Nearly 40% of Black workers feel comfortable talking about their faith with people at work, the highest of any U.S. racial group, our two recent studies found. But they also risk facing religious discrimination.
For the past 15 years, we have been studyingreligionin workplaces. Recently we conducted two studies, including two online surveys involving 15,000 workers and in-depth interviews with nearly 300. Our respondents included Christian, Jewish, Muslim and nonreligious individuals.
The majority of Black Americans – nearly 8 in 10 – identify as Christians. And we found that Black workers from all faiths are more likely than other racial groups to use their traditions to find meaning and purpose in their work and to feel “called” to their work.
Although not all Black Americans are religious or want their faith to intersect with their work, we found that many Black Americans very much want to bring their religious beliefs to work. This goes beyond just talking about them at work, such as their holiday celebrations or the importance of their church in their lives. In addition, Black Americans are more likely than other racial groups to display or wear religious symbols, such as jewelry or head coverings.
Some Black Christians told us that when they mention faith at work, they fear they will be discriminated against because of their race and because of their faith – what we call “double marginalization.”
For example, we interviewed a Black Christian woman who worked as an assistant professor of English. She told us she was reluctant to describe the challenges she faced in academia as religious discrimination but said the humanities “tend to not always be welcoming toward religious people and Christians specifically.” She recalled several instances when she was treated differently due to her faith.
Black Christians we interviewed said that co-workers stereotyped them as narrow-minded or sanctimonious in ways that felt marginalizing. For example, some said the term “holy” – which might seem positive in certain kinds of contexts – can be applied in pejorative ways to Black Christians. A man we interviewed who attends a majority Black congregation said he talks about his faith openly in the workplace and often feels negatively judged.
Their faith sometimes makes Black Americans less likely to address inequality in their workplaces. We found they sometimes draw on religious values like forgiveness and their belief that “God is in control” to justify remaining quiet about religious and racial discrimination.
What’s next
This contrasts with our previous work, where we argued that religion can be used to address inequalities at work. We need more research that examines the inextricable link between religion and race in workplaces. Workplace leaders who care about lessening inequality need to understand that racial and religious identities are often deeply intertwined.
The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.
Elaine Howard Ecklund receives funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc., the Templeton Religion Trust, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.
Christopher P. Scheitle receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation.
Denise Daniels receives funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc.
The idea came from my frustration with traditional methods used to teach hospitality management. As a professor and industry professional, I saw the need to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world skills.
Internships and fieldwork are valuable. But they may not be available to students, especially those in online or hybrid programs. I wanted to offer students an opportunity to gain hands-on learning experiences.
Using Articulate’s Rise 360 – an e-learning development platform – I created dynamic simulations based on stories from my own experiences, as well as from other industry professionals.
For example, an interactive lost wallet scenario I created with my instructional design team involves a person who realizes they’ve left their wallet behind after visiting a nursing home. It includes decision points that enhance critical thinking and decision-making through the use of concept art.
AI-driven prompts aid in transforming industry experiences into online course content. The Pinnacle Golf Resort, a made-up resort I created using Rise 360, engages students with dynamic cause-and-effect decision trees with realistic managerial challenges.
What does the course explore?
Students engage with real-world challenges, such as:
• Managing guest complaints
• Handling staffing issues
• Dealing with financial challenges
• Implementing operational solutions
• Moral and ethical issues and conflict resolution
Students are tasked with making decisions that affect the outcome of each scenario, with immediate feedback on their choices. That provides personalized learning experiences tailored to their progress.
The course focuses on connecting theory to practice, such as application of leadership styles − autocratic, democratic or different types of power − to solve problems and improve guest satisfaction.
One scene in the Pinnacle Golf Resort simulation involves a restaurant manager handling a disruptive guest during a high-profile event. I realized I needed a decision-rating scale to assess the student’s choices. Generative AI refined decision options and aided in the construction of that decision-rating scale.
This ensures that choices − such as offering a goodwill gesture or removal of the guest − have realistic consequences. Therefore, the total number of points affixed would determine whether the restaurant manager would be promoted or need more training.
Why is this course relevant now?
As the hospitality industry becomes more competitive and complex − with higher turnover rates and shifting workforce expectations − effective decision-making and problem-solving skills become crucial in managing guest experiences.
Traditional internships and fieldwork are valuable.
But online and hybrid programs may struggle to provide these opportunities. As hospitality programs shift to online and hybrid formats, the demand for scalable, hands-on learning tools has increased.
What’s a critical lesson from the course?
A key lesson is the importance of adaptive decision-making and understanding the consequences of one’s actions. Through simulations created with the help of generative AI, students see firsthand how their decisions impact multiple areas of a hospitality business.
These scenarios allow students to experience real-world challenges. And this helps them practice making decisions in a dynamic environment.
By participating in the simulations, students learn that there is no one-size-fits-all approach in hospitality management. They must adapt their leadership style based on the situation and the individuals involved.
What materials does the course feature?
The course creates interactive simulations using Articulate 360 and Rise 360.
These simulations replicate real-world hospitality situations such as managing guest complaints or financial decision-making.
The class uses stories drawn from the instructor’s own industry experience. This exposes students to the complexities of hospitality management.
Feedback is generated based on the student’s decisions in the simulations, developed with the help of ChatGPT. This fosters self-reflection and promoting continual improvement in their leadership abilities.
What will the course prepare students to do?
Upon completion, students will be able to:
• Navigate complex guest relations and manage complaints in real time.
• Make informed operational decisions while balancing guest satisfaction, employee performance and financial considerations.
• Apply various leadership styles to motivate teams, resolve conflicts and ensure high service standards.
• Assess their leadership style and adapt it to different situations in hospitality management.
Betsy A. Pudliner is affiliated with ICHRIE-International Council of Hospitality, Restaurant and Institutional Educators.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Eloy Geenjaar, Ph.D. Student in Electrical Engineering & Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology
AI promises to help wearable devices like smart watches better monitor your health.adamkaz/E+ via Getty Images
The human body constantly generates a variety of signals that can be measured from outside the body with wearable devices. These bio-signals – ranging from heart rate to sleep state and blood oxygen levels – can indicate whether someone is having mood swings or can be used to diagnose a variety of body or brain disorders.
It can be relatively cheap to gather a lot of bio-signal data. Researchers can organize a study and ask participants to use a wearable device akin to a smartwatch for a few days. However, to teach a machine learning algorithm to find a relationship between a specific bio-signal and a health disorder, you first need to teach the algorithm to recognize that disorder. That’s where computer engineers like myself come in.
Many commercial smartwatches, such as ones by Apple, AliveCor, Google and Samsung, currently support atrial fibrillation detection. Atrial fibrillation is a common type of irregular heart rhythm, and leaving it untreated can lead to a stroke. One way to automatically detect atrial fibrillation is to train a machine learning algorithm to recognize what atrial fibrillation looks like in the data.
This machine learning approach requires large bio-signal datasets in which instances of atrial fibrillation are labeled. The algorithm can use the labeled instances to learn to recognize a relationship between the bio-signal and atrial fibrillation.
The labeling process can be quite expensive because it requires experts, such as cardiologists, to go through millions of data points and label each instance of atrial fibrillation. The same problem extends to many other bio-signals and disorders.
To resolve this issue, researchers have been developing new ways to train machine learning algorithms with fewer labels. By first training a machine learning model to fill in the blanks of large-scale unlabeled bio-signal data, the machine learning model is primed to learn the relationship between a bio-signal and a disorder with fewer labels. This is called pretraining. Pretraining even helps a machine learning model learn a relationship between a bio-signal and a disorder when it is pretrained on a completely unrelated bio-signal.
Bio-signals are found all over the body and provide information about different bodily functions. Each of these is a bio-signal that measures a specific physiological signal in a noninvasive way. Eloy Geenjaar
Challenges of working with bio-signals
Finding relationships between bio-signals and disorders can be difficult because of noise , or irrelevant data, differences between people’s bio-signals, and because the relationship between a bio-signal and disorder may not be clear.
First, bio-signals contain a lot of noise. For example, when you’re wearing a smartwatch while running, the watch will move around. This causes the sensor for the bio-signal to record at different locations during the run. Since the locations vary across the run, swings in the bio-signal value may now be due to variations in the recording location instead of due to physiological processes.
Second, everyone’s bio-signals are unique. The location of veins, for example, often differ between people. This means that even if smartwatches are worn at exactly the same place on everyone’s wrists, the bio-signal related to those veins is recorded differently from one person to the next. The same underlying signal, such as someone’s heart rate, will lead to different bio-signal values.
The underlying signal itself can also be unique for people or groups of people. The resting heart rate of an average person is around 60-80 beats per minute, but athletes can have resting heart rates as low as 30-40 beats per minute.
Lastly, the relationship between a bio-signal and a disorder is often complex. This means that the disorder is not immediately obvious from looking at the bio-signal.
Machine learning algorithms allow researchers to learn from data and account for the complexity, noise and variability of people. By using large bio-signal datasets, machine learning algorithms are able to find clear relationships that apply to everyone.
Learning to fill in the blanks
Researchers can use unlabeled bio-signal data as a warmup for the machine learning algorithm. This warmup, or pre-training, primes the machine learning algorithm to find a relationship between the bio-signal and a disorder. This is a bit like walking around a park to get the lay of the land before working out a route to go running.
To do this, we take a bio-signal and artificially create gaps of a certain length – for example, one second. We then teach the machine learning algorithm to fill in the missing piece of bio-signal. This is possible because the machine learning algorithm sees what the bio-signal looks like before and after the gap.
If the heart rate of a person is around 60 beats per minute before the gap, there will likely be a heartbeat in the one-second gap. In this case, we’re training the machine learning algorithm to predict when that heartbeat will occur.
Once we have trained the machine learning algorithm to do this, it will have found a relationship between someone’s heart rate and when the next beat should occur. We can now train the machine learning algorithm with this relationship between a normal heart rate and bio-signal already learned. This makes it easier for the algorithm to learn the relationship between heart rate and atrial fibrillation. Since atrial fibrillation is characterized by fast and irregular heartbeats, and the algorithm is now good at predicting when a heartbeat will happen, it can quickly learn to detect these irregularities.
Machine learning pre-training on filling in the blanks of a heart bio-signal. Eloy Geenjaar
The idea of filling in the blanks can be generalized to other bio-signals as well. Previous researchhas shown, and our work reconfirmed, that pretraining a model on one bio-signal without any labels allows it to learn clinically useful relationships from other bio-signals with few labels. This shortcut means that researchers can pretrain on bio-signals that are easy to gather and use the machine learning model on ones that are hard to gather and label.
Faster disorder detection development
By improving pretraining, researchers can make machine learning algorithms better and more efficient at detecting diseases and disorders. Pretraining improvements reduce cost and time spent by experts labeling.
A recent example of machine learning algorithms used for early detection is Google’s Loss of Pulse smartwatch feature. The emerging field of bio-signal pretraining can help enable faster development of similar features using a wider range of bio-signals and for a wider range of disorders.
With increasing types of bio-signals and more data, researchers may be able to discover relationships that dramatically improve early detection of disease and disorders. The earlier many diseases and disorders are found, the better a treatment plan works for patients.
Eloy Geenjaar receives funding from the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation, and performed bio-signal research during an internship at Dolby Laboratories.
In the recent flurry of executive orders from President Donald Trump, one warned of “a distorted narrative” about race “driven by ideology rather than truth.” It singled out a current exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum titled “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” as an example. The exhibit displays over two centuries of sculptures that show how art has produced and reproduced racial attitudes and ideologies.
The executive order condemns the exhibition because it “promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating ‘Race is a human invention.’”
The executive order apparently objects to sentiments such as this: “Although a person’s genetics influences their phenotypic characteristics, and self-identified race might be influenced by physical appearance, race itself is a social construct.” But those words are not from the Smithsonian; they are from the American Society of Human Genetics.
I’m a historian who specializes in the scientific study of race. The executive order places “social construct” in opposition to “biological reality.” The history of both concepts reveals how modern science landed at the idea that race was invented by people, not nature.
Race exists, but what is it?
At the turn of the 20th century, scientists believed humans could be divided into distinct races based on physical features. According to this idea, a scientist could identify physical differences in groups of people, and if those differences were passed on to succeeding generations, the scientist had correctly identified a racial “type.”
The results of this “typological” method were chaotic. A frustrated Charles Darwin in 1871 listed 13 scientists who identified anywhere between two and 63 races, a confusion that persisted for the next six decades. There were almost as many racial classifications as racial classifiers because no two scientists could seem to agree on what physical characteristics were best to measure, or how to measure them.
One intractable problem with racial classifications was that the differences in human physical traits were tiny, so scientists struggled to use them to differentiate between groups. The pioneering African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois noted in 1906, “It is impossible to draw a color line between black and other races … in all physical characteristics the Negro race cannot be set off by itself.”
But scientists tried. In an 1899 anthropological study, William Ripley classified people using head shape, hair type, pigmentation and stature. In 1926, Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton, the leading racial typologist in the world, listed 24 anatomical traits, such as “the presence or absence of a postglenoid tubercle and a pharyngeal fossa or tubercle” and “the degree of bowing of the radius and ulna” while admitting “this list is not, of course, exhaustive.”
All this confusion was the opposite of how science should operate: As the tools improved and as measurements became more precise, the object of study − race − became more and more muddled.
Keith dismissed science as the surest method to distinguish race; one knows a person’s race because “a single glance, picks out the racial features more certainly than could a band of trained anthropologists.” Keith’s view perfectly captured the view that race must be real, for he saw it all around him, even though science could never establish that reality.
In the scientific study of race, however, things were about to change.
Turning to culture to explain difference
By 1933, the rise of Nazism had added urgency to the scientific study of race. As anthropologist Sherwood Washburn wrote in 1944, “If we are to discuss racial matters with the Nazis, we had better be right.”
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, two new scientific ideas came to fruition. First, scientists began looking to culture rather than biology as the driver of differences among groups of people. Second, the rise of population genetics challenged the biological reality of race.
In 1943, anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish wrote a short work also titled The Races of Mankind. Writing for a popular audience, they argued that people are far more alike than different, and our differences owe to culture and learning, not biology. An animated cartoon short later gave these ideas wider circulation.
‘The Brotherhood of Man’ was based on Benedict and Weltfish’s pamphlet and pointed out that differences between people come from their environments.
Benedict and Weltfish argued that while people did, indeed, differ physically, those differences were meaningless in that all races could learn and all were capable. “Progress in civilization is not the monopoly of one race or subrace,” they wrote. “Negroes made iron tools and wove fine cloth for their clothing when fair-skinned Europeans wore skins and knew nothing of iron.” The cultural explanation for different human lifestyles was more robust than confused appeals to an elusive biological race.
The turn to culture was consistent with a deep change in biological knowledge.
A new tool, what scientists called a “genetic population,” was much more valuable. The geneticist, Dobzhansky held, identified a population based on the genes it shared in order to study change in organisms. Over time natural selection would shape how the population evolved. But if that population didn’t shed light on natural selection, the geneticist must abandon it and work with a new population based on a different set of shared genes. The important point is that, whatever population the geneticist chose, it was changing over time. No population was a fixed and stable entity, as human races were supposed to be.
Sherwood Washburn, who happened to be Dobzhansky’s close friend, brought those ideas into anthropology. He recognized that the point of genetics was not classifying people into fixed groups. The point was to understand the process of human evolution. This change reversed everything taught by Hooton, his old teacher.
Writing in 1951, Washburn argued, “There is no way to justify the division of a … population into a series of racial types” because doing so would be pointless. Presuming any group to be unchanging stood in the way of understanding evolutionary changes. A genetic population was not “real”; it was an invention of the scientist using it as a lens to understand organic change.
A good way to understand this profound difference relates to roller coasters.
Anyone who’s been to an amusement park has seen signs that precisely define who is tall enough to ride a given roller coaster. But no one would say they define a “real” category of “tall” or “short” people, as another roller coaster might have a different height requirement. The signs define who is tall enough only for riding this particular roller coaster, and that’s all. It’s a tool for keeping people safe, not a category defining who is “really” tall.
Anyone trying to pound a nail with a screwdriver soon realizes that tools are good for tasks they were designed for and useless for anything else. Genetic populations are tools for specific biological uses, not for classifying people into “real” groups by race.
The Conversation U.S. receives funding from the Smithsonian Institution.
John P. Jackson, Jr. 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.
Jared Isaacman, the nominee for next NASA administrator, has traveled to orbit on two commercial space missions. AP Photo/John Raoux
Jared Isaacman, billionaire, CEO and nominee to become the next NASA administrator, faced questions on April 9, 2025, from members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation during his confirmation hearing for the position.
Should the Senate confirm him, Isaacman will be the first billionaire – but not the first astronaut – to head NASA. Perhaps even more significant, he will be the first NASA administrator with significant ties to the commercial space industry.
As a space policy expert, I know that NASA leadership matters. The head of the agency can significantly shape the missions it pursues, the science it undertakes and, ultimately, the outcome of America’s space exploration.
Jared Isaacman speaks at a news conference in 2024, before his Polaris Dawn mission. AP Photo/John Raoux, File
An unconventional background
At 16 years old, Isaacman dropped out of high school to start a payment processing company in his basement. The endeavor succeeded and eventually became known as Shift4.
Though he found early success in business, Isaacman also had a love for aviation. In 2009, he set a record for flying around the Earth in a light jet, beating the previous record by more than 20 hours.
In 2019, Isaacman sold his stake in Draken International. In 2020, he took Shift4 public, making him a billionaire.
Isaacman continued to branch out into aerospace, working with SpaceX beginning in 2021. He purchased a crewed flight on the Falcon 9 rocket, a mission that eventually was called Inspiration4. The mission, which he led, represented the first private astronaut flight for SpaceX. It sent four civilians with no previous formal space experience into orbit.
Following the success of Inspiration4, Isaacman worked with SpaceX to develop the Polaris Program, a series of three missions to help build SpaceX’s human spaceflight capabilities. In fall 2024, the first of these missions, Polaris Dawn, launched.
