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Can you imagine Australia without Medicare, the age pension, or with 50% tariffs on imported goods such as cars, clothes and shoes?

Institutions we take for granted now took many decades of agitating, fighting vested interests and staring down passive resistance to be created. This is the realpolitik of economics.

Economic reforms have changed institutions and systems to significantly improve wellbeing for Australians. They are less glamorous than scientific and technological innovations, but our standard of living would be very much worse without them.

To some extent ideas are cheap. They are the fun part of reform. The heavy slog of realising ideas can consume lives and test the dedication of even extraordinary people.

These struggles show that reform has never been easy, but persistence pays off.

The 30-year battle for Medicare

Before 1975, health care was largely fee-for-service with some private insurance coverage. Most uninsured people were low-income and people with chronic or severe problems.

Between 1937 and 1953, there were four failed attempts to introduce a universal health plan. However, it was fiercely opposed at every turn by the medical and health insurance associations. They fought at both the emotional and political level and managed to forestall a national health insurance scheme by three decades.

The final successful push to introduce a universal scheme came from research work at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic Research at the University of Melbourne. An alliance with sympathetic media created enough heat that Gough Whitlam, then deputy leader of the opposition, supported it behind the scenes.

After the Coalition won the 1969 federal election, the reform plan was opposed by all other federal members of parliament, including Labor. However, Labor’s Bill Hayden and Whitlam continued to make it official Labor policy.

Labor won the 1972 election, but medical bodies still resisted the reform. One set up a A$2 million “fighting fund”. The General Practitioners Society asked GPs to distribute letters that included the line: “The control of our country has fallen into the hands of socialists.”

The argy-bargy between Hayden, the doctors, private insurers, hospitals, bureaucrats and state governments could fill volumes.

The sticking points were about money, profits and control – not what was in the best interests of the population. The legislation was eventually passed in 1974.

Successive generations of health department officials had simply believed that reforms to the health care system were not possible.

Garnishing wages to support children

Before the mid-1980s, financial support for children following divorce was either agreed privately or determined by court order. Although courts typically struck very low rates of payment, compliance was estimated to be only 30%. Custodial parents often lived in extreme poverty.

The problem at the time was easy to articulate: why should children suffer because their parents had decided to separate?

Labor’s Minister for Social Security Brian Howe intended to solve this problem. He appointed experts Bettina Cass and Meredith Edwards to build an evidence base and implement a solution.

Edwards proposed that employers deduct payments directly from workers’ wages, along with income tax. The child payment portion would be transferred to the custodial parent.

As strange as it sounds, it was opposed all along the social security chain of command. It was considered an “impossible reform”, according to Edwards.

The department of social security was openly hostile. At first, it did not take the review seriously, then it kept putting up different arguments for why it could not be done. Finally, it moved Edwards and her team out of the building as they posed a “safety risk”.

Undeterred, the team never took no for an answer and worked out solutions for each “unsurmountable” barrier.

The tax office was also antagonistic to assisting the child support unit, saying it wasn’t their job and it would cost too much to run.

The child support scheme officially began in 1988, meaning it’s now been in place for almost two generations.

Dismantling trade barriers

By the 1950s, Australia was the second most protectionist country among advanced economies, with an average tariff rate of about 30%.

By 2017, Australia had close to the lowest tariff rates in the world, with an average tariff of less than 1%. How did this come about?

The Australian journey to a low-tariff environment was driven by the intellectual force of academic economists. It was eventually taken up by successive Australian governments.

The arguments from economists such as Max Corden and Dick Snape were that Australia’s high level of import tariffs were lowering the average standard of living of the Australian people by forcing people to pay high prices for imported goods.

Economic evidence was used to considerable effect. Work done by politicians, backed by evidence from economists in academia and the public service, eventually disarmed manufacturers. Evidence made manufacturers focus on long-term issues rather than just immediate effects. Economic analysis was used to set out clearly the trade-offs of not making a change.

The business media was often brought in as an ally.

It took many reports by the Productivity Commission and its predecessors for the export and household sectors to appreciate how much tariffs were undermining their standard of living.

The main opponents to tariff reform were the NSW Labor right and the Business Council of Australia. However, the National Farmers Federation and the Australian Mining Industry Council eventually understood the (positive) implications for their exports and exerted their muscle.

By the 1980s, the broad arguments were largely accepted by both major parties and the labour movement. As a trade economist, Corden advocated for a gradual simplification of tariff rates and then reduction of import barriers. The Button Plan in the 1980s, and later plans from the Bracks and Green Reviews in the 2000s, had programs to help affected businesses refocus their markets or close in an orderly manner.

Interestingly, tariff reforms were not traditional Labor issues. But they were adopted by then Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Treasurer Paul Keating, who realised that some of the party’s mantras were undermining the party’s goals of social and economic justice.

What do we learn from these examples?

There are none so blind and belligerent as vested interests. We’ve seen this more recently in the vocal pushback to the federal government’s recent tax reforms.

Australia has entrenched economic and social problems, from unaffordable housing to wealth inequality.

No government, from any party, can fix those problems in one or two terms. History shows it takes persistent work over decades. At times, change can feel impossible. But that’s what health officials once said about setting up Medicare too.

Beth Webster, Director, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne

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

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t yet causing widespread job losses in Australia. But with some high-profile business leaders still predicting a looming unemployment “crisis” it’s little wonder many people fear AI is coming for their job.

Anxiety about automation dates back to the early days of the industrial revolution. We know with the benefit of hindsight that the machinery of mass production ultimately did upend the lives of many workers and transform the world.

Yet today, centuries later, people haven’t stopped making things by hand; far from it. In much of the world, handicrafts are booming. From quilting and knitting to pottery and wood carving, many old skills are enjoying something of a resurgence among a new generation.

So, what’s behind the enduring appeal of making something by hand? And can looking to the past teach us anything about this present moment?

The backlash to industrial abundance

Edmund Cartwright, an English clergyman and inventor, first patented an early version of the power loom in 1785. It took a few decades of refinement to develop this invention into a reliable machine, but its adoption ultimately redefined the textiles industry.

As the industrial revolution rolled on, a group of labour activists we now know as the “Luddites” protested the working conditions and job losses that resulted.

Today, the term is used to describe people generally hostile to new technologies, but this contemporary usage misses the fact that they did have a point: industrialisation did have a devastating impact on many workers and their communities.

However, responses to the industrial revolution were not only political and economic. They were also cultural and aesthetic, and in some cases, a rejection of the cheapness of industrial abundance.

Across Europe and beyond, the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th and early 20th century looked to craft practices, handmaking, and nature as stylistic inspiration for this most Victorian of radical politics.

As William Morris, designer, writer, activist and manufacturer famously stated at the time:

Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

An enduring appeal

Crafts are as popular as ever. According to recently released results from Creative Australia’s sixth National Arts Participation Survey, an estimated nine million Australians participate in creating some form of art or craft. Among these, visual arts and craft are the most common.

For many people, craft is more than a hobby. My previous research has shown that at the time of the last Australian census, 116,538 people were employed in jobs requiring craft skills, or 1.1% of the total workforce.

This included roles ranging from stonemasonry to industrial ceramics, scientific instrument making to textile production and fashion.

What about the cost?

Crafting today can be an expensive business. Hand spun, rare breed, naturally dyed wools can be knitted on handmade needles.

But you can also still pick up a pair of needles cheaply at your local op shop and some old wool from someone’s no-longer-needed stash.

However despite this growth in interest, Australia’s arts and craft retail sector is facing pressure from the shift to online sales.

In June, craft supplies and fabric supplier Lincraft announced it would be closing all physical Lincraft stores in Australia.

While some large retailers may be under pressure, more local, specialist and high-quality shops are opening to fill the demand for making materials driven by interest and recreation, not need or frugality.

Notably, across its 20 years of existence, craft supply stores have featured among Etsy’s most successful shops.

There is also growing demand for haberdashery, an over $A550 million sector, as new generations motivated by sustainability repair and alter existing garments rather than buy new ones.

Why analogue is so appealing

But more recently and often as part of wider trends driven by young people to make space to slow life down, avoid “doomscrolling” and perhaps get offline together, there is growing interest in the making side of craft.

Beside the sociality and sense of achievement this can offer, having the skills to repair items or re-use existing materials resonates with a commitment to living more sustainably.

In this way, craft can mark a re-calibration of our relationship to the material world grounded in care, doing things well, and at a human not industrial scale.

For some, too, crafting offers a way to connect with family across generations as they carry on a craft practice learned from parents or grandparents, linking with family memory and bringing this into the present (and hopefully, the future).

The time, labour and skill that goes into making rather than just buying a gift to give to another elevates that present to a whole new level of meaning.

A fulfilling sense of friction

Developing skills to turn materials into useful items has throughout history been a motivating human force. A key driver behind craft’s enduring appeal is precisely the friction of doing it “the old way”.

In the face of AI disruption, it is notable that creative manual work is seen as relatively safe from being replaced, requiring imagination and fine motor skills that AI can’t replicate.

Today, the sense of tangible achievement that comes from this offers many people, including growing numbers of younger people, a sense of control and agency in a world that often feels out of control, echoing again the words of William Morris:

A good way to rid one’s self of a sense of discomfort is to do something.

Susan Luckman, Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, Adelaide University

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

From fistfights in the corridors to tractors driven up its front steps, New Zealand’s parliament has seen plenty of odd and unruly behaviour by sitting MPs.

But a few other controversies have involved something slightly less rowdy: knitting.

In the latest instance, Labour MP Deborah Russell was spotted stitching together a woollen vest during parliament’s question time last week. Around half of more than 43,000 respondents to a Stuff poll thought it unacceptable.

Russell’s defence? It helps her stay calm and focused. She also described it as a way of signalling displeasure with the debate happening in the chamber.

In suggesting a political element, Russell wasn’t pulling the wool. Knitting happens to have a long and storied place in political protest in New Zealand and around the world.

A history of needling

Knitting is often seen as a quiet hobby for the home and hearth. And for good reason: research suggests it can be calming, aid concentration and create social connections.

But its quiet nature has also made knitting an unlikely tool for protest.

During the French Revolution, women known as tricoteuses famously knitted while watching public executions. During World War I, Belgian women reportedly used knitting to record the movements of German troops and artillery.

New Zealand has its own history of knitting rubbing up against politics. An 1880 illustration depicts women knitting as they watched proceedings from parliament’s ladies’ gallery.

Heather Nicholson’s history of New Zealand knitting, The Loving Stitch, contains a colourful anecdote from the women’s suffrage debate of this period: “a ball of wool rolled right up the Speaker’s chair”, while “a half-finished camisole fluttered down to the feet of a scandalised legislator”.

Whether this was simply a knitting mishap or a political gesture is unclear.

There was less ambiguity about Marilyn Waring. The renowned feminist and former National MP, who was the first woman to knit on parliament’s floor, later described her own knitting as a political act.

More recently, former National leader Bill English accused Labour’s Judith Tizard of showing “contempt and arrogance” by knitting in 2002. And in 2021, then-Labour MP Stuart Nash objected when ACT’s Nicole McKee knitted during a tribute to the Duke of Edinburgh.

Away from the halls of power, New Zealand has plenty of other examples of disruptive stitching. In 1955, women staged a “knit-in” on railway tracks to protest the closure of the Nelson railway line, continuing for ten days before being arrested.

Overseas, the pink “Pussyhat” became a symbol of the 2017 Women’s March in Washington DC, where hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered following Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Knitting has also been a source of cultural innovation. Māori women unravelled wool from imported knitted garments and reworked it into korowai – an example of one culture’s materials being adapted for another.

A common thread

These examples show how something associated with quiet domesticity can carry a very public message. Knitting offers a form of protest that does not need to be loud or confrontational to make a point.

There’s also a clever term for this: craftivism. In 2009, British activist Sarah Corbett founded the Craftivist Collective to promote what she called “the art of gentle protest”.

To better understand this phenomenon, I interviewed 50 women in four countries involved in knitting for social change.

In Australia, Christian social justice organisation Common Grace invited people to knit “climate scarves” for politicians, using coloured stripes to depict changes in average global temperatures over the previous century.

For some of the women I interviewed, the project offered a way to participate in politics when they might otherwise have felt powerless. As one grandmother told me: “I’ve never spoken to a politician… I’m a little ordinary person. I’m sitting here watching the world get hotter. [Knitting] gave me some agency.”

Another described the scarves as a gentler way of communicating the urgency of climate change.

In England, knitting was used to show solidarity with survivors of church abuse.

Survivors in the Diocese of Newcastle had adopted the strawberry as a symbol of resilience and change, prompting church knitting groups to make more than 600 red and green knitted strawberries.

Many carried handwritten messages of support and were displayed inside the cathedral. One participant described the result as “exuberant defiance” – a particularly potent description given how abuse within religious settings can involve the silencing of survivors. Here, their voices were being made visible at the heart of the church.

Across these projects, I found knitting could give people a sense of agency, connect those who might otherwise feel isolated and make overlooked voices more visible.

As amusing or irksome as it may have seemed to many of us, Deborah Russell’s knitting was part of a rich and meaningful tradition.

For generations, women have taken an activity often regarded as quaint and homely and carried it into public life – sometimes for comfort, sometimes for community and sometimes to make a political point.

Perhaps that’s why, after all these years, a harmless pair of knitting needles can still get parliament in a tangle.

Stephen John Taylor, Research Affiliate, Centre for Theology and Public Issues, University of Otago

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

Some 550 million years ago, the Earth looked very different to what it does today. The Southern Hemisphere was dominated by an enormous, single continent known as Gondwana.

This continent was first recognised by Austrian geologist Eduard Seuss in 1885 based on the presence of a unique plant fossil that was first discovered in the Gondwana Province of India. The fossils were then found in Australia, Africa, Antarctica and South America, demonstrating these land masses were once connected.

But whether Gondwana was an actual “supercontinent” has been a subject of intense scientific debate in recent years.

A new paper I coauthored, published today in Science Advances, helps settle the debate. Our team found a previously hidden part of the Gondwanan landmass that’s now buried under mountains, which shows it was much bigger than previously thought.

What exactly is a supercontinent?

The concept of supercontinents and supercontinental cycles came about in the mid-1980s when geologists first recognised cyclic, global-scale sea level changes in the geological record. These cycles dated back at least 2 billion years.

