Despite being one of the Liberals’ strongest performers, frontbencher Jonno Duniam is quitting politics by the end of this year – and leaving with some regrets.

Duniam, 43, is Angus Taylor’s home affairs spokesman and has been in the Senate for nearly a decade. He’s been central in the crafting of the opposition’s immigration policy, which is still to be fully released.

Duniam joined the podcast to reflect on his time in politics, the future of the Liberals, dealing with One Nation – and how his sons responded to the news of him quitting politics.

I’ve been in and around politics for 25 years, ten of those as a senator […] It means you aren’t there to help with the very basic things, like getting ready for school and packing lunches and picking up and dropping off.

[…] It is not a good feeling sitting in Canberra doing your job while there is an issue that needs dealing with for family. And I know that is a common issue. I’ve talked about with colleagues across the political spectrum […] This is not unique to politics [… But] when you’re 20, 25 weeks of the year away from home, it does mount up.

Duniam recounts breaking the news of his retirement to his three boys, aged 11 to 17.

I snuck out early to pick up three copies of the local newspaper in which the story was broken that I was going to be leaving politics. And I left a copy of the paper for each of my sons. And my youngest son, Spencer, got up and read it and he was heard to say, as he was flicking through the paper, ‘I never thought this day would come.’ He’s my youngest.

My oldest has missed out on a lot of me being around, he’s on the verge of turning 18. And my 15 year old, I think you could only say is elated by this decision. So I know very much that I’ve made the right call, and I think those boys are going to benefit.

Why he’s leaving, even with some guilt

Duniam denied he was quitting politics because of the Coalition’s faltering performance – now running a long way third in the polls, behind One Nation and Labor:

It’s got nothing to do with where we’re at, but everything to do with my own life and where I’m at […] Now that does leave me with a feeling of guilt, I’ll be honest. There’s a sense of regret in leaving friends and trusted colleagues on the field of battle, when they’re going to keep fighting a very, very tough fight and I’m leaving.

[…] That is something that doesn’t sit easily with me, but […] I can’t do my job justice and be a father to my boys properly. Something was going to have to give and I made the decision that it is my boys and my family that came first, ahead of this job, after ten years of giving it everything I’ve got.

Looking for ‘signs of life’ in the Liberals

On why the Liberals are in such a bad state, Duniam said they did “nothing” during the nine months after the 2025 election.

For the first nine months after that devastating election result, we did nothing. We did nothing to turn the dial […] When you’re out in the community, people [were] saying, you know ‘come on, you guys have got to get your act together.’

[…] In the lead up to our leadership change, there was frankly you know, no sign of us doing that […] And that’s why, in my belief, people started changing when it comes to answering those polling questions – ‘Who would you vote for? One Nation, the Liberals, Labor, Green’ – people were going from the Libs to One Nation in great numbers.

He said since becoming Liberal leader, Angus Taylor had been providing “signs of life” for Australians who’d turned away from the party – and while “it’s far from job done”, the Liberals were “on the right track” now.

Why it’s ‘mad’ to be talking One Nation deals now

On potential preference deals with One Nation, Duniam said it’s “mad” to suggest the party should be considering that now:

I do not for one minute subscribe to this notion that we should be having conversations about preference deals or coalition governments right now. It’s mad to suggest that that’s what we should be doing as a party. Would you ever see a Labor politician saying, ‘you know what, it’s okay if you want to vote Green, because we are not, sort of, Green enough for you’.

On the Coalition’s immigration policy

Duniam isn’t quitting politics immediately, partly because he wants to finalise his party’s immigration policy before he goes.

On the challenge of crafting that policy without dividing Australians, Duniam said:

The immigration debate – if you just take the headline out of a press conference that I may have done or Angus or whoever – it’s easy to turn it into a divisive anti-immigrant rant from the Liberals trying to outdo One Nation.

[But] when you sit down and explain it to someone who might have misapprehended our policy intentions, they accept what we’re doing and think, ‘oh, that’s actually not so bad after all beyond the headline’. That is the difficulty in Australian politics, of course.