Polaris Dawn added more accomplishments to Isaacman’s resume. Isaacman, along with his crewmate Sarah Gillis, completed the first private spacewalk. Polaris Dawn’s SpaceX Dragon capsule traveled more than 850 miles (1,367 kilometers) from Earth, the farthest distance humans had been since the Apollo missions.
The Polaris Dawn mission launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in September 2024. AP Photo/John Raoux
The next adventure: NASA
In December 2024, the incoming Trump administration announced its intention to nominate Isaacman for the post of NASA administrator.
As NASA administrator, Isaacman would oversee all NASA activities at a critical moment in its history. The Artemis program, which has been in progress since 2017, has several missions planned for the next few years.
This includes 2026’s Artemis II mission, which will send four astronauts to orbit the Moon. Then, in 2027, Artemis III will aim to land on it.
If the mission proceeds as planned, the Artemis II crew will fly in an Orion crew capsule, pictured behind them, around the Moon in 2026. Kim Shiflett/NASA via AP, File
But, if Isaacman is confirmed, his tenure would come at a time when there are significant questions about the Artemis program, as well as the extent to which NASA should use commercial space companies like SpaceX. The agency is also potentially facing funding cuts.
Some in the space industry have proposed scrapping the Artemis program altogether in favor of preparing to go to Mars. Among this group is the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk.
Isaacman has also dealt with accusations that he is too close to the commercial space industry, and SpaceX in particular, to lead NASA. This has become a larger concern given Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration and its cost-cutting efforts. Some critics are worried that Musk would have an even greater say in NASA if Isaacman is confirmed.
But the success of any of NASA’s plans depends on having the money and resources necessary to carry them out.
While NASA has been spared major cuts up to this point, it, like many other government agencies, is planning for budget cuts and mass firings. These potential cuts are similar to what other agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services have recently made.
Although Isaacman stated that he believed NASA had the resources to do both at the same time, the agency is still in a time of budget uncertainty, so that may not be possible.
About his relationship with Musk, Isaacman stated that he had not talked to Musk since his nomination in November, and his relationship with SpaceX would not influence his decisions.
Additionally, he committed to carrying out space science missions, specifically to “launch more telescopes, more probes, more rovers.”
But since NASA is preparing for significant cuts to its science budget, there is some speculation that the agency may need to end some science programs, like the Hubble space telescope, altogether.
Isaacman’s future
Isaacman has received support from the larger space community. Nearly 30 astronauts signed a letter in support of his nomination. Former NASA administrators, as well as major industry groups, have signaled their desire for Isaacman’s confirmation.
Barring any major development, Isaacman will likely be confirmed as NASA administrator by the Senate in the coming weeks. The Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation could approve his nomination once it returns from a two-week break at the end of April. A full vote from the Senate would follow.
If the Senate does confirm him, Isaacman will have several major issues to confront at NASA, all in a very uncertain political environment.
Wendy N. Whitman Cobb is affiliated with the US School of Advanced Air and Space Studies. Her views are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense or any of its components.
The Trump administration has announced a 90-day pause on its plan to impose so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly all US imports. But the pause does not extend to China, where import duties will rise to around 125%.
The move signals a partial retreat from what had been shaping up as a broad and aggressive trade war. For most countries, the US will now apply a 10% baseline tariff for the next three months. But the White House made clear that its tariffs on Chinese imports will remain in place.
So why did President Trump back away from the broader tariff push? The answer is simple: the economic cost to the US was too high.
Our economic model shows the fallout, even after the ‘pause’
Using a global economic model, we have been estimating the macroeconomic consequences of the Trump administration’s tariff plans as they have developed.
The following table shows two versions of the economic effects of the tariff plan:
“pre-pause” – as the plan stood immediately before Wednesday’s 90-day pause, under a scenario in which all countries retaliate except Australia, Japan and South Korea (which said they would not retaliate)
“post-pause” after reciprocal tariffs were withdrawn.
As is clear, the US would have faced steep and immediate losses in employment, investment, growth, and most importantly, real consumption, the best measure of household living standards.
Heavy costs of the tariff war
Under the pre-pause scenario, the US would have seen real consumption fall by 2.4% in 2025 alone. Real gross domestic product (GDP) would have declined by 2.6%, while employment falls by 2.7% and real investment (after inflation) plunges 6.6%.
These are not trivial adjustments. They represent significant contractions that would be felt in everyday life, from job losses to price increases to reduced household purchasing power. Since the current US unemployment rate is 4.2%, these results suggest that for every three currently unemployed Americans, two more would join their ranks.
Our modelling shows the damage would not just be short-term. Across the 2025–2040 projection period, US real consumption losses would have averaged 1.2%, with persistent investment weakness and a long-term decline in real GDP.
It is likely that internal economic advice reflected this kind of outlook. The decision to pause most of the tariff increases may well be an acknowledgement that the policy was economically unsustainable and would result in a permanent reduction in US global economic power. Financial markets were also rattled.
The scaled-back plan: still aggressive on China
The new arrangement announced on April 9 scales the higher tariff regime back to a flat 10% for about 70 countries, but keeps the full weight of tariffs on Chinese goods at around 125%. Rates on Canadian and Mexican imports remain at 25%.
The table’s “post-pause” column summarises the results of the scaled-back plan if the pause becomes permanent. For consistency, we assume all countries except Australia, Japan and Korea retaliate with tariffs equal to those imposed by the US.
As is clear from the “post-pause” results, lower US tariffs, together with lower retaliatory tariffs, equal less damage for the US economy.
Tariffs applied uniformly are less distortionary, and significant retaliation from just one major partner (China) is easier to absorb than a broad global response.
However, the costs will still be high. The US is projected to experience a 1.9% drop in real consumption in 2025, driven by lower employment and reduced efficiency in production. Real investment is projected to fall by 4.8%, and employment by 2.1%.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that the costs are still so high. In 2022, China, Canada and Mexico accounted for almost 45% of all US goods imports, and many countries were already facing 10% reciprocal tariffs in the “pre-pause” scenario. Trump’s tariff pause has not changed duty rates for these countries.
US President Donald Trump discusses the 90-day pause.
What does this mean for Australia?
Much of the domestic commentary in Australia has focused on the risk of collateral damage from a US-China trade war. Given Australia’s economic ties to both countries, it is a reasonable concern.
But our modelling suggests that Australia may actually benefit modestly. Under both scenarios, Australia’s real consumption rises slightly, driven by stronger investment, improved terms of trade (a measure of our export prices relative to import prices), and redirection of trade flows.
One mechanism is what economists call trade diversion: if Chinese or European exporters find the US market less attractive, they may redirect goods to Australia and other open markets.
At the same time, reduced global demand for capital, especially in the US and China, means lower interest rates globally. That stimulates investment elsewhere, including in Australia. In our model, Australian real investment rises under both scenarios, leading to small but sustained gains in GDP and household consumption.
These results suggest that, at least under current policy settings, Australia is unlikely to suffer significant direct effects from the tariff increases.
However, rising investor uncertainty is a risk for both the global and Australian economies, and this is not factored into our modelling. In the space of a single week, the Trump administration has whipsawed global investor confidence through three major tariff announcements.
A temporary reprieve
Tariffs appear to be central to the administration’s economic program. So Trump’s decision to pause his broader tariff agenda may not signal a shift in philosophy: just a tactical retreat.
The updated strategy, high tariffs on China and lower ones elsewhere, might reflect an attempt to refocus on where the administration sees its main strategic concern, while avoiding unnecessary blowback from allies and neutral partners.
Whether this narrower approach proves durable remains to be seen. The sharpest economic pain has been deferred. Whether it returns depends on how the next 90 days play out.
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 Coalition has been forced to reassert its commitment to the Paris climate agreement after its energy spokesman Ted O’Brien appeared to waver on the pledge on Thursday.
O’Brien faced off against Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen at a debate in Canberra, weeks out from a federal election in which energy policy is emerging as a hot-button issue.
Under the landmark Paris deal, Australia has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by the end of the decade, compared to 2005 levels. O’Brien on Thursday said the Coalition would review the target if it wins office. He deflected a question on whether a Dutton government would remain a signatory to the Paris Agreement, saying the Coalition would “always act in the national interest”.
Within hours of the debate, the Coalition was forced to clarify O’Brien’s comments and reaffirm its commitment to Paris. But the Coalition appears intent on winding back the 2030 target if it is elected next month – a move that would weaken our bipartisan commitment to net zero by 2050 and be against the interests of the global climate.
The 2025 Climate and Energy debate | ABC NEWS.
Resetting the 2030 target
The Coalition has long disputed Labor’s claims that the 43% target would be met.
In June last year, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton claimed the Albanese government has “no hope of achieving the targets and there’s no sense signing up to targets you don’t have any prospect of achieving”.
In January this year, Dutton said a Coalition government would remain party to Paris, despite United States President Donald Trump’s move to withdraw his nation from the deal.
On Thursday, O’Brien confirmed a Coalition government would review the 43% target. In doing so, it would consider three factors: Australia’s emissions trajectory, the state of the economy and the Coalition’s suite of policies – including nuclear power and more gas.
O’Brien went on to say:
Labor, the Coalition, nobody in this country will be able to achieve the emission target set by Chris Bowen and Anthony Albanese. The difference between Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese is that Peter Dutton has been honest and upfront about that.
O’Brien would not rule out withdrawing Australia from the Paris deal, but later released a statement saying the Coalition remained committed to the agreement.
Will Australia meet the 43% target?
During the debate, Bowen claimed Australia is “on track” to meet its emissions-reduction goal. He pointed to analysis by his department released late last year showing emissions are projected to be 42.6% below 2005 levels in 2030.
Australia will have to work hard to meet the target, with our emissions reductions having stalled since 2021. The government’s projection assumes it achieves its target of 82% renewable electricity generation by 2030 – possible but very challenging from about 45% today.
It also depends on two policies to reduce emissions outside electricity, neither of which have yet demonstrated their progress.
The first is the safeguard mechanism, which aims to reduce emissions from heavy industry. It began in mid-2023 but its results are not yet clear. Second is the new vehicle efficiency standard, introduced from January this year.
What if Dutton does walk back Australia’s Paris commitment?
Even if a Dutton government remained in the Paris Agreement, walking back on the 43% emissions target is problematic, for a number of reasons.
Most obviously is that the threat of dangerous climate change is real, and growing. The Paris deal aims to keep average global temperatures “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and ideally, limit warming to no more than 1.5°C.
But according to official data, Earth’s monthly global average temperature exceeded 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for 11 months last year. So meeting the Paris commitment is already looking shaky.
While the Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty, there has been much debate as to the real meaning of “legally binding”. Some argue that national commitments to reduce emissions are not legally binding, and can be revised in either direction. While a downward revision is liable to draw criticism, it could be a legally available option under the Paris Agreement. Transgressors don’t get kicked out of the club.
But any downward revision on the targets is a bad look on the global stage. University of Melbourne climate law expert Jacqueline Peel has argued that any moves by a future Coalition government to water down Australia’s 2030 target, or to submit a 2035 target weaker than our current pledges, would:
go against the spirit, if not the letter, of the Paris Agreement, and – in some circumstances – could constitute a breach of those obligations.
Where to now?
The Albanese government chose not to announce a 2035 target before the election. The Opposition says it won’t set a 2035 target until it’s in government.
That means voters will be left in the dark on this important issue as they head to the ballot box.
At the moment, the Coalition appears to be relying on its controversial nuclear power plan to meet the bipartisan goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. But analysts have warned the plan will lead to much more emissions between now and then.
Meanwhile, there is far more work to be done outside the energy sector – in agriculture, transport, industry and more – to meet Australia’s climate commitments.
Australia’s cost of living crisis has garnered much attention during the election campaign so far. There has been very little talk about how Australia’s entire economy will get to net-zero.
That’s a terrible reflection on the state of our politics. Ultimately, unmitigated climate change will be bad for the planet and very bad for Australia.
Tony Wood may own shares in companies in relevant industries through his superannuation fund.
Scientists, professors, engineers, teachers and doctors are routinely ranked among the most trustworthy people in society. This is because these professions rely heavily on research, and good research is viewed as the most reliable source of knowledge.
These are studies that check to see if previous results can be repeated and are reliable. The administration’s focus seems to be specifically on studies that revisit the debunked claim of a link between vaccines and autism.
This is a worrying waste of effort, given the extensive evidence showing that there is no link between vaccines and autism, and the harm that suggesting this link can cause. However, the broader idea of funding studies that attempt to repeat earlier research is a good one.
Take research on Alzheimer’s disease as an example. In June 2024, Nature retracted a highly cited paper reporting an important theory relating to the mechanism of the disease. Unfortunately, it took 18 years to spot the errors and retract the paper.
If influential studies like this were regularly repeated by others, it wouldn’t have taken so long to spot the errors in the original research.
Alzheimer’s is proving a particularly tricky problem to solve despite the large amounts of money spent researching the disease. Being unable to reproduce key results contributes to this problem because new research relies on the trustworthiness of earlier research.
Research is complicated and there may be legitimate reasons research findings cannot be reproduced. Mistakes or dishonesty are not necessarily the cause.
In psychology or the social sciences, failure to reproduce results – despite using identical methods – could be due to using different populations, for instance, across different countries or cultures. In physical or medical sciences problems reproducing results could be down to using different equipment, chemicals or measurement techniques.
A lot of research may also not be reproducible simply because the researchers do not fully understand all the complexities of what they are studying. If all the relevant variables (such as genetics and environmental factors) are not understood or even identified, it is unsurprising that very similar experiments can yield different results.
In these cases, sometimes as much can be learned from a negative result as from a positive one, as this helps inform the design of future work.
Here, it is helpful to distinguish between reproducing another researcher’s exact results and being given enough information by the original researchers to replicate their experiments.
Science advances by comparing notes and discussing differences, so researchers must always give enough information in their reports to allow someone else to repeat (replicate) the experiment. This ensures the results can be trusted even if they may not be reproduced exactly.
Transparency is therefore central to research integrity, both in terms of trusting the research and trusting the people doing the research.
Unfortunately, the incentive structure within research doesn’t always encourage such transparency. The “publish or perish” culture and aggressive practices by journals often lead to excessive competition rather than collaboration and open research practices.
One solution, as new priorities from the US have suggested, is to directly fund researchers to replicate each other’s studies.
This is a promising development because most other funding, alongside opportunities to publish in the top journals, is instead linked to novelty. Unfortunately, this encourages researchers to act quickly to produce something unique rather than take their time to conduct thorough and transparent experiments.
We need to move to a system that rewards reliable research rather than just novel research. And part of this comes through rewarding people who focus on replication studies.
Industry also plays a part. Companies conducting research and development can sometimes be guilty of throwing a lot of money at a project and then pulling the plug quickly if a product (such as a new medicine) seems not to work. The reason for such failures is often unclear, but the reliability of earlier research is a contributing factor.
To avoid this problem, companies should be encouraged to replicate some of the original findings (perhaps significant experiments conducted by academics) before proceeding with development. In the long run, this strategy may turn out to be quicker and more efficient than the rapid chopping and changing that occurs now.
The scale of the reproducibility, or replicability, problem in research comes as a surprise to the public who have been told to “trust the science”. But over recent years there has been increasing recognition that the culture of research is as important as the experiments themselves.
If we want to be able to “trust the science”, science must be transparent and robustly conducted.
This is exactly what has happened with research looking at the link between vaccines and autism. The topic was so important that in this case the replication studies were done and found that there is, in fact, no link between vaccines and autism.
Simon Kolstoe works for the University of Portsmouth, and is a trustee of the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO). He receives research and consultancy funding from charities, universities and government. He chairs research ethics committees for the UK Health Research Authority, Ministry of Defence and Health Security Agency.
Rob Brooks is Scientia professor of evolution at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Through his research on artificial intimacy between humans and AI chatbots, Brooks became interested in how human evolution might be shaped by the proliferation of AI. He recently published a paper exploring various scenarios, from AI’s potential influence on human intelligence, to brain size, to more direct intervention in fertility treatment.
For Brooks, the relationship between humans and machines, including AI, mirrors the symbiotic relationships that happen in nature, where one species is linked to or depends on another. Some of these relationships are mutualistic, with each benefiting the other, he says:
I think that most of our relationships with technology should be mutualisms because that why we have the technologies … A lot of the things that AI does for us at the moment are incredible computational heavy lifting [tasks]. It could be difficult calculations or it could be remembering people’s birthdays – there’s a kind of mutualism.
But sometimes that mutualism can morph into parasitism, where one harms the other. Brooks thinks smartphones have already reached this stage because of the amount of human attention they take up and the influence this is having on human relationships, particularly among young people. He believes it’s also reasonable to assume “that attention and time parasites in the AI ecosystem will influence human evolution”.
Listen to the full episode of The Conversation Weekly to hear a conversation with Brooks about the potential ways AI could influence human evolution, from human intelligence to our relationships and even our brain size. This episode also includes an introduction with Signe Dean, science and technology editor at The Conversation in Australia.
This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written and produced by Gemma Ware. Mixing and sound design by Eloise Stevens and theme music by Neeta Sarl.
Artist’s rendering: Woolly mammoths once roamed large swathes of Siberia.Denis-S / Shutterstock
From dire wolves to woolly mammoths, the idea of resurrecting extinct species has
captured the public imagination. Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas-based biotech company leading the charge, has made headlines for ambitious efforts to bring back long-lost animals using cutting edge genetic engineering.
It recently announced the birth of pups with key traits of dire wolves, an iconic predator last seen roaming North America more than 10,000 years ago. This followed on the heels of earlier project announcements focused on the woolly mammoth and the thylacine. This all fuels a sense that de-extinction is not only possible but imminent.
But as the science advances, a deeper question lingers: how close must the result be to count as a true return? If we can only recover fragments of an extinct creature’s genome – and must build the rest with modern substitutes – is that really de-extinction, or are we simply creating lookalikes?
To the public, de-extinction often evokes images of Jurassic Park-style resurrection: a recreation of a lost animal, reborn into the modern world. In scientific circles, however, the term encompasses a variety of techniques: selective breeding, cloning, and increasingly, synthetic biology through genome editing. Synthetic biology is a field that involves redesigning systems found in nature.