Since the 1980s, at least four supercontinents have been recognised. The youngest is Pangea which formed 300–250 million years ago. Gondwana is the second youngest at 550–500 million years. Rodinia formed about 1 billion years ago and the oldest verified is called Columbia or Nuna, which formed between 2–1.6 billion years ago.

However, the supercontinent status of Gondwana has been questioned in the 21st century. This was because an arbitrary value of 75% of continental landmass was considered necessary to attain supercontinent status and Gondwana was initially measured at 64%.

The initial measurement of Gondwana was based on five core continental fragments: India, South America, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. Subsequent measurements included landmasses extending from the Appalachian mountains in the United States, through southern Europe, to Turkey, Iran and Pakistan, then connecting to India.

Even so, the additional landmass was insufficient to increase the status of Gondwana.

Gondwana’s true scale

As is often the case in science, our team’s discovery of Gondwana’s buried bits was serendipitous.

We were compiling a global dataset of granite samples from around the world to understand how deep crustal processes relate to mineral formation. Part of that deep Earth understanding was to determine the age of the rocks from which the exposed granites – now at surface – came from.

Most granites are formed by melting older continental rocks. We used a special technique which measures the amount of radioactive isotopes in rocks. This technique has existed for several decades, but the individual datapoints from rock samples is rarely plotted at a continental scale. We did this at global-scale to generate an age-map of the deep Earth.

To give an example, even though some granites formed in the Himalayas only 20 million years ago, others formed at 50 million years. Still others formed at 120 million years ago. But our analysis showed that all the Himalayan granites were derived from a common continental block.

That block formed approximately 700–550 million years ago and was part of Gondwana.

We have traced the original Gondwanan fragments from India and southeast Asia, through most of China into Kazakhstan. Previously, much of this region was thought to be ancient ocean floor containing volcanic island chains like in the Pacific Ocean today.

It turns out that most of this region, which is now mountainous and covered by younger rocks, was originally part of Gondwana.

This finding expands Gondwana’s continental landmass to roughly 80%. In other words, it really was a supercontinent.

So what if Gondwana was a supercontinent?

It matters that greater Gondwana was a true supercontinent because the world changed immediately after it formed.

The formation of supercontinents can impact global dynamics, such as global climate and biological change, including the explosion of life on Earth between 550 and 500 million years ago.

Many models have invoked specific environmental effects for the Cambrian explosion, as this event is known. But the profound changes required a global cause-and-effect relation.

Even then, linking global climate, biology and geology is daunting. However, other isotopes found in carbon, oxygen and seawater were recording the same change. So here was a paradox to evaluate with our new information.

When greater Gondwana was forming between 750 and 550 million years ago, Himalayan-sized mountain ranges criss-crossed the supercontinent. Gondwana was an entirely frozen, arid landmass.

However, once the continental fragments amalgamated, Earth had to reconfigure its plate tectonics. A volcanic arc chain formed that encircled the supercontinent, extending from Russia, via China, Australia, Antarctica, South Africa to the Andes of South America.

This volcanic arc around Gondwana was the precursor of today’s Ring of Fire around the Pacific Ocean. It was also similar in length, almost 35,000km.

Like the present day, this ancient ring of fire was associated with constant volcanic eruptions. It released huge amounts of volcanic gases, especially water vapour and carbon dioxide. Present-day gas emissions from volcanoes are estimated at 1–4 million metric tonnes of water vapour and 150–370,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide daily – most coming from the Ring of Fire.

Once the Cambrian ring of fire formed, the huge amount of gas emitted each day over 50 million years helped change Earth’s climate from icehouse to greenhouse. And in doing so, it was the catalyst for life to proliferate for the first time on planet Earth.

Bill Collins, Adjunct Professor, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University

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

Tasmanian devils are among Australia’s most distinctive mammals. Stocky, powerful and famously noisy, wild populations are now restricted to Tasmania.

But this was not always the case. In fact, thousands of years ago devils could be found across mainland Australia.

Skeletal remains of Tasmanian devils have been found in deposits from southern Australia to the tropical north, across the Nullarbor, central Australia, Queensland, the Northern Territory and parts of southern Western Australia. Yet one major region was missing from this record: Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

Our new study, published in Archaeology in Oceania, reports the first unequivocal evidence of Tasmanian devils from the Pilbara, recovered from the Juukan 2 rockshelter on Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinikura Country.

Why the Juukan rockshelter matters

Juukan 2 was a large rockshelter in the western Hamersley Plateau. Archaeological research has shown people used the shelter from at least 47,000 years ago, including through the dry Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 29,000 to 19,000 years ago).

The shelter is the only known mainland northern Australian Pleistocene-aged archaeological site where faunal remains occur in unequivocal association with stone tools. Its deposits preserve an unusually detailed record of people, animals and environmental change.

That record became internationally significant after Juukan 2 was extensively damaged by mining blasting in 2020. Research and rehabilitation have since continued under the direction of Traditional Owners.

A jaw, a tooth and thousands of scavenged bones

The strongest evidence for devils at Juukan comes from two fossils.

The younger fossil is part of a lower jaw preserving the first two molars. Dating of the sediment around the bone shows it is between 6,900 and 7,300 years old.

The older specimen is a fragment of a lower first or second premolar. This tooth was excavated from sediment dated to between 42,500 and 47,100 years old.

Our findings are reinforced by a much larger body of evidence – the context archaeologists and palaeontologists use to interpret the past.

We have examined more than 8,000 catalogued animal bones from Juukan so far. More than 1,000 show chewing or gnawing marks from mainly rodents, but also quolls, devils and perhaps monitor lizards.

Upon analysing 55 of the bone specimens, we found at least ten with tooth-pit dimensions (or gnaw marks) closest to those produced by Tasmanian devils.

These devil-like marks occur in deposits from pre-Last Glacial Maximum (roughly 47,000 to 26,000 years ago), post-glacial (roughly 19,000 to 11,600 years ago) and Holocene (roughly 11,600 years ago to present day). This shows that devils repeatedly scavenged at Juukan across a substantial part of the sequence.

We also examined 263 digested bone fragments found in the rockshelter. These fragments are too big to be from the prey of Pilbara’s smaller extant carnivores like quolls and mulgaras. They are most compatible with digestion by a large bone-eating dasyurid such as the Tasmanian devil.

Taken together, the fossils, tooth marks and digested bone show that devils were a recurrent part of the Juukan scavenger community over tens of thousands of years. They persisted through dramatic environmental change, demonstrating they were not restricted to the cooler or more temperate environments where they live today.

Devils, people and a changing scavenger community

Juukan also gives us a rare glimpse into the ecological relationship between people and devils.

Much of the medium- and large-animal bones at Juukan were brought into the shelter and butchered by people, while smaller animals were often gathered by owls and deposited as pellets. The devil-like chewing occurs on the larger material associated with humans.

This raises the possibility that human camps provided predictable scavenging opportunities for devils for tens of thousands of years.

The finds also complement devil-like rock art at Nganjarli in Murujuga, within the Dampier Archipelago National Heritage Place.

No comparable images are currently known from around Juukan itself. However, marine shell beads from the rockshelter indicate that people or objects moved between inland and coastal areas during the Holocene. Cultural knowledge of animals such as devils may likewise have circulated through these connections.

Importantly, there is no evidence that the two Juukan devil fossils themselves were butchered, cooked or eaten. Their presence may instead reflect animals entering and scavenging and eventually dying at the shelter.

The disappearing devil

Devils disappeared from mainland Australia about 3,200 years ago, after dingoes had arrived and spread across the continent.

Dingoes have long been implicated in devil extinction because they competed for prey and carcass scavenging. Our findings suggest another possibility: dingoes may also have displaced devils from scavenging around human camps.

If devils had exploited animal remains discarded by people for tens of thousands of years, the arrival of a new carnivore increasingly associated with humans could have reduced access to that reliable food source.

We can’t yet demonstrate that dingoes caused devil extinction. But it identifies a previously underappreciated form of competition that may have contributed to their decline.

Juukan preserves far more than a list of vanished species. It records changing relationships between people, predators and prey over almost 47,000 years.

That is precisely why places such as Juukan are irreplaceable archives of Australia’s cultural and environmental past.

Timothy Churchill, Adjunct Associate Lecturer, School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences, UNSW and Gavin Ashburton, Puutu Kunti Kurrama Traditional Owner, Indigenous Knowledge

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

In the 1950s and 60s, artists, writers and musicians were drawn to the islands in the Aegean, including Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who took up residence on the Greek island of Hydra, as did the young Leonard Cohen.

In 1962, Melbourne-born Australian artist Leonard French spent six months on Samos, with his wife Helen, his son Marc, and me, then just a baby. While there, a fortune teller told him he would “decorate the heavens”.

It proved to be an apt prediction, and became a much-retold family story. In 1968, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) opened on St Kilda Road with my father’s monumental stained-glass ceiling illuminating its Great Hall. He had created what is still believed to be “the world’s largest cut-glass ceiling”.

The heavens had, indeed, been decorated.

One of my childhood memories is of my father laying out the thick pieces of glass on vast glowing light boxes, then adding sawdust in between the glass to see the effect. I also recall visiting the Great Hall while the ceiling was being constructed, and later lying on the floor beside him, gazing up at his work: the giant turtles at either end, surrounded by birds and partly obscured serpents, all facing a massive sun at its centre.

The NGV has just installed another work by my late father at the Ian Potter Centre, its Australian art museum at Federation Square. I had not seen it before, and coming face to face with it for the first time was thrilling; it is spectacular!

To view it, visitors ride the escalator to the right of the gallery entrance and slowly approach the work. It looks so perfect there, one could imagine it was commissioned for that space.

A key to deciphering a masterpiece

It proves to be a fabulous companion to the original NGV commission. Able to be seen close up, this window provides visitors with something unexpected: a key to deciphering the imagery of French’s Great Hall ceiling, one of Australia’s most familiar, yet surprisingly little-interrogated, artworks.

At the top of the new window is a figure with outstretched hands reaching to a blue sky. Beneath each arm, three birds fly upwards, signifying renewal.

The water, which is teeming with life, has a giant brightly coloured fish swimming in a turquoise sea, and a massive royal blue serpent with a vivid red eye, sliding upwards towards the figure.

At the bottom, three turtles surge forward. The exhilarating upward movement of the composition is beautiful and joyous.

Each of the motifs in the new window recur throughout French’s work. Here, the progression from turtles (land), through the fish (water), to birds (sky), give the work a powerful sense of regeneration and ascent, a spiritual and natural completeness.

From private home to public gallery

By the 1960s, Leonard French had achieved a degree of celebrity unusual for an Australian visual artist of the period. He appeared on the cover of The Bulletin in June 1967 and Life (Australia) in August 1968, and received a number of high profile public commissions, including the Alpha and Omega window at Monash University.

Growing up, I was aware of his fame.

NGV Australia’s window was originally commissioned by the late businessman and entrepreneur Gordon Barton for his private home. It was the largest of several windows my father created for the house, which he referred to collectively as “Gordon Barton’s windows” (here I will refer to NGV Australia’s work as the Barton window).

According to my father, Barton had admired his stained-glass windows at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and commissioned him through architect Michael Dysart to create windows for his new home in Vaucluse, Sydney. The NGV’s window was originally commissioned for the stairwell, where it was installed around 1972.

In 2020, the Barton window, which had been removed from the house by subsequent owners, was offered for private sale by Leonard Joel auction house, where it was purchased by a philanthropist, who later donated it to the NGV.

Conservation has included removing white paint that had covered areas around the glass, allowing French’s original composition and the extraordinary luminosity of the glass to be seen again.

I am delighted that the window, more than half a century after it was created, has been placed on public view.

The Barton window has found a particularly fitting home at NGV Australia. The Great Hall ceiling is one of the museum’s most recognisable works, yet its distance from the viewer can make the imagery of turtles, serpents, fish and birds difficult to discern.

I have lived with my father’s images all my life, but for many viewers these creatures are hidden in what can appear to be geometric abstraction. The Barton window offers a new way into his visual world.

Lisa French, Professor & Dean, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

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

On Friday morning in Melbourne, 100,021 people crammed into the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) for the first National Football League (NFL) game ever to be played in Australia.

Tickets for the clash between the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers – which the 49ers won 27-7 – sold out in about half an hour. So, there is definitely interest in Australia.

But even though the NFL has played games around the world for decades, why has it now chosen to go to Australia, a country with a population of only about 28 million people with its own unique version of football?

The expansion of the US’ biggest sport

Culturally and financially, the NFL is the United States’ most dominant sport.

For decades, the league has hoped international games can bring new fans to the sport and help identify NFL-ready talent around the world.

Its first international game was an exhibition contest in Tokyo, Japan, in 1976.

In the mid-1980s, preseason games were played in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Mexico.

It wasn’t until 2005 when a regular-season match was hosted outside the US, in Mexico City.

After a one-year break, the NFL started hosting annual international games during the season. Since then, regular-season games have been played in countries such as the UK, Germany, Spain, Brazil and Mexico.

This year, Australia and France were added to the slate.

So, why Melbourne?

For the NFL, Commissioner Roger Goodell said expanding to Australia “underlines our ambitions to become a global sport and accelerate international growth.”

He later added:

We’re coming here for the long term. We don’t come as a one-off.

Los Angeles Rams owner Stanley Kroenke also emphasised the value of the Australian market:

When we first identified Australia as one of our global markets, it was not only because of our passionate fans who reside there, but also because of the important role Los Angeles plays in serving as a gateway to Australia and many countries across the Pacific.

But Australia has a small population. Mexico reportedly boasts the biggest fanbase outside the US, with some 40 million NFL fans. Wouldn’t doubling down on the NFL’s investments there be a better use of energy and money?

Or Germany, the world’s third-largest economy? Every NFL game there has sold out almost instantly since 2022.

The time zones of these countries are also much safer bets for US television audiences and media contracts. Additionally, the travel time is much shorter, requiring far less consideration of sleep and recovery for the athletes.

Of course, money is crucial.

International games are a lucrative business: the Jacksonville Jaguars reportedly generate US$35-50 million (A$49-70 million) each time they play in London. The league has made similar gains through broadcasting. Teams are allocated international marketing rights across 22 global regions.

