James Howells is considering buying a council dump in south Wales after his former partner accidentally threw away a hard drive containing his bitcoin wallet. Howells has already lost a high court case to allow him to search the tip for the hard drive, which he believes contains bitcoin worth £600 million.
But would it even be possible to find it? Let’s do the maths.
Howells, a Welsh IT engineer, was an early adopter of the cryptocurrency bitcoin in December 2008. By February 2009, he had started mining the coins on his laptop – a process which involves using your computer to carry out complex mathematical processes in exchange for the coins.
At the time, he was one of just five people mining the currency, and he eventually accrued a fortune of around 8,000 bitcoin. Initially, these were basically worthless – the first real-world transaction involving the currency was in 2010, when a man in Florida bought two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins.
However, in the 15 years since, the value of the currency has grown dramatically, with a single bitcoin passing the US$100,000 mark in December 2024 – a value which would mean those two pizzas are now worth US$1 billion (£790 million).
Doing the calculations
No wonder Howells wants to find his hard drive. But what are the chances of finding a tiny 10cm hard drive in a site containing 1.4 billion kg of waste? Is it literally like finding a needle in a haystack?
At first, this seems like a simple calculation. If we randomly select a single location within the landfill, the probability that the hard drive will be there is simply the size of the object divided by the total size of the landfill.
A Google maps estimate of the area of the Docksway landfill site suggests it is roughly 500,000 square metres (or 5 billion square centimetres), which is approximately the size of 70 football pitches.
Docksway landfill in Newport, Wales, in 2007. wikipedia, CC BY-SA
However, we also have to account for the depth of the landfill, with years of rubbish piled on top of each other. Even a conservative estimate of 20 metres would give a total volume of 10 million cubic metres (or 10 trillion cubic centimetres). This is roughly 3,600 times the volume of the swimming pool used at last summer’s Paris Olympic Games.
Howells says the bitcoin are on a 2.5-inch hard drive, which has a volume of around 70 cubic centimetres (7cm x 10cm x 1cm). Therefore, the odds of finding the bitcoin at a single randomly selected location are 70/10,000,000,000,000 = 0.000000000007 – approximately a one in 143 billion chance.
This is over 3,000 times less likely than winning the jackpot on the UK’s National Lottery. However, with £600 million on the line, it seems unlikely anyone would just turn up and search one single location.
So, the real question here is about time and money. If we know that the hard drive is located somewhere within the landfill site, how long would it take to find it, and how much would it cost?
If we focus on time to begin with, this is really just an extension of our first calculation. Suppose it takes 1 second to search each 1,000 cubic centimetre section of the landfill (an incomplete estimate since my experience of hunting landfill for hard drives is limited), then it would take us 10 billion seconds (or 316 years) of continuous searching to cover the entire site. But of course, this could be significantly reduced by having an entire team searching at the same time.
Is it financially worth it?
Clearly, Howells does not have 316 years available to complete his search, but what if he was given the resources for one full year of non-stop searching? The odds of finding the hard drive in this year would be 1 in 316, and while the chances remain slim, this might start to sound tempting given the potential reward.
That is where the aspect of cost comes in. How much would you be willing to pay in order to have a 1 in 316 chance of winning £600m? The answer lies in the statistical concept of “expected value”“, which is the expected long-term outcome of a scenario if you were able to repeat it over and over again.
For example, suppose you were rolling a die, and you were told that you would be given £2 if you rolled a six but would have to pay £1 if you rolled any other value. You can work out the expected value of this game to see if it is worth playing. The odds of rolling a 6 are 1/6, and the odds of rolling any other value are 5/6. We can therefore compute the expected value as:
In other words, you would expect to lose half of £1 (or 50p), on average, every time you played this game.
In the case of our bitcoins, we can think about the expected value as being the amount of money you would expect to make on average if you searched the landfill for a whole year. We would expect that, on average, we would find the hard drive (and the £600 million) 1 time out of 316, and would fail to find it 315 times out of 316 and get absolutely nothing. Therefore, we can compute the expected value as:
This means that on average, by searching the site for a year, you would expect to find £1.9 million. So, if the searching costs were less than this amount, you would expect to make a profit on average, and it may be considered a worthwhile investment. However, if the search cost more than £1.9 million, you would expect to lose money on average, and it would not be considered worthwhile.
These calculations can be easily adjusted to account for different lengths of search time, number of people searching, or indeed different sizes of landfill site or search area.
If Howell ever gets access to the dump, it might be worth having a statistician on hand to help guide the search (and of course, I would be happy to offer my services for a small fee…).
Craig Anderson 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 administration accidentally fired civil servants who were responsible for safeguarding the country’s nuclear weapons, preventing a bird flu epidemic and overseeing the nation’s electricity supply. A Veterans Administration official told NBC, “It’s leading to paralysis, and nothing is getting done.” A spokesperson at a nationwide program that provides meals to seniors, Meals on Wheels, which the government helps fund, said, “The uncertainty right now is creating chaos for local Meals on Wheels providers not knowing whether they should be serving meals today.”
Our recent book, “How Government Built America,” shows why the administration’s aim to eliminate government could result in an America that the country’s people have never experienced – one in which free-market economic forces operate without any accountability to the public.
The U.S. economy began in the Colonial era as a mix of government regulation and market forces, and it has remained so ever since. History shows that without government regulation, markets left to their own devices have made the country poorer, killed and injured thousands, increased economic inequality, and left millions of Americans mired in desperate poverty, among other economic and social ills.
Government funding and regulation have yielded countless economic benefits for the public, including the launch of many efforts later capitalized on by the private sector. Government funding delivered a COVID-19 vaccine in record time, many of the technologies – GPS, touchscreens and the internet – that are key to the functioning of the cellphone in your pocket, and the highway system that enables travel throughout the country.
Yet government has addressed these failings as Americans’ understanding of equality has evolved. Over the past century, rights for women, racial and ethnic minority groups and people with a range of sexualities and gender identities have been recognized in constitutional amendments, federallaws, state laws and Supreme Courtdecisions.
As our book shows, the responses haven’t always been immediate, but the president and Congress have addressed policy mistakes and incompetent administration by making appropriate adjustments to the mix of government and free markets, sometimes at the behest of court cases and more often through congressional action.
Many Trump voters cited economic factors as motivating their support. And our book documents how policies supported by both political parties – particularly globalization, which led to the flood of manufacturing jobs that went overseas – contributed to the economic struggles with which many Americans are burdened.
But based on the history of how government built America, we believe the most effective way to improve the economic prospects of those and other Americans is not to eliminate portions of the government entirely. Rather, it’s to adopt government programs that create economic opportunity in deindustrialized areas of the country.
These problems – economic inequality and loss of opportunity – were caused by the free market’s response to the lack of government action, or insufficient or misdirected action. The market cannot be expected to fix what it has created. And markets don’t answer to the American people. Government does, and it can take action.
Sidney Shapiro is affiliated with the Center for Progressive Reform.
Joseph P. Tomain 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.
Source: The Conversation – USA – By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, Associate Professor of Critical Cultural & International Studies, Colorado State University
The question was famously attributed to former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and refers to the historical inability of the political entity of Europe to coordinate on a united front in the global arena.
Friedrich Merz, the expected next chancellor of Germany, offered one continental vision shortly after his conservative party triumphed in the country’s national elections. “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” he said.
Merz’s apparent desire for a stronger German role could portend a balance shift back to Germany’s preeminent place in the EU, a position it has pulled back from in recent years. But it remains an open question as to what extent Europe can be unified given the continent’s political landmines – or even what kind of Europe it would be.
Filling Merkel’s shoes
A German leader has, in living memory, succeeded in providing something approaching a singular European voice that the White House could deal with. Europe was long synonymous with Angela Merkel, Germany’s long-lasting – and only female – chancellor, who was known by affectionate nicknames like “Mutti Merkel,” or “Mommy Merkel,” and, during Trump’s first time in office, was even referred to by some as the de facto leader of the free world.
Merkel collaborated especially well with France’s Emmanuel Macron, a passionate fellow Europeanist, communicating a vision of a united Europe and its core values to the rest of the world. Dubbed “Merkron” by commentators, the pair were seen as the EU’s power couple.
Merkel was visionary, too, especially regarding the former superpowers of the Cold War and their controversial leaders. A child of East Germany, she never trusted Russia’s Vladimir Putin. She also experienced great difficulties collaborating with Trump during his first presidency. Somewhat anticipating Merz’s recent comments, Merkel in 2017 warned that neither Germany nor the EU could rely on the U.S. the way they used to, urging her fellow Europeans to take their fate and their interests in their own hands.
A déjà vu of ‘the German question’
But in some ways Merkel was more popular abroad than at home.
The so-called “German question” – or the inability of the Germans to unify as a nation in its leadership and “Leitkultur,” or “guiding culture” – has been tormenting the country since the 19th century and gained renewed relevance during the years of German reunification following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Years on from the so-called “Miracle of Merkel,” Germany’s increasing internal political divisions – especially pronounced between the country’s West and East – mirror the broader divisions facing the EU at large, including over who should claim the mantle of political leadership and around what vision.
To regain the gravitas within Europe it had under Merkel, Germany now would need a similar kind of strong and visionary program that resonates with the continent. The country’s political, economic and social challenges in 2025 demand clear national leadership, something that in my opinion neither the unemotional and uncharismatic outgoing Chancellor Olaf Scholz nor the opposition right-wing leader and soon-to-be successor Merz has demonstrated in public over the past couple of years.
Although Merkel and Merz represent the same political party, the CDU, their visions for Germany and the EU are strikingly different. A wealthy former business lawyer, Merz’s signature book, “Dare More Capitalism,” is a blueprint for a policy agenda that prioritizes reduction of government intervention, less bureaucracy, lower taxes and pro-market reforms. Merz also wants to strengthen German borders with restrictionist immigration politics, a reflection of how the country has moved far to the right on the issue amid the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), with whom Merz has at times flirted.
Yet in Merz’s relatively different agenda, he similarly advocates for both Europe and NATO, and wishes to refashion Germany into the powerhouse it was in the Merkel years and make it again the envy of Europe.
Given the current “America First” attitude of the Trump administration and the rise of far-right populism across the EU and the world, it is thought-provoking – some would say alarming – that Trump declared the results of an election that saw strong gains for the far right – propelling it into second place – as a “great day for Germany.”
Whether it is great for Europe depends on what vision of the continent one has in mind. Merz, although more right wing than Merkel, nonetheless has advocated for a strong Europe, led by Germany, that could promote a Europe independent of U.S. influence, appearing to follow in the steps of former French President Charles de Gaulle, who sought to cleave Europe from American dominance.
Despite the bewilderment and dismay expressed by the European leaders at such statements, today’s tormented and divided Europe can hardly claim it is a problem-free environment, nor that many of the continent’s leaders don’t likewise support such politics.
The rise of populism and nationalism across Europe poses a huge problem for what could unceremoniously be described as “Old Europe,” especially now, when it is seemingly drifting apart from its former ally and protector, the United States.
With Russian influence and authoritarian politics growing in Central Europe – especially in Hungary and Slovakia – and ultra-nationalist and far-right ideas likewise strong in Austria, Germany, France and elsewhere, today’s Europe is hardly a unified political, economic and cultural totality.
Less than a year ago, France’s Macron, the still-passionate Europeanist, marked a somber note in suggesting: “We must be clear on the fact that our Europe, today, is mortal. … It can die, and that depends entirely on our choices.”
Among other things, what Macron’s warning points to is the unresolved question of what the European bloc desires to be. So long as the answer to that question remains unclear, Kissinger’s question could be rephrased to, “Is there even a Europe to call?”
And, given the Trump administration’s emerging hostility to a host of EU policies, including on the war in Ukraine, foreign aid, regulation and trade, there is a further worrying interpretation for EU leaders, even if there were “a Europe to call”: Would Washington bother picking up the phone?
Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager 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.
The film, which has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards, centers on the efforts of fictional protagonist László Tóth to realize a mammoth, bunkerlike, concrete structure that will house a community center in Pennsylvania.
A survivor of the Holocaust, Tóth insists on the building’s overwhelming scale, starkly unadorned concrete surfaces and labyrinthine interior in order to create an architectural version of the designer’s own shattered, traumatized inner world. The near-maniacal drive to finish the work becomes an intensely personal project of overcoming his trauma.
Yet “The Brutalist” doesn’t relay much about Brutalist architecture beyond its reflexive relationship to Tóth. Drawings and photographs of real-life Brutalist buildings appear in several scenes as glimpses into Tóth’s originality and style. But the structures come across as the progeny of one architect’s ego, while the philosophy behind Brutalism remains unexplained.
The actual story of Brutalism is so much more.
What you see is what you get
In my research, I’ve explored how architecture can embody values such as the common good and the human struggle for well-being. Specifically, my work explores how architecture after World War II presented a vision of a new world, one that could overcome decades of violence, exploitation and oppression.
Brutalism, which flourished from the 1950s until around 1980, is one style that has taught me a lot.
Brutalist buildings emphasize form using assemblies of monumental geometric shapes. While some critics find Brutalism’s heavy look and utilitarian use of materials like concrete, brick and glass harsh – even ugly – there is a beautiful intent behind them.
Historian and critic Reyner Banham articulated Brutalism’s core ideas in a 1955 review of Peter and Alison Smith’s Hunstanton School, which was completed in 1954 in Norfolk, United Kingdom.
Banham latched onto the French term “beton brut” – “bare concrete” – to christen the emergent style. The architects at the forefront of what Banham termed “New Brutalism” were actually thwarting the overly theorized, self-referential modernism of the times. Their buildings, he explained, exhibited three simple traits: an easily visible interior plan, direct expression of structure, and building materials that were valued for their own traits.
In “The Brutalist,” Tóth’s insistence on plain concrete, as well as Cararra marble for the community center’s altar, captures the core of the philosophy. The materials used for Brutalist structures are not chosen as mere cladding, but as components that are essential to the building’s design. Their presence is an endorsement of their utility and beauty.
Some Brutalist buildings, such as the Hunstanton School, are made of brick instead of concrete. Others use stone. The goal is honest expression, not in-your-face experimentation.
Monuments to the masses
Beyond the devotion to the materials, plan and form of buildings, Brutalism often signified a devotion to social change.
Brutalism sought to upend preexisting social hierarchies and divisions. Its staggering forms made monuments out of ordinary places frequented by ordinary people: homes, schools, libraries.
In the U.S., public colleges and universities erected Brutalist structures to celebrate the expansion of higher education to the masses, thanks to the GI Bill. In a project led by Walter Netsch, the University of Illinois-Chicago wove together its buildings with concrete walkways leading to a central, outdoor amphitheater. Harry Weese’s Forest Park Community College in St. Louis consisted of long, monumental brick blocks that made the junior college appear as a temple.
Chicago-born architect Walter Netsch made an outdoor amphitheater the beating heart of the University of Illinois-Chicago’s campus. ArchEyes
Well-known, if not always well-loved, public buildings such as Boston City Hall, which was built in 1968, expressed faith in modern democracy, giving the majestic government buildings of the past a new look to signify a modern egalitarianism.
Other projects emphasized the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement. The Neigh Dormitory at Mary Holmes College in West Point, Mississippi, was completed in 1970 by the firm of Black architect J. Max Bond Jr. Architectural historian Brian Goldstein described it as “modernism as liberation.”
Despite Brutalism’s social optimism, it is not without detractors. In 2014, Northwestern University demolished Bertrand Goldberg’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago despite pleas from preservationists. According to the university, the concrete construction made the building impossible to adapt for new laboratory space.
In the U.K., cities faced damages from Nazi bombing during World War II as well as long-deferred upgrades to public housing. Brutalism was a key part of postwar housing recovery and expansion efforts.
That same year, Alison and Peter Smithson unveiled their massive apartment complex, Robin Hood Gardens, in London. With its hulking concrete forms and “streets in the sky” – wide, outdoor decks on each story that were meant to mimic street life and facilitate contact with neighbors – the project demonstrated that working-class people could not only have modern apartments, but also live in new ways. London’s massive, middle-class Barbican Estate, completed in 1982, created a small city within the city, replete with plazas, a waterway and iconic concrete and brick buildings.
Other European Brutalist works directly confront the horrors of World War II.
The Swiss-French architect and artist known as Le Corbusier built the Convent at Sainte Marie de La Tourette in France in the 1950s with concrete shapes resembling cannons and machine-gun barrels in its walls.
In Paris, Georges-Henri Pingusson’s Memorial to the Martyrs of Deportation, built in 1962, commemorates the lives of 200,000 victims of the Holocaust through an assemblage of stark, monolithic concrete forms.
While the Soviet Union’s 1950s and 1960s prefabricated concrete panel housing estates built under Premier Nikita Khruschev embody the Brutalist devotion to cost efficiency and social problem-solving, projects in the former Yugoslavia show how Brutalism could symbolize the rebirth of a people. Housing projects and commercial blocks in New Belgrade forged a new architecture for a new nation – and, in a sense, a new nationality.
