle of the target band.
The (lack of) impact of the budget
The main impact of last week’s federal budget will be to delay the bounceback in electricity prices, after the end of the current rebates, for another six months. If there is a change in government, there will be a temporary fall in petrol prices for a year.
But both of these have only temporary effects on the “headline” inflation rate. The Reserve Bank is more concerned about sustained movements in underlying inflation.
Labor’s proposed income tax cuts, which will be cancelled if the Coalition wins power, are only “modest” (in the treasurer’s own words) and do not come into effect until July 2026. They are also unlikely to have a material impact on the Reserve Bank’s inflation forecasts.
The governor suggested as much, commenting that the forecasts following the budget would be similar to those made in February. She described increasing government spending as “filling a gap” in relatively weak private demand.
The fallout from tariffs
We will not know the extent of the new tariffs being announced by United States President Donald Trump until later in the week. And even then he may change them within days – or even on the same day.
The US tariffs will push up prices there. But if they trigger a trade war, the global economy will weaken and this may lead to lower prices globally. The governor pointed out that trade diversion prompted by tariffs could lower the price of some imports.
Bullock said the central bank was assessing the potential impact of tariffs on Australia’s trading partners including China. If Chinese authorities boosted support for their economy, then the economic impact on Australia might be “muted”.
The Reserve Bank’s 0.25% interest rate cut in February to 4.1% was the first change in the cash rate since November 2023 and marked the first small reversal of 13 rate increases that began in the closing days of the Morrison government.
The heightened attention placed on the Reserve Bank in an election campaign is not that unusual. With Australian parliamentary terms limited to three years, but with no fixed duration, we are often approaching a possible election.
While cutting interest rates will suit one side of politics, not cutting benefits the other. The impartial approach taken by the Reserve Bank is to make the same decision as they would if no election were looming.
The new board
This is the first meeting of the new monetary policy board, which is now separate from the central bank’s governance board.
This specialisation was a recommendation of the 2023 Reserve Bank review commissioned by the treasurer. But seven of the nine member remain from the previous board. The two new members, including one of the authors of the review, are not expected to hold markedly different views to the continuing members.
John Hawkins was formerly a senior economist with the Reserve Bank.
Getting a headache during or after exercise can be seriously frustrating – especially if you have kept hydrated to try and stop them from happening.
But why do these headaches occur? And does keeping hydrated make any difference?
What are exercise headaches?
Exercise headaches (also known as “exertional headaches”) are exactly what they sound like: headaches that occur either during, or after, exercise.
French doctor Jules Tinel first reported these headaches in the medical literature in 1932 and they’ve been a regular point of discussion since.
Exercise headaches commonly present as a throbbing pain on both sides of the head. They most often occur after strenuous exercise – although what is considered “strenuous” can differ between people, depending on their fitness levels. They can last anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days.
Exercise headaches are thought to impact about 12% of adults, although this number varies from 1% all the way up to 26% across individual studies.
In most circumstances, these headaches are harmless and will resolve on their own, over time. Some research suggests you will stop getting them after a few months of starting a new type of workout.
But while they are usually harmless, they can sometimes signal an underlying condition that requires medical attention.
What causes exercise headaches?
Despite a good amount of research looking at exertional headaches, we don’t know their exact cause, but we do think we know why they occur.
The leading theory suggests they are caused by changes in blood flow to the brain. During intense exercise, blood vessels in the brain dilate, increasing blood flow and pressure, leading to pain.
Because long-term exercise improves our cardiovascular health, including our ability to dilate and constrict our blood vessels, this theory makes sense when we consider that exercise headaches tend to resolve themselves over time. This might explain why research suggests fitter people are less likely to get exercise headaches.
People with migraines appear more likely to experience exercise headaches, which are thought to be caused by this same mechanism.
Does heat and dehydration cause exercise headaches?
There is evidence suggesting that exercise headaches are more likely to occur in the heat.
Your brain cannot dissipate heat by sweating like the rest of your body can. So when it’s hot, your body has to increase blood flow to the brain to help bring down its temperature, which can increase pressure.
Similarly, exercise headaches also seem to get worse, and occur more often, when people are dehydrated.
However, we are not sure why this happens. Some research has shown that dehydration results in increased strain during exercise. As such, dehydration might not necessarily cause the headache, but make it more likely to occur.
Red flags: when to see a doctor
Most exercise headaches resolve themselves after a few hours and result in no lasting negative effects.
it’s accompanied by other symptoms such as vision changes, confusion, or sensations of weakness
you experience a stiff neck, nausea, or vomiting with your headache
it lasts for more than 24 hours and doesn’t seem to be getting better.
Can you prevent exercise headaches?
There is no surefire way to prevent exercise headaches.
But a recent review suggests that ensuring you’re adequately hydrated and gradually warm-up to your desired exercise intensity can make them less likely to occur.
Beyond this, you may wish to keep your exercise intensity in a light-to moderate range for a couple of months. This will give your cardiovascular system some time to adapt before trying more strenuous exercise, hopefully reducing the likelihood of getting exercise headaches at all.
Exercise headaches are annoying, but are generally harmless and should subside on their own over time.
Hunter Bennett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Social media has recently been flooded with images that looked like they belonged in a Studio Ghibli film. Selfies, family photos and even memes have been re-imagined with the soft pastel palette characteristic of the Japanese animation company founded by Hayao Miyazaki.
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT are best understood as “style engines”. And what we are seeing now is these systems offering users more precision and control than ever before.
But this is also raising entirely new questions about copyright and creative ownership.
How the new ChatGPT makes images
Generative AI programs work by producing outputs in response to user prompts, including prompts to create an image.
Previous generations of AI image generators used diffusion models. These models gradually refine random, noisy data into a coherent image. But the latest update to ChatGPT uses what’s known as an “autoregressive algorithm”.
This algorithm treats images more like language, breaking them down into “tokens”. Just as ChatGPT predicts the most likely words in a sentence, it can now predict different visual elements in an image separately.
This tokenisation enables the algorithm to better separate certain features of an image – and their relationship with words in a prompt. As a result, ChatGPT can more accurately create images from precise user prompts than previous generations of image generators. It can replace or change specific features while preserving the rest of the image, and it improves on the longstanding issue of generating correct text in images.
A particularly powerful advantage of generating images inside a large language model is the ability to draw on all the knowledge already encoded in the system. This means users don’t need to describe every aspect of an image in painstaking detail. They can simply refer to concepts such as Studio Ghibli and the AI understands the reference.
The recent Studio Ghibli trend began with OpenAI itself, before spreading among Silcon Valley software engineers and then even governments and politicians – including seemingly unlikely uses such as the White House creating a Ghiblified image of a crying woman being deported and the Indian government promoting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s narrative of a “New India”.
Understanding AI as ‘style engines’
Generative AI systems don’t store information in any traditional sense. Instead they encode text, facts, or image fragments as patterns – or “styles” – within their neural networks.
Trained on vast amounts of data, AI models learn to recognise patterns at multiple levels. Lower network layers might capture basic features such as word relationships or visual textures. Higher layers encode more complex concepts or visual elements.
This means everything – objects, properties, writing genres, professional voices – gets transformed into styles. When AI learns about Miyazaki’s work, it’s not storing actual Studio Ghibli frames (though image generators may sometimes produce close imitations of input images). Instead, it’s encoding “Ghibli-ness” as a mathematical pattern – a style that can be applied to new images.
The same happens with bananas, cats or corporate emails. The AI learns “banana-ness”, “cat-ness” or “corporate email-ness” – patterns that define what makes something recognisably a banana, cat or a professional communication.
The encoding and transfer of styles has for a long time been an express goal in visual AI. Now we have an image generator that achieves this with unprecedented scale and control.
This approach unlocks remarkable creative possibilities across both text and images. If everything is a style, then these styles can be freely combined and transferred. That’s why we refer to these systems as “style engines”. Try creating an armchair in the style of a cat, or in elvish style.
The copyright controversy: when styles become identity
While the ability to work with styles is what makes generative AI so powerful, it’s also at the heart of growing controversy. For many artists, there’s something deeply unsettling about seeing their distinctive artistic approaches reduced to just another “style” that anyone can apply with a simple text prompt.
Hayao Miyazaki has not publicly commented on the recent trend of people using ChatGPT to generate images in his world-famous animation style. But he has been critical of AI previously.
All of this also raises entirely new questions about copyright and creative ownership.
Traditionally, copyright law doesn’t protect styles – only specific expressions. You can’t copyright a music genre such as “ska” or an art movement such as “impressionism”.
This limitation exists for good reason. If someone could monopolise an entire style, it would stifle creative expression for everyone else.
But there’s a difference between general styles and highly distinctive ones that become almost synonymous with someone’s identity. When an AI can generate work “in the style of Greg Rutkowski” – a Polish artist whose name was reportedly used in over more than 93,000 prompts in AI image generator Stable Diffusion – it potentially threatens both his livelihood and artistic legacy.
Some creators have already taken legal action.
In a case filed in late 2022, three artists formed a class to sue multiple AI companies, arguing that their image generators were trained on their original works without permission, and now allow users to generate derivative works mimicking their distinctive styles.
As technology evolves faster than the law, work is under way on new legislation to try and balance technological innovation with protecting artists’ creative identities.
Whatever the outcome, these debates highlight the transformative nature of AI style engines – and the need to consider both their untapped creative potential and more nuanced protections of distinctive artistic styles.
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.
The small Queensland town of Eromanga bills itself as Australia’s town furthest from the sea. But this week, an ocean of freshwater arrived.
Monsoon-like weather has hit the normally arid Channel Country of inland Queensland. Some towns have had two years’ worth of rain in a couple of days. These flat grazing lands now resemble an inland sea. Dozens of people have been evacuated. Others are preparing to be cut off, potentially for weeks. And graziers are reporting major livestock losses – more than 100,000 and climbing. In some areas, the flooding is worse than 1974, the wettest year on record in Australia.
Why so much rain? Tropical, water-laden air has been brought far inland from the oceans to the north and east. This can happen under normal climate variability. But our ocean temperatures are the highest on record, which supercharges the water cycle.
In coming weeks, this huge volume of water will wend its way through the channels and down to fill Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre, the ephemeral lake which appears in the northern reaches of South Australia. It’s likely this will be a Lake Eyre for the ages.
In the first three months of the year, deadly record-breaking floods hit northern Queensland before Cyclone Alfred tracked unusually far south and made landfall in southeast Queensland, bringing widespread winds and rains and leaving expensive repair bills. Now the rain has come inland.
Why so much rain in arid areas?
Some meteorologists have dubbed this event a pseudo-monsoon. That’s because the normal Australian monsoon doesn’t reach this far south – the torrential rains of the monsoonal wet season tend to fall closer to the northern coasts.
Because the Arafura and Timor Seas to the north are unusually warm, evaporation rates have shot up. Once in the air, this water vapour makes for very humid conditions. These air masses are even more humid than normal tropical air, because they have flowed down from the equator. Many Queenslanders can vouch for the intense humidity.
But there’s a second factor at work. At present, Australia’s climate is influenced by a positive Southern Annular Mode. This means the belt of intense westerly winds blowing across the Southern Ocean has been pushed further south, causing a ripple effect which can lead to more summer rain in Australia’s southeast, up to inland Queensland. This natural climate driver has meant easterly winds have blown uninterrupted from as far away as Fiji, carrying yet more humid air inland.
Many inland rivers in Queensland are in major flood (red triangles) as of April 1. Bureau of Meteorology, CC BY
These two streams of converging humid tropical air were driven up into the cooler heights of the atmosphere by upper and surface low pressure troughs, triggering torrential rain over wide areas of the outback
While these humid air masses have now dumped most of their water, more rain is coming in the aftermath of the short-lived Cyclone Dianne off northwest Australia. These rains won’t be as intense but may drive more flood peaks over already saturated catchments.
This is why it has been so wet in what is normally an exceptionally dry part of Australia.
What is this doing to the Channel Country?
Many Australians have never been to the remote Channel Country. It’s a striking landscape, marked by ancient, braided river channels.
Even for an area known for drought-flood cycles, the rainfall totals are extreme. This is a very rare event.
People who live there have to be resilient and self-sufficient. But farmers and graziers are bracing for awful losses of livestock. Livestock can drown in floodwaters, but a common fate is succumbing to pneumonia after spending too long in water. After the water moves down the channels, it will leave behind notoriously boggy and sticky mud. This can be lethal to livestock and native animals, which can find themselves unable to move.
Where will the water go next?
Little of these temporary inland seas will ever reach the ocean.
Some of the rain has fallen in the catchment of the Darling River, where it will flow down and meet the Murray. The Darling is often filled by summer rains, while the Murray gets more water from autumn and winter rains. This water will eventually reach the Southern Ocean.
But most of the rain fell further inland. The waters snaking through the channels will head south, flowing slowly along the flat ground for weeks until it crosses the South Australian border and begins to fill up Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre. Here, the waters will stop, more than 300 km from the nearest ocean at Port Augusta, and fill what is normally a huge, salty depression and Australia’s lowest point, 15 metres below sea level.
When Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre fills, it creates an extraordinary spectacle. Millions of brine shrimp will hatch from eggs in the dry soil. This sudden abundance will draw waterbirds in their millions, while fish carried in the floodwaters will spawn and eat the shrimp. Then there are the remarkable shield shrimps, hibernating inland crabs and salt-adapted hardyhead fish.
It’s rare that Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre fills up – but when it does, life comes to the desert. Mandy Creighton/Shutterstock
The rain event will send enough water to keep Lake Eyre full for many months and it usually takes up to two years for it to dry out again. We can expect to see a huge lake form – the size of a small European country. Birdwatchers and biologists will flock to the area to see the sight of a temporary sea in the desert.
