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Category: Politics

  • MIL-Evening Report: This week’s federal budget will focus on cost-of-living measures – and a more uncertain global economy

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

    Treasurer Jim Chalmers will bring down the federal budget on Tuesday.

    It’s likely most of the major spending initiatives have already been announced. An extra A$8.5 billion in spending on Medicare will aim to ensure nine out of ten GP visits will be bulk billed by 2030. Queensland’s Bruce Highway is to be upgraded with the Albanese Government providing $7.2 billion of the $9 billion cost.

    In a speech last week, Chalmers promised “meaningful and substantial” cost-of-living relief.

    He also stressed the global economy is more volatile and unpredictable. He said the budget bottom line would be little changed from the mid-year update released in December, when the deficit was forecast to be $26.9 billion this financial year.

    It was a comprehensive dress rehearsal for tomorrow evening’s budget speech.

    No rabbits out of the hat

    Australian budgets today are well signposted in advance in speeches such as this. That is deliberate. It is seen as a mark of responsible fiscal management to have few surprises, either positive or negative.

    In past decades, treasurers were prone to announcing surprise spending measures. No longer. The rationale for rejecting the “rabbit out of a hat” approach was spelled out by former treasurer Wayne Swan in his 2008 budget lockup press conference: he said the budget had to be “responsible”. Chalmers was Swan’s deputy chief of staff at the time.

    This means calls by economists such as Chris Richardson and Ken Henry for major tax reform are unlikely to be heeded.

    Bracket creep (increases in tax revenues as taxpayers move into higher tax brackets) will do most of the work in the very gradual windback of the budget deficit. In the mid-year budget update, it was projected to take a decade to return the budget to balance.



    Read more:
    If Treasury forecasts are right, it could be a decade before Australia is ‘back in black’

    Good luck rather than good management

    Not that a balanced or surplus budget is a sign of good budgeting. The driver of recent budget surpluses under both Labor and Coalition governments has not been government policy but stronger than expected commodity prices and exports. They have been accidental, not deliberate.

    While deficits add to debt, imposing costs on future generations, what matters is whether the debts can be paid. If the economy grows faster than the rate of debt, the situation is manageable. So we are likely to see a chart in Tuesday’s budget papers showing this, with debt gradually declining as a share of Gross Domestic Product over time.

    However, these forecasts for the bottom line do not include off-budget items such as special green energy funds or student debt write-offs that total close to $100 billion, according to Deloitte Access Economics.

    This is because the budget covers only the “general government sector” – public service departments and agencies and the defence force. It is not the whole of the public sector, which includes commercial or financial entities like government business enterprises, the Reserve Bank of Australia, and various funds.

    On Sunday, the government announced further cost-of-living relief with an extension of electricity rebates, giving households another $150 this year. This will avoid headline inflation rebounding above 3%, as the Reserve Bank is currently forecasting.

    The energy rebate last year cost the budget an estimated $3.5 billion in 2024-25. Extending it for six months will cost $1.8 billion. Chalmers has also promised another reduction in the maximum cost of prescription medicines to $25.

    In December’s budget update, the unemployment rate was forecast to be around 4½% in mid-2025 and stay around that level for the next couple of years. Given the unemployment rate was steady at 4.1% in February, that forecast may be lowered.

    Inflation was forecast to stay below 3%.

    The increasing risk of a global trade war will see some reduction in forecasts for global and Australian economic growth. The OECD has lowered its forecasts for global growth and emphasised the international outlook is highly uncertain.

    This means the Australian budget forecasts are more likely than usual to be wrong. We just don’t know in which direction they will be wrong – will they be too optimistic or pessimistic?

    What will it mean for interest rates?

    The Reserve Bank board is unlikely to feel it has enough additional information to cut interest rates again at the April 1 meeting.

    Nonetheless, the government will be constrained in how much support it can provide households. It does not want undermine its narrative of future interest rate cuts by stimulating household spending too much.

    Something to watch for will be “decisions taken but not yet announced”. These are additional initiatives the government will announce during the election campaign. They will be able to answer the “where’s the money coming from?” question by saying they are already included in the budget.

    Finally, will there be increases in defence spending? US President Donald Trump is pressing US allies to do this. Trouble is, defence spending does not address the political problem of cost-of-living pressures – if anything it adds to them.

    A potential way out is for government to support more defence spending, but only “in principle”, leaving the details for future budgets. That would help manage both domestic and international pressures.

    John Hawkins was a formerly a senior economist at the Treasury and Reserve Bank.

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

    – ref. This week’s federal budget will focus on cost-of-living measures – and a more uncertain global economy – https://theconversation.com/this-weeks-federal-budget-will-focus-on-cost-of-living-measures-and-a-more-uncertain-global-economy-252515

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Trouble at Tesla and protests against Trump’s tariffs suggest consumer boycotts are starting to bite

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erin O’Brien, Associate Professor, School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University

    Getty Images

    When the United States starts a trade war with your country, how do you fight back? For individuals, one option is to wage a personal trade war and boycott products from the US.

    President Donald Trump has said no nation will be exempt from his tariffs, and this includes both Australia and New Zealand. His tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports, in particular, could hurt the sector in Australia, while New Zealand’s meat and wine exports to the US could also feel the effect.

    So far, political leaders have responded differently. Canada, Mexico and the European Union have imposed reciprocal tariffs on the US, while Australia has indicated it will not retaliate.

    But whether governments choose to push back or not, citizens in those and other countries are making their own stands. This includes artists such as renowned pianist András Schiff, who has cancelled his upcoming US tour.

    Most notably, collective outrage at the US president has led to a growing global boycott of Elon Musk’s Tesla due to his role in the Trump administration. Sales of new Tesla vehicles are down 72% in Australia and 76% in Germany. The share price has dropped by more than 50% since December 2024, with calls for Musk to step down as chief executive.

    Some governments are even encouraging consumer boycotts. The Canadian government, for example, has urged citizens to “fight back against the unjustified US tariffs” by purchasing Canadian products and holidaying in Canada.

    Canadians are clearly embracing this advice. Road trips to the US have dropped by more than 20% in the past month and US liquor brands have been removed from some Canadian stores altogether.

    This rise in calls for boycotts of American brands and companies is unsurprising in the Trump 2.0 era, where the lines between government and corporate America have become increasingly blurred.

    Political change by proxy

    When people want to protest a government policy, but have no political leverage because they’re not citizens of that country, boycotting corporations or brands gives them a voice. These actions are sometimes called “surrogate” or “proxy” boycotts.

    This form of “political consumerism”, where individuals align their consumption choices with their values, is now one of the most common forms of political participation in western liberal democracies.

    When France opposed the war in Iraq in 2003, US supporters of the war aimed boycotts at French imports. Consumers in the US, United Kingdom and elsewhere have boycotted Russian goods over the invasion of Ukraine, and targeted Israel over its military action and policies in Gaza and the West Bank.

    Most famously, protests against the apartheid regime in South Africa from the 1950s through to the 1990s helped isolate and eventually change its government.

    The current boycotts are not just protesting Trump’s trade war, of course. They are also about the role of unelected leaders from the corporate world, such as Musk and the heads of the Big Tech and social media companies, and their perceived self-interest and influence.

    Trump has responded angrily to consumer boycotts, calling the actions against Tesla “illegal”, which they are not. Indeed, political leaders like Trump often argue that consumer action, rather than government regulation, should be relied on to ensure corporations conform to social expectations.

    Ukrainians demonstrate in front of the Lukoil headquarters in Belgium over European imports of Russian fossil fuels, 2022.
    Getty Images

    How to wage a personal trade war

    Consumer boycotts do create change under certain conditions – typically when there is a contained problem that the targeted corporation has the power to solve.

    For example, consumer boycotts against Nestlé in the 1970s over false and dangerous marketing of powdered milk for infants led to changes in the firm’s marketing approaches. Boycotts of Nike products over sweatshop conditions for workers had a direct impact on the company’s bottom line and led to improvements.

    Things may still need to improve at Nestlé and Nike, but these boycotts show consumer pressure can catalyse corporate action. However, it is much harder – though not impossible – for boycott campaigns to succeed when the target is a government.

    Consumers boycotting American products can amplify the impact of their protest by also lobbying retailers. For example, if enough consumers stop buying a bottle of soft drink from the US, major supermarkets like Woolworths and Foodstuffs will stop buying thousands of bottles.

    There are also other ways to “vote with your wallet”. People can engage in “political investorism” by using their power as a shareholder, bank customer or pension-fund member to express their political views.

    After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, investors sought to divest from Russian companies, and superannuation funds were pressured by their members to do the same.

    As consumers and investors, individuals can wage a personal trade war, sending a clear message. Trump may not be willing to listen to the leaders of allied nations, but if consumer and investor pressure is sustained and spreads globally, he may yet hear the voice of corporate America.

    Erin O’Brien receives funding from the Australian Research Council to examine consumer and investor activism for social change. She is affiliated with the Australian Political Studies Association.

    Justine Coneybeer receives funding from the Australian Research Council to investigate ethical investment.

    – ref. Trouble at Tesla and protests against Trump’s tariffs suggest consumer boycotts are starting to bite – https://theconversation.com/trouble-at-tesla-and-protests-against-trumps-tariffs-suggest-consumer-boycotts-are-starting-to-bite-252489

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Adelaide Hills water crisis: a local problem is a global wake-up call

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Holland, Principal Research Scientist, Water Security, CSIRO

    A dry farm dam in Montacute, Adelaide Hills, March 2025. Ilan Sagi.

    The Adelaide Hills are experiencing severe water shortages. The root cause? A prolonged dry period and not enough water tankers to meet unprecedented demand from people not connected to the mains water supply.

    Thousands of residents and farmers are hurting as dams, tanks and streams dry up. Water tankers are becoming a common sight, carting in desperately needed water. People are waiting weeks for expensive water deliveries.

    The South Australian government has set up emergency water collection points to cope with the demand from off-grid families. More water tankers have been secured. But despite recent rain, the situation is far from over.

    We found rainfall and flows into Adelaide’s reservoirs are at their lowest levels in 40 years. Reservoir levels have dropped to 44% – the lowest for more than 20 years.

    Adelaide is not currently at risk of running out of water; the state government built a desalination plant after the Millennium Drought. Production at the desal plant is four to six times higher than usual to meet demand. Without the desal plant and water from the River Murray, the city would be under severe water restrictions.

    But the crisis shows many off-grid families, farms and businesses need new options to plan for the future.

    Over the past 12 months, rainfall in parts of South Australia has been the lowest on record.
    Commonwealth of Australia 2025, Bureau of Meteorology

    Global water stress

    This is not the first time entire communities have run out of water.

    Cape Town in South Africa nearly ran out of water in 2018. The city of nearly 4 million people was weeks away from “Day Zero”.

    In Australia, several regional and rural country towns have hit their own Day Zero. Stanthorpe in Queensland officially ran out of water in January 2020. Truckloads of water were carted into town every day to meet residential demand.

    Scientists have coined a new term, “hydroclimate whiplash”, to describe the rapid swings between intensely wet and dangerously dry weather currently occurring across the globe. This climate volatility amplifies natural hazards such as flash floods, wildfires, landslides and disease.

    The January wildfires in Los Angeles happened when two wet winters were followed by an extremely dry autumn and winter, providing plenty of dry fuel for fire.

    These aren’t isolated events. The global water crisis didn’t go away.

    The bigger picture

    What’s happening in the Adelaide Hills – and in other very dry places worldwide – demonstrates the need for careful, long-term water security planning.

    The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6 is to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. Water stress already affects more than 2 billion people – more than a quarter of the world’s population.

    By 2030, the UN predicts 2 billion people will still be living without safely managed drinking water, 3 billion without safely managed sanitation, and 1.4 billion without basic hygiene services.

    For many, this is literally a life-or-death matter.

    Investing in water security

    CSIRO is collaborating with industry, government and research organisations on research to overcome drought and build resilience for regional Australia. Our researchers are testing how well each of these strategies might work in different regions during extended dry periods. We calculate how much water can be collected and stored during the driest periods on record.

    Rainfall over Norfolk Island, a subtropical island in the Pacific Ocean roughly 1,500km southeast of Brisbane, has declined by 11% since 1970, with long runs of dry years in recent decades. The future is likely to be drier still.

    Our Norfolk Island Water Resource Assessment explored ways to help the community determine how to adapt and build resilience to drought.

    Since this project finished in 2020, residential and commercial rainwater tanks have been upgraded and a new seawater desalination plant installed. Other options to diversify water supplies included sharing groundwater bores, capturing runoff in gully dams, managing vegetation water use, and storing water underground.

    Excess water from rainwater or recycled wastewater can sometimes be stored underground in natural reservoirs called aquifers for use during drought. This is called “water banking” or “managed aquifer recharge”. The technique has been developed over the past 20 years and used to safely store water underground across Australia and overseas.

    Brackish (salty) groundwater is a potential water source that could be unlocked during drought. A National Water Grid funded project is investigating ways to use groundwater that would normally be too salty, along with renewable energy to power inland desalination plants. The project is investigating the prospect of using brackish groundwater across Western Australia for the first time.

    Future generations are likely to face more severe water shortages.
    Rosie Sheba

    A call to action

    The Adelaide Hills water crisis is a microcosm of a global issue. It’s a reminder action is needed now to secure our water future. Not when the water runs out.

    Deeper groundwater bores, water tankers on standby and bigger water storages are all potentially part of the portfolio of emergency plans. And due to climate change, the Adelaide Hills water crisis will happen again if we are unprepared. It is a question of when, not if.

    We have also seen the catastrophic effects of drought in Los Angeles – a tinderbox waiting to burn, and insufficient water on hand to fight the fires. We can and must prepare for natural disasters today. These are not unforeseen consequences. They are not “unknown unknowns”. We know them today. We will have no excuse when this happens.

    By adopting more sustainable water management policies and practices in the longer term, we can make sure the spectre of Day Zero does not become real for more communities around the world.

    With thanks to CSIRO Senior Research Scientist and Hydrologist Matt Gibbs and Principal Experimental Scientist in Hydrogeology Andrew Taylor.

    Kate Holland receives funding from the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, and Department of Industry, Science and Resources.

    Craig T. Simmons has received funding for water research from various government and non-government organisations in the past. He is currently serving as Chief Scientist for South Australia.

    – ref. Adelaide Hills water crisis: a local problem is a global wake-up call – https://theconversation.com/adelaide-hills-water-crisis-a-local-problem-is-a-global-wake-up-call-251265

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: ‘Better than nothing’: clinicians and hospital heads accept lower standards of care outside metro hospitals

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Olivia Fisher, Senior Research Fellow, Applied Implementation Science, Charles Darwin University

    Seven million Australians live in rural and remote areas and many struggle to access the same quality of health care as those in metropolitan areas.
    More than 18,000 Australians have no access to primary health care services within an hour’s drive time from their home, and many are hours or even multiple days’ drive from their closest major hospital. Travel to a major city to access health care is costly and time-consuming.

    Rural Australians have almost A$850 less spent on their health per year than those in major cities.

    People living in rural and remote Australia have substantially higher levels of preventable hospitalisations, burden of disease, and avoidable deaths. This leaves a gap in median life expectancy between people in very remote areas and major cities of 13 years for men and 16 years for women.

    Our new research shows clinicians and health care decision-makers are willing to accept a lower standard of care for people outside of major cities because they consider it better than nothing.