And on the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia, run by a Nazi puppet regime, architect Bogdan Bogdanović crafted perhaps the most optimistic acknowledgment of the will to overcome the 20th century’s darkest hours.
Where slave labor once made bricks, and thousands lost their lives, the designer crafted a massive concrete monument, completed in 1969. The stark form suggests a flower emerging from tortured soil but set upon thriving anyway.
To me, monuments like Bogdanović’s show how Brutalism is the perfect style to convey the earnest hope that a new world is possible.
Bogdan Bogdanović’s memorial honors the people killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp in Croatia. Stringer/AFP via Getty Images
Michael Allen is an Advisor to the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Finding fulfilling and motivating work is a challenge for many people, but it can be especially difficult for those just starting their careers. And as Generation Z professionals – those born between 1997 and 2012 – increasingly seek personalized career paths, managers are tasked with helping employees find meaning in their roles while also meeting organizational goals.
Some managers may view Gen Z’s desire for meaningful work as a form of entitlement, but dismissing it can be costly. Research shows that employees who find their work meaningful experience greater job satisfaction, which directly boosts productivity. Meanwhile, ignoring this need can lead to higher employee turnover and “quiet quitting.” In short, helping younger employees find meaning on the job isn’t just good for them – it’s a smart business strategy.
As business professorswho study meaningful work, we wanted to understand how managers can help younger staff thrive. So, together with leadership consultant Shanna Hocking, we asked a range of Gen Z professionals about their workplace experiences. Through these conversations, we identified three crucial factors that can help managers unlock meaning for early career professionals: self-knowledge, adding value and relationships.
By addressing these areas, managers can foster a supportive environment where Gen Z professionals thrive.
The 3 keys to meaningful work
Self-knowledge is about understanding who you are and what you value, and recognizing your strengths and weaknesses. Research shows self-awareness can be a powerful tool for creating a productive and engaged workforce.
To help Gen Z employees develop self-knowledge, encourage them to reflect on what energizes and interests them. To get the ball rolling, you can ask them to think about their college experiences, internships and important personal milestones. These reflections can help them uncover patterns in what they enjoy and what drives their motivation.
Additionally, many Gen Z professionals seek roles that align with their values. It’s common for them to focus on developing a sense of purpose that extends beyond a specific job title.
The U.S. workforce now has more people who were born after 1997 than those born between 1946 and 1964.
For example, one young employee we interviewed, who works in fashion merchandising, told us, “I will make things beautiful and that will be my life.” This is a flexible sense of purpose – one that isn’t tied to any particular job, but rather to a bigger vision of impact. A smart manager will connect day-to-day tasks to employees’ larger goals, helping them see how their contributions fit into the bigger picture.
Adding value at work comes down to two key things: feeling recognized and knowing one’s contributions make a difference. Our study found that adding value and feeling valued play a crucial role in shaping workplace meaning. For example, when asked what makes work meaningful, a Gen Z worker said, “being part of a team where you are able to contribute and directly see the impact of your work, regardless of the level you are at.”
So, how do you make Gen Z employees feel recognized? It can be as simple as giving praise or as big as offering a raise. But for many young professionals, meaningful work goes beyond just perks – it’s about feeling like their efforts contribute to a larger goal and make a positive impact on society.
Finally, how people get work done in the office is often tied to the relationships they have.
Previous research has shown that Gen Z professionals are more likely to thrive in work environments that prioritize diversity and inclusion and encourage positive relationships between colleagues. Our conversations with Gen Z workers backed that up: They told us they valued quality relationships, collaboration, and support from managers and colleagues.
Managers can foster this type of environment by encouraging team members to meaningfully connect. As a Gen Z private equity analyst shared with us, “When you work such long hours, it’s nice knowing there’s others in the trenches with you.”
Building strong relationships with direct reports is also important. Gen Z professionals value being mentored by their managers and receiving regular feedback and honest communication. Research has shown connection at work is powerful for creating a meaningful environment of trust for employees of all ages.
We also found that Gen Z appreciates being able to take risks – and potentially fail – in a safe space. That’s why mentorship programs can be impactful; they help young professionals develop skills, build confidence and find meaning in their work by providing a safe space for learning and growth.
3 questions to unlock the power of meaningful work
Reflection and coaching are powerful tools that help early career employees develop self-awareness, add value and build strong relationships. This work may seem daunting at first, but it’s easy to incorporate into the regular conversations you’re already having as a manager. To bring out the best in your Gen Z employees, start by asking three simple questions during your next one-on-one meeting.
1. When have you felt most energized at work?
Asking this question can help early career employees gain a deeper understanding of what motivates them. By identifying key moments, both you and the employee can gain valuable insight into their priorities and interests. Pay close attention to the specific aspects of their work that spark enthusiasm, and observe nonverbal cues such as body language and facial expressions – they can reveal just as much as words about what truly excites them.
Make it a dialogue by sharing what you’ve noticed about the employee’s interests and discussing ways to tap into their motivations. Then, encourage the employee to find tasks and projects that align with their interests and bring them to the next one-on-one to discuss. From there, when assigning new tasks, be sure to highlight how the work connects to the employee’s interests and the organization’s larger goals.
2. Where do you feel you contribute the most?
This question helps early career employees recognize their strengths, allowing them to contribute more effectively and feel like a valued part of the team. As they respond, look for recurring themes in how they approach their work and the quality of their output.
Help employees see the bigger picture by connecting their efforts to departmental objectives and the company’s overall mission. Highlight how their skills and contributions make a difference – not just in their own work but in supporting their colleagues and driving team success. And be on the lookout for opportunities to genuinely acknowledge their contributions in real time, as well as during performance reviews.
3. Whom in the company do you want to learn from or work more closely with?
Bringing up an employee’s work relationships in a one-on-one meeting might seem unconventional, but it’s a valuable opportunity to guide them in building strong partnerships. Plus, showing genuine interest in their connections reinforces your own relationship with them.
As you discuss their workplace interactions, pay attention to whom they mention and why. Their responses can offer valuable insights into their career aspirations, potential collaboration opportunities and the relationships they find most meaningful.
Also, remember: You don’t have to have all the answers. If a Gen Z employee comes to you with a question, use it as a chance to connect them with other team members or subject-matter experts. Encouraging them to seek out knowledge from others not only strengthens their network but also fosters a culture of continuous learning and collaboration.
As Gen Z professionals seek more personalized and fulfilling career paths, managers play a critical role in supporting them. Helping early career team members reach their professional goals will, in turn, help organizations reach their own goals. So if you’re a manager, asking these three simple questions during one-on-one meetings can lead to happier, more motivated workers and a more productive and stable organization.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In June 2020, the business-review website Yelp introduced a feature allowing consumers to search for Black-owned restaurants. As professors who study digitization, inequality and the economics of technology, we were interested in understanding its effect. So we analyzed more than two years of data from Yelp.
We found that restaurants labeled as Black-owned saw a 65% increase in online traffic, more searches and calls, and higher sales through food orders and in-person visits. These results suggest that for many Black-owned businesses, a simple change in their visibility can create new opportunities for growth.
However, the impact varied by location. The gains were strongest in politically liberal areas and places with lower levels of implicit racial bias, as measured by regional variation in implicit-association test scores. This suggests that platforms are in part channeling, as opposed to creating, customer demand. Interestingly, white customers drove most of the increase, suggesting the label helped raise awareness of businesses they might not have considered before.
This wasn’t just a 2020 trend – in follow-up analyses, we found similar results among businesses that opted into the feature later. We also collaborated with the online furniture company Wayfair, which launched a “Black Maker” label on its site in 2023, and found that it led to a 57% increase in web traffic. Finally, Yelp rolled out a Latino-owned label on the platform late that year, which led to a similar increase in consumer engagement.
Why it matters
This research has implications for business owners, digital platforms and policymakers. Growing awareness of racial inequality – partially driven by the Black Lives Matter movement, especially after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — has led to increased corporate and customer interest in supporting minority-owned businesses. It also led many companies to make commitments to promote racial equity.
However, more recently, many companies have dismantled these efforts. For instance, Target recently announced that it was eliminating its program to spotlight Black-owned businesses. Our findings suggest that increasing the visibility of minority ownership – a relatively low-cost change – can substantially improve economic outcomes for Black-owned businesses.
Our results also show that diversity initiatives aren’t just about warm and fuzzy feelings. Businesses should measure and evaluate their impact to ensure their programs are effective. A well-designed program can benefit the bottom line, while a poorly designed one risks being ineffective or even counterproductive.
So it’s important to acknowledge the potential risks. Past research, including some of our own, indicates that revealing racial identity sometimes can lead to discrimination or backlash. While our findings suggest that labeling can have positive effects, a poorly implemented policy can backfire. Yelp’s initiative design empowered users looking to support Black-owned businesses while allowing other users to continue searching in alternative ways.
That means policy design is crucial. What matters isn’t just what information is revealed, but also how it’s communicated. Our analysis shows that customer demand and preferences vary considerably across locations and demographics, meaning that context also matters.
What still isn’t known
While our research suggests that businesses experienced economic benefits from adopting the label, it’s crucial to understand which policy designs work best in the long run. For instance, Yelp’s program used an opt-in feature, which may have contributed to its success.
However, open questions remain. How are platforms affected by labeling businesses? What other types of labels might be impactful, and for which types of businesses? Could some interventions backfire?
Another key question is, which customers respond to racial identity disclosures? Recent advances in data analytics can help companies refine their strategies, making it easier to target the right consumer groups for more effective initiatives.
Ultimately, our study is a step toward understanding how transparency and visibility can shape economic outcomes. It highlights a diversity initiative that has benefited both customers and businesses, and provides a road map for companies that want to design initiatives that matter. And, more broadly, it speaks to a question facing all companies: How can companies better understand and shape their societal footprint?
In the past, Oren Reshef has worked as an Economics Research Intern at Yelp. The company did not intervene in the analysis or the publication process of this article.
Michael Luca has done consulting for tech companies including Yelp.
Abhay Aneja 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.
For all the apparent division over Black Lives Matter, the movement may have had a widespread and positive impact on Americans’ support for policies that help the poor.
Since the Black Lives Matter movement launched in 2013, several studies using a range of datasets have all found that Americans’ views of Black people have become significantly more positive. As a sociologist who researches the safety net, I wondered how this might translate to support for policies that support low-income Americans.
If this has held true, more positive views of Black Americans should translate into more support for social welfare programs. Indeed, since 2012, the share of Americans who support higher spending on these programs has grown by 12%.
So I decided to explore the extent to which these changes in attitudes about government benefits can be attributed to recent shifts in racial attitudes. I found that nearly all of the increase in support for these safety net programs since 2012 can be explained by changes related to Americans’ racial attitudes.
For decades, however, TV shows, movies and the news media have portrayed Black people as impoverished recipients of government benefits. This has caused many Americans to incorrectly presume that these programs support mostly Black people.
The ‘welfare queen’ myth advanced by President Ronald Reagan has been hard to dislodge in the American imagination.
Feelings toward Black people have shifted
Since 2012, however, Americans’ racial attitudes have dramatically changed.
In 2012, for example, 49% of Americans responding to the General Social Survey, a long-standing national survey that measures societal change, said Black-white differences in income, housing and jobs were due to a lack of willpower on the part of Black people. By 2022, the most recent year available, this number had fallen to 29%.
Black Lives Matter began in 2013 in response to the acquittal of the man who murdered Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager. It gained further momentum in 2014 with the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. In 2020, following the police murder of George Floyd, it became the largest movement in U.S. history by number of protesters.
Meanwhile, support for government benefits for low-income people has also grown in recent years.
To figure out whether increased support for Black people was tied into more support for government aid for the poor, I analyzed two national datasets by running a type of statistical analysis called “decomposition.”
A decomposition analysis takes the difference between two groups and breaks it into different parts to explain what’s behind that difference. For example, decomposition analysis has been used to explain the pay gap between men and women. These analyses often find that part of the gender pay gap can be explained by differences in the average number of hours men and women work and by differences in the payoff to a college degree experienced by men and women, among other things. Instead of comparing men and women, I compare Americans in 2012 versus Americans in 2020.
In my analysis, I found that improved attitudes toward Black people between 2012 and 2020, more than any other measure, explained increased support for welfare programs during that same period.
A second factor also helps to explain the increased support for the safety net: Americans are exhibiting greater alignment between their racial and social policy attitudes.
In the past, many Americans expressed support for racial equality in principle but opposed the policies that might actually achieve it. I found something new. In 2020, most Americans didn’t just say that they want racial equality in the abstract. They also expressed support for the programs they believed will bring it about.
These progressive attitude shifts can even be found among Republican – albeit to a lesser extent. Republican politicians once appealed to voters by disparaging welfare recipients and Black people. In light of these attitude shifts, that approach no longer appears to be a recipe for political success in America.
Instead, Republicans have made opposition to immigration central to their campaigns. Immigration is an issue where Republicans perform well with voters, and this strategy has paid off at the voting booth.
But governing requires attention to more than just the issues that poll well.
The safety net may very well become a major liability for the Republican Party. To the extent that the GOP continues to back spending cuts for programs that help millions of low-income people, it will be out of step with many of its voters. But if it follows the lead of right-wing parties in Europe and supports the safety net, it will be at odds with many of its donors.
Karyn Vilbig received funding for this work from the American Sociological Association’s Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (ASA DDRIG).
Much of the territory’s infrastructure – its schools, hospitals and homes – has been damaged or destroyed. And yet, the tremendous human and societal loss has been augmented by a lesser reported but potentially catastrophic, consequence: environmental devastation.
In June 2024, the United Nations Environment Programme conducted an environmental impact assessment to evaluate the damage resulting from Israeli military actions in Gaza. It found “unprecedented levels of destruction” from the intensive bombing campaign, along with the complete collapse of water and solid waste systems, and widespread contamination of the soil, water and air. And that was before another six months of bombing caused further damage to Gaza.
As a scholar of environmental justice, I have thought carefully about the impact that a lack of clean water, access to sanitation facilities, and the absence of basic infrastructure can have on a community, particularly vulnerable and marginalized populations. The current pause in fighting is providing respite for the 2.2 million people in Gaza who have endured more than a year of war. It also provides an opportunity to evaluate the environmental damage to the densely populated enclave in three crucial areas: the water, sanitation and hygiene sector, or WASH; air quality; and waste management.
Here is what we know so far:
WASH sector
According to an interim damage assessment released by the World Bank, U.N. and E.U. in March 2024, an estimated US$502.7 million of damage was inflicted on the WASH sector in Gaza in the initial months of bombing, including damage to approximately 57% of the water infrastructure.
The United Nations reported that water desalination plants in Gaza, 162 water wells and two of the three water connections with Israel’s national water provider had been severely damaged.
As a result, the amount of available water in Gaza was at that point reduced to roughly 2-8 liters per person per day – below the World Health Organization emergency daily minimum of 15 liters and far below its standard recommendation of 50-100 liters per day.
In November 2024, meanwhile, the charity Oxfam reported that all five wastewater treatment plants in Gaza had been forced to shut down, along with the majority of its 65 wastewater pumping stations. This resulted in ongoing discharges of raw, untreated sewage into the environment. As of June 2024, an estimated 15.8 million gallons of wastewater has been discharged into the environment in and around Gaza, according to the U.N. environmental report.
Meanwhile, sanitation facilities for Palestinians in Gaza are practically nonexistent. Reporting from U.N. Women states that people in Gaza routinely walk long distances and then wait for hours just to use a toilet, and due to the lack of water, these toilets cannot be flushed or cleaned.
Air quality
The air quality in Gaza has been drastically impacted by this war. NASA satellite imagery from the first few months of the war found that approximately 165 fires were recorded in Gaza from October 2023 to January 2024.
With a shortage of electricity, residents have been forced to burn various materials, including plastics and household waste, for cooking and heating. And this has contributed to a dangerous decline in air quality.
Meanwhile, large amounts of dust, debris and chemical releases have been produced from explosions and the destruction of infrastructure, leading to significant air pollution. In February 2024, the U.N. Mine Action Service estimated that, in the first few months of the war alone, more than 25,000 tons of explosives had been used, equivalent to “two nuclear bombs.”
Waste management
In the first six months of bombardment, more than 39 million tons of debris were generated, much of it likely to contain harmful contaminants, including asbestos, residue from explosives and toxic medical waste.
Substantial damage has been done to five out of six solid waste management facilities, and solid waste continues to accumulate at camps and shelters, with an estimate of 1,100 to 1,200 tons being generated daily.
The charge of ‘ecocide’
With such environmental destruction, claims of “ecocide” have been made against the Israeli government by international rights groups.