One of Colossal’s dire wolves, created using genome editing. Colossal
Scientists have used selective breeding of modern cattle in attempts to recreate an animal that resembles the auroch, the wild ancestor of today’s breeds. Cloning has been used to briefly bring back the pyrenean ibex, which went extinct in 2000. In 2003, a Spanish team brought a cloned calf to term, but the animal died a few minutes after birth.
This is often cited as the first example of de-extinction. However, the only preserved tissue was from one female animal, meaning it could not have been used to bring back a viable population. Colossal’s work falls into the synthetic biology category.
These approaches differ in method but share a common goal: to restore a species
that has been lost. In most cases, what emerges is not an exact genetic copy of the extinct species, but a proxy: a modern organism engineered to resemble its ancestor in function or appearance.
Take the case of the woolly mammoth. Colossal’s project aims to create a cold-adapted Asian elephant that can fulfil the mammoth’s former ecological role. But mammoths and Asian elephants diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago and differ by an estimated 1.5 million genetic variants. Editing all of these is, for now, impossible. Instead, scientists are targeting a few dozen genes linked to key traits like cold resistance, fat storage and hair growth.
Compare that to humans and chimpanzees. Despite a genetic similarity of around 98.8%, the behavioural and physical differences between the two are huge. If comparatively small genetic gaps can produce such major differences, what can we expect when editing only a tiny fraction of the differences between two species? It’s a useful rule of thumb when assessing recent claims.
As discussed in a previous article, Colossal’s dire wolf project involved just 20 genetic edits. These were introduced into the genome of a gray wolf to mimic key traits of the extinct dire wolf. The resulting animals may look the part, but with so few changes, they are genetically much closer to modern wolves than their prehistoric namesake.
Colossal’s ambitions extend beyond mammoths and dire wolves. The company is
also working to revive the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger), a carnivorous marsupial that was once native to mainland Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea. The last example died at Hobart Zoo in 1936. Colossal is using a genetic relative called the fat-tailed dunnart – a tiny marsupial – as the foundation. The goal is to engineer the dunnart’s genome to express traits found in thylacines. The team says it is developing an artificial uterus device to carry the engineered foetus.
Colossal also has a project to revive the dodo, a flightless bird that roamed Mauritius until the 1600s. That project will use the Nicobar pigeon, one of the dodo’s closest living relatives, as a basis for genetic reconstruction.
In each case, the company relies on a partial blueprint: incomplete ancient DNA, and then uses the powerful genome editing tool Crispr to edit specific differences into the genome of a closely related living species. The finished animals, if born, may resemble their extinct counterparts in outward appearance and some behaviour – but they will not be genetically identical. Rather, they will be hybrids, mosaics or functional stand-ins.
That doesn’t negate the value of these projects. In fact, it might be time to update our expectations. If the goal is to restore ecological roles, not to perfectly recreate extinct genomes, then these animals may still serve important functions. But it also means we must be precise in our language. These are synthetic creations, not true returns.
Technology to prevent extinction
There are more grounded examples of near-de-extinction work – most notably the
northern white rhinoceros. Only two females remain alive today, and both are
infertile. Scientists are working to create viable embryos using preserved genetic
material and surrogate mothers from closely related rhino species. This effort
involves cloning and assisted reproduction, with the aim of restoring a population
genetically identical to the original.
Unlike the mammoth or the thylacine, the northern white rhino still has living
representatives and preserved cells. That makes it a fundamentally different
case – more conservation biology than synthetic biology. But it shows the potential of this technology when deployed toward preservation, not reconstruction.
Gene editing also holds promise for helping endangered species by using it to introduce genetic diversity into a population, eliminate harmful mutations from species or enhance resilience to disease or climate change. In this sense, the tools of de-extinction may ultimately serve to prevent extinctions, rather than reverse them.
So where does that leave us? Perhaps we need new terms: synthetic proxies, ecological analogues or engineered restorations. These phrases might lack the drama of “de-extinction” but they are closer to the scientific reality.
After all, these animals are not coming back from the dead – they are being invented, piece by piece, from what the past left behind. In the end, it may not matter whether we call them mammoths or woolly elephants, dire wolves or designer dogs. What matters is how we use this power – whether to heal broken ecosystems, to preserve the genetic legacy of vanishing species or simply to prove that we can.
But we should at least be honest: what we’re witnessing isn’t resurrection. It’s reimagination.
Timothy Hearn 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.
Over the past fortnight, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have regained control of almost all of the country’s capital, Khartoum. Much of the city had been in the hands of the rival Rapid Support Forces (RSF) since April 2023. Now the SAF are reportedly driving out the last outposts of the RSF from the fringes of the sprawling city.
When it began the war against its former SAF allies in April 2023, the RSF seized almost all of the city. But its presence was an occupation rather than a government. Looting, murder and rape were widely reported. No wonder, then, that many have welcomed the return of the SAF as a liberation.
But not everyone will celebrate. The SAF claims to be the rightful government of Sudan. But its leader, Abdel Fattah Burhan, himself seized power in 2021 by throwing out a transitional civilian government that was supposed to be leading Sudan back to democracy.
That was in the wake of the popular uprising in 2018-19 that ended the long authoritarian regime of Omar al-Bashir. So, the legitimacy of the SAF’s claim to power is questionable.
To complicate matters further, the SAF’s military success has come through alliance with local militias, whose fighters have been active in the struggle for Khartoum. Troubling accounts have emerged of arrests and summary executions by the SAF and allied military – sometimes allegedly targeted at people from southern or western Sudan, who are accused of supporting the RSF.
The RSF, meanwhile, keeps up its occupation of much of the west of Sudan, and its murderous siege of the western city of El Fasher. It has also continued to launch drone assaults on cities along the Nile.
Despite recent positive statements from the SAF, the war seems far from over. The SAF and RSF denounce one another. Each – with good reason – accuses the other of relying on foreign support, and each insists it should – and will – rule all of Sudan.
That vast territory in north-east Africa was formally divided when its southern third became the independent state of South Sudan in 2011, after years of struggle against the central government. Now it seems the north is also fragmenting, torn to pieces by the ambitions of rival military leaders and the unruly militias they have spawned. So, can there be a future for Sudan?
It would be easy to answer that with a simple “no”. Some might even welcome the end of a state that began in colonial violence and has seen multiple regional revolts and movements of secession. Others might argue that Sudan is simply too diverse to be viable. But its current plight was not inevitable, nor is its fate settled.
Sudan has long been burdened with a hyperactive military. That is partly a colonial legacy – the army has always been at the heart of the state.
After independence, soldiers saw themselves as not simply the guardians of the state, but as its embodiment. They were at first suspicious – and then increasingly contemptuous – of civilian politicians they regarded as self-interested, prone to factionalism, and chronically unable to agree on major issues, from the place of religion in the state to the nature of local government.
Three times, the soldiers seized power: in 1958, 1969 and 1989. Each time, they stayed in power for longer, and sought to impose their visions of what Sudan should be. Though these varied from conservative to socialist to Islamist, they always imagined a Sudan united by authoritarian rule, with uniformed men at its heart.
When popular uprisings threatened this military rule, the soldiers were adept at temporary concessions – removing the leader of the regime and cooperating with civilians for a few years, before seizing power again. Sudan’s soldiers saw the state as their possession.
Yet they struggled to rule it. There were struggles within the military itself over who should be in charge – the long rule of Jaafar Nimeiri was punctuated by repeated coup attempts. Omar al-Bashir in turn sought to manage rivals in the military by creating additional security forces and setting the soldiers against one another.
When unrest grew at the margins of Sudan, in the south and then the west, the soldiers were unable to contain this. So they armed and encouraged militias, exploiting and militarising local tensions and conflicts. As they did so, they unwittingly undermined their own claim to be the only legitimate wielders of violence.
Sudan’s soldiers insisted the state was theirs. But they squabbled over control of it and pulled both local militias and external powers into their struggles. This made their wars more lethal – but not more conclusive. Time and again, powerful men made decisions that drove conflict when they could have acted otherwise.
Sense of a nation
To recount this history is not simply to explain where Sudan is now. It is to remember this is not where it has to be. Sudan could yet mean more than this militarised vision of imposed unity. In the popular uprisings, protesters wrapped themselves in the Sudanese flag – evoking a vision of Sudan that celebrated its diversity, rather than treating this as a problem.
Some of that was romanticised or idealistic. The earnest expressions of national solidarity tended to gloss over profound differences in wealth and opportunities. Yet since its independence, the idea of Sudan has repeatedly inspired civilian protest and hopes of a better future.
The local resistance committees whose members made the uprising of 2018-19 imagined a more inclusive and just Sudan. That hope now drives the “emergency response rooms” that ordinary people have organised over the past two years – often in the face of extreme danger – to shelter and feed civilians.
Those brave enough to pursue that future deserve more than a condescending shrug from international analysts, and an assumption that Sudan is doomed to failure.
Justin Willis has in the past received funding from the UK government to undertake research on elections in Sudan; and from UK research councils for research on the history of state authority in Sudan.
The day of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, his incoming administration abruptly paused the work of USAID, while also claiming that it would preserve USAID’s “lifesaving and strategic aid programming”. These dramatic, overnight cuts were an unprecedented – and deadly – experiment in relation to aid spending which will have a catastrophic effect on the lives of those who depended on it.
The sudden suspension of USAID is set to make the famine in Sudan the deadliest for half a century. Since the announcement I’ve been working to see the impact of these cuts with a team of Sudanese researchers in South Kordofan State (Sudan), including from the South Kordofan-Blue Nile Coordination Unit, as part of my famine-focused project.
When war erupted in Khartoum in April 2023, the southern region of South Kordofan was relatively peaceful, so large numbers of people fled there for safety. But most fled with no food, so local people had to work out how to support the new arrivals. Many decided to host families, sharing what little food they had for themselves, believing that international aid would be made available.
Without this aid, these local humanitarians are now themselves also facing serious shortages. The timing and abrupt nature of the shuttering of USAID has made this particularly dangerous.
South Kordofan sits on the border with South Sudan. Like much of the country, it’s an agricultural region and in times of peace, people are able to grow crops and raise livestock. The region also has a long history of exporting livestock and commercially grown crops.
However, this food trade has been largely extractive as it followed colonial agricultural schemes run by British imperial agents and their elite indigenous associates that often left locals in poverty.
Sudan: one of Africa’s largest and most diverse countries. gt29/Shutterstock
After independence, the region suffered through decades of war between the Sudan government to the north and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) which fought a campaign that culminated in the foundation of South Sudan in 2011 (with the support of the US). South Kordofan and its SPLA supporters were trapped in the middle.
People in South Kordofan long for peace and a state that provides them with basic services, so they wouldn’t depend so heavily on humanitarian support. Since the 1980s, famine mortality has been dramatically reduced by international aid.
In fact, the US response to the famine of the mid-1980s under the then president, Ronald Reagan, whose administration provided more than US$1 billion (£766 million), saved hundreds of thousands of lives. This period became known in Sudan as “Reagan’s famine”.
‘Hemedti famine’
Now in South Kordofan they are calling the hardship created by the influx of starving people fleeing fighting further north the “Hemedti famine”, after Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, the leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The RSF is fighting the national army, the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) run by rival warlord General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan.
Many of those who have fled from urban centres lack the skills to survive and are far from their family networks, making them particularly vulnerable. Sudanese people have a strong moral sense – and sometimes a legal obligation to help family members.
This clearly doesn’t necessarily apply to most of those fleeing the fighting. But there is also a strong tradition of helping all people and even strangers in need, which people in South Kordofan have had to navigate.
Many locals chose to provide lifesaving local humanitarian support. But that is of necessity and finite. There is now a desperate need for a massive increase in aid. In such emergencies, international aid plays a key role in topping up the food that people grow and gather for themselves, and has made the difference between life and death.
Why is the USAID freeze so deadly?
This is why the curtailing of USAID support is so catastrophic. Even if US support were to be fully restored, the pause has already had deadly consequences. The sudden stopping of many local NGO worker salaries, a key source of income in the region, is another disaster. Each salary supported dozens of family members.
The 2025 aid cuts are set to be devastating for more people. Things are already critical. It has been estimated that half a half a million people died from hunger and disease across Sudan in 2024 alone.
I’m now getting reports from South Kordofan of households not lighting a fire for up to four days at a time, which means the family is not eating. And, as ever, it is the children and the elderly who are particularly vulnerable.
The consequences of famine are lasting. People in South Kordofan are reporting an increase in criminality as people steal in order to survive, which leaves lasting mistrust and social division. Famine also leaves a legacy of shame because people are witnessing their loved ones suffer and die. When people die in times of famine the living often do not even have the energy or resources to provide a dignified burial.
The Trump administration could not have turned off USAID support at a worse time. Aid logistics in Sudan follow a seasonal cycle. In the wetter months from May to November, the roads to South Kordofan that aid organisations depend on for food distribution become impassable.
So aid for the hungriest months from April to August, when stores are running low but the harvest in September has not yet come, must be delivered in the driest months before the rains start. USAID was halted in January, at the heart of the dry season, so this opportunity has been missed.
Meanwhile north-south flights in Sudan have been prohibited by the Sudan government since the civil war flared in 2023. There has been a report that the government will also ban incoming aid flights from Kenya due to Nairobi’s alleged support for the RSF.
Last month, the founder of Sudanese thinktank Confluence Advisory, Kholood Khair, told journalists: “It’s difficult to overstate how devastating the USAID cut will be for Sudan, not just because Sudan is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis but also because the US was Sudan’s largest humanitarian donor.” We’re now seeing that devastation getting worse by the day.
Naomi Ruth Pendle receives funding from the British Academy and the European Research Council.
When Jim Chalmers and Angus Taylor met for this week’s treasurers’ debate, the moderator observed that in three or six years they might be facing each other as prime minister and opposition leader.
Election results trigger, or subsequently lead to, leadership resets. Even in the turmoil of a campaign, players will also have their eyes on the future.
After two weeks, the election campaign appears to have shifted more clearly in Labor’s direction. The uncertainty caused by Donald Trump is making some voters inclined to stick with the status quo, and the Liberal campaign has appeared faltering. Things could change, but as of now, Labor is better placed.
Assuming Anthony Albanese wins, the dynamics within Labor will be different according to whether his government is in minority or majority.
Albanese’s negotiating skills were evident during the last minority Labor government, and would likely come to the fore again if Labor had to wrangle crossbenchers in the House of Representatives.
But regardless of majority or minority, there would probably be pressure for a leadership change at some point during the next term. It is hard to see Albanese, 62, taking Labor into the 2028 election.
Chalmers, 47, is the obvious frontrunner to succeed him, but not the only horse in the field. And, apart from Chalmers, other aspirants might be concerned time would pass them by if there was not a transition next term.
Home Affairs minister Tony Burke, 55, from the right in NSW, is ambitious and canny; he has delivered to the unions and could look to support from that quarter. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, 57, who hails from the Victorian right, also sees himself as a potential successor.
The left’s Tanya Plibersek, 55, is a favourite with the party rank and file but could struggle to get enough backing in a leadership transition during a second term. Energy Minister Chris Bowen, 52, has had a tough time selling the government’s energy transition policy; in the past he was seen as a serious leadership contender, but doesn’t make it into dispatches these days.
If the Labor leadership is contested, the rules provide for a ballot of the rank and file. That contributes 50% of the result, with caucus providing the other 50%. A transition in government during the term either would not involve a formal ballot or, if it did, the rules would be changed to override the provision for a long grass roots contest.
The dynamic between Chalmers and Albanese in a second-term government would be closely watched. There have been some differences between the two over the past three years, notably over the recalibration of the Morrison government’s tax cuts. Chalmers eventually won his push to change them. The treasurer’s loyalty to Albanese has not been in question. But the contrast in their communication skills has been widely remarked on.
The usual pattern of these things is that a treasurer who sees himself as a future prime minister becomes increasingly impatient as time goes on. Paul Keating, who eventually toppled Bob Hawke, and Peter Costello, who never got to the point of challenging John Howard, are examples.
While Albanese has obviously not had to watch his back this term, the dynamic would be different next time around. The example of Scott Morrison is instructive. After he unexpectedly won the 2019 election, Morrison was seen as untouchable. Fast forward to before the following election and some in the Liberal party approached treasurer Josh Frydenberg to try to replace Morrison. He rebuffed them.
Looking across the board, it’s notable that the most impressive Labor leaders currently are two state premiers, Chris Minns in NSW and Peter Malinauskas in South Australia. Both are centrist, pragmatic, unifying figures who come across well. Many in Labor might regret they are not in the federal parliament (although the leadership aspirants would be relieved).
On the other side of politics, if 54-year-old Peter Dutton loses, what happens with the Liberal leadership? The size of the loss would be crucial. If Labor remained in majority, that would be such a major failure Dutton would surely be replaced immediately. If he picked up a respectable number of seats, on the other hand, he would likely be kept on. He has worked his relationships within the Liberal party well; he is seen as more consultative than, for example, Morrison or Malcolm Turnbull.
But how long would he last as leader? If the Coalition was only a whisker away from power, he might get a second crack in 2028. However if Labor, although in minority, was looking solid, the Liberals would start thinking about a new leader.
Their problem is that there is a dearth of frontbench talent.
Taylor, 58, certainly has ambition. But he has not performed well as shadow treasurer, and is not a good retail politician. Liberal deputy leader Sussan Ley, 63, is scatty and widely criticised by colleagues. Defence spokesman Andrew Hastie, 42, hasn’t broadened out as much as might have been expected this term, and has the disadvantage of coming from Western Australia, which has limited his visibility.
The loss of Frydenberg at the last election has left the Liberals with a long-term succession problem.
Partly, though not entirely, this goes back some way, to the sort of candidates selected in former years. This is an increasing challenge for both “parties of government”. The talent pool is narrowing.
Fewer potential high flyers are wanting to enter politics. A toxic political culture and greater media intrusion contribute to this. Politicians might never have commanded great respect but they are accorded even less these days, and there are larger rewards elsewhere. Also, political staffs are bigger, and these young hustlers are well placed to secure preselection.