Eventually, the intense sun of the outback will evaporate every last drop of the floodwaters, leaving behind salted ground and shrimp eggs for the next big rains.
As the climate keeps warming, we can expect to see more sudden torrential rain dumps like this one, followed by periods of rapid drying.
Steve Turton has previously received funding from the federal government.
The damage climate change will inflict on the world’s economy is likely to have been massively underestimated, according to new research by my colleagues and I which accounts for the full global reach of extreme weather and its aftermath.
To date, projections of how climate change will affect global gross domestic product (GDP) have broadly suggested mild to moderate harm. This in part has led to a lack of urgency in national efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
However, these models often contain a fundamental flaw – they assume a national economy is affected only by weather in that country. Any impacts from weather events elsewhere, such as how flooding in one country affects the food supply to another, are not incorporated into the models.
Our new research sought to fix this. After including the global repercussions of extreme weather into our models, the predicted harm to global GDP became far worse than previously thought – affecting the lives of people in every country on Earth.
Weather shocks everywhere, all at once
Global warming affects economies in many ways.
The most obvious is damage from extreme weather. Droughts can cause poor harvests, while storms and floods can cause widespread destruction and disrupt the supply of goods. Recent research has also shown heatwaves, aggravated by climate change, have contributed to food inflation.
Most prior research predicts that even extreme warming of 4°C will have only mild negative impacts on the global economy by the end of the century – between 7% and 23%.
Such modelling is usually based on the effects of weather shocks in the past. However, these shocks have typically been confined to a local or regional scale, and balanced out by conditions elsewhere.
For example, in the past, South America might have been in drought, but other parts of the world were getting good rainfall. So, South America could rely on imports of agricultural products from other countries to fill domestic shortfalls and prevent spikes in food prices.
But future climate change will increase the risk of weather shocks occurring simultaneously across countries and more persistently over time. This will disrupt the networks producing and delivering goods, compromise trade and limit the extent to which countries can help each other.
International trade is fundamental to the global economic production. So, our research examined how a country’s future economic growth would be influenced by weather conditions everywhere else in the world.
What did we find?
One thing was immediately clear: a warm year across the planet causes lower global growth.
We corrected three leading models to account for the effects of global weather on national economies, then averaged out their results. Our analysis focused on global GDP per capita – in other words, the world’s economic output divided by its population.
We found if the Earth warms by more than 3°C by the end of the century, the estimated harm to the global economy jumped from an average of 11% (under previous modelling assumptions) to 40% (under our modelling assumptions). This level of damage could devastate livelihoods in large parts of the world.
Previous models have asserted economies in cold parts of the world, such as Russia and Northern Europe, will benefit from warmer global temperatures. However, we found the impact on the global economy was so large, all countries will be badly affected.
A warm year across the planet causes lower global growth. Pictured: wilted corn crops during drought. wahyusyaban/Shutterstock
Costs vs benefits
Reducing emissions leads to short-term economic costs. These must be balanced against the long-term benefits of avoiding dangerous climate change.
Recent economic modelling has suggested this balance would be struck by reducing emissions at a rate that allows Earth to heat by 2.7°C.
This is close to Earth’s current warming trajectory. But it is far higher than the goals of the Paris Agreement, and global warming limits recommended by climate scientists. It is also based on the flawed assumptions discussed above.
Under our new research, the optimal amount of global warming, balancing short-term costs with long-term benefits, is 1.7°C – a figure broadly consistent with the Paris Agreement’s most ambitious target.
Avoiding climate change has short-term costs and long-term benefits. Dany Bejar/Shutterstock
Changing course
Our new research shows previous forecasts of how such warming will affect the global economy have been far too optimistic. It adds to otherrecent evidence suggesting the economic impacts of climate change has been badly underestimated.
Clearly, Earth’s current emissions trajectory risks our future and that of our children. The sooner humanity grasps the calamities in store under severe climate change, the sooner we can change course to avoid it.
Timothy Neal 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.
Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Sarah G. Phillips, Professor of Global Conflict and Development; Non-Resident Fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies (Yemen), University of Sydney
The “Signalgate” story has received wall-to-wall coverage since Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, published explosive details about a Signal group chat where senior US officials discussed impending airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the coverage has focused on details of most concern to Western audiences, including the depth of the security breach, the classification status of the material that was shared, and the implications of sending war plans through a non-secure platform.
But what are the implications of this for Yemen? In short, it helps the Houthis and hurts the civilians living under their control.
Providing the Houthis with intelligence
Yemeni civilians are caught in an impossible position. They have suffered from years of ruthless violence in a civil war that began with the Houthi capture of the capital, Sana’a, in 2014. The conflict grew even more violent when a Saudi-led (and Western-backed) military coalition entered the fray to back the Yemeni government the following year, imposing a crippling blockade that lasted until 2021.
In early 2024, the Houthis then began attacking ships in the Red Sea, bringing retaliatory strikes by the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel. Each of these have caused further civilian casualties and harm.
The Houthis (and their Iranian and Russian supporters) will draw comfort from the Signal chat group’s apparent confirmation the US strikes on March 15 were not a sign of the Trump administration’s intent to dislodge them from power:
Vice President JD Vance (14 March, 08:16am ET): The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth (14 March, 08:27am ET): This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.
The Houthis can withstand intermittent airstrikes – they have withstood airstrikes for over two decades.
But a more substantial intervention — one that combines a coalition of local forces with guaranteed air support from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates (with US support) — would pose a far greater threat to the Houthis.
With this apparently not being considered, the Houthis may now feel emboldened to press-gang more people into military service before a fresh assault on the strategically important oil fields in Marib. This is the last major city in northern Yemen still under government control.
The Houthis have tried to take Marib before, but were prevented by Yemeni troops supported by Saudi air cover. Controlling the oil fields in Marib is vital to the group’s ability to sustain itself economically.
Putting Yemeni civilians at risk
While the Trump administration claims the chat did not compromise sources and methods, Goldberg noted a US-based intelligence officer was named. The Atlantic removed their name for security reasons.
The publication’s decision to remove this detail is a stark reminder of whose security matters — and whose doesn’t. The transcript reads:
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz (15 March, 13:48pm ET): VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID…
Waltz (15 March, 14.00pm ET): Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.
Putting aside the fact this was a residential building — it should not be an aside, but this is how most news coverage has been treating it — this detail is important to the Houthis.
This is because Waltz confirms “multiple” sources had positively identified a target, which the Houthis may use to justify further crackdowns, forced disappearances and even executions of those they accuse of being spies.
The Trump administration was clearly reckless in divulging this detail. But it’s striking The Atlantic did not consider the danger posed to Yemeni civilians by publishing it. Experts on the Houthis – and their methods of subjugation – could have quickly highlighted this point if they were consulted.
From a Yemeni perspective, a named source may have even been preferable to the hazy, but authoritative, confirmation of US operational methods and sources. The lack of specificity in the transcript plays to the Houthis’ dragnet approach to extinguishing independent voices by forcibly disappearing people on fake allegations of espionage.
These are typically aid workers, academics, minorities, journalists and members of civil society who are not vocally aligned with the group.
These abductions have been occurring for years, but ramped up in the middle of 2024. Dozens of members of civil society and aid organisations (and potentially many more) were kidnapped last year. Some are confirmed to have died in detention; many others have not been heard from since.
There are reports that abductions are already escalating in response to the latest US strikes.
The ongoing abductions have had a chilling effect on the willingness of local and international aid providers to speak out against the Houthis. This has helped the Houthis consolidate their control over the flow of humanitarian assistance (particularly food), which they divert based on political, rather than needs-based, calculations as a means of coercing compliance.
Yemeni civilians are seldom, if ever, a consideration in the geopolitical machinations that concern their country. The reflexive prioritisation of Western security interests exposed in the group chat – and the publication of these details – condemns them to further insecurity.
Sarah G. Phillips receives funding from The Australian Research Council as a Future Fellow (FT200100539), and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah G. Phillips, Professor of Global Conflict and Development; Non-Resident Fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies (Yemen), University of Sydney
The “Signalgate” story has received wall-to-wall coverage since Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor of The Atlantic, published explosive details about a Signal group chat where senior US officials discussed impending airstrikes against the Houthis in Yemen.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the coverage has focused on details of most concern to Western audiences, including the depth of the security breach, the classification status of the material that was shared, and the implications of sending war plans through a non-secure platform.
But what are the implications of this for Yemen? In short, it helps the Houthis and hurts the civilians living under their control.
Providing the Houthis with intelligence
Yemeni civilians are caught in an impossible position. They have suffered from years of ruthless violence in a civil war that began with the Houthi capture of the capital, Sana’a, in 2014. The conflict grew even more violent when a Saudi-led (and Western-backed) military coalition entered the fray to back the Yemeni government the following year, imposing a crippling blockade that lasted until 2021.
In early 2024, the Houthis then began attacking ships in the Red Sea, bringing retaliatory strikes by the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel. Each of these have caused further civilian casualties and harm.
The Houthis (and their Iranian and Russian supporters) will draw comfort from the Signal chat group’s apparent confirmation the US strikes on March 15 were not a sign of the Trump administration’s intent to dislodge them from power:
Vice President JD Vance (14 March, 08:16am ET): The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth (14 March, 08:27am ET): This [is] not about the Houthis. I see it as two things: 1) Restoring Freedom of Navigation, a core national interest; and 2) Reestablish deterrence, which Biden cratered.
The Houthis can withstand intermittent airstrikes – they have withstood airstrikes for over two decades.
But a more substantial intervention — one that combines a coalition of local forces with guaranteed air support from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates (with US support) — would pose a far greater threat to the Houthis.
With this apparently not being considered, the Houthis may now feel emboldened to press-gang more people into military service before a fresh assault on the strategically important oil fields in Marib. This is the last major city in northern Yemen still under government control.
The Houthis have tried to take Marib before, but were prevented by Yemeni troops supported by Saudi air cover. Controlling the oil fields in Marib is vital to the group’s ability to sustain itself economically.
Putting Yemeni civilians at risk
While the Trump administration claims the chat did not compromise sources and methods, Goldberg noted a US-based intelligence officer was named. The Atlantic removed their name for security reasons.
The publication’s decision to remove this detail is a stark reminder of whose security matters — and whose doesn’t. The transcript reads:
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz (15 March, 13:48pm ET): VP. Building collapsed. Had multiple positive ID…
Waltz (15 March, 14.00pm ET): Typing too fast. The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.
Putting aside the fact this was a residential building — it should not be an aside, but this is how most news coverage has been treating it — this detail is important to the Houthis.
This is because Waltz confirms “multiple” sources had positively identified a target, which the Houthis may use to justify further crackdowns, forced disappearances and even executions of those they accuse of being spies.
The Trump administration was clearly reckless in divulging this detail. But it’s striking The Atlantic did not consider the danger posed to Yemeni civilians by publishing it. Experts on the Houthis – and their methods of subjugation – could have quickly highlighted this point if they were consulted.
From a Yemeni perspective, a named source may have even been preferable to the hazy, but authoritative, confirmation of US operational methods and sources. The lack of specificity in the transcript plays to the Houthis’ dragnet approach to extinguishing independent voices by forcibly disappearing people on fake allegations of espionage.
These are typically aid workers, academics, minorities, journalists and members of civil society who are not vocally aligned with the group.
These abductions have been occurring for years, but ramped up in the middle of 2024. Dozens of members of civil society and aid organisations (and potentially many more) were kidnapped last year. Some are confirmed to have died in detention; many others have not been heard from since.
There are reports that abductions are already escalating in response to the latest US strikes.
The ongoing abductions have had a chilling effect on the willingness of local and international aid providers to speak out against the Houthis. This has helped the Houthis consolidate their control over the flow of humanitarian assistance (particularly food), which they divert based on political, rather than needs-based, calculations as a means of coercing compliance.
Yemeni civilians are seldom, if ever, a consideration in the geopolitical machinations that concern their country. The reflexive prioritisation of Western security interests exposed in the group chat – and the publication of these details – condemns them to further insecurity.
Sarah G. Phillips receives funding from The Australian Research Council as a Future Fellow (FT200100539), and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies.
When Lisa’s husband passed away unexpectedly, she assumed accessing his superannuation death benefit would be straightforward. Instead, she spent months navigating a bureaucratic maze.
She repeatedly sent documents, waited weeks for callbacks and struggled to get answers from his fund.
Her experience is far from unique. A damning new report reveals systemic failure by Australia’s A$4 trillion superannuation industry in handling members’ death benefits.
A system in disarray
The Australian Security and Investments Commission’s landmark review of ten major super trustees, managing 38% of super assets, exposes an industry that is not serving its members.
Grieving families routinely face excessive delays, insensitive treatment and unnecessary hurdles when trying to access death benefits. It found they sometimes waited over a year for payments to which they were legally entitled.
The central problem was a fundamental breakdown in claims processing, with five critical failures exacerbating inefficiency and distress.
1. Poor oversight
No trustee monitored end-to-end claims handling times, leaving boards unaware of how long families were waiting. While the fastest trustee resolved 48% of claims within 90 days, the slowest managed just 8%.
In one case, a widow waited nearly a year despite her husband having a valid binding nomination. ASIC found 78% of delays stemmed from processing inefficiencies entirely within trustees’ control.
2. Misleading and inadequate information
Many funds misled on processing times and masked extreme delays. Boards often received reports only on insured claims, despite most death benefits not involving insurance. This meant boards were unable to fix systemic problems.
3. Process over people
Risk-averse procedures often overrode common sense. Many funds imposed claim-staking – delaying payments for objections – even for straightforward cases, adding a median 95 day delay.
Communication failures further compounded delays, with claimants receiving inconsistent advice and few or no status updates.
4. Outsourcing without accountability
Claims handled in-house were processed significantly faster than those managed by external administrators. Only 15% of outsourced claims were resolved within 90 days, compared to 36% of in-house claims.