We’ve got to talk to all Australians on issues that are important to them. And […] if we keep trying out One Nation, One Nation on […] particular issues like immigration to the exclusion of others, then we won’t win back these votes. But I know our plan will be for all Australians, on a range of issues that everyone is concerned about.

Attracting young talent, despite ‘clowns in Canberra’

Duniam was still confident young people would keep wanting to join politics, as he did at an early age. But he agreed the state of the politics today doesn’t always help.

We don’t help ourselves when we behave in certain ways, and people think ‘who would be a politician? Look at those clowns in Canberra.’ So there is an element of the nature of the industry we’re in that probably is less helpful to attracting young people than the busyness of the job itself.

He said none of his three sons wanted to run for politics now – but he would support them if they ever changed their minds.

I think we do need good people – and I hope to raise good men in my sons – to run for parliament […] I’ve loved doing this job. Yes, there have been times I’ve hated it. Of course, I’d be lying to you if I said otherwise. But, by and large, it’s been the privilege and honour of a lifetime to represent Tasmania in the Senate.

[…] That is the one thing I will leave parliament knowing […] There are a lot of flawed, broken people in that building, and I happen to be one of them. But, for the most part, people want to the best they can for the people they represent. I might disagree with how they want to get there, or the policy or the law that they’re proposing, but I applaud them for wanting to have a go.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

UK media celebrity Jeremy Clarkson this week revealed he has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.

He told his co-stars about the diagnosis on air during the latest season of Clarkson’s Farm. At the time of filming, he said he didn’t know whether he would be back for another season. However, he said the cancer had been caught early and he was receiving treatment.

Clarkson specifically noted his cancer was “aggressive”.

So what does this actually mean? And what makes some cancers more aggressive than others?

What is an aggressive cancer?

When doctors and scientists refer to a cancer being aggressive, they mean it’s fast-growing.

This is the definition authorities, such as the National Cancer Institute in the United States or the Cancer Council Victoria in Australia, use.

Cancers occur when your body’s cells acquire DNA mutations that alter their behaviour. For instance, certain mutations might lead cells to evade death or divide uncontrollably. Mutations can also affect how fast this division occurs.

For instance, DNA mutations leading to excessive production of the MYC protein allow cells to grow and divide more rapidly. Dividing quickly and uncontrollably is the simplest measure of cancer aggression.

As the name suggests, aggressive cancers are quite dangerous. The speed at which they can develop and grow means they are more likely to be diagnosed only once they have reached a more advanced stage and spread to other parts of the body.

Sadly, once cancers have spread and are considered “advanced”, they are very difficult to treat.

However, if an aggressive cancer is caught early, there are usually treatment options.

How about treatment?

Sometimes, the aggressiveness of a cancer can be exploited as a weakness and used against it.

For example, chemotherapy works by damaging DNA. When cells divide, if their DNA is also damaged, they die. But as cancer cells grow faster than most other cells in our body, the chemotherapy essentially destroys the cancer cells first. Therefore, fast-growing cancer cells can be more susceptible to chemotherapy.

A good example is the blood cancer known as Burkitt lymphoma. Burkitt lymphomas generally express abnormally high levels of MYC protein, making them highly aggressive.

Most Burkitt lymphoma patients (64–85%) can be cured with intensive chemotherapy. This was also one of the first cancer types to be cured by chemotherapy alone, back in the 1960s.

Why are some cancers more aggressive than others?

Every cancer is different. Different genetic mutations drive different abnormal behaviours, and these behaviours are linked to the cancer’s aggressiveness. And, for every part of the body, there can be dozens of different sub-types of cancer.

However, many cancers share certain characteristics, meaning we can make some generalisations.

For example, pancreatic cancers and a sub-type of breast cancer known as “triple-negative” are highly aggressive. They grow rapidly and have limited treatment options.

But there are always new treatments being developed for many aggressive cancers once thought untreatable.

One example is the development of a new drug that targets the cancer-promoting protein, KRAS. In clinical trials, this drug nearly doubled the survival of people with aggressive pancreatic cancers.

How about Clarkson’s cancer?

It is impossible to speculate about Clarkson’s case without more information. Most prostate cancers are not considered aggressive, and people can live for many years with slower growing, non-spreading, low-risk forms.