In Australia, the state of Victoria beat out two other states (New South Wales and Western Australia) – in addition to South Korea and Japan – for the NFL deal, reportedly paying $15 million per game as part of a multi-year agreement.

NSW Premier Chris Minns said the asking price was “a king’s ransom”.

The venue choice for Melbourne was controversial, too. Critics argued a rectangular stadium would better suit the sport compared to the oval-shaped MCG.

But Australia – and Melbourne, in particular – makes sense for the NFL due to people’s passion for sport. Research suggests Australia has the second-highest attendance at professional sporting events in the world per capita, behind the UK.

This fandom is not limited to one sport, either, with healthy fan bases for Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union.

The local NFL fanbase is growing quickly, too. It is approaching similar fan numbers to the NBA, despite basketball having a long head start in the country.

Athletes are part of the picture, too

Developing international talent is one of three stated pillars of the NFL’s global strategy.

The league’s International Player Pathway was launched in 2017 to funnel elite overseas athletes into the sport. It helped the Philadelphia Eagles’ Jordan Mailata, from Sydney, earn an NFL contract. The Super Bowl winner was a former rugby league junior player before swapping sports.

In 2024, the NFL’s first Southern Hemisphere academy was also opened on the Gold Coast, with Mailata as its ambassador.

In recent years, there has also been a pipeline of Australian punters (kickers) heading to the US to play in college, with many later making it onto NFL rosters.

Prokick Australia is the major player here, having spent almost two decades converting Australian-rules football players into punters. It has produced many NFL players, including the Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl champion Michael Dickson (a former Sydney Swans academy prospect).

So, Australia now has three distinct pathways for local athletes into the NFL – more than most international markets.

Flag football – a modified version of the sport – is another element the NFL has invested in to try to attract more athletes and fans to American football. It will make its Olympic debut in 2028.

Recently, the NFL partnered with American Football Australia to expand in flag football in schools across Australia, with the hope of gaining enough momentum to remain part of the Olympics in 2032 in Brisbane.

What will the impact be?

Considering Melbourne’s insatiable appetite for major sporting events, perhaps selling out the first regular-season NFL game in Australia was the easy part.

Time will tell if Australia’s fandom and passion for a wide variety of sports translates into a viable return for the US league.

Adam Cohen, Senior Lecturer, Sport Management, University of Technology Sydney

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

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Margaret Preston is a breathtaking exhibition. It is Preston as we have never seen her before, and challenges many earlier preconceptions.

We see her work in the context of her students/lovers, Bessie Gibson and Gladys Reynell, and her obsession with First Nations art – her adaptations, her collections, and, now, commentaries on her adaptations by Trevor Nickolls and Gordon Bennett, among others.

A much more complex and nuanced image of Preston emerges than in previous exhibitions.

The show is a mixture of a chronological survey with her early still life paintings from the opening decade of the 20th century, then her decorative flower pieces moving to the magnificence of her hand-coloured woodcuts.

There is a desire to bring her art to life: we see her iconic Wheelflower print of 1929, next to the actual woodblock from which it was printed. Her First Nations pieces are shown together with their actual sources of inspiration.

The exhibition is full of these little detective pieces that save the exhibition from being just another Margaret Preston show to make it into the Margaret Preston show for our generation.

A spectacular makeover

Born Margaret Rose McPherson in Adelaide in 1875, she initially trained in Sydney, then at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. She spent many years travelling in Europe, mainly in Germany, France and England.

She first travelled with Betty Davidson and then Gladys Reynell, with both of whom, the NGV catalogue asserts, she had a romantic bond.

She exhibited to limited acclaim, first under the name of Rose McPherson and by 1912 as Margaret McPherson.

Her personal and artistic makeover was as spectacular as it was sudden.

On the last day of 1919, the 44-year-old McPherson falsified her age by eight years and married Lieutenant William George Preston, subsequently a successful businessman. This made her, at least on the marriage certificate, a socially respectable two years younger than her husband, rather than the embarrassing six years older.

She changed her exhibiting name to Margaret Preston and, armed with her husband’s wealth, launched her new career with a massive publicity blitz that was to last until her death in 1963.

Following her marriage, she settled with her husband in the bayside Sydney suburb of Mosman and moved rapidly up the social ladder to become a friend of the publisher Sydney Ure Smith.

Preston was the most articulate and outspoken female artist of her generation, writing frequent articles and giving lectures and interviews.

While always a committed traveller, after her marriage Preston embarked on numerous journeys throughout Asia and the Pacific, the Middle East and Europe.

At the height of the Depression, the Prestons moved from Mosman to a 14-acre block in rural Berowra, before returning to the Mosman neighbourhood in 1939, where they remained until her death.

A revelation

For me, a revelation of this exhibition is her late stencil pieces, including Christ turning the water into wine (1951) and White gum (1953) where Preston in her mature years is grappling with a host of conceptual problems and exhibits a brilliant technical inventiveness.

While many of the pieces have been seen before, here they gain a new poignancy through their new context.

With over 200 works on display, there is enough to present a comprehensive overview to gain a good understanding of her work and her contribution to Australian art and not an overkill requiring a packed lunch for viewing every print she ever made.

On ‘primative’ art

Although a strong advocate for First Nations art, I feel that Preston’s attitude still sat within the framework of cultural imperialism.

That is, it came from one who had not the slightest doubt in the superiority of her own culture that could absorb “primitive” elements from Indigenous cultures.

She illustrated how a sacred Kimberley dancing board could give you a suggestion for a curtain. In 1924 she boasted,

I have barely altered the design […] The Australian aboriginal has followed the usual abstract designs that are characteristic of the savage […] I have suggested a cushion cover that could be adapted from the design.

In 1925 Preston wrote,

In wishing to rid myself of the mannerisms of a country other than my own, I have gone to the art of a people who have never seen or known anything different from themselves, and were accustomed to always use the same symbols to express themselves.

[…]

It is on the primitive natural forms that we must depend. In returning to primitive art it should be remembered that it is to be used as a starting point only for a renewal of growth, and a gradual selection must take place to arrive at the culmination.

Over the decades, Preston’s attitude to First Nations art matured as she travelled thousands of kilometres to view rock art and art in various communities. But the art remained a quarry from which a “civilized” artist could plunder elements from which to create an “authentic” Australian national art.

Preston’s ideas on a national art were naïve, but, as shown by this exhibition, she did create a powerful and memorable oeuvre.

Margaret Preston is at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia until January 31 2027.

Sasha Grishin, Adjunct Professor of Art History, Australian National University

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

Astronauts who undergo long-duration spaceflight aboard the International Space Station often return with health problems that resemble some age-related conditions in people on Earth.

Remarkably, some of this decline reverses within months of their return but others persist. This raises an intriguing question: what can be learned from these rapid changes and could they help prevent or reverse aspects of age-related decline on Earth?

That question has turned space into a laboratory for ageing research. Spaceflight reproduces many features of ageing. Astronauts also experience unusual conditions, including very low gravity, increased radiation and disrupted sleep. Even so, changes that usually develop over decades on Earth can appear within weeks or months in space, giving scientists an opportunity to observe some ageing-related processes in fast-forward.

A 2026 study, which tracked four astronauts during the nine-day Axiom-2 mission, examined chemical markers attached to DNA that can be used to estimate biological age. This is an estimate of how old the body appears to be based on molecular changes, rather than the number of years a person has lived.

The astronauts’ estimated biological age increased during the mission and began to fall after they returned to Earth. This does not mean that they physically aged by years in a matter of days. With only four participants, the study cannot provide firm conclusions, but it shows how rapidly the body can respond to the conditions of spaceflight.

Why would leaving gravity behind affect the body in ways that resemble ageing? On Earth, muscles, bones, and the cardiovascular system and other organs are adapted to function under the constant pull of gravity. That continual mechanical load helps keep these systems healthy, although their function often declines later in life. In space, many of those demands disappear.

When muscles age in fast-forward

Skeletal muscle provides one of the clearest examples. Astronauts lose muscle mass and strength at a startling rate in very low gravity, even while exercising for around two hours a day to attempt to limit the effects.

Some of the biological processes involved may overlap with those associated with sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle strength and mass that increases the risk of frailty, falls and loss of independence.

Scientists are still working out how closely muscle loss in space resembles sarcopenia, because similar effects can arise through different biological processes. The crucial difference is timescale. That compression is exactly what drew our team to space.

Through our UK Space Agency-funded MicroAge mission, we sent lab-grown human muscle constructs to the International Space Station.

These miniature muscles, roughly the size of a grain of rice, were engineered from human muscle stem cells. Using lab-grown tissue, rather than relying solely on the limited number of astronauts available for study, allowed us to compare muscle adaptations in very low gravity with those seen during ageing on Earth. It also allowed us to carry out early tests of possible ways to protect muscle. If some of the same mechanisms are involved in both settings, space could provide a useful opportunity to study years of biological change over the course of months for a single mission.

Our follow-up mission, MicroAge II, will explore the biology of this decline in greater detail. It focuses on mitochondria, the structures inside cells that produce most of the energy those cells need. Problems with mitochondria are recognised as one process involved in muscle ageing on Earth.

MicroAge II will investigate whether similar changes to their structure and function also contribute to rapid muscle loss in space. Why does any of this have significance beyond the space station?

Loss of muscle mass and function is one of the most consequential aspects of growing older. It underlies frailty, falls and the loss of independence that many people fear, yet effective treatments remain limited. Testing potential interventions in populations that age over decades is inevitably slow. Space research will hopefully help scientists identify relevant biological processes and test early ideas more rapidly.

Experiments in space cannot replace final clinical studies involving older people, however. Any treatment suggested by this work would still require extensive testing on Earth to establish whether it is safe and effective but would identify potential drug candidates far more quickly.

Samantha Jones, Postdoctoral Research Associate in Musculoskeletal and Ageing Science, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Liverpool and Anne McArdle, Professor of Musculoskeletal and Ageing Science, University of Liverpool

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

One Sunday morning, Juliet* woke up to an eager delivery driver with a large package she had no recollection of ordering. She was quick to dismiss it as an e-commerce mistake before the card inside helped solve the mystery: “To Sober Juliet, from your friend, Drunk Juliet.”

The fact this story was recounted to us while researching this topic illustrates the rise of a cultural trend that surprisingly few academics have explored. But drunk shopping is a rapidly growing consumption phenomenon.

Intoxicated consumers generate billions of dollars in annual revenue: by one US survey estimate, around US$45 billion a year. In the latest research I carried out with colleagues, we attempted to explore this phenomenon and its ethical implications further.

How alcohol affects a shopper

When alcohol enters the human body, it acts as a general disinhibitor, causing people to “let go” of the inhibitions that would normally constrain their actions and increasing the likelihood of engaging in foolish and risky behaviour. Psychologists call the underlying mechanism alcohol myopia: short-sighted information processing that is part of alcohol intoxication.

Alcohol reduces the scope and focus of attention, limiting both the range of cues that can be perceived and the ability to process them. Behaviour is based only on the most salient and impelling “go” cues in the environment, not the less salient and inhibiting “no go” ones.

While driving, this might mean missing the dog running into the road. Behind an electronic platform, it can mean that the inviting “buy now” button crowds out anything else on the screen.

People shopping while drunk may pay a great deal of attention to the payment process at the expense of other significant details, such as the amount of money they will spend or the selection of a preferred item. And this is not ordinary impulse buying.

We define drunk shopping as a context-specific form of impulse purchasing, distinct from consumption when tired or stressed. It reflects a situational, temporary impairment, not a chronic, trait-based vulnerability, such as being materialistic.

An environment built to remove inhibition

Prompts such as one-click purchasing, storage of credit card details, limited-time countdowns (for example, “offer ends at midnight”), and scarcity prompts like “only two left in stock” may merely increase the likelihood of purchasing out of convenience or persuasion when a person is sober.

But to alcohol-intoxicated consumers these prompts may have a disproportionately stronger effect by narrowing their attention and weakening their self-control. Intoxication does not create new stimuli; it alters the weight of these effects in the purchase decision.

While the transaction may appear voluntary, the underlying decision process is shaped by temporary impairment and digitally engineered environments that amplify impulsivity. You click the button, but all the conditions around it were carefully designed to make clicking as easy as possible.

Retailers probably know

Online platforms can anticipate when some users are operating under the influence of alcohol, through signals such as late-night contexts and jerky mouse movements.

But as companies can benefit from drunk shoppers, they may not do much to address it, and may instead effectively promote drunk shopping, for instance through late-night flash sales.

The obvious and defensive company response is that shoppers who bought something online can return the product. Yet most consumers never or rarely return such products, to avoid the hassle of the return process.

Existing consumer protection does not really cover this either. Current thinking treats consumers’ vulnerability as a given trait or a socioeconomic condition, and assumes rational, informed communication.

It does not fit a case where cognitive capacity is only temporarily reduced, or where the impairment is likely detectable from digital alerts.

What responsible retailing would look like

While consumers initiate the transaction, firms operate in environments designed to anticipate, amplify and monetise behavioural tendencies. This raises the question of whether firms should be held accountable not only for facilitating such behaviour, but also for failing to mitigate predictable harm.

In our paper we prescribe a “vulnerability mitigation mandate” for digital retailers: detect, disclose and defer impaired transactions. In practice that could mean impairment detection that pauses transactions, time-based ad restrictions, “cooling-off” periods before an order is finalised, or spending limits on platforms.

Some consumers already build such defences themselves: heavy drinkers may develop protective mechanisms to prevent unnecessary purchases, such as putting up a password barrier every time they try to buy. Even after a year of studying this topic we don’t have an answer as to why the burden of protection should fall on the impaired shopper rather than the profiting platform.

Juliet laughed off her “gifted” parcel, and most drunk purchases end as good stories as illustrated by the countless similar narratives on social media. But behind each such decision sits a platform that probably saw the signals, took the money, and asked no questions.

The next time “Drunk Juliet” goes shopping, the shop that never closes could at least learn to say: “Maybe sleep on it and let’s confirm in the morning.”

*Not her real name

Solon Magrizos, Associate Professor, University of Birmingham

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

Writer Blanche d'Alpuget has died aged 82, leaving a lasting imprint on Australian literature, and having influenced the course of political history with her pathbreaking 1982 book on the then prime ministerial aspirant, Bob Hawke.