The securities commission is calling for stronger oversight. External administrators significantly slow down responses, so some funds may need to bring claims processing back in-house to ensure efficiency.
5. Lack of transparency
Many funds failed to provide clear timelines or explanations for delays and had no accountability mechanisms.
The ten funds investigated include the Australian Retirement Trust, Avanteos (Colonial First State), Brighter Super, Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation, HESTA, Hostplus, NM Super (AMP), Nulis (MLC), Rest and UniSuper.
Two others, Australian Super and Cbus, are being sued separately by ASIC for either failing to pay out or delaying payments to thousands of eligible beneficiaries.
KEY FINDINGS
None of the trustees monitored or reported on end-to-end death benefit claims handling times
27% of claims files reviewed involved poor customer service – for example, calls were not returned, queries were dismissed
8% vs 48% was the difference in claims closed in 90 days between the slowest and the fastest trustee
78% of claim files reviewed were delayed by processing issues within the trustee’s control
17% of claim files reviewed involved vulnerable claimants. About 30% of those were handled poorly
ASIC has made 34 recommendations to improve death benefit processing. This will require real change, not box ticking. Changes should include setting performance objectives and empowering frontline staff to cut unnecessary steps.
There should be consequences for failure. Unlike the United Kingdom, which fines pension providers for missing statutory deadlines, ASIC’s recommendations lack penalties.
Without consequences, some funds may continue prioritising administrative convenience over members receiving their entitlements.
What needs to happen now?
ASIC’s report is a wake-up call, but real reform requires strong action.
Super funds must be held to clear, binding processing timelines, with meaningful penalties for non-compliance. Standardising requirements across the industry would eliminate unnecessary hurdles, ensuring all beneficiaries are treated fairly.
Beyond regulation, funds must improve communication and accountability. Bereaved families deserve clear, plain language guidance on what to expect, not bureaucratic roadblocks or sudden document requests.
Technological upgrades should focus on reducing delays, not just internal efficiencies.
And to better support families, an independent claims advocate could help navigate the process, ensuring no one is left to struggle alone.
Has ASIC gone far enough?
While ASIC’s review is a step in the right direction, it does not fundamentally overhaul flawed claims-handling practices.
The recommendations lack enforceability, relying on voluntary compliance.
Also, the role of insurers within super remains largely unaddressed, despite death benefits being tied to life insurance policies. This often causes further complications and delays.
Ensuring insurers adopt and apply ASIC’s recommendations will be critical for meaningful change.
Most importantly, super funds must remember that behind every claim is a grieving family. No one should have to fight for what they are owed during one of the most stressful times in their life.
Natalie Peng 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.
New Zealand’s North Island features a number of geothermal systems, several of which are used to generate some 1,000 MegaWatts of electricity. But deeper down there may be even more potential.
Supercritical geothermal is hotter and deeper than conventional geothermal sources. It targets rocks between 375°C and 500°C, close to – but not within – magma.
Water at these temperatures and depths has three to seven times more energy for conversion to electricity, compared to ordinary geothermal generation at comparatively cooler temperatures of 200°C to 300°C.
The investment is staged, with $5 million earmarked for international consultants to design a super-deep well, and further funds to be released later for drilling to depths of up to six kilometres. Consultation is underway, with resources minister Shane Jones hoping to convince Māori landowners to collaborate.
New Zealand already produces 1,000MW of electricity from conventional geothermal sources. Shutterstock/Chrispo
GNS Science estimates the central North Island might have about 3,500MW worth of this resource, although actually accessing it might be difficult and expensive. The energy consulting firm Castalia was engaged to predict how much would be worth developing, suggesting between 1,300MW and 2,000MW, starting from 2037.
This would be a lot of extra power. Even better, it would reduce the peaks and troughs in generation that arise from more variable solar and wind sources, which are expected to make up a growing share of electricity generation in the future. Supercritical geothermal is reportedly cost effective, which means the technology deserves serious consideration. But such claims should be subject to scrutiny.
But New Zealand has a healthy geothermal industry. In the past two decades, geothermal companies have invested $2 billion in hundreds of new wells and new power plants. The industry already knows how to drill wells and profit from them. So why is the government stepping in now?
In practice, supercritical geothermal exploration and development faces several research, technical and economic risks. Private enterprise seems unwilling to bear them alone, prompting the government to step in to establish feasibility.
How to crack soft rock
One problem supercritical geothermal might encounter is that drilling deeper might find lots of hot rock, but not much water. Drilling experiments in Japan and Italy have shown that reaching 500°C is possible, but in both cases the rock was so ductile (pliable and easily stretched) because of the high temperatures that it couldn’t keep open the gaps needed for water to flow.
However, the experience was different in Iceland where two wells managed to find water above 400°C. At this stage, it’s not clear whether this is because Iceland has special rocks – particularly basalts, which are less ductile – or because the country is being stretched through tectonic forces at a high rate. New Zealand is less able to count on basalts but it does experience rapid tectonic stretching.
Deep drilling would test this key hypothesis: is there permeability (gaps for water to flow through) at supercritical conditions? The only way to know for sure is to drill down.
If there isn’t permeability, the government could either abandon the investment or look into methods to create it. Multi-stage hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is an option which has worked overseas in the North American shale gas industry. It has also recently been demonstrated in some US geothermal systems.
Even if we did find permeability, the water produced in Iceland’s supercritical wells was enormously corrosive. A better option then might be to inject cold water into the well, suppressing the corrosive fluids. The injected water would heat up and rise into the overlying geothermal system – flushing the heat upwards.
However, both water injection and fracking can trigger earthquakes, perhaps a magnitude 4-5 every year or a magnitude 5-6 every few decades. This happened in 2017 in Pohang in South Korea where water injection triggered a magnitude 5.5 earthquake. It resulted in the cancellation of the geothermal project.
But there are many other geothermal projects where injection has not led to concerning earthquake activity.
Fierce competition from solar, wind and batteries
The other risk is economic. Supercritical geothermal might one day be technically feasible, but its potential contribution in New Zealand will be limited if it can’t beat other generation technologies on cost.
Worldwide, the renewable energy sector continues to be disrupted by unprecedented cost decreases driven by innovations in utility-scale battery storage and solar photovoltaics.
But the supply chains are largely overseas, mostly concentrated in China. This adds geopolitical complexity to the energy security calculus. Homegrown solutions are a strength.
Nevertheless, the International Renewable Energy Agency reports cost reductions for solar and battery modules of 89% and 86% between 2010 and 2023. Solar costs drop 33% each time the built amount doubles. Drops in battery cost are enabling large deployments for daily smoothing of the peaks and troughs of intermittent solar and wind generation.
This shifting cost landscape creates financial uncertainty for energy investors. While cost declines might not continue forever, it’s hard to pick when they will level off. Meanwhile, geothermal costs have been flat for a long time. A billion-dollar geothermal investment might quickly become uncompetitive.
Despite all these caveats, we shouldn’t overlook the positive signal of the government taking a bet on New Zealand science and innovation. It will be exciting to see what’s happening at six kilometres of depth underground. And although the plan is not to drill for magma, an accidental strike (as happened in Iceland) would lead to some amazing science.
Lastly, energy security deserves to be taken seriously over the long term. While supercritical geothermal won’t fix our immediate vulnerability to winter scarcity, it could help avoid similar issues in the 2040s.
David Dempsey receives science funding from MBIE for research into geothermal energy.
Australia’s horse racing industry is in the spotlight after recent allegations of tranquilliser use on horses so they can be “worked” (exercised) between race days.
A recent ABC report stated workers in the Australian racing industry allege horses are being routinely medicated for track work at the peril of rider and horse safety.
Using tranquillisers on horses during training and management may not be illegal but this could breach nationwide racing rules.
The prevalence of the practice is not clear but many industry insiders report it as common.
Racing Australia had “recently become aware” of the use of acepromazine for track work and had begun collecting data about the practice, but had not been made aware of any complaints or concerns.
What medications are horses given?
Horses may be given a low dose of a tranquilliser, most commonly acepromazine. This makes their behaviour easier to control in certain situations, such as when they’re being examined by a veterinarian.
This drug must be prescribed by an attending veterinarian, and it can calm unfriendly and apprehensive animals. This could assist with making excited, hyperactive horses easier to control and less likely to buck, rear or put people at risk of injury from uncontrolled flight responses.
But proprioception – the way horses feel the world around them, notably the ground beneath them – is likely to be compromised. So, from a work health and safety perspective, the risk of tripping and falling is front of mind.
In the racing industry, tranquillisers are given to reduce the difficulties that come from riding and handling very fit, young horses that have been bred, fed and managed to be highly reactive and move at very high speeds.
This combination of selective breeding and only basic training can make them very difficult to control both during trackwork, when speeds of over 60 kilometres per hour can be reached, as well as during routine management.
Thoroughbreds’ diets, intensive management and relative lack of behavioural conditioning can be a dangerous combination.
The diets and confinement make them excitable and likely to take off; if they do, the lack of appropriate training makes them difficult to stop.
What makes race thoroughbreds hard to handle?
All horses have three fundamental needs – friends, forage and freedom, known as the “three F’s”.
Friends: horses have evolved to spend time with large mixed groups. They feel safer in these groups and this safety is highly valued: mutual grooming with preferred conspecifics (other equids) can calm them. In contrast, most stabled horses have no choice about who their neighbours are and can usually only have minimal physical interactions. Once out on the track, horses are highly motivated to stay with other horses and are more likely to be distracted rather than to attend to the rider.
Forage: horses are trickle feeders that graze on high-fibre, low-nutrient forages for up to 16 hours a day. In contrast, racehorses are fed high-energy diets that can be quickly consumed, leading to risk of digestive disturbances, such as gastric ulcers and long periods during which, confined to their stables, they have nothing to do.
Modern racehorse management and training often denies them access to these “three F’s”, which leads to behavioural problems that are then sometimes managed by tranquillising the horse.
Collectively, these factors create horses that are not having their fundamental needs met. It’s no wonder that, once free of the confinement of their stables, they can become excited and hard to control, putting their riders and even themselves at risk of injury.
A band-aid solution
There is no textbook that advises vets on how to diagnose or treat horses that are hyperactive, nor are there any data on how horses can be safely tranquillised before being ridden.
However, a UK government data sheet for the most common equine tranquilliser globally, acepromazine maleate, states: “do not, in any circumstances, ride horses within the 36 hours following administration of the product”.
In Australia, racing trainers must keep records of all medications given to horses. Unfortunately, the veterinarians who supply this medication to trainers for use on racehorses are usually doing so without a specific diagnosis or treatment plan.
Routine use of tranquillisers is a band-aid solution to an industry-wide practice of confining, over-feeding and under-training fit, young horses that have been bred to run.
If this practice is ever policed, there will likely be enormous repercussions for the sustainability of racing.
As a first step to addressing this issue, the industry could commit to monitoring and publishing annual data on the routine use of tranquillisers.
Paul McGreevy has received funding from the Australian Research Council, RSPCA Australia and animal welfare focussed philanthropy. He is a Fellow of the International Society for Equitation Science, a member of the British Veterinary Association and currently sits on the NSW Veterinary Practitioners Board.
Cathrynne Henshall receives funding from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Welfare Foundation. She is a trustee and council member of the International Society for Equitation Science.
The federal government’s 2024 budget shows that Canadian taxpayers have funded over $16 billion in research and development since 2016. Each year, millions of those research dollars flow from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
These publicly funded federal agencies each offer unique grants and programs covering different research disciplines. When they work in unison, such as when setting research guidelines and policies that apply across all three agencies like the one described in this article, they are collectively known as the Tri-Agency. This money is an investment is Canada’s future, and researchers and their institutions rely on Tri-Agency funding to conduct and share their research.
In 2015, the Tri-Agency implemented its open access (OA) policy requiring that most published research articles funded by Tri-Agency grants should be openly available in some format, and free to anyone anywhere, with no sharing or distribution restrictions.
For Canadians and readers around the world, that means no subscription fees or paywalls. This mandate enshrined the principle that publicly funded research should be available to the public. It reached across disciplines by including research supported by all three funding bodies.
Strengthening the open access mandate
Following consultation with researchers, institutions, publishers, libraries, Indigenous advisers and others, the Tri-Agency released a draft revision of its open access policy in February 2025. This update explicitly mentions that Canadians at large are part of the research audience.
Key improvements include eliminating the 12-month embargo period that allowed publishers to delay open access, and requiring researchers to use open copyright licenses (like Creative Commons). Authors must also maintain copyright over their works, including secondary publishing rights. Together these provisions ensure that research can be accessed, shared and used.
The Tri-Agency plans to implement the new policy in January 2026, leaving some time for final revisions. This presents an opportunity to make the mandate even stronger.
There is a need for researchers seeking national funding to commit to reporting on the openness of their research. (Shutterstock)
Creating opportunities from open policy pitfalls
Unfortunately, the revised policy repeats some mistakes from the past. Addressing just two key areas will improve accountability and transparency, and reinforce the commitment to making publicly funded research available to the public.
1. Meaningful monitoring and reporting: A weakness in the existing and revised policy is a lack of effective compliance measures. Research evidence shows that mandating open access reinforces compliance compared to just recommending that authors to make their research open. Many Canadian researchers are meeting this mandate, but overall the Tri-Agency has a significant open access compliance problem.
Even the Tri-Agency itself doesn’t know whether authors are meeting the current mandate.
After a decade, the mandate doesn’t seem to be very effective. And nothing in the proposed revisions empowers authors or institutions to track and report on the open access status of their publications, or demonstrate they’ve met their open access expectations.
Instead of repeating past shortcomings, a commitment to reporting and monitoring at organizational and Tri-Agency levels would help. There’s an opportunity here for collaboration.