There is another factor. Nowadays there’s more pressure to put forward “local champions” – people who are deeply embedded in their communities. We’ve seen this in the success of the “community candidates” movement – many voters respond to them.
With fewer “safe” seats and this desire for localism, the major parties cannot so easily parachute high flyers into seats in which they don’t live. Labor notoriously tried this with Kristina Keneally, a former senator and former NSW premier, at the last election, and managed to lose what had been the solid Labor seat of Fowler.
The political move to local champions and community candidates, whatever pluses it might have, will over time erode the potential leadership pools of the major parties.
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.
Warning: this article contains major spoilers for the ending of White Lotus season three.
“Is this a bit ‘You killed my father, prepare to die,’ kind of?” asks Chelsea, the horoscope-obsessed Brit played with charm by Aimee Lou Wood in season three of The White Lotus.
Chelsea may be thinking of The Princess Bride (1987), but we’re firmly in Hamlet territory. Her partner Rick (Walton Goggins) soon sets off to avenge his father’s death and kicks off a chain of violence that ends, inevitably, in blood and tragedy.
Mike White’s luxury-hotel-meets-moral-decline drama, The White Lotus, has always toyed with highbrow references. Season two gave us Madame Butterfly meets commedia dell’arte (a genre of early Italian theatre replete with wealthy lovers, greedy old men, duplicitous servants and glamorous courtesans).
Season three shifts the setting to Thailand. There, the show’s satire of super-wealth is framed through not only the lens of Buddhism, but also through many of Sheakeapre’s great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, and King Lear.
Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.
Enter Rick, our sullen Hamlet. He’s been raised on a tragic fairy tale. As a child, his mother told him that his saintly father was murdered by a corrupt Thailand-based hotel-owner, Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn). Rick insists this theft of a parent is the root of his suffering. But like Hamlet, he can’t act – not at first.
When he finally does pull the trigger, the results are devastating. Jim’s wife, Sritlana (Lek Patravadi), reveals the twist. Jim was his real father, an oedipal moment that was unsurprising in a season so obsessed with incest.
In the ensuing swirl of gunfire, Chelsea is killed. Rick, cradling her body in a Lear-like pietà, is shot by the noble yet spiritually doomed security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong). The two lovers’ bodies float in the lily-strewn waters in an overt modern-day remake of Sir John Everett Millais’s painting, Ophelia (another character from Hamlet).
Yet it’s Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), not Rick, who most clearly channels Hamlet’s existential torment. Facing exposure for financial fraud, Timothy contemplates suicide and even taking his family with him.
Like Hamlet, though, he hesitates. Not out of pity, but uncertainty. What comes after death? Hamlet asked the same:
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Life is suffering. Hamlet and the Buddha knew that well. So why do we put up with it? To live or die? To act or wait? At a Buddhist monastery, Timothy seeks answers to these questions.
The senior monk tells him: death is not an escape, but a return. Like a droplet returning to the sea, “Death is a happy return, like coming home.” Pain is inescapable; it must be faced. Timothy, and Hamlet, struggle to accept that.
The inevitability of greed
Season three of The White Lotus may have touched on Hamlet’s considerations of suicide, revenge and fate (its finale is named Amor Fati, which translates as love of one’s fate), but its trademark attack on the inevitability of greed was thrown into sharp relief this season thanks to its light engagement with Buddhism.
Timothy speaks with the monk.
The senior monk tells Timothy in his gently broken English, “Everyone run from pain towards the pleasure, but when they get there only to find more pain. You cannot outrun pain.” This season, even our moral compasses, Gaitok, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), run from pain to pleasure – towards power, sex, comfort and money over enlightenment.
Gaitok puts his morals aside to kill Rick so that he might get a promotion and win the heart of Mook (Lalisa Manobal). Piper decides against a year at the monastery after realising she needs the comforts of wealth more than she realised. And Belinda? She could have exposed the killer of Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge’s beloved character from seasons one and two). Instead, she takes a US$5 million payout and sails away smiling.
As she departs, Billy Preston’s buoyant song Nothing from Nothing plays. It’s the same phrase Rick uttered earlier in the season: “Nothing comes from nothing, right?” He’s already empty, he cannot be saved. On the surface, it’s a throwaway line. But it holds weight – philosophical, spiritual and Shakespearean.
Buddhism teaches anatta, the doctrine of no-self. It’s the idea that release comes through relinquishing ego, embracing nothingness. Since we are essentially nothing, all that ever can come from us is nothing: the business and strife and frustration of life is in fact empty froth on the surface of a deep nothingness. And Shakespeare knew the dangers of misunderstanding that “nothing”.
Belinda goes back on her plans to start a business with Pornchai once she receives the money.
“Nothing comes from nothing” is a favoured maxim of King Lear. After asking the first two of his three daughters to express profusely their love for him, he rewards them with land and wealth. Turning to his third daughter, Cordelia, he asks, “What can you say to draw / A third more opulent than your sisters? Speak,” to which she responds:
Cordelia: Nothing, my lord.
Lear: Nothing?
Cordelia: Nothing.
Lear: Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.
If Cordelia gives Lear “nothing,” he will give her “nothing” in return – no dowry, no inheritance, no kingdom. This exposes how Lear has come to place a transactional value on love. In his mind, affection must be spoken, quantified and rewarded with land and power. He’s unable, or unwilling, to recognise the moral worth of Cordelia’s honest, restrained love because it offers no immediate gratification or political utility.
At this early stage of the play, Lear, like The White Lotus’s spiritually bankrupt denizens, falsely clings to worldly value, not seeing it as mere illusion. Belinda’s spiritual bank, however, was full. Yet in the season’s finale, the repetition of “nothing comes from nothing” after Belinda’s ethical one-eighty hints at how fateful her choice really is.
In one moment, she trades enlightenment and true (if restrained) happiness for the nothingness of wealth. At the start of both The White Lotus and King Lear, “nothing”, whether it means death, poverty, or solitude, is a threat. By the end, it’s all that remains.
Emily Rowe 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 James Laurenceson, Director and Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute (UTS:ACRI), University of Technology Sydney
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton have both committed to stripping a Chinese company, Landbridge, of the lease to operate Darwin Port. Landbridge paid A$506 million for the 99-year lease from the Northern Territory government in October 2015.
In Australia’s political system, democratically elected representatives like Albanese and Dutton have the power to make such decisions. Still, Australians would hope and expect these decisions were driven by the best available advice, not domestic political sparring ahead of a federal election.
This is particularly so when such a move would likely elevate fears among foreign investors around sovereign risk.
Defence Minister Richard Marles has refused to say if security agencies are recommending Australia retake control of the port, nor has the Coalition provided a reason for its new stance.
Media reports often cite “defence experts” who claim Chinese ownership of the lease involves unacceptable risks.
However, it has been the long-standing and consistent advice of Australia’s most senior national security officials that this is not the case.
Earlier concerns batted away
Landbridge did not need Canberra’s approval when it secured the port lease in 2015. Nonetheless, the company notified the Foreign Investment Review Board of its interest in submitting a competitive bid for the lease four months before the deal was sealed.
The Department of Defence and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) “examined it thoroughly”. The then-secretary of the Department of Defence, Dennis Richardson, said:
We are at one in agreeing that this was not an investment that should be opposed on defence or security grounds.
Richardson told Senate Estimates in 2015 he was “not aware of any concerns” among the senior leadership in the Australian Defence Forces (ADF), either.
The chief of the ADF, Mark Binskin, said in the same hearing:
If [ship] movements are the issue, I can sit at the fish and chip shop on the wharf […] and watch ships come and go, regardless of who owns it.
Some analysts raised concerns after the sale, but these were borderline ridiculed by officials with access to the most highly classified national security information.
Analysts at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, for example, warned that a Chinese company holding the lease “could facilitate intelligence collection” of ADF operations and US Marine deployments.
Richardson said it was “amateur hour” to suggest Chinese spies could use the port for this purpose. He added: “It’s as though people have never heard of overhead imagery” from spy satellites.
Analysts also suggested China could acquire valuable knowledge of the types of signals an Australian or US warship would “emit through a variety of sensors and systems”. Richardson dismissed this as “absurd”.
Even more ludicrous were claims the port deal would provide the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLA-N) with “facilitated access to Australia”.
Richardson labelled this as “alarmist nonsense”. Any visits by foreign naval vessels cannot be approved by a commercial port operator, he said. They must be signed off on by the Department of Defence.
Tellingly, when Landbridge found itself in financial difficulty in 2017, it was forced to borrow in high-interest rate debt markets. This is common for privately owned Chinese firms, but not those with close state and party connections. They would be able to access subsidised loans from state-owned banks.
Successive reviews have reaffirmed the decision
When Foreign Minister Julie Bishop was asked in 2018 whether she had any lingering security fears about the Darwin Port lease, she replied the Department of Defence “had no concerns […] and that is still the case”.
As the China-Australia relationship deteriorated in the ensuing years, the Morrison government reviewed the deal in 2021. It found there were still no national security grounds sufficient to overturn the lease.
Yet another review by the Albanese government just 18 months ago also deemed it “not necessary to vary or cancel the lease”. It concluded:
there is a robust regulatory system in place to manage risks to critical infrastructure, including the Port of Darwin.
In announcing his pledge to reacquire the Darwin Port last weekend, Dutton alluded to “advice of the intelligence agencies”, pointing to a deterioration in Australia’s strategic circumstances.
However, the Coalition had apparently not yet received an intelligence briefing on any security risks specifically connected to the Port of Darwin when Dutton made this pledge. Opposition leaders only made a request for the national security advice underpinning Albanese’s promise to reacquire the port in a letter to the government on Monday.
The reality is that if Albanese and Dutton now suddenly and genuinely believed that Darwin might need to serve as a staging post for military conflict with China, forcing the sale of a few commercial wharves currently operated by a Chinese company would be a woefully inadequate response.
They would instead be committing to a massive infrastructure upgrade, most likely in the form of an entirely new port facility. Planning for such a facility was already being mooted in 2019.
The fact that they aren’t says a lot.
James Laurenceson 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.
In March 2025, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a leading accreditation body, revised its guiding principles. This included removing the phrase “diversity and inclusion” from its accreditation standards and replacing it with the more neutral “community and connectedness”. The decision emerged amid a shifting legal and political climate in the United States, following a wave of executive orders and legislative efforts aimed at dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across public institutions.
For years, diversity and inclusion have been central to how business schools engage with and signal social responsibility, shaping policies on faculty hiring, student recruitment and curricula. The AACSB change is more than a semantic adjustment – it reflects growing pressure on institutions to retreat from politically sensitive terrain.
Now, business schools – many of which once celebrated DEI as a strategic and ethical imperative – are being forced to re-evaluate. Will they continue to invest in inclusion, or quietly abandon it under mounting institutional and political scrutiny? The answer will have global consequences, not just for higher education, but for the kind of leadership business schools claim to cultivate.
Accreditation bodies: shaping business schools’ strategies
The AACSB’s shift could have a significant impact on how business schools engage with diversity. As higher education institutions have embraced neoliberal, market-driven models, fuelled by students’ consumer-like expectations, external validation from accreditation bodies has become essential. Only 136 institutions (about 1% of all business schools) worldwide hold “triple accreditation” – accreditation by the AACSB, EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS), and Association of MBAs (AMBA). This status allows business schools to signal their elite standing and adherence to high international standards – and to charge higher tuition.
Accreditation offers tangible benefits, including use of prestigious logos, membership in exclusive networks, mutual recognition of academic credits, student exchange opportunities, and access to shared resources and best practices. These benefits shape strategic decisions, as business schools prioritise accreditation to maintain their reputation and competitiveness to attract high-paying students.
Many institutions even have associate or deputy deans dedicated to fulfilling accreditation requirements. Among these requirements has been the long-standing “diversity checkbox”, which required schools to demonstrate their commitment to diversity. AACSB was not alone in this focus: AMBA, another leading accreditation body that specialises in MBA programmes, annually recognises schools for their diversity efforts and initiatives promoting inclusion.
Accreditation pressures are compounded by the influence of business school rankings, another powerful driver of institutional priorities. Rankings such as the Financial Times’ business school list include diversity-related indicators, such as gender balance in classrooms, representation of women among faculty, and international faculty diversity. Bloomberg Businessweek’s Best Schools Diversity Index placed US universities George Washington, Howard and Morgan State at the very top in 2024. While these institutions don’t typically rank highly in overall MBA rankings, the diversity index offered them visibility and a competitive edge to attract prospective students.
With accreditation bodies and business school rankings shaping institutional identities, a key question emerges: will business schools continue to prioritise diversity if structural incentives erode, or will it quietly disappear from the agenda?
These initiatives were not developed in a vacuum. Accreditation standards and external recognition gave institutions the legitimacy and incentive to act. Diversity became part of the strategic fabric – an ethical development, yes, but also a business case aligned with the values that accreditation and rankings rewarded.
Now, with a major accreditation body stepping back and public discourse increasingly polarised, that alignment is beginning to fracture. In the US, federal support for diversity-related research is shrinking. Facing pressure from the Department of Education to end diversity initiatives or risk losing funding, some universities have already taken action by alternately moving to close DEI offices; removing references to DEI from websites, policies and official materials; or even cancelling a planned celebration of International Women’s Day.
At least two US schools have either severed or planned to sever links with the PhD Project, a programme founded in 1994 that is devoted to “increasing the number of brilliant educators from all communities”. In Europe, some institutions may quietly reduce their commitments, no longer seeing DEI as worth the political or institutional risk.
The dilemma is no longer about how to advance diversity – but whether to defend it at all. Business schools must decide: is diversity still central to their mission, or just another line item to be dropped when the pressure mounts?
If business schools are serious about their social mission, they must continue investing in diversity – not as a symbolic gesture, but as a structural commitment. Diversity, equity and inclusion are not peripheral concerns; they are embedded in frameworks like the Principle of Responsible Management Education and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5: Gender Equality; SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities) – benchmarks that many institutions cite as central to their values. More than 30 Nordic business schools, all members of AACSB, recently issued a joint statement that diversity remains a core value for them.
Diversity and knowledge
Beyond institutional mandates, diversity is foundational to the production of credible knowledge. In Why Trust Science? (2019), historian Naomi Oreskes argues that while “diversity does not heal all epistemic ills”, it plays a crucial role in identifying blind spots and challenging groupthink. Drawing on feminist theorists Sandra Harding and Helen Longino, she shows how epistemic communities that are diverse – and critically engaged – are better positioned to identify and correct biases. In more homogeneous groups, dominant assumptions often go unchallenged, leading to structural oversights that undermine both knowledge and legitimacy.
At a time when trust in academic institutions is eroding, ensuring diverse perspectives is not just desirable – it is necessary. For business schools, which train future leaders and decision-makers, the stakes are especially high.
This is a moment not to retreat from diversity, but to reclaim it. Rather than treating it as a politicized liability, schools can reassert it as a core academic and democratic value – a way of remaining relevant, rigorous and responsible. And in a climate where “woke” has become a catch-all insult, schools also have an opportunity to reclaim the term – not as provocation, but as a return to its original meaning: a principled alertness to social realities and structural injustice. The LGBTQI+ community’s reclamation of “queer” as a term of empowerment and resistance against societal norms can point the way.
By reinforcing their commitment to diversity, business schools can help deepen critical inquiry, rebuild public trust in science and ultimately equip their students for leadership in this fractured world – which they will need to understand in all its complexity.
Alessandro Ghio ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
The upcoming elections in Gabon will test whether the country is on a firm democratic footing, or whether it will be business as usual with military men in control, but under the guise of democratic choice.
Brice Oligui Nguema, now the transitional president, staged a coup against Ali Bongo in August 2023. Oligui Nguema and his military junta promised to return power to civilians at the end of a two year military transition.
But Oligui Nguema wrong-footed opposition figures on two fronts. First, he announced the elections six months earlier than the transition arrangement allowed for. And second, in early March he resigned his office as general and presented himself as a civilian and therefore eligible to run as a candidate. He is contesting against seven other candidates, one of whom is the former prime minister of Gabon, Claude Bilie-By-Nze.
Since most of the other candidates have no national following and lack sufficient campaign finance or party machinery throughout the densely forested national territory, I argue that the presidential race has been reduced to a run-off between two men: Oligui Nguema and Bilie-By-Nze.
Both men were part of the previous regime. Although the two men agreed to stand against one another, they never contradict each other.
Whoever wins the 12 April election, Gabon’s people will see a new government run by members of the former one. So, for the people of Gabon, perhaps the only thing that will change will be the end of the 56-year Bongo family dynasty.
The contenders
Originally, 23 applications for candidacy were sent to the National Commission for the Organization and Coordination of Elections and Referendum. On 27 March Gabon’s Constitutional Court validated eight candidates.
They are Thierry Yvon Michel Ngoma, Axel Stophène Ibinga Ibinga, Alain Simplice Boungoueres, Zenaba Gninga Changing, Stéphane Germain Iloko, Joseph Lapensée Essigone, Bilie-By-Nze and Oligui Nguema.
At first the military junta threatened to exclude the former ruling party from participating in the 2025 multiparty elections. But after a year of close consultations with former ministers, deputies and local party “big men”, Oligui Nguema decided to allow the Gabonese Democratic Party to present candidates.
In return, the party agreed to call on all its activists and supporters to vote for Oligui Nguema.
Where Oligui Nguema has resurrected the former ruling party, which ruled Gabon from 1967 to 2023, its politicians and its national machinery, Bilie-By-Nze has positioned himself as the “candidate of rupture”. Beyond the public posturing, there doesn’t seem to much difference between the two.
The election, which will follow a new code put in place in January 2025, involves several key steps to ensure transparency and fairness.
Citizens register to vote, providing identification and proof of residency. As a referendum on a new constitution was held in November 2024, electoral lists are largely complete.
The election has to be organised on the basis of “permanent biometric electoral lists”. This means a biometric register of voters would be used for verification. Information and communications technologies must be used to ensure the transparency, efficiency and reliability of the ballots.
Candidates and their parties campaign, presenting their platforms and policies. This campaign period is regulated to ensure fair play, with restrictions on campaign financing and media coverage.