Now deeply fused in the public mind with Hawke, d'Alpuget was already an acclaimed writer with significant star power of her own before becoming publicly associated with him through that book, and later through marriage – the second for both.

d'Alpuget was the daughter of Sydney Sun journalist Lou d'Alpuget, who once shouted so hard at then cadet journalist John Pilger for getting facts wrong that Pilger fainted.

Blanche grew up in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and was educated at Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School (SCEGGS) and the University of Sydney.

She became a journalist on the Sun’s rival tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, in the early 1960s, working alongside fellow journalist Anna Torv who would later become the second Mrs Rupert Murdoch.

When tyro journalist Laurie Oakes graduated from Sydney University and joined the Mirror, he sat between d'Alpuget and Torv in the Mirror’s Holt Street newsroom.

“She and Anna were each charged with showing me the ropes, showing me how to do it,” Oakes said.

The manuscript of d'Alpuget’s first novel, Monkeys in the Dark, was written while living in Indonesia where her first husband, journalist turned diplomat Tony Pratt, was posted in the early 1970s.

Rejected by publishers, d'Alpuget turned to short story writing. She returned to Australia to live in Canberra, where Pratt continued work as a public servant and she became active in the women’s movement.

Friend, fellow feminist activist and later Hawke government minister, Susan Ryan, described d'Alpuget as vivacious and unconventional. “Dazzlingly pretty and petite, she looked like a Thai beauty with blond curls,” Ryan wrote in her memoir Catching the Waves:

Blanche was full of fun. She liked to make loud, outrageous observations about people, particularly about their sexual demeanour […] In an era of dull and careless feminist dress codes she was a welcome sight at (Women’s Electoral Lobby) meetings, a little bird of paradise in gold high-heeled sandals, tight black slacks and a mink jacket to keep out the Canberra cold, her face luminous with detailed make up.

d'Alpuget’s short story turn worked. She won Fellowship of Australian Writers prizes for two of them in 1975.

A friendship with Sue Kirby, daughter of Arbitration Commission president Richard Kirby, serendipitously led in 1977 to the publication of her first book, Mediator: A biography of Sir Richard Kirby.

Kirby had personally known Sukarno, president of Indonesia (1945–67), and d'Alpuget, as she later wrote, was an “observer in the last days of (Sukarno’s) shattered dream”. It was a shared bond that created a strong chassis for the biographer-subject relationship that resulted in a critically acclaimed book.

d'Alpuget’s stepmother, journalist and editor Tess van Sommers, critiqued draft chapters of the Kirby manuscript. In d'Alpuget’s view it was this, along with the input of Melbourne University Press publisher Peter Ryan, that forged her as a writer.

She then reworked her Monkeys in the Dark manuscript, found a publisher and won the Sydney PEN Golden Jubilee Award for her first novel.

Her second novel, Turtle Beach (1982), won the Age Novel of the Year Award and the South Australian Government Award for Fiction.

d'Alpuget brought knowledge and insight from her years living in Asia to both books: Monkeys in the Dark is set in Indonesia and Turtle Beach is set in Malaysia.

The Hawke biography

Her fourth book – and second biography – Robert J. Hawke: A Biography – is arguably the best political biography in Australian literary history.

After a successful career as President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Hawke was elected to federal parliament in 1980, where he became a poorly performing Labor shadow minister under Opposition Leader Bill Hayden.

A heavy-drinking philanderer with little feel for effective parliamentary performance, Hawke was a man drifting towards an unfulfilled destiny, despite the best efforts of Labor’s NSW Right faction to install him in the Labor leadership.

d'Alpuget took a psychoanalytical approach but wrote in an accessible manner, giving the book a wide and enthusiastic audience as it zeroed in on – rather than avoiding – Hawke’s sins and shortcomings as a husband, father and man.

She confronted Hawke with elements of his life he had avoided through alcohol-fuelled carousing, and induced him to deal with his demons while she researched and wrote the biography.

“Only when they’d read the book did (people) realise he was actually a great man,” d'Alpuget said. “Because all they’d seen before was a drunken lout, a drunken larrikin.”

Hawke found salvation in d'Alpuget’s unusual approach, which enabled him to give up drinking and prepare seriously to occupy Australia’s top office. The biography was published in 1982, and in March 1983 Hawke won the election that made him prime minister.

“No-one has ever been as lucky in their biographer as Bob Hawke,” he said.

Loving (and rewiring) Bob Hawke

d'Alpuget and Hawke first became lovers when she interviewed him in 1976 for her biography of Richard Kirby, before whom Hawke had appeared as an industrial advocate.

Hawke, long married to wife Hazel with whom he had four children, proposed marriage to d'Alpuget in 1978.

He reneged in 1979 after deciding the potential political damage of divorce was too high a price to pay, driving d'Alpuget to both suicidal and homicidal thoughts.

Having bills to pay, and making no headway with a proposed biography of former ACTU president Albert Monk, d'Alpuget decided to write one of Hawke, which would be published with great success by independent Melbourne publisher Morry Schwartz.

After launching the book with Hawke’s co-operation, d'Alpuget broke with Hawke and left Australia for some time. Her next book was a novel, Winter in Jerusalem (1986).

The relationship resumed later in life, and they married in 1995. d'Alpuget ceased writing for some time before resuming with a long series of historical novels based on the Plantagenets.

d'Alpuget will be remembered best for her extraordinary Hawke biography, which she described as “internally strong”.

“I was actually thinking of the architecture of a Congregationalist church I’d seen in South Australia when I was writing it: well-proportioned stone, four-square,” she said.

In her research and writing for the Hawke biography, d'Alpuget did a fair amount of rewiring of her subject, to his immense benefit. In the process she put her subject on firm psychological foundations for one of 20th-century Australia’s most successful prime ministerships.

Chris Wallace, Professor, Canberra School of Government, University of Canberra

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

This year’s winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards query the instability of Australian identity. And the winners of the fiction and nonfiction prizes both point to the cruel legacy of European invasion and colonialism.

A brave and moving historical Yolŋu novel, A Piece of Red Cloth, has won the fiction prize. It was collectively authored by Yolŋu knowledge holders Merrkiyawuy Ganambar-Stubbs, Djawa Burarrwanga and Djawundil Maymuru, and novelist Leonie Norrington.

A pioneering collaboration between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers that honours Yolŋu ancestors through the eyes of their descendants, it represents a healing opportunity for Australian culture. As Norrington says, “Aboriginal people, since the first invaders came, have been trying to say, ‘Look, we have a really wonderful way of understanding the world, and you can learn from it.’”

Described by the judges as “a profound work of remembrance, fusing oral history, novelistic technique and deep cultural knowledge”, this innovative book also received this year’s Australian Book Industry Award for Social Impact Book of the Year. It has been shortlisted for multiple prizes.

The nonfiction prize winner, Walkley Award-winning journalist Kate Wild’s The Red House, is a gripping exposé of race and power within contemporary Australia – explored through the tragic killing of Kumanjayi Walker in 2019, and the subsequent murder trial of Constable Zachary Rolfe. It’s also no stranger to literary prizes, having won this year’s Age Non-fiction Book of the Year.

Play, emotion and imagination

Turkish–Australian Ender Başkan’s playful and expansive Two Hundred Million Musketeers has won the poetry prize. Rohan Howitt’s consideration of Australia’s claims to the Antarctic, The Southern Frontier, was awarded the Australian history prize.

Both prizes for younger readers went to verse novels. Drift by Pip Harry, which follows two 14-year-olds as they navigate fitting in and deal with anxiety (and bees), won for young adult literature. And Song of a Thousand Seas by Zana Fraillon, which looks at friendship and different brains through the eyes of an octopus, won for children’s literature.

These are stories about kin, culture and belonging, migration, settlement and territorial rights. They pick at the loose threads of psychological and physical definitions of what it means to be Australian. Their fresh perspectives explore and interrogate ideas of home and nationhood, ownership and entitlement – with imagination, rigour and heartfelt emotion.

The awards, delivered by Creative Australia, boast the biggest prize pool in the country. The winners of each category receive A$80,000, with A$5,000 each for shortlisted writers.

‘True history’ as fiction

A Piece of Red Cloth, set in the 1600s, tells the story of Batjani, a Yolŋu elder trying to protect her beloved granddaughter, Garritji, from Makassan trepang fishermen on the coast of Arnhem Land. The story opens up a complex and unfamiliar chapter of pre-colonial Australian history.

For hundreds of years, trading between Yolŋu and seafarers from the port of Makassar, now eastern Indonesia, took place without issue. But when European merchants claimed the region as the Dutch East Indies, a new chapter of brutality was introduced.

The Makassan traders adopted the cruel tactics of their colonisers, and began plying Yolŋu men with opium and alcohol. In exchange, they claimed the young women and children, and took them for sex-trafficking, until the the elder Yolŋu women rose up in protest.

The novel reimagines these facts as Batjani does her best to protect Garritji, who is approaching womanhood, from the fishermen. “It’s a true history,” says Ganambarr-Stubbs, whose own grandmother was snatched in a similar scenario. “Wider Australia should learn more about the history – all the histories – because that’s how all of us came to be here now.”

Nonfiction: ongoing race inequity

The Red House highlights the ongoing inequities of race in Australia. In her investigation of the legacy of Australia’s colonial past, journalist Kate Wild seeks ways to break the cycle of dehumanisation and state violence that continues to plague this country.

With precision and care, she recounts the confrontation between Walker and Rolfe in an isolated desert community, and tracks the aftermath of Rolfe’s high-profile, emotionally charged court case. Her report reveals the depth of Australia’s damaged and unresolved relationship with its First Nations peoples.

An outsider, she nevertheless finds ways to integrate Warlpiri and Luritj perspectives with care and respect, laying down a challenge to those involved in the work of communicating First Nations stories.

Her book was praised by the judges as a work “of great listening” that “embeds the reader in a supratemporal zone beyond Western ideas of time, history and narrative in order to trace repeating patterns of violence, rhetoric, pain and anger”. It represents a nuanced, compassionate contribution to a critical ongoing national conversation about race, culture, history and entitlement.

A story of transgenerational trauma, difficult questions and unfinished business, Wild’s work takes on issues that many Australians still prefer to avoid or deny. It presses for an end to a situation that appears to have no resolution.

Poetry: fatherhood in an uncertain world

With his debut poetry collection, Two Hundred Million Musketeers, Ender Başkan captures the intensity of parenting young children within an increasingly uncertain world.

Fatherhood impacts his work, friendships and creative practice in inner-city Melbourne. It alters his awareness of social and political concerns, and shifts his attention from the past and the present into the future.

Dealing in connection and bustling with life, Başkan’s poems reflect on his childhood, his grandparents’ exile from Türkiye (where Başkan returns, with his young family), and on being Turkish. He explores his responsibilities to child-rearing and housekeeping, the need to earn a living and to care for older generations.

Başkan has been critically hailed as a writer whose “main point is that poetry can and should be fun”. He won the 2021 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the 2025 Anne Elder Award.

His work continues the legacy of migrant poets that included his close friend and mentor, the late Ania Walwicz. According to the judges, Başkan offers “an invitation to explore what might be possible if a line were to stretch between one person and another”.

Liz Evans, Adjunct Researcher, English and Writing, University of Tasmania

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

On Tuesday, the Australian federal government announced a long-awaited amendment to the Online Safety Act, outlining a digital duty of care to protect Australians from preventable online harms.

The bill will be discussed by parliament before the end of the year. While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has presented the legislation as “world leading”, the European Union has had something similar in place for a while now.

The EU Digital Services Act came into effect in 2022. Like in Australia’s draft regulation, it gives users more power to choose what their social media feeds look like. It requires companies to provide the option of a feed in which content is not based on “profiling” – algorithmic content selection based on how you previously interacted with the app.

You would assume, then, that European users already have a very different experience of social media apps compared to people in Australia. But that’s not the case (more on that in a moment).

Due to a 2025 court ruling, the Netherlands is an exception, with an Instagram app that really does look slightly different. But is the Dutch version of Instagram a good blueprint for what we want in Australia?

What happened in the EU?

The Digital Services Act requires large social media platforms (with more than 45 million monthly users in the EU) to let users opt for non-personalised content (content recommended by the algorithm).

When it came to platforms actually implementing the act, research has shown that social media companies didn’t make it easy for users to change their settings.

Some critics have called this “malicious compliance”, where platforms do what the law orders, but in such a clunky way that users don’t actually enjoy the option and stick with the default, algorithmic experience.

Which leads us to the Netherlands exception. In 2025, Dutch digital rights group Bits of Freedom won a court case arguing Meta (the company behind Facebook and Instagram) was not compliant with the Digital Services Act.

The court ordered Meta to add an easily accessible option for Facebook and Instagram users to get rid of algorithmic recommendations. Non-compliance would lead to substantial fines.

As a result, Dutch users have more options to shape the way they experience Instagram compared to users elsewhere, including other European nations.

What does Instagram look like in the Netherlands?

The difference isn’t as major as you’d think.

Australian users already have the option to change their feed on Instragram. You can do this by clicking on the Instagram logo at the top of your screen and choosing “following”. This brings up a feed with posts from people you follow. (“Favorites” presents a feed from people you’ve added to a special category.)

In “following” mode, you can’t use many of Instagram’s normal functionalities, such as sending private messages. And the option doesn’t stay on by default: when you open Instagram again, you’re brought back to the regular, algorithm-governed feed.

By contrast, when Dutch users click on the Instagram logo, they can choose not only between favourites or followers, but also a “voor jou” (for you) feed. This option is the one with algorithmic content recommendations.

Unlike in other countries, whatever option users in the Netherlands choose will be remembered when they open Instagram again. Regardless of which feed they choose, they can also use all of Instagram’s functionalities such as direct messaging.

Arguably, the Dutch version of Instagram does give users more choice.

However, just like for Australian users, you need to know how to get to these feed options. The Dutch court order explicitly states users must be made aware of the new options through a pop-up. Some Dutch Instagram users I spoke with vaguely remembered getting a pop-up, whereas others didn’t.

How can Australia learn from this?

Australia’s draft legislation lists a number of harmful design features and obliges social media companies to implement “user empowerment tools” so they can turn these features off.

However, there are no requirements for the way in which these empowerment tools are presented to users. This could lead to the same “malicious compliance” situation as is currently seen in the EU.