The Tri-Agency could commit to monitoring open access outcomes, and researchers seeking national funding could commit to reporting on the openness of their research. This would improve adherence, allow the Tri-Agency to highlight the benefits of public research funding, give Canadian researchers some time in the spotlight and strengthen public trust in our institutions.
Under this model, authors must pay an extra publication fee to the journal to make their article open access, and many researchers are using research funds to pay expensive fees instead of directing that money toward more research. Similar to compliance rates, the Tri-Agency doesn’t know how much of their funding is being redirected to publishers as publication fees.
We have an opportunity to implement real change by requiring free open access in the updated mandate. With nearly 100 open research repositories registered in Canada, and over 13,000 fee-less journals registered in the Directory of Open Journals, paying to publish is unnecessary. The Tri-Agency could also limit the use of agency funding to pay these fees.
Now is the time to act
I am an academic librarian engaged in open publishing, and a researcher subject to the same funding mandate. In my professional opinion the policy updates prove that the Tri-Agency is committed to change.
Now is the time to make the open access mandate stronger, by improved monitoring and by directing researchers toward free open access publishing options.
The power to make these changes and put solutions in place all rests with the Tri-Agency. It’s in their hands. The fact that this policy is being revised right now means it’s the perfect time to explicitly support free and open access to research paid for by Canadians.
As the Tri-Agency weighs feedback from recent public consultations, let us hope that policy-makers, universities, libraries, publishers and individual researchers will come together to make free and open access the norm.
Richard Hayman has received SSHRC funding in the past. The views expressed here are his own and in no way influenced by SSHRC or any other organisation.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Jonathan P. Stewart, Professor of Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles
The 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake near San Francisco in 1989 caused about $6.8 billion in damage and 63 deaths.J.K. Nakata/U.S. Geological Survey
Earthquakes and the damage they cause are apolitical. Collectively, we either prepare for future earthquakes or the population eventually pays the price. The earthquakes that struck Myanmar on March 28, 2025, collapsing buildings and causing over 2,000 deaths, were a sobering reminder of the risks and the need for preparation.
In the U.S., this preparation hinges in large part on the expertise of scientists and engineers in federal agencies who develop earthquake hazard models and contribute to the creation of building codes designed to ensure homes, high-rises and other structures won’t collapse when the ground shakes.
Local communities and states decide whether to adopt building code documents. But those documents and other essential resources are developed through programs supported by federal agencies working in partnership with practicing engineers and earthquake experts at universities.
First, seismologists and earthquake engineers at the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, produce the National Seismic Hazard Model. These maps, based on research into earthquake sources such as faults and how seismic waves move through the earth’s crust, are used to determine the forces that structures in each community should be designed to resist.
A steering committee of earthquake experts from the private sector and universities works with USGS to ensure that the National Seismic Hazard Model implements the best available science.
In this 2023 update of the national seismic risk map, red areas have the greatest chance of a damaging earthquake occurring within 100 years. USGS
Second, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, supports the process for periodically updating building codes. That includes supporting the work of the National Institute of Building Sciences’ Provisions Update Committee, which recommends building code revisions based on investigations of earthquake damage.
More broadly, FEMA, the USGS, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Science Foundation work together through the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program to advance earthquake science and turn knowledge of earthquake risks into safer standards, better building design and education. Some of those agencies have been threatened by potential job and funding cuts under the Trump administration, and others face uncertainty regarding continuation of federal support for their work.
It is in large part because of the National Seismic Hazard Model and regularly updated building codes that U.S. buildings designed to meet modern code requirements are considered among the safest in the world, despite substantial seismic hazards in several states.
This paradigm has been made possible by the technical expertise and lack of political agendas among the federal staff. Without that professionalism, we believe experts from outside the federal government would be less likely to donate their time.
These programs and the federal agencies supporting them have benefited from a high level of staff expertise because hiring and advancement processes have been divorced from politics and focused on qualifications and merit.
This has not always been the case.
For much of early U.S. history, federal jobs were awarded through a patronage system, where political loyalty determined employment. As described in “The Federal Civil Service System and The Problem of Bureaucracy,” this system led to widespread corruption and dysfunction, with officials focused more on managing quid pro quo patronage than governing effectively. That peaked in 1881 with President James Garfield’s assassination by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled supporter who had been denied a government appointment.
The passage of the Pendleton Act by Congress in 1883 shifted federal employment to a merit-based system. This preference for a merit-based system was reinforced in the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. It states as national policy that “to provide the people of the United States with a competent, honest, and productive workforce … and to improve the quality of public service, Federal personnel management should be implemented consistent with merit system principles.”
The shift away from a patronage system produced a more stable and efficient federal workforce, which has enabled improvements in many critical areas, including seismic safety and disaster response.
Merit-based civil service matters for safety
While the work of these federal employees often goes unnoticed, the benefits are demonstrable and widespread. That becomes most apparent when disasters strike and buildings that meet modern code requirements remain standing.
A merit-based civil service is not just a democratic ideal but a proven necessity for the safety and security of the American people, one we hope will continue well into the future. This can be achieved by retaining federal scientists and engineers and supporting the essential work of federal agencies.
Jonathan P. Stewart has received funding from NSF and USGS. He is the chair of the Steering Committee for the National Seismic Hazard Model, a member of the National Institute of Building Sciences’ Provisions Update Committee, and a member of the federal Advisory Committee for Earthquake Hazard Reduction (ACEHR). His contributions to this article draw upon his experience and do not reflect the views of the Steering Committee, Provisions Update Committee, or ACEHR.
Lucy Arendt has received funding from NSF and the Applied Technology Council. She is a member and current chair of the federal Advisory Committee for Earthquake Hazard Reduction (ACEHR). Her contributions to this article reflect her professional expertise and do not reflect the views of ACEHR.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a top contender for the title of Great American Novel, turns 100 on April 10.
A century later, it is invoked to help make sense of a world that still confuses “material enterprise with moral achievement” – as critic Sarah Churchwell wrote in the foreword to Gatsby’s centennial edition.
A Meta insider’s memoir takes its title, Careless People, from Fitzgerald’s novel. The same phrase circulated on social media and in The New York Times during Donald Trump’s first presidency, referring to his administration’s downplaying of COVID-19.
In 2018, The Atlantic compared Trump to Tom Buchanan, one of Fitzgerald’s “careless people”, describing “an eerie symmetry […] as if the villain of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel had been brought to life in a louder, gaudier guise for the 21st century”. More recently, others have compared Trump to Gatsby himself.
The Great Gatsby tells the tale of a lovesick man striving for social acceptance, believing personal reinvention and riches can help to rewrite the past. It is a story of longing: not just for lost love, but for an unattainable ideal.
The centenary couldn’t be more timely for this literary masterpiece, preoccupied by the same things we are: immense affluence, privilege, the limits of social mobility and the hidden underbelly of the American Dream. The Great Gatsby, while a relative literary failure in Fitzgerald’s lifetime, is enduringly popular today, with at least 25 million copies sold to date, numerous film and stage adaptations (and literary riffs), and a staple position on school and university reading lists.
“What we think about Gatsby illuminates what we think about money, race, romance and history,” wrote The New York Times’ A.O. Scott recently. “How we imagine him has a lot to do with how we see ourselves.”
The Great Gatsby is set against the backdrop of Roaring Twenties America: an era Fitzgerald famously dubbed the Jazz Age.
Fuelled by the infectious rhythms of jazz, driven by the economic forces of market prosperity and mass consumerism, and heady on the alcoholic vapours and illicit thrills associated with Prohibition-era nightlife, the 1920s were a decade where American fortunes were made and lost.
It was also, as Fitzgerald’s novel outlines, a period where individual ambition burned as fiercely as desire.
Picryl
The plot follows the enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a spotlight-eschewing, self-made millionaire whose seemingly breezy approach to life masks a singular obsession: the rekindling of a lost romance with a beautiful woman from his past.
Born James Gatz, Fitzgerald’s charismatic protagonist reinvents himself in the hope of winning back the love of his life, wealthy socialite Daisy Buchanan. Taken at face value, Gatsby’s world is one of incredible luxury and dazzling excess – lavish parties, fast cars and ostentatious attire – all designed to lure Daisy back into his arms.
But as we begin to scratch beneath the surface, the glittering facade Gatsby has constructed gives way to something far more fragile and tragic: an impossible fantasy driven by jealously, obsession and self-deception.
As the reader comes to appreciate, Gatsby’s accumulated gains may grant him partial access to the world of old money, but he will never truly be accepted by America’s elite. No matter how hard he might try, he cannot surmount the barriers of class and entitlement.
Ultimately, Gatsby’s misguided belief that he can somehow crowbar his way into the upper echelons of high society while simultaneously turning back the hands of time leads to his downfall. In Fitzgerald’s words, he ends up paying “a high price for living too long with a single dream”.
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel is still invoked to help make sense of a world that often confuses ‘material enterprise with moral achievement’. Nickolas Muray/Picryl
F. Scott Fitzgerald, literary celebrity
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24 1896. The son of middle-class Catholic parents, he spent much of his youth living in upstate New York. In 1913, he enrolled at Princeton University, where he formed a lasting friendship with future literary critic Edmund Wilson.
More absorbed in literary and dramatic endeavours than his studies, Fitzgerald’s grades suffered and he dropped out in 1917 – though not before falling deeply in love with Ginevra King, an heiress who would leave an indelible imprint on his writing. She would inspire many of his fictional female characters, including Daisy Buchanan.
Fitzgerald first encountered King during a winter vacation in St. Paul in January 1915. The debutante daughter of a wealthy Chicago stockbroker, she quickly became the object of Fitzgerald’s intense devotion (much to the disapproval of her family, who thought him beneath her).
In the wake of his heartbreak after the relationship broke down, Fitzgerald enlisted in the United States Army, earning a commission as a second lieutenant. During his military service, he met Zelda Sayre, the woman he would eventually marry. Meanwhile, he began work on his first novel, This Side of Paradise.
Released in 1920, Fitzgerald’s formally adventurous debut was a critical success and cultural sensation, capturing the restless energy and shifting moral landscape of a cohort coming of age in the wake of World War I.
The novel’s transparently autobiographical narrative centres on Amory Blaine, a young Midwesterner whose intellectual and romantic adventures at Princeton – especially a doomed affair with the beautiful, elusive Isabelle Borgé – struck a chord with readers. It turned Fitzgerald into a media celebrity and unofficial spokesman for his generation.
Two years later, Fitzgerald published The Beautiful and Damned. It details the disintegration of a wealthy, aimless couple – Anthony and Gloria Patch – whose hedonistic lifestyle and misplaced belief in their own brilliance leads to ruin.
Fitzgerald’s tonally pessimistic second novel was again shaped by his own experiences, drawing heavily on his tempestuous marriage to Zelda, who was exhibiting symptoms of profound mental instability.
However, in stark contrast to This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned sold well, but received a lukewarm reception from reviewers. Some found its characters unappealing and its plot depressing.
By then, the Fitzgeralds had grown accustomed to the finer things in life. Which meant they needed money. Lots of it. To keep up with their lavish spending, Fitzgerald started to churn out short stories for popular magazines at a rapid pace. While this move provided him with a degree of financial security, some critics and contemporaries questioned whether he was squandering his literary gifts. Ernest Hemingway, for one, was “shocked” by his friend’s willingness to pander to commercial tastes and imperatives.
‘I want to write something new’
That said, while he was generating copy for mass-market publication, Fitzgerald was also hard at work on The Great Gatsby. In July 1922, he declared:
I want to write something new – something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned.
Determined to prove his worth as an artist, Fitzgerald, who wanted “to write a novel better than any ever written in America”, began to play with “form and emotion”. As his ideas for the new novel – which at one point bore the working title Trimalchio – took shape, Fitzgerald set up shop in Great Neck, Long Island. This location became the inspiration for East and West Egg, the fictionalised island communities that are the novel’s primary setting.
Fitzgerald, clearly not lacking in confidence, set his sights high for his third novel, taking inspiration from James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
Departing from conventional realism, Fitzgerald experimented with modernist techniques, layering his narrative with symbolic depth, synesthetic imagery, fragmented storytelling and complex characterisation.
The result was a work both lyrical and impressionistic. Here’s a vivid, illustrative excerpt:
The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. […] The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.
Fitzgerald’s Midwestern narrator, Nick Carraway, is describing one of Gatsby’s legendary West Egg parties. He is renting the house next to Gatsby’s mansion,
“a colossal affair by any standard”, with “a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden”.
At first, Nick is fascinated by his enigmatic neighbour, drawn in by the sheer force of Gatsby’s optimism and his unrelenting faith in the transformative power of love and the trappings of wealth. But as the novel progresses, events lead Nick to reevaluate. He describes his charming friend as possessing “one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life”.
He continues, outlining attributes essential to a good confidence man:
It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
When he isn’t with Gatsby, Nick is often with his cousin Daisy and her husband, Tom, the embodiment of American aristocracy and snobbery. They are, in Nick’s damning estimation, “careless” and “rotten” people.
An unreconstructed white supremacist prone to casual displays of extreme prejudice and physical violence, the adulterous Tom – who wouldn’t be out of place in the more dismal real-world and online recesses of today – is, in particular, deeply suspicious of Gatsby, regarding him as an interloper with dubious intentions.
The Atlantic wrote that Tom, “the Yale man, the football star, the spender of old money, the scion of what he calls the Nordic race – embodies the peak of social status in his century”. And that “Trump – the former Playboy-cover subject, the billionaire celebrity, the most powerful man in America – does the same for his”.
And their shared personality traits are the product of their shared relationship to power – the casual unreflective certainty that comes from inheritance, and enables its holders to wield its blunt force as both a weapon and a shield.
Tom’s “little investigation” into Gatsby’s background and finances reveals they are not what they seem. This leads to unintended, disastrous consequences.