Although not presently incorporated into the framework of international law, there have been recent efforts for ecocide to be added as a crime under the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. Indeed, a panel of experts in 2021 proposed a working definition of ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment caused by those acts.”
Although the Israeli government has not responded to these accusations, it has consistently stated that it has a right to defend itself and that it seeks to protect civilians as it conducts its military operations.
Health impacts of environmental harm
Regardless of whether the charge of ecocide applies to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, the environmental impact, the spread of disease, and other harmful health impairments will be felt for years to come.
The lack of adequate WASH facilities has also disproportionately affected women and girls by interfering with basic menstrual hygiene, harming their mental and physical health.
Meanwhile, the increased presence of dangerous air pollutants has led to increases in respiratory issues, including nearly 1 million acute respiratory illnesses. Presently, the most common respiratory ailments in Gaza are asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchitis, pneumonia and lung cancer.
While the situation is unprecedented, there are concrete steps that the international community can take to help Gaza’s environment recover. The three-stage ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, which went into effect on Jan. 19, 2025, is a promising first step. This agreement has allowed some Israeli hostages to be released and Palestinian detainees to return to their homes. It also allows for more humanitarian aid to enter Gaza to deal with the current food crisis and health emergency.
Nevertheless, there are significant challenges ahead for the people of Gaza. First, the ceasefire agreement will need to hold – and already there are signs of difficulty in implementing the agreement in full. Should fighting resume, that will close or delay the opportunity for engineers and surveyors to perform detailed, comprehensive field assessments.
Meanwhile, the need for a post-conflict plan for Gaza has never been starker.
Recovering from Gaza’s environmental devastation will require Israel and neighboring countries, as well as influential world powers such as the United States and the European Union, to work together to rebuild critical infrastructure, such as water and wastewater treatment plants and solid waste infrastructure. Moreover, to succeed, any long-term plan for the reconstruction of Gaza will need to prioritize the needs and perspectives of Palestinians themselves.
Lesley Joseph 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.
In April 2025, the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether the nation’s first religious charter school can open in Oklahoma. The St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School would be funded by taxpayer money but run by a local archdiocese and diocese.
The case is often discussed in terms of religion, and a decision in the school’s favor could allow government dollars to directly fund faith-based charter schools nationwide. In part, the justices must decide whether the First Amendment’s prohibition on government establishing religion applies to charter schools. But the answer to that question is part of an even bigger issue: Are charters really public in the first place?
As two professors who studyeducation law, we believe the Supreme Court’s decision will impact issues of religion and state, but could also ripple beyond – determining what basic rights students and teachers do or don’t have at charter schools.
Dueling arguments
In June 2023, the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved St. Isidore’s application to open as an online K-12 school. The following year, however, the Oklahoma high court ruled that the proposal was unconstitutional. The justices concluded that charter schools are public under state law, and that the First Amendment’s establishment clause forbids public schools from being religious. The court also found that a religious charter school would violate Oklahoma’s constitution, which specifically forbids public money from benefiting religious organizations.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court in the Oklahoma State Capitol in Oklahoma City, May 19, 2014. AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File
On appeal, the charter school is claiming that charter schools are private, and so the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause does not apply.
Moreover, St. Isidore argues that if charter schools are private, the state’s prohibition on religious charters violates the First Amendment’s free exercise clause, which bars the government from limiting “the free exercise” of religion. Previous Supreme Court cases have found that states cannot prevent private religious entities from participating in generally available government programs solely because they are religious.
In other words, while St. Isidore’s critics argue that opening a religious charter school would violate the First Amendment, its supporters claim the exact opposite: that forbidding religious charter schools would violate the First Amendment.
Are charters public?
The question of whether an institution is public or private turns on a legal concept known as the “state action doctrine.” This principle provides that the government must follow the Constitution, while private entities do not have to. For example, unlike students in public schools, students in private schools do not have the constitutional right to due process for suspensions and expulsions – procedures to ensure fairness before taking disciplinary action.
In Caviness v. Horizon Learning Center, a case from 2010, the 9th Circuit held that an Arizona charter school corporation was not a state actor for employment purposes. Therefore, the board did not have to provide a teacher due process before firing him. The court reasoned that the corporation was a private actor that contracted with the state to provide educational services.
In contrast, the 4th Circuit ruled in 2022 that a North Carolina charter school board was a state actor under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this case, Peltier v. Charter Day School, students challenged the dress code requirement that female students wear skirts because they were considered “fragile vessels.”
The court first reasoned that the board was a state actor because North Carolina had delegated its constitutional duty to provide education. The court observed that the charter school’s dress code was an inappropriate sex-based classification, and that school officials engaged in harmful gender stereotyping, violating the equal protection clause.
If the Supreme Court sides with St. Isidore – as many analysts think is likely – then all private charter corporations might be considered nonstate actors for the purposes of religion.
But the stakes are even greater than that. State action involves more than just religion. Indeed, teachers and students in private schools do not have the constitutional rights related to free speech, search and seizure, due process and equal protection. In other words, if charter schools are not considered “state actors,” charter students and teachers may eventually shed constitutional rights “at the schoolhouse gate.”
Amtrak: An alternate route?
People ride an Amtrak Acela train through Pennsylvania, en route from New York City to Washington, in 2022. AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey
When courts have held that charter schools are not public in state law, some legislatures have made changes to categorize them as public. For example, California passed a law to clarify that charter school students have the same due process rights as traditional public school students after a court ruled otherwise.
Likewise, we believe states looking to clear up charter schools’ ambiguous state actor status under the Constitution can amend their laws. As we explain in a recent legal article, a 1995 Supreme Court case involving Amtrak illustrates how this can be done.
Lebron v. National Railroad Passenger Corporation arose when Amtrak rejected a billboard ad for being political. The advertiser sued, arguing that the corporation had violated his First Amendment right to free speech. Since private organizations are not required to protect free speech rights, the case hinged on whether Amtrak qualified as a government agency.
The court ruled in the plaintiff’s favor, reasoning that Amtrak was a government actor because it was created by special law, served important governmental objectives, and its board members were appointed by the government.
Courts have applied this ruling in other instances. For example, the 10th Circuit Court ruled in 2016 that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children was a governmental agency and therefore was required to abide by the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
Currently, we believe charter schools fail the test set out in the Amtrak decision. Charter schools do serve the governmental purpose of providing educational choice for students. However, charter school corporations are not created by special law. They also fall short because most have independent boards instead of members who are appointed and removed by government officials.
However, we would argue that states can amend their laws to comply with Lebron’s standard, ensuring that charter schools are public or state actors for constitutional purposes.
Preston Green III is affiliated with the National Education Policy Center.
Suzanne Eckes 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.
Newborn polar bear cubs spend weeks in the den with their mother until they’re old and strong enough to be outdoors.(Dmytro Cherkasov/Polar Bears International), CC BY
Despite being the largest land carnivore and a top Arctic predator that can weigh over 600 kg, polar bears start off surprisingly small. Blind, almost hairless, and weighing just 600g at birth, cubs are born in maternity dens under the snow. These snow caves keep newborns warm and safe for the first few months of their life, when they grow rapidly by nursing on their mother’s rich milk.
After three to four months in the den, cubs will have grown to about 20 times their birth weight and will be large enough and furry enough to follow their mothers out into the frigid Arctic spring.
In a study published in The Journal of Wildlife Management, we used remote cameras to study polar bear families as they emerged from their dens in Svalbard, Norway, gaining insight into the behaviour of mothers and cubs as they experience the world outside the den for the first time.
Drifting snow helps polar bear dens remain hidden. (B.J. Kirschhoffer/Polar Bears International), CC BY
As technology has developed, additional data can also be collected from these devices, including data on activity and temperature. An extended stationary period and low activity readings are the telltale signs of denning. Above-ambient temperatures also indicate a bear in a den; insulated by snow and warmed by the mother’s body heat, the interior of the den can be more than 20 °C warmer than the outside.
In Svalbard, polar bears build their dens on slopes of fjords and mountainous areas, where drifting snow means dens are often impossible to distinguish from the snow-covered surroundings.
Locating dens
We relied on GPS locations transmitted from satellite collars worn by females to locate 13 den sites. With the return of daylight to Svalbard in the spring, our team installed time-lapse cameras facing the entrance of each suspected den, capturing footage of polar bear families as they exited. To minimize any disturbance, the final approach was made on foot or by ski, and cameras were collected several months later — long after the polar bear families had departed for the sea ice.
After processing thousands of images, the camera gave us a detailed look at this cryptic component of polar bears’ life cycle. By linking images back to data from the collars, we were also able to develop a model of the various behaviours caught on camera, providing a new tool to remotely monitor denning bears more accurately.
A feat of endurance
Although critical to cubs, denning can be tough on a mother. Pregnant female polar bears usually enter a den in the fall, give birth in mid-winter, and remain in the den nursing their cubs until the family is ready to emerge in the spring. Although their offspring guzzle down high-energy milk, mother polar bears don’t feed at all during this time and rely on their fat reserves, losing up to 43 per cent of their body mass while in the den.
Despite this clear motivation to get back to hunting seals on the sea ice, polar bear families will often hang out at the den for days or weeks after emerging. On average, the families we monitored in Svalbard stayed at the den site for a further 12 days after first emerging.
During this time, mother and cubs frequently left the den to explore, sometimes staying outside for less than a minute, and in other cases emerging for hours at a time. Cubs rarely ventured outside without their mother and were seen alone in only five per cent of camera observations. In general, bears spent longer outside when temperatures were warmer and the more days had passed since they first emerged outside.
This post-emergence period may allow cubs time to acclimatize to the external environment, and to develop the skills and strength they’ll need to follow their mother across the sea ice for the next two-and-a-half years.
We also saw incredible variation in behaviour post-den emergence, with one family abandoning the den after only a couple of days, and another family remaining at the den for a full month after first appearing outside. Two females even decided to move their cubs to new dens after emerging.
Consequences of Arctic change
These kinds of insights lead to new questions: what drives decisions to stay or leave the den, what cues do families respond to? While we continue to build out our data set to better understand these behaviours, on average, we noted that polar bears abandoned their dens about a week earlier than previously recorded in the region. The Barents Sea is one of the fastest warming regions on the planet, and continued monitoring will make clear if this is an emerging trend in response to sea ice loss.
To get even more detailed information, we have also been testing custom designed camera systems that can capture behaviour continuously.
Climate warming has already resulted in declining polar bear health in parts of the Arctic that are experiencing rapid loss of sea ice. With continued warming jeopardizing the persistence of polar bears across much of their range, successful denning and reproduction is essential to give the next generation of polar bears a chance.
Time spent denning, the date of den exit and the amount of time bears remain at the den after emerging all contribute positively to the subsequent survival of cubs. Yet climate warming means the human footprint in the Arctic is expanding, risking encroachment on denning habitat and disturbing polar bear families.
Improved monitoring and a deeper understanding of denning behaviour will help to protect polar bears during this critical time.
Louise Archer receives funding from Polar Bears International. She is affiliated with University of Toronto Scarborough and Polar Bears International. This study was performed in collaboration with the Norwegian Polar Institute and San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.
Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Julian May, Director DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security, University of the Western Cape
The death in early February of a 9-year-old South African boy, Alti Willard, who drank poison while scavenging for food in rubbish bins with his father, is a tragic reflection of the persistent food insecurity crisis in the country.
A child dying while trying to avert starvation is hard to comprehend, given the country’s economic and natural resources. South African has the capability to feed the entire nation. But it is grappling with a triple burden of malnutrition, comprising under-nutrition and hunger, micronutrient deficiencies, and unhealthy diets.
According to the most recent Food and Nutrition Security Survey, conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), food insecurity affects 63.5% of households in the country – 17.5% of them severely. Food insecurity is not just a matter of inadequate access to food. It is deeply intertwined with child malnutrition, meaning that food security is not just about having enough food; it’s about having nourishing food for children.
The link between household food insecurity and child malnutrition is stark. Among households with at least one child under the age of five suffering from stunting, food insecurity rates reach 83.3%.
Alarmingly, 1,000 children die each year due to preventable acute malnutrition. And 2.7 million children under six live in households where poverty levels prevent their basic nutritional needs from being met. Food poverty rates have worsened since the COVID-19 pandemic. Food inflation has exacerbated the crisis.
The survey indicates that 28.8% of children under the age of five suffer from stunting, an indicator of chronic undernutrition. It means children are below the height expected for their age.
The South African Early Childhood Review 2024 reinforces these findings. This is an annual review of child development produced by the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town and Ilifa Labantwana, an early childhood development NGO. It highlights a rise in child malnutrition, particularly severe acute malnutrition. Between 2020 and 2023, these cases increased by 33%, with 15,000 children requiring hospitalisation in 2022/23 alone.
Based on our extensiveresearch experience, policy advice and activism in food security, we argue that food insecurity transcends mere food supply issues. It is deeply intertwined with systemic inequality, food system dynamics, poverty and failures in policy.
Tackling these crises will need a profound change in the approach to food and nutrition security. It requires a shift from temporary relief measures such as the social relief of distress grant to sustainable, structural solutions that lower the cost of a healthy food basket. That would mean no child would have to search for sustenance in refuse bins.
Any solution so far?
South Africa has the highest number of people who relay on social grants. Some of these are aimed at addressing food insecurity and nutrition, particularly among children. Despite these safety nets, food insecurity persists, suggesting that they are either inadequately resourced or poorly targeted.
The grants include:
Social grants: About 58% of children aged 14 and younger receive social grants, primarily through the child support grant. However, the youngest children, especially infants, are most likely to be excluded from the grant due to delays in registering infants after birth.
Enrolling eligible infants from birth requires better coordination between government departments. However, due to the size of the grant relative to the cost of ensuring child nutrition, and competing demands on the grant from other household needs such as housing and clothing, the grants are not enough to alleviate food insecurity.
School and early childhood development feeding programmes: The National School Nutrition Programme reaches over 9 million children annually. Evidence suggests that children in these programmes have better nutritional outcomes than those who are not.
Community and NGO initiatives: While home, school and community gardens, community kitchens and NGO-driven food relief programmes provide support, they lack sustainability and reach.
What needs to be done?
The HSRC and South Africa Early Childhood Review 2024 highlight the urgent need for comprehensive, multi-sectoral solutions:
Increase the value of the child support grant, currently R530 (US$28 a month, to align with the cost of a thrifty healthy basket of R945 (US$51).
Ensure infants and young children are enrolled in the child support grant from birth through better collaboration between the departments of health, home affairs and social development. The recent reduction in the visa backlog shows what can be achieved.
Establish the national multi-sectoral food security coordination body proposed in the National Food and Nutrition Security Plan to streamline policies across different government departments. Brazil followed a similar approach with success.
Expand early childhood development nutrition programmes, register informal early childhood development centres, and increase subsidies to improve food provision in these centres.
Address gender inequalities in food security by ensuring better economic opportunities for women engaged in food trade, including street vending, who are more likely to be heads of household.
Expand community-based health services, using community health workers to monitor child growth and nutrition at the household level.
For example, poverty negatively affects caregivers’ mental health, which in turn affects child nutrition. Caregivers experiencing food insecurity have higher levels of depression and hopelessness. This potentially affects their capacity to provide the care and attention that children require. Expanding income support and community health services to caregivers can mitigate this cycle.
Disabled children and caregivers are another example. They face additional challenges and must be specifically targeted for tailored support.
Finally, children of seasonal farmworkers are highly vulnerable when their caregivers are without employment and not receiving unemployment insurance fund payments. Immediate food relief can prevent fluctuations in the quality and quantity of their diets.
Julian May receives funding from the National Research Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). He is a National Planning Commissioner (NPC) and serves on the Council of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). He was chair of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Food and Nutrition Security Survey and the NPC lead on the Early Childhood Review, 2024.
Thokozani Simelane received funding from the Department of Agriculture. This was for the National Food and Nutrition Security Survey on which the article is partially based. He was the principal investigator of the National Food and Nutrition Security Survey. He is a member of the Council on Higher Education (CHE) Community of Practice that is developing the research and innovation standard for higher education institutions in South Africa.
The family of a Papua New Guinea police constable, killed in an ambush last month, has blocked a section of the Highlands Highway in Goroka, Eastern Highlands Province, demanding justice for his death.
Constable Harry Gorano succumbed to his injuries in intensive care two weeks ago after spending three weeks in a coma.
He was attacked alongside colleagues in the Southern Highlands in January, during which fellow officer Constable Noel Biape was fatally shot.
Gorano’s relatives, frustrated by the lack of arrests in the case, staged the roadblock early today, halting traffic on a key transit route.
They have repeatedly called for authorities to arrest those responsible for the ambush.
Additional personnel have been deployed to Goroka to assist local officers in managing tensions.
Forces in neighboring regions have also been placed on standby amid concerns that the protest could spark broader unrest.
The incident highlights the ongoing risks faced by PNG’s police force.