To address this issue, the Australian government could specifically require social media companies to make a “following” feed the default option. That way, users would only see posts from accounts they follow without having to enable any special settings.

Alternatively, Australian law could require social media companies to not bury any settings behind a logo or deep in the app. The Dutch case shows a pop-up is not necessarily helpful. A lot of effort, then, would have to be put into educating the public about the new powers they have over the algorithm.

Other experts have proposed the idea of algorithmic choice, which may give users even more control – choosing what types of feeds to follow and how those feeds prioritise information.

Unless forced to do so, big tech companies are unlikely to implement features that go against their business model – to keep us all on the apps as long as possible.

As we have seen in the Netherlands, a design change still required a court ruling. And many European users are still waiting for a meaningful option to take control over their social media feeds.

Chris Zomer, Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, Deakin University

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

Social media users could switch off recommender algorithms in their social media feeds, under new draft laws the Australian government plans to unveil this week.

The proposed digital duty of care legislation would hold social media companies to greater account for content on their platforms. Opposition leader Angus Taylor said the Coalition had yet to see the proposal but warned against efforts to “censor social media”.

The digital duty of care plan is separate to the government’s proposed Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill, which aims to toughen existing rules around the under-16 social media ban.

So what’s been proposed in these digital duty of care laws? And will it help reduce harm?

What’s been proposed?

Under the proposed digital duty of care legislation:

• users could opt out of social media recommender algorithms via pop-up messages
• social media companies would be expected to identify and manage risks on their platforms
• the onus would be on platforms to stop harmful content (such as illegal pornography) from being shared.

The ABC reported that, for under-18s:

about half a dozen additional areas of ‘psycho-social harm’ would be identified, including content about body image and bullying.

Under the plan, breaches of the law would lead to fines of more than A$100 million.

Will it help?

The devil will be in the detail, which we won’t know until the full plans are released in the week ahead.

That said, there have long been calls for digital duty of care laws in Australia – since well before the under-16s social media ban – and it’s good to see these calls being considered.

The onus should be on platforms and other online entities to better test the risks of their products, before features are rolled out.

In an ideal world, that would mean they could mitigate the risks and evaluate whether features or tools do more harm than good before they are released. If they are found to being causing harm, platforms could not roll them out at all, or ensure they aren’t available to children and young people.

As with the social media ban, it looks like the government will try to put legislation in place before sorting out the technical details of how it will work. That’s a mixed blessing.

It means we are not beholden to companies saying, “This isn’t possible”. But it also might make implementation and enforcement tricky.

Opting out of algorithmic content

The idea of opting out of algorithms sounds great, but raises the question: what would you get instead?

Take Instagram, for example. There’s the main feed, which is one recommender algorithm. There’s disappearing stories, which is a different algorithm. And then there’s reels, which is a third algorithm. They work in different ways and do very different jobs.

So, if you opted out of the algorithm in Instagram, which of those three would be impacted?

It’s been so long since people have seen a chronological feed (as opposed to one serving you algorithmic content tailored to you), it would feel very weird at first.

My suspicion is that the vast majority of people won’t elect to opt out of any algorithms, and will stick with the recommended content in general.

So a more powerful change the government could have chosen instead would be to make it so you get a chronological feed by default; to get algorithmic recommended content you’d have to opt in.

It’s also unclear how parents might manage all this opting-out. If it comes down to vast and complex parental control dashboards for each platform and online service, that places a large burden back on parents.

Harmful content harder to regulate

The draft legislation puts the onus on social media platforms to identify and manage risks around content, such as videos promoting disordered eating. But it’s hard to know exactly how.

Historically, holding tech companies responsible for the content shared on their platforms has been very difficult. In the American tradition, the idea is that users (not companies) are responsible for such content.

It’s easy to see how moves to more strongly regulate this could lead to an angry midnight phone call from US President Donald Trump to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

That said, the rest of the world has shown a much stronger appetite for regulation of content on platforms in recent years.

A promising start

Fines of around $100 million for breaches of the proposed digital duty of care laws sound impressive, but it’s a tiny fraction of what some of these tech companies make annually. Making fines a percentage of a company’s yearly revenue in Australia makes more sense.

What matters most with the digital duty of care is ensuring social media platforms are forced to be transparent about their compliance.

One thing Australia got wrong with the social media ban is that we asked the companies to comply with the laws but they don’t have to tell us exactly how they did it.

With the proposed digital duty of care laws, it looks like there might be provisions for the eSafety Commissioner and for researchers to be in involved in finding out about and testing what companies are doing to ensure compliance with these laws.

We haven’t seen the detail but it sounds like this aspect of regulation is being taken seriously – and that’s very promising.

Tama Leaver, Professor of Internet Studies, Curtin University

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

In the same week the federal government is preparing to introduce its landmark digital duty of care legislation, it is also returning to some unfinished business: strengthening its social media age restrictions.

On Tuesday, the government will move an amendment through federal parliament to give the eSafety Commissioner stronger powers to investigate whether social media platforms are complying with the minimum age rules.

The changes bring these investigative powers into line with those eSafety already has for other online safety obligations.

Why is the government introducing these laws?

Australia’s social media age restrictions came into effect in December last year. They require major social media platforms to take “reasonable steps” to stop Australians under 16 from holding accounts. Importantly, the law doesn’t punish teenagers for using designated platforms. The legal responsibility sits with the platforms to keep them from holding an account.

However, there are already serious questions about platform compliance.

A recent study provides some of the clearest evidence so far. Researchers followed more than 400 Australian teenagers before and after the restrictions took effect. Three months in, more than 85% of participants aged under 16 were still using social media platforms covered by the law. Most were accessing them through their own accounts.

There was certainly some circumvention. Of those that attempted to use a restricted service, between 15% and 19% reported using a fake account, while 6% to 11% reported accessing social media through a private browser.

But the problem isn’t simply crafty teenagers finding ways around the rules. Only about two-thirds of under-16s still using restricted platforms reported encountering any sophisticated age check at all. Common approaches included simply asking users to state their age or upload a selfie.

The researchers ultimately found little evidence that the legislation had produced a substantial immediate reduction in social media use among under-16s. That suggests the gap between passing an age restriction and actually enforcing one is significant.

This is the gap the new Online Safety Amendment Bill is trying to address.

What’s included in the amendments?

The most significant change is to eSafety’s information-gathering powers.

The amendment will empower the commissioner to demand documents – not just information – from social media companies which show what they’ve done (or failed to do) to enforce age restrictions.

It will also empower eSafety to gather information or documents from other people and organisations where it reasonably believes they have evidence relevant to an investigation.

This matters because social media platforms don’t operate in isolation. They sit within a much larger digital ecosystem of app stores, technology vendors, advertising companies, and increasingly, specialist age-assurance providers. A platform may be legally responsible for keeping under-16s from holding accounts, but the systems it relies on to do that may be designed or operated by other companies.

Imagine, for example, a social media platform engages a third-party company to provide its age-checking technology. Under the amendments, eSafety could seek information directly from that company to independently test whether the platform’s approach is actually working. App stores, which sit between platforms and many of their users, are another obvious potential source of information.

This gives eSafety a better view of the whole system rather than just the platform at its centre. Effective regulation can’t depend entirely on asking a company whether it thinks it is complying with the rules. If responsibility is spread across an ecosystem of different technologies and providers, regulators need to be able to follow the evidence across that ecosystem too.

The bill also doubles the fines that companies may be ordered to pay if they are found to have breached the age restrictions, bringing it up to a maximum of A$99 million.

This brings the financial penalties in line with other corporate regulation in Australia. However, the 2024 Rickard Review of the Online Safety Act recommended that courts should be able to impose penalties in an amount that reflects a percentage of global turnover, say 5%, if that is greater.

Other countries do this in their online safety laws. It is also in Australia’s competition and consumer law and privacy law.

Are these changes likely to be effective?

The amendment will give the regulator expanded access to important evidence, and a bigger stick when companies don’t comply. And it will bring the powers for enforcing the social media minimum age restriction into line with the other powers the eSafety Commissioner already has.

But there is a limit to what stronger information gathering and higher penalties for this one measure can achieve.

Researchers, including many of us working in this area, warned before the original legislation passed that age assurance would be difficult, young people would find ways around restrictions, and measuring whether the policy was actually working would be challenging.

The early evidence bears out many of those concerns.

Australia is simultaneously moving towards a digital duty of care, which starts from a somewhat different idea about online safety.

Age restrictions essentially ask: how do we keep young people out of potentially harmful digital environments?

A duty of care asks: how do we make all digital environments safer for everyone?

Teenagers are highly motivated users of digital services, and their online lives stretch across apps, browsers, devices, messaging services and other parts of a complex digital ecosystem. Keeping them out of a handful of social media platforms won’t address the deeper problems of platform design, recommendation systems and business models that can make these environments harmful in the first place.

That is why the digital duty of care may ultimately prove to be the better and more important reform. It puts responsibility back where much of it belongs: on platforms to identify and reduce foreseeable harms created by their services.

The difficulties enforcing the age ban only strengthen the case for getting that broader reform right.

Daniel Angus, Professor of Digital Communication, Director of QUT Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology and Christine Parker, Professor of Law, The University of Melbourne

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

A child who snores loudly every night might seem like a funny sight. But if that snoring accompanies repeated narrowing or blockage of the airway, the effects can reach far beyond a noisy night.

Obstructive sleep apnoea is often associated with adults who snore and struggle to stay awake during the day. Children can develop it too. Its prevalence is difficult to pin down: a 2024 systematic review of 30 studies found that recent estimates in preschool children ranged from 12.8% to 20.4%, but definitions and testing methods varied considerably. Only two population studies used a full overnight sleep study, so the true figure remains uncertain.

In children, habitual loud snoring is an important warning sign. Parents may also notice mouth breathing, restless sleep, pauses followed by gasps or snorts, or the chest and abdomen working hard to draw breath. Not every child who snores has sleep apnoea, however, and symptoms alone cannot confirm it.

Daytime symptoms

The daytime signs can be less obvious. Rather than appearing sleepy, some children become irritable or unusually active, struggle to concentrate or develop behavioural and learning difficulties. These problems can resemble or worsen symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The conditions can also occur together, so this should not be treated as a simple either-or diagnosis.

During sleep, the muscles that help keep the upper airway open relax. In obstructive sleep apnoea, the passage behind the nose and mouth repeatedly narrows or closes. The child then has to work harder to breathe. These episodes can lower blood oxygen and briefly disturb sleep, even when the child does not appear to wake fully.

Repeatedly disrupted sleep is associated with poorer behaviour, learning and quality of life. Research also links childhood sleep apnoea with changes in blood-pressure control and metabolism, including how the body regulates blood sugar, although the severity of these effects varies between children.

In younger children, enlarged tonsils and adenoids are a leading cause. The tonsils sit at the back of the throat; the adenoids are similar tissue behind the nose. Because a child’s airway is narrow, enlarged tissue can leave too little room for air to pass comfortably.

Obesity, differences in the shape of the skull or jaw and allergic rhinitis, which is inflammation inside the nose caused by an allergy, are also associated with greater risk. Research has additionally found associations with asthma and premature birth. Children with some genetic conditions, particularly Down syndrome, have a much higher prevalence. Globally, obesity among five to 19-year-olds rose from about 2% in 1990 to about 8% in 2022, according to a large analysis of population studies.

Air pollution may contribute too, but the evidence requires caution. Observational studies have linked exposure to fine airborne particles with habitual loud snoring and other breathing problems during sleep. Such studies cannot establish that pollution causes obstructive sleep apnoea.

A child who regularly snores loudly, has pauses or gasps, breathes through their mouth or seems to struggle for breath during sleep should be assessed by a doctor. A GP may refer the child to a paediatrician, sleep service or ear, nose and throat specialist.

The reference test is polysomnography, usually called an overnight sleep study. Sensors record brain activity, airflow, breathing effort, heart rate and blood oxygen, allowing clinicians to see whether breathing is repeatedly obstructed and how severely sleep is affected.

A short video of the child sleeping may also help. Preliminary research on smartphone recordings suggests that they could help clinicians screen and prioritise children, although they cannot diagnose sleep apnoea or replace a sleep study.

Treatment

Treatment depends on the cause and severity. When enlarged tonsils and adenoids are obstructing the airway, removing them is often the first treatment offered. In a randomised trial involving 464 children, surgery improved symptoms, behaviour, quality of life and sleep-study findings compared with watchful waiting. It did not produce a significantly greater improvement on the trial’s main objective test of attention and the mental skills used to plan and control behaviour.

An operation does not always resolve the condition. Up to 40% of children may have persistent sleep apnoea after surgery, with higher rates among those with obesity, severe disease or other medical conditions.

For mild cases, a clinician may recommend monitoring or treating nasal inflammation. Anti-inflammatory steroid nasal sprays may help selected children, but the evidence is mixed. Mouth and facial muscle exercises are sometimes considered, although the supporting studies are small and inconsistent. Evidence for orthodontic devices in children also remains limited.

If surgery is unsuitable or sleep apnoea persists, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) can hold the airway open by delivering gently pressurised air through a mask during sleep.

Some mild cases resolve as children grow, but others persist or worsen. Follow-up is therefore important. Routine child health checks should include a question recommended in paediatric guidance: “Does your child snore?”

Obstructive sleep apnoea is treatable but easy to miss. When a child is restless, unusually active or struggling to concentrate, asking what happens after bedtime may reveal an important part of the picture.

Mirja Quante, Attending Neonatologist; Director, Pediatric Sleep Program, University of Tübingen

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

You’ve just finished eating lunch and you’re back at your desk, ready to dive into the rest of the day’s work. Yet by 3pm, you find your eyes starting to droop. Before long, the only thing you can think about is how much you’d like to take a nap.

The “afternoon slump” (also sometimes called the “3pm slump”) is a common experience. It’s that distinct drop in energy that tends to occur in the mid-afternoon hours.

While it’s tempting to blame this sudden urge to snooze on what you’ve eaten for lunch, this alone can’t take the blame. The afternoon slump is actually caused by several distinct biological pressures beginning to converge.

One part of the explanation begins long before lunch. From the moment we wake up, our drive to sleep gradually increases. Adenosine – an organic compound involved in regulating sleep and wakefulness – accumulates in the brain while we’re awake, contributing to our gradual need to sleep, referred to as “sleep pressure”.