Nick, our disillusioned observer, doesn’t quite know what to make of it all. We take leave of him at the end of the novel, on “the beach and sprawled out on the sand”, reminiscing about “Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock”.
‘A flying leap into the future’
Fitzgerald knew he had achieved something special with The Great Gatsby. His peers did too. T.S. Eliot considered it “the first step” forward “American fiction has taken since Henry James”. Edith Wharton concurred, calling it “a flying leap into the future.”
Yet, for all this critical acclaim, The Great Gatsby failed to resonate with the reading public – much to Fitzgerald’s dismay. By October, the book had sold less than 20,000 copies. (By comparison, This Side of Paradise had sold nearly 50,000 copies, across multiple printings.) As his biographer Arthur Mizener observed, by February 1926, “a few thousand more copies had been sold and the book was dead”. It was a blow the writer never really recovered from.
Fitzgerald’s personal life was tumultuous, marred by alcoholism, Zelda’s mental health issues and financial debt. This had a negative effect on his work. While he completed one more novel in 1934 – the excellent, darkly romantic Tender is the Night, arguably his best book – Fitzgerald struggled to be productive.
Following several failed suicide attempts, in 1940 he died of a heart attack, believing himself an abject failure and his career a total write-off. His most recent royalty cheque had been for $13.13. He was 44.
In the immediate aftermath of his death, writers and critics began to reassess Fitzgerald’s accomplishments. This effort was initially spearheaded by his friends, notably Edmund Wilson, who, in 1941, organised a series of tributes to be published in The New Republic.
In 1945, Viking Press released The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Dorothy Parker, which brought Fitzgerald to the attention of a new generation of readers. At the same time, the US military distributed 150,000 copies of The Great Gatsby to American servicemen during World War II as part of their Armed Services Editions.
Before long, The Great Gatsby made its way into the classroom, where it remains a staple of countless high school and university syllabuses. It continues to inspire readers, many of whom encounter it at a formative stage in their lives.
Amazon
It has been adapted for the screen on multiple occasions – with mixed results. Jack Clayton’s 1974 version, starring Robert Redford as the eponymous Gatsby, was faithful to Fitzgerald’s vision, but utterly lifeless, while Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation, a hollow exercise in audiovisual bluster, failed to do justice to the novel’s subtleties. For all their shortcomings, these films helped cement Gatsby’s place in the popular imagination.
An ‘uncannily prescient’ enduring classic
Novelist Jesmyn Ward suggests Fitzgerald’s novel is
a book that endures, generation after generation, because every time a reader returns to The Great Gatsby, we discover new revelations, new insights, new burning bits of language.
I agree – and I think Fitzgerald would have had rich material to work with, had he been alive today. Ours, lest we forget, is a world where ersatz robber barons hoard nearly all our shared available assets and resources, where racist discourse resounds, and where rampant consumerism remains unchecked.
Last year America magazine argued Gatsby himself “gives the greatest insight into why Mr. Trump is still popular”, comparing Trump’s “fraudulent real estate deals” to Gatsby’s nefarious way of making his money, and Gatsby’s huge parties to Trump’s rallies. Both, the writer argued, are nouveau riche outsiders, “hell-bent on being accepted by the Manhattan set”, and scorned by the elites. (Though Trump’s second presidency seems to be ushering in a new elite.)
Thinking aloud, perhaps it’s more accurate to say Trump is a weird combination of characters. On one hand, he resembles Gatsby: a self-mythologising social climber, nostalgic for a past that never really existed. On the other, he shares much with Tom Buchanan: unscrupulous, self-interested and protected by his wealth.
In a historical moment that mirrors his own in many ways, Fitzgerald’s essentially tragic masterwork, which ends suggesting we are all forever “borne back ceaselessly into the past”, strikes me as uncannily prescient and relevant today.
Alexander Howard 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.
While this political climate brings uncertainty at an international level, it comes with fear of job loss for many Canadians at a time when the cost of living is already straining many families’ finances.
These topics may appear to be concerns for adults, but children may also feel the effects. As psychology researchers studying parent-child relationships and child mental health, we believe it is important to consider children’s potential fears and anxiety in the current political climate.
Here, we explain why it’s important to address this topic with children, and how parents can do so in a reassuring and informative manner.
Children’s concerns and emotions
While the economy and politics could seem like topics that children would not really care about, recent research suggests that many children and youth actually worry about these topics.
Studies suggest children worry about issues affecting their families. (Shutterstock)
Similarly, studies elsewhere suggest children and youth worry about issues affecting their families. Based on these numbers, we can assume that many Canadian children also worry about the current Canada-U.S. political climate.
Of course, it’s worth remembering not all families experience political and economic events in the same way. For example, children whose families face economic precarity are likely already living with stressors affecting their households like unemployment or food insecurity. Current tensions may also exacerbate children’s existing concerns.
When children are able to talk about what concerns them with their parents, they learn important emotional regulation and coping skills. For example, they learn how to identify and understand their emotions, and how to regulate those emotions. Discussions between parents and children also help foster a climate of trust, in which children feel like they can rely on their parents in moments of need.
Noticing, tackling children’s anxiety and fears
Children may not always have the words to articulate their concerns in the same way that adults do. Parents should watch for anxiety symptoms in their children, which may manifest in various ways, including having mood changes, being more irritable or sad, having difficulty sleeping, being more clingy than usual, or withdrawing from activities. There are also signs that may be harder to spot.
We present five ways to address the situation with your children:
1. Use direct questions to understand how children feel. Direct questions can help understand how children feel. For example, you may ask: “What have you heard about what’s happening?” or “How do you feel about it?” These questions can help understand what specifically is scary to them.
Children could be worried about no longer seeing family in the U.S., or some may even fear a military clash. (Shutterstock)
This is especially important given that children tend to worry about different things than adults. For example, younger children with family in the U.S. may worry they will no longer be able to see their family members anymore. Older children may be worried about a parent losing a job, the country’s economic instability or environmental impacts. Some children may even fear a military clash.
2. Be sensitive to how the conflict is presented. In the media, it is common to refer to the diplomatic and economic tensions as a “trade war.” While adults understand that trade wars do not involve military attacks, this concept is much more abstract for children.
It’s important to reframe the conflict in ways that children can understand. For example, parents can compare the conflict between two children. Parents might say: “You know when there are two children upset with each other at school, and they have a big disagreement. Sometimes it can take a lot of time to find a solution that works for everyone. The conflict between Canada and the U.S. is a bit like that. It could take a lot of time and trouble to find a solution.”
3. Avoid misinformation. When discussing these topics, parents should seek to clarify any misinformation and provide reassurance. They should also help ensure children receive information from credible sources rather than social media or peers, who may sensationalize or misinterpret events. Providing factual but age-appropriate explanations is a key ingredient in mitigating fear and uncertainty.
4. Focus on co-operation and opportunities instead of boycotting.
Many Canadian families are choosing to boycott American products. In order to ease the emotional burden on children, it can be helpful to reframe the boycott as an opportunity for co-operation. For instance, parents can highlight how they are trying to support local businesses.
Similarly, for families with resources to travel, changes in travel plans can be framed as a way to discover new places. A parent might frame it as: “This year, instead of going to the beach, we’re going to be exploring some incredible places closer to home. We’re going to have so much fun trying new things!” This approach creates curiosity and control, not anxiety. It can also be beneficial for children’s development to learn to be more flexible with change.
5. Create a sense of normalcy and routine. As important as it is to validate children’s fears, it is equally important to help them maintain a sense of normalcy. Families should strive to balance discussions about the trade war and its potential ramifications with more light, mundane topics. Similarly, limiting the time that children watch the news or when it is audible can help limit further concerns from developing.
Routines are also beneficial for children’s development and well-being. Maintaining a predictable schedule, such as a bedtime routine, can help children feel safe and less anxious. Focus on adding fun and soothing activities to the daily routine. This lets children know life goes on.
Navigating turbulent times
As the trade war with the U.S. plays out, parents should consider how it may impact their children’s emotions and sense of safety. Even serious conflicts such as this one don’t last forever, and solutions will come.
In the meantime, parents can help children cope with these challenging times by offering age-appropriate explanations and encouraging resilience.
Jean-François Bureau receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Consortium National de Formation en Santé.
Audrey-Ann Deneault receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Centre de recherche universitaire sur les jeunes et les familles.
One year after Video Ezy opened its first store in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Broadcasting Act 1989 was introduced. It established frameworks and funding for local content that largely still exist.
But in 2025, New Zealanders’ viewing and listening habits are radically different. We’ve shifted from local broadcasters to international streaming and online media services. Video and music streaming platforms now reach more people than local TV and radio.
This brings convenience and access to a world of film, TV, news, and music. But it also means local content risks being swamped on its own shores. A recent discussion document from Manatū Taonga/Ministry for Culture and Heritage is the latest attempt to address the problem.
Among the suggested changes to local content funding, promotion, and distribution are:
requiring newly manufactured smart TVs to pre-install New Zealand apps
the merger of NZ On Air with the NZ Film Commission
changes to the Broadcast Standards Authority
increased captioning and audio description
and requiring local and global media providers to invest in and promote New Zealand content.
Some of these are welcome – and long overdue. But broader media reform must also take this opportunity to create future-proofed policy; one that’s responsive to where local audiences are consuming content, and which supports the media sector to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape.
Why local content struggles
New Zealand media, already hit by wider platform choice and the movement of advertising revenue offshore, has experienced deep job cuts, including at state-owned TVNZ, and the complete closure of Newshub.
While that might seem positive, Netflix, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram each individually outperform TVNZ+ viewership. And many global video-on-demand platforms have fewer than ten local titles available for New Zealand audiences to watch.
These figures might suggest New Zealanders aren’t interested in local content – but that isn’t necessarily true. If we compare local media structures to overseas markets, we see major differences in the opportunities for local content to reach audiences.
Unlike other comparable countries, New Zealand lacks government-owned and fully-funded platforms for locally produced content to find local audiences. Where these platforms exist overseas, engagement with local content is higher.
Announcing his government’s creative sector strategy last year, Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Paul Goldsmith said it aims to “nurture talent and support a pipeline to provide sustainable career opportunities”.
Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Paul Goldsmith. Getty Images
The strategy also speaks of “modernising and streamlining government regulation to enable our cultural sectors to thrive”.
But there are significant omissions in the latest discussion document. Video gaming, for example, is largely missing from the proposals, although research suggests the industry could represent up to 44% of global consumer entertainment spending by 2040.
Addressing those omissions and strategically embracing new opportunities offers a chance to support local producers in two key ways: enhancing the global presence of New Zealand content, and ensuring local audiences see themselves in the media they enjoy.
This would require an ambitious rethink around media infrastructure and investments, focused on what can have the biggest impact long term. This might include:
investing in a fully-funded youth radio station
changing the revenue structure of TVNZ to be primarily state funded
legislating global video sharing platforms like YouTube and TikTok to promote New Zealand content
or developing a progressive, industry-informed video game policy.
It’s vital that any proposed policy changes are fit for purpose and adaptable for years to come.
Past attempts at media reform in Aotearoa New Zealand have often been reactive to changing environments, rather than proactive. But there’s an opportunity now to consider more meaningful changes, addressing current challenges while looking to the future.
Jesse Austin-Stewart has completed commissioned research for NZ On Air and participated in focus groups for Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage. He has received competitive funding from Creative New Zealand, NZ On Air, Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture & Hertiage, and the NZ Music Commission. He is a writer member of APRA AMCOS and a member of the Composer’s Association of New Zealand
Catherine Hoad has previously completed research in partnership with or commissioned by APRA AMCOS, Toi Mai Workforce Development Council, Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture & Heritage, ScreenSafe, and NZ On Air.
Dave Carter is a writer member of APRA AMCOS and has previously received funding from Manatū Taongao Ministry for Culture and Heritage.
Oli Wilson has previously completed research in partnership with or commissioned by APRA AMCOS, Toi Mai Workforce Development Council, Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture & Heritage and the NZ Music Commission. He has also received funding, or contributed to projects that have benefited from funding from NZ on Air, the NZ Music Commission and Recorded Music New Zealand. He has provided services to The Chills, owns shares in TripTunz Limited, and is a writer member of APRA AMCOS.
Drowning in streaming choices? If so, you’re not alone – as our experts have a particularly wide range of picks this month.
From musicals and comedy, to serial killers and twisted fictional corporations, there’s plenty to get stuck into.
The Pitt
Binge (Australia), Neon (NZ)
The Pitt is best described as a cross between ER and 24. The series follows an emergency room in Pittsburgh in real time across a 15-hour shift. Each one hour episode is an hour of their shift. Creator R. Scott Gemill and executive producer John Wells both worked extensively on ER, as did Noah Wyle who plays Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending.
The day in question falls on the anniversary of the death of Robby’s mentor during the COVID pandemic and he experiences several flashbacks throughout the shift. The ER ward is chaotic due to the nursing shortage and failing American healthcare system. The series regularly cuts to the overcrowded waiting room of desperate people, waiting to receive care.
The large ensemble is fantastic and it’s great to see a medical show that actually includes nursing staff as key characters (take note, Grey’s Anatomy!). By unfolding in real time, we get a sense of how chaotic their work is, with several doctors jumping between patients. Several key cases also unfold across several episodes, with many building to dramatic effects.
It should also be noted that due to having its home on a streaming platform, the show is allowed to depict graphic and sometimes gruesome medical scenes without intruding soundtracks or montages, which only adds to the realism.
– Stuart Richards
Severance, season two
Apple TV
In absurdist psychological thriller Severance, individuals working for the multinational biotech corporation Lumon Industries can have their work-selves surgically “severed”, separating the memories and experiences of their workplace “innies” from those of their “outies”.