    Relying on what they have

    Our research investigated Queensland clinicians’ and health care decision-makers’ perspectives on virtual health care as a means to improve access to care.

    We also asked about what constitutes acceptable quality and standards for rural patients.

    Although we used virtual health care as an example, the results are indicative of a broader issue.

    What is virtual health care? What are its pros and cons?

    “Virtual health care” is more than just telehealth. It includes:

    • hospital in the home. A nurse will visit a patient in their home to provide treatments such as intravenous antibiotics, coupled with telehealth consultations with a doctor. This model of care can achieve similar outcomes to those at traditional hospitals

    • virtual wards, such as influenza or COVID wards. These wards involve a patient in their home, and combination of telehealth, remote monitoring devices such as pulse oximeters, and face-to-face care from visiting clinicians if required.

    • virtual emergency departments. These support patients who can be safely and effectively managed at home. Emergency doctors and nurses provide guidance and identify which patients need to present to a traditional emergency department.

    Virtual health care can minimise travel time to major cities, keeping patients better connected with their family and community while undergoing treatment.

    Virtual health care often involves nurse care and doctor telehealth.
    PeopleImages.com – Yuri A/Shutterstock

    However, virtual health care is not currently suitable for patients who require intensive care, some types of physical procedures, or for patients at high risk of complications.

    Virtual services need to be well-designed, with appropriately trained clinicians, and consider what can and cannot be accomplished remotely.

    When virtual health care isn’t well designed, and clinicians aren’t adequately trained, it can result in poor patient outcomes. As one doctor explained:

    I can catalogue just over the last month, I’ve seen errors in telehealth […] They’ve missed pneumonia, they’ve missed kidney stones, they’ve missed a bowel obstruction, they’ve missed an ischaemic valve, they’ve missed an MI [myocardial infarction]. You know, all because they think they can do all these things on telehealth […].

    Our research

    We interviewed 26 clinicians (such as doctors and nurses) and executive leaders from private, not-for-profit hospitals and aged care services in metropolitan, regional, rural and remote Queensland in 2023.

    Most participants expressed reticence towards using telehealth and other forms of virtual health care for people in major cities who can readily access traditional hospitals and providers face-to-face.

    They felt safety and care standards would be inferior to traditional inpatient care.

    However, they said virtual health care – even if it was a lower standard to traditional hospitals – was better than nothing. As one doctor and health service leader said:

    there’s no other choice is there, so you just do it that way.

    Another doctor and health service leader explained:

    But we would use it for sure. I mean especially those days when we get, you know, which is becoming more and more common where the hospital rings down there’s no beds. There’s no beds and you’re like, well, what do I do now I’ve got ten people here and nowhere to send them.

    Sometimes patients can’t be cared for in other settings and need to go to hospital.
    Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

    Towards more equitable care for rural patients

    Sub-standard health care will not bring health outcomes and life-expectancy of people in rural and remote areas up to parity – it will merely reinforce current inequities.

    We need to design health services that improve both quality and access. Taking health-care models that work in our major cities and rolling them out in rural areas doesn’t work. We need tailored, creative solutions that meet the same standards we would expect in a city.

    In addition to increasing and improving access to virtual health care, we also need to:

    • attract and retain a rural health workforce of experienced practitioners to provide face-to-face services

    • design health services in conjunction with the community to ensure they suit local needs and conditions

    • address state and federal government funding issues that impact the sustainability and capacity for innovation of rural health services.

    An unconscious willingness to accept better than nothing is simply not good enough for the millions of Australians who live outside of major cities.

    Olivia Fisher receives funding from UnitingCare Queensland.

    Caroline Grogan receives funding from UnitingCare Queensland and the Irene Patricia Hunt Memorial Trust.

    Kelly McGrath receives funding from the Australian Government Department of Industry, Science and Resources via an Elevate Scholarship, Wesley Research Institute, UnitingCare Queensland, Mitsubishi Development, and the Catalano Family Foundation.

    – ref. ‘Better than nothing’: clinicians and hospital heads accept lower standards of care outside metro hospitals – https://theconversation.com/better-than-nothing-clinicians-and-hospital-heads-accept-lower-standards-of-care-outside-metro-hospitals-251063

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Despite some key milestones since 2000, Australia still has a long way to go on gender equality

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Janeen Baxter, Director, ARC Life Course Centre and ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow, The University of Queensland

    Australia has a gender problem. Despite social, economic and political reform aimed at improving opportunities for women, gender gaps are increasing and Australia is falling behind other countries.

    The World Economic Forum currently places Australia 24th among 146 countries, down from 15th in 2006. At the current rate of change, the forum suggests it will take more than 130 years to achieve gender equality globally.

    Australia has taken important steps forward in some areas, while progress in other areas remains painfully slow. So how far have we come since 2000, and how much further do we have to go?

    The good stuff

    There are now more women in the labour market, in parliament, and leading large companies than at any other time.

    Over the past 25 years, there have been major social and political milestones that indicate progress.

    These include the appointment of Australia’s first female governor-general in 2008 and prime minister in 2010, the introduction of universal paid parental leave in 2011, a high-profile inquiry into workplace sexual harassment in 2020, and new legislation requiring the public reporting of gender pay gaps in 2023.

    Timeline of equality milestones

    • 2000

      Child Care Benefit introduced, subsidising cost of children for eligible families

    • 2008

      First female Governor-General (Dame Quentin Bryce)

    • 2010

      First female Prime Minister elected (Julia Gillard)

      First Aboriginal woman from Australia elected to UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (Megan Davis)

      Australia’s first national paid parental leave scheme

    • 2012

      Julia Gillard misogyny speech

      Workplace Gender Equality Act becomes law, Workplace Gender Equality Agency established

    • 2013

      Dad or Partner Pay Leave commenced

    • 2016

      First Indigenous woman elected to House of Representatives (Linda Burney)

    • 2017

      Launch of Women’s Australian Football League

      #metoo movement spreads globally to draw attention to sexual harassment and assault

    • 2020

      Respect@Work National Inquiry into sexual harassment in the Australian workplace chaired by Kate Jenkins released.

    • 2021

      Grace Tame named Australian of the Year for her advocacy in sexual violence/harassment campaigns

      Independent review into Commonwealth parliamentary workplaces launched

    • 2022

      National plan to end violence against women is finalised

    • 2023

      Closing the Gender Pay Gap Bill passes parliament

    • 2024

      Superannuation on government-funded paid parental leave from July 1, 2025

      Parental leave to be increased to 26 weeks from July 2026.

    There are, however, other areas where progress is agonisingly slow.

    Violence and financial insecurity

    Women are more likely to be in casual and part-time employment than men. This is part of the reason women retire with about half the superannuation savings of men.

    This is also linked to financial insecurity later in life. Older women are among the fastest-growing groups of people experiencing homelessness.

    The situation for First Nations women is even more severe. The most recent Closing the Gap report indicates First Nations women and children are 33 times more likely to be hospitalised due to violence compared with non-Indigenous women.

    They are also seven times more likely to die from family violence.

    Improving outcomes for Indigenous women and children requires tackling the long-term effects of colonisation, removal from Country, the Stolen Generations, incarceration and intergenerational trauma. This means challenging not only gender inequality but also racism, discrimination and violence.

    At work, the latest data from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency suggests the gender pay gap is narrowing, with 56% of organisations reporting improvements.

    On average, though, the pay gap is still substantial at 21.8% with women earning only 78 cents for every $1 earned by men. This totals an average yearly shortfall of $28,425.

    There are also some notable organisations where the gender pay gap has widened.

    The burden of unpaid work

    Another measure of inequality that has proved stubbornly slow to change is women’s unequal responsibilities for unpaid domestic and care work.

    Without real change in gender divisions of time spent on unpaid housework and care, our capacity to move towards equality in pay gaps and employment is very limited.

    Australian women do more unpaid and domestic work after having children.
    Shutterstock

    Australian women undertake almost 70% of unpaid household labour. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics time use data show that of those who participate in domestic labour, women spend an average of 4.13 hours per day on unpaid domestic and care work, compared with men’s 2.14 hours.

    This gap equates to more than a third of a full-time job. If we add up all work (domestic, care and paid), mothers have the longest working week by about 10 hours. This has changed very little over time.

    These charts, based on analyses of data from the Households, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) study, show what drives this gap.

    Women respond to increased demand for care and domestic work by doing more, while men do not. Parenthood significantly increases the time women spend on unpaid care and housework, while also reducing their time in employment.

    Men increase their time in unpaid care after a birth, but the jump is minor compared with women, and there is no change to men’s employment hours.

    Not surprisingly given these patterns, parenthood is associated with substantial declines in women’s employment hours, earnings, career progression, and mental health and wellbeing.

    The way forward

    Current policy priorities primarily incentivise women to remain in employment, while continuing to undertake a disproportionate share of unpaid family work, through moving to part-time employment or making use of other forms of workplace flexibility. This approach focuses on “fixing” women rather than on the structural roots of the problem.

    There is limited financial or cultural encouragement for men to step out of employment for care work, or reduce their hours, despite the introduction of a two-week Dad and Partner Pay scheme in 2013 and more recent changes to expand support and access.

    Fathers who wish to be more actively involved in care and family life face significant financial barriers, with current schemes only covering a basic wage. If one member of the family has to take time out or reduce their hours, it usually makes financial sense for this to be a woman, given the gender earning gap.

    The benefits of enabling men to share care work will not only be improvements for women, but will also improve family relationships and outcomes for children.

    Research shows relationship conflict declines when men do more at home. Time spent with fathers has been found to be especially beneficial for children’s cognitive development.

    Fixing the gender problem is not just about helping women. It’s good for everyone.

    Gender inequality costs the Australian economy $225 billion annually, or 12% of gross domestic product.

    Globally, the World Bank estimates gender inequality costs US$160.2 trillion. We can’t afford to slip further behind or to take more than a century to fix the problem.

    This piece is part of a series on how Australia has changed since the year 2000. You can read other pieces in the series here.

    Janeen Baxter receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (CE200100025) and an Australian Research Council Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellowship (FL230100104).

    – ref. Despite some key milestones since 2000, Australia still has a long way to go on gender equality – https://theconversation.com/despite-some-key-milestones-since-2000-australia-still-has-a-long-way-to-go-on-gender-equality-250250

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-Evening Report: Should Australia increase its defence spending? We asked 5 experts

    Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Bergman, International Affairs Editor

    Both Labor and the Coalition are considering an increase to defence spending ahead of the federal election.

    Defence spending is currently at about 2% of gross domestic product (GDP), or around A$56 billion per year. The Coalition is reportedly eyeing an increase to 2.5% of GDP by 2029.

    The Albanese government’s current spending plan is expected to reach 2.33% of GDP by 2034. And in this week’s budget, it is expected to bring forward some of its already announced $50 billion increase in defence spending.

    Why do these percentages matter? US President Donald Trump has made it very clear he expects America’s allies to pay more on defence, at least 3% of GDP.

    We asked five experts if defence spending should be increased, and if so, by how much. They agreed more money is needed, albeit with caveats.

    – ref. Should Australia increase its defence spending? We asked 5 experts – https://theconversation.com/should-australia-increase-its-defence-spending-we-asked-5-experts-252374

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump threats: Is foreign policy the biggest issue for Canadian voters this election?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Adam Chapnick, Professor of Defence Studies, Royal Military College of Canada

    Canadians are heading once again to the polls on April 28 to vote in a federal election.

    This election will offer voters competing visions of Canada’s future at a time when it has become all but impossible to separate foreign policy from domestic politics.

    There’s no question much of the conversation during the campaign will centre on how the next government will deal with United States President Donald Trump amid his continuing threats to Canadian sovereignty.

    But even though the Trump administration has undermined the liberal democratic world order in which Canada has prospered for close to a century, it’s unclear whether threats of a global tariff war, an ongoing divisive conflict in the Middle East and continued Russian aggression in Ukraine will directly affect how Canadians cast their votes.

    Most political scientists have traditionally argued that foreign policy does not matter to Canadians at the voting booth.

    But a recent book by historian Patrice Dutil has claimed that “at least half of Canada’s national elections featured substantive discussions of Canada’s place in the world.”

    So who’s right?

    Foreign policy as an issue

    My new report, “Foreign Policy and Canadian Elections: A Review,” finds truth on both sides.

    Foreign policy is what people who study elections call an “issue,” just like the economy, national security or health care.

    Issues compete with many other considerations — like ideology, perceptions of leadership and the need for change — to determine a voter’s ultimate decision.

    Local candidates can affect how people vote, as can party affiliation. If you live in a riding where your preferred candidate is unlikely to win, you might vote strategically.

    According to Canadian political scientist Elizabeth Gidengil, for an issue like foreign policy to really matter in an election, it must satisfy three conditions:

    • Political parties must position themselves on opposite sides of it;
    • Voters must be aware of the differences between the parties’ views;
    • The balance of opinion on the issue must clearly favour one side over the other.

    That rarely happens in relation to Canadian foreign policy. Our political parties don’t typically differ significantly on world affairs. When they do disagree, it’s unusual for the public to overwhelmingly support one side over the other.



    Read more:
    Trump’s potential embrace of ‘continentalist geopolitics’ poses grave risks to Canada

    Handling the Trump threat

    There are no real divisions between the election’s front-runners — Liberal Mark Carney and Conservative Pierre Poilievre — over how to deal with Trump.

    Both have pledged that Canada will never become the 51st state and have promised to strike back at American tariffs with economic measures of their own.

    Poilievre says he’ll manage Canada-U.S. relations more effectively than the Liberals would, but he has not proposed any different tactics to do so.

    On the other hand, Poilievre was clearly onto something in his endless quest to make the election all about the Justin Trudeau government’s carbon tax and rebate.

    Until Carney replaced Trudeau, the differences between the Conservatives and the Liberals on carbon pricing were stark. Thanks to an extraordinary Conservative marketing campaign, the Canadian public was well aware of those differences — and a significant majority of Canadians sided with Poilievre.

    Now that Carney has axed the tax himself, those differences have become much less significant.

    Domestic politics aside, Trump will still loom large throughout the next five weeks.

    But international and domestic issues have been, and remain, sufficiently interconnected that it’s hard to discuss one to the exclusion of the other.

    Free trade with the United States was a key topic of debate during four election campaigns — 1891, 1911, 1935, 1988 — because of its impact on Canadians’ sense of independence.

    Canadians were divided over conscription during the 1917 election campaign. They differed over support for Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis and throughout the election the following year.

    Just as the American invasion of Iraq split the Liberals and the Canadian Alliance during the election of 2003, so did attitudes towards increased defence spending in 2000. Canadian support for Syrian refugees came up regularly during the 2015 election campaign.

    Still, it’s not clear if these differences affected more than a small number of individual Canadians when they marked their ballots.

    Voters tend to cast their ballots emotionally, and even though Trump is preoccupying the national consciousness at the moment, the leading political parties have not offered us specific policy alternatives to deal with him.

    What’s ahead this election campaign

    Over the next five weeks, Canadians should expect to learn about the leading political parties’ views on relations with the U.S., the situations in the Middle East and Ukraine, foreign interference in the affairs of state and Canada’s global defence.

    Voters can and should demand that those who wish to lead the country are thoughtful and literate on these and other international issues.