Gene Hackman, an acting titan of 1970s and ‘80s Hollywood with more than 80 screen credits to his name, has died at 95. He was found dead in his home with his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, and his dog.
Hackman had a rugged, dominating and commanding presence on screen, known for his emotionally honest, raw and fierce performances. Always the tough guy, never the romantic lead, off camera he was shy and enjoyed the quiet life.
I first saw Hackman as a child in The Poseidon Adventure (1972). My dad put the film on for the upside-down ocean liner disaster sequences, but it was Hackman who left a lasting impression. I vividly remember being so moved by his final speech berating God for deserting the ship’s passengers and crew while he hangs from a pressure valve door over flames.
There is no actor who comes close to conveying authority with such humanity and reserve.
He was often referred to as the actor’s actor and mentioned by Hollywood A-listers such as Kevin Costner as the best actor they’ve ever worked with. Clint Eastwood, once Hackman retired, described him as “too good not to be performing”.
Hackman will leave a legacy to be studied and appreciated for years to come.
Finding a foot in show business
Born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30 1930, Hackman’s family moved to Danville, Illinois, when he was three. Hackman’s father left when he was 13, which he described to James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio as his father “driving by with a casual wave goodbye”.
Hackman joked to Lipton the departure of his father at an early age made him a better actor.
Hackman left Danville at the age of 16 to join the marines, where he spent roughly four years. He was a rebellious child, but as Peter Shelley detailed in his biography of Hackman, the marine corps was the first time he gave in to authority.
After the marine corps, Hackman moved to New York wanting to become an actor, telling people he was inspired by tough guy James “Jimmy” Cagney.
In New York, Hackman struggled making a living as an artist while waiting for his breakthrough (his uncle told him to give up and get an honest job). Moving to California, he became friends early on with Dustin Hoffman (they finally appeared opposite each other in Hackman’s penultimate film, 2003’s Runaway Jury).
After struggling for years, Hackman landed his first credited screen role in 1964’s Lilith at the age of 34. He played a small part opposite upcoming star Warren Beatty.
As Hackman recounted to Lipton, Beatty told director Arthur Penn how great Hackman was in a scene they did together. That landed Hackman his breakthrough role playing Buck Barrow opposite Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the 1967 hit Bonnie and Clyde, earning him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
Breaking through in the 1970s
It wasn’t until the 1970s that Hackman began his leading role career, starring in The French Connection (1971) as the unforgettable hard-boiled New York detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. This role earned him his first Academy Award, for best actor.
He was to wait more than 20 years for his second and final Academy Award, for playing the ruthless Little Bill Daggett opposite Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven (1992).
Throughout the 1970s, Hackman was gaining huge popularity on screen, sharing records with the likes of Robert Redford and Harrison Ford as the highest grossing stars at the box office.
There are too many great Hackman performances to mention, but my favourites are Unforgiven, The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, The Conversation (1974), Hoosiers (1986), Mississippi Burning (1988) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
The French Connection’s director, William Friedkin, said in an interview Hackman was anti-authority and anti-racism because of his upbringing in an area known for its large Ku Klux Klan presence, and his absent father.
Hackman almost pulled out of The French Connection one week into shooting because he didn’t like “beating on people” for a four-month shoot. He told Friedkin “I don’t think I can do this,” but Friedkin refused to let him go.
Hackman recalled he was eternally grateful Friedkin didn’t, as it was “the start of [his] career”.
Hackman said his character Popeye Doyle was a “bigot, an antisemitic, and whatever else you wanted to call him”, and he famously struggled to say the N-word in one key scene. He initially protested the line but eventually went with it, believing “that’s who the guy is […] you couldn’t really whitewash him”.
Hackman often played the character who had the greatest authority on the surface but slipped up, whether he was playing the hero or the villain. Even for a role such as Reverend Scott in The Poseidon Adventure, in which Hackman played a self-righteous preacher onboard the capsized SS Poseidon, he questions his religion as he leads the entire band of escapees to safety.
A life after acting
Hackman retired from acting in 2004 at age 74.
There are many stories about why he retired, like, as Shelley writes, not wanting to play Hollywood “grandfathers” and his “heart wasn’t in shape”, but his life after acting gives a strong hint: he had other interests.
Over the past 20 years, Hackman wrote three historical fiction novels, was a keen painter, and enjoyed exercise such as cycling. Married to classical pianist Arakawa from 1991 until their death, they lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he designed his own home (yes, he also loved architecture!).
A man of many talents who played a kaleidoscopic range of authoritative roles, Hackman will almost certainly be remembered mainly for his tough-guy performance in The French Connection – though many will also remember him as the Hollywood actor’s actor.
Will Jeffery 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.
Gene Hackman, an acting titan of 1970s and ‘80s Hollywood with more than 80 screen credits to his name, has died at 95. He was found dead in his home with his wife, pianist Betsy Arakawa, and his dog.
Hackman had a rugged, dominating and commanding presence on screen, known for his emotionally honest, raw and fierce performances. Always the tough guy, never the romantic lead, off camera he was shy and enjoyed the quiet life.
I first saw Hackman as a child in The Poseidon Adventure (1972). My dad put the film on for the upside-down ocean liner disaster sequences, but it was Hackman who left a lasting impression. I vividly remember being so moved by his final speech berating God for deserting the ship’s passengers and crew while he hangs from a pressure valve door over flames.
There is no actor who comes close to conveying authority with such humanity and reserve.
He was often referred to as the actor’s actor and mentioned by Hollywood A-listers such as Kevin Costner as the best actor they’ve ever worked with. Clint Eastwood, once Hackman retired, described him as “too good not to be performing”.
Hackman will leave a legacy to be studied and appreciated for years to come.
Finding a foot in show business
Born in San Bernardino, California, on January 30 1930, Hackman’s family moved to Danville, Illinois, when he was three. Hackman’s father left when he was 13, which he described to James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio as his father “driving by with a casual wave goodbye”.
Hackman joked to Lipton the departure of his father at an early age made him a better actor.
Hackman left Danville at the age of 16 to join the marines, where he spent roughly four years. He was a rebellious child, but as Peter Shelley detailed in his biography of Hackman, the marine corps was the first time he gave in to authority.
After the marine corps, Hackman moved to New York wanting to become an actor, telling people he was inspired by tough guy James “Jimmy” Cagney.
In New York, Hackman struggled making a living as an artist while waiting for his breakthrough (his uncle told him to give up and get an honest job). Moving to California, he became friends early on with Dustin Hoffman (they finally appeared opposite each other in Hackman’s penultimate film, 2003’s Runaway Jury).
After struggling for years, Hackman landed his first credited screen role in 1964’s Lilith at the age of 34. He played a small part opposite upcoming star Warren Beatty.
As Hackman recounted to Lipton, Beatty told director Arthur Penn how great Hackman was in a scene they did together. That landed Hackman his breakthrough role playing Buck Barrow opposite Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the 1967 hit Bonnie and Clyde, earning him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
Breaking through in the 1970s
It wasn’t until the 1970s that Hackman began his leading role career, starring in The French Connection (1971) as the unforgettable hard-boiled New York detective Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle. This role earned him his first Academy Award, for best actor.
He was to wait more than 20 years for his second and final Academy Award, for playing the ruthless Little Bill Daggett opposite Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven (1992).
Throughout the 1970s, Hackman was gaining huge popularity on screen, sharing records with the likes of Robert Redford and Harrison Ford as the highest grossing stars at the box office.
There are too many great Hackman performances to mention, but my favourites are Unforgiven, The French Connection, The Poseidon Adventure, The Conversation (1974), Hoosiers (1986), Mississippi Burning (1988) and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
The French Connection’s director, William Friedkin, said in an interview Hackman was anti-authority and anti-racism because of his upbringing in an area known for its large Ku Klux Klan presence, and his absent father.
Hackman almost pulled out of The French Connection one week into shooting because he didn’t like “beating on people” for a four-month shoot. He told Friedkin “I don’t think I can do this,” but Friedkin refused to let him go.
Hackman recalled he was eternally grateful Friedkin didn’t, as it was “the start of [his] career”.
Hackman said his character Popeye Doyle was a “bigot, an antisemitic, and whatever else you wanted to call him”, and he famously struggled to say the N-word in one key scene. He initially protested the line but eventually went with it, believing “that’s who the guy is […] you couldn’t really whitewash him”.
Hackman often played the character who had the greatest authority on the surface but slipped up, whether he was playing the hero or the villain. Even for a role such as Reverend Scott in The Poseidon Adventure, in which Hackman played a self-righteous preacher onboard the capsized SS Poseidon, he questions his religion as he leads the entire band of escapees to safety.
A life after acting
Hackman retired from acting in 2004 at age 74.
There are many stories about why he retired, like, as Shelley writes, not wanting to play Hollywood “grandfathers” and his “heart wasn’t in shape”, but his life after acting gives a strong hint: he had other interests.
Over the past 20 years, Hackman wrote three historical fiction novels, was a keen painter, and enjoyed exercise such as cycling. Married to classical pianist Arakawa from 1991 until their death, they lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he designed his own home (yes, he also loved architecture!).
A man of many talents who played a kaleidoscopic range of authoritative roles, Hackman will almost certainly be remembered mainly for his tough-guy performance in The French Connection – though many will also remember him as the Hollywood actor’s actor.
Will Jeffery 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 Western media went into overdrive this week to work the laconic Kiwis into a mild frenzy over three Chinese naval vessels conducting exercises in the Tasman Sea a few thousand kilometres off our shores.
What was really behind this orchestrated campaign?
The New Zealand government led the rhetorical charge over the Hengyang, the Zunyi and the Weishanhu in mare nostrum (“Our Sea”, as the Romans liked to call the Mediterranean).
“We cannot hide at this end of the world anymore,” Defence Minister Judith Collins said in light of three Chinese boats in the Tasman.
Warrior academics were next . “We need to go to the cutting edge, and we need to do that really, really fast,” the ever-reliable China hawk Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University said, telling 1 News the message of the live-firing exercises was that China wants to rule the waves.
The British Financial Times chimed in with a warning that “A confronting strategic future is arriving fast”.
Could this have anything to do with the fact we are fast approaching the New Zealand government’s 2025 budget and that they — and their Australian, US and UK allies — are intent on a major increase in Kiwi defence funding, moving from around 1.2 percent of GDP to possibly two percent? A long-anticipated Defence Capability Review is also around the corner and is likely to come with quite a shopping list of expensive gear.
The New Zealand government led the rhetorical charge over the Hengyang, the Zunyi and the Weishanhu in mare nostrum (“Our Sea”, as the Romans liked to call the Mediterranean). Image: www.solidarity.co.nz
What’s good for the goose . . . It is worth pointing out that New Zealand and Australian warships sailed through the contested Taiwan Strait and elsewhere in the South China Sea as recently as September 2024. What’s good for the goose is good for the Panda.
And, of course, at any one time about 20 US nuclear submarines are prowling in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea. Each can carry missiles the equivalent of over 1000 Hiroshima bombs — truly apocalyptic.
Veteran New Zealand peace campaigner Mike Smith (a friend) was not in total disagreement with the hawks when it came to the argy-bargy in the Tasman.
“The emergence apparently from nowhere of a Chinese naval expedition in our waters I think may be intended to demonstrate that they have a large and very capable blue water navy now and won’t be penned in by AUKUS submarines when and if they arrive off their coast.
“I think the main message is to the Australians: if you want to homebase nuclear-capable B-52s we have more than one way to come at you. That was also the message of the ICBM they sent into the Pacific: Australia is no longer an unsinkable aircraft carrier.”
According to the Asia Times, China fired the ICBM — the first such shot into the Pacific by China — just days after HMNZS Aotearoa sailed through the Taiwan Strait with Australian vessel HMAS Sydney.
Smith says our focus should be on building positive relationships in the Pacific on our terms. “Buying expensive popguns will not save us.”
China Scare a page out of Australia’s Red Scare playbook For people good at pattern recognition this week’s China Scare was obviously a page or two out of the same playbook that duped a majority of Australians into believing China was going to invade Australia. They were lulled into a false sense of insecurity back in 2021 — the mediascape flooded with Red Alert, China panic stories about imminent war with the rising Asian power.
As a sign of how successful the mainstream media can be in generating fear that precedes major policy shifts: research by Australia’s Institute of International & Security Affairs showed that more Australians thought that China would soon attack Australia than Taiwanese believed China would attack Taiwan!
Once the population was conditioned, they woke one morning in September 2021 with the momentous news that Australia had ditched a $90 billion submarine defence deal with France and the country was now part of a new anti-Chinese military alliance called AUKUS. This was the playbook that came to mind last week.
There are strong, rational arguments that could be made to increase our spending at this time. But I loathe and decry this kind of manipulation, this manufacturing of consent.
I also fear what those billions of dollars will be used for. Defending our coastlines is one thing; joining an anti-Chinese military alliance to please the US is quite another.
Prime Minister Luxon has called China — our biggest trading partner — a strategic competitor. He has also suggested, somewhat ludicrously, that our military could be a “force multiplier” for Team AUKUS.
We are hitching ourselves to the US at the very time they have proven they treat allies as vassals, threatened to annex Greenland and the Panama Canal, continue to commit genocide in Gaza, and are now imposing an unequal treaty on Ukraine.
Australia’s ABC News on Foreign Minister Winston Peter’s talks in China. Video: ABC
Whose side – or calmer independence? Whose side should we be on? Or should we return to a calmer, more independent posture?
And then there’s the question of priorities. The hawks may convince the New Zealand population that the China threat is serious enough that we should forgo spending money on child poverty, fixing our ageing infrastructure, investing in health and education and instead, as per pressure from our AUKUS partners, spend some serious coin — billions of dollars more — on defence.
Climate change is one battle that is being fought and lost. Will climate funding get the bullet so we can spend on military hardware? That would certainly get a frosty reaction from Pacific nations at the front edge of sea rise.
The government in New Zealand is literally taking the food out of children’s mouths to fund weapons systems. The Ka Ora, Ka Ako programme provides nutritious lunches every day to a quarter of a million of New Zealand’s most needy children.
Its funding has recently been slashed by over $100 million by the government despite its own advisors telling it that such programmes have profound long-term wellbeing benefits and contribute significantly to equity. In the next breath we are told we need to boost funding for our military.
The US appears determined to set itself on a collision course with China but we don’t have to be crash test dummies sitting alongside them. Prudence, preparedness, vigilance and risk-management are all to be devoutly wished for; hitching our fate to a hostile US containment strategy is bad policy both in economic and defence terms.
In the absence of a functioning media — one that showcases diverse perspectives and challenges power rather than works hand-in-glove with it — populations have been enlisted in the most abhorrent and idiotic campaigns: the Red Peril, the Jewish Peril and the Black Peril (in South Africa and the southern states of the USA), to name three.
Our media-political-military complex is at it again with this one — a kind of Yellow Peril Redux.
New Zealand trails behind both Australia and China in development assistance to the Pacific. If we wish to “counter” China, supporting our neighbours would be a better investment than encouraging an unwinnable arms race.
In tandem, I would advocate for a far deeper diplomatic and cultural push to understand and engage with China; that would do more to keep the region peaceful and may arrest the slow move in China towards seeking other markets for the high-quality primary produce that an increasingly bellicose New Zealand still wishes to sell them.
Let’s be friends to all, enemies of none. Keep the Pacific peaceful, neutral and nuclear-free.
Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and he is a regular contributor to Asia Pacific Report and Café Pacific.
As the Albanese government struggles to stay on its political feet, who would have thought the China issue would suddenly insert itself into the campaign, leaving the prime minister looking, at best, flat-footed?
Improving and stabilising what had become a toxic bilateral relationship under Scott Morrison has been one of the Albanese government’s major pluses in its foreign and trade policy.
China has taken off all of the roughly $20 billion in barriers it had enacted on Australian exports. Australian lobsters are back on Chinese menus. And who can forget the PM’s visit to China, when he was lauded as “a handsome boy”.
But now, almost on the eve of the election campaign, a Chinese military exercise in the Tasman Sea has not just reminded Australians of Chinese military power, but has left the PM appearing poorly informed. Or not wanting to offend the Chinese.
Of course, China did not set out to force Anthony Albanese into what were publicly misleading comments. That was all his own doing.
The China incident was on the morning of Friday last week, when its navy commenced the live-fire exercise.
Albanese was briefed on Friday afternoon. Later in the day, a reporter asked him about an ABC report of “commercial pilots [being] warned about a potential hazard in airspace” where three Chinese warships had been sailing.
The PM said: “China issued, in accordance with practice, an alert that it would be conducting these activities, including the potential use of live fire”. This told, at best, a sliver of what was a rather alarming story.
The government says the Chinese had acted in accordance with the law but the amount of notice they’d given (which was not provided directly to Australia) was inadequate. Representations about this were made by Foreign Minister Penny Wong to the Chinese.