The second season, three years in the making, looks at the fallout from season one’s cliffhanger finale, in which the innies of Macrodata Analysis, Helly R (Britt Lower), Irving B (John Turturro) and Dylan G (Zach Cherry), led by Mark S (Adam Scott), staged a revolt and busted briefly into their outies’ worlds. In doing so, they exposed shocking secrets about Lumon – including that outie Mark’s wife, thought dead, is somehow alive but being held by Lumon.
This season has been as stylish and weird as the first, revelling in striking cinematography, impeccable direction, quirky scripting and inspired world-building. It also becomes increasingly eerie, focusing more on Lumon’s bizarre, cult-like history and culture, and the unsettling nature of the innies’ jobs.
Although lore-heavy, the show has avoided many of the pitfalls of “puzzle box” shows, balancing revelations with astonishingly good performances, particularly from Trammell Tillman as Lumon floor manager Mr Milchick. This uncanny and perversely funny season deserves its status as a water cooler hit. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait three more years for a resolution.
– Erin Harrington
Happiness
ThreeNow (New Zealand) from April 3
With their new show Happiness, airing on Three and Three Now, Kip Chapman and Luke Di Somma have created a welcome New Zealand answer to the popular style of “backstage” musical TV show.
The protagonist is stage director Charlie (Harry McNaughton), who has returned from New York to his hometown of Tauranga having been dismissed from helming a Broadway revival of Cats. In a desperate attempt to demonstrate competency for a renewal of his visa, and to please his mum Gaye (Rebecca Gibney), Charlie decides to help out the local amateur musical theatre society Pizzaz (“the finest large-scale yet boutique classical musical theatre company in Tauranga”) with its latest production, an original musical called The Trojan Horse.
While the story is fairly predictable, the show blessed with an engaging pastiche score by Luke Di Somma that references a variety of fun musical theatre tropes. It is a welcome addition to the “let’s put on a show” backstager genre, and will appeal to fans of musical theatre as well as workplace comedies.
Happiness paints New Zealand musical theatre talent in a positive light – showing what the locals can do – while being highly entertaining in its own right.
– Gregory Camp
Running Point
Netflix
Running Point is writer-producer Mindy Kaling’s return to her roots with an office-family comedy. After spending some time in high-school with Never Have I Ever and college with Sex Lives of College Girls, Kaling returns to where she started her TV career with The Office and The Mindy Project. Based very loosely on the real-life story of Los Angeles Lakers President Jeanie Buss, this Kate Hudson vehicle is ripe with satire, family dynamics and absurdity.
When her older brother (Justin Theroux) goes to rehab, he names his sister (Hudson) as the new president of their family business: basketball empire the Los Angeles “Waves”. Running Point feels like a more fully-realised version of Kaling’s previous short-lived family sports comedy Champions.
The cast is stacked with TV comedy MVPs including Brenda Song, Drew Tarver, Scott MacArthur, Jay Ellis, Max Greenfield and Jon Glaser. Hudson is at her most Goldie Hawn-like here, mixing physical comedy with goofiness and heart. It’s easy and enjoyable watching, even if (like me) you are not a big sports fan!
– Jessica Ford
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer
Netflix
True crime documentaries, particularly those concerned with serial killers, are often criticised for their silencing of the victims, while elevating the perpetrator and perversely celebrating their crimes.
Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer bucks that trend. Its focus is on the women who were murdered by Rex Heuermann, and the families and friends who band together in their shared suffering and pursuit of justice over a period of more than two decades. In particular, it is the disappearance of Shannan Gilbert, and her mother’s dogged perseverance in keeping the police department’s attention on her missing daughter, which leads to the discovery and identification of the bodies of another six women.
Like his namesake, the “Long Island Ripper”, Heuermann relied on the fact that his victims were sex workers – assuming their deaths would be of little consequence to law enforcement, or that their disappearances wouldn’t even be noticed. For some time this was true, as one interviewee observes: “knowing that sex workers might be afraid to come forward with information, police were not active in reaching out to them and making them feel comfortable coming forward”.
But these women were mothers, daughters, sisters and friends. Gone Girls rejects the marginalisation of the victims, just as their communities had worked so hard to do.
– Jessica Gildersleeve
Adolescence
Netflix
Why do children kill other children? What makes an intelligent boy from a loving suburban family borrow a knife from a school friend and, on a casual Sunday evening, stab another child to death? When someone so young commits a horrific act, who is to blame – the child, the family, or society?
With its technical mastery and gut-punch power, Adolescence is a tour de force. The series tracks the story of 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) after he is arrested and later charged with the murder of his classmate, Katie. Co-creator Stephen Graham stars as Jamie’s father, Eddie.
The series is a harrowing take on male violence and rage, and the misogynist radicalisation of vulnerable boys. Trapped in the dark mirrors of the manosphere, and allured by the grim logic of Andrew Tate, Jamie represents a generation of boys tragically and perhaps permanently lost to incel culture.
Skilfully filmed in Philip Barantini’s signature one-shot style, the series pushes the limits of television production. The high-wire act of timing and trust amplifies the message that one misstep can lead to failure. In Adolescence, however, there are no easy outs. Just as the continuous filming style offers no reprieve, the show refuses to offer a simple explanation for why Jamie did it.
Adolescence is not an easy watch, but for those parenting teens, it is a necessary one.
Edutainment at its finest, The Role of a Lifetime approaches contemporary parenthood with good humour and even better, good research. Informative without being preachy, the short series focuses on parenting tweens (children in late primary school) and above, with a sympathetic approach to the pressures of modern life. In a nutshell: social media is everywhere, what can and should we do about it?
Leads Kate Ritchie and Nazeem Hussain serve as part-segment presenters and part-parent role players in this mixture of magazine show and sitcom, while the steady hands of Amanda Keller and Maggie Dent provide context and permission to get it wrong.
Aimed very squarely at a nuclear heterocentric Australian middle class, there are moments that still stray into cliché. For instance, why is mum still in charge of dinner even though she’s also worked a full day, often still in full work clothes, until late at night? Nonetheless, the warm dynamic between the family members and the chosen experts makes the show really engaging and invites further discussion rather than dictating rules and failures.
The featured “young experts” who participate in the casual panels are also excellent. If they are anything resembling Australia’s future, we are in good hands.
– Liz Giuffre
Nickel Boys
Prime Video
Nickel Boys, a new film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, follows Elwood Curtis – a studious, law-abiding teenager who is sent to the Nickel Academy in mid-1960s Florida after he unwittingly accepts a ride in a stolen car and is unjustly convicted as an accessory to the theft.
The Nickel Academy, based on the real-life Dozier School for Boys, is a segregated reform school operating as a front for the coercion of unpaid labour from the boys detained there. These boys are subject to beatings, rapes and psychological torture. And their efforts to run away or resist often prove fatal.
At Nickel, Elwood bonds with another 17-year-old inmate, Turner, whose cynicism provides a foil to Elwood’s idealism. A second timeline follows the adult Elwood’s efforts to build a life and maintain relationships in the aftermath of his imprisonment and escape.
You don’t watch Nickel Boys so much as experience it – seeing and hearing what Elwood and (later) Turner see and hear. The film’s first-person approach can sometimes be distracting, not least because of the impulse to compare it with your own sense of what looking looks like.
That said, the film honours Whitehead’s ambivalence, developing a visual style that amplifies a major plot twist in the novel. It turns the darkest events into a luminous fable of endurance.
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.
The future of Australia’s key climate policy is uncertain after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said a Coalition government would review the measure, known as the “safeguard mechanism”, which is designed to limit emissions from Australia’s largest industrial polluters.
According to the Australian Financial Review, if the Coalition wins office it will consider relaxing the policy, as part of its plan to increase domestic gas supplies.
Evidence suggests weakening the mechanism would be a mistake. In fact, it could be argued the policy does not go far enough to force polluting companies to curb their emissions.
Both major parties now accept Australia must reach net-zero emissions by 2050. This bipartisan agreement should make one thing clear: winding back the safeguard mechanism would be reckless policy.
What’s the safeguard mechanism again?
The safeguard mechanism began under the Coalition government in 2016. It now applies to 219 large polluting facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases a year. These facilities are in sectors such as electricity, mining, gas, manufacturing, waste and transport. Together, they produce just under one-third of Australia’s emissions.
Under the policy’s original design, companies were purportedly required to keep their emissions below a certain cap, and buy carbon credits to offset any emissions over the cap. However, loopholes meant the cap was weakly enforced.
Labor strengthened the safeguard mechanism after it won office, by setting a hard cap for industrial emissions. The Coalition voted against the reforms.
Dutton has since labelled the safeguard mechanism a “carbon tax”
– a claim that has been debunked. Some members of the Coalition reportedly believe the policy makes manufacturers globally uncompetitive.
Now, according to media reports, a Coalition government would review the safeguard mechanism with a view to weakening it, in a bid to bolster business and increase gas supply.
Why the safeguard mechanism should be left alone
Weakening the safeguard mechanism would lead to several problems.
First, it would mean large facilities, including new coal and gas projects, would be permitted to operate without meaningful limits on their pollution. This threatens Australia’s international climate obligations.
Second, if polluters were no longer required to buy carbon offsets, this would disrupt Australia’s carbon market.
As the Clean Energy Regulator notes, the safeguard mechanism is the “dominant source” of demand for Australian carbon credits.
In the first quarter of 2024, about 1.2 million carbon-credit units were purchased by parties wanting to offset their emissions. The vast majority were purchased by companies meeting compliance obligations under the safeguard mechanism or similar state rules.
If companies are no longer required to buy offsets, or they buy fewer offsets, this would hurt those who sell carbon credits.
Carbon credits are earned by organisations and individuals who abate carbon – through measures such as tree planting or retaining vegetation. The activities are often carried out by farmers and other landholders, including Indigenous organisations. Indigenous-led carbon projects have delivered jobs, cultural renewal and environmental benefits.
The safeguard mechanism, together with the government pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, also provides certainty for the operators of polluting facilities. Many in the business sector have called for the policy to remain unchanged.
And finally, winding back the safeguard mechanism would send a troubling signal to the world: that Australia is stepping back from climate action.
Now is not the time to abdicate our responsibilities on climate change. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen dramatically since 1960. This increase is driving global warming and climate change, leading to extreme weather events which will only worsen.
A hard-won policy
The safeguard mechanism has not had time to deliver meaningful outcomes. And it is far from perfect – but it is hard-won, and Australia needs it.
The 2023 reforms to the mechanism were designed to support trade-exposed industries, while encouraging companies to invest in emissions reduction.
Undoing this mechanism would risk our climate goals. It would leave the government limited means to curb pollution from Australia’s largest emitters, and muddy the roadmap to net-zero. It would also create uncertainty for all carbon market participants, including the polluting facilities themselves.
Felicity Deane 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Frew, Lecturer in Mycorrhizal Ecology, Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, Western Sydney University
If you’re walking outdoors, chances are something remarkable is happening under your feet. Vast fungal networks are silently working to keep ecosystems alive.
These fungi aren’t what you might picture. They are not mushrooms, or brightly coloured growths on tree trunks. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi look like spools of thread wrapped around plant roots.
What makes these fungi remarkable is the deal they struck almost half a billion years ago with another kingdom of life – plants.
AM fungi make threads of hyphae thinner than spider silk and weave them through plant roots. Then, they begin to trade, offering plants water and phosphorus, a vital plant nutrient in soils. In return, plants offer carbon-rich sugars and fats from photosynthesis. Fungi can’t photosynthesise, but plants can.
This symbiotic relationship can help plants survive periods of drought and live in nutrient poor soils. More than 80% of all plant families rely on these fungi, while AM fungi cannot live without plants.
Without these fungi, many of Australia’s plants — and the soil they grow in — would be in real trouble. Our continent is ancient, dry, and nutrient-poor. But while we monitor the fate of plants and animals in response to human impact and climate change, we haven’t been tracking the fungi who support it all. We don’t even know how many species there are, let alone if we’re losing them.
To help fill this gap, I have developed the first dedicated database recording species and distributions of AM fungi in Australia – AusAMF.
The underground economy of roots and filaments
AM fungi deserve to be better known. These essential companions to most of the world’s plants maintain plant diversity, suppress invasive species, store carbon, cycle nutrients and prevent soil erosion.
Here are five remarkable things about AM fungi:
1. They’re older than roots
Incredibly, this fungus-plant symbiosis emerged before plants evolved roots some 360–420 million years ago.
AM fungi have been around for 475 million years, partnering with very early land plants such as the ancestors of today’s liverworts – which have no roots. This ancient alliance actually helped plants colonise land.
2. They can boost native plants and reject invasives
AM fungi do more than transport nutrients, carbon and water. They shape entire plant communities. Some plants benefit more than others, influencing competition and species co-existence. By giving some species a competitive edge, AM fungi allow some plants to survive which might otherwise be lost.
When AM fungal diversity declines, it can lead to a loss of native plants and open the door to invasive plant species.
But with the right management — such as reducing pesticides or reintroducing locally adapted fungi — AM fungi can boost plant nutrition and ecosystem restoration. They can help native vegetation recover and stop invasive species from gaining a foothold.
3. They run an invisible underground economy
The fungi-plant trade is more organised than you might think.
In some instances, plants reward the fungi giving them the most phosphorus with more carbon, while the fungi prioritise plants offering them the most carbon – a bit like a marketplace. Some plants have figured out how to cheat the fungi, taking resources without giving anything in return.
This high-magnification video shows water and nutrients flowing inside the hyphae of the AM fungus Rhizophagus irregularis. Source: Oyarte Galvez et al. (2025) Nature
4. They boost plant defences against pests and disease
Fungi don’t just help plants grow, they help them fight. As AM fungi colonise a plant’s roots, they boost its defences against threats such as diseases and plant-eating insects by strengthening and speeding up chemical responses. My research shows the size of this fungal-defence boost for plants can depend on what AM fungi are present.