    As then Prime Minister Stephen Harper reflected in 2011:

    “Since coming to office — in fact, since becoming prime minister [in 2006] — the thing that’s probably struck me the most in terms of my previous expectations … is not just how important foreign affairs/foreign relations is, but in fact that it’s become almost everything. There’s hardly anything today of any significance that doesn’t have a huge international dimension to it.”

    But expecting party views on foreign policy to shape the election’s outcome is probably unrealistic.

    When we head to the voting booths, most Canadians will likely just listen to their gut.

    Exactly how Carney or Poilievre promises to deal with Trump probably won’t matter nearly as much as who they simply feel will do a better job on a host of issues.

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

    – ref. Trump threats: Is foreign policy the biggest issue for Canadian voters this election? – https://theconversation.com/trump-threats-is-foreign-policy-the-biggest-issue-for-canadian-voters-this-election-247065

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Can Mark Carney truly connect with Canadian voters? Canada will now find out

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Kevin Quigley, Scholarly Director of the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance, Dalhousie University

    After a busy two weeks as prime minister, Mark Carney has called an election for April 28.

    As the first in Canadian history to be named prime minister without ever having held public office, Carney is hoping he can win the trust of Canadians. He’ll run for a seat in the Ottawa riding of Nepean.

    Trustworthiness is awarded to those who are at least perceived as knowledgeable, transparent and concerned. Can Carney pull it off?

    When it comes to economics, Carney is among the most knowledgeable in the country. After obtaining a PhD at the University of Oxford, Carney has had a distinguished public service career in the Canadian Department of Finance, the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

    With such a high level of economic uncertainty today in the face of repeated threats from United States President Donald Trump, his supporters say he’s the right person to lead Canada. His chief rival, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, was first elected to the House of Commons at the age of 25 and has quite a different CV.

    Is Carney empathetic?

    Carney, however, might struggle more with the other characteristics of trustworthiness — seeming open and showing concern.

    The Conservatives have criticized Carney for not being more transparent about his private financial interests. While Carney is following disclosure rules, the Conservatives argue Canadians need to know more about whether he’s in a conflict of interest when he makes decisions in government.

    Carney’s answers to questions about his time at Brookfield Asset Management have on occasion been unsteady.

    On the surface, this is about transparency, but in fact it’s just as much about empathy and whether Carney can relate to working-class voters. By alluding to Carney’s wealth and connections, the Conservatives are implying that Carney is an out-of-touch elite who doesn’t share the concerns of average Canadians.

    Some of the early visuals of Carney can cut both ways.

    His recent chummy embrace at the Élysée with French President Emmanuel Macron exemplifies how immediately comfortable he is with world leaders. Some will find this reassuring, given the state of geopolitics; others might find it privileged and off-putting. Even his hockey skills, which were part of a recent photo-op in Edmonton when he practised with the Oilers, were acquired partly during his time at Harvard University, an institution among the most elite in the world.

    Empathy, instinct

    Can Carney connect with people?

    Arguably, he needs work on this front. He might consider some of his Liberal predecessors.

    Former prime minister Justin Trudeau could certainly rally a crowd. Trudeau became a motivational speaker in the 2000s and used opportunities like the WE Charity to practise public speaking to what would become an important constituency for him — young voters — when he led the Liberals to victory in 2015.

    Not everything can be taught at school. Political instinct is also crucial. It requires reconciling the knowledge of experts with the concerns of everyday citizens. There is no formula for this balance sheet.

    Here again, Trudeau had insight. Bill Morneau, a corporate executive himself and the former federal finance minister, noted after the COVID-19 pandemic that government payouts had been too generous and driven more by Trudeau’s view of the politics of the moment than by the economic analysis provided to him by the Finance Department.

    This may be so, but most would say Trudeau handled the early stages of the pandemic deftly.

    Chretien’s skills

    It was interesting that at the recent Liberal convention confirming Carney as leader, delegates gushed over former prime minister Jean Chretien, far from an elitist. A winner of three consecutive majorities, Chretien delivered a speech that went over at least as well with delegates as Carney’s.

    Chretien had unparalleled political instincts. When Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney rolled out the GST in 1991, it was deeply unpopular. Despite Chretien later famously backtracking on his original opposition to the GST, the Liberal Party under his stewardship used the issue to exact maximum damage on the Progressive Conservatives, delivering them a near-fatal blow.

    Chretien’s killer instincts trumped expert knowledge. While the Progressive Conservatives paid a heavy price for adopting the GST, the policy was largely advocated and shaped by business and economic elites, including in the Department of Finance. Good economics does not always make for good politics.

    Emotions to run high

    If the 1988 federal election that focused almost exclusively on free trade with the U.S. is any indication of what the next few weeks will look like in Canada, the election campaign is going to get heated quickly. Arguments may be more emotional than sensible.

    The fact that Carney dropped the carbon tax and capital gains tax was an early sign that he’s not an economist anymore, he’s a politician.

    The challenge for Carney — and for any politician in the heat of an election campaign battle — will be to find the sweet spot that reconciles expert opinion with public concerns and to articulate policies in a manner that voters will understand and support.

    Kevin Quigley receives funding from SSHRC.

    – ref. Can Mark Carney truly connect with Canadian voters? Canada will now find out – https://theconversation.com/can-mark-carney-truly-connect-with-canadian-voters-canada-will-now-find-out-252365

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Trump threats: Is foreign policy really the biggest issue for Canadian voters this election?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Adam Chapnick, Professor of Defence Studies, Royal Military College of Canada

    Canadians are heading once again to the polls on April 28 to vote in a federal election.

    This election will offer voters competing visions of Canada’s future at a time when it has become all but impossible to separate foreign policy from domestic politics.

    There’s no question much of the conversation during the campaign will centre on how the next government will deal with United States President Donald Trump amid his continuing threats to Canadian sovereignty.

    But even though the Trump administration has undermined the liberal democratic world order in which Canada has prospered for close to a century, it’s unclear whether threats of a global tariff war, an ongoing divisive conflict in the Middle East and continued Russian aggression in Ukraine will directly affect how Canadians cast their votes.

    Most political scientists have traditionally argued that foreign policy does not matter to Canadians at the voting booth.

    But a recent book by historian Patrice Dutil has claimed that “at least half of Canada’s national elections featured substantive discussions of Canada’s place in the world.”

    So who’s right?

    Foreign policy as an issue

    My new report, “Foreign Policy and Canadian Elections: A Review,” finds truth on both sides.

    Foreign policy is what people who study elections call an “issue,” just like the economy, national security or health care.

    Issues compete with many other considerations — like ideology, perceptions of leadership and the need for change — to determine a voter’s ultimate decision.

    Local candidates can affect how people vote, as can party affiliation. If you live in a riding where your preferred candidate is unlikely to win, you might vote strategically.

    According to Canadian political scientist Elizabeth Gidengil, for an issue like foreign policy to really matter in an election, it must satisfy three conditions:

    • Political parties must position themselves on opposite sides of it;
    • Voters must be aware of the differences between the parties’ views;
    • The balance of opinion on the issue must clearly favour one side over the other.

    That rarely happens in relation to Canadian foreign policy. Our political parties don’t typically differ significantly on world affairs. When they do disagree, it’s unusual for the public to overwhelmingly support one side over the other.



    Read more:
    Trump’s potential embrace of ‘continentalist geopolitics’ poses grave risks to Canada

    Handling the Trump threat

    There are no real divisions between the election’s front-runners — Liberal Mark Carney and Conservative Pierre Poilievre — over how to deal with Trump.

    Both have pledged that Canada will never become the 51st state and have promised to strike back at American tariffs with economic measures of their own.

    Poilievre says he’ll manage Canada-U.S. relations more effectively than the Liberals would, but he has not proposed any different tactics to do so.

    On the other hand, Poilievre was clearly onto something in his endless quest to make the election all about the Justin Trudeau government’s carbon tax and rebate.

    Until Carney replaced Trudeau, the differences between the Conservatives and the Liberals on carbon pricing were stark. Thanks to an extraordinary Conservative marketing campaign, the Canadian public was well aware of those differences — and a significant majority of Canadians sided with Poilievre.

    Now that Carney has axed the tax himself, those differences have become much less significant.

    Domestic politics aside, Trump will still loom large throughout the next five weeks.

    But international and domestic issues have been, and remain, sufficiently interconnected that it’s hard to discuss one to the exclusion of the other.

    Free trade with the United States was a key topic of debate during four election campaigns — 1891, 1911, 1935, 1988 — because of its impact on Canadians’ sense of independence.

    Canadians were divided over conscription during the 1917 election campaign. They differed over support for Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis and throughout the election the following year.

    Just as the American invasion of Iraq split the Liberals and the Canadian Alliance during the election of 2003, so did attitudes towards increased defence spending in 2000. Canadian support for Syrian refugees came up regularly during the 2015 election campaign.

    Still, it’s not clear if these differences affected more than a small number of individual Canadians when they marked their ballots.

    Voters tend to cast their ballots emotionally, and even though Trump is preoccupying the national consciousness at the moment, the leading political parties have not offered us specific policy alternatives to deal with him.

    What’s ahead this election campaign

    Over the next five weeks, Canadians should expect to learn about the leading political parties’ views on relations with the U.S., the situations in the Middle East and Ukraine, foreign interference in the affairs of state and Canada’s global defence.

    Voters can and should demand that those who wish to lead the country are thoughtful and literate on these and other international issues.

    As then Prime Minister Stephen Harper reflected in 2011:

    “Since coming to office — in fact, since becoming prime minister [in 2006] — the thing that’s probably struck me the most in terms of my previous expectations … is not just how important foreign affairs/foreign relations is, but in fact that it’s become almost everything. There’s hardly anything today of any significance that doesn’t have a huge international dimension to it.”

    But expecting party views on foreign policy to shape the election’s outcome is probably unrealistic.

    When we head to the voting booths, most Canadians will likely just listen to their gut.

    Exactly how Carney or Poilievre promises to deal with Trump probably won’t matter nearly as much as who they simply feel will do a better job on a host of issues.

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

    – ref. Trump threats: Is foreign policy really the biggest issue for Canadian voters this election? – https://theconversation.com/trump-threats-is-foreign-policy-really-the-biggest-issue-for-canadian-voters-this-election-247065

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How political leaders communicate climate policy will be a defining factor this election

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Andrew Heffernan, Climate Associate at the Information Integrity Lab and Adjunct Professor in Political Studies, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

    Prime Minister Mark Carney has called an April 28 federal election, setting the stage for a campaign where climate policy could be a central issue.

    The current iteration of Canada’s consumer carbon rebate is dead — which many view as a casualty of effective communication — yet climate policy remains a pressing topic for voters and a major battleground for political leaders.



    Read more:
    The Canada Carbon Rebate is still widely misunderstood — here’s why

    As Canada grapples with intensifying climate-related challenges, the next government will not only need to implement evidence-based policies to meet international climate commitments, but also effectively communicate its vision to voters.

    The public remains concerned about environmental issues, yet many are worried that bold climate policies have damaged the economy. This tension between environmental responsibility and economic growth will shape how each party formulates and communicates their climate policies in the upcoming campaign.

    The Liberals: Navigating the middle ground

    For Carney and the Liberal Party, the challenge is twofold. First, the Liberals must present a new climate plan after the collapse of the consumer carbon rebate, which has faced widespread public opposition in recent years.

    While the new Liberal leader has already terminated the the carbon rebate, it still remains unclear what exactly his comprehensive climate plan will look like. Carney’s website states that his strategy will: “Provide incentives for consumers. Put more of the burden on big polluters. And help us build the strongest economy in the G7.”



    Read more:
    Big government, big trouble? Defending the future of Canada’s climate policy

    This suggests his climate policy will hinge more on positive incentives for consumers to invest in sustainable approaches rather than putting a cost on polluting.

    While the carbon rebate initially enjoyed broad support as a key tool for reducing emissions, it has become a lightning rod for political controversy.

    Climate change is no longer just an environmental issue; it’s increasingly seen as a matter of economic survival, with green energy jobs and clean technologies representing an opportunity for Canada to position itself as a global leader in the sector.

    Carney will have to make a convincing case that his policy will create jobs, stimulate innovation and provide a clear path toward a greener, more sustainable economy.

    Failing to do so could lead to the loss of centrist and moderate voters, some of whom are wary of the perceived economic risks of aggressive climate action.

    The Conservatives: Axing the rebate isn’t enough

    On the opposite end of the political spectrum, federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has made axing the carbon rebate a central part of his platform.

    Framing the carbon rebate as an economic penalty, Poilievre has played into populist sentiments by promising to “axe the tax” and relieve financial pressures on Canadian families and businesses.

    However, even if the Conservatives are successful in eliminating the carbon rebate, they still face the challenge of needing a comprehensive climate policy that lowers emissions and meets Canada’s Paris Agreement targets. Poilievre has said he would not withdraw Canada from the accord, but he hasn’t addressed how he would meet Canada’s commitments.

    Poilievre’s populist rhetoric may resonate with voters who feel economically squeezed, but it’s unlikely to be enough to win over voters concerned about the climate crisis — especially as he has voted against environmental and climate action in Parliament over 400 times in his career, a point his opponents will be sure to raise repeatedly.

    For the Conservatives, the real challenge will be how to present a climate policy that appeals to both economic conservatives, who prioritize fiscal responsibility, and environmental conservatives, who are concerned about the future of the planet.

    Poilievre will need to clearly articulate how his policies will preserve Canada’s environmental future without stifling economic growth or inflating costs for the average Canadian.

    NDP and Green Party

    A key piece of the future of climate policy in Canada will be the NDP and Green Party, who are generally considered left-of-centre parties alongside the governing Liberals.

    The NDP, which can siphon progressive votes away from the Liberals — which sometimes benefits Conservatives — have been clear as mud when it comes to their climate policy for the next election.

    NDP leader Jagmeet Singh rescinded his party’s long-standing support for the Liberal carbon rebate in April 2024, but has not yet said what his party would put in its place.

    Meanwhile, the Green Party, which has historically played a less significant role in electoral outcomes in terms of vote splitting, has generally maintained its support for the carbon rebate. Its website suggests the party supports the polluter-pays principle. However, the Greens have yet to take a clear stance on the shifting climate grounds on which this election could partially be fought.

    Political communication the key to success

    In the coming years, the future of climate policy in Canada will be less about crafting the perfect policy and more about crafting a message that addresses how people are feeling.

    The Liberal Party has been open about the demise of the carbon rebate being a combination of a lack of their own effective communication strategy, mixed with harmful disinformation campaigns that led to the demise of their signature climate policy.

    For the Liberals, Conservatives, NDP and Greens alike, the road to effective climate policy will lie in this communication. Political leaders will need to balance ambition and pragmatism, ensuring their policies align with Canadians’ economic interests.

    With 71 per cent of Canadians suggesting they want the next government to do more to address climate change, leaders who can articulate a vision for a sustainable, prosperous future while addressing the immediate concerns of Canadians will be the ones who have the best chance of winning the public’s trust — and the next election.

    Andrew Heffernan is affiliated with the Liberal Party of Canada.