Yet the reason we do not simply become progressively sleepier from breakfast onwards is because another system is working alongside it. Our circadian clock, which controls our body’s sleep-wake system, generates a changing drive for wakefulness across the day.

During the morning, this system helps to counteract increasing sleep pressure. But in the early afternoon, we enter a natural period of increased sleep propensity. As sleep pressure has continued to build regardless, this creates a window in which tiredness becomes easier to feel.

Lunch can then add another layer. Eating changes signalling between the gut, metabolism and brain, as the brain receives information about stomach distension, nutrients and gut hormones.

The size and composition of the meal can also influence how we perform afterwards. Larger lunches have been associated with poorer attention and greater post-meal sleepiness – although it’s not clear that any particular food group, such as fat, carbohydrate or sugar, is specifically responsible.

So a very large lunch may exaggerate the slump, but there’s no convincing evidence that one particular macronutrient is universally to blame.

We’re still teasing apart exactly how eating contributes to the mid-afternoon slump, but one intriguing candidate is the brain’s orexin system. Orexin-producing nerve cells in the hypothalamus (a region which regulates basic body function) help sustain wakefulness and are sensitive to metabolic signals, including glucose. Eating may therefore influence some of the neural circuits responsible for keeping us awake.

Recent research suggests that this post-meal sleepiness may also be neurologically distinct from simply being short of sleep.

In a study measuring brain activity and vigilance before and after eating, post-meal drowsiness was associated with a shift in activity within the brain’s cerebral cortex – the outer layer of the brain that’s involved in attention, perception and complex cognitive processes. This shift pushed brain activity towards inhibition and slower reaction times.

Sleep deprivation, by contrast, was associated with greater cortical excitability – meaning that neurons in the cerebral cortex were more readily activated. We can therefore experience something that feels remarkably similar to sleep deprivation – tiredness, slower thinking and a desire to stop concentrating – while the brain may have arrived there by different routes.

What you shouldn’t and should do

While many people make themselves a cup of coffee or tea, this isn’t a great strategy for overcoming the slump.

Caffeine does not give the brain more energy. It works largely by blocking adenosine receptors. Although caffeine may temporarily block these sleep-promoting signals, adenosine will still continue accumulating. This is why caffeine can improve alertness but cannot substitute for sleep.

Timing matters too. A late-afternoon caffeine hit may solve one problem, but if enough caffeine remains circulating in your system by bedtime, you may struggle to sleep. This may cause even more fatigue the next day.

A better way to push back against the afternoon dip is using natural light.

Light is a powerful signal to the systems that control alertness. A 2024 systematic review of 62 experimental studies found daylight most consistently improved subjective alertness and working memory – although effects on sustained attention were less consistent.

The effect is not limited to natural light, either. One study found that using a lamp which simulated the blue light wavelengths of natural daylight improved reaction times, lapses in attention, sleepiness and motivation in office workers.

For those spending afternoons indoors, getting a bit of daylight (or simulated daylight) may help to wake you up. But if coffee and bright light isn’t enough, there is another option: stop fighting the sleep pressure.

A short afternoon nap can take the edge off the slump. Around ten to 20 minutes is often enough to reduce sleepiness and improve alertness while keeping you largely in lighter sleep, reducing the chance of waking with the grogginess known as sleep inertia.

Set an alarm and aim to nap in the early afternoon rather than late in the day, when sleep may interfere with bedtime. Trial and error can help find your own optimal duration.

Longer naps of around 60 minutes may offer additional benefits – including for memory – but they increase the chance of waking from a deeper sleep feeling temporarily worse.

Perhaps the most useful response to the afternoon slump is not to treat it as evidence of laziness or declining motivation. Human cognitive performance is not designed to remain perfectly flat across the working day. Attention, alertness and reaction time fluctuate according to biology as well as workload. We have simply constructed working days that often assume otherwise.

Michelle Spear, Professor of Anatomy, University of Bristol

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

More than 1.4 billion people worldwide live with high blood pressure (hypertension). It’s the single biggest metabolic risk factor for early death – driving diseases such as heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure and dementia.

Most of these cases of high blood pressure are shaped by how we live and what we eat. This means that making changes to your diet can have a big impact on your risk of developing high blood pressure.

Even small changes can help, as our latest research shows. We found that adding just one serving of nuts into your daily diet is linked with lower hypertension risk.

It’s well known that eating more plant foods is associated with a lower risk of hypertension – but research on the impact of nuts has been limited to date.

Fruits and vegetables are associated with a lower risk of hypertension, with consumption of 800g (ten portions) per day reducing the risk by 11%.

Whole grains – brown rice, oats, wholemeal bread – are similarly linked to lower risk of hypertension. Our research found that the people who consumed the highest amount of whole grains each day had a roughly 26% lower risk compared to people consuming the least.

We have also shown that legumes and soya are associated with a 16% and 19% lower risk of hypertension respectively.

Our latest analysis published in the British Journal of Nutrition, now shows the clear impact eating nuts can have on hypertension risk.

Our study pooled data from 143,000 people – including 20,665 people who had hypertension. We found that eating around a handful of nuts daily (between 30-35g) was linked with a 26% lower risk of hypertension compared to not eating any nuts.

Why plant foods work

Plant foods share a few key characteristics, which may explain why they’re beneficial for the heart.

They are an excellent source of potassium, which helps to lower blood pressure by shedding sodium and relaxing blood vessels.

Plant foods also provide fibre that feeds gut bacteria so they can produce short-chain fatty acids – compounds that are linked to lower blood pressure.

Many plant foods also contain L-arginine and nitrates, which the body converts into nitric oxide in order to widen blood vessels. Plant foods are rich in polyphenols, which have also been associated with lower blood pressure.

Despite nuts being energy-dense, they’re linked to lower obesity rates – thus helping to mitigate another risk factor for hypertension.

These overlapping mechanisms all nudge blood pressure down, and help explain the link between plant-rich diets and lower risk of cardiovascular diseases.

But as tempting as it might be to call nuts a heart health “superfood,” their real power lies within a broader pattern of healthy eating. While reductions in hypertension risk are observed with intake of even just one daily serving of nuts, a diet built around several whole plant foods may provide even further benefits.

This is exactly what Dash, Mediterranean and plant-based diets prove. They all work because they put these different plant-based foods on the same plate.

However, it’s worth noting that the studies included in our analysis are observational. This means they show that people who eat more nuts tend to have lower blood pressure, but they cannot fully prove that nuts are the cause.

People who consume more plant foods in their diet also tend to follow other healthy lifestyle habits such as regular physical activity. Although our analysis adjusted for many of these factors, we cannot fully rule their impact out.

But the randomised controlled Dash diet trials, where diet is actually changed to include more vegetables, whole grains and lean protein, are what give us confidence the link is real. Similarly, intervention trials, which compared the effects of multiple different plant-based diets, also show benefits for blood pressure reduction.

There are knowledge gaps to note, too. The nut studies we included in our review did not separate salted from unsalted. Since salt raises blood pressure, the true benefit of unsalted nuts may even be larger than reported.

Most of the data also came from Europe, the Americas and East Asia. Little evidence came from Africa and India. More large studies conducted in a variety of regions will help sharpen the evidence base.

The takeaway is practical and affordable. You don’t need supplements or fads. Fill half your plate with fruit and veg, choose whole grains, build meals around beans and tofu and add a handful of unsalted nuts. These are small habits that add up to a significant reduction in one of our biggest health risks.

Shireen Kassam, Visiting Professor, Health and Wellbeing Research Group, University of Winchester and Dagfinn Aune, Research Fellow, School of Public Health, Imperial College London

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

Across Australia, thousands of people are waiting to find out if their homes will be built, after several separate construction company collapses.

By far the biggest of those recent collapses has been the Bathla Group, a Sydney developer that’s been one of Australia’s largest affordable home builders.

Owing about A$3.4 billion to private lenders, Bathla’s voluntary administration has thrown the construction of more than 2,000 apartments into limbo, while jeopardising a further pipeline of 14,000 homes.

More builders going bust since COVID

Figures released last week show 3,472 Australian construction companies went bust in the financial year to June 30 2026: one in four (24.5%) of all company insolvencies nationally.

The only good news? The number of builder insolvencies was slightly down for the first time since a steep rise began during COVID.

However, our research has found insolvencies in the construction sector remain consistently higher than in other industries. That makes it harder to build the housing we need.

Australia is falling further behind in meeting the federal government’s 1.2 million new homes goal by 2029. Official forecasts released last month indicate the target won’t be met until December 2030. New South Wales – Australia’s largest housing market – may not meet its targets until March 2032, three years late on a five-year target.

There’s no shortage of demand for new homes. What we lack is a construction system capable of delivering them reliably, sustainably and at scale.

Bathla’s financial ripple effects

On Monday, more than 200 of Bathla’s 350 staff were stood down as the administrator continues to work on a rescue deal.

While most of its building projects are in Western Sydney, Bathla’s collapse is being watched around Australia because of its wider financial impacts.

Like any company collapse, there are specific circumstances involved in Bathla’s current woes. Its business model relied on high volumes of low-cost building.

The NSW building regulator has also conducted more than 40 inspections of Bathla sites in recent months, and ordered the builder to fix serious defects in one major development.

Bathla may have taken as many as 1,000 deposits from buyers for homes now stalled. But home buyers aren’t the only people affected.

‘Troubling developments’ in private credit

As well as owing money to subcontractors, Bathla owes money to a long list of non‑bank lenders – also known as private credit firms.

This reflects the construction industry’s heavy reliance on alternative finance, because banks have reduced their exposure to riskier lending.

On Friday, Australian Securities and Investments Commission chair Sarah Court said the corporate watchdog was closely following “several troubling developments in the private credit sector, most notably with the recent collapse of Bathla”.

Court pointed out that many Australians are exposed to private credit through their superannuation funds – meaning “this is not some peripheral issue”.

The perfect storm hitting builders

Bathla is not an isolated case. The wider construction industry is under strain, with higher costs, thinner profit margins and rising risks.

Figures released last month show house construction costs are now 51% higher than before COVID.

For builders with slim profit margins, the rise in costs can make some projects uneconomic.

With costs rising unpredictably, builders locked into fixed-price contracts are absorbing losses they cannot sustain. This was a major driver of the spike in builder insolvencies during COVID.

Falling house prices and poor market sentiment mean some projects no longer stack up financially.

Many investors and buyers are spooked by three interest rate rises this year, higher costs, and recent federal budget changes to housing tax concessions that have made housing less attractive to investors. The prospect of further interest rate increases is also likely to see projects stalled, as the market waits for conditions to improve.

Then there are ongoing shortages of tradespeople. On top of those, home builders are now competing with data centre builders for tradies, which has driven up salaries.

Little wonder construction insolvencies have risen back to pre-COVID levels, despite strong demand for housing.

Structural change is needed

Governments can’t fix all the problems we face, such as price hikes driven by the Middle East war.

But federal, state and local governments are increasingly recognising their role in creating structural barriers to building more homes.

A Productivity Commission draft report released in July identified many of the problems we need to address, including restrictive land-use regulation, slow and inconsistent approvals, poor coordination on key infrastructure, and complex regulation. These all increase costs and delays.

Our 2025 report showed over-regulation is particularly hard on small builders, who struggle to comply with overlapping national, state and local requirements. That matters because our research also showed almost two-thirds (63%) of building company collapses were concentrated among small builders.

The National Construction Code is another challenge. Even with some states deferring 2025 code changes, the national rules remain complex and frequently updated – again, making compliance difficult for small builders.

What’s safer than houses?

Some builders are responding by pivoting to infrastructure and commercial projects, such as Victoria’s Big Housing Build or Queensland’s Olympics construction projects. These can offer more manageable terms and less exposure to market volatility.

Good builders can pick and choose their work. Right now, housing is the riskiest option on the table.

Until that changes, we’re likely to see more Australian builders moving away from creating the homes we urgently need – along with more headlines about another builder going bust.

Lyndall Bryant, Senior lecturer, QUT Centre for Justice, School of Econmics and Finance, Queensland University of Technology and Amanda Bull, Lecturer, Faculty of Business and Law, Queensland University of Technology

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

Australian governments have an unfortunate history with community grants programs. Sports infrastructure programs, car park grants and other schemes have repeatedly raised the same concern: public money intended to serve communities becomes entangled with electoral politics.

The Albanese government’s $560.9 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program (MLCIP) was established to deliver community infrastructure commitments made at the 2025 election.

It was a one-off, invitation-only and non-competitive program. More than 220 organisations were invited to apply — but beyond saying they were election commitments, the government has never publicly explained how it decided which community projects were invited.

New analysis released this week by the Centre for Public Integrity raises serious questions about the scheme, with almost three-quarters of the funding going to the government’s own electorates. Even after accounting for Labor holding more seats, Labor-held electorates received substantially more funding than a proportional distribution would predict, while Coalition and other electorates received correspondingly less.

A closed, invitation-only program

The integrity questions around this program began before we even knew where the money went. Unlike an ordinary competitive grants program, community organisations could only apply if invited by the federal government.

The 2022 New South Wales ICAC Report on investigations into pork barrelling described closed, non-competitive, one-off grants as relying on ministerial discretion, and often announced during election campaigns. The report warned:

[F]or obvious reasons, this category of grant is at high risk of pork barrelling.

The report recommended that if this type of grant is adopted, the government must explain why, and “outlin[e] the risk mitigation strategies”.

Yet the Albanese government has never publicly explained how projects were selected for invitation or why a closed, non-competitive process was necessary, let alone provided a risk mitigation strategy.

Attempts to get answers from the government through parliament produced little clarity. Independent Senator David Pocock asked in Senate Estimates who within government had determined who could apply. The answer was simply that projects had been “identified by government”. No further information was provided.

Why community infrastructure grants programs are vulnerable

This is not a problem peculiar to Labor. Australian governments from both sides of politics have repeatedly used discretionary grants programs in ways that blur the line between public benefit and electoral advantage.

In relation to the Morrison government’s 2018–19 “sports rorts” affair, the auditor-general found the sports minister’s office ran a parallel assessment process that gave priority to marginal electorates, rather than simply following Sport Australia’s assessment of merit.