For more aggressive forms, the prognosis often depends on how early the cancer is detected. Prostate cancer is more common in men over the age of 50, but symptoms are not always apparent early, and screening techniques are imperfect.

If you are concerned about your cancer risk, it’s best to see your doctor for personal advice.

Sarah Diepstraten, Senior Research Officer, Blood Cells and Blood Cancer Division, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research) and John (Eddie) La Marca, Senior Research Officer, Blood Cells and Blood Cancer, WEHI (Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research)

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the renowned Holocaust documentary, Shoah (1985), former SS guard Franz Suchomel sings a song prisoners had to perform in the Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. After finishing the last line, he chillingly asks the director, Claude Lanzmann: “Satisfied? That’s unique. No Jew knows that today!”

More than 30 years before, in 1945, Yehuda Eismann, a Holocaust survivor, published a little collection of songs, conveyed to him by Jewish refugees passing through Bucharest in Romania. He called it Mima’amakim: folkslider fun lagers un getos in poyln 1939-1944 (Out of the Depths: Folks Songs from the Camps and Ghettos of Poland, 1939-1944).

“The poets and the others who sang the songs are for the most part no longer living,” he wrote in the introduction. But the songs survived. Passed from mouth to mouth, they lived among survivors. Eismann and his team collected and recorded them to create a “memorial stone for Polish Jewry”, a community largely destroyed by the Holocaust.

Review: Out of the depths: the first collection of Holocaust songs – by Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher (Manchester University Press)

Eighty years later, two Sydney-based scholars, Joseph Toltz and Anna Boucher, republished the songs, with information about their authors. The collection shows that the Nazi plan to erase the memory of those slated for destruction – their suffering, but also their resilience – failed.

A lucky coincidence led to the recovery of these hidden voices of the Holocaust. In 2013, Olga R., a Sydney based Polish–Jewish survivor, passed away. Her family found a little booklet containing songs written in Yiddish in her cupboard. They shared it with Toltz, which led to more than a decade of arduous labour, tracing the origin of the songs and the fate of their authors. This incredible piece of history includes the musical score and translations of the songs.

Music and Holocaust history

Songs are part of Holocaust history. In concentration and death camps, such as Treblinka, Auschwitz and Janowska, the SS forced Jewish inmates to perform songs as a way of mocking and torturing them. The camp orchestras had to play as Jews marched to the backbreaking slave labour, or to their death.

In other contexts, Jewish prisoners in the ghettos, camps or forests performed songs to keep their spirits high and forge a strong collective identity. Others responded to the events they witnessed and composed new songs. Some documented their experience; others paid respect to the memory of their loved ones, murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices.

Many of the songs died with their authors before the end of the war. But others spread around the world during the massive postwar migration of Holocaust survivors, staying hidden among personal belongings – until their discovery decades later.

Eismann, who recorded these songs, was born in 1913 in Lviv (Lemberg), a town now located in Ukraine, though between the world wars it was part of independent Poland. In 1941, the town was occupied by the German army and the Nazis together with Ukrainian nationalists orchestrated a brutal pogrom, killing hundreds of Jewish civilians. Eismann passed through several ghettos and camps, until he assumed a false identity and escaped to Budapest in Hungary. Eventually, in late 1944, he moved to liberated Bucharest. His parents and brother perished.

In Bucharest, Eismann and a small team – including architect Flora Romm, his future wife, and Olga R., who later came to Australia – recorded close to 1,000 protocols with Jewish survivors who passed through the city. They tried to capture their memories of wartime events immediately after the liberation.

Similar initiatives developed across liberated Europe. Survivor activists collected evidence to record the wartime persecution, commemorate those who perished and help bring to justice those who caused their predicament. But the survivors carried more than just their trauma and memory of the persecution.

As Eismann wrote, “as refugees arrive the songs arrive with them”. Testifying and recording the songs helped survivors cope with the trauma of survival. It also returned agency to those who suffered for so long. The book is another proof that the oft-repeated dictum about survivors’ silence early after the war, and their unwillingness to talk about their experiences is inaccurate.