    – ref. How political leaders communicate climate policy will be a defining factor this election – https://theconversation.com/how-political-leaders-communicate-climate-policy-will-be-a-defining-factor-this-election-251990

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI New Zealand: Child Poverty – CPAG calls on Ministers to reverse lunch cuts with Budget bid

    Source: Child Poverty Action Group

    The Child Poverty Action Group is urging senior Government Ministers to put children first and find the money needed to reverse the cuts it has made to the school lunches programme.
    CPAG has today written to Minister of Finance Nicola Willis with a ‘Budget Bid’ on behalf of the children of New Zealand.
    CPAG Executive Director Sarita Divis said David Seymour, Erica Stanford, Winston Peters and Louise Upston had been copied into the bid and CPAG wanted one of them to put the bid in.
    “It’s been problem after problem with school lunches this year: late deliveries, flies in food, inappropriate and unsafe food for students, a student in hospital with burns. Not to mention excessive wastage and lost economic opportunities for local community suppliers,” Ms Divis said.
    “The time has come for the Government to admit the cuts were a mistake and to put things right by funding the previous model properly.”
    CPAG was also concerned that nutritional information about the food under the new model was not clear. Good nutrition is essential for children, especially if they are not having breakfast or dinner.
    A recent Talbot Mills poll showed 60 percent of voters want the government to reinstate the previous Ka Ora, Ka Ako system.
    “Budgets and taxes are how we prioritise the things that really matter and the Government needs to put children first,” Ms Divis said.
    “Ministers will right now be putting in their Budget bids for Budget 2025. We ask the Ministers to consider stepping forward to do the right and compassionate thing, which is what most Kiwis want, and reverse the cuts for the children of New Zealand.”
    As well as reinstating the budgeted amount for food from $3 back to $8 per meal, CPAG wanted schools to once again be able to source school lunches from local community suppliers.
    “The new model has been bad news for children. David Seymour continues to say it’s working well, but Kiwis know that’s just not the case,” CPAG Deputy Chair Rich Greissman says.
    “Funding needs to be found in Vote Education, which is within the power of both Ministers Stanford and Seymour.”
    Ms Divis said Minister Upston, as Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, was also well within her power to call for funding to be reversed.
    “Corporate tax cuts or feeding hungry kids? It’s a no-brainer. The Government can find the money to do this. It is a choice.”
    Based on the 2023 and 2024 Budget Summary of Initiatives, CPAG refers to estimates of the cost of restoring school lunches to their 2024 standard, between $107-115 extra a year.
    There are also hidden costs to the new model, with many schools citing unexpected costs associated with the new model that are not covered by the School Lunch Collective.
    For example, schools are now having to employ people to remove waste which comes out of a school’s operations budget.
    Background
    The Ka Ora Ka Ako Healthy School Lunches programme was introduced in 2020 to meet genuine unmet needs in New Zealand classrooms and homes.
    It was a policy created by New Zealand First when it was in government with Labour and championed by former NZ First MP Tracey Martin which is why Winston Peters has also been copied into CPAG’s letter.
    In the lead up to the 2023 election, National leader Christopher Luxon described Ka Ora, Ka Ako as a “good programme” and promised it would “continue to improve each and every year under a National government”.
    A Ministry of Education evaluation of the original Ka Ora, Ka Ako in October 2022 found that the wellbeing results of the programme often exceeded expectations, with even greater benefits for students who rarely had enough food at home. Other benefits included less hunger at school, improvement in dietary patterns and greater local employment.
    The Child Poverty Action group is concerned the new model for school lunches, along with the cuts to the programme budget, puts these gains at risk.
    Under the Child Poverty Reduction Act (2018), the Government is legally required to address child poverty rates in the Budget with specific policies.
    The Child Poverty Action Group believes an additional $115m a year of funding for the school lunches programme represents a remarkably small cost when the wider economic and social benefits of Ka Ora, Ka Ako are considered.

    MIL OSI New Zealand News –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Could bullying be an evolutionary trait?

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Tony Volk, Professor, Child and Youth Studies, Brock University

    Given the seriousness of the consequences of bullying for its victims, it behooves us all to take a good, hard look at why so many people continue to bully. (Shutterstock)

    Bullying is a serious problem that impacts hundreds of millions of young people across the world each year. Defined as the goal-directed, harmful abuse of a power imbalance, bullying can cause serious, long-term physical and mental health outcomes for victims.

    As a result, countries around the world have mobilized anti-bullying efforts. Unfortunately, these efforts have had relatively little impact on bullying worldwide.

    Why? One reason might be that bullying is, at least in part, an evolutionary adaptation that offers adolescent perpetrators benefits, like popularity, resources and even dates and sex.

    But do these benefits extend beyond adolescence? This is what we set out to test at Brock University’s Research on Aggression and Victimization Experiences group. In particular, we wanted to know if the earlier and more frequent dating and sex that adolescent bullies experienced translated into having more children in later life.

    Children of bullies may learn how to be bullies themselves, through directly experiencing bullying from their parents or through indirectly watching their parents bully others.
    (Shutterstock)

    An evolutionary trait?

    There is very little data on whether bullying benefits like popularity or sex extend beyond adolescence, but early data suggested that might be the case. We sought to replicate that research using two studies.

    The first was a longitudinal study of adolescents: approximately 600 Canadian boys and girls from age 14 until their mid-20s. The second was a retrospective study of more than 500 North American adults ages 18-35. We found that adolescents who bullied others reported having children earlier and having more children in total, compared to adolescents who did not engage in bullying.

    While we note that a complete study should entail following adults into their mid-40s (the very end of most child births), we wanted to compile data now rather than waiting another 15-20 years for our longitudinal sample to mature. That means that while we can’t rule out that non-bullies might catch up with later reproduction, the data clearly shows that onset of reproduction is tied closely to total reproduction.

    Is having children early, and more often, a good thing? Given that bullying does appear to be partly due to evolved genetics (with the environment still playing a pivotal role in its expression), reproduction is the ultimate currency of evolution. Passing on genes is, quite literally, the biological meaning of life. So this is strong evidence for the theory that bullying is, at least in part, an evolutionarily successful strategy in some contexts.

    Socially, bullies are also more likely to be in the romantic relationship that is typically required to have children. We believe this is because bully’s power is related to potentially positive attributes, like attractiveness, strength and even social skills.

    Our yet-to-be published data also indicates that former bullies end up investing more energy into their children than average parents. Think of the hockey or soccer parents yelling on the sidelines, bullying their child’s coach, referees or other players in order to benefit their own child. Bullying’s links with parenting go beyond purely quantitative considerations and impact both mating success and parental effort.

    If bullying offers benefits, we want to reduce, replace and redirect those benefits.
    (Shutterstock)

    Why does this matter?

    It matters because it helps explain why bullying is so ubiquitous and hard to prevent. Bullying appears to offer meaningful benefits to those who use it and that’s critical information if parents, teachers, schools and governments want to come up with strategies for preventing it.

    What might some of those strategies look like? If bullying offers benefits, we want to reduce, replace and redirect those benefits. We can do so by getting peers to not reward bullies with the attention and popularity that they desire. We can replace benefits with costs by pointing out that while bullies gain popularity, they lose likeability. People might fear the bully’s power, but they generally don’t like them.

    Finally, we can try to teach adolescents to replace bullying with more prosocial behaviour that might have equal or better outcomes with respect to peer support.

    This also matters because our data shows bullying as a potentially intergenerational problem. We know that violence can be transmitted from parents to their children. It is possible that children of bullies will learn how to be bullies themselves, through directly experiencing bullying from their parents or through indirectly watching their parents bully others.

    This generational transmission might very well be another reason why bullying is so hard to prevent — because it starts in the home. Given the seriousness of the consequences of bullying for its victims, we must all to take a good, hard look at why so many people continue to bully, or support bullies, so that we can understand how we to best stop this toxic and damaging pattern of behaviour.

    Tony Volk receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

    – ref. Could bullying be an evolutionary trait? – https://theconversation.com/could-bullying-be-an-evolutionary-trait-251237

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Pharmacare is now law in Canada, but negotiations with provinces could slow progress

    Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jane Fletcher, PhD Candidate in Community Health Sciences, University of Calgary

    Ensuring people have coverage for essential medications is crucial. (Shutterstock)

    Despite Canada’s commitment to universal health care, one in 20 Canadians cannot afford their prescribed medications, with people from Alberta, New Brunswick and British Columbia being the most likely to say they’re missing doses due to costs.

    When people skip medications, it leads to more emergency room visits, costly hospital stays and worse health.

    Ensuring people have coverage for essential medications is crucial. In October 2024, Canada took a step forward when Bill C-64, or the Pharmacare Act, received royal assent and became law.

    The act will cover contraceptives for nine million Canadians, helping with family planning and managing conditions like endometriosis and polycystic ovary syndrome.



    Read more:
    Pharmacare’s design could further fragment and politicize Canada’s health system

    It will also cover diabetes medications for the 3.7 million Canadians living with the disease — critical for managing blood sugars and preventing complications like blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks and strokes.

    Despite this historic passage of pharmacare legislation, its rollout remains uncertain. The government’s next steps are complicated by the Constitution Act of 1867, which gave provinces jurisdiction over health care.

    The federal government must now negotiate agreements with each province to implement the plan — a task made more difficult because medication coverage varies widely across Canada. Without full co-operation, pharmacare’s impact could be limited, with coverage gaps persisting for millions of Canadians.

    Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has also said he’ll scrap pharmacare.

    Coverage differs among provinces

    In many provinces — including B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and Newfoundland and Labrador — pharmacare coverage is provided universally with income-based deductibles. This means provincial coverage only kicks in after an individual reaches a spending threshold on medications. This threshold varies by age and income level.

    Alberta and New Brunswick use premium-based systems, requiring monthly membership fees.

    Most provinces also use co-payments, meaning people must cover part of the cost of each prescription — for example, 20 to 30 per cent of the full cost, or a flat fee of $5 to $10. Only Québec mandates prescription insurance coverage, either privately or through its public plan.

    Currently, a major driver of how much Canadians pay for their medications is arbitrary — it’s about where one lives. For example, a young Albertan living with diabetes and heart disease who earns $14,000 would need to pay $1,000 annually for medications. In Ontario, that same person would pay just $100.

    Such differences can influence where people choose to live and can hinder interprovincial labour mobility. It’s a driving force behind the push for pharmacare — to ensure free access to the most important medications, regardless of where someone lives.

    An opportunity for national pharmacare

    Pharmacare could have been implemented nationally, like it was for the Canadian Dental Care Plan, offering federal coverage for essential medications like contraceptives and diabetes medications, while insurers and provincial plans cover the rest.

    This would have been a simple approach that would have allowed for future changes, and could have been implemented by provinces much like vaccines are — paid for using people’s provincial health numbers, sidestepping the difficulty of enrolling people in a new plan.

    But in the waning days of the current Liberal federal government, it appears the chosen direction has been to negotiate separate agreements with each province and territory to establish a minimum standard.

    Movement in this direction has already been seen in B.C., Manitoba and P.E.I. where deals have already been made with the federal government, while other provinces remain in talks.

    The pace of these agreements remains uncertain, and it’s unclear when — or if — all the provinces and territories will sign on.

    The fight for pharmacare isn’t over

    As Canada takes its first steps toward pharmacare, many questions remain. For provinces with income-based deductibles, would the deductible simply shift to other drugs, meaning people with other health conditions won’t really save on their overall medication costs each year?

    For those with premium-based coverage, how would those who don’t enrol in the public plan access coverage? How would this be rolled out in Québec where some form of medication coverage is already mandatory?

    The push for universal drug coverage in Canada dates back decades. When medicare was first recommended in 1964 by the Hall Commission, it included a proposal for universal drug coverage that was ultimately never implemented.

    Over the decades, multiple reports, including the 1999 Kirby Report and the 2019 Pharmacare For All Report, have called for its implementation.

    Organizations like the Canadian Medical Association and the Canadian Nursing Association have similarly stressed its importance. Yet, despite decades of advocacy, Canada has remained the only country with a universal health-care system that doesn’t provide comprehensive drug coverage.

    With negotiations on pharmacare officially underway, its success will depend on federal-provincial co-operation, which has been increasingly strained in recent years. Advancing pharmacare is in Canadians’ best interest — especially for the 7.5 million people who cannot afford the medications their doctor prescribes.

    The question now is whether governments will act swiftly to implement pharmacare, or if political roadblocks will delay access to life-saving medications even further.

    Jane Fletcher receives funding from CANTRAIN (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) and Alberta Innovates.

    David Campbell receives funding from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Diabetes Canada, and Alberta Innovates.

    Braden Manns and Reed F Beall do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Pharmacare is now law in Canada, but negotiations with provinces could slow progress – https://theconversation.com/pharmacare-is-now-law-in-canada-but-negotiations-with-provinces-could-slow-progress-250888

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: FS gives keynote speech in Beijing

    Source: Hong Kong Information Services

    Continuing his visit to Beijing, Financial Secretary Paul Chan today attended the China Development Forum opening ceremony and delivered a keynote speech at the forum’s Symposium on Igniting Growth Momentum through Reform.

    In the speech, Mr Chan pointed out three major trends that are profoundly impacting the global political landscape and economic development.

    He said the rise of protectionism and unilateralism is bringing uncertainty and instability to the global economy, while the trend of regionalisation is reshaping international economic and trade relations, as well as the global trading system.

    At the same time, the emergence of economies in the Global South is becoming a new driving force for economic growth, while technological innovation, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), is triggering changes in production models, business models and consumption patterns.

    He emphasised that in the face of a complex and changing global situation, China remains steadfast in embracing true multilateralism, and works with countries to promote inclusive economic globalisation. He also remarked that China has stressed the need to expand high-level opening-up and advance institutional innovation, deepen reforms in the technology sector, and nurture new quality productive forces based on local conditions.

    Separately, the Financial Secretary mentioned that Hong Kong, under “one country, two systems”, has unique advantages and can play a special role in deepening international exchanges and co-operation, contributing to the country’s high-level opening-up and quality development while creating greater business opportunities for global economies and enterprises.

    First, Hong Kong will leverage its advantage of connecting both the Mainland and the world. While strengthening ties with traditional markets in Europe and the Americas, Hong Kong will explore new markets and develop high-value multinational supply chain management and trade financing services to support Mainland enterprises in going global.

    Second, through financial empowerment, Hong Kong is actively supporting the financing needs of enterprises and projects in areas such as tech development and climate change. The city will continue to enhance the breadth, depth and efficiency of its financial markets to promote mutual benefit between finance and the real economy.

    Third, Hong Kong will drive technological innovation with a particular focus on AI. Leveraging strengths in innovation and technology, international capital, data and talent, along with the innovative capabilities, depth of industries and wide scope of application scenarios of sister cities in the Greater Bay Area, Hong Kong is committed to becoming a hub for international exchange and co-operation in the AI industry.

    Hong Kong also aims to support the growth of technological innovation and future industries by building an ecosystem of “patient capital”, he added.

    Mr Chan will return to Hong Kong tomorrow morning.

    MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

  • MIL-OSI China: Chinese premier pledges further opening up amid rising global uncertainties

    Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News

    BEIJING, March 23 — Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Sunday pledged to unswervingly advance opening up and cooperation amid rising global instability and uncertainty.

    Li made the remarks in a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the China Development Forum 2025 in Beijing.

    China will continue to welcome enterprises from around the world with open arms, further expand market access, actively address the concerns of businesses, and facilitate the deeper integration of foreign-funded enterprises into the Chinese market, he said.

    The increasing global economic fragmentation, coupled with rising instability and uncertainty in today’s world, underscores the growing need for countries to open their markets and for enterprises to share resources, in order to address challenges and pursue common prosperity, the premier said.