It took evidence before Senate estimates hearings this week to paint a full picture of what happened.
On Monday, Rob Sharp, CEO of Airservices Australia (the country’s civil air navigation services provider) told senators: “We became aware at two minutes to ten on Friday morning – and it was, in fact, a Virgin Australia aircraft that advised one of our air traffic controllers – that a foreign warship was broadcasting that they were conducting a live firing 300 nautical miles east off our coast. So that’s how we first found out about the issue.”
Initially, “we didn’t know whether it was a potential hoax or real”.
Meanwhile, a number of commercial planes were in the air and some diverted their routes.
On Wednesday, Australian Defence Force Chief David Johnston was asked at another estimates hearing whether Defence was only notified of what was happening from a Virgin flight and Airservices Australia 28 minutes after the Chinese operation firing window commenced. Johnston’s one-word reply was “Yes”.
Australia does not know whether the Chinese ships, which proceeded towards Tasmania, intend to circumnavigate the continent, or whether they have been accompanied by a submarine.
Relations with China won’t be a first-order issue with most voters at this cost-of-living election. But these events play to the Dutton opposition, for whom national security is home-ground territory.
They reinforce the broader impression, which has taken hold, of Albanese being poor with detail.
Dutton said on Sydney radio on Thursday, “I don’t know whether he makes things up, but he seems to get flustered in press conferences. You hear it – the umming and ahing, and at the end of it, you don’t know what he’s actually said.
“But what we do know is that he is at odds with the chief of the Defence force, and he needs to explain why, on such a totemic issue, he either wasn’t briefed, that he’s made up the facts, that he’s got it wrong.”
Wong hit back, “We have been very clear China is going to keep being China, just as Mr Dutton isn’t going to stop being Mr Dutton – the man who once said it was inconceivable we wouldn’t go to war is going to keep beating the drums of war.
“The Labor government will be calm and consistent; not reckless and arrogant.”
There’s one political complication for Dutton in seeking to exploit the China issue. Despite his natural hawkishness, in recent times he has been treading more softly on China, with an eye to the importance of voters of Chinese heritage in some seats.
The Trump administration has dramatically increased the uncertainty of the international outlook that the Australian government, whether Labor or Coalition, will face during the next parliamentary term.
Defence Minister Richard Marles this week talked up the US administration’s policy in the region. “We are very encouraged by the focus that the Trump Administration is giving in terms of its strategic thinking to the Indo Pacific.”
Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who was in Washington lobbying for a tariff exemption was also, declared that “the alliance and the economic partnership between Australia and the US is as strong as it’s ever been.”
Whether we get that exemption will be an early indication of where we stand in terms of the special relationship with the US. But who knows what the US might want in return.
A volatile world and perhaps pressure from the US may push Australia into spending more on defence, which on present planning is due to tick past 2% of GDP.
Dutton has already said he would put more funding into defence, although, like most other aspects of opposition policy, the amount is vague. The Coalition says when it produces its costing (which will be in the last days before the election) there will be more precision.
We’ve yet to see how the crucial US-China relationship evolves. That trajectory will have implications for Australia, positive or negative. On the very worst scenario, if China, encouraged by US President Donald Trump’s benign attitude to Russia, moves on Taiwan, the security of which the president has refused to guarantee, that could produce a dire situation in the region.
Australia remains confident of continuing American support for AUKUS. But if Trump becomes even more arbitrary and adventurous, AUKUS could become a lot less popular not in America but in Australia.
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.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers has given the green light for Qatar Airways to buy a 25% stake in Virgin Australia, as part of a strategic alliance. The deal will shake up the Australian aviation market.
The announcement follows a detailed assessment by the Foreign Investment Review Board, and a draft determination to authorise the deal by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC).
The deal allows Qatar Airways to buy the 25% stake from the US private equity firm Bain Capital, and makes an eventual initial public offering of Virgin more likely. It also allows Virgin to operate regular services from some of Australia’s major capital cities to Doha.
Chalmers said the agreement will be subject to enforceable conditions, including retaining Australians on the board of Virgin and protecting consumer data.
The ACCC has previously said the tie-up would boost competition and benefit consumers.
The announcement comes on the same day as competitor Qantas posted its latest half-year earnings, showing statutory profits up 6% on the same period last year. So, will Australian flyers be the ultimate winners?
Getting Australians around the world
For many Australian travellers, getting where they want to go around the world has long meant making a stopover, especially if travelling to Europe.
Currently, Qantas does operate direct flights between Perth and three cities in Europe: London, Paris and Rome.
However, other international carriers – including Emirates, Singapore Airlines, Thai Airways, Malaysia Airways and some Chinese carriers – all provide connecting flights via an international hub airport.
Doha’s Hamad International Airport is one such hub, and Qatar Airways currently flies from there to more than 170 destinations.
At the heart of this new partnership is what’s called a “wet lease arrangement”. Virgin will be able to use both the aircraft and crew of Qatar Airways to operate its own flights.
That will allow Virgin to compete as if it were an established international carrier, because it provides access to Qatar’s international network. It should also mean streamlined transit procedures, minimal waiting times, and better baggage handling.
This deal is expected to create 28 new weekly return services to Doha, from Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Brisbane. Having additional flights to this hub by Virgin will give travellers many more options for getting around the world.
More competition for Qantas
The agreement will greatly expand Virgin’s international reach and make it more competitive with Qantas. Virgin had to scale back its international footprint after it went into receivership in 2020.
Qantas will continue to be a major player in flying Australians to Europe. It has also recently added more direct flights from Perth to European destinations.
But we may be seeing signs of more robust competition pressures already. In its profit announcement on Thursday, Qantas outlined a plan for cabin upgrades for its Boeing 737s as it awaits delivery of new Airbus aircraft.
Virgin will offer international flights through a ‘wet lease’ arrangement with Qatar. Seth Jaworski/Shutterstock
Turning things around
Virgin Australia has come a long way since entering voluntary administration in April 2020. After being sold to Bain Capital, the airline restructured its cost base, fleet and commercial functions.
With a focus on cutting costs and improving its Velocity frequent flyer program, Virgin has since been able to bounce back from the brink and win back market share.
That success means Virgin is now better positioned to return to international markets and compete with Qantas there, too.
Chrystal Zhang 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.
Not so long ago, former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was branded “Mr Harbourside Mansion”, a moniker bestowed upon him by his own side of politics.
Turnbull’s estimated A$200 million in wealth when he entered politics was well known. So too was the estimated $56 million in riches accrued outside of politics by Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd and his family.
Not all politicians are multimillionaires like Turnbull and Rudd. But generally, they are wealthier than their constituents. They are also more likely to own more than one home.
A recent ABC analysis of the parliamentary public interests register found 215 of Australia’s 227 members and senators own at least one property. 77 of them recorded interest in three or more properties.
Out of touch pollies?
Australians know their politicians tend to be richer than they are and sometimes it makes waves.
Anthony Albanese’s purchase of a $4 million home on the New South Wales Central Coast dominated headlines for weeks, and it’s still being raised in focus and research groups as an issue with voters.
Crucially, like Turnbull and Rudd’s wealth, Albanese’s cash splash on his coastal dream home has always been publicly available information.
Veiled wealth
But Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has mostly managed to skate by in the conversations about MPs and their money. He has kept the media’s focus on his brief career as a Queensland police officer, rather than the riches he has accrued through investing in property.
While Dutton has not made a secret of his previous investments, and elements of his wealth have dripped into the public domain in the past, his affluence has rarely been discussed in whole terms. That changed this week with the Nine newspapers estimating his property investments at $30 million in transactions across 26 pieces of real estate.
The portfolio, bought and sold over 35 years, eclipse Albanese’s property interests several times over.
Dutton’s story highlights a tension that continues to frustrate voters: politicians who enjoy superior wealth are the ones who decide the financial circumstances of their constituents’ lives.
Uncomfortable questions
The stories highlighting Dutton’s prosperity have pointed out his past use of tax structures, including discretionary trusts, self-managed super funds and family companies to manage his money.
Dutton has defended the millions he has made in property purchases. He’s accused his political rivals of mounting a “smear campaign” by trying to discredit him for being an “astute investor”.
On the other side of politics, Albanese has refused to say if he used negative gearing before he became prime minister to reduce his tax bill.
Exposing and debating the wealth of our leaders may be uncomfortable for them, but it’s an opportunity to push all sides of politics to address the aspects of our tax system that make it less fair.
Tax loopholes for some
The first thing to understand is that there are far fewer tax loopholes for avoiding tax on wages. If you work for a living, like most Australians, there are not many tax tricks for you.
If you own assets and earn income from investments, however, things are a little different. How you own the assets is also important. Simply owning your own home is nice, but not as good as owning assets through a discretionary trust, a self-managed super fund, or a family company.
Financial vehicles
A discretionary trust is a way of holding income earning assets where the income stream can be split between beneficiaries. This means money can be directed to the people in the trust who face the lowest marginal tax rates, such as adult children, rather than a higher-earning parent, who faces a higher tax rate.
The income earned from trusts overwhelmingly goes to high income earners. Treasury estimates (page 47) that the top 10% of income earners receive 63% of the income from trusts, while the bottom half of income earners get just 11% of the income.
A self-managed super fund helps reduces taxation because of the various tax breaks for superannuation. For example, an owner might have their business in their self-managed super fund, with the income to the fund being taxed at a lower rate than it would have if it was owned in the business owner’s name.
A family company, like trusts and self-managed super funds, is a vehicle for owning assets. If the assets are owned by a family company, then profits are subject to company tax rates. This can be as low as 25% if the company turnover is less than $50 million per year.
All three of these asset-owning vehicles are entirely legal. And they can have legitimate uses. But they also provide tax loopholes that can be used to reduce the amount of tax someone has to pay and to obscure who actually owns the assets.
Level the playing field
This is fundamentally unfair. These structures for reducing tax are mostly only available to the wealthy. The average wage earner cannot structure their income through such complex tax structures.
Scrapping the capital gains tax discount, getting rid of discretionary trusts, placing more limits on the types of assets that can be held in self-managed super funds, and increasing tax rates on people with big super balances would reduce the ability of the wealthy to avoid paying tax.
It is hard to reform tax loopholes because most people don’t understand them and the people who do understand them reap the biggest benefits from them.
The current discussion around Dutton’s investments might help more people become cognisant of these tax structures and how some of the biggest beneficiaries are politicians pretending to understand what it’s like to be a worker in a cost-of-living crisis.
Rod Campbell is the Research Director at The Australia Institute, an independent research organisation based in Canberra. See www.australiainstitute.org.au
The greatest achievements in women’s economic progress in recent decades are potentially being eroded by domestic violence. This is the key finding of a new research report being released today by the University of Technology Sydney’s Business School. The report provides data that enable us, for the first time, to quantify the economic impact of domestic violence on Australian women.
The increase in women’s participation in employment and higher education in recent decades has been nothing short of dramatic. In 1966, about 37% of women were in the labour force, compared to 84% of men. By 2024 that figure had climbed to 63%, with almost 7 million women employed, 57.3% of them in full-time jobs.
Yet our research shows a dramatic “employment gap” between women who have experienced domestic violence and those who have not.
In 2021-22, the employment rate for women who had experienced partner violence or abuse (physical, sexual, emotional or economic) was 5.3% lower than the employment rates for women who had never experienced violence.
The gap is larger for women who have experienced economic abuse, reaching 9.4% in 2021-22, according to customised data commissioned from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) especially for this report.
The employment gap varies among sub-groups of women. For instance, the gap between women with disability who have recently experienced economic abuse by a partner and women with disability who have never experienced partner violence or abuse is 13.4%. For culturally and linguistically diverse women, the employment gap was 3.7%.
We used the 2018-19 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey to try to calculate employment gaps for First Nations women. They certainly existed but, because of the small sample size, the results were not statistically significant. Further research is urgently needed.
The 2021-22 Personal Safety Survey conducted by the ABS reported that 451,000 women have had a previous partner who had controlled or tried to control them from working or earning money. More than 30,000 women have experienced similar conduct from their current partner.
In other words, many men are using forceful tactics to try to sabotage their partners’ employment. They resort to such tactics as hiding her car keys, letting down the car tyres, damaging her work clothes, even getting into her phone’s calendar to change her appointments, trying to make her appear unreliable as an employee.
The ‘education gap’
What is of perhaps even greater concern for the long-term employment prospects of women is the other key finding of our report: the existence of an “education gap” among young women at university. This is especially the case because the growth of women’s participation in higher education has been spectacular.
In 1982, a mere 8% of women aged 25-34 held a bachelor degree or higher. By 2023, this had skyrocketed to 51.6% of women in this age range holding at least a bachelor degree, amounting to 990,000 women.
The education gap is a new and truly shocking finding that young women who experience domestic violence fail to complete their university degrees. For young women, by the time they are 27, there is a nearly 15% gap in the rates of university degree attainment between victim-survivors and other women.
Statistical analysis of data obtained from the Australian Longitudinal Study in Women’s Health, which surveys the same women over time, allows us to track the direct impact of domestic violence in the following years. We show that domestic violence causes a 5.2% decline in young women’s university degree attainment in the year following the first time they report experiencing violence. This rises to 9.7% three years after the violence is first reported.
These findings on the impact of violence on university education in Australia have never previously been reported.
Ripple effects of violence against women
The implications of these findings are immensely significant for the progress of women’s employment.
The lifelong consequences of failing to complete their degrees are significant, with individuals holding a bachelor’s degree in Australia earning 41% more annually than those with only Year 12 schooling. In addition, these young women are likely to have accrued an indexed HECS debt that could affect their credit rating throughout their lives. Their lower earnings also mean a concomitant decrease in retirement savings.
These young women’s economic futures are severely compromised and it will be extremely difficult for them to ever recover those lost opportunities.
Neither can we overlook the fact of, and possible connection between, the dramatic fall in men’s share of bachelor degrees. Women are now outperforming men at university. In 2023, a majority (57.2%) of bachelor students were women. Is this a source of resentment among men?
The existence of domestic violence among students may be news to many people. Indeed, it is not something that has attracted much attention, including from universities, which have policies to provide paid leave and other supports for staff members who experience domestic violence but little for students.
Yet it ought not to be surprising. We know that many students cohabit and so the possibility for violence exists. And we know from the Personal Safety Survey in 2016 that women aged 18-24 experience the highest rates of recent partner violence: 19.3% (compared to 11.5% for women aged 25 to 34 and 7.7% for women aged 35-44).
Our findings point to the growing prevalence of men trying to exert economic control over their partners. Essential to this has been the use of surveillance, especially stalking of women, designed to intimidate and further control. In 2021-22 the Personal Safety Survey found 323,800 women reported a male intimate partner had “loitered or hung around outside their workplace, school or educational facility”. Often such stalking is accompanied by harassment using a phone or other device, which has been made easier by the advent of new technologies.
In other words, the two gaps identified in this report represent the economic consequences of domestic violence, in addition to the physical harm women suffer when targeted by violent partners.
The full report, by Anne Summers, with Thomas Shortridge and Kristen Sobeck (2025), will be available online on Friday, February 28.
Anne Summers has received research funding from the Paul Ramsay Foundation and the federal Office for Women.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katrina McFerran, Professor and Head of Creative Arts and Music Therapy Research Unit; Director of Researcher Development Unit, The University of Melbourne
Imagine a scene from the movie Jaws, with the great white shark closing in on another helpless victim. The iconic semi-tone pattern builds and your heartbeat rises with it; the suspense pulls you further to the edge of your seat.
Now picture that scene without the score. Much of the tension evaporates.
Maybe it’s a heartfelt pop ballad or a suspenseful soundtrack. If you are my age, it might be the Friends theme song, forever associated with the (largely unfulfilled) hope for sharing apartments with mates and growing old together in a blissful acceptance of one another’s limitations. Music is a powerful force to induce and pre-empt all kinds of emotions in us.
But how do so many different combinations of rhythm, harmony and melody trigger such profound reactions?
The categorical approach
Swedish music psychology researcher Patrik Juslin proposed the most popular explanation of music’s ability to trigger emotion.
He identified eight key mechanisms under the acronym BRECVEMA. The categories begin with more fundamental connections:
Brain stem reflexes – maybe a movie jumpscare moment or another sudden, frightening sound triggering a pre-conscious response. Evolution programmed these reactions into the brain over thousands of years in order to influence arousal levels and initiate the necessary emotional response.
Rhythmic entrainment, like the tendency to tap your foot to the beat; the benefits of moving in time together have been critical to human survival and evolution.
Then, the listings become increasingly complex:
Evaluative conditioning in the fashion of Pavlov’s dog. After years of watching and cultural references, we hear the Jaws music and automatically feel tense.
The contagion effect, wherein we feel the emotions we perceive in the music. Lyrics aren’t necessary; the Peanuts cartoon’s signature tune, for example, strongly conveys childhood wonder and freedom without any words.