Nine of the ten electorates receiving the most funding were marginal or Coalition-targeted seats. In the $660 million commuter car parks program, the auditor-general again found project selection was neither open nor transparent, and not demonstrably merit-based. It also reflected the political profile of those given the opportunity to nominate projects.

In another instance, Labor’s 2008 Better Regions Program funded 2007 election commitments. The auditor-general found funding was largely concentrated in marginal and fairly safe seats held by the Coalition before the election. These included electorates that Labor was seeking to win.

So where did the community infrastructure grants go?

Using information from the Commonwealth Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sports and the Arts, the Australian Electoral Commission and by examining Labor’s media releases, social media posts and local news articles, the centre found the following:

1. Almost three quarters of funding (73.2%, or $409.1 million) went to notionally Labor-held divisions. This compared to 22.6% of funding to Coalition-held divisions. For every dollar going to a Coalition-held seat, more than $3.20 went to a Labor-held seat.This disparity cannot simply be explained by Labor holding more seats: even after accounting for the number of electorates held by each party, Labor-held seats received about $118 million more than they would have under a proportional distribution.

2. Accounting for the different number of electorates in each category, marginal seats in which Labor was competitive received $66.5 million more than they would have received if funding had been distributed proportionately across categories of electorates. Fairly safe Labor seats received $62.9 million more. By contrast, marginal seats where Labor was not competitive, fairly safe non-Labor seats and safe non-Labor seats collectively received $116.6 million less.

3 Using household income and “community connectedness” as indicators of community need, there appears to be no relationship between the level of funding received by an electorate and its level of need on these measures. If community need explains the distribution of funding, the government should make the basis for that assessment publicly available.

The data do not definitively show individual grants were awarded for partisan reasons. But combined with a process in which government decided who could apply, and without publishing how it made that decision, this pattern demands an explanation.

The existing framework isn’t enough

The Commonwealth Grants Rules and Principles provide a non-binding framework for the government. They say competitive, merit-based selection should be used unless another approach is specifically agreed on. If another method is used, the rationale should be documented in the grant opportunity guidelines. For closed processes, the framework describes it as “better practice” to identify eligible applicants or explain how eligibility was determined.

The Centre for Public Integrity has argued reform requires three things.

First, the government must be required to set clear, merit-based criteria that govern the allocation of grants.

Second, the government must be required to report to parliament how decisions about funding were made against those criteria.

Finally, there must be proper accountability for the grants system, including by making the grants framework enforceable and introducing greater parliamentary accountability.

Public money should not be treated by governments as money they can use for political advantage. The distribution of the community funds raises concerns this is exactly what happened.

Community organisations should not need to be in the right electorate — or receive an invitation from the government of the day — to have the opportunity to make their case for funding.

This article was written in collaboration with Zoe Neumayer and Max Douglas from the Centre for Public Integrity.

Gabrielle Appleby, Professor of Law, UNSW Law School, UNSW

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

Every September, Australians are encouraged to ask someone a simple question: “Are you OK?”

R U OK? Day is Australia’s most recognisable mental health campaign, and a familiar part of workplace morning teas, school assemblies and social media feeds.

But does it actually improve mental health? Our new study suggests it does. We found a small but measurable improvement in mental wellbeing after R U OK? Day. The gain was largest among men aged 25–49.

But we found no increase in visits to a GP for a mental health treatment plan, or in prescriptions filled for mental health-related medicines.

Together, these findings show both the value and the limits of public awareness campaigns.

What we studied and how

R U OK? Day is held annually on the second Thursday of September. The campaign asks Australians to follow four steps:

• ask someone whether they’re OK
• listen with an open mind
• encourage them to take action if needed
• check in with them over the next couple of weeks.

We used nine years of data drawn from across the Australian population, from 2011 to 2019, to test whether the campaign changed two main outcomes.

First, we used responses from the long-running Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, which happens to conduct annual interviews in the months around R U OK? Day. Participants answered nine questions about how they had felt during the previous four weeks. These included how often they had felt happy, nervous, full of life, or so down that nothing could cheer them up. We combined their answers into an overall measure of mental wellbeing.

Second, we used national health records from Medicare to count the daily number of mental health treatment plans GPs prepared and prescriptions filled for psychiatric medicines.

The statistical analysis compared the change in these outcomes in the four weeks before and after R U OK? Day in more recent years, when the campaign was highly visible, with the same change in earlier years, when its reach was much smaller. We also accounted for weather, seasonal patterns, economic conditions and other factors.

This comparison captures the campaign’s short-term population-level effect. That includes the combined effect of direct conversations, workplace events, media coverage, and the wider attention given to mental health around R U OK? Day.

A small lift in how people feel

The encouraging finding is that R U OK? Day does appear to improve mental wellbeing.

Across the population, the campaign produced a measurable increase in self-assessed mental wellbeing, equivalent to moving the average person from the 50th to the 53rd percentile of wellbeing.

This is not a dramatic change – it means people felt slightly more full of life, calm, energetic or happy, and slightly less down in the dumps.

But this is an average across the whole population, including many people who had no direct contact with the campaign. The improvement among people who took part in an R U OK? conversation was probably much larger, although our data cannot isolate that effect.

The effect was strongest for men aged 25 to 49 – the increase in their mental wellbeing was twice as large. This is important because middle-aged men are among the least likely to seek help for mental health problems, and they are disproportionately represented in Australia’s suicide statistics.

The most plausible mechanism is social connection. Being asked “are you OK?” by a colleague or friend, or getting together with others to talk openly about mental health, may reduce feelings of isolation. It may also signal that it is socially acceptable to acknowledge when you are struggling.

We see this reflected in our results. R U OK? Day increased people’s sense that they had someone to turn to for support, with the strongest improvement again among men aged 25 to 49.

No increase in mental health care

R U OK? Day also encourages people who are struggling to seek professional support. On this outcome, however, we found no detectable effect.

National records showed no increase in visits to a GP for a mental health treatment plan.

Nor was there an increase in prescriptions filled for mental health-related medicines.

The result was the same when we extended the follow-up period from four weeks to two and three months.

This doesn’t mean nobody sought help because of R U OK? Day. But any individual responses were not large enough to produce a measurable increase across the population. It is also possible that individuals sought help from other services, such as helplines, which we cannot measure.

Encouraging someone to seek help is only one part of the process. A person may still worry about stigma or be unsure where to go. Even when someone decides to seek professional help, the health-care system itself can create barriers, including long waits for appointments and high out-of-pocket costs.

Policy implications

R U OK? Day appears to be achieving something valuable.

Our findings suggest peer-support campaigns can produce real psychological benefits. Encouraging people to check in with one another, listen and offer support can make a meaningful difference, especially for population groups unlikely to seek out help.

Public campaigns also point people towards support. But whether people can act on that encouragement depends on the health system: care needs to be accessible, timely and affordable. Achieving this may require changes that reduce waiting times, lower out-of-pocket costs and make care easier to navigate.

R U OK? Day shows that asking a simple question can help people feel more supported. But when the answer is “no”, the next step also needs to be within reach.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Nicole Black, Associate Professor of Health Economics, Monash University; David Johnston, Professor of Health Economics, Monash University; Johannes Kunz, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, and Lachlan Deer, Lecturer in Marketing, The University of Melbourne

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

After a bad night’s sleep, you squabble with your kids at breakfast. Then a neighbour parks you in. When you finally get to work an hour late, your boss makes one more impossible demand. No wonder you’re angry with the world.

So what is the best way to control your anger? Is it going for a run to blow off some steam?

Or would you be better off meditating?

I’m a psychology researcher with a special interest in anger and aggression. Here’s what the evidence says does and doesn’t work.

When you’re angry

Feeling angry is not just about having a feeling. Your body becomes aroused – your face turns red, your heart rate, blood pressure and respiration rate increase, and you sweat.

On any given day, 22% of us report being angry. Most of this anger doesn’t turn into aggression (harming other people). However, about 8% of people say their anger negatively impacts their lives.

1. Exercise can backfire

You may feel like you need to “blow off some steam”, in other words, do something active to ease the anger and stave off any aggressive urges.

This “catharsis” is an idea popularised by the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Now it has found its way into modern life.

But some of these physical activities can increase your anger and aggression. That includes going for a run or climbing the stairs.

Let’s suppose you argue with your partner and you correctly interpret that feeling of arousal as being angry. But going for a run can also make you aroused or “amped up”. So when you return from your run, even a relatively innocuous comment can trigger more anger or aggression.

But you don’t have to blow off steam to try to alleviate anger. For most people, anger will dissipate within 30 minutes all by itself.

2. Mulling it over and over won’t help

Replaying the event constantly in our minds and thinking about how we might get even is all part of angry rumination. This involves diving deep into thinking about the causes and consequences of a personally important provocation and how to respond.

Rumination may feel like we’re processing the event in a helpful way. And many people who struggle with controlling their anger tend to use rumination, albeit ineffectively.

Many experiments show angry rumination actually increases or maintains anger, and increases aggressive behaviour. That’s because rather than looking for solutions and effectively processing the anger-inducing event, people just focus on their angry feelings, and the causes and consequences of the event.

3. Distraction works

Distraction, perhaps the opposite of rumination, works much better. It’s also one of the simplest things you can do to alleviate angry feelings.

My colleagues and I have done this in experiments by asking participants to think about a neutral topic, such as the layout of their university campus. But you could play a non-aggressive game on your phone, read a book, or recall happy memories.

This distraction allows the arousal to dissipate and, along with it, the feelings of anger.

In one experiment we did with university students, about 85% distracted themselves and reduced their anger.

4. Sit with your anger, don’t react

As anger is a high-arousal state, another way to combat angry feelings is to induce a state of low arousal.

When colleagues and I grouped together the best available evidence in a meta-analysis, we found mindfulness meditation is effective in reducing anger and aggression.

In simple terms, mindfulness involves being fully aware of your body, thoughts, feelings and emotions in the present moment, in an accepting and non-judgemental way.

It’s something you can learn to do, using a free app, such as Smiling Mind.

In addition to lowering arousal, mindfulness involves accepting the anger. That means “sitting” with the anger and not reacting to it, which makes it difficult to feel angry and aggressive.

In another meta-analysis, researchers found low-arousal activities such as relaxation exercises, meditation and yoga lowered anger. This included in university students, people with criminal histories, people of all ages, and people from Eastern and Western cultures.

5. Look at it another way

Another way is to use a strategy called “cognitive reappraisal”. This is a broad term for thinking about the anger provocation in an objective way that reduces your anger.

You could do this by looking at the situation from an outsider’s perspective. How would a passerby evaluate the argument you two are having? You could imagine the provocation as if you were floating above yourself and the person who provoked you. You might consider that the person who provoked you is experiencing a lot of stress in their lives.

The key is you’re creating psychological distance between the anger and you to create more objective thinking and less-personal responses.

People who tend to habitually use cognitive reappraisal are less angry, less aggressive, and show more healthy cardiovascular responses to provocation.

What’s the take-home message?

By using the techniques that work, and avoiding the others, your relationships, wellbeing, and even heart health can improve.

However, if you find this doesn’t work, and your anger episodes are frequent, distressing to yourself or others, long-lasting, or accompanied by aggression, it may be time to seek professional help.

Tom Denson, Professor of Psychology, UNSW

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

As high school and university students approach the exam period, study sessions often increase and intensify.

But even when students are “trying hard” to study they can still fall into some common study traps that hinder, rather than help, their learning.

I research how the human mind learns. Here are three misconceptions about studying, and some alternative methods that will improve learning (and, yes, your exam performance).

Myth 1: repeatedly reading your textbook and notes is the best way to study

Rereading textbooks and course material is a popular study method among students.

A 2018 study aggregated five previous surveys of university students and adults in the United States. It found 78% of participants reread notes as a study strategy. More than half said they also highlighted or underlined important sections in their notes as part of this technique.

However, other research suggests the benefits of rereading material are limited. This is because it’s a passive form of study, meaning it usually doesn’t add much to knowledge constructed from the initial reading.

What students should do instead

This doesn’t mean rereading is a problem in itself, or that you should avoid it entirely. It just might not always be the best use of all your time.

If you do want to reread material, research has found it’s better to space out repeated readings over multiple days instead of cramming it all into a single study session.

You should also intersperse rereading with other active learning strategies outlined later in this article.

Myth 2: if you feel confident about the course material, you’ll do well on the exam

When we’re trying to figure out how well we understand a topic, our judgements are often based on how easy it is to comprehend the material or how familiar it feels.

For example, it’s easy to feel confident about a particular subject when the material is in front of you and you have seen it repeatedly.

But high confidence may not be reflected by good performance during the stress of a timed exam in a different environment, without your notes, books or devices.

What students should do instead

To avoid this overconfidence, it can help to put yourself in an exam-like situation during study.

This may look like answering practice questions, similar to the ones expected on the exam, without referring to notes or devices.

Doing this will give you a better indication of how well you have learned and where you need improvement. When you’re able to more accurately judge what you have learned well (and not well), you are better able to tailor your study efforts to areas that need attention.

Myth 3: the main goal of studying is to get information into your head

Many students focus on absorbing as much information as they can. But this is only half of the equation.

Being able to pull the information out of your head during an exam or assessment is just as important.

What students should do instead

You can practise recalling information from memory by:

• completing practice quizzes

• using flash cards

• answering end-of-chapter questions

• pausing at regular intervals during study to recall key ideas of what you’ve just read.

There are other techniques that can help too.

Asking yourself “why”

When reading a text, you can regularly ask yourself “why” to help create links between new information and previous knowledge.

For instance, a student reading a history text about the second world war would encounter the fact that Germany invaded Poland. They might then ask themselves, “why is this fact true?” or “why does this make sense?”

By mentally asking themselves why, they would activate prior learning (that Germany lost territory in world war one). This would help them integrate the new information with what they already know and make it more retrievable in future.

Explaining ideas to yourself

Another effective method is self-explanation. This is when you explain the information you are studying to yourself as if you’re telling it to someone who doesn’t know anything about the topic.

For example, when reading about the circulatory system in the human body, you might explain to yourself each component, its function, and how it relates to other components or the system as a whole.

This technique also helps students connect new information to previous learning and helps to fill gaps in knowledge. It often leads to a richer construction of knowledge that is more retrievable.

If you struggle to explain concepts or retrieve information when studying, it’s often a telling sign your mastery of the content is inadequate.