    He said China will safeguard free trade, and contribute to the smooth and stable operation of global industrial and supply chains.

    China has set its full-year growth target at around 5 percent for 2025. Li said the decision reflects both China’s profound understanding of its fundamental economic conditions and strong confidence in its governance capacity and future development potential, and pledged efforts to strengthen policy support while stimulating market forces in order to achieve the target.

    The country will implement more proactive and impactful macro policies, further strengthen counter-cyclical adjustments, and introduce new incremental policies when necessary to provide strong support for the sustained improvement and stable operation of the economy, Li said.

    The country will continue to advance the building of a unified national market and unclog bottlenecks in economic circulation to create a better development environment for various business entities, he added.

    Li pointed out that around this year’s Spring Festival, the Chinese economy has seen a surge of phenomenal highlights, with new growth drivers gaining strength across various sectors, which will inject sustained and robust momentum into the economy.

    The China Development Forum 2025 is scheduled from March 23 to 24. The theme of this year’s forum is “Unleashing Development Momentum for Stable Growth of Global Economy.”

    Around 720 people, including entrepreneurs, government officials, experts and representatives from international organizations from home and abroad attended the opening ceremony of the forum, hosted by the Development Research Center of the State Council.

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI China: AI empowers China’s agriculture to harvest smarter future

    Source: People’s Republic of China – State Council News

    BEIJING, March 23 — Inside a smart greenhouse in Chengdu, the capital of southwest China’s Sichuan Province, two robots, swiftly zipping through ridges between fields, were taking patrol training. With their high-definition cameras, these robots can snap real-time shots of crops’ growth and send images straight to the cloud.

    “After integrating with the DeepSeek large model, our team trained the robots through tens of thousands of images to improve their pest identification accuracy, which has exceeded 80 percent,” said Wu Yuanqing, the robots’ developer.

    Once the accuracy is improved, these robots can help farmers increase their decision-making precision in planting and efficiency of agricultural production, Wu added.

    The rise of AI-powered agriculture in China highlights the government’s continued efforts to modernize its agricultural sector to accelerate rural revitalization, which profoundly impacts the lives of over 460 million people in rural areas.

    The Chinese government has introduced multiple policies to promote smart agriculture development for years. In this document for 2025, Chinese policymakers have, for the first time, identified the development of “new quality productive forces in agriculture” as a top priority.

    The document underscores the need to increase support for smart agriculture and calls for expanding the use of technologies such as AI, big data and low-altitude systems in agricultural production.

    Maoming, a well-known lychee-growing city in south China’s Guangdong Province, is a premium example of how age-old practices meet with cutting-edge technologies to create a smarter, more efficient, precision-driven local industry.

    In February, the city completed deploying the DeepSeek model into its local AI assistant platform, integrating more than five million data points, including a lychee disease prevention database and detailed local meteorological records.

    So far, 69 sets of 5G-powered Internet of Things sensors have been installed across 20 lychee-growing towns in Maoming, according to Xu Hong, an official with Maoming’s agricultural and rural affairs bureau. These facilities monitor everything from soil moisture to air temperature, generating real-time insights that allow farmers to anticipate and mitigate risks before adverse weather takes a toll.

    Farmers in Maoming also dived into learning and applying AI technologies in lychee cultivation. Zhang Xianfeng, a local farmer, has recently turned to an AI-powered assistant for guidance as persistent wet and chilly weather threatened Zhang’s lychee. Within seconds, the system provided a tailored management plan for her.

    “In the past, we relied entirely on experience to determine the flowering period of crops. Fertilizers were applied by instinct, and we often reacted too late to disease outbreaks,” Zhang said. “Now, solutions provided by AI help us tackle these challenges immediately and accurately.”

    Fueled by a surging demand, AI in agriculture has expanded rapidly. In 2021, China’s “AI plus Agriculture” market was valued at approximately 68.5 billion yuan (about 9.55 billion U.S. dollars). That figure is projected to exceed 90 billion yuan by 2024, marking an average annual compound growth rate of around 10 percent, according to the Qianzhan Industry Research Institute, a Chinese think tank.

    While still in the early stages, experts are optimistic about AI’s future in agriculture. “AI holds great potential in precision farming, pest identification and control, automated agricultural machinery, and supply chain optimization,” said Li Zhan, a professor at Southwest Jiaotong University.

    Li noted that domestic AI technologies like DeepSeek will significantly enhance agricultural production efficiency, resource management accuracy, and product quality safety, driving the intelligent and sustainable development of agriculture.

    However, challenges still remain. Issues such as inconsistent data collection, privacy concerns, and limited farmer adoption continue to curtail the full potential of AI in this field.

    More efforts are needed to strengthen infrastructure in rural areas to lower the barriers to AI access, said Liu Jingjing, a researcher at a research center under China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.

    Liu stressed that it is vital to cultivate more AI talents to facilitate the integration of new technologies into agricultural practices.

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-Evening Report: View from The Hill: 5 things to look for in the budget – and why we really need another budget soon

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

    Jim Chalmers likes to boast, or marvel, that he is the first treasurer since Ben Chifley to deliver four budgets in a term.

    If Labor wins the May election, the treasurer will reckon the budget will be done and dusted for this year. But actually, we really need another budget post election.

    That’s for two reasons. First, because this one will be short on any hard reforms or big savings, because it is all about chasing votes.

    From roads to health, this year has been give, give, give from the government. Much of the spending has been matched by the opposition. Just in recent days, the Coalition has said yes to the government’s initiatives to boost bulk billing and to reduce the price of pharmaceutical scripts. At the weekend, it instantly embraced the announcement to extend energy bill relief (A$150 dollars off bills in the second half of 2025).

    Secondly, the budget could, to an extent, be quickly overtaken because it is being delivered days before the Trump administration’s April 2 tariff announcement. That announcement could have big implications for the world economy, which would flow through to the outlook for Australia.

    The international fallout would be more serious for Australia than any direct hits we might take – there are worries around beef exports and pharmaceuticals – although the politics would centre on what happened to our industries.

    Given the election context, you will have to look hard for specific “nasties” in this budget. The main negative is likely to be the overall uncertainty about the future.

    So specifically, what should we look for on Tuesday? Independent economist Chris Richardson suggests, in an interview with The Conversation, five things to track.

    1. The big ‘off-budget’ number

    This is where the cost of initiatives does not directly show up in the underlying bottom line (which will be deficits through the forward estimates).

    Putting large commitments off budget has increased over the years. Richardson says the Albanese government inherited about $33 billion off-budget spending (over the forward estimates), and in this budget it could be more than $100 billion. This includes spending on student debt relief, the NBN, some housing areas, and infrastructure programs.

    Putting lots of items off budget “means less scrutiny and accountability,” Richardson says.

    2. Tax reform (or lack thereof)

    Richardson’s second item won’t involve much of a search. He asks rhetorically, “Will there be any hint the government is trying to do anything about the narrowing base of the tax take?” That is, anything to lighten the very heavy weight we place on personal and company taxes to raise revenue. As an advocate for tax reform, Richarson expects the budget will contain zero in this area.

    3. NDIS spending

    What is really happening with reining in spending on the National Disability Insurance Scheme? The government has made much of its progress towards bringing the growth in its share of spending on the scheme down to a projected 8% annually.

    But Richardson says this is looking at only part of the story. Considerable responsibility is being pushed back onto the states; the federal government agreed to finance half the cost of new services to be delivered through state education and health systems for children with developmental disabilities to curb the burden on the NDIS. “To focus only on the federal spend on the NDIS is to miss the wider cost picture,” he says.

    4. The mid-year mystery

    How will the budget deal with the “mystery” that existed in its December mid-year update? That update did not seem to account for a rise in wages for public servants, even this was clearly in the pipeline.

    5. The Trump factor

    The budget will discuss the risks on the downside for the economy, but how will it deal with what is to come from Donald Trump? What assumptions will it contain on the likely actions of an unpredictable president?

    With the election so close, there will be almost as much interest in Peter Dutton’s Thursday budget reply as in the budget itself.

    The understanding is it will contain some new policy. It could hardly do otherwise. But will whatever Dutton announces stand up to scrutiny? If it is too thin, it will reinforce an impression the opposition is not presenting a credible alternative. In last year’s budget reply Dutton announced his proposed migration cuts and that quickly became mired in an argument about whether his numbers fitted together.

    Under the spotlight in budget week, the opposition also has to be careful with precisely what is being said and committed to. We’ve seen the confusion over its divestiture policy and about a possible referendum to facilitate the removal of dual citizens.

    On Sunday finance spokeswoman Jane Hume gave Labor some material for a scare campaign on the NDIS.

    She told Sky, “The NDIS, for instance, is one of those areas in the budget that has run out of control; it was growing at 14% per annum.

    “It’s been brought under control somewhat. We think that there’s more that can be done.”

    Chalmers immediately jumped on her comments, demanding detail. Labor’s spinners and ad team would have been rubbing their hands.

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

    – ref. View from The Hill: 5 things to look for in the budget – and why we really need another budget soon – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-5-things-to-look-for-in-the-budget-and-why-we-really-need-another-budget-soon-252513

    MIL OSI Analysis – EveningReport.nz –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Sydney’s future rail and road connections to be mapped out for funding from Albanese Government

    Source: Workplace Gender Equality Agency

    The Albanese Government is building on its recent $1 billion investment to protect the corridor for the South West Sydney Rail Extension by investing $32.5 million to map out other road and rail corridors across the city. 

    We’re investing $20 million to plan for three future programs: 

    • A preliminary business case for the New Cumberland Line 
    • A preliminary business case for T8 Airport & South and T2 Leppington & Inner West line upgrades
    • Outer South West Housing Enablement Development Program

    Building on the current Cumberland Line on the Sydney rail network, the New Cumberland Line would provide an enhanced north west-south west rail connection, better linking Western Sydney’s major population centres. 

    The preliminary business case will provide Government with a road map for future investments in transformative north-south rail links to improve public transport between Greater Parramatta, Fairfield, Bradfield and Liverpool. 

    Upgrades to the T8 Airport & South and T2 Leppington & Inner West rail lines will also be explored, to better connect Sydney’s south west to Parramatta and the harbour CBD. 

    The Preliminary Business Case will consider investments to upgrade existing rail networks and expand fast, frequent and reliable rail services into Sydney’s Outer South West.

    To support this, we’re investing in the Outer South West Housing Enablement Development Program component will support project development on future infrastructure initiatives that enable new housing and improve transport links in outer South West Sydney.

    An additional $12.5 million will also be invested to develop Final Business Cases for both the Devonshire Link Road and Bradfield Metro Link Road, critical connections in the Western Sydney International Airport Precinct Road Network. Investing in these business cases delivers on a high priority recommendation of the 2023 Western Sydney Transport Infrastructure Panel Independent Report. 

    When built, the Bradfield Metro Link Road will link Fifteenth Avenue, Badgerys Creek Road and the Eastern Ring Road. The Australian and NSW governments recently announced a $1 billion joint investment to upgrade Fifteenth Avenue. 

    Subject to finalisation of the scope, the 3 kilometre long, 45 metre wide road is expected to feature two traffic lanes and two dedicated bus lanes, as well as walking and cycling shared paths on both sides. 

    The Devonshire Road Link Project is a critical junction that completes the network of road projects, including Mamre Road, Elizabeth Drive, and the M12 Motorway. This vital link will also connect the Mamre Road Precinct, which hosts the Western Sydney Employment Area and the future freight intermodal, to the M12 and the Elizabeth Drive, reducing travel times and improving freight access and connectivity.

    Quotes attributable to Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government Minister Catherine King:

    “Sydney’s incredible growth has to be matched by an ambitious and well-considered infrastructure pipeline. 

    “Our final business cases will bed down the future roads the Western Sydney Airport precinct needs to keep people moving. 

    “We also know a city’s public transport network always needs to evolve to keep pace with how people travel and where they want to go. Our new preliminary business cases on a New Cumberland Line and capacity upgrades on the existing network will provide a roadmap for future rail connections across the city. 

    “In the early 2010s, when Anthony Albanese was Infrastructure Minister, he was commissioning comprehensive studies on Sydney’s second airport. Today, that airport is nearing completion with freight flights due to start next year, with passenger flights not long after. 

    “City building takes time, but we know that careful, detailed planning leads to excellent results.”

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: South West Sydney to benefit from $110 million investment in critical upgrades on Henry Lawson Drive

    Source: Workplace Gender Equality Agency

    The Albanese Labor Government is building New South Wales’ future through a partnership with the New South Wales Government to deliver the next stage of upgrades to Henry Lawson Drive. 

    The Australian and NSW governments will each provide $110 million to progress the next stage of upgrades to Henry Lawson Drive. 

    Henry Lawson Drive is a vital north-south connection in Sydney, carrying around 38,000 vehicles during daily peak periods. 

    It follows the northern bank of the Georges River, passing through Georges Hall, East Hills and onto Peakhurst. 

    The road varies between a single lane in each direction, to six-lane dual carriageway road towards Peakhurst. 

    The Henry Lawson Drive Stage 1B project will upgrade approximately 1.8 kilometres of Henry Lawson Drive from Auld Avenue, to its connection with the M5 motorway. 

    The works will widen this busy section of the road from a two-lane road to a four-lane divided road.

    This will provide more capacity for a growing number of vehicles and reduce delays due to merging required by vehicles heading north off the M5 motorway. 

    Intersections will also be upgraded to improve road safety and connections to the Bankstown Airport and surrounding areas. 

    The project will include the construction of new walking and cycling shared paths, improving access to the Auld Avenue sporting fields and Milperra Sports Centre. 

    Quotes attributable to Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government Minister Catherine King:

    “Ducking and weaving between two and four lane sections of Henry Lawson Drive between the M5 and Milperra Road will no longer be a thing when these vital works are complete. 

    “This road sees tens of thousands of cars during weekday peak periods, but also on the weekend as people head to Flower Power. 

    “Widening this road will ensure we have the capacity to accommodate the traffic on these roads, 24 hours, seven days a week. 

    Quotes attributable to NSW Roads Minister Jenny Aitchison:

    “This is welcome funding, allowing us to fast track Stage 1B of Henry Lawson Drive. 

    “The work on Henry Lawson Drive builds on the nearby $144 million Stage 1A upgrade that has made it easier to travel between Auld Avenue and Tower Road, and further upgrades to the north in Georges Hall.”

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Alphacrucis University College: Faith-Based Education in Western Sydney

    Source: Murray Darling Basin Authority

    Good morning.

    I begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we are meeting and pay my respects to elders past and present.

    I also acknowledge:

    •    Professor Stephen Fogarty, President of Alphacrucis University College 
    •    Rev Assoc Prof David Perry, Chair, Independent Higher Education Australia (IHEA) 
    •    Shiekh Shadi Alsuleiman, Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) 
    •    Associate Professor Gil Davis from the Australian Catholic University
    •    Senator Dave Sharma 
    •    Mr Peter McKeon, Chair, Australian Christian Higher Education Alliance 
    •    Ms Margery Evans, Association of Independent Schools of NSW (AISNSW) 
    •    Mr Graham Catt, Independent Schools Australia 
    •    Mr Sai Paravastu, Hindu Council of Australia 
    •    Mr Dallas McInerney, Catholic Schools, NSW 
    •    Mr Ian Liney, Christian Schools Australia 
    •    Mrs Vanessa Cheng, Australian Association of Christian Schools

    And can I thank the team at Alphacrucis for bringing us all together.