Polling stations are set up across the country, equipped with the necessary high-tech materials. Election officers are trained to assist voters and manage the process. Voters receive ballots listing all candidates and parties. They mark their choices in private booths to ensure confidentiality.
After the polls close, votes will be counted under strict supervision to prevent tampering. Counting is conducted transparently, with representatives from political parties and observers present to monitor the process, as per Article 90 of the electoral code.
The official results are announced by the electoral commission, with observers present to validate the process. Despite having high-technology biometric counting systems, it can take as long as two weeks to announce the official results, especially if the results are close.
Any disputes or complaints are addressed through legal channels to ensure a fair outcome, in accordance with Article 105 of the electoral code.
Doubts persist
Despite these systems being in place, opposition figures (including former interior minister Jean-Remy Yama) have expressed doubts that the process will be fair.
Firstly, candidates endorsed by the Gabonese Democratic Party have always won. Since Oligui Nguema has been endorsed by the Gabonese Democratic Party, he is, in a statistical sense, the most probable winner.
Secondly, prominent figures from the former regime who are now leading opposition actors criticised Oligui Nguema’s premature announcement of the poll. According to his transition timeline, the election was to take place in August 2025. It is an old trick: calling quick elections to prevent the opposition from uniting behind a common candidate who can challenge the president.
Drawing from its past experience as election observer in Gabon, the Gabonese Red Cross plans to mobilise a team of 200 volunteers, in addition to its staff. This team will supplement the limited human resources available during the 2023 operation to help the public authorities.
International observers from organisations such as the African Union and the United Nations are expected to monitor the elections to ensure they are free and fair, providing an additional layer of oversight.
Security measures are also heightened during the election period to maintain peace and order, enabling citizens to exercise their democratic rights without fear or intimidation.
If the referendum held in November 2024 is any indicator of what is to come, then foreign observers should expect a peaceful presidential election with a clear victory for the winner.
It promises to be a peaceful transition from military rule to civilian rule. This is especially so as the new government will be run by members of the former one.
Douglas Yates 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 Trump administration has announced a 90-day pause on its plan to impose so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly all US imports. But the pause does not extend to China, where import duties will rise to around 125%.
The move signals a partial retreat from what had been shaping up as a broad and aggressive trade war. For most countries, the US will now apply a 10% baseline tariff for the next three months. But the White House made clear that its tariffs on Chinese imports will remain in place.
So why did President Trump back away from the broader tariff push? The answer is simple: the economic cost to the US was too high.
Our economic model shows the fallout, even after the ‘pause’
Using a global economic model, we have been estimating the macroeconomic consequences of the Trump administration’s tariff plans as they have developed.
The following table shows two versions of the economic effects of the tariff plan:
“pre-pause” – as the plan stood immediately before Wednesday’s 90-day pause, under a scenario in which all countries retaliate except Australia, Japan and South Korea (which said they would not retaliate)
“post-pause” after reciprocal tariffs were withdrawn.
As is clear, the US would have faced steep and immediate losses in employment, investment, growth, and most importantly, real consumption, the best measure of household living standards.
Heavy costs of the tariff war
Under the pre-pause scenario, the US would have seen real consumption fall by 2.4% in 2025 alone. Real gross domestic product (GDP) would have declined by 2.6%, while employment falls by 2.7% and real investment (after inflation) plunges 6.6%.
These are not trivial adjustments. They represent significant contractions that would be felt in everyday life, from job losses to price increases to reduced household purchasing power. Since the current US unemployment rate is 4.2%, these results suggest that for every three currently unemployed Americans, two more would join their ranks.
Our modelling shows the damage would not just be short-term. Across the 2025–2040 projection period, US real consumption losses would have averaged 1.2%, with persistent investment weakness and a long-term decline in real GDP.
It is likely that internal economic advice reflected this kind of outlook. The decision to pause most of the tariff increases may well be an acknowledgement that the policy was economically unsustainable and would result in a permanent reduction in US global economic power. Financial markets were also rattled.
The scaled-back plan: still aggressive on China
The new arrangement announced on April 9 scales the higher tariff regime back to a flat 10% for about 70 countries, but keeps the full weight of tariffs on Chinese goods at around 125%. Rates on Canadian and Mexican imports remain at 25%.
The table’s “post-pause” column summarises the results of the scaled-back plan if the pause becomes permanent. For consistency, we assume all countries except Australia, Japan and Korea retaliate with tariffs equal to those imposed by the US.
As is clear from the “post-pause” results, lower US tariffs, together with lower retaliatory tariffs, equal less damage for the US economy.
Tariffs applied uniformly are less distortionary, and significant retaliation from just one major partner (China) is easier to absorb than a broad global response.
However, the costs will still be high. The US is projected to experience a 1.9% drop in real consumption in 2025, driven by lower employment and reduced efficiency in production. Real investment is projected to fall by 4.8%, and employment by 2.1%.
Perhaps we should not be surprised that the costs are still so high. In 2022, China, Canada and Mexico accounted for almost 45% of all US goods imports, and many countries were already facing 10% reciprocal tariffs in the “pre-pause” scenario. Trump’s tariff pause has not changed duty rates for these countries.
US President Donald Trump discusses the 90-day pause.
What does this mean for Australia?
Much of the domestic commentary in Australia has focused on the risk of collateral damage from a US-China trade war. Given Australia’s economic ties to both countries, it is a reasonable concern.
But our modelling suggests that Australia may actually benefit modestly. Under both scenarios, Australia’s real consumption rises slightly, driven by stronger investment, improved terms of trade (a measure of our export prices relative to import prices), and redirection of trade flows.
One mechanism is what economists call trade diversion: if Chinese or European exporters find the US market less attractive, they may redirect goods to Australia and other open markets.
At the same time, reduced global demand for capital, especially in the US and China, means lower interest rates globally. That stimulates investment elsewhere, including in Australia. In our model, Australian real investment rises under both scenarios, leading to small but sustained gains in GDP and household consumption.
These results suggest that, at least under current policy settings, Australia is unlikely to suffer significant direct effects from the tariff increases.
However, rising investor uncertainty is a risk for both the global and Australian economies, and this is not factored into our modelling. In the space of a single week, the Trump administration has whipsawed global investor confidence through three major tariff announcements.
A temporary reprieve
Tariffs appear to be central to the administration’s economic program. So Trump’s decision to pause his broader tariff agenda may not signal a shift in philosophy: just a tactical retreat.
The updated strategy, high tariffs on China and lower ones elsewhere, might reflect an attempt to refocus on where the administration sees its main strategic concern, while avoiding unnecessary blowback from allies and neutral partners.
Whether this narrower approach proves durable remains to be seen. The sharpest economic pain has been deferred. Whether it returns depends on how the next 90 days play out.
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.
Major changes are scheduled for the sector later this year, four years after the damning Royal Commission report into aged care. Yet no additional funding has been announced.
Estimates suggest funding is short around $5 billion to address losses by residential care providers or the shortfall in Home Care Packages.
What can we expect this year?
A new Aged Care Act will come into force on July 1 with a much greater emphasis on the rights of older people to get the care that suits their needs. This will mean:
a new system to regulate aged care
a new independent complaints commissioner
a new Support at Home program for older people who want to live at home, and in the community
changes to fees for residential aged care.
But a number of problems remain and it is not clear the reforms being introduced this year will fix them.
Access is still an issue
Access to aged care continues to be a problem, particularly in rural and remote areas. The system is difficult to navigate for often vulnerable and confused consumers and their families.
The government relies heavily on the My Aged Care website to inform older people and their families about aged care options. But this provides only basic information and it is difficult to get individualised support.
There is also a “digital divide” for a significant group who are unfamiliar with, and lack confidence in, using online services.
So we need a much greater emphasis on providing local “one stop shops” for personalised support and advice, particularly when people first enter the aged-care system. These services could be provided through Centrelink or new regional aged-care offices.
Not everyone can navigate websites to get information about the care they need. Screenshot/My Aged Care
About one-third of older people say they need help to live at home. But to get assistance you need an aged-care assessment and that process too needs improving.
There are some concerns the number of new aged-care beds is not increasing fast enough. For instance, there are shortages of residential aged care in particular areas such as Canberra.
Yet increased demand for home-care packages is not being met.
For those who need more intensive services at home, waiting times remain stubbornly and unacceptably long because there aren’t enough home care packages.
Despite years of complaints, there are still more than 80,000 people on the waiting list for care at home.
The new Support at Home program will introduce an eight-level system of support. The highest level of home-care funding will increase to $78,000 to bridge the gap between funding for home and residential care. But many more intensive care packages for home care will be needed to reduce waiting times.
The Support at Home program also introduces significantly higher out-of-pocket costs for older people. Such costs for everyday services – such as meals, cleaning and gardening – currently funded through the Commonwealth Home Support Program will increase significantly.
Most controversially, there will also be greater out-of-pocket costs for “independence” services including personal care, social support, respite care and therapy.
Staff shortages still a concern
For aged-care providers, chronic workforce shortages are still the biggest problem. Recent increases in wages for aged-care workers, including nurses, are a step in the right direction. But wages are still low.
It remains hard to attract staff, staff turnover is high and staff are under-trained, risking the quality of care. Shortages are particularly acute in rural areas.
The aged-care industry is calling for streamlined migration, better training and incentives for regional workers to make up the shortfall. But so far no new election announcements have been made.
Despite changes we’ll see from July, the organisation and financing of aged care remains fundamentally unchanged.
Overall, Australia’s aged-care system is still heavily privatised and fragmented. In 2022-23 there were 923 home-care providers, 764 residential-care providers and 1,334 home-support providers, nearly all in the private and not-for-profit sectors.
The Commonwealth continues to manage the sector through a cumbersome combination of highly centralised regulation and prescriptive funding contracts.
It has not put into place an effective, regional management structure to plan, organise and govern the sector to drive quality, innovation, equity, responsiveness and efficiency.
Nor has the Commonwealth been willing to adequately finance the system either through a levy, a social insurance scheme or via increased taxation. Instead, it’s upping the reliance on user fees to meet the cost of providing services.
Hal Swerissen is Deputy Chair of the Bendigo Kangan Institute for TAFE.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane McAdam, Scientia Professor and ARC Laureate Fellow, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW Sydney
The details of a new visa enabling Tuvaluan citizens to permanently migrate to Australia were released this week.
The visa was created as part of a bilateral treaty Australia and Tuvalu signed in late 2023, which aims to protect the two countries’ shared interests in security, prosperity and stability, especially given the “existential threat posed by climate change”.
The Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union, as it is known, is the world’s first bilateral agreement to create a special visa like this in the context of climate change.
Here’s what we know so far about why this special visa exists and how it will work.
Why is this migration avenue important?
The impacts of climate change are already contributing to displacement and migration around the world.
As a low-lying atoll nation, Tuvalu is particularly exposed to rising sea levels, storm surges and coastal erosion.
As Pacific leaders declared in a world-first regional framework on climate mobility in 2023, rights-based migration can “help people to move safely and on their own terms in the context of climate change.”
And enhanced migration opportunities have clearly made a huge difference to development challenges in the Pacific, allowing people to access education and work and send money back home.
Countries with greater migration opportunities in the Pacific generally do better.
While Australia has a history of labour mobility schemes for Pacific peoples, this won’t provide opportunities for everyone.
Despite perennial calls for migration or relocation opportunities in the face of climate change, this is the first Australian visa to respond.
As a low-lying atoll nation, Tuvalu is particularly exposed to rising sea levels. maloff/Shutterstock
How does the new visa work?
The visa will enable up to 280 people from Tuvalu to move to Australia each year.
On arrival in Australia, visa holders will receive, among other things, immediate access to:
education (at the same subsidisation as Australian citizens)
Medicare
the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS)
family tax benefit
childcare subsidy
youth allowance.
They will also have “freedom for unlimited travel” to and from Australia.
This is rare. Normally, unlimited travel is capped at five years.
According to some experts, these arrangements now mean Tuvalu has the “second closest migration relationship with Australia after New Zealand”.
Reading the fine print
The technical name of the visa is Subclass 192 (Pacific Engagement).
The details of the visa, released this week, reveal some curiosities.
First, it has been incorporated into the existing Pacific Engagement Visa category (subclass 192) rather than designed as a standalone visa.
Presumably, this was a pragmatic decision to expedite its creation and overcome the significant costs of establishing a wholly new visa category.
But unlike the Pacific Engagement Visa – a different, earlier visa, which is contingent on applicants having a job offer in Australia – this new visa is not employment-dependent.
Secondly, the new visa does not specifically mention Tuvalu.
This would make it simpler to extend it to other Pacific countries in the future.
Who can apply, and how?
To apply, eligible people must first register their interest for the visa online. Then, they must be selected through a random computer ballot to apply.
The primary applicant must:
be at least 18 years of age
hold a Tuvaluan passport, and
have been born in Tuvalu – or had a parent or a grandparent born there.
People with New Zealand citizenship cannot apply. Nor can anyone whose Tuvaluan citizenship was obtained through investment in the country.
This indicates the underlying humanitarian nature of the visa; people with comparable opportunities in New Zealand or elsewhere are ineligible to apply for it.
Applicants must also satisfy certain health and character requirements.
Strikingly, the visa is open to those “with disabilities, special needs and chronic health conditions”. This is often a bar to acquiring an Australian visa.
And the new visa isn’t contingent on people showing they face risks from the adverse impacts of climate change and disasters, even though climate change formed the backdrop to the scheme’s creation.
Settlement support is crucial
With the first visa holders expected to arrive later this year, questions remain about how well supported they will be.
Australia would provide support for applicants to find work and to the growing Tuvaluan diaspora in Australia to maintain connection to culture and improve settlement outcomes.
That’s promising, but it’s not yet clear how this will be done.
A heavy burden often falls on diaspora communities to assist newcomers.
For this scheme to work, there must be government investment over the immediate and longer-term to give people the best prospects of thriving.
Drawing on experiences from refugee settlement, and from comparative experiences in New Zealand with respect to Pacific communities, will be instructive.
Extensive and ongoing community consultation is also needed with Tuvalu and with the Tuvalu diaspora in Australia. This includes involving these communities in reviewing the scheme over time.
Jane McAdam receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the expert sub-committee of the Ministerial Advisory Council on Skilled Migration.
Women MPs are increasingly targets of misogynistic, racist and sexual online abuse, but New Zealand’s legal framework to protect them is simply not fit for purpose.
Recently released research found online threats of physical and sexual violence have caused those MPs to feel fearful, anxious and distressed. Some included in the study said the harassment led to them self-censoring, using social media less often, and considering leaving politics early.
But the current legal framework is not well equipped to address the nature or volume of the online harassment aimed at MPs.
Serious online threats made by identifiable individuals can be criminal offences under the Crimes Act 1961. Similarly, the new stalking law, expected to pass later this year, will create some protection for women MPs from online harassers – as long as the stalker can be identified.
Under the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015), victims of online harassment can ask the court for protection from the person harassing them, which can include orders to stop all contact. But once again, police need to be able to identify the perpetrator.
And that is the sticking point. Online abuse is usually committed anonymously and often by perpetrators using a VPN service that encrypts internet traffic and protects your online identity.
Also, the Harmful Digital Communications Act was not drafted to deal with volumetric harassment – a coordinated effort designed to overwhelm and intimidate a target through a deluge online interactions.
These campaigns typically involve a large number of participants who collectively flood someone with abusive, threatening or harmful messages. Reporting and attempting to take action on every single message or comment is simply not practical.
Some women MPs told researchers the harassment led to them self-censoring, using social media less often and considering leaving politics early. Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images
The way forward
Despite the challenges, there are some steps the government can take to improve the law to better protect MPs.
Firstly, any new law needs to be fit for purpose. The technological landscape is very different now to when the Harmful Digital Communications Act was introduced in 2015.
New Zealand should consider following the European Union’s example and criminalise inciting, aiding and participating in mob-style or mass online harassment campaigns. In the EU, the penalty for this can include imprisonment.
Much of the online abuse originates on social media platforms. But unlike the United Kingdom and Australia, New Zealand does not currently regulate social media.
In the UK, for example, the Online Safety Act 2023 makes social media companies legally responsible for user safety. Companies must minimise risk of harm (including online violence) when designing, implementing and using any technology on their platforms. Failing these legal duties will incur significant financial penalties.
The UK’s framework shifts the burden of online safety off the shoulders of individual victims and places it on social media companies which are better positioned to remove harmful content and users swiftly. The rules also alter how new technology is implemented to better protect user safety.
Dust off past proposals
Under the previous Labour government, the Ministry of Internal Affairs proposed a new, independent regulatory body to promote online safety, with industry standards and codes of practice. The current coalition government scrapped the proposal last year, leaving New Zealand without a clear plan to address online harm.
Political leaders should urgently reconsider the Internal Affairs proposal for social media regulation. But they should also go further.
My research evaluating responses to online abuse in New Zealand, Australia and the UK has highlighted the importance of addressing underlying social and cultural causes of online gender-based violence.
To effectively prevent online violence against women MPs, a new regulatory framework should require social media platforms to actively challenge and modify harmful gender stereotypes embedded in their services.
This includes conducting comprehensive risk assessments during the design, development, deployment and use of their platforms.
While the recent revelations about online abuse directed at women MPs makes for grim reading, it’s clear there are steps the government can take to ensure all MPs feel safe to participate in the political process.
Cassandra Mudgway is a member of the NZ Labour Party.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on April 10, 2025.