And if one plant is attacked, it puts out chemical signals which can move through the fungal network and let other plants know to ready their defences.
5. They take in vast amounts of carbon
Plants take carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their leaves, roots and wood. But AM fungi store carbon from plants too.
Because mycorrhizal fungi are found wherever there are plants, their underground networks are vast – and so is their carbon impact. Recent research estimates the annual figure is more than a third of global fossil fuel carbon emissions.
Vitally important, all but unknown
If AM fungi vanished, many plant species would likely follow suit. Others would become more vulnerable to drought, disease, and pests. Soil would erode more easily, and nutrient and carbon flows would shift dramatically.
Are they in trouble? We don’t know. AM fungi are out of sight, out of mind. No federal or state government agency seem to be tracking them. Our current National Soil Action Plan doesn’t mention fungi at all, despite their importance to soil health.
Other than Antarctica, Australia is the least sampled continent for soil AM fungi, with just 32 sites in global databases. Europe, by comparison, has data from more than 1,200 sites.
AM fungi help plants grow better. On the left is grass in symbiosis with AM fungi with visible white hyphae. On the right is grass without the fungi. Soil Ecology Wiki, CC BY
That’s where I hope the AusAMF database will help. I partnered with landholders and research networks to gather soil samples. So far, the database has data from 610 locations, with about 400 more on the way.
But this is still scratching the surface. AM fungal communities can differ between neighbouring fields or habitats, depending on land management methods and types of vegetation. Virtually all current records are a single snapshot in time — we lack the long-term monitoring needed to track seasonal or annual changes.
It would be a mistake to remain in the dark about AM fungi. The more we learn, the more we see their importance, not only in supporting biodiversity, but in helping our crops and ecosystems cope with a changing world. If they are in decline, we need to know – and set about protecting them.
Adam Frew receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the British Ecological Society.
standardised tobacco pack and cigarette stick sizes, no more novelty pack sizes or cigarette lengths
updated and improved graphic health warnings and quitting advice inserts within all tobacco packs
warnings printed directly on cigarettes
banning ingredients that make tobacco taste better and easier to smoke, including menthol.
Retailers have a three-month grace period to sell any old stock already in their stores by July 1.
Here’s what’s behind these changes – and what needs to happen next.
Packs warn about the harms of smoking. Department of Health and Ageing
New graphic health warnings
Cigarette packaging requirements have been stagnant since 2012, when Australia introduced plain packaging laws that banned the use of all on-pack logos and branding. This was a world-first.
New warnings replace those from 2012. Department of Health and Ageing
Cigarette packages must carry one of ten new health warnings. Fresh warnings that smoking doubles the risk of cervical cancer and leads to diabetes will be new information for many smokers.
There are also warnings for roll-your-own, cigar, bidi and shisha tobacco packaging.
The size, shape, and colour of cigarettes has also been standardised to prevent tobacco companies from using unique cigarette designs to attract new users. Long, thin cigarettes, for example, have been marketed to women as a fashion accessory and diet tool for nearly a century.
Warnings will now be on the sticks themselves. Department of Health and Ageing
The ingredients permitted in cigarettes are also changing, with ingredients that enhance the flavour of tobacco being now banned. The long list of prohibited ingredients includes everything from cloves, to sugar, to probiotics and vitamins.
Until now, the tobacco industry has had free reign to add ingredients that increase the palatability and attractiveness of cigarettes. This banned list also captures menthol and any ingredients that mimic the cooling properties of menthol.
Why ban menthol?
Menthol masks the harshness of smoke. Just like cold lollies that contain menthol to soothe sore throats and tame coughs, menthol in cigarettes prevents inexperienced smokers from reacting to the rough effects of tobacco smoke in the throat. This helps to make smoking a more pleasant experience that young users will return to.
The introduction of crushable menthol capsules in cigarette filters has proven very popular with Australian teenagers. Teens who use these products are more likely to have recently smoked and have higher smoking intentions in the future. The new laws also explicitly prohibit these “crush balls” or “flavour beads.”
Other counties that have banned menthol have seen drops in tobacco sales and use and increases in quitting behaviours.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed a rule banning menthol in 2022, and a 2024 US Surgeon General report highlighted that menthol products increase addiction and are:
disproportionately used by Black people, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander people, women and people who identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual.
Under the Biden Administration, the FDA delayed issuing the final rule which meant the ban was not properly enacted before Trump was elected.
Organised criminals are operating in Australia’s tobacco supply chain to illegally import and sell tobacco products. Government action to step in and gain control of that supply system is long overdue.
Until this year, Australia’s two most populous states didn’t even require tobacco sellers to be licensed, and Queensland only introduced licensing last year.
Australia will need to change how tobacco is sold. It should not be so easy and commonplace to sell such an addictive and deadly product.
Both state and national governments need timely and transparent reporting on the size and scope of the illicit market, and strict licensing of the entire tobacco supply chain.
Businesses that sell illicit tobacco must face real consequences – not only large fines and loss of licences to operate, but also criminal charges.
All aspects of the tobacco supply chain – from wholesalers to retailers – must be tightly controlled.
Becky Freeman is an expert advisor to the Cancer Council tobacco issues committee and a member of the Cancer Institute vaping communications advisory panel. She has received relevant competitive grants from the NHMRC, MRFF, NSW Health, the Ian Potter Foundation, VicHealth, and Healthway WA.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has finally ended weeks of speculation and named the election date for the national parliament.
After months of unofficial campaigning, Australians will now be treated to a festival of democracy as promises are made, policies are announced, and the leaders travel the country to rally support.
Much of the campaigning by the parties will be focused on the House of Representatives. This is to be expected as the lower house is where government is formed by the party that wins the majority of seats in this chamber, and the leader of this party becomes prime minister.
While the election for the lower house dominates the campaign, the contest for the Senate is rarely mentioned.
This is a bit unfair as the Senate is an immensely powerful chamber.
The power of the Senate
Barring its inability to initiate or amend supply bills, the Senate has almost the same powers as the House of Representatives. Senators can introduce their own bills, as long as they’re not supply bills.
For any proposed bill to become law, it must be passed by the Senate as well as the House of Representatives.
All states have equal representation in the chamber. Currently, every state is represented by 12 senators, each with six-year terms.
This means half the Senate is up for election at every general election.
The territories are represented by two senators each and they face re-election at every general election. The current number of senators is 76.
Winning a majority in the Senate has no bearing on who forms government (it’s the result of the lower house – the House of Representatives – which determines this). It does, however, make it easier for the government to pass bills to become law if it enjoys a majority in this chamber.
Who wins seats in the Senate?
The voting system in the Senate is very different to the House of Representatives. To win a seat in the House of Representatives, a candidate must win 50% +1 of the votes cast in the district.
In the Senate, however, a candidate must win a proportion (approximately 14.3%) of the state-wide vote.
This makes it a bit easier for minor parties to win representation as they can rely on broad support from across the state to reach the required threshold.
Changes introduced in 2016 mean Australians have choice on how to complete their Senate ballot paper. They can either number six or more candidates of their choice above the black line, or vote below the line by numbering 12 or more candidates.
While parties will organise their own preference deals to benefit them, voters are ultimately in control of where their preferences go.
Thanks to the voting system used in the Senate, it is rare for a government to hold a majority of seats in the upper house. The last time this occurred was in 2004 when the John Howard-led Coalition enjoyed a majority in the chamber.
The current Senate
Following the 2022 election, both major parties lost ground in the Senate. To have a majority in the chamber, a party must have 39 seats. Currently, Labor has 25 representatives, while the Coalition has 30.
The remaining seats are held by the Greens with the third highest number of representatives (11), One Nation (2), Jacqui Lambie Network (1), United Australia Party (1), and six Independents.
Several high-profile senators are up for election in 2025. In Queensland, for example, Malcolm Roberts from Pauline Hanson’s One Nation will be up for re-election, Jacqui Lambie will be recontesting in Tasmania, while Independent Senator David Pocock from the ACT will be seeking another term.
There will also be some other prominent senators hoping to be re-elected from established parties.
These include Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (Country Liberal Party) and Senator Malarndirri McCarthy (ALP) from the Northern Territory, Liberal James Paterson from Victoria, Sarah Hanson-Young from the Greens in South Australia, and Jordan Steele-John from the Greens in Western Australia.
The 2025 contest
Fewer people have been voting for the major parties in recent years. In 2022, the vote for non-major party candidates reached a high of 35.7% (which, as Antony Green reminds us, was higher than the primary vote for both the Coalition and Labor).
Since the 1980s, Australians appear to have become open to supporting non-major party candidates contesting the Senate. If this continues as expected in 2025, whoever becomes prime minister will have to deal with the diverse interests and policy demands from those in the upper house.
While the campaign for the Senate may go under the radar over the next few weeks, who is elected to the Senate will have a massive impact on Australian politics for years to come.
Zareh Ghazarian 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.
Good health care depends on evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. They translate the best available research into recommendations that shape diagnosis, treatment, and prevention strategies.
But what happens when the studies underpinning these guidelines are flawed?
Evidence suggests scientific misconduct – from fabricated or manipulated data to methodological errors and ethical concerns – is a growing problem. In some disciplines, estimates suggest as many as 40% of studies included in systematic reviews may have issues with their integrity.
This is not just an academic issue. When flawed studies are used to guide real-world health care, the consequences for health-care providers and ultimately patients can be serious. They include unnecessary or even harmful treatments, delay or denial of other effective treatments, wasted resources and a loss of public trust in science and health care itself.
Yet until recently, there has been no formal method to identify and manage flawed studies, before they make their way into clinical recommendations. We recently helped develop a framework that addresses this crucial gap. Published in The Lancet’s eClinicalMedicine, this framework provides a step-by-step process for evaluating the integrity of studies used in clinical guidelines and systematic reviews.
In an era of increasing concern about research misconduct, it’s a timely and much-needed advance.
Clinical care relies on research integrity
Randomised controlled trials are considered the gold standard in medical research.
Their results often underpin clinical guidelines that shape day-to-day decisions in health care. But what if a randomised controlled trial contains fabricated data? Or is conducted without ethics approval? Or is retracted after being used in a previous guideline?
A 2020 study found 44% of randomised controlled trials submitted to a major medical journal between 2017 and 2020 contained problematic or false data.
Compounding the problem is the fact that journal editors and publishers can be very slow to respond to concerns about research integrity.
For example, between November 2017 and April 2024, a group of researchers wrote to editors and publishers of 891 potentially untrustworthy papers published in 206 different journals. At the time their study was published earlier this year, only 30% of the papers they flagged had received an outcome – 58% of which were retracted.
Notably, it took a median time of 38 months for editors and publishers to make a decision. In only 13% of the flagged cases was a decision made within 12 months.
The ripple effects of this can be enormous. A review by the independent Cochrane Collaboration of nutrition interventions in pregnancy found that removing studies with integrity concerns changed the conclusions of 72% of reviews. One third (33%) needed to be updated because their guidance was no longer reliable.
Despite this, most guideline development tools — including those from the World Health Organization — assess methodological quality, not the trustworthiness or integrity of the studies that are included.
When flawed studies are used to guide real-world medical advice, the consequences for doctors and ultimately patients can be serious. Yuri A/Shutterstock
A practical framework for safeguarding integrity
Our framework features a six-step process for safeguarding research integrity:
Review: conduct a standard systematic review to identify eligible studies
Exclude: remove studies that have been formally retracted or are flagged with serious concerns
Assess: use available tools and checklists to assess the integrity of the remaining studies
Discuss: convene an independent integrity committee to review ratings and vote on each study
Establish contact: reach out to authors of high-risk studies to clarify issues or provide missing information
Reassess: based on responses (or lack thereof), determine whether a study should be included, excluded, or held in limbo.
The integrity committee is central to this approach. It is a multidisciplinary group responsible for assessing studies objectively, without preconceived judgements or biases around which studies to exclude.
Polycystic ovary syndrome is a common hormonal, reproductive and metabolic condition affecting 8–13% of women of reproductive age, depending on the diagnostic criteria used. It can cause irregular menstrual cycles, elevated androgen levels, and an increased number of small follicles in the ovaries, visible on ultrasound. It is a leading cause of infertility.
The guideline was developed with input from diverse professional and consumer groups. It was endorsed by 39 organisations across six continents.
In making recommendations on infertility treatment in polycystic ovary syndrome, 101 studies were initially identified. After applying our framework, 45 studies were not included due to concerns about integrity. Only three authors responded to clarification requests. This illustrates the problem with transparency after publication.
Without our framework, these problematic studies may have directly shaped recommendations and health care for women with polycystic ovary syndrome around the world.
Our framework was incorporated into the National Health and Medical Research Council review process that approved the guidelines. It has since been applied to other guidelines in women’s health. Further scale up is planned.
A 2020 study found 44% of randomised controlled trials submitted to a major medical journal between 2017 and 2020 contained false data. T.Schneider/Shutterstock
Some drawbacks
While our framework offers a much-needed solution, it’s not without drawbacks.
Second, older studies (conducted before trial registries were common) or those from countries with different ethics standards, may be unfairly penalised.
There is also a risk that valid research could be excluded simply because authors do not respond to integrity enquiries.
Implementing the framework can also take time. In resource-limited settings, this may be a barrier.
But failing to assess integrity will likely cost more in the long run. It could lead to flawed recommendations, misplaced public confidence and patient harm.
Aya Mousa receives funding from NHMRC.
Ben W. Mol receives funding from NHMRC, MRFF as well as international competitive grants.
Helena Teede receives funding from NHMRC and MRFF as well as international competitive grants. She is President of International Endocrine Society.