The visual imagery many people experience when listening to music, imagery which is often tied to some deep emotion.
Episodic memories, when hearing certain music brings up recollections of a past event. Music therapists can monitor the emotional reactions people have when unexpectedly reminded of particular situations, be they positive, negative or both. The therapists then use their expertise to support people in processing these resulting emotions.
From there, Juslin’s model gets more technical and music theory-based:
Musical expectancy, when we anticipate the resolution of a chord or phrase. This is something you might feel rather than consciously notice. Take My Heart Will Go On: a delicate tension builds through the chorus, before finally resolving as Celine Dion sings the final line of the section and listeners are put to ease.
Aesthetic judgements, closely related to the ways we experience pleasure, are our personal emotional responses to how beautiful (or not) we consider a piece of music.
It makes sense that a theory using the brain to explain otherwise indescribable relationships would be popular. It provides a level of objectivity to what is, in essence, a purely subjective and non-generalisable experience.
Celine Dion keeps listeners on tenterhooks before the chorus comes to a beautifully satisfying resolution.
Is it just about neurological pathways?
Evolutionary theories suggest music and emotions are connected because of the inherent musicality we are each born with, essential to our ability to develop relationships and flourish.
Parent-infant interactions often have musical aspects to them, described as:
pulse, a shared tempo, where infant and carer move in time together and synchronise to one underlying beat
quality, the character and melodic interplay of voices and movements, mirroring one another in dynamics and timbre
narrative, the tendency for the same phrases, gestures and movements to be repeated on the same pitch and pace over time.
Subsequently, however, other learning and our limited brain capacity mean this ability is buried deep, so it rarely translates to perfect pitch or other forms of music theory knowledge that underpin Mozart-like genius.
This baby-talk theory may be the most intimate and emotion-based explanation for why music affects us so strongly – it was designed to enhance our emotional bonds with others. When adults coo and dance with babies, they are being musical, meaning emotional reactions to music are implicit in human nature.
Cognitive developmental theorists like Steven Pinker have opinions firmly in contrast to this. Pinker calls music “evolutionary cheesecake”, functioning only to tickle the senses and serving no evolutionary purpose.
Pleasure for purpose
Cultures across the world have long acknowledged the healing power of music.
Sound healing practitioners in India and China, for example, point to ancient traditions of healing and draw correlations between recovery from illness and certain tones, scales and chants. Some suggest the vibrations of different tones can serve specific purposes.
In the West, the idea of emotional differences between major and minor scales still has public traction even though its academic credibility hasn’t really extended in the past 100 years.
None of these concepts have been used in the modern practice of music therapy, but they do reflect assumptions many people hold about how music works.
Instead, a fundamental principle of music therapy is based on how each person’s unique connections with music shapes their emotional reactions. What moves your sibling to tears might leave you cold, for example. It always depends on a range of conditions – historical, cultural and personal.
Cultural upbringing, simple song-like phrases from infancy and our own unique musical preferences and behaviours all shape these connections. They’re powerful, but they sure ain’t simple.
Katrina McFerran has received funding from the Australian Research Council to investigate music and emotions. She is affiliated with the Australian Music Therapy Association.
Climate regulation through carbon storage was worth A$43.2 billion to Australia in 2020-21, according to a report released today which seeks to put a monetary value on the benefits flowing from our natural assets.
Australia’s first national ecosystem accounts were released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics today. Together, they reveal the key ways our environment contributes to Australia’s economic and social wellbeing in dollar terms.
Ecosystems covered by the accounts include desert, grasslands, native forests, rivers, streams, coastal areas and oceans.
The accounts provide a holistic view of Australia’s land, freshwater and marine environments. They intend to help policymakers look beyond GDP to a broader measurement of how ecosystems contribute to society and the economy.
Valuing our ecosystems
The accounts cover services provided by Australia’s ecosystems in 2020–21.
Australian ecosystems stored more than 34.5 billion tonnes of carbon – the most valuable service by ecosystems examined in the accounts, according to the ABS.
It brought a $43.2 billion benefit to Australia in the form of climate regulation. Plants and other organisms reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by removing and storing them. This helps stabilise the climate, avoiding damage caused by climate change.
Grasslands made the biggest contribution to carbon storage, followed by native forests and savannas.
The accounts show grazed biomass, or grasslands, provide $40.4 billion in benefits, through the forage provided to cattle and sheep. The dollar figure represents what farmers would otherwise have spent on feeding their livestock.
The accounts also examined the provision of surface water taken from ecosystems, and used for drinking, energy production, cooling, irrigation and manufacturing. This was valued at $1.4 billion.
The provision of wild fish, sold to consumers to eat, was put at $39.2 million.
The accounts also reveal how coral reefs, sandbanks, dunes and mangroves protect our coastlines against tides and storm surges.
The ABS estimates mangroves protected 4,006 dwellings around Australian coastlines. This prevented more than $57 million worth of building damage.
The accounts also track changes in Australia’s ecosystems.
Some 281,000 hectares of mostly farmland were converted to urban and industrial uses between 2015–16 and 2020–21. And 169,000 hectares of “steppe” land – flat, unforested grassland – was converted to sown pastures and fields.
Feral animal and weed species continue to spread. Meanwhile, the number of threatened native species is increasing.
Why do we need ecosystem accounting?
Think of a logged forest. The value of the timber produced counts towards Australia’s gross domestic product. But cutting trees down also produces a loss. For example, the forest is no longer there for the community to enjoy. And it no longer provides “services” such as filtering water and preventing soil erosion.
There are many reasons to measure the value of those services. For example, governments might then be able to charge a logging company a licence fee which reflects the community value of the forest. A government may decide the forest is too valuable to allow logging at all, or the fee may just be set too high for any company to find it profitable to log it.
To date, the value lost when trees are cut down, or other ecosystems are damaged, has not been included in the national accounts. The new environmental accounts seek to change this.
Obviously, ecosystems are complex and difficult to measure. The ABS has been guided by an international framework developed by the United Nations.
The ecosystem accounts are a collaboration between several federal agencies: the ABS, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and the CSIRO.
Boundless plains and golden soil, girt by sea
The accounts distinguish between environmental “realms”.
About half of Australia’s terrestrial (dry land) realm is desert. About a quarter is savanna and grassland. Intensively used land, such as pastures, is a smaller proportion.
There are contrasts between the states. Western Australia has 158 million hectares of desert while Victoria, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory have none. Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory host 97% of Australia’s mangroves.
About half of Australia is the marine realm, covering 681 million hectares. Some 30% of this is the marine shelf and 70% deep sea. About 14 million hectares comprise coral reefs. The darker areas in the map below show where most fish are caught.
The coastal realm comprises mangroves and saltmarsh. In 2021, mangroves covered an estimated 1.1 million hectares of Australia’s coastal areas.
A small but important proportion of Australia is our freshwater realm, comprising rivers and streams. The accounts show between 2015–16 and 2020–21, 4% of natural environments along perennial rivers were converted to higher intensity land uses.
Where to now?
These accounts are just the first step in estimating the value of Australia’s natural assets.
The ABS will update Australia’s ecosystem accounts annually. It describes the inaugural accounts as “experimental” and says the government agencies involved will run a consultation process to improve them.
We can expect the accounts to become more useful over time as data accrues and trends can be identified.
According to the ABS, policy uses for the accounts include managing healthy and resilient ecosystems, and integrating biodiversity into planning.
Poet and playwright Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as someone who “knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”. In today’s society we often underrate things that do not have a dollar value attached.
So this compilation of Australia’s ecosystems, and their value to us, is a welcome development. It should lead to more informed, holistic decisions about whether natural assets should be protected, or damaged for economic benefit.
John Hawkins 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.
If your summer holiday already feels like a distant memory, you’re not alone. Burnout – a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion following prolonged stress – has been described in workplaces since a 5th century monastery in Egypt.
So what’s the difference between burnout and depression?
Depression is marked by helplessness and burnout by hopelessness. They can have different causes and should also be managed differently.
What is burnout?
The World Health Organization defines burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” resulting from excessively demanding workload pressures. While it is typically associated with the workplace, carers of children or elderly parents with demanding needs are also at risk.
Our research created a set of burnout symptoms we captured in the Sydney Burnout Measure to assist self-diagnosis and clinicians undertaking assessments. They include:
exhaustion as the primary symptom
brain fog (poor concentration and memory)
difficulty finding pleasure in anything
social withdrawal
an unsettled mood (feeling anxious and irritable)
impaired work performance (this may be result of other symptoms such as fatigue).
People can develop a “burning out” phase after intense work demands over only a week or two. A “burnout” stage usually follows years of unrelenting work pressure.
What is depression?
A depressive episode involves a drop in self-worth, increase in self-criticism and feelings of wanting to give up. Not everyone with these symptoms will have clinical depression, which requires a diagnosis and has an additional set of symptoms.
Clinically diagnosed depression can vary by mood, how long it lasts and whether it comes back. There are two types of clinical depression:
melancholic depression has genetic causes, with episodes largely coming “out of the blue”
non-melancholic depression is caused by environmental factors, often triggered by significant life events which cause a drop in self-worth.
Burnout shares some features with melancholic depression, but they tend to be general symptoms, such as feeling a loss of pleasure, energy and concentration skills.
We found there were more similarities between burnout and non-melancholic (environmental) depression. This included a lack of motivation and difficulties sleeping or being cheered up, perhaps reflecting the fact both have environmental causes.
Looking for the root cause
The differences between burnout and depression become clearer when we look at why they happen.
Personality comes into play. Our work suggests a trait like perfectionism puts people at a much higher risk of burnout. But they may be less likely to become depressed as they tend to avoid stressful events and keep things under control.
Those with burnout generally feel overwhelmed by demands or deadlines they can’t meet, creating a sense of helplessness.
On the other hand, those with depression report lowered self-esteem. So rather than helpless they feel that they and their future is hopeless.
However it is not uncommon for someone to experience both burnout and depression at once. For example, a boss may place excessive work demands on an employee, putting them at risk of burnout. At the same time, the employer may also humiliate that employee and contribute to an episode of non-melancholic depression.
What can you do?
A principal strategy in managing burnout is identifying the contributing stressors. For many people, this is the workplace. Taking a break, even a short one, or scheduling some time off can help.
Australians now have the right to disconnect, meaning they don’t have to answer work phone calls or emails after hours. Setting boundaries can help separate home and work life.
Burnout can be also be caused by compromised work roles, work insecurity or inequity. More broadly, a dictatorial organisational structure can make employees feel devalued. In the workplace, environmental factors, such as excessive noise, can be a contributor. Addressing these factors can help prevent burnout.
For non-melancholic depression, clinicians will help address and manage triggers that are the root cause. Others will benefit from antidepressants or formal psychotherapy.
While misdiagnosis between depression and burnout can occur, burnout can mimic other medical conditions such as anemia or hypothyroidism.
For the right diagnosis, it’s best to speak to your doctor or clinician who should seek to obtain a sense of “the whole picture”. Only then, once a burnout diagnsois has been affirmed and other possible causes ruled out, should effective support strategies be put in place.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Gordon Parker receives funding from the University of of NSW.
If your summer holiday already feels like a distant memory, you’re not alone. Burnout – a state of emotional, physical and mental exhaustion following prolonged stress – has been described in workplaces since a 5th century monastery in Egypt.
So what’s the difference between burnout and depression?
Depression is marked by helplessness and burnout by hopelessness. They can have different causes and should also be managed differently.
What is burnout?
The World Health Organization defines burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” resulting from excessively demanding workload pressures. While it is typically associated with the workplace, carers of children or elderly parents with demanding needs are also at risk.
Our research created a set of burnout symptoms we captured in the Sydney Burnout Measure to assist self-diagnosis and clinicians undertaking assessments. They include:
exhaustion as the primary symptom
brain fog (poor concentration and memory)
difficulty finding pleasure in anything
social withdrawal
an unsettled mood (feeling anxious and irritable)
impaired work performance (this may be result of other symptoms such as fatigue).
People can develop a “burning out” phase after intense work demands over only a week or two. A “burnout” stage usually follows years of unrelenting work pressure.
What is depression?
A depressive episode involves a drop in self-worth, increase in self-criticism and feelings of wanting to give up. Not everyone with these symptoms will have clinical depression, which requires a diagnosis and has an additional set of symptoms.
Clinically diagnosed depression can vary by mood, how long it lasts and whether it comes back. There are two types of clinical depression:
melancholic depression has genetic causes, with episodes largely coming “out of the blue”
non-melancholic depression is caused by environmental factors, often triggered by significant life events which cause a drop in self-worth.
Burnout shares some features with melancholic depression, but they tend to be general symptoms, such as feeling a loss of pleasure, energy and concentration skills.
We found there were more similarities between burnout and non-melancholic (environmental) depression. This included a lack of motivation and difficulties sleeping or being cheered up, perhaps reflecting the fact both have environmental causes.
Looking for the root cause
The differences between burnout and depression become clearer when we look at why they happen.
Personality comes into play. Our work suggests a trait like perfectionism puts people at a much higher risk of burnout. But they may be less likely to become depressed as they tend to avoid stressful events and keep things under control.
Those with burnout generally feel overwhelmed by demands or deadlines they can’t meet, creating a sense of helplessness.
On the other hand, those with depression report lowered self-esteem. So rather than helpless they feel that they and their future is hopeless.
However it is not uncommon for someone to experience both burnout and depression at once. For example, a boss may place excessive work demands on an employee, putting them at risk of burnout. At the same time, the employer may also humiliate that employee and contribute to an episode of non-melancholic depression.
What can you do?
A principal strategy in managing burnout is identifying the contributing stressors. For many people, this is the workplace. Taking a break, even a short one, or scheduling some time off can help.
Australians now have the right to disconnect, meaning they don’t have to answer work phone calls or emails after hours. Setting boundaries can help separate home and work life.
Burnout can be also be caused by compromised work roles, work insecurity or inequity. More broadly, a dictatorial organisational structure can make employees feel devalued. In the workplace, environmental factors, such as excessive noise, can be a contributor. Addressing these factors can help prevent burnout.
For non-melancholic depression, clinicians will help address and manage triggers that are the root cause. Others will benefit from antidepressants or formal psychotherapy.
While misdiagnosis between depression and burnout can occur, burnout can mimic other medical conditions such as anemia or hypothyroidism.
For the right diagnosis, it’s best to speak to your doctor or clinician who should seek to obtain a sense of “the whole picture”. Only then, once a burnout diagnsois has been affirmed and other possible causes ruled out, should effective support strategies be put in place.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Gordon Parker receives funding from the University of of NSW.
Wrangling head lice, and the children they infest, must be up there with the most challenging duties a parent or carer has to face.
And the job is getting harder. Commonly used chemical products aren’t working as well as they once did, meaning head lice are harder to kill.
You can still rid your children of lice – but it’s likely to take some patience and persistence.
Remind me, what are head lice? And nits?
Head lice are tiny six-legged insects that are only found in the hair on a human’s head – most commonly in the hair of primary school-aged children.
Head lice have been a constant companion for humans throughout their millions of years of evolution.
Lice love living in our hair. But they scoot down to our scalp up to a half dozen times a day to drink our blood.
Their claws are perfectly designed to scuttle up and down shafts of hair. But while they’re nimble on our hair, once they’re off, they don’t last long –they’re clumsy, uncoordinated and die quickly.
The term “nits” actually describes the eggs of head lice. They’re often the first sign of an infestation. And with one louse laying more than 100 in their month-long lifespan, there can be a lot of them.
No. Head lice are annoying and their bites may cause skin reactions. But Australian health authorities don’t consider lice a health risk. There is no evidence that head lice can spread pathogens that cause disease.
From child care through to primary school, it’s likely your child has had a head lice infestation at least once. One Australian study found the infestation rate in Australian classrooms ranged from no cases to 72% of children affected.
Girls are more likely to be carry head lice than boys. Long hair means it’s easier for the head lice to hitch a ride.
One study found that in some classrooms, almost three in four children had head lice. CDC/Unsplash
Head lice don’t jump or fly, they move from head to head via direct contact.
Head lice come home with your children because they spend time in close contact with other children, hugging, playing or crowding around books or screens. Any head-to-head contact is a pathway of infections.
Rules differ slightly between states but in New South Wales and Queensland, children don’t need to be kept home from school because of head lice.
How can I keep my home free of head lice?
Keeping the house clean and tidy won’t keep head lice away. They don’t care how clean your bed sheets and towels are, or how frequently you vacuum carpets and rugs.
There may be a risk of head lice transfer on shared pillows, but even that risk is low.
There’s no need to change the child’s or other family member’s bedding when you find lice in a child’s hair. Research-based recommendations from NSW Health are that “bed linen, hats, clothing and furniture do not harbour or transmit lice or nits and that there is no benefit in washing them as a treatment option”.