Keith Rankin Essay – Rational Expectations, Intelligence, and War Essay by Keith Rankin. ‘Rational Expectations’ is a problematic theory in economics. Here I want to focus more away from economics; and more on the meanings of ‘rationality’ in decision-making, than on the problematic ambiguity of the word ‘expect’ (and its derivatives such as ‘expectations’). ‘Expectation’ here means what we believe ‘will’ happen, not ‘should’
Location-sharing apps are enabling domestic violence. But young people aren’t aware of the danger Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria Atienzar-Prieto, PhD Candidate, School of Health Sciences and Social Work, Griffith University The Conversation/Snapchat Location-sharing apps are shaping how we connect and communicate – especially among younger people. Snap Map, a popular feature within Snapchat, is widely used by teens and young adults to stay in
Tools like Apple’s photo Clean Up are yet another nail in the coffin for being able to trust our eyes Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By T.J. Thomson, Senior Lecturer in Visual Communication & Digital Media, RMIT University Apple Clean Up highlights photo elements that might be deemed distracting. T.J. Thomson You may have seen ads by Apple promoting its new Clean Up feature that can be used to remove elements in a
Current major party policies fall short for Indigenous communities. Here’s a better path forward Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bartholomew Stanford, Senior Lecturer of Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Education and Research Centre, James Cook University Since the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023, the Indigenous Affairs portfolio has not featured prominently in policy debates at the national level. As the election campaign continues, there’s yet to be
Good boy or bad dog? Our 1 billion pet dogs do real environmental damage Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bill Bateman, Associate Professor, Behavioural Ecology, Curtin University William Edge/Shutterstock There are an estimated 1 billion domesticated dogs in the world. Most are owned animals – pets, companions or working animals who share their lives with humans. They are the most common large predator in the world.
Labor made plenty of promises at the last election. Did they deliver? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Rindert Algra-Maschio, PhD Candidate, Social and Political Sciences, Monash University Election promises are a mainstay of contemporary politics. Governments cite kept commitments as proof they can be trusted, while oppositions pounce on any failure to deliver. But beyond the politics, campaign pledges are also central to
1 in 10 tunnel workers could develop silicosis, our new research shows Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Cole, Occupational Hygienist, PhD Candidate, University of Sydney Around 10% of underground tunnel workers in Queensland could develop silicosis, our new study has found. Silicosis is a serious, incurable lung disease caused by inhaling small particles of silica dust. You might have heard about it in
Here’s how a ‘silent’ tax hike is balancing the budget – with the heaviest burden on the lowest paid Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Murphy, Visiting Fellow, Economics (modelling), Australian National University With just over three weeks to go until the federal election, both major parties are trying to position themselves as Australia’s better economic managers. Labor was able to hand down two consecutive budget surpluses in its current term.
Our ancestors didn’t eat 3 meals a day. So why do we? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rob Richardson, Senior Lecturer in Culinary Arts & Gastronomy, Auckland University of Technology Shutterstock Pop quiz: name the world’s most famous trio? If you’re a foodie, then your answer might have been breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s an almost universally accepted trinity – particularly in the Western
Tripped at the first hurdle: fees-free changes could put some students off tertiary study altogether Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wendy Ann Alabaster, PhD candidate, University of Canterbury skynesher/Getty Images The door to tertiary education will likely close for some students now changes have kicked in for the fees-free policy. In 2017, the Labour government introduced a fee holiday for students’ first year of academic study, or
Europe tops global ranking of dynamic and sustainable cities – here’s why Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pascual Berrone, Head of Strategic Management Department and Chair of Sustainability and Business Strategy, IESE Business School (Universidad de Navarra) London, New York and Paris have been named the world’s most dynamic and liveable cities. This is according to a new ranking of global cities that highlights
Election Diary: Chalmers and Taylor quizzed on personal flaws during animated treasurers’ debate Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Perhaps the most compelling moment, at least for non-economists, in Wednesday night’s debate between Treasurer Jim Chalmers and his “shadow” Angus Taylor was when each man was forced to respond to what critics see as their personal flaws. Moderator Ross
The Coalition’s domestic gas plan would lower prices – just not very much Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samantha Hepburn, Professor, Deakin Law School, Deakin University A LNG carrier departs Gladstone. Ivan Kuzkin/Shutterstock It surprised many Australians when the Coalition announced a plan straight from the progressive side of politics: force large gas companies to reserve gas for domestic use – at a lower cost
Can you spot a financial fake? How AI is raising our risks of billing fraud Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Grosse, Director of the Master of Business Analytics, Senior Lecturer, Accounting, University of Technology Sydney Along with the many benefits of artificial intelligence – from providing real time navigation to early disease detection – the explosion in its use has increased opportunities for fraud and deception.
Running for parliament is still a man’s world, with fewer female candidates – especially in winnable seats Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Stephenson, Deputy Director, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, Australian National University Despite progress towards gender equality in Australian elections, women remain underrepresented among candidates vying for office on May 3. They are also overrepresented in “glass cliff” seats, which are the ones that are difficult to
Adam Bandt says the Greens can deliver ‘real change’ – but the party should choose its battles more wisely Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Crowley, Adjunct Associate Professor, Public and Environmental Policy, University of Tasmania Federal Greens leader Adam Bandt says the federal election offers “an opportunity for real change”, saying his party would use the balance of power in the next parliament to help deliver serious policy reforms. In
Don’t let embarrassment stop you – talking about these anal cancer symptoms could save your life Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suzanne Mahady, Gastroenterologist & Clinical Epidemiologist, Senior Lecturer, Monash University sarkao/Shutterstock Anal cancer doesn’t get a lot of attention. This may be because it’s relatively rare – anal cancer affects an estimated one to two Australians in every 100,000. As a comparison, melanomas affect around 70 in
Gold rush Melbourne and post-war boom: how Australia overcame housing shortages in the past Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Stevens, Lecturer, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University As part of their federal election campaign, the Coalition announced plans to limit the number of international students able to commence study each year to 240,000, “focused on driving […] housing availability and affordability”. This
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
‘Rational Expectations’ is a problematic theory in economics. Here I want to focus more away from economics; and more on the meanings of ‘rationality’ in decision-making, than on the problematic ambiguity of the word ‘expect’ (and its derivatives such as ‘expectations’). ‘Expectation’ here means what we believe ‘will’ happen, not ‘should’ happen; a rational expectation is a prediction, an unbiased average of possibilities, formed through a (usually implicit) calculation of possible benefits and costs – utilities and disutilities, to be technical – and their associated probabilities.
A rational decision is one that uses all freely available information in unbiased ways – plus some researched information, bearing in mind the cost of information gathering – to reach an optimal conclusion, or to decide on a course of action that can be ‘expected’ to lead to an optimal outcome to the decision-maker.
All living beings are rational to a point, in that they contain an automatic intelligence (AutoI) which exhibits programmed rationality. For most beings, AutoI is fully pre-programmed, so is not ‘intelligence’ as we would normally understand it; for others, that programming is subject to continuous reprogramming through a process of ‘learning’, true intelligence. In addition, beings of at least one species – humans – have a ‘manual override‘ intelligence (ManualI), which is our consciousness or awareness.
AutoI is an imperfect, though subversive, process of quasi-rational decision-making. Brains make calculations about optimal behaviour all the time; calculations of which we are not aware. (Richard Dawkins – eg in The Selfish Gene – would argue that these calculations serve the interest of the genotype rather than the individual phenotype.) For humans at least, full rationality means the capacity to use ManualI to override the amoral limitations of AutoI.
Rational decision-making, through learning, may be called ‘intelligence’. Though intelligence has another meaning: ‘information’, as in the ‘Central Intelligence Agency’ (CIA). It is perfectly possible to use unintelligent (stupid?) processes to gather and interpret intelligence!
Even when rational processes are used, many good decisions will, with hindsight, have inferior outcomes; or many good forecasts will prove partly or fully incorrect. It’s mostly bad luck, but also partly because intelligence is rarely completely unbiased, and partly because the cost of gaining extra information can be too high.
Expected Value, aka Expected Outcome
There is a simple rationality formula – familiar to students of statistics and of finance – which can yield a number called an ‘expected value’. In this expectations’ formula, a high positive number represents a good decision and a higher positive number represents a better decision. A negative number represents a bad (ie adverse) expected outcome, although sometimes all available expected outcomes are ‘bad’, meaning that the better course of action is the ‘lesser evil’. A positive number indicates an expected benefit, though not a necessary benefit. Negative possible outcomes represent ‘downside risk’, whereas positive possible outcomes represent ‘upside risk’.
(It is important to note that, in many contexts, a negative number does not denote something bad. A negative number may indicate ‘left’, as in the left-side of a Bell Curve; or ‘south’ or ‘west’ as in latitude and longitude. In accounting, a ‘deficit’ by no means indicates something bad, though President Trump and many others are confused on that point [see Could US tariffs cause lasting damage to the global economy?Al Jazeera 7 April 2025, where he says “to me a deficit is a loss”]; and we note that the substitution of the term ‘third world’ for ‘global south’ suggests an inferiority of southern latitudes. In double-entry bookkeeping, items must add to zero; one side of any balance sheet has negative values by necessity. A deficit, in some contexts, represents a ‘shortfall’ which is probably ‘bad’; but also a ‘longfall’ – or ‘surplus’ – is often bad, just think of the games of lawn bowls and pétanque.)
A simple example of rational decision-making is to decide between doing either something or nothing; for example, when contemplating asking someone out on a date. The expected outcome of doing nothing – not asking – has a value of zero. But, if you ask the person for the date, and you evaluate the chance of a ‘yes’ as 0.2, the utility of a ‘yes’ as +10, and the disutility of a ‘no’ as -1, then the expected value calculates to 1.2; so, the rational decision is to ask (the calculation is 10×0.2–1×0.8). This example is interesting, because the more probable outcome is a ‘no’, and a ‘no’ would make you less happy than if you had not asked the question; nevertheless, the rational decision here is to ‘take the risk’. (‘Risk averse’ persons might have rated the consequence of ‘rejection’ as a -4 rather than a -1; they would calculate an expected value of -1.2, so would choose to not ask for the date.)
Political Decision-Making when Catastrophic Outcomes are Possible
A rational calculation allocates values and probabilities to each identified possible outcome. A favourable outcome is represented by a positive number, a neutral outcome has a zero value, and an adverse outcome has a negative value.
A basic favourable outcome may be designated a value of one; an outcome twice-as-good has a value of two. An outcome an ‘order-of-magnitude’ better has a utility or happiness value of ten. The same applies to adverse outcomes; the equivalent disutility scores are minus-one, minus-two, and minus-ten.
An aeroplane crash might incur a score of minus fifty to society and minus ten million to an individual. The probability of dying in such a crash, for an individual, getting on a plane is probably about one in 100 million. If it was less than one-in-a-million, hardly anybody would get on a plane. (The chance of winning NZ Lotto first division is about one-in four-million.)
We should be thinking like this when we think about war. What kind of risk would we be willing to take? A problem is that the people who provoke wars do not themselves expect to be fatal victims.
A catastrophic outcome could range from minus 100 (say a small war) to minus infinity. An outcome which meant the total eradication of all life on Earth would come close to minus infinity. However, because of the mathematics of infinity (∞), any outcome of minus infinity with a non-zero probability yields an expectation of minus infinity. So for the following example, I will use minus one billion (-1b) as the disutility score for such a total catastrophe. A catastrophe that leads ‘only’ to human extinction might have a value of minus ten million (-10m). A holocaust the size of the 1943 RAF firebombing of Hamburg might have a catastrophe-value of minus one thousand (-1,000). A catastrophe the size of the 1932-1945 Bloodlands of Eastern Europe (which included 14,000 murders including the Holocaust, and much additional non-fatal suffering) might have an overall catastrophe-value of minus a hundred thousand (-100,000).
(Could we imagine an outcome of plus infinity: +∞? Maybe not, though certain evangelical Christians – extreme dispensationalists – pray for Armageddon; “dispensationalism views the progression of history in stages that begin in the Garden of Eden and ends in the paradise of the New Heavens and New Earth“. Thus, what might be minus infinity to most of us could be plus infinity for a few. There is an analogy of ‘wrap-around-mathematics’ in geospace; a longitude of +180° is the same as a longitude of -180°. And, in another example, some people believe that there is little difference between extreme-far-right politics and extreme-far-left politics. On this topic of extremes, the mainstream media should avoid the mindless repetition of hyperbole – as in a comment recently heard that President Trump’s tariffs may amount to an “economic nuclear winter“.)
My Example – the Ukraine War
In an example with some relevance to today, we might consider the NATO-backed ‘defence of Ukraine’. I could assign a modestly favourable outcome of +1 with a 50% probability, a very favourable outcome +10 with a 10% probability, and a catastrophic -1,000,000 with a 1% probability. (All other possibilities I will treat here as neutral, although my sense is that they are mostly adverse.) I calculate an expected value of minus 9,998.5; practically, minus 10,000; this is an average of all the identified possibilities, a catastrophic risk rather than a prediction of a major catastrophe.
This decision to persevere with the NATO-backed ‘defence of Ukraine’ is only rational if the only alternative decision – to abandon the NATO- backed ‘defence of Ukraine’ – comes up with an even lower expected value. (These two alternative decisions would be characterised by New Zealand’s former Ambassador to the United Kingdom – Phil Goff – as ‘standing up for Good in the face of Evil’ versus ‘appeasement of Putin’.) It seems to me that catastrophe becomes much less probable, in my example, with the ‘appeasement’ option than with the ‘defence’ option. (In the case that Goff was commenting on, his implication was that the 1938 ‘appeasement’ of Adolf Hitler by Neville Chamberlain led to either an increase in the probability of catastrophic war, or an increase in the size of catastrophe that might ensue.)
Morality Fallacy
One view of morality is the identification of some Other as Evil, and that any subsequent calling out of that (Evil) Other must therefore be Good. Further, in this view of morality, the claim is that, if and when hostilities break out between Good and Evil, then Good must fight to the ‘bitter end’ at ‘any cost’. (When we see Evil fighting to the bitter end – as per the examples of Germany and Japan in World War Two – we tend to think that’s stupid; but Good fighting to the bitter end is seen as righteous.)
Of course, this kind of morality is quite wrong. The idea that one must never surrender to Evil is a moral fallacy, based on the false (binary) idea that one side (generally ‘our side’) of a dispute or conflict has the entire ‘moral-high-ground’ and the other side has the entire ‘moral-low-ground’. Further, a victory to ‘Evil’ is surely less catastrophic than annihilation; a victory to Evil may be a lesser evil. Choosing annihilation can never be a Good choice.
Most conflict is nothing like Good versus Evil, though many participants on both (or all) sides believe that their side is Good. Most extended conflict is Bad versus Bad, Bad versus Stupid, or Stupid versus Stupid; although there are differing degrees of Bad and Stupid. Further, in the rare case when a conflict can objectively be described as Good versus Evil, it can never be good to disregard cost.
Morality in Practice
True morality requires a broadening of the concepts of ‘self’ and ‘self-interest’.
The important issues are benefits and costs to whom (or to what), and the matter of present benefits/costs versus future benefits/costs. In a sense, morality is a matter of ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. Is it beneficial if something favourable happens ‘here’ but not ‘there’? ‘Now’, but not ‘then’? To ‘me’ or ‘us’, but not to ‘you’ or to ‘them’.
Human ManualI is very good at inclusive morality; AutoI is not.
It is natural, and not wrong, to prioritise one’s own group; and to prioritise the present over the future. The issue is the extent that we ‘discount’ benefits to those that are not ‘us’, and future benefits vis-à-vis present benefits. And costs, which we may regard as negative benefits. A very high level of discounting is near complete indifference towards others, or towards to future. An even higher level of discounting is to see harm to others as being beneficial to us; anti-altruism, being cruel to be cruel.
Then there is the ‘straw man’ morality much emphasised by classical liberals. ‘Libertarians’ claim that certain people with a collectivist mindset believe in an extreme form of altruism, where benefits to others take priority over benefits to self; such an ethos may be called a ‘culture of sacrifice’, benefitting by not-benefitting. While this does happen occasionally, what is more common is for people to emphasise public over private benefits; this is the sound moral principle that libertarians really disapprove of.
Thus, an important part of our ‘rational calculus’ is the private versus public balance; the extent to which we might recognise, and account for, ‘public benefits’ in addition to ‘private benefits’.
So, when we complete our matrix of probabilities and beneficial values, what weight do we give to the benefits that will be enjoyed by people other than ourselves, to other people in both their private and public capacities. Should we care if another group experiences genocide? Do we gloat? Should we empathise, or – more accurately – sympathise, and incorporate others into a more broadly-defined ‘community of self’?
If we have a war against a neighbouring country, should we care about how it affects other more distant countries through ‘collateral damage’? Should we care about a possible catastrophe if it can be postponed until the end of the life-expectancy of our generation? Should we care about the prosperity of life forms other than our own? Should we care about the well-being of our environments? Should we care more about our ‘natural resources’ – such as ‘land’ – than we care about other people who might be competing for the use of those same resources? If we have knowledge that will allow us to make improvements to the lives of others so that they catch up to our own living standards, should we make that knowledge public and useful? Should we account for the well-being of people who live under the rule of rulers who we have cast as ‘Evil’ (such as the burghers of Hamburg in 1943)?
One important morality concept is that of ‘reciprocation’. If we accept that others have the right to think of us in ways that compare with how we think of them, then we must value their lives much as we value our own lives. If I live in Auckland, should I value the life of a person who lives in New Delhi nearly as much as I value the life of someone who lives in Wellington? I should if I expect persons in Mumbai to value my life nearly as much as they value the lives of people in New Delhi.
Reciprocal morality can easily fail when someone belongs to a group which has apparent power over another group. We may cease to care whether the other group suffers our wrath, if we perceive that the ‘lesser’ group has no power to inflict their wrath onto our group. We may feel that we have immunity, and impunity. They should care about us, but we need not care about them.
It is through our ManualI – our manual override, our consciousness, our awareness – that we have the opportunity to make rational valuations which incorporate morality. Our AutoI, while rational in its own terms, is also amoral. We can behave in amoral self-interested ways – even immoral ways – without being aware of it. Our automatic benefit-cost analyses drive much of our behaviour, without our awareness; we cannot easily question what drives our Auto-Intelligence.
Our AutoI systems may – in evolutionary terms – select for degrees of ignorance, stupidity, blindness as ways of succeeding, of coping. AutoI protects us from having to face-up to the downsides of our actions and our beliefs; especially downsides experienced more by others than by ourselves. And they tell us that we are Good, and that some others are Bad.
Pavlovian Narratives
We come to believe in other people’s narratives through habit or conditioning. AutoI itself has a cost-cutting capacity that allows speedy decision-making; it adopts reasoning shortcuts, in the context that shortcuts save costs. We build careers – indeed our careers as experts in something – by largely accepting other people’s narratives as truths that should not be questioned and that should be passed on. We enjoy belonging to ‘belief communities’; and we are ‘pain-minimisers’ at least as much as we are ‘pleasure-maximisers’; it may be ‘painful’ to be excluded from a community. We too-easily appease unsound public-policy decisions without even knowing that we are appeasing. We turn-off the bad news rather than confronting it.