    At times like this, that’s really important.  

    We are the best country in the world.

    I really believe that.

    And a big part of that, I think, is because we are made up of people from all around the world, all different backgrounds, all different faiths.

    Living in harmony.

    That makes us different to most other countries.

    It sends a message to the rest of the world about what is possible.

    We haven’t always been like this.

    If we jumped in a time machine and went back to when I was born in the early 70s we would barely recognise the Australia we found.

    The White Australia Policy still hadn’t been completely dismantled.

    Only about 1 per cent of Australians came from somewhere other than Europe.

    Today more than 4 million Australians were born in Asia – or their parents were.

    The number of Indian Australians has doubled in just the last decade.

    After Christianity, the next biggest faith practiced by Australians is Islam.

    The fastest growing religion is Hinduism.

    We are a different country.

    Education has also made us a different country to the one I was born in.

    In 1972 only 18 per cent of Australians finished school. Today’s it’s about 80 per cent.

    Back then less than 10 per cent of young Australians had a uni degree. Now it’s almost one in two.

    That’s nation changing stuff.

    And the truth is religious institutions have done a big chunk of that work.  

    Professor Paul Oslington from Alphacrucis College has made the point that faith-based education was here before our first public universities.

    St James College on King Street was teaching children and adults before the first brick was laid at the University of Sydney.

    Across the country now there are almost 3,000 Catholic, Anglican, Islamic, Jewish and other religious schools.

    That change that I talked about, that’s happened in the last 50 years hasn’t stopped. We are still changing.

    And if we get into a time machine and take it to 2050 it will look a lot different again.

    This is why the Universities Accord is important.

    To help us get ready for that future.

    What it says is that by 2050 we are going to need a workforce where 80 per cent haven’t just finished high school, we are going to need a workforce where 80 per cent have finished school and they have gone to TAFE or university as well.

    That’s a big shift.

    Some of that will happen organically.

    Just because the fastest growing jobs are in professions that require a uni degree or a TAFE qualification.

    But some of it will require reform.

    Reform to our education system.

    To help us get there.

    I said a moment ago about one in two young Australians have a university degree today.

    But it’s not one in two everywhere.

    But it’s not one in two in our outer suburbs. It’s not one in two in the regions or the bush.

    And if we are going to hit that 80 per cent target, we have got to change that.

    That’s what the Accord says. And that’s what the reforms I am implementing are all about.

    Things like:

    •    Wiping $3 billion of HECS debt for more than 3 million Australians. 
    •    Paid prac – financial support for teaching, nursing, midwifery and social work students while they do their prac.
    •    Massively expanding fee-free uni ready courses – those courses that act as a bridge between school and uni.

    All of that is in the Parliament right now.

    It’s just the start.

    The Accord also recommends a new funding system, needs-based funding and a new Australian Tertiary Education Commission to steer reform over multiple governments.

    And I hope to provide you with more detail on all of that before the end of the year.

    There is also another Bill in the Parliament.

    That’s the one that sets up a National Student Ombudsman.

    An independent body to investigate and resolve disputes and give students a stronger voice when the worst happens.

    It will also have strong investigative powers, similar to those of a Royal Commission.

    It is a long overdue response to the appalling evidence of sexual violence and harassment on campuses and in student accommodation.

    But it’s not just about that. Its scope will be broad.

    That includes complaints about antisemitism and Islamophobia or any type of racism or discrimination.

    The bottom line is I want students to be safe and feel safe and if something really bad happens they have a place to go to get action.

    Something else I want to talk about today is this.

    Institutions here in this room help train teachers, nurses, counsellors, lawyers, care workers.

    And you also train pastors and priests and ministers. But we don’t train Rabbis or Imams in Australia. Not yet.

    I’ve spoken a number of times to leaders in the Jewish community and Islamic community and others, like Murray Norman, CEO of Better Balanced Futures, about this.

    I think it’s in our interest as a country to change this.

    For Australian religious leaders to be able to get the training and qualifications they need here in Australia.

    Without having to go overseas.

    I also want to talk to you today about our schools.

    We have got big challenges here too.

    Think about this.

    Over the last eight years the percentage of students finishing high school has gone down not up.

    From 85 percent to 79 percent.

    That drop isn’t happening everywhere.

    In non-government schools the percentage of students finishing school is either pretty flat or going up.

    Where the drop is happening is in our public schools. From 83 percent to 73 percent.

    This is what we have to turn around.

    This is what the reforms I am trying to implement with the States are all about.

    Our non-government schools are fully funded or on a path to be fully funded.

    Our public schools aren’t.

    We need to fix funding and tie that funding to the reforms that are going to help students catch up, keep up and finish high school.

    This not about breaking Gonski. It is about finishing it.

    That’s good for the whole schooling system.

    You know I am a product of public education. And proud of it.

    But I hope you also know that I value what you do too.

    You will never see me attacking faith-based education.

    You are an integral part of our education system.

    One last thing.

    The reforms I am driving aren’t just in our universities or schools.

    If we are serious, we have to go back further than that.

    I am talking about early education.  

    The child care debate is over. It’s not babysitting. It’s early education.

    The first five years of a child’s life are everything.

    Everything they see, everything they hear, everything they eat, every book they open, every lesson they learn shapes the person that they become.

    The Government is now considering the Productivity Commission’s final report on the future of early education.

    It tells us it’s children from poor families who are the least likely to go to early childhood education and care, and the most likely to benefit from it.

    It will help us to build a more accessible and affordable early education and care system, which gives children the skills they need to start school ready to learn.

    All these reforms will help us to continue to write the story of Western Sydney.

    A story of change. A story of progress. A story of aspiration.

    A story made possible by the power of education.

    A story that you are helping to write every day. Thank you for what you do and thank you for being here today.

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency’s (TEQSA) 2024 Conference

    Source: Murray Darling Basin Authority

    I start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we are meeting and pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. 

    [Acknowledgements omitted]

    Two and half years ago when I got this job, I said I didn’t want to be the type of Minister that just signed letters.

    I wanted to reform the system. 

    To make it better and fairer.

    I suspect now you can see I meant it. 

    And I hope you can see the reason why in the Universities Accord. 

    What it tells us is that by the middle of this century we are going to need a workforce where 80 per cent of people have a university degree or a TAFE qualification.

    That’s up from about 60 per cent today. 

    That’s a big shift. A big change.

    Some of this will happen organically. 

    Think about it. The fastest growing professions all require some sort of tertiary qualification.

    But some of it will require us to change what we do and how we do it.

    The key message in the Accord is that we are not going to hit that 80 per cent target unless we break that invisible barrier that stops a lot of young people from walking through your door. 

    Overwhelmingly, the young people they are talking about are from poor families, from the outer suburbs of our big cities and from our regions.

    Breaking down that barrier means reforming our entire education system.

    Here’s the nub of it.

    At a time when we need more people to go to TAFE and university, the number of people finishing school at the moment is going backwards.

    From 85 per cent 8 years ago to 79 per cent today.

    That drop isn’t happening everywhere. 

    In non-government schools it’s either pretty flat or going up. 

    It’s happening in our public schools. It’s dropped from 83 per cent to 73 per cent in just eight years.

    And in particular its kids from poor families.

    If we are going to hit that 80 per cent target we have got to turn this around.

    And that doesn’t start in high school either.

    The same young people you don’t see walking through your doors, the same young people who don’t finish high school are the same people who fall behind when they are little.

    They are also the same people who are more likely to start behind, to have never been to early education and care.

    Can you see the common thread?

    Fixing this isn’t easy or quick.

    It is going to talk a lot of work and it is going to take time.

    But the first parts of that are in the Parliament right now.

    In the next two weeks six pieces of education legislation will be voted on by the Senate. 

    The first is a 15 per cent pay rise for early educators right across the country.

    Some of the most important workers in the country and some of the most underpaid.  

    If we are going to build the sort of early education system that we need, that Danielle’s team have plotted out for us in their recent report, we need to build the workforce first. 

    And that’s what this is about. 

    The second bill is to increase funding for our public schools – to help complete the work that David Gonski started more than a decade ago. 

    Fully funding all public schools and tying that funding to reforms to turn around that drop in high school completion rates. 

    The third bill is another piece of unfinished business. 

    It extends the system of USIs, or unique student identifiers, that every university student and every TAFE student has to every school student.

    We have been talking about this for 15 years – and now it is finally happening.

    The fourth bill implements the change we are making to international education. 

    It makes important changes to fix integrity issues in the system and introduces limits, or caps, on the number of international students. 

    For VET providers, it will mean they will be able to enrol about 30 per cent fewer students next year than they did last year.

    For universities it’s different. It will mean they will be able to enrol roughly the same number of students next year that they did last year.

    The difference is it won’t just the big metro universities that benefit. 

    And when it passes, Ministerial Direction 107 will go.

    I know how important international education is. 

    It doesn’t just make money. It makes us friends.

    But we have got to get the balance right here.

    And we have also got to remember what the primary and most important job our universities do is.

    And that brings me to the fifth bill. 

    This is the bill that implements the first stage of the Universities Accord.

    It includes almost half a billion dollar investment in paid prac.

    The first time the Commonwealth has ever done this.

    That’s financial support for teaching students, for nursing students, for midwifery students and for social work students, to help support them while they do the practical part of their degree.

    A lot of students tell me that when they do their prac they have to give up their part-time job, or they’ve got to move away from home or work fewer hours. 

    Sometimes it can mean they have to delay doing their degree or not finish it at all.

    This will give people who have signed up to do some of the most important jobs in this country a bit of extra help to get the qualifications they need. And we need.

    Just to give you one example of what this will mean, earlier this year I met a midwifery student at UTS who told me this:

    “I’m a first-year mature-age midwifery student. This payment is going to be absolutely life-changing for me. As a mother of two small children, I’m often balancing between practical work, placement and looking after my babies. 

    “There are literally some days where I’m doing 16 hour days between my study and my work and looking after my children. 

    “I cannot wait for this payment to be available for myself and other future mature-age students who might also want to enrol in this course who previously couldn’t financially afford it.”

    That’s what this reform is all about.

    This is also the bill that will massively expand the number of free enabling courses.

    You know what I’m talking about.

    These are those free courses that are effectively a bridge between school and university. 

    A lot of unis already offer these courses.

    Not many do it better than Newcastle University. They have been doing it now for 50 years. 

    One in five people who get a degree from Newcastle University today, start with one of these free courses.

    People like Jennifer Baker.

    Jennifer was a mum at 19. She worked in hospitality for 10 years. One day she saw an ad for one of these free courses in the local paper. 

    Now she’s got a science degree. An Honours degree. A PhD. And a Fulbright Scholarship. 

    She’s a computational medicinal chemist.

    That’s what these courses do.

    And what this bill does is effectively uncap funding for those courses, right across the country.

    We’ve committed an additional $350 million over four years to significantly expand these courses. 

    It’s an ongoing funding commitment. 

    Universities currently receive as little as $1,286 per place to run these courses.

    These changes ensure that universities will receive $18,278 per place next year, which will be tied to CPI increases each year. 

    It provides funding certainty for universities. 

    It deals with the disincentives baked into the current system. 

    And most importantly, it ensures that these courses remain free. 

    It will help more Australians to get a crack at university and succeed when they get there. 

    The Department of Education estimates that this will increase the number of people doing these free courses by about 40 per cent by the end of this decade and double that number in the decade after that.

    This is also the bill that fixes how HECS debts are indexed. 

    It fixes what happened last year when inflation spiked and indexation went through the roof, and makes sure it never happens again.

    To do this, it caps indexation at either inflation or wage growth, whatever is the lowest.

    And it backdates this to June last year. 

    That on its own will wipe $3 billion in student debt for more than 3 million people.

    But it is just the first step in making HECS fairer. 

    As you know, a bit over a week ago, the Prime Minister announced that if we win the next election, the first piece of legislation we introduce will cut all student debts by a further 20 per cent. 

    For someone with an average student debt of around $27,000 the legislation in the Parliament at the moment will wipe about $1,200 off their debt. This will wipe a further $5,500 off it. 

    That’s real help for a lot of young Australians, just out of uni or just out of TAFE, just moved out of home, just getting started.

    And we will also make another change, to make it easier to pay off your student debt.

    We will increase the salary you have to earn before you have to start paying it off from $54,000 to $67,000. 

    And will reduce your annual minimum repayments.

    For someone on about $70,000, for example, this will mean you have to repay more than $1,000 less a year.

    It’s another recommendation of the Universities Accord. In fact it’s a recommendation from the architect of HECS, Professor Bruce Chapman. 

    The fact is university is more expensive today than it was when most of us were uni students. 

    When HECS was first created students paid an average of about 24 per cent of the cost of degree. 

    This increased to about 36 per cent in the late 1990s. 

    And now, because of the changes the previous government made, it’s about 45 per cent. 

    Cutting student debt by 20 per cent fixes that for a generation of Australians. 

    But there is more to do. 

    That includes changing the way we fund universities. 

    Part of that is uncapping the number of places at university for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who get the marks for the course they want to do. 

    Part of that is a new needs-based funding system, so these same students get the extra academic and wraparound support that they need to succeed when they get there. 

    And part of that is a new Australian Tertiary Education Commission.

    A steward. To drive reform over the long term. 

    And I hope to provide you with more detail on all of that before the end of the year.

    Finally, the sixth bill that I want the Senate to pass in the next two weeks creates a National Student Ombudsman. 

    When I was at this conference last year, I talked about the scourge of sexual violence in our universities and I said that change is coming.

    And change is coming. 

    What we are establishing is a dedicated, national body to handle student complaints within our higher education system.

    Equipped with the power:

    • To investigate complaints;
    • To bring parties together to resolve issues, including offering restorative engagement processes and alternative dispute resolution where appropriate;
    • To make findings and recommendations on what actions universities should take; and
    • To monitor the implementation of those recommendations.

    It will also have the sort of investigative powers a Royal Commission has. That includes the power to:

    • To require a person or university to provide information, documents or other records relevant to an investigation;
    • To enter premise of a university as part of an investigation; and
    • To require a person to attend and answer questions before the Ombudsman.

    Recent events at St Paul’s College in Sydney remind us of how important this work is. 

    This is another recommendation of the Universities Accord.

    And it’s not just about sexual violence. 

    It will be able to investigate everything from complaints about homophobia to antisemitism to Islamophobia to any other form of racism or discrimination.  

    This will complement the work of TEQSA.

    A couple of weeks ago I was with Dr Russell and the team at TEQSA for a meeting they organised with all Vice Chancellors as well as the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism and the Race Discrimination Commissioner.

    It was focussed on lessons learned from the last few months, sharing best practice and the work we need to do together to ensure students and staff are safe and feel safe on campus.  

    As part of this, TEQSA is currently developing ‘Sector Guidance’ and a ‘Statement of Regulatory Expectations’ for Australian higher education providers.

    To help manage contested issues, protests, and improve complaints and grievance services.

    Can I thank Dr Russell and the whole team for all the work you are doing here.

    Can I also thank you and the whole team for bringing us together yesterday and today. 

    To grapple with everything from good governance to generative AI. 

    And to talk about what’s next. 

    That’s what our universities are all about. 

    What’s next. 