I’ve used nit solution. Why isn’t it working?
A wide range of products are available at your local pharmacy to treat head lice. Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration assesses products to ensure that they are both safe and effective.
The problem is that most of these products are insecticides that kill the lice on contact but may not kill the eggs.
Also, if treatments aren’t completed as directed on product labels, some head lice won’t be killed.
Head lice also seem to be fighting back against the chemicals we’ve been using against them and it’s getting harder to clear children of infestations.
Don’t expect any miracle cures but health authorities in Australia generally recommend the “conditioner and comb” or “wet comb” method. This means you physically remove the lice without the need for chemical applications.
There are three key steps:
immobilise the lice by applying hair conditioner to the child’s damp hair and leaving it there for around 20 minutes
systematically comb through the hair using a fine toothed “lice comb”. The conditioner and lice can be wiped off on paper towels or tissues. Only adult lice will be collected but don’t worry, we’ll deal with the eggs later
repeat the process twice, about a week apart, to break the life cycle of the head lice.
Repeating the process after a week allows the remaining eggs to hatch. It sounds counter-intuitive but by letting them hatch, the young lice are easier to remove than the eggs. You just need to remove them before they start laying a fresh batch of eggs and the infestation continues.
While children are much more likely to have head lice, the reality is that everyone in the household is just as likely to host a head louse or two. You don’t necessarily need everyone to have a treatment but “grown ups” should be on the lookout for lice too.
Cameron Webb and the Department of Medical Entomology, NSW Health Pathology and University of Sydney, have been engaged by a wide range of insect repellent and insecticide manufacturers to provide testing of products and provide expert advice on medically important arthropods. Cameron has also received funding from local, state and federal agencies to undertake research into various aspects of management of various medically important arthropods.
It’s central to any democracy that citizens receive fair treatment under the law. An important part of this is access to legal advice and representation.
But lawyers are expensive. Many people who engage with the justice system can’t afford them.
This is where legal aid comes in. Legal aid is a government-funded service available to some people unable to afford legal assistance. It is tightly targeted and many people are turned away.
Those approved can access professional advice and representation. Many clients are women and children escaping family violence, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who remain vastly overrepresented in the criminal justice system.
But the first ever national census of legal aid private practitioners reveals widespread underfunding, overwhelming workloads and high financial costs borne by the lawyers providing help.
How does legal aid work?
Vulnerable Australians who need essential services often access them from private providers in mixed markets. This is the case for childcare, aged care and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
It’s also true of legal aid, in which private lawyers play major roles.
Legal Aid Commissions deliver legal aid through a mix of directly employed, in-house practitioners and approved private providers. The mix is heavily weighted toward private providers, although it fluctuates over time and across jurisdictions.
According to National Legal Aid, in 2022–23, 72% of successful legal aid applications were assigned to private practitioners.
To resource this arrangement, private practitioners are funded by grants of aid allocated to approved clients, with amounts regulated through a fixed scale of fees. Legal Aid Commissions in each state and territory usually release grant funds to practitioners in stages, initially to cover advice, investigation and negotiation, with funding extended to cover more work, such as going to trial, if cases progress.
Private practitioners are expected to assist legal aid clients at the same standard of quality they would provide to other, fee-paying clients.
But quality legal representation, especially for highly vulnerable people, is complex and time-consuming.
Our research shows private practitioners feel frustrated that government funding does not cover all activities they need to perform and falls short of meeting community need.
Our research
We surveyed private practitioners who had delivered legal aid in the past two years, or who were listed on legal aid panels or preferred supplier lists.
Among the 1,010 who participated, most were self-employed or working in very small practices. A quarter had delivered legal aid for more than 20 years.
Commitment to legal aid is high, reflected in statements such as “everyone deserves good-quality representation”, and
there is an obligation on professionals to assist in providing access to justice.
Overwhelmingly, private practitioners find legal aid satisfying and meaningful. They also value the way it can build expertise for practitioners early in their legal career.
But despite being enjoyable and enriching work, private practitioners say legal aid is becoming more difficult to deliver.
Bearing the brunt of the cost
Legal aid work can be stressful for practitioners, but their greatest challenge by far is funding.
While there is no illusion that legal aid will be lucrative, private practitioners are frustrated with paltry grants that require significant administration and which undervalue their work.
They feel the funding they receive does not recognise the time required in legal aid cases, nor the growing complexity of cases. As legal aid clients increasingly present with unmet health, social and economic needs, cases are more complex, lengthy and costly.
Announcements of additional funding and better indexation have been welcomed, but aren’t enough to fix the shortfall.
In the census, private practitioners repeatedly told us the funding available does not cover all activities required in legal aid cases or expected by courts. As one practitioner explained:
legal aid matters effectively become pro bono matters near weeks into an initial grant, despite being potentially years-long.
For 85% of private practitioners, “having to perform unremunerated work” is a source of difficulty. More than three-quarters said “trying to do quality work with limited time and resources” makes legal aid cases difficult.
Many private practitioners travel long distances for their legal aid work and feel frustrated when costs are not covered. They also find administration is slow and cumbersome, and feel that Legal Aid Commissions are too understaffed to respond quickly to inquiries.
Although 70% intend to continue to deliver at least some legal aid in the next year, many private practitioners feel undervalued. A third want to reduce their legal aid caseload and one in nine plan to abandon this work altogether.
To continue to deliver legal aid, private practitioners echo scholarly evidence
in calling for better grants, straightforward administration and responsive communication.
Some question why legal aid, as a public good, has come to rest so heavily on the commitment of private practitioners and suggest that in-house staff and the community legal sector play bigger roles.
Ultimately, some private practitioners will find ways to integrate legal aid into their business, or simply wear the cost. But for most, financial costs and risks are too high. Essential services cannot be delivered based on practitioners’ goodwill.
Natasha Cortis conducts commissioned research on social policy and service delivery, for government and non-government organisations. The research this article discusses was commissioned by National Legal Aid.
Megan Blaxland conducts commissioned research on social policy and service delivery for a range of government and non-government organisations. The research this article discusses was commissioned by National Legal Aid.
Spanning more octaves than a piano, humpback whales sing powerfully into the vast ocean. These songs are beautifully complex, weaving phrases and themes into masterful compositions. Blue and fin whales richly fill out a bass section with their own unique versions of song.
Together, these three species can create a marvellous symphony in the sea.
Published today in PLOS One, our new research reveals these baleen whale species’ response to major changes in their ecosystem can be heard in their songs.
Food for long-distance travel
The six-year study took place in whale foraging habitat in the eastern North Pacific, off the coast of California in the United States. From this biologically rich foraging habitat, the whales migrate long distances each year to breeding habitats at lower latitudes.
They eat little to nothing during their migration and winter breeding season. So they need to build up their energy stores during their annual residence in foraging habitat.
This energy, stored in their gigantic bodies, powers the animals through months of long-distance travel, mating, calving, and nursing before they return to waters off California in the spring and summer to resume foraging.
The whales eat krill and fish that can aggregate in massive schools. However, their diets are distinct.
While blue whales only eat krill, humpback whales eat krill and small schooling fish such as anchovy. If the prey species are more abundant and more densely concentrated, whales can forage more efficiently. Foraging conditions and prey availability change dramatically from year to year.
We wanted to know if these changes in the ecosystem were reflected in the whales’ acoustic behaviour.
Piecing together a complex puzzle
To track the occurrence of singing, we examined audio recordings acquired through the Monterey Accelerated Research System. This is a deep-sea observatory operated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and funded by the US National Science Foundation.
Analysis of sound recordings is a highly effective way to study whales because we can hear them from quite far away. If a whale sings anywhere within thousands of square kilometres around the hydrophone, we will hear it.
Yet, piecing together the complex puzzle of whale behavioural ecology requires diverse research methods.
Our study used observations of the whales, including sound recordings, photo identification and diet analysis. It also used measurements of forage species abundance, characterisation of ecosystem conditions and theoretical modelling of sound propagation.
Our ability to probe the complex lives of these giants was enhanced for humpback whales because we had a unique data resource available for this species: extensive photo identification.
The Happywhale community science project combines photos supplied by researchers and ecotourists, and identification enabled by artificial intelligence, to recognise individual whales by the shape and coloration of their flukes.
This unique resource enabled us to examine the local abundance of humpback whales. We could also study the timing of their annual migration and how persistently individual whales occupied the study region.
Scientists used a deep-sea hydrophone to keep a nearly continuous record of the ocean soundscape. MBARI
An increase in food – and in song
The study began in 2015, during a prolonged marine heatwave that caused major disruption in the foraging habitat of whales and other animals throughout the eastern North Pacific.
All three whale species sang the least during the heatwave, and sang more as foraging conditions improved over the next two years.
These patterns provided the first indications that the singing behaviour by whales may be closely related to the food available. Remarkably, whale song is an indicator of forage availability.
Further evidence was found in the striking differences between humpback and blue whales during the later years of the study.
Continued increases in detection of humpback whale song could not be explained by changes in the local abundance of whales, the timing of their annual migration, or the persistence of individuals in the study region.
However, humpback song occurrence closely tracked tremendous increases in the abundances of northern anchovy — the largest increase in 50 years. And when we analysed the skin of the humpback whales, we saw a clear shift to a fish-dominated diet.
In contrast, blue whales only eat krill, and detection of their songs plummeted with large decreases in krill abundance. Our analysis of blue whale skin revealed they were foraging over a larger geographic area to find the food they needed during these hard times in the food web.
Humpback song occurrence closely tracked tremendous increases in the abundances of northern anchovy. evantravels/Shutterstock
Predicting long-term changes
This research shows listening to whales is much more than a rich sensory experience. It’s a window into their lives, their vulnerability, and their resilience.
Humpback whales emerge from this study as a particularly resilient species. They are more able to readily adapt to changes in the ecology of the foraging habitats that sustain them. These findings can help scientists and resource managers predict how marine ecosystems and species will respond to long-term changes driven by both natural cycles and human impacts.
At a time of unprecedented change for marine life and ecosystems, collaboration across disciplines and institutions will be crucial for understanding our changing ocean.
This work was enabled by private research centres, universities and federal agencies working together. This consortium’s past work has revealed a rich new understanding of the ocean soundscape, answering fundamental questions about the ecology of ocean giants.
Who knows what more we will learn as we listen to the ocean’s underwater symphony?
The study’s findings can help scientists better understand how blue whales and other baleen whales respond to long-term changes in the ocean. Ajit S N/Shutterstock
This work was led by John Ryan, a biological oceanographer at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), with an interdisciplinary team of researchers from MBARI, Southern Cross University, Happywhale.com, Cascadia Research Collective, University of Wisconsin, NOAA Southwest Fisheries Science Centre, University of California, Santa Cruz, Naval Postgraduate School, and Stanford University.
Ted Cheeseman is the co-founder of citizen science project, Happywhale.
Jarrod Santora receives funding from NOAA, NASA, and NSF.
The above chart traces the vote-share of Germany’s establishment political parties: the right-wing CDU/CSU and the now-centre-right SPD (essentially the Christian Democrats, just like National in New Zealand) and the Social Democrats (just like Labour). And it compares Germany with England to show a similar process there.
An increasingly stale political centre has consolidated power in both Germany and the United Kingdom, despite record low vote-shares for these establishment parties. In Germany, the ‘major party’ combined vote has fallen to 45% (nearly as low as that in last year’s election in France, for the Centre and the traditional Right). In the United Kingdom, the establishment (Labour, Conservative) vote has fallen to 60%; though, given a much lower turnout in the United Kingdom than Germany, 60% there represents a similar level of support to that of the equivalent parties in Germany.
With these outcomes being at-best borderline-democratic (JD Vance had a point about the shutting-out of alternative voices), neither country is scheduled to have another election until 2029. And the ‘left’ establishment parties – in office in both countries in March 2025 – are as right-wing as their centre-right predecessor governments of Merkel and Sunak.
We note that, for Germany, elections before 1991 are for West Germany only. And, for the United Kingdom, my aim has been to focus on England, where Celtic nationalist parties have not played a role; thus until 1979, the British data is for the United Kingdom, whereas from 1983 the data is for England only. We also note that Germany shows few signs of promoting the literally colourful characters who play such an important part in contemporary British politics.
The waxing and waning of the postwar German mainstream
Postwar German politics began in 1949, with its new MMP voting system; proportional voting featuring two disqualification mechanisms, a five percent party-vote threshold, and the failure to gain a local electorate using the simple-plurality (FPP) criterion. (In Germany, in the 1950s, the latter disqualification rule was tightened; three electorate seats were required, rather than one.)
The rise in the two-party vote from 1949 to 1972 represented the consolidation of the major-party system, essentially in line with the post-war German economic miracle. From 1949 to 1969, the government was CDU-led. The SPD led the government from 1969 to 1982 (though with fewer votes than the CDU/CSU). All subsequent governments have been CDU-led, except for the relatively short-lived administrations of Gerhard Schröder (c.2000) and Olaf Scholz.
The fall in establishment-party vote-share reflects the rise of the Green Party in Germany, which itself reflects the waning of the economic miracle.
The 1990s’ political stability reflects the reunification era, the political dominance of Helmut Kohl; and the fact that, due to reunification, German politics suspended its characteristic debt-phobia.
The 2000s and 2010s represents the Angela Merkel era. The 2009 result reflects the Global Financial Crisis. The 2005 vote reflects the early Eurozone period, in which investment within the European Union was diverted into the development of the southern EU countries (and to Ireland). In particular, the 2000s saw the rise of The Left Party, which was shunned by the Establishment parties; this was the beginning of the German ‘firewall’, which meant that ‘grand coalitions’ were favoured over the inclusion of ‘outsider’ parties into government. In that time, the Green Party became a centrist party; inside rather than outside ‘the tent’.
In 2014 the debt-phobic way Germany ‘resolved’ the Euro crisis was popular in Germany, though ‘austerity’ ushered in the deflationary bias that has characterised subsequent fiscal policy in the European Union. (The adverse effect of deflationary fiscal policy was the use of a zero-interest-rate monetary policy by the European Central Bank; so the adverse consequences of the austerity policies played out more slowly than they might have.)
Since the initial ‘triumph’ of austerity in 2014, we have seen a substantial and ongoing decline in the vote for the establishment parties. However, these parties managed to consolidate power despite haemorrhaging votes. The new 2025 Government will be a substantially right-wing government made up of German-National (CDU 28.5%) and German-Labour (SPD 16.4%); this represents easily the worst vote ever for the ‘left’ SPD and easily the second-worst vote ever for the ‘winning’ CDU/CSU.
And, in the United Kingdom, the vote for Labour in 2024 was easily the worst vote of any ‘winning’ party in any election since 1945 (and possible since the time of Walpole in the 1720s).
Democracy anyone?
Postscript UK
In the UK, the highest percentage vote for a political party in the postwar era was 48.8% for Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, seeking a third term in office (in a very-early election which Attlee was tricked into calling). Labour was defeated, despite its record-high poll! Winston Churchill’s Conservatives got 48.0% of the vote; but, crucially, more seats. Attlee’s government was the least stale government in the United Kingdom’s post-war history; Attlee, in the UK, had a popularity and significance comparable to that of Michael Joseph Savage in New Zealand.
*******
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 John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra
Peter Dutton and his Coalition colleagues have dithered for several weeks on their plans for the Commonwealth public sector.
While being upfront that public service jobs would be targeted, they’ve made numerous contradictory statements about the number of public servants who would be sacked if the Coalition wins the coming election.
But Peter Dutton’s most recent comments confirm that he clearly wants to make significant cuts.
And it’s hard to see how the sackings wouldn’t erode important front line services that many Australians depend on for help and support.
36,000 jobs on the line
This week the opposition leader declared the Coalition would achieve A$24 billion in savings by reducing the size of the public service.
He was unequivocal. The money would be clawed back over four years and would more than cover the Coalition’s promised $9 billion injection into Medicare.
Dutton explicitly tied the $24 billion in savings to the 36,000 Commonwealth public servants who have been hired since the last election
Under the Labor Party, there are 36,000 additional public servants, that’s at a cost of $6 billion a year, or $24 billion over the forward estimates. This program totals $9 billion over that period. So, we’ve well and truly identified the savings.
While still not nominating a precise number of job cuts, it’s Peter Dutton’s clearest statement of intent to date. By “truly” identifying the savings, 36,000 jobs are on the line. And it accords with Dutton’s earlier comments that the extra workers are not providing value for money for Australian taxpayers.
(They have) not improved the lives of Australians one iota
While this sounds like he wants to dismiss them all, senior colleagues are more circumspect.
According to Nationals leader David Littleproud, the number of job cuts has not yet been decided. Shadow Public Service Minister Jane Hume further muddied the waters by referring to the cuts being by attrition, and excluding frontline services.
Frontline services
The public service head count has grown to 185,343, as of June 2024. So cutting 36,000 staff, or even a large proportion of that number, would be a very significant reduction.