Our beliefs are subject to Pavlovian conditioning. And one of the most painful experiences any human being can suffer is to have beliefs cancelled as ‘stupid’. So we unknowingly – through AutoI – program our auto-intelligences to protect our beliefs from adverse exposure; and, if such protection fails, to denounce those who challenge our belief-narratives.
One form of cost-cutting-rationality is ‘follow-the-leader’. It’s a form of ‘conclusion free-riding’. We choose to believe things if we perceive that many others believe those things. An important form of ‘follow-the-leader’ is to simply take our cues from authority figures, saving ourselves the trouble of ‘manual’ self-reasoning.
With AI – Artificial Intelligence – we delegate even more of our decision-making away from our moral centres, our consciousnesses, our manual overrides. We allow automatic and artificial intelligence to perform ever more of our mental labour. It’s more a matter of people becoming robot-like than being replaced by robots.
Pavlovian rationalisation is heavily compromised by unconscious bias. Beliefs that arise from uncritical ‘follow-the-leader’ strategies are unsound. They lead us to make suboptimal decisions.
Why War?
Many people, including people in positions of influence, make decisions that are sub-rational, in the sense that they allow auto-biases to prevail over reflective ‘manual’ decision-making. There are biases in received information, and further biases in the way we interpret/process information.
Unhelpful, biased and simplistic narratives lead us into wars. And, because wars end in the future, we forever discount the problem of finishing wars.
When we go to war, how much do we think about third parties? In the old days when an attacker might lay-siege to a castle, it was very much ‘us’ versus ‘you’. But today is the time of nuclear weapons, other potential weapons of mass destruction, of civilian-targeting, and drone warfare. Proper consideration of third-parties – including non-human parties – becomes paramount. A Keir Starmer might feel cross towards a Vladimir Putin; but should that be allowed to have a significant adverse impact on the people of, say, Sri Lanka; let alone the people of Lancashire or Kazan?
Proper reflective and conscious consideration of the costs and benefits of our actions which impact on others should be undertaken. Smaller losses are better than bigger losses, and the world doesn’t end if the other guy believes he has ‘won’. Such considerations, which minimise bias, do allow for a degree of weighting in favour of the protagonists’ communities. But our group should never be indifferent to the wellbeing of other groups – including but not only the antagonist group(s) – and should forever understand that if we expect our opponents to not commit crimes, then we should not commit crimes either.
War escalates conflicts rather than resolves them. And it exacerbates other public ‘bads’ such as disease, famine, and climate change. War comes about because of lazy unchecked narratives, and unreasoned loyalty to those narratives.
Further Issues about Rational Expectations:
Poor People
It is widely believed by middle-class people that people in the precariat (lower-working-class) and the underclass should not gamble; as in buying lottery tickets and playing the ‘pokies’. But ‘lower-class people’ generally exhibit quite rational behaviour. In this case, rare but big wins make a real difference to people’s lives, whereas regular small losses make little difference to people already in poverty or in poverty-traps.
The expected return on gambling is usually negative, though the actual value of a big-win cannot simply be measured in dollar-terms. $100,000 means a much greater benefit to a poor person than to a rich person. Further, the expected value of non-gambling for someone stuck in a poverty-trap is also negative. It is rational to choose the least-negative option when all options are adverse.
Policy Credibility
Here I have commented about the rationality of decision-making, and how rational decisions are made in a reflective, conscious, moral, and humane way. However, there is also an issue around the meaning of ‘expectations’. While the more technically correct meaning of expectation is a person’s belief in what will happen, the word ‘expectation’ is also used to express a person’s belief in what should happen.
(An expectation can be either what someone will do, or should do. Consider: ‘Russia will keep fighting’ and ‘Russia should stop fighting’. To ‘keep fighting’ and to ‘stop fighting’ are both valid expectations; though only the first is a rational expectation from the viewpoint of, say, Keir Starmer; the second is an ‘exhortation’.)
The phrase ‘rational expectations’ is used most widely in the macroeconomics of interest rates and inflation. The job of Reserve Banks (‘central banks’) in the post-1989 world is to condition people (in a Pavlovian sense) into believing that an engineered increase in interest rates will lead to a fall in the inflation rate. This is called ‘credibility’. The idea is that if enough people believe a proposition to be true, then it will become true, and hence the conditioned belief becomes a rational belief. If people come to believe that the rate of inflation this year will be less than it was last year – however they came to that belief – then it should dowse their price-raising ardour; it becomes a contrived ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’.
War
The same reasoning may be applied to warfare. If, by one side (especially ‘our’ side) talking-tough (and waving an incendiary stick), people on both sides believe that the other side will dowse its asset-razing ardour (due to fear or ‘loss of morale’), then the belief that a war is more-likely-to-end may in itself lead to a cessation of hostilities. While unconvincing, because humans are averse to humiliation, it’s an appeal to ‘our’ AutoI (automatic intelligence) over our less credulous ManualI (manual override, our reflective intelligence). It’s the ‘credible’ ‘tough-man’ (or iron-lady) narrative. In this sense, Winston Churchill was a credible wartime leader.
*******
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bartholomew Stanford, Senior Lecturer of Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Education and Research Centre, James Cook University
Since the Voice to Parliament referendum in 2023, the Indigenous Affairs portfolio has not featured prominently in policy debates at the national level.
As the election campaign continues, there’s yet to be much substantive discussion about how to improve the lives of First Nations people.
But what do we know about Indigenous policy under a continuing Albanese Labor government, or a new one led by Peter Dutton?
And more importantly, what does the evidence suggest the government, regardless of persuasion, should do with the Indigenous Affairs portfolio and areas where Indigenous policy needs reform to meet international standards?
Anthony Albanese committed to implementing the statement in full. It includes two other principles in addition to the Voice to Parliament: a Truth-Telling Commission and Treaty.
But the government appears to have no appetite for these matters at the moment. The failure of the referendum is also something the prime minister would likely want to distance his government from in the re-election bid.
After the referendum in October 2023, the government made a significant change in direction from Indigenous rights to economic initiatives for Indigenous communities. In December of that year, the government began public consultations to investigate how to strengthen the Indigenous Procurement Policy.
In February 2025, the government announced reforms to the policy. It committed to new procurement targets, with an intention of reaching 4% of all Commonwealth procurement being from Indigenous businesses by 2030.
There have been criticisms of this policy and the Indigenous business sector however, with concerns about Indigenous identity fraud and misuse of the policy.
What has Labor pledged?
Labor has committed to a continuation of efforts to close the gap. This is despite clear deficiencies within the policy to address socioeconomic disadvantage and the growing incarceration rates of Indigenous Australians.
The government has flagged the potential for more economic based policies instead of returning to the prior focus on Indigenous rights, recognition and truth-telling.
Labor has also committed to more Indigenous engagement at the international level. This is mostly through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s First Nations Ambassador initiatives, Indigenous foreign policy and public diplomacy.
What about the Coalition?
The Liberal and National parties are using the referendum outcome as a barometer to gauge the public’s attitudes towards Indigenous affairs. They are largely opposed to increased Indigenous rights and recognition.
This has already started at a state level. The Queensland Liberal National Party, for instance, walked back their support for a state treaty just a week after the referendum result.
The federal Coalition has since been vocal about curtailing Indigenous recognition and placing greater scrutiny on Indigenous funding and programs.
Peter Dutton has expressed an interest in removing the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags at government press conferences. He also wants to scrap the First Nations ambassador role.
Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs Jacinta Nampijinpa Price wants the Coalition to audit government spending on Indigenous programs. She also wants a royal commission into sexual abuse in Indigenous communities.
It’s safe to assume the Coalition will have no interest in revisiting any aspects of the Uluru Statement.
Dutton has indicated, however, that a referendum on Indigenous constitutional recognition could be reconsidered, if it had bipartisan support.
But he seems very uncertain on this issue. It’s unclear if he or the Coalition would even support this.
The direction of conservative politics in Australia is following trends happening in New Zealand. Indigenous rights there are very much in the crosshairs of policy debate and political attack.
The missing policy pieces
So what does the evidence say about what politicians should be doing to improve outcomes for First Nations people?
The first thing to do is come up with a plan. We, as a nation, must move past the referendum result and present a clear roadmap for addressing Indigenous rights and ongoing marginalisation.
Second, work on implementing the Uluru Statement remains unfinished. Truth and Treaty can still be acted on. The recognition so resoundingly called for in the statement remains elusive.
And if not a Voice to Parliament, government needs to work with First Nations people to determine a path forward for legislating a representative Indigenous national body that both sides of politics will support.
The Closing the Gap policy needs also needs massive overhaul. Of the 19 targets, only five are on track to be met.
The Productivity Commission, which monitors the progress on the targets, has said the program will fail “without fundamental change”.
Some improvements have been made, but closing the gap in life expectancy and addressing the over-representation of Indigenous people in incarceration continue to be areas of vital concern.
Finally, Australia has not yet lifted Indigenous policy to international standards. The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) has existed since 2007. Australia officially endorsed it in 2009.
But, according to the Law Council of Australia, legal recognition of the declaration, and the rights it accords, is only recognised in a “piecemeal manner”.
This means there is no comprehensive or consistent legal provision for Indigenous rights in Australia.
And with no Treaty, there are limited safeguards for Indigenous cultures, creating further uncertainty which perpetuates and exacerbates Indigenous disadvantage.
Bartholomew Stanford receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Apple Clean Up highlights photo elements that might be deemed distracting.T.J. Thomson
You may have seen ads by Apple promoting its new Clean Up feature that can be used to remove elements in a photo. When one of these ads caught my eye this weekend, I was intrigued and updated my software to try it out.
The feature has been available in Australia since December for Apple customers with certain hardware and software capabilities. It’s also available for customers in New Zealand, Canada, Ireland, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The tool uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse the scene and suggest elements that might be distracting. You can see those highlighted in the screenshot below.
Apple uses generative AI to identify elements, highlighted here in red, that might be distracting in photos. It then allows users to remove these with the tap of a finger. T.J. Thomson
You can then tap the suggested element to remove it or circle elements to delete them. The device then uses generative AI to try to create a logical replacement based on the surrounding area.
Easier ways to deceive
Smartphone photo editing apps have been around for more than a decade, but now, you don’t need to download, pay for, or learn to use a new third-party app. If you have an eligible device, you can use these features directly in your smartphone’s default photo app.
Apple’s Clean Up joins a number of similar tools already offered by various tech companies. Those with Android phones might have used Google’s Magic Editor. This lets users move, resize, recolour or delete objects using AI. Users with select Samsung devices can use their built-in photo gallery app to remove elements in photos.
There have always been ways – analogue and, more recently, digital – to deceive. But integrating them into existing software in a free, easy-to-use way makes those possibilities so much easier.
Using AI to edit photos or create new images entirely raises pressing questions around the trustworthiness of photographs and videos. We rely on the vision these devices produce in everything from police body and traffic cams to insurance claims and verifying the safe delivery of parcels.
If advances in tech are eroding our trust in pictures and even video, we have to rethink what it means to trust our eyes.
How can these tools be used?
The idea of removing distracting or unwanted elements can be attractive. If you’ve ever been to a crowded tourist hotspot, removing some of the other tourists so you can focus more on the environment might be appealing (check out the slider below for an example).
But beyond removing distractions, how else can these tools be used?
Some people use them to remove watermarks. Watermarks are typically added by photographers or companies trying to protect their work from unauthorised use. Removing these makes the unauthorised use less obvious but not less legal.
Others use them to alter evidence. For example, a seller might edit a photo of a damaged good to allege it was in good condition before shipping.
As image editing and generating tools become more widespread and easier to use, the list of uses balloons proportionately. And some of these uses can be unsavoury.
AI generators can now make realistic-looking receipts, for example. People could then try to submit these to their employer to get reimbursed for expenses not actually incurred.
Considering these developments, what does it mean to have “visual proof” of something?
If you think a photo might be edited, zooming in can sometimes reveal anomalies where the AI has stuffed up. Here’s a zoomed-in version of some of the areas where the Clean Up feature generated new content that doesn’t quite match the old.
Tools like Clean Up sometimes create anomalies that can be spotted with the naked eye. T.J. Thomson
It’s usually easier to manipulate one image than to convincingly edit multiple images of the same scene in the same way. For this reason, asking to see multiple outtakes that show the same scene from different angles can be a helpful verification strategy.
Seeing something with your own eyes might be the best approach, though this isn’t always possible.
Doing some additional research might also help. For example, with the case of a fake receipt, does the restaurant even exist? Was it open on the day shown on the receipt? Does the menu offer the items allegedly sold? Does the tax rate match the local area’s?
Manual verification approaches like the above obviously take time. Trustworthy systems that can automate these mundane tasks are likely to grow in popularity as the risks of AI editing and generation increase.
Likewise, there’s a role for regulators to play in ensuring people don’t misuse AI technology. In the European Union, Apple’s plan to roll out its Apple Intelligence features, which include the Clean Up function, was delayed due to “regulatory uncertainties”.
AI can be used to make our lives easier. Like any technology, it can be used for good or bad. Being aware of what it’s capable of and developing your visual and media literacies is essential to being an informed member of our digital world.
T.J. Thomson receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is an affiliated researcher with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society.
Location-sharing apps are shaping how we connect and communicate – especially among younger people. Snap Map, a popular feature within Snapchat, is widely used by teens and young adults to stay in the loop and facilitate real-time meet-ups with friends and partners.
Meanwhile, Life360 markets itself as “Australia’s number one family safety app”. It offers parents peace of mind through continuous, sophisticated location tracking.
These apps determine a person’s real-time location primarily with GPS technology that’s already in a phone. The convenience and sense of security they provide might be appealing to many people. But they can also enable stalking and other forms of coercive control.
The recent inquest into the murder of Lilie James starkly highlighted these risks. However, our research on young people’s perceptions of technology-facilitated abuse has shown many of them are not aware of the danger.
A meticulously planned murder
In October 2023, James, a 21-year-old water polo coach, was killed by her 24-year-old ex-boyfriend, Paul Thijssen, in a bathroom at St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney.
James had been in a brief relationship with Thijssen. But she ended it when he became obsessed.
The coronial inquest revealed Thijssen had meticulously planned the murder. He had also used a range of coercively controlling behaviours in the lead up to his crime. For example, he physically stalked James by driving past her home on multiple occasions.
He also tracked James’s location on Snapchat to monitor her whereabouts and asked a mutual friend to keep “an eye on her” during a party she attended.
The court also heard about Thijssen’s use of abusive digital behaviours as a pattern of coercive control across his previous relationships.
Not a sign of love and care
A friend of James and Thijssen misinterpreted his tracking of her location as a sign of love and care. Young people are generally at risk of making similar mistakes, as our recent research highlights.
As part of Maria’s PhD thesis, the research included surveys with more than 1,000 respondents and follow-up focus groups with 28 young people (aged 16–25). We asked these young people about their perceptions of technology-facilitated coercive control in dating relationships.
Every young person who participated in the focus groups had either used location-sharing apps in their own relationships or knew someone who had. This reflected a high level of normalisation regarding the use of location sharing between dating partners.
Many participants underestimated the risks associated with these behaviours.
In fact, most young people in our study misinterpreted tracking a partner via Snapchat, the “Find My” app and Life360 as a protective behaviour and a sign of care and trust.
There is a high level of normalisation regarding the use of location sharing between dating partners. Tom Wang/Shutterstock
It starts at home
According to the young people in our study, initial experiences with location tracking often start in the family home.
Our findings suggest the widespread use of location sharing within families normalises its adoption outside the home. This can lead to a greater acceptance of surveillance among young people in friendships and romantic relationships.
This observation is unsurprising when considering research from November 2024 by the eSafety Commissioner on broader community attitudes towards location sharing. It found one in ten Australians believe it is “reasonable to expect to track a partner using location-sharing apps”.
Young people in our research were able to identify common red flags of harmful location tracking – for example, obsessively monitoring a partner’s whereabouts. But they described how the normalisation of location sharing makes it challenging for them to “opt out” of sharing their location with friends and partners.
Location sharing is perceived as a demonstration of commitment in young relationships. Therefore, when someone in a relationship decides to stop sharing their location, it is seen as a sign of distrust or a breach of shared dating norms. And it may lead to displays of anger, as seen in the example of Thijssen’s earlier controlling relationships.
Location sharing is often normalised in the family context without informed conversations about the associated risks in other relationships. But opting out of location sharing with friends or partners requires the skills and confidence to have such conversations.
The Australian Government is investing A$77.6 million in respectful relationships education. This will be delivered in partnership with states, territories and non-government school sectors.
However, for this initiative to be successful, both parents and young people should be educated about digital behaviours. These behaviours include location sharing in various contexts, such as with family members, partners and friends.
Parents need to be informed about the potential risks associated with location sharing and its normalisation. Beyond learning how to use parental controls to ensure their children’s online safety, it is equally important that parents are equipped with skills to have informed conversations with their children about the risks associated with these features.
Young people also require skills to navigate difficult conversations about their own digital boundaries.
Solely relying on more education around the risks and protective measures related to location sharing, such as online stalking or increasing awareness of privacy controls, will not achieve this. We must equip young people with crucial knowledge and skills to recognise the need for, and negotiate, digital boundaries early on in their relationships.
Setting boundaries in response to experiences of technology-facilitated coercive control may require additional safeguards, including the awareness and support of family and friends.
Where technology-facilitated coercive control behaviours persist or escalate, national helplines and local domestic violence services can offer vital support, information and referral pathways.
The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.
Silke Meyer receives funding from Australia’s Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) and state government funding for research into domestic, family and sexual violence.
Maria Atienzar-Prieto 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.
There are an estimated 1 billion domesticated dogs in the world. Most are owned animals – pets, companions or working animals who share their lives with humans. They are the most common large predator in the world. Pet cats trail far behind, at about 220 million.