    What this conference calls “Navigating Tomorrow”. 

    I have talked a bit about that today. 

    But it is really just the start. 

    There is a lot to navigate. 

    And a lot to do. 

    To make our education system better and fairer. 

    And if we get this right. Make the country we love better and fairer too. 

    It’s what makes this job so important and such a privilege. 

    One I will never take for granted. 

    Thank you so much for inviting me to talk to you today.

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: Launch of Monash University’s Campus Cohesion research program

    Source: Murray Darling Basin Authority

    **CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY**

    I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which we are meeting today, and I pay my respects to elders, past and present.

    I would also like to acknowledge: 

    • Vice Chancellor Sharon Pickering
    • Associate Professor David Slucki
    • Dr Susan Carland 
    • Hugh de Krestser, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission
    • Mr Aftab Malik, Special Envoy to Combat Islamophonia
    • My friends and colleagues, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and Josh Burns 

    For a lot of Australians, October 7 and everything that’s happened since in Gaza and now in Lebanon feels like a world away.

    But for some Australians, it’s close to home.

    It feels different because it is different. 

    The people we see suffering on our television or on social media aren’t strangers to them. They know them. Or they know someone who knows them.

    All of that pain and helplessness manifests itself in different ways.

    I see it in my local community in Western Sydney and we’ve seen it here at Monash and at other universities across the country.

    Today, I thought I would tell you a story about how it’s affected one particular friend of mine. A Jewish friend.

    In the days after October 7, he rang me and told me how he felt afraid to send his son to school. 

    A few months later, he rang me again.

    This time he wanted me to know that before October 7 that his son’s best friend was a boy called Mohammed, and that he is still his best friend today. 

    He told me every week during soccer season he drops his son over at Mohammed’s house, and they go to training together. 

    And he also wanted me to know that next year, his son will celebrate his bar mitzvah, and Mohammed will be there too.

    There’s a lesson here in this, I think, for all of us.

    A lesson about the sort of country we really are. 

    About what we are like at our best.

    When you take the politics out of it. 

    People living and working and studying and playing soccer together.

    And that’s what the work that David and Susan are about to kick off is all about too – without the soccer bit.

    It’s such important work.

    At its core, it’s about something really simple, and that’s respect. About all of us being a little bit more like these two little boys.

    And being big enough to admit it.

    And see how we can do things better. 

    I want to thank Susan and David for your courage and your ambition in embarking on this work. 

    I know it isn’t easy. It’s a lot easier to say no at the moment than it is to say yes.

    And I want to thank you, Sharon, for funding this work. Without hesitation. 

    That is real leadership. 

    And what comes out of this research won’t just make Monash a better and a safer and a more welcoming place. 

    It will also help inform the work the Race Discrimination Commissioner is doing about racism in all its forms on every campus across the country. 

    That will help make every campus a better, safer and more welcoming place. 

    That’s how significant this work is, and that is why I wanted to be here today.

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI Australia: National Association of Enabling Educators of Australia Conference

    Source: Murray Darling Basin Authority

    G’day everyone.

    I start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which the conference is taking place and pay my respects to Elders past, present and emerging. 

    I want to also acknowledge: 

    • Emeritus Professor Mary O’Kane 
    • Professor Sarah O’Shea 
    • And Professor Ruth Wallace 

    Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today and I’m sorry I can’t be there in person. 

    Two and half years ago when I got this job, I said I didn’t want to be the type of Minister that just signed letters.

    I wanted to reform our education system. 

    To make it better and fairer.

    And that reform is happening. 

    The Universities Accord, that Professor O’Kane chaired and crafted, provides us with a blueprint for how to reform higher education over the next decade and beyond.

    What it tells us is that by the middle of this century we are going to need a workforce where 80 per cent of people have a university degree or a TAFE qualification.

    That’s up from about 60 per cent today. 

    That’s a big shift. A big change.

    Some of this will happen organically. 

    Think about it. The fastest growing professions all require some sort of tertiary qualification.

    But some of it will require us to change what we do and how we do it.

    The key message in the Accord is that we are not going to hit that 80 per cent target unless we break that invisible barrier that stops a lot of young people from going to university or TAFE.  

    The Accord is massive. Implementing it will take more than one budget or one government, but we have bitten off a big chunk this year.

    29 of the Accord’s 47 recommendations in full or in part.

    And part of that is uncapping funding for enabling courses.

    The work you do.

    Just one of those places where this happens in Newcastle University. 

    They have been doing it for 50 years this year. 

    One in five people who get a degree from Newcastle University today, start with one of these FEE-FREE Uni Ready courses.

    And just one of those people is Jennifer Baker.

    Jennifer was a mum at 19. She worked in hospitality for 10 years and one day saw an ad for one of these free courses in the local paper. 

    Now she’s got a science degree. An Honours degree. A PhD. And a Fulbright Scholarship. 

    She’s a computational medicinal chemist.

    That’s what these courses do.

    They’re a bridge between school and uni to help you get the skills you need to succeed when you get there. 

    Mary and the Accord team recommended we significantly increase the availability of these courses and that’s what we are doing. 

    Last week, we passed legislation to effectively uncap funding for those courses, right across the country.

    We’ve committed an additional $350 million over four years to significantly expand these courses. 

    It’s an ongoing funding commitment.

    Universities currently receive as little as $1,286 per place to run these courses.

    These changes ensure that universities will receive $18,278 per place next year, which will be tied to CPI increases each year. 

    It provides funding certainty for universities. 

    It deals with the disincentives baked into the current system. 

    And most importantly, it ensures that these courses remain free. 

    It will help more Australians to get a crack at university and succeed when they get there. 

    My department estimates that this will increase the number of people doing these free uni ready courses by about 40 per cent by the end of the decade and double the number doing them by 2040.

    That strengthens the bridge between school and uni. 

    Universities have been informed of their initial 2025 Fee-Free Uni Ready places. 

    And this week, applications have opened where unis can apply for additional places. 

    But that’s not all the legislation we passed last week does. 

    It also wipes out $3 billion of HELP debt for more than 3 million Australians.

    And it establishes, for the first time, a Commonwealth Prac Payment. 

    That is, a bit of financial support for teaching students, for nursing students, for midwifery students and for social work students, to help support them while they do the practical part of their degree.

    And this is just the start. 

    We will also establish a new funding system for universities – that guarantees a place in university for everyone from a disadvantaged background who gets the marks to get in.  

    And needs based funding to support them when they get there.  

    And a new Australian Tertiary Education Commission to steer reform over the next decade and beyond. 

    And I hope to have more to say about all of this in the coming weeks.

    We have a good higher education system.

    But it can be a lot better and a lot fairer. 

    That’s what these reforms and the work each and every one of you do everyday is all about. 

    So thank you.

    I hope you have a great conference today.

    MIL OSI News –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Wealthy Africans often don’t pay tax: the answer lies in smarter collection – expert

    Source: The Conversation – Africa – By Giovanni Occhiali, Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, Institute of Development Studies

    Faced with some of the worse debt levels in over a decade, African countries are struggling to find ways to balance their books. Increasing revenue sources from their citizens is an obvious place to look.

    A good starting point for African countries would be to focus on the tax contribution of wealthy citizens. This is because the most under performing taxes across the African continent are those bearing on the income of wealthy individuals, namely personal income and property taxes.

    The reasons for this are two fold: People who are better off in some countries often remain invisible to tax authorities. This is even though they have higher tax liabilities. Compare this with citizens who have formal labour contracts. Think of public school teachers or supermarket clerks. Their taxes are withheld by their employers. This makes tax evasion impossible. Most taxes on personal income in Africa are paid by citizens in these forms of employment.

    In contrast, prior to 2015, only one of the top 71 Ugandan government officials and 17 of the country 60 most successful lawyers paid any personal income tax. Similarly, only 16% of all landlords identified in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, during a registration drive in 2021 had registered for taxes.

    This shows that wealthy Africans face lower effective tax rates than average citizens, replicating a trend already demonstrated for the relative tax burden of small and large companies.

    This situation is disheartening. But there are immediate steps that African revenue authorities can take to address this unfairness.

    Research led by the International Centre for Tax and Development, to which I have contributed, shows that revenue increases from wealthy citizens can be obtained by focusing on better enforcement of existing taxes rather than by introducing new ones or hiking tax rates.

    An effective approach to increase wealthy citizens tax contribution relies on three strategies:

    • their identification

    • a simplification of tax compliance processes, and

    • the effective enforcement of existing taxes.

    While these suggestions might seem banal, they can lead to some quick revenue gains: as much as US$5.5 million in Uganda or US$900,000 in a single Nigerian state in one year, or tripling property tax revenue collection in Sierra Leone.

    But these improvements require changes in the way African revenue authorities operate.

    Tax collection services need change of focus

    Revenue services in all African countries need to be better resourced. A typical tax officer on the continent might be responsible for as many as 10 times the number of taxpayers than a tax officer in the Global North.

    First, their efforts need to be redirected away from the registration of small informal businesses. These efforts have been shown to contribute little revenue in countries as diverse as South Africa and Sierra Leone.

    Instead their efforts should be directed a developing a definition of high-net-worth individual appropriate for their domestic context. In Uganda this includes criteria such as having performed land transactions of approximately US$300,000 over five years, or earning approximately US$150,000 in rental income in any given year.

    Due to its federal structure, criteria in Nigeria vary across states, for example including an yearly income above Naira 2 million in Borno and Kano state, with the threshold raising to Naira 15 million in Imo state, Naira 20 million in Niger state and Naira 25 million in Lagos state.

    However, in both countries criteria also cover less directly measurable assets, such as owning high-value commercial forestry or animal ranches in Uganda, or having received contracts from the government in Nigeria’s Kaduna state.

    Property taxes are especially important. Research in Ethiopia and Rwanda shows that investing in real estate represents one of the main strategies to store wealth when inflation and foreign exchange fluctuation make bank deposits unattractive.

    These properties then contribute to increasing the income of wealthy citizens who rent them out or resell them for profit. While we lack granular data on capital gains or rental income taxes, there are good reasons to think they are also significantly underperforming. Capital gains refers to the additional value which an investor accrues when disposing of assets such as houses or companies share previously bought at a lower price.

    Second, this should be followed by the creation of an office to follow the affairs of high net-worth individuals. This already happens for large taxpayers. Most countries, including the majority of anglophone African countries, have a dedicated office following the tax affairs of large companies active in their territory.

    Having dedicated resources for high net-worth individuals would be useful because using the international definition (a net worth of US$1 million) might be hard to operationalise. The reason for this is that most revenue authorities lack detailed data on assets owned by their taxpayers. Even when they know some information, such as the number of houses, estimates of their market value might be lacking.

    African countries are better off relying on data already in their possession as they seek to collect further useful information on their taxpayers. This allows the establishment of a set of multiple core and non-core criteria.

    Third, high-net worth individual units require substantial backing. In the first instance from revenue authorities’ senior management, who in turn needs to have the support of the government in pursuing often well-connected individuals. This backing is needed for actions as apparently easy as obtaining data from other government agencies, without which identification efforts could be quickly thwarted, and becomes crucial when its time to move to enforcement.

    However, a cooperative approach should be the initial choice. One approach is voluntary disclosure programmes with associated tax amnesties. These are useful to obtain information about the assets of wealthy citizens. Additionally, they contribute substantial revenue – as much as US$296 million in South Africa and US$192 million in Nigeria.

    Fourth, requiring candidates running for public office to obtain tax clearance certificates can also be an important source of information and revenue. This has been shown to work in both Uganda and Nigeria.

    This set of actions represents an optimal starting point for African countries looking to improve the tax contribution of wealthy citizens.

    Efforts to produce suitable guidance for wealth taxation for low-income countries by the United Nations, or to introduce a global wealth tax on billionaire by the Brazilian G20, are important to highlight the role of fiscal redistribution in addressing inequality. But many African countries are better off by first being bold about the basics of their tax systems, which can already make them more effective and progressive.

    The International Centre for Tax and Development, where Dr Giovanni Occhiali works, receives funding from the United Kingdom Foregin, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the Gates Foundation, and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad).

    – ref. Wealthy Africans often don’t pay tax: the answer lies in smarter collection – expert – https://theconversation.com/wealthy-africans-often-dont-pay-tax-the-answer-lies-in-smarter-collection-expert-252437

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: Secretary-General’s message on World Meteorological Day [scroll down for French version]

    Source: United Nations secretary general

    The dark predictions of meteorologists are coming to pass. Our climate is going up in flames. Every one of the last ten years has been the hottest in recorded history. Ocean heat is breaking records. And every country is feeling the effects – whether scorched by fires, swept by floods, or pummelled by unprecedented storms.
     
    The theme of this year’s World Meteorological Day – Closing the Early Warning Gap Together – reminds us that, in this new climate reality, early warning systems are not luxuries. They are necessities and sound investments – providing an almost ten-fold return. Yet, almost half the world’s countries still lack access to these life-saving systems. It is disgraceful that, in a digital age, lives and livelihoods are being lost because people have no access to effective early warning systems.

    The United Nations Early Warnings for All initiative aims for everyone, everywhere to be protected by an alert system by 2027. The world must come together, and urgently scale-up action and investment, to realize this goal.

    We need high-level political support for the Initiative within countries, a boost in technology support, greater collaboration between governments, businesses and communities, and a major effort to scale-up finance. Increasing the lending capacity of the Multilateral Development Banks is key. The Pact for the Future agreed last year made important strides forward, it must be delivered in full. So must the COP29 finance outcome.

    At the same time, we must intensify our efforts to tackle the climate crisis at source – through rapid and deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions – to prevent it getting unimaginably worse. This year all countries must honour the promise to deliver new national climate action plans that align with limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    In an era of climate disaster, every person on Earth must be protected by an early warning system as a matter of justice. Together, let’s deliver. 

    ***

    Les sombres prévisions des météorologues sont en passe de se réaliser. Notre climat s’embrase. Les dix dernières années ont été les plus chaudes jamais enregistrées dans l’histoire de l’humanité. Les océans connaissent des niveaux record de chaleur. Incendies ravageurs, inondations dévastatrices ou tempêtes sans précédent : aucun pays n’est épargné par les effets des changements climatiques.

    Cette année, la Journée météorologique mondiale est placée sous le thème « Combler ensemble les lacunes en matière d’alertes précoces », qui vient nous rappeler que, dans cette nouvelle réalité climatique, les systèmes d’alerte précoce ne sont pas un luxe. En plus d’être indispensables, ils représentent des investissements judicieux, puisque les bénéfices qui en découlent sont pratiquement dix fois supérieurs aux montants investis. Pourtant, près de la moitié des pays de la planète n’ont toujours pas accès à ces systèmes d’une importance vitale. À l’ère du numérique, il est déplorable que des personnes perdent la vie ou voient leurs moyens de subsistance anéantis faute d’avoir accès à des systèmes d’alerte précoce efficaces.

    L’initiative « Alertes précoces pour tous » de l’Organisation des Nations Unies vise à ce que chaque habitant de la planète soit protégé par un système d’alerte d’ici à 2027. La communauté internationale doit unir ses forces et accroître d’urgence ses efforts et ses investissements pour atteindre cet objectif.