The agencies that added the most public servants between June 2023 and June 2024 were the National Disability Insurance Agency (up 2,193), Defence (up 1,425), Health and Aged Care (up 1,173) and Services Australia (up 1,149).
Many of these extra staff would be providing invaluable front line services to clients and customer who are accessing essential support.
And some of the new public servants replaced more expensive outsourced workers. Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has claimed the Albanese government has saved $4 billion of taxpayers’ money by reducing spending on consultants and contractors.
Rather than the alleged explosion in the size of the bureaucracy, the growth in public service numbers has closely matched the increase in the population. Last year, they accounted for 1.36% of all employed persons, up by only a minuscule degree on the 1.35% in 2016.
Canberra bashing
According to Dutton, the 36,000 additional public servants hired under Labor all work in Canberra. It was not a slip of the tongue. The claim is also in the Liberal Party’s pre-election pamphlet.
But only 37% of the public service workforce is located in the national capital. Half are based in state capitals. A full quarter of those involved in service delivery work in regional Australia.
The Liberals clearly think they have nothing to lose among Canberra voters, given they have no members or senators from the Australian Capital Territory.
The coming election will no doubt tell us if Canberra bashing still resonates with voters elsewhere in the country. Dutton has clearly made the political judgement that it does.
Another night of the long knives?
A change of government often precipitates a clean out at the top of the public service.
When the Howard government was elected in 1996, no fewer than six departmental secretaries were sacked on the infamous night of the long knives. Then prime minister Tony Abbott dismissed four departmental chiefs in one fell swoop after taking office in 2013. He didn’t even consult his treasurer before dumping the head of Treasury.
This pattern of culling senior public servants represents a chilling risk to good policy development. Departmental secretaries concerned about losing their jobs may be reluctant to give the “frank and fearless advice” their positions demand.
Voters are entitled to know what the Coalition has planned for the public service before they cast their ballots.
The lack of detail on job losses is matched by a reluctance to outline spending cuts elsewhere. Dutton has ruled out an Abbott-style audit commission. He is prepared to cut “wasteful” spending, but won’t say if it may be necessary to also chop some worthwhile outlays to dampen inflationary pressures.
Dutton is adamant that any spending cuts by a government he leads will be determined after the election, not announced before it. This does nothing for democratic accountability. It does not give the electorate the chance to cast their votes on the basis of an alternative vision from the alternative government.
All Australians, not just public servants, deserve to know before polling day just how deep Dutton and the Coalition are really planning to cut.
John Hawkins is a former public servant and lives in Canberra.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Strating, Director, La Trobe Asia, and Professor of International Relations, La Trobe University
Debating Australia’s role in world politics is not always high on the political agenda. Elections here are more often fought on economic issues than foreign or defence policy. And while the major parties have different views on foreign policy, there tends to be bipartisanship on the central tenets of our strategic policy, including Australia’s alliance with the United States.
In recent years, however, Australia has found itself wedged between two great powers: its security guarantor, the US, and its major trading partner, China. The increasing strategic competition between these two great powers, especially in Asia, has raised new questions about how Australia should manage these relationships and conceive of its role in the world.
For some countries, having a prominent role on the global stage may be more obvious than for others. Wealthy states with large militaries and populations, for example, often play the part of “great powers”. These countries tend to make claims about their unique rights and responsibilities, such as having a greater say in multilateral institutions (like the United Nations) and the “rules” intended to govern international conduct.
However, most of the world’s countries are not great powers. For a middle-sized nation like Australia, its role on the global stage is not necessarily static but determined by how our leaders balance national interests and values.
These, in turn, are shaped by “material factors”, such as geography, population and economy size, natural resources, shared political ideals (for example, our belief in democratic institutions), norms and culture.
In addition, a middle-sized country’s global role can change depending on how leaders perceive contemporary threats and challenges to their security.
Australia as a ‘middle power’
The National Defence Strategy released in 2024 describes Australia as an “influential middle power”. According to the strategy, this is demonstrated by several things:
our enduring democratic values
our history of safeguarding international rules and contributing to regional partnerships
the strong foundations of our economy
the strength of our partnerships in the Indo-Pacific.
Whether Australia should be described as a “middle power”, though, has long been the subject of political debate. Since H.V. “Doc” Evatt, then-attorney general and minister for external affairs, used the term in 1945, it has been most often (but not always) associated with the Labor Party.
Recent Coalition governments have been more reluctant to view Australia as “just” a middle power.
Alexander Downer, the foreign minister in the Howard government, would occasionally use the term “pivotal power”. Pivotal powers, as one political analyst put it, are “destined to shape the contours of geopolitics in key regions of the world” due to their strategic location, economic power and political influence.
Meanwhile, Julie Bishop, foreign minister in the Abbott and Turnbull administrations, preferred the term “top 20 country”, arguing this better reflected Australia’s standing and level of influence on the global stage.
At the core of this historical debate is the extent to which a country like Australia can – and does – have influence in the region and globally.
Middle powers have different characteristics from great or smaller powers. Size, geography and economic wealth affect the extent to which they can shape the world. As a result, middle powers often adopt certain types of actions or behaviours to enhance their influence.
There are a number of ways middle powers do this, such as by:
supporting adherence to international law and rules (because these can help restrain more powerful states from imposing their will on others)
encouraging cooperation through multilateralism (cooperation between multiple states)
finding creative new solutions to global problems, such as climate change
taking the diplomatic lead on specific, but important, issues.
A liberal-democratic middle power, such as Australia, may also seek to promote its values internationally, including the respect for human rights, free and open trade, and the principles of democratic governance and accountability.
Australia’s reliance on ‘great and powerful friends’
In addition, middle powers often choose to align themselves with a bigger power to boost their influence even further.
In Australia’s case, its strategic dependence on the United States developed, in part, by historical anxieties that faraway “great and powerful friends”, as former diplomat Allan Gyngell phrased it, might abandon it in a potentially hostile region.
Prior to the second world war, Australia relied on its former colonial ruler, Britain, for its security. The Fall of Singapore in 1942, in which Japanese forces routed British and Australian troops defending the island, demonstrated the risks of our overdependence on a distant ally.
In the aftermath of the war, Australia forged a new security alliance with a new global superpower, the United States, through the ANZUS Treaty. Yet, replacing one “great and powerful” but distant friend with another did not alleviate Australia’s abandonment anxieties.
Since then, debates about Australia’s international role have largely focused on the extent to which it can – and should be – self-reliant in the context of the US alliance, or if it should pursue a more independent foreign policy.
US domestic politics – particularly during President Donald Trump’s time in office – have also driven uncertainty about Washington’s reliability, as well as its commitment to Asia and the implications for allies like Australia.
Despite such concerns, Australia’s relationship with the US is as strong and deeply entwined as it has ever been. In fact, it only got stronger during Trump’s first term. While Canberra has sought to deepen engagement with regional states it views as “like-minded”, such as Japan, South Korea and India, it has done so firmly in the context of its broader alliance with the United States.
This, of course, is driven by the new anxieties over China’s rise as a major economic and military power in the region. In recent years, Beijing’s assertive and coercive behaviours in the region have made it the key national security threat facing Australia.
This is a break from the past, when Australian leaders – both Labor and Liberal – broadly agreed that a “pragmatic approach” to engaging great powers meant Canberra would not have to “choose sides” between China and the US.
In 2023, the Albanese government sought a détente of sorts with China, attempting to return to this pragmatic approach. But wariness of Beijing remains.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s visit to Beijing in late 2023.
An Indo-Pacific power?
In the context of these new challenges presented by a rising China, Australia has increasingly leaned into becoming an “Indo-Pacific” power in recent years. There are a number of ways in which this shift is observable.
First, Australia has been instrumental in encouraging the global adoption of this phrase, “Indo-Pacific”, as a new way of referring to the region. This is partly driven by the desire to maintain US leadership and presence in Australia’s neighbourhood. The US is a Pacific state, so this concept anchors the US in our region in a way that “Asia” does not.
And when people used the term “Asia-Pacific” to talk about the region in the past, this had a primarily economic connotation. This is due to the importance of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and the move towards free-trade agreements between Australia and other countries in the region.
As such, the new term “Indo-Pacific” has become more of a security concept centred on the region’s waters. Generally, it is used to incorporate South, Southeast and Northeast Asia, Oceania (Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands) and the United States. By connecting the Indian (“Indo”) and the Pacific Oceans, it has become primarily a maritime strategic concept.
The narratives usually associated with the Indo-Pacific also relate to the need to protect the international rules-based order, and freedom of navigation and overflight for ships and aircraft in the region. This, again, reflects the growing geopolitical anxieties about a rising China, particularly in the disputed South and East China seas and the Taiwan Strait.
Australia does not have territorial or maritime claims in either sea, but we are nonetheless concerned about China’s efforts to undermine the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and what this might mean for the “rules-based order” more generally.
The second way Australia is moving more towards becoming a regional power is in the narrowing of its core defence interests to an “inner ring” focused on the South Pacific and maritime Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent, an “outer ring” in the broader Indo-Pacific and wider world. These geographical boundaries have consequences for how Australia views its international role.
After nearly two decades of military engagement in the Middle East and Afghanistan, Australia is shifting its focus back on its home region. This reflects not just the limits of our military capabilities, but also new concerns about the changing balance of power in Asia.
Third, Australia is increasingly focusing on a more strategic, narrower form of multilateralism. This, too, has been more centred on our region.
Multilateralism has always been seen as an important part of middle power identity. Australia, for instance, played a key role in setting up institutions like the United Nations.
However, this began to shift under recent Coalition governments. Prime Minister Scott Morrison expressed scepticism about such institutions, criticising them as an “often ill-defined borderless global community” that promoted “negative globalism”.
Under successive Coalition governments, Australia instead became a key player in two smaller groups of nations – the re-branded “Quad” in 2017 (along with Japan, the US and India) and AUKUS in 2021 (with the US and United Kingdom).
Under the Albanese government, global multilateralism was reinstated as an important pillar of foreign policy. But Australia’s investment and involvement in these smaller groups has only deepened.
Both AUKUS and the Quad demonstrate Australia’s changing role as a regional power in the Indo-Pacific. These groups offer Australia an opportunity to shape the regional security agenda by joining forces with other powerful states. They also provide a way of encouraging the US to maintain its presence and leadership in the region and to counterbalance China’s rise.
As part of this, Australia has become a key proponent of what the Biden administration coined “integrated deterrence”.
This is a central pillar of the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy that seeks to mobilise “like-minded” states – especially its regional allies such as Australia, Japan and South Korea – to form a regional coalition against rival states. This strategy reflects a growing awareness the US can’t provide security in Asia alone.
The AUKUS security agreement, including the commitment to develop new nuclear-powered submarines for Australia, is a part of this strategy.
Since the announcement of the submarine plan in 2021, both the procurement plan and the language that American and Australian leaders have been using suggest that Canberra is preparing to play a bigger security role in the region alongside the US.
Time for a new ‘strategic imagination’?
Has Australia’s shift to an Indo-Pacific regional power served it well?
It has allowed the deepening of defence relationships with partners like Japan and India. And through its roles in the Quad and AUKUS, Australia has a seat at the table and is more visible in regional security discussions.
But there are risks to a more assertive regional power stance. Australia could be viewed by its neighbours as too focused on military and not invested enough (or in the right way) in diplomacy or regional development. Australia’s overseas aid contribution, for example, has been declining for three decades.
It is also unclear which other regional states are likely to participate in a US-led coalition if a real conflict with China ever broke out. The Quad and AUKUS groups may be viewed by others as exclusionary or contributing to increasing tensions in the region.
How nuclear-powered submarines will “deter” potential adversaries is also yet to be clearly explained. These submarines could potentially entangle Australia in a regional conflict instead. Being able to clearly articulate and distinguish between Australian and US interests will remain vital for ensuring that future governments don’t “sleepwalk” into war.
Finally, Australia’s advocacy of the “rules-based order” has left it – and the US – exposed to criticisms of hypocrisy and double standards, particularly with Washington’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
…one which can develop a coherent security strategy by working with old and new allies and partners to shape the regional order in ways that ensure its security.
The approach emphasises the need for all parts of our government to work in coordination to protect Australians from the range of complex conventional and unconventional challenges it faces (including climate change).
Australia’s security and its international role should not be viewed through the lens of the “China threat” alone. Doing so is counter-productive, as many states in the region do not share the same perception about China.
Instead, as Wallis and I wrote, Australia needs a “more comprehensive, nuanced and contingent understanding of the range of security opportunities and threats” we face.
This is an edited extract from How Australian Democracy Works, a new collection of essays from The Conversation on all aspects of the country’s political landscape.
Rebecca Strating receives funding from Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra
Peter Dutton and his Coalition colleagues have dithered for several weeks on their plans for the Commonwealth public sector.
While being upfront that public service jobs would be targeted, they’ve made numerous contradictory statements about the number of public servants who would be sacked if the Coalition wins the coming election.
But Peter Dutton’s most recent comments confirm that he clearly wants to make significant cuts.
And it’s hard to see how the sackings wouldn’t erode important front line services that many Australians depend on for help and support.
36,000 jobs on the line
This week the opposition leader declared the Coalition would achieve A$24 billion dollars in savings by reducing the size of the public service.
He was unequivocal. The money would be clawed back over four years and would more than cover the Coalition’s promised $9 billion injection into Medicare.
Dutton explicitly tied the $24 billion in savings to the 36,000 Commonwealth public servants who have been hired since the last election
Under the Labor Party, there are 36,000 additional public servants, that’s at a cost of $6 billion a year, or $24 billion over the forward estimates. This program totals $9 billion over that period. So, we’ve well and truly identified the savings.
While still not nominating a precise number of job cuts, it’s Peter Dutton’s clearest statement of intent to date. By “truly” identifying the savings, 36,000 jobs are on the line. And it accords with Dutton’s earlier comments that the extra workers are not providing value for money for Australian taxpayers.
(They have) not improved the lives of Australians one iota
While this sounds like he wants to dismiss them all, senior colleagues are more circumspect.
According to Nationals leader David Littleproud, the number of job cuts has not yet been decided. Shadow Public Service Minister Jane Hume further muddied the waters by referring to the cuts being by attrition, and excluding frontline services.
Frontline services
The public service head count has grown to 185,343, as of June 2024. So cutting 36,000 staff, or even a large proportion of that number, would be a very significant reduction.
The agencies that added the most public servants between June 2023 and June 2024 were the National Disability Insurance Agency (up 2,193), Defence (up 1,425), Health and Aged Care (up 1,173) and Services Australia (up 1,149).
Many of these extra staff would be providing invaluable front line services to clients and customer who are accessing essential support.
And some of the new public servants replaced more expensive outsourced workers. Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has claimed the Albanese government has saved $4 billion of taxpayers’ money by reducing spending on consultants and contractors.
Rather than the alleged explosion in the size of the bureaucracy, the growth in public service numbers has closely matched the increase in the population. Last year, they accounted for 1.36% of all employed persons, up by only a minuscule degree on the 1.35% in 2016.
Canberra bashing
According to Dutton, the 36,000 additional public servants hired under Labor all work in Canberra. It was not a slip of the tongue. The claim is also in the Liberal Party’s pre-election pamphlet.
But only 37% of the public service workforce is located in the national capital. Half are based in state capitals. A full quarter of those involved in service delivery work in regional Australia.
The Liberals clearly think they have nothing to lose among Canberra voters, given they have no members or senators from the Australian Capital Territory.
The coming election will no doubt tell us if Canberra bashing still resonates with voters elsewhere in the country. Dutton has clearly made the political judgement that it does.
Another night of the long knives?
A change of government often precipitates a clean out at the top of the public service.
When the Howard government was elected in 1996, no fewer than six departmental secretaries were sacked on the infamous night of the long knives. Then prime minister Tony Abbott dismissed four departmental chiefs in one fell swoop after taking office in 2013. He didn’t even consult his treasurer before dumping the head of Treasury.
This pattern of culling senior public servants represents a chilling risk to good policy development. Departmental secretaries concerned about losing their jobs may be reluctant to give the “frank and fearless advice” their positions demand.
Voters are entitled to know what the Coalition has planned for the public service before they cast their ballots.
The lack of detail on job losses is matched by a reluctance to outline spending cuts elsewhere. Dutton has ruled out an Abbott-style audit commission. He is prepared to cut “wasteful” spending, but won’t say if it may be necessary to also chop some worthwhile outlays to dampen inflationary pressures.
Dutton is adamant that any spending cuts by a government he leads will be determined after the election, not announced before it. This does nothing for democratic accountability. It does not give the electorate the chance to cast their votes on the basis of an alternative vision from the alternative government.
All Australians, not just public servants, deserve to know before polling day just how deep Dutton and the Coalition are really planning to cut.
John Hawkins is a former public servant and lives in Canberra.