Toltz and Boucher situate Eismann’s efforts in the long tradition of Jewish zemler (collectors): ethnographers who recorded traditional Jewish culture at the time of mass migration and dislocation. The destruction wrought by the Holocaust, however, turned them into “crisis ethnographers”, who captured the lost world and the civilisation the Nazis tried to erase.

The Holocaust as a global event

The story of the authors, composers and performers is also about global migration, Toltz and Boucher suggest.

There is a common belief that Holocaust survivors moved straight from the liberated camps to what is now Israel. In fact, survivors passed through Bucharest on their way from eastern Europe to their new homes overseas. Many of those who passed through Bucharest migrated to other places, including countries in Europe and the Americas.

With them, they carried the trauma of survivor and memory of the Holocaust, including the cultural production that originated during the genocide. When they stopped in Bucharest, Eismann and his team, through their strenuous efforts, captured their memories. The survivors then moved to their new homelands, bringing the story of the Holocaust and their communities to the rest of the world.

The discovery of the songbook in Sydney reminds us that Australia was part of the Holocaust’s geography. Around 27,000 survivors came to Australian shores in the decades after the war. Eismann and Romm settled in Tel Aviv.

‘Death has taken all I love’

Preparing the book, Eismann wanted to offer a holistic perspective on the Jews’ experiences. The survivors came from eastern Europe, where the Jews were the first to experience the deathly part of the Nazi persecution in the summer of 1941. More than 90% of Polish Jews perished.

The narrative arc of Mima’amakim has a redemptive direction, leading us through three sections: despair, hope, and battle and victory. The songs do not shy away from dealing with traumatic experiences of the suffering and death in the ghettos and camps.

In The Third pogrom, the author, Ayzik Flaysher, 13 at the time, wrote:

Brothers shot, my sisters lost, impoverished in the death. Death has taken all I love and left me here to mourn.

Later, the songs turn to themes more familiar from other popular Holocaust songs: Jewish partisans (or, resistance fighters), resistance itself and hope for survival.

Many of the songs originated from Vilna (contemporary Vilnius in Lithuania), where Romm lived. The Jewish partisan groups were active in this area. Their members composed several resistance songs, including the Partisan March:

Comes the hour that we have yearned for, strong and dear. As our footsteps drum the beat: now we are here!

Jewish resistance

The book raises the contentious question of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Some of the songs are directly related to the experiences of Jewish fighters.

The truth is, only a small minority of Jews actively fought against the Nazis and their local collaborators with weapons. But the assumption that the Jews “went like sheep to the slaughter” is based on a wrong premise.

The Jews lived in a hostile environment. They faced a mighty, well-organised army. They knew that once they started fighting, they condemned the weaker of them – women, children, the elderly – to death. That is why a wider definition of resistance is more appropriate.

Some historians promote the concepts of Amidah (standing up against) and sanctification of life. They argue any activity that went against the declared Nazi goals of destroying the Jews, their humanity and any traces of their existence counted as resistance.

This included cultural or education activities in the ghettos and camps that helped to ensure a meaningful Jewish survival. It could be almost any activity that supported other prisoners, kept their spirit high and helped them cope with the persecution. Some of the songs recorded in the book certainly belong to the category.

Many have opposed this wide definition. Already, during the war, some Jewish people opposed cultural activities in the ghettos and camps. They criticised those who staged theatre performances, cabarets or concerts. You do not sing and dance on the graves of millions, they believed. Others saw it as escapism that distracted prisoners from “real” resistance activities, like fighting the Germans and their accomplices with guns.

A task for all of us

The question of resistance is open to interpretation. However, cultural production during the Holocaust, including these songs, ensured the survival of the memory of what happened – and evidence of Jewish responses to persecution. The authors and interpreters behind this book have preserved the humanity of the victims.

Those who composed the songs are no longer with us. The songs remind us about the fate of millions who perished during the Nazi-led genocide. They also carry a deeper meaning now, when the last survivors are dying.

The songs, their authors and those remembered in the lyrics are here to stay. As Toltz and Boucher ask: “Please share the stories of these contributors, sing the music of this book and carry with you their resilience, tenacity and creativity.” This is a task for all of us.

Jan Lanicek, Associate Professor in Modern European History and Jewish History, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.