    Il est primordial que chaque pays accorde à l’initiative un soutien politique de haut niveau, qu’un appui plus énergique soit offert sur le plan des technologies, que les gouvernements, les entreprises et les communautés resserrent leur coopération et que les financements connaissent un véritable bond. Il est également crucial d’accroître la capacité de prêt des banques multilatérales de développement. Le Pacte pour l’avenir, adopté l’an dernier, a permis de poser des bases solides ; il doit maintenant être appliqué pleinement. Il faut également concrétiser les engagements pris en matière de financement à la vingt-neuvième session de la Conférence des Parties à la Convention-cadre des Nations Unies sur les changements climatiques (COP 29).

    Dans le même temps, il nous faut redoubler d’efforts pour chercher à résoudre la crise climatique à la source, en réduisant rapidement et fortement les émissions de gaz à effet de serre, afin d’éviter que la situation n’empire dans des proportions inimaginables. Cette année, tous les pays doivent honorer leur promesse de présenter de nouveaux plans d’action nationaux pour le climat qui soient compatibles avec l’objectif consistant à limiter le réchauffement planétaire à 1,5 degré Celsius.

    À l’ère des catastrophes climatiques, il faut que chaque personne sur Terre soit protégée par un système d’alerte précoce ; il s’agit là d’une question de justice. Ensemble, donnons corps à cette ambition.

    ***
     

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-OSI United Nations: Mind your language: The battle for linguistic diversity in AI

    Source: United Nations 2

    By Fabrice Robinet

    Culture and Education

    For two years, one international organization under the umbrella of the UN has been leading a relentless campaign in the corridors of global digital diplomacy. Its mission? To bring linguistic diversity to English-dominated artificial intelligence.

    With his signature geeky glasses and TED-Talk-style headset, Sundar Pichai looked straight out of a Silicon Valley incubator.

    That Monday, February 10, Google’s chief executive took the stage at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. From the Grand Palais podium, he heralded a new golden age of innovation.

    “Using AI techniques, we added over 110 new languages to Google Translate last year, spoken by half a billion people around the world,” said the tech mogul, his eyes fixed on his notes. “That brings our total to 249 languages, including 60 African languages – more to come.”

    Delivered in a monotone, his statement barely registered among the summit’s attendees – an assembly of world leaders, researchers, NGOs, and tech executives.

    © Permanent Mission of Canada

    But for advocates of linguistic diversity in artificial intelligence, Mr. Pichai’s words marked a quiet victory – one achieved after two years of intense, behind-the-scenes negotiations in the arcane world of digital diplomacy.

    “It shows the message is getting through and tech companies are listening,” said Joseph Nkalwo Ngoula, digital policy advisor at the UN mission of the International Organisation of La Francophonie, in New York.

    Linguistic divide

    Mr. Pichai’s speech was a far cry from the linguistic missteps of early generative AI – a branch of artificial intelligence capable of creating original content, from text to images, music and animation.

    When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, non-English speakers quickly discovered its limitations.

    A query in English would generate a detailed, informative response. The same prompt in French? Two paragraphs, followed by a sheepish apology: “Sorry, I haven’t been trained on that,” or, “my model isn’t updated beyond this date.”

    Such a gap lies in the intricate mechanics of AI tools, which rely on so-called large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Meta’s LlaMA, or Google’s Gemini to digest vast troves of internet data that help them understand and generate text.

    But the internet itself is overwhelmingly Anglophone. While only 20 per cent of the world’s population speaks English at home, nearly half of the training data for major AI models is in English.

    Even today, ChatGPT’s responses in French, Portuguese, or Spanish have improved but remain less illuminating than their English counterparts.

    UN Photo/Elma Okic

    Sharper focus

    “The volume of available information in English is much greater, but it’s also more up to date,” said Mr. Nkalwo Ngoula. By default, AI models are conceived, trained, and deployed in English, leaving other languages struggling to catch up.

    The divide isn’t just quantitative. AI, when deprived of robust training in any given language, starts to “hallucinate” – generating incorrect or absurd answers with unsettling authority – much like an overconfident friend bluffing his way through trivia night.

    A classic AI hallucination consists of responding to a request for biographical details about a famous person by inventing a Nobel Prize or coming up with an odd parallel career, as in this example generated by ChatGPT, at the behest of UN News:

    UN News: ‘Who is Victor Hugo?’

    Hallucinating AI: “Victor Hugo, the 19th-century French writer, was also a passionate astronaut who contributed to the early design of the International Space Station.” 🚀😆

    Black box

    “It’s a black box absorbing data,” Mr. Nkalwo Ngoula explained. “The results might be formally coherent and logically structured, but factually, they can be wildly inaccurate.”

    Beyond factual errors, AI tends to flatten linguistic richness. Chatbots struggle with regional accents and language variations, such as Quebecois French or Creole languages spoken in Haiti and the French Caribbean.

    AI-generated French often feels sanitized, stripped of its stylistic nuances.

    “Molière, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Mongo Beti – they’d all be turning in their graves if they saw how A.I. writes French today,” joked Mr. Nkalwo Ngoula.

    The issue runs deeper in multilingual countries, as in the diplomat’s native Cameroon, where youth commonly speak Camfranglais – a hybrid of French, English, Pidgin, and local languages.

    “I doubt young people could ask an AI something in Camfranglais and get a meaningful response,” he said. Expressions like “Je yamo ce pays” (I love this country) or “Réponds-moi sharp-sharp” (Answer me quickly) would likely leave A.I. models bewildered.

    UN Photo/Loey Felipe

    Shadow Campaign of La Francophonie

    Mr. Nkalwo Ngoula’s organization, La Francophonie – which brings together 93 states and governments around the use of French, representing more than 320 million people worldwide – has made this linguistic gap a centerpiece of its digital strategy.

    The group’s efforts culminated in last year’s UN Global Digital Compact, a framework for AI governance adopted by the Member States. From 2023 onward, La Francophonie leveraged its diplomatic network – including the influential Francophone Ambassadors’ Group at the UN – to ensure linguistic diversity became a core principle in AI policymaking.

    Along the way, unexpected allies emerged. Lusophone and Hispanic advocacy groups joined the fight, and even Washington sided with their cause. “The US defended language inclusion in AI development,” Mr. Nkalwo Ngoula noted.

    Their push paid off. The final Global Digital Compact explicitly recognizes cultural and linguistic diversity – an issue that had initially been buried under broader discussions on accessibility. “Our goal was to bring it to the forefront,” he said.

    The movement even reached Silicon Valley. At the UN Summit for the Future in September 2024, where the Compact was officially adopted, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, surprised many by emphasizing the need for A.I. to provide access to global knowledge in multiple languages.

    “We’re working toward 1,000 of the world’s most spoken languages,” he pledged – a commitment he reaffirmed in Paris months later.

    Limits of the Global Digital Compact

    Despite these gains, challenges remain. Chief among them is visibility. “Francophone content is often buried by platform algorithms,” Mr Nkalwo Ngoula warns.

    Streaming giants like Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify prioritize popularity, meaning English-language content dominates search results.

    “If linguistic diversity were truly considered, a French-speaking user should see French-language films at the top of their recommendations,” he argued.

    The overwhelming dominance of English in AI training data is another hurdle sidestepped by the Compact, which also omits any reference to UNESCO’s Convention on Cultural Diversity – an oversight that, according to Mr. Nkalwo Ngoula, should be rectified.

    “Linguistic diversity must be the backbone of digital advocacy for La Francophonie,” Nkalwo Ngoula insisted.

    Given the pace of AI development, those changes can’t come a moment too soon.

    MIL OSI United Nations News –

  • MIL-OSI China: Key consensus reached at China-Japan high-level economic dialogue

    Source: China State Council Information Office

    Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, co-chairs the sixth China-Japan High-Level Economic Dialogue with Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya in Tokyo, Japan, March 22, 2025. Officials from 15 government departments of both countries attended the meeting. (Xinhua/Jia Haocheng)

    Chinese Foreign Minister and member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee Wang Yi and Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya on Saturday co-chaired the sixth China-Japan High-Level Economic Dialogue in Tokyo, pledging efforts to deepen economic collaboration between the two nations.

    Both sides agreed to jointly implement an important consensus reached by their leaders, enrich the economic dimension of the China-Japan strategic relationship of mutual benefit, and work together to build a constructive and stable economic and trade relationship that meets the demands of a new era.

    The dialogue concluded with 20 key consensus points regarding cooperation in areas such as green development, environmental protection, elderly care services, service trade, food safety, supply chains and intellectual property protection, among others.

    The two sides agreed to support each other in hosting multiple events, and hold consultations and dialogues at various levels.

    The two countries also agreed to hold the seventh China-Japan High-Level Economic Dialogue in China at an appropriate time. 

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI China: US military launches fresh strikes on Yemen’s Hodeidah airport, central province

    Source: China State Council Information Office

    The U.S. naval forces carried out three strikes on the Hodeidah airport in the Yemeni Red Sea port city, and five strikes on the Majzar district in Yemen’s central province of Marib on Saturday night, Houthi-run al-Masirah TV reported.

    The report did not provide details on casualties or damage caused by the attacks, and there has been no comment from the U.S. side yet.

    The Hodeidah airport has been closed to civilian flights since late 2014 when the Houthi group seized control over several northern cities, including the strategic city of Hodeidah. The airport has also been a frequent target of previous U.S. airstrikes.

    Earlier on Saturday, the Houthis said they had carried out a sixth attack on U.S. naval forces in the northern Red Sea since March 15, launching several drones at warships escorting the USS Harry S. Truman.

    The Houthis said they had also launched a ballistic missile attack on Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, an assault the Israeli military said was intercepted late on Friday.

    The Houthis, which control much of northern Yemen, including the capital Sanaa, have been fighting against the internationally-recognized government since 2014.

    Tensions between the Houthis and the U.S. military have escalated since Washington launched fresh airstrikes on Yemen on March 15. The strikes followed Houthi threats to resume attacks on Israeli targets unless humanitarian aid is allowed into Gaza. 

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI China: S. Korean government declares state of disaster over massive wildfires

    Source: China State Council Information Office

    The South Korean government declared a state of disaster on Saturday over wildfires that broke out in the country’s southeastern areas including Ulsan city, North Gyeongsang province and South Gyeongsang province, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said.

    A mountain fire first broke out in Sancheong County in the province of South Gyeongsang on Friday afternoon before the fire continued to spread on Saturday.

    More massive mountain fires erupted on Saturday morning in other parts of the southeastern regions.

    Acting President Choi Sang-mok inspected the situation in the affected places, ordered relevant authorities to work together to mobilize all equipment available and bring the wildfires under complete control.

    At around 3:30 p.m. local time on the same day, the Korea Forest Service raised the national emergency alert level in the most affected areas to its highest, which is the “severe” stage.

    So far, four firefighters were reported dead and six were injured, local media reported. 

    MIL OSI China News –

  • MIL-OSI China: China, Japan, ROK FMs pledge to advance trilateral cooperation

    Source: China State Council Information Office

    China is ready to work with Japan and the Republic of Korea (ROK) to elevate China-Japan-ROK cooperation under the new circumstances, and make it more mature, stable and resilient, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in Tokyo on Saturday.

    Wang, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks at the 11th China-Japan-ROK Trilateral Foreign Ministers’ Meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Takeshi Iwaya and ROK Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul.

    Noting that the trilateral cooperation is one of the most deeply rooted, highly institutionalized, and promising cooperation frameworks in East Asia, Wang said the three-way cooperation has yielded positive results over the past 20 years since its inception, which not only benefits the peoples of the three countries and their respective development, but also promotes regional stability and economic integration.

    With the joint efforts of the three parties, new progress has been made in the cooperation in the six key areas identified at the Ninth China-Japan-ROK Trilateral Summit, Wang said, adding that facts have proved that the more solid China-Japan-ROK cooperation, the stronger the ability of the three countries to withstand risks, the stronger the foundation for empowering development, and the more effective the promotion of mutual understanding and friendship between the peoples.

    Wang noted 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, as well as the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, and only by sincerely reflecting on history can we truly create the future.

    The three countries should review the consensus of “facing history squarely and looking to the future,” stick to the original intention of cooperation and promote the China-Japan-ROK cooperation to achieve the effect of “1+1+1>3” for the benefit of the three countries, the region and the world.

    Stressing that wind and rain are the norm, but being undeterred by them is a state of mind, Wang said to achieve steady and lasting trilateral cooperation, it is essential to create a virtuous cycle of mutual reinforcement with bilateral relations.

    In particular, the three countries need to respect each other’s core interests, properly manage differences, and continuously build consensus, cultivate momentum and deepen cooperation on the basis of maintaining sound and steady relations, Wang said.

    First, Wang said, the three countries will deepen economic and trade cooperation and strengthen its role as the “ballast stone.” Negotiations on the China-Japan-ROK Free Trade Agreement should be resumed at an early date to reach an agreement, expand mutual trade and investment, set up a trilateral dialogue mechanism on export controls, and maintain the stability and smoothness of industrial and supply chains.

    Second, to promote scientific and technological innovation to stimulate new drivers for growth. In line with the principle of openness and cooperation, we will share innovation opportunities and enable new quality productive forces to better empower the high-quality development of the three countries. A trilateral dialogue mechanism on digital economy cooperation will be established. Japan and the ROK are welcome to actively participate in the China-Japan-ROK Innovation Cooperation Center that China is planning to establish.

    Third, to expand people-to-people and cultural exchanges and consolidate public support. We will strive to increase the number of people-to-people exchanges among the three countries to 40 million by 2030, ensure the success of the China-Japan-ROK Year of Cultural Exchange from 2025 to 2026, continue to build the brands of “Culture City of East Asia” and “CAPMUS Asia,” carry forward the fine traditional culture of East Asia, and promote mutual understanding and friendship among our peoples.

    Fourth, to respond to common challenges and promote sustainable development. We will deepen cooperation in healthy aging, medical and health care, new energy, green development and ecological and environmental protection, and strengthen cooperation in disaster management, police and counterterrorism, and jointly address non-traditional security challenges.

    At present, as changes unseen in a century accelerate, global economic growth remains sluggish, geopolitical conflicts are intensifying and the global openness index keeps declining, Wang pointed out that China, Japan and the ROK, as important countries in the Asia-Pacific and major economies in the world, should adhere to the general direction of open economy, jointly uphold free trade, firmly safeguard the rule-based multilateral trading system, foster an open, inclusive and non-discriminatory international economic environment, and promote economic globalization that benefits all.

    We should actively promote regional cooperation, support the building of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Community, create more “China-Japan-ROK+” cooperation projects, and inject strong impetus into the development of East Asia cooperation with the vitality of trilateral cooperation, Wang added.

    He said the three countries should practice a new concept of common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security and jointly safeguard regional and world peace, noting we should adhere to the unity of independence and self-reliance and take the destiny of Asia into its own hands.

    The top diplomats of the three countries exchanged in-depth views on trilateral cooperation as well as regional and international issues and made preparations for the 10th China-Japan-ROK Trilateral Summit, believing that they should jointly maintain the momentum of trilateral cooperation, advance practical cooperation in the six key areas in a comprehensive and balanced manner based on the Trilateral Cooperation Vision for the Next Decade, explore new areas of cooperation and expand future-oriented cooperation on the basis of maintaining continuity.

    The three sides also agreed on continuing to deepen people-to-people and culture exchanges, enhance mutual understanding and mutual trust, enrich practical cooperation in various fields, and work for more new outcomes that benefit the peoples of the three countries and the region.

    MIL OSI China News –