We are all too aware of the negative effects of cats, both owned and feral, on wildlife. Feral dogs too are frequently seen as threats to biodiversity, although dingoes can have a positive role. By contrast, our pet dogs often seem to get a free pass.
This is, unfortunately, based more on feelings than data. Our beloved pet dogs have a far greater, more insidious and more concerning effect on wildlife and the environment than we would like to be the case.
In our new research, we lay out the damage pet dogs do and what can be done about it.
Dogs are predators. They catch many types of wildlife and can injure or kill them. Their scent and droppings scare smaller animals. Then there’s the huge environmental cost of feeding these carnivores and the sheer quantity of their poo.
We love our pet dogs, but they come with a very real cost. We have to recognise this and take steps to protect wildlife by leashing or restraining our animals.
The predator in your home
Dogs are domesticated wolves, bred to be smaller, more docile and extremely responsive to humans. But they are still predators.
Pet dogs are responsible for more reported attacks on wildlife than are cats, according to data from wildlife care centres, and catch larger animals.
Pet dogs off the leash are the main reason colonies of little penguins are nearing collapse in Tasmania.
In New Zealand, a single escaped pet dog is estimated to have killed up to 500 brown kiwis out of a total population of 900 over a five-week period.
Once off the leash, dogs love to chase animals and birds. This may seem harmless.
But being chased can exhaust tired migratory birds, forcing them to use more energy. Dogs can kill fledglings of beach-nesting birds, including endangered birds such as the hooded plover.
The mere presence of these predators terrifies many animals and birds. Even when they’re on the leash, local wildlife are on high alert. This has measurable negative effects on bird abundance and diversity across woodland sites in eastern Australia.
In the United States, deer are more alert and run sooner and farther if they see a human with a leashed dog than a human alone.
Several mammal species in the United States perceived dogs with a human as a bigger threat than coyotes.
Dogs don’t even have to be present to be bad for wildlife. They scent-mark trees and posts with their urine and leave their faeces in many places. These act as warnings to many other species. Researchers in the US found animals such as deer, foxes and even bobcats avoided areas dogs had been regularly walked compared to dog exclusion zones, due to the traces they left.
Beach-nesting birds such as hooded plovers are vulnerable to off-leash dogs, who can easily trample eggs, kill hatchlings or scare off the parents. Martin Pelanek/Shutterstock
Keeping dogs healthy and fed has a cost
The medications we use to rid our pet dogs of fleas or ticks can last weeks on fur, and wash off when they plunge into a creek or river. But some of these medications have ingredients highly toxic to aquatic invertebrates, meaning a quick dip can be devastating.
Researchers have found when birds such as blue tits and great tits collect brushed-out dog fur to line their nests, it can lead to fewer eggs hatching and more dead hatchlings.
Then there’s the poo. In the US, there are about 90 million pet dogs, while the UK has 12 million and Australia has 6 million.
The average dog deposits 200 grams of faeces and 400 millilitres of urine a day. This translates to a tonne of faeces and 2,000 litres of urine over a 13 year lifespan. Scaled up, that’s a mountain of waste.
This waste stream can add to nitrogen pollution in waterways, alter soil chemistry and even spread diseases to humans and other wildlife. More than 80% of the pathogens infecting domesticated animals also infect wildlife.
Dogs largely eat meat, meaning millions of cows and chickens are raised just to feed our pets. Feeding the world’s dogs leads to about the same emissions as the Philippines and a land use “pawprint” twice the size of the UK.
No one likes thinking about this
People love their dogs. They’re always happy to see us. Their companionship makes us healthier, body and mind. Many farms couldn’t run without working dogs. We don’t want to acknowledge they can also cause harm.
Dogs, of course, are not bad. They’re animals, with natural instincts as well as the domesticated instinct to please us. But their sheer numbers mean they do real damage.
Many of us have a large dog-shaped blind spot. Little Brutus wouldn’t have done something like that, we think. But Brutus can and does.
Choosing to own a dog comes with responsibilities. Being a good dog owner means caring not just for the animal we love, but the rest of the natural world.
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.
Pop quiz: name the world’s most famous trio? If you’re a foodie, then your answer might have been breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s an almost universally accepted trinity – particularly in the Western world.
But how did it come about?
The first meals
Early humans were nomadic. Forming small communities, they would travel with the seasons, following local food sources.
While we can only guess what daily mealtimes rhythms looked like, evidence dating back 30,000 years from the South Moravia region, Czech Republic, shows people visited specific settlements time and again. They gathered around hearths, cooking and sharing food: the first signs of human “commensality”, the practice of eating together.
One of the best-preserved hunter-gatherer sites we’ve found is Ohalo II – located on the shores of the modern-day Sea of Galilee (also called Lake Tiberias or Lake Kinneret) in Israel, and dating back some 23,000 years.
In addition to several small dwellings with hearths, it provides evidence of diverse food sources, including more than 140 types of seeds and nuts, and various birds, fish and mammals.
The development of agricultural knowledge some 12,000 years ago gave rise to permanent settlements. The earliest were in the Levant region (across modern-day Iraq, southwestern Iran and eastern Turkey), in an area called the “Fertile Crescent”.
The fertile crescent covers the rich, biodiverse valleys of the Tigris, Euphrates and Jordan rivers. Shutterstock
Permanent agriculture led to the production of a surplus of food. The ability to stay in one place with food on-hand meant the time it took to cook no longer mattered as much.
It quickly became common to eat one light meal early in the day, followed by a larger hearth-prepared meal later on. The specific timings would have varied between groups.
Eating together as a rule
The communal nature of foraging and hunting, and later farming, meant humans almost always ate their meals in the company of others. In the ancient city-state of Sparta, in the 4th century BCE, these practices were codified as common main meals called syssitia (meaning “eating together”).
These meals were consumed at the end of the day in communal dining halls. Food was served by young boys to tables of 15 or so men who lived together and fought in the same military division. The men gradually shared generational knowledge with the young boys, who themselves would join the tables by age 20.
In the 5th century BCE, Greek historian Herodotus wrote about how syssitia evolved from a Spartan military practice to having deep political meaning in society. Similarly, Platowrote common meals were an integral component of civil society, and that missing a meal without good reason was a civic offence.
By dining in full view of the rest of society, citizens were compelled to maintain self-discipline. Mealtime was also an opportunity for social linkage, and important discussions ranging from business deals to politics.
The eating habits of Spartan women are missing in the texts, although it is implied they ate at home.
Bunches of lunches
Counter to the tough Spartan way of life, the Romans enjoyed their main meal, cena, earlier in the day, followed by a lighter meal just before bed.
The northern European tribes tended towards two larger meals per day, as more sustenance is required in colder climes. To the Vikings, these meals were known as dagmal and nattmal, or day meal and night meal. Nattmal was the cooked evening meal, while dagmal usually consisted of leftover nattmal with the addition of bread and beer or mead.
In Australia, evidence suggests Aboriginal peoples tended toward a daily single meal, which aligns with the predominant method of cookery: slow-cooking with hot coals or rocks in an earth oven. This underground oven, used by Aboriginal and also Torres Strait Islander communities, was referred to as a kup murri or kap mauri by some groups.
This is similar to other Indigenous preparations throughout the Pacific, such as the New Zealand Māori hāngī, Hawaiian imu, Fijian lovo, and even the Mayan píib.
The once-daily meal would have been supplemented with snacks throughout the day.
Three’s the magic number
The timing of meals was heavily influenced by class structure, local climate and people’s daily activities. Practicality also played a part. Without reliable lighting, meals had to be prepared and eaten before dark. In settled parts of Northern Europe, this could be as early as 3pm.
So how did we go from one or two main meals, to three? The answer may lie with the British Royal Navy.
Since its inception in the 16th century, the navy served three regular meals to align with the shipboard routine. This included a simple breakfast of ship’s biscuits, lunch as the main meal, and dinner as more of a light supper.
Some sources suggest the term “square meal” may have come from the square wooden trays meals were served in.
Initially, sailors recieved a daily gallon of beer with meals. This was later changed to watered-down rum, the infamous ‘grog’, which is being handed out in this 1940 photo taken aboard HMS King George V. Imperial War Museums, CC BY-NC
The Industrial Revolution, which started around 1760, arguably also played a role in formalising the concept of three specific mealtimes across the Western world.
The cadence of breakfast, lunch and dinner matched the routine of the longer, standardised workdays. Workers ate breakfast and dinner at home, before and after work, while lunch was eaten with coworkers at a set time.
With minimal breaks, and no time for snacking, three substantial meals became necessary.
The fall of the holy trinity
Today, many factors impact the time and frequency of our meals, from long work commutes to juggling hobbies and social obligations.
The ways in which we eat and share food continue to evolve alongside our societies and cultures. Shutterstock
The COVID pandemic also impacted how and what we eat, leading us to eat larger amounts of higher calorie foods. The rapid growth of delivery services also means a meal is no more than a few minutes away from most people.
All of this has resulted in mealtimes becoming less rigid, with social meals such as brunch, elevenses and afternoon teas expanding how we connect over food. And mealtimes will continue to evolve as our schedules become ever more complicated.
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.
With just over three weeks to go until the federal election, both major parties are trying to position themselves as Australia’s better economic managers.
Labor was able to hand down two consecutive budget surpluses in its current term. But the most recent federal budget shows a return to deficit this financial year.
After the deficit peaks – at 1.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) next financial year – it will then take a decade to balance the budget. My own economic forecasts also imply the budget can return to balance in this time frame.
However, this slow budget repair work is done silently by “bracket creep”, not by policy actions of the government.
Under a progressive tax system, as incomes rise with inflation, the additional income is taxed more heavily.
For example, a worker on average, annual wages of A$79,000 pays 20.3% of that in tax. But they pay tax of 32% (including the medicare levy) on any wage increases, even if those wage increases are only just enough to keep pace with inflation.
The higher tax rate on additional wages pushes up average tax rates – known as bracket creep. This piece explains it well.
Bracket creep has the political advantage of being a silent way of gradually increasing average tax rates. Both major parties are heavily relying on it. But is it good economic policy?
The ‘silent’ tax hike
Though Australia’s personal income tax system is progressive, it’s possible to work out the average tax rate faced by Australians collectively. This is total personal income tax paid as a percentage of total taxable income.
In the first two decades of this century, personal income tax accounted for an average of 22.9% of taxable incomes. There was no clear trend.
Since then, the trend has been up, because announced tax cuts haven’t been enough to offset silent bracket creep.
The average tax rate this financial year, 2024-25, is estimated to be 24.3%.
In the latest budget, the government reduced the lowest marginal tax rate – from 16% to 15% in 2026-27, then to 14% in 2027-28 and beyond.
This almost stabilises the average tax rate for two years. However, it then resumes its upward trend under the silent influence of bracket creep, reaching 28.1% in 2035-36.
This will be an all-time high average tax rate. Living standards will be squeezed and incentives to work and save will diminish.
Some countries limit bracket creep by indexing personal income tax brackets to price inflation. This stops price inflation alone pushing workers into higher tax brackets.
To illustrate how indexing could work, if inflation was 2%, all of the tax thresholds would move up by 2%. For example, the tax free threshold of $18,200 would increase to $18,564.
A worker whose pay had increased by 2% would similarly pay only 2% extra tax, keeping their average tax rate unchanged.
However, most of the time wages rise faster than prices because of productivity growth.
Why bracket creep is unfair
The unfairness of bracket creep can be illustrated with examples.
Under the budget, the average rate of tax (for everyone) rises over the next 11 years by 3.8% points of income.
The average wage earner with an annual income of $79,000 fares a little better. Their average tax rate goes from 20.3% in 2024-25 to 23.6% in 2035-36, an increase of 3.3% points of income, as noted in the recent budget.
However, a low wage earner, with an annual income of $45,000 fares worse. Their average tax rate jumps from 10.8% to 17.3%, an increase of 6.5% points of income.
Do we think it is fair that someone with an annual income of only $45,000 today should have to pay about 17% of their income in income tax in 11 years time?
While this is an extreme example, it illustrates the fact that bracket creep is regressive and has serious unintended consequences.
Less of a “Robin Hood” effect
All of this has implications for the fairness of our tax system overall.
To measure how much a country’s personal income tax system reduces inequality in income distribution, economists use something called the “Reynolds-Smolensky redistribution index”. Let’s call it the “R” index.
A higher R index for a country means a stronger “Robin Hood” element in its tax system – that the system is doing more to redistribute income.
The International Monetary Fund reports that in 2018, the R index for Australia was 6.8%, compared to the average for OECD countries of under 5%. In 2024-25, the Australian R index is already a little lower at 6.5%.
The R index can also be used to measure how benefits reduce inequality, but here, we’re only using it for personal income tax.
Without any budget measures, the regressive nature of bracket creep would have caused the R index to fall further to a value of 6.3% in 2035-36.
However, this budget’s “top-up tax cut” to the lowest marginal tax rate limited this fall to 6.4%, because it was a progressive tax change.
Time for indexation
Politicians from both major parties should stop relying so much on their silent partner, bracket creep, to slowly repair budget deficits.
Instead of misleading announcements of tax cuts in only some budgets, my modelling shows how we could benefit from automatically indexing the tax brackets to prices in every budget.
This will mean that the average rate of personal income tax will rise more modestly over the next 11 years, from 24.3% to 25.5%, instead of to 28.1%. Indexation also limits the fall in the R index to a value of 6.4%.
The resulting revenue shortfall could be filled in ways that are more transparent, efficient and fairer than bracket creep.
Possible ways include better priorities and higher efficiency in government spending, more reliance on indirect taxes such as the GST and expanding the tax base itself through reforms to boost productivity.
Chris Murphy 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.
Around 10% of underground tunnel workers in Queensland could develop silicosis, our new study has found.
Silicosis is a serious, incurable lung disease caused by inhaling small particles of silica dust. You might have heard about it in people who work with engineered stone. But silica is more widespread.
Silica is found in rocks and concrete, so workers in industries such as construction, mining and tunnelling are at high risk if proper safety measures aren’t in place.
When silica dust is breathed in, it gets trapped in the lungs, causing inflammation and scarring. Over time, this scarring makes it harder to breathe and can be fatal.
As symptoms of silicosis can take decades to appear, workers may not realise they’re sick until long after they’ve started working, or even after they stop.
Tunnelling involves breaking up large amounts of silica-containing rock with heavy machinery.
Tunnel workers rely on advanced ventilation systems to provide fresh air underground, water systems to keep the rocks wet and suppress dust, and they wear respirators on their face to keep the air they breathe clean. But some people have raised concerns these measures do not always work properly.
There are also national legal limits in place for silica dust exposure, currently 0.05 milligrams per cubic metre over an eight-hour work day.
However, a media investigation last November revealed one-third of air monitoring tests from a Sydney tunnel project were above legal limits.
While air monitoring tests are required by law, the results of routine air monitoring tests are often not made public.
An expert taskforce has recently been set up in New South Wales to address the silica-related health risks for tunnel workers, promising to make high silica results above legal limits publicly available.
The results of air monitoring tests are important because they show whether legal silica dust limits are being adhered to.
Another valuable use of this data is it can help us predict future disease risk. Instead of waiting to see how many workers develop silica-related diseases such as silicosis and lung cancer, this data can be used to estimate cases in advance.
We worked through the parliamentary inquiry documents to uncover the results of hundreds of individual air monitoring tests conducted on three major Queensland tunnel projects between 2007 and 2013.
We analysed this data to estimate how many workers were exposed to silica dust and at what levels. We then modelled how many cases of silicosis and lung cancer would occur over the workers’ lifetimes.
We estimated that in a group of around 2,000 workers involved in these Queensland tunnel projects, 200 to 300 would develop silicosis over their lifetime as a result of silica dust exposure (roughly one in every ten workers).
We also estimated between 20 to 30 workers would develop lung cancer due to their exposure.
We had limited information on workplace conditions in the specific projects, so we made a number of assumptions based on publicly available information and our own experience. These included assumptions around the use and protective nature of masks. The fact we had to make some assumptions could be a limitation of our study. Due to the lack of data transparency we don’t know if these figures apply more broadly to tunnel workers throughout Australia.
Our projected rate of silicosis, 10%, is the same as the rate of silicosis recorded by a government inquiry in 1924 which investigated silicosis among workers who built Sydney’s sewers.
So it doesn’t seem things are any better in terms of silicosis risk in underground work than a century ago.
We need to do more to protect tunnel workers
Continued secrecy around silica dust data reduces our ability to understand the scale of the problem and respond effectively. Nonetheless, the small amount of data that has been made available supports the need for urgent action.
With Australia’s ongoing infrastructure expansion, policymakers must act now. This should include enforcing stricter legal limits for silica dust exposure. There is concern among health experts that current limits don’t sufficiently protect workers’ health.
Policymakers should also ensure protective measures such as advanced ventilation and dust suppression systems are in place for all tunnel projects, set up national tunnel worker health surveillance, and make exposure data available to workers and the public.
There are several examples where things are done better. Internationally, Norway and Switzerland have strong systems to protect tunnel workers’ health such as air and health monitoring being conducted by an independent government agency. In Switzerland, this agency also insures the project. Noncompliance results in higher insurance premiums or, in some cases, the withdrawal of insurance, effectively stopping the project.
Nationally, Australia’s mining industry is more heavily regulated than tunnelling, with stricter enforcement of compliance.
Without immediate intervention, thousands of tunnel workers will continue to face serious health risks and Australia will face a growing wave of preventable occupational diseases.
Kate Cole receives higher degree by research funding from The University of Sydney; is a member of the Asbestos and Silica Safety Eradication Council; the NSW Dust Diseases Board; the Chair of the External Affairs Committee for the Australian Institute of Occupational Hygienists; and acts as an expert witness for law firms concerning silica-related diseases in tunnel workers.
Renee Carey has previously received funding from the Australian Council of Trade Unions. She is a member of the Occupational Lung Disease Network Steering Committee formed by Lung Foundation Australia.
Tim Driscoll has acted as an expert witness, and written government reports, in relation to silica exposure but not specifically connected to tunnelling. He chairs the Occupational and Environmental Cancer Committee of Cancer Council Australia and chairs the Occupational Lung Disease Network Steering Committee of Lung Foundation Australia.