Seemingly innocuous conversations, informed by online campaigns, could interfere with elections.(Matt Quinn/Unsplash), CC BY
Election interference is a much broader phenomenon than is often assumed. Once limited to intimidation, voter fraud or hacking, election interference includes more mundane, pervasive and ubiquitous interactions. A seemingly innocuous and casual chat with a neighbour or barista could now be considered part of a hostile influence campaign.
From this perspective, interference is less about how ballots are cast and more about shaping the motivations, intentions and contexts in which voters think about politics. Yet those same processes, debates, persuasions and messy arguments are integral to democracy.
If “election interference” encompasses all efforts to influence opinion, do we risk diluting its meaning, creating a new hollow accusation like “fake news?” More importantly, if this broad view is right, it raises difficult new challenges beyond the narrow measures of election law.
Blurred lines
Germany recently accused Elon Musk of meddling in their February election, claiming that his prominent endorsement of the Alternative for Germany party on X was an illegal foreign donation. During the 2022 Brazilian election, misinformation on WhatsApp and Telegram swayed voter intentions, and the Superior Electoral Court frequently requested that content be taken down.
Much of this content was homegrown, produced, endorsed and circulated by Brazilians themselves. If such content was traditional journalism, existing laws and standards could be applied. But when it resembles ordinary political speech, many see takedowns as censorship. Blurred lines between citizen speech and journalism complicate the laws and policies designed to address clearly defined electioneering.
During the 2020 Taiwan elections, officials worried that pro-unification memes came not only from Chinese-controlled bots and paid posters (itself a form of election interference), but were trending because the TikTok algorithm systematically prioritized it.
And in the United States, the legislative push to ban TikTok gained momentum alongside political concern that an apparent uptick in anti-Israel sentiment was caused by covert manipulation of TikTok’s algorithm.
Broader concerns
Concerns about election interference should extend the focus beyond the ballot to include information vulnerabilities. Politicians of all stripes have called for action on deceptive speech, but there is little agreement on the nature of the problem, especially across partisan divides
Complaints about fake news are as likely to be strategic as sincere. News isn’t just about facts, it’s about what matters and why, and as such, media regulation should not solely be determined by the legal system. There is the risk that any effort to control content used to interfere with elections (propaganda, disinformation, fakes) will be inescapably partisan, thus unacceptable in democracies.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) notes some of these concerns. The act indicates that monitoring and reporting about societal risks and public transparency databases will be required. It establishes “trusted flaggers” (experts and civil society groups) to help moderate content. It doesn’t mention elections, but voices concerns that platforms may be “used to disseminate or amplify misleading or deceptive content, including disinformation,” which can undermine fundamental rights.
Currently, too much speech is circulating, along with the power given to algorithms and human moderators to make sense of it. This suggests a different ideal — the freedom to be informed and in control of our information environments, to feel authentically represented and to have fair dealings with speech platforms. Translating these to policies and slogans is much harder than a hands-off approach to media regulation.
Overwhelmed with information, consumers favour brands, curators, editors, tastemakers, vibes and tribes that align with their personal values. If there is a shift in values, consumers cancel, unfollow and disconnect — and then replace the source.
Trust-breaking disrupts the systems we use to filter, verify and contextualize information. This is exemplified in “firehose of falsehood” tactics and hack-and-leak operations that simultaneously sow distrust and weaponize predictable reactions.
Scales of influence
For every internationally important election or referendum, there are hundreds of local contests, municipal elections, internal party nominations and the like that shape political realities just as meaningfully. Influencers operating at small scales can have outsized effects that ripple through broader constituencies. A post on a local forum might spark a thousand invisible offline conversations.
These broad concerns about vulnerabilities in our media systems matter all the time, not just during elections. Political representation requires trust in the media that inform us about what other people and communities think and care about. These reflections are distorted by online social media platforms and messaging apps.
We will have to eventually consider something like a “made in Canada” Digital Services Act that can give voters a voice in the kind of information environment they want. There’s much to be learned from the EU’s early lessons, especially as they respond to American tech companies that control so much of the online information space.
The artifacts found at Longtan, southwest China, were as old as 60,000 years.Qijun Ruan
New technologies today often involve electronic devices that are smaller and smarter than before. During the Middle Paleolithic, when Neanderthals were modern humans’ neighbors, new technologies meant something quite different: new kinds of stone tools that were smaller but could be used for many tasks and lasted for a long time.
Archaeologists like me are interested in the Middle Paleolithic – a period spanning 250,000 to 30,000 years ago – because it includes the first appearance of our species, our arrival into many parts of the world for the first time, and our invention of many new kinds of stone tools.
Illustration of a typical Quina scraper and related tools. The toolmaker would flake pieces of stone off the core to carefully shape the Quina scraper. Pei-Yuan Xiao
In our study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of international collaborators and I describe our discovery in China of the first complete example of a Middle Paleolithic technology previously seen only in Europe and the Middle East.
Archaeologists have thought that ancient people in East Asia completely skipped the Middle Paleolithic. Our discovery challenges the long-standing notion that while ancient people in Europe and Africa were inventing new tools during this period, people of East Asia stuck to only the most basic tools that remained unchanged for thousands of years.
The Quina tool kit from Longtan. (A–D) Quina scrapers. (E–G) Quina cores. (H-J) Resharpening flakes showing Quina retouch at the near end of the top face. (K) Small tool made on resharpening flake. Hao Li
Quina scrapers helped hunters process kills
The tool we’ve identified is called a Quina scraper. This type of stone tool is well known from archaeological sites in Europe and the Middle East.
Quina scrapers are typically quite thick and asymmetrical, with a broad and sharp working edge that shows clear signs of being used and resharpened multiple times. This shape results in durable cutting edges, ideal for long cycles of use followed by resharpening.
People used Quina scrapers to scrape and cut soft materials, such as meat and animal skins, and medium-hard materials, such as wood. We know this from tiny scratches and chips on the scrapers that match traces caused by working these materials in experiments using contemporary stone tools.
European archaeologists believe that Quina scrapers were invented to meet the needs of highly mobile hunters living in cool and dry climates. These hunters were focused on seasonal migratory prey such as reindeer, giant deer, horse and bison. Quina scrapers would have helped them process their kills into food and other resources – for example, to extract marrow.
A. Map showing the location of the discovery of the Quina tool kit in China, at the southern margin of the Hengduan Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau. B. View of the landscape showing the Longtan archaeological site. Hao Li, CC BY-ND
First find of a Quina tool in East Asia
Our team, led by Hao Li of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research and Qijun Ruan of the Yunnan Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology, excavated Quina scrapers and related stone tools from the Longtan archaeological site in southwest China.
Bo Li collects samples from Longtan for luminescence dating at his laboratory at the University of Wollongong. Qijun Ruan
Our colleague Bo Li at the University of Wollongong used optical luminescence dating methods on the layers of earth that contained the artifacts. This technique can identify how much time has passed since each individual sand grain was last exposed to the Sun. Dating many individual grains in a sample is important because tree roots, insects or other animals can mix younger sediments down into older ones.
After we identified and removed intrusive younger grains, we found the layers containing the artifacts were 50,000 to 60,000 years old. This is roughly the same time Quina scrapers were being used in Europe at Neanderthal sites.
Keliang Zhao from China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology looked at pollen grains from the Longtan excavations. He found that the Middle Paleolithic people of Longtan lived in a relatively open forest-grassland environment and a dry and cool climate. This environment is similar to that of Quina sites in Europe.
Davide Delpiano, Marco Peresani and Marie-Hélène Moncel, experts on European Middle Paleolithic tools, joined our team to help with the comparison of the Chinese and European specimens and confirm their similarities.
Hélène Monod, from Universidad Rovira i Virgili in Spain, looked at our Quina scrapers under the microscope and found traces on them from scraping and scratching bones, antlers and wood. She also found polish from using the tools on meat, hides and soft plants.
Who lived in East Asia during this period?
Our new discovery of Quina scrapers joins another recent find of a different kind of Middle Paleolithic technology in East Asia: Levallois tools from Guanyindong Cave in Guizhou Province in south-central China. Levallois tools result from a distinctive multistep sequence that efficiently produces lots of useful cutting tools, with minimal wasted stone. Taken together, these two finds make a strong case that Middle Paleolithic technologies were present in East Asia.
But why are we only just finding this Quina tool kit now, when it has been known in Europe for such a long time?
One reason is that archaeologists have been looking in Europe for longer than almost anywhere else in the world. Another reason Middle Paleolithic evidence appears rare in East Asia is because what now seem to be less typical variations of the Quina tool kit previously found in China had been overlooked, likely due to archaeologists’ narrow definitions based on European examples.
The Quina tools at Longtan are among the earliest artifacts from that site, which makes it hard for researchers to determine the origins of this new technology. Was it introduced by visitors from Europe? Or did local people in East Asia independently invent it?
The research team shows off the Longtan artifacts. Hao Li
To answer these questions, we hope to find more Quina scrapers at sites with deeper – meaning older – layers than Longtan. If older layers hold what look like the remnants of experiments in stone toolmaking that would eventually result in Quina tools, it suggests Quina tools were invented locally. If deeper layers have dissimilar tools, that suggests Quina technology was introduced from a neighboring group.
We also hope future work will reveal who made these tools. Our excavations at Longtan did not find any human bone or DNA that could help us identify the toolmakers.
During the Middle Paleolithic, there were multiple human species that could make tools like this. It could have been modern humans like us. But it could also have been Neanderthals. Considering that the Quina technology in Europe is directly associated with Neanderthals, this seems likely. But it could also have been Denisovans, an extinct species similar to modern humans found during this time in Siberia, the Tibetan Plateau and Laos, or even a new human species that hasn’t been seen before.
Whoever was making and using these Quina scrapers, they were able to be inventive and flexible with their technology, adapting to their changing environment.
Ben Marwick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Marine Le Pen, figurehead of France’s Rassemblement National (RN), one of the most established far-right parties in Europe, has been found guilty of embezzling funds from the European parliament.
During her time as an MEP between 2004 and 2017, Le Pen and her team paid party staff with funds that should have gone to European parliamentary aides. The ruling estimates that a total of €2.9 million (£2.4 million) in European parliament funds were involved in the crimes and that Le Pen personally embezzled €474,000 of that total.
She has been sentenced to four years in prison, two of which would be electronic monitoring. She is also unlikely to see the inside of a cell for the other two years as she is appealing her conviction.
More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that she has been banned from holding public office for five years. Crucially, the ban is to start immediately, meaning that even with an appeal, Le Pen is highly unlikely to be able to stand as a candidate in the next presidential election in 2027.
For many in the RN, the court’s decision will be a major blow. The party appears to have lost the candidate they believed was on course for victory in 2027. However, others will no doubt see this as a chance to distance the party further from the Le Pen name, following the death of Marine Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen earlier this year.
This process has been in motion for some time. Jordan Bardella took over from Le Pen as president of the party in 2022 and has clearly been waiting and preparing for this eventuality. Allegations were first levelled at Le Pen many years ago and her crimes relate to her time as an MEP between 2004 and 2017. He has been the plan B option throughout her trial.
Bardella led the RN to victory in the 2024 European election in France. He also managed to send a record number of parliamentarians to the National Assembly after French president Emmanuel Macron called a snap election just weeks later.
This was, nevertheless, a somewhat disappointing outcome as many on the far right had started to imagine Bardella as prime minister. Since failing to meet this expectation, his leadership has come under more scrutiny. His reaction to Le Pen’s sidelining will be watched carefully.
Playing the victim
Overall, it is good news to see corruption being taken seriously and justice being served. However, Le Pen’s conviction comes after years of embezzlement which has allowed the far right to build its strength. All this has come on the back of a system it has vowed to destroy. As such, it feels like too little too late.
Furthermore, this decision, and the fact that it is tied to the European Union, is likely to feed into typical far-right propaganda on the domestic stage. Le Pen and the party will play the victim, blaming Le Pen’s fate on a wide conspiracy organised by something akin to the deep state operating via Brussels.
The deep levels of distrust in public institutions and mainstream politics are likely to play a role here. Le Pen will aim to paint the decision of an independent court as the political assassination of the “champion of the people”.
She could become a martyr, turning her cause into a revolt against “the system”. Bardella has already said that Le Pen’s conviction amounted to the “execution” of democracy.
Crucially, though, this outcome isn’t inevitable. Whether such a narrative takes hold is a choice that is very much in the hands of mainstream elite actors. Those who have a privileged access to shaping public discourse, such as journalists, politicians and experts will therefore play a key role.
Instead of giving pride of place to Le Pen and the far right in a tempting sensationalising coverage, the mainstream media must turn to serious analysis. This would involve removing the focus from individuals and putting it on the wider issues at hand. That would lessen the potential for a narrative of victimisation to take hold.
Beyond providing an accurate picture of the case itself, good coverage should predominantly focus on politics rather than on the spectacle the RN will inevitably try to construct as a diversion tactic. This would mean engaging seriously with what the RN actually proposes as a model of society: one that is not against the “elite” and for the people, but merely in favour of a different elite taking control at the head of a top-down authoritarian state.
This would then allow voters to understand that the far right is not on their side, but on the side of power, wealth and hierarchies. Those who oppose such a takeover could go some way to fix the damage that has been done with carelessly associating these parties with “populism”.
Finally, good coverage would also mean shifting the agenda away from the far right and its pet issues. Had politicians – left, right and centre – not continuously used the far right as a diversion from their own failures to tackle the many crises their countries face, the far right would not be as powerful as it seems.
As opinion polls show, when people are asked what are their biggest concerns personally, issues core to the far right such as immigration are low. Instead, it is issues that would require radical measures to tackle economic and social insecurity which are prioritised.
The far right offers nothing to address these – only division to make citizens powerless to fight back. Now that Le Pen is out of the picture, it is a good time to shift the agenda back to democracy and hope.
Aurelien Mondon 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.