While these learning strategies have been framed within the context of studying for an exam, they are widely applicable for people of all ages when learning new information too.

Sean Kang, Associate Professor in the Science of Learning, The University of Melbourne

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

We’ve all been there. You spend an hour in the gym, and before you even reach the change room, you start thinking about our favourite takeaway meal – after all, you’ve earned it!

Before long, you’re tucking into a super-sized meal. Then the guilt hits: what was the point of exercising to burn all those calories if it just makes us eat even more calories?

But while this might be a familiar pattern, it’s not necessarily a super-sized hunger at play. Let’s see what the science says.

How exercise impacts our appetite

While many people report that exercise makes them hungry, the science is more nuanced.

In the short term, a bout of exercise can actually suppress appetite. A meta-analysis of 20 studies found exercise reduced the hunger hormone ghrelin while increasing hormones associated with fullness, including PYY, GLP-1 and pancreatic polypeptide.

But this effect is temporary. A more recent systematic review and meta-analysis found exercise suppressed appetite initially, but this effect wore off 30–90 minutes later.

So exercise isn’t an appetite-suppression strategy. Rather, there appears to be a short window after exercise when our appetite may be dampened before it returns to normal.

There is an important distinction between what happens after one workout and what happens when we exercise regularly.

A systematic review of exercise training in adults who were above a healthy weight or who had obesity found a small increase in hunger levels while fasting.

However, there were no clear or consistent increases in post-meal or daily hunger, and exercise did not substantially increase average energy intake.

In other words, if you’re exercising more, you may well feel hungrier at some point. That’s not your body “fighting” exercise – it’s a normal physiological response to having expended more energy.

People don’t necessarily compensate by eating back all the energy they have used.

Does exercise intensity matter?

A systematic review and meta-analysis of 13 randomised controlled studies found both short bursts of high-intensity exercise (interspersed with recovery) and moderate-intensity continuous exercise temporarily suppressed appetite.

High-intenstity exercise suppressed participants’ appetites a little more, though differences weren’t consistent.

But this doesn’t mean you need to start doing high-intensity interval training to control your appetite. The bigger lesson is our appetite can change temporarily in response to exercise, and people respond differently.

Choose forms of physical activity you enjoy and can realistically keep doing. Enjoyment is an important part of maintaining regular exercise, and regular activity is far more valuable than choosing a particular workout simply because it produces a short-term hormonal effect.

How much exercise will result in weight loss?

The amount of exercise you need depends on your goal.

For general health, adults should aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity on most days, plus regular light activity and muscle-strengthening exercises twice a week.

For weight loss, more is needed. Research suggests around 60 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a day may be required to achieve meaningful weight loss from exercise alone.

So why can you sometimes feel ravenous after exercising?

The answer isn’t necessarily that exercise has “switched on” your appetite. Several things can be happening at once.

First, there’s the simple biology: if you’ve expended a substantial amount of energy, your body may eventually respond by increasing hunger as it works to restore energy balance. The more energy you expend, the more likely it is that genuine hunger will appear later.

There are also psychological and behavioural factors.

After exercising, we may give ourselves permission to eat more because we feel we’ve “earned” it. Research suggests people can be more likely to seek a food reward when they perceive an activity as exercise rather than simply as something enjoyable or recreational.

Hydration can also matter. If you’ve exercised while dehydrated, thirst and hunger can sometimes be difficult to distinguish.

But this shouldn’t be interpreted as meaning that post-exercise hunger is simply thirst in disguise. If you’ve expended a lot of energy, genuine hunger is a perfectly normal response.

So don’t fear hunger after exercise – but don’t automatically assume you’ve “earned” a super-sized meal either.

How to manage your post-exercise hunger

Research suggests regular exercise can reduce our desire for high-energy foods and and help reduce overeating.

But if your post-exercise hunger is genuinely derailing your weight goals, here are some strategies that might help:

1. Hydrate first

After exercise, have some water and give yourself a moment to check in with your body. If you’ve been sweating heavily or exercising in hot conditions, replacing fluids is important.

2. Check whether you’re genuinely hungry or just want a reward

Real hunger comes on gradually and has distinct physical cues: a rumbling stomach, low energy, a headache, light-headedness and difficulty concentrating.

3. Eat if you’re genuinely hungry

Never deprive yourself of food. Your post-exercise hunger is your body working more efficiently and responding to increased energy and metabolic demands.

4. Reach for nature first

Have a filling post-exercise snack ready to go. Choose foods that are filling and nutrient-rich, such as:

• a handful of nuts
• Greek or natural yoghurt with berries
• a piece of fruit with a handful of nuts
• wholegrain toast with avocado or cottage cheese
• boiled eggs with wholegrain toast
• hummus with vegetable sticks
• a glass of milk.

These foods provide a combination of protein, fibre and healthy fats, which can help keep you satisfied until your next meal.

The Charles Perkins Centre studies the science of obesity and weight loss. You can learn more about our clinical trials here.

Nick Fuller, Clinical Trials Director, Department of Endocrinology, RPA Hospital, University of Sydney

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

Testosterone is having a moment. On social media, it’s being lauded for everything from building muscle to gaining wealth and sexual dominance.

United States secretary of war Pete Hegseth has ordered testosterone screening for US service members over 30, as part of “restoring warfighter capability”. Health secretary RFK Jr has promoted testosterone replacement as an answer to a supposed collapse in American manhood. And online, men are encouraged to check their testosterone levels and “Tmaxx”: push their testosterone as high as it will go.

Review: Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How it Shapes Men’s Lives – Darby Saxbe (Bodley Head)

But high testosterone isn’t always a good thing. A new book by US clinical psychologist Darby Saxbe offers a refreshing perspective: the life event that changes men most profoundly (becoming a father) naturally drops their testosterone. And the more involved they are, the more it drops.

The book draws on 20 years of research and Saxbe’s own, brain-scan based studies of men crossing into fatherhood. It shows how profoundly, and hormonally, fatherhood changes men.

High testosterone doesn’t equal good fathering

Calls to “remasculinise” men by administering testosterone rest on the same view: that testosterone is the dial of man, and the man with his testosterone set to 11 is the greater.

But a fundamental flaw with the idea of “more testosterone, more man” is that biological processes rarely work in such simple terms. Much more commonly, they are negative feedback loops.

Further, we know that testosterone levels respond to a man’s life and environment. Increasing testosterone from outside the body, via injections or gels, does not reliably lead to more aggressive behaviours or more competitiveness. Nor does it lead to more wins.

Dominant, “successful” men do tend to have higher testosterone: the correlation the manosphere has noticed is real enough. But the reason for it is situational.

Winning a contest, or facing a challenge to your standing, is what pushes testosterone up; losing pushes it down. Testosterone is closer to a gauge that reads a man’s circumstances than a lever that changes them.

The largest review of the human research into testosterone synthesises studies of more than 15,000 people. It found a man’s testosterone level barely predicts whether he’s aggressive and giving a man extra testosterone makes no measurable difference to how aggressively he behaves.

Testosterone really starts to matter when a man is already in a contest. It drives status-seeking – but our social context decides what status looks like.

One fascinating and inconvenient truth the manosphere fails to mention is that too much injected testosterone causes the brain to stop sending the signal that tells the testes to produce it. The result is a huge decrease in the production of sperm.

The effect is so strong that the World Health Organization even trialled it as a male contraceptive. Of 271 men given weekly testosterone injections, close to two thirds stopped producing sperm altogether – and among those men’s partners, there was a single pregnancy across more than a thousand months.

The hormone sold to young men as the essence of manhood is, when administered exogenously and in excess, a fairly reliable way of stopping them becoming fathers.

Across many species, male testosterone rises during territorial and mating competition, and drops back during the parental phase. High testosterone across the whole male life course doesn’t help a man stick around and be a good dad.

Bonds with our children change our brains

Dad Brain offers insight into the male life course, allowing us to contemplate the whole man. It shows that with some physiological changes, men gain a whole lot of meaning and purpose that extra testosterone can’t replace.

With collaborators in Madrid, Saxbe scanned the brains of 20 first-time fathers in Barcelona before their partners conceived and again two months after the birth. She compared their brains with those of 17 childless men. The fathers lost cortical grey matter volume; the deeper brain structures were spared. A second cohort in Los Angeles showed the same pattern.

A later study of 38 first-time fathers, scanned throughout their partners’ pregnancy and again six months after the birth, went further: the men who had bonded most strongly with the unborn child and who planned to take more time off work, lost the most brain volume.

Analyses found new fathers lost grey matter in many of the same regions that shrink in women’s brains. Saxbe explains the changes similarly to maternal changes: a “slimmed-down brain” may process information more efficiently once the hard work of parenting starts.

“We found that the strength of the bond fathers shared with their children – even while their partners were pregnant – predicted their brain changes,” she writes:

Fathers-to-be who felt more bonded with their babies in utero and who hoped to take more parental leave showed more brain volume loss in the cortex […] the downsized paternal brain reflected more readiness to parent.

Along with reductions in grey matter, men experience drops in testosterone before the baby comes along. In one study, Saxbe and psychologist Robin Edelstein followed 27 expectant couples across a first pregnancy and found fathers’ testosterone declined steadily – it was around 17% lower at 36 weeks than at 12.

The men whose levels fell furthest reported feeling more invested and committed, and their partners described them as more supportive after birth. Sleep deprivation cannot explain a change that arrives months before the sleepless nights.

‘Best’ dads change with society ideals

These processes occurring among men preparing for fatherhood, then becoming fathers, show that a man doesn’t “optimise” his way to fatherhood by getting hormone tests or testosterone replacement therapy.

In fact, Saxbe also shows that some of the best fathers have the lowest testosterone of all. Among the BaYaka, an egalitarian foraging people of the Congo Basin who prize touch and connection – and who judge a good father partly by his willingness to share with the wider community – the men rated the best dads have the lowest testosterone.

In neighbouring villages, the Bandongo – a fishing and farming society anthropologist Lee Gettler describes as very patriarchal, very competitive and very hierarchical, where providing means dangerous physical work and fathers teach older children to fish, hunt and clear land – the best-rated dads have the highest testosterone. Same hormone but opposite ideal, set by what each society asks of its men.

Saxbe is careful not to simply flip the argument. In a study of 149 couples, fathers with lower testosterone at nine months postpartum reported more symptoms of depression. But their partners reported fewer symptoms.

Mothers, meanwhile, whose partners had higher evening levels of testosterone reported more depressive symptoms at nine and 15 months postpartum and, in turn, less satisfaction with the relationship.

Saxbe’s book’s own conclusion is clear: interventions that supplement or alter men’s testosterone may carry unintended consequences for the whole family. As Saxbe puts it, “what is good for the goose is not good for the gander when it comes to testosterone after birth.”

If there’s one thing we can be sure of in this messy hormonal world, it’s that testosterone does not make the man – and certainly not the father.

Samuel Cornell, Research Fellow in Public Health, The University of Queensland

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

Imagine overhearing on a bus that the city council plans to implement new restrictions under an urban planning program called “15-minute cities”. Curious, you search the term on Google.

It’s likely that at the top of the results page, an AI-generated text summarising the search results will appear. This text synthesises content from various webpages that answer specific search queries. They are increasingly appearing not only in Google, but also in other search engines, and users are now likely to stop reading the search results page beyond this AI-generated text.

But what if the AI-generated answer – the only search result users may see – confidently makes misleading or incorrect claims? Or reinforces conspiratorial ideas suggested by pro-conspiracy search terms?

Our new research, published in the journal Media International Australia, shows this is sometimes true of Google’s AI-generated overviews. It highlights that stronger guardrails are needed to tackle the spread of dangerous conspiracy theories.

Focusing on two conspiracies

We focused on two conspiracy theories: chemtrails and 15-minute cities.

“Chemtrails” is a conspiracy theory that has been around since the 1990s. Its believers mainly perceive the condensation trails left behind aircraft as large-scale weather or climate modification programs.

Researchers called out Google for giving visibility to conspiratorial beliefs around chemtrails back in 2015. In response, the company demoted problematic search results.

Conspiracy theories surrounding 15-minute cities are relatively younger. The term was originally coined to represent an efficient urban planning model. But for the conspiracist, these plans represent a nefarious elite, globalist agenda that seeks to monitor and control residents through technology.

Comparing search results

We developed search queries reflecting these conspiratorial beliefs and general ways of searching on the same topics (relying on open fora and Google Trends for query examples). We then collected data from the first page of Google search results for a week in January 2026.

We compared the AI overviews, the sources they link to, and the conventional lists of search results across the two conspiracy theories and two types of queries.

We found search queries that reflect conspiratorial beliefs fetched notably different AI summaries as compared to queries without pro-conspiracy words. This was especially true when the search query involved lesser-known narratives or incorporated words that could suggest the searcher believes in the conspiracy – for example, searching for “15 minute city segregation” as opposed to just “15-minute cities”.

The good news is that, for well-established cases, such as chemtrails, the AI overviews mention the conspiracy theory very rarely. Generally, for both topics, AI summaries for “conspiratorial” searches debunked conspiratorial beliefs.

The bad news is that such debunking is cursory. It often does not go beyond statements that conspiracy theories are “misinformation”. However, to stop these narratives from spreading, people seeking information about them need to be presented with factual and logical arguments debunking them.

Of concern, AI summaries for the less established “15-minute cities” case actively promoted conspiratorial beliefs, even while debunking the conspiracy theory in some instances. For this topic, 12.5% of AI overviews we analysed presented the false claims as one side in a legitimate debate. For example, in response to our query, “15 minute cities versus smart cities control”, the AI overview contained the following:

Overlap: A 15-minute city can be smart by using smart mobility and [Internet of Things] to manage its local resources efficiently, but a smart city doesn’t automatically become a 15-minute city. In essence, think of the 15-minute city as the “what” (livable design) and the smart city as a potential “how” (technology to enable it), but the control aspect is where critics focus their backlash, blurring the lines between convenience and surveillance.

The ranked lists of search results – a staple of Google search for years – are not foolproof either. Our simulation of “conspiratorial” searches returned links pointing to YouTube videos and Facebook posts promoting such beliefs.

The AI-generated snippets also tended to feature more commercial results. This is understandable – businesses rely on Google to connect them to customers. And if users do not read beyond AI overviews, it is beneficial for companies to be included as sources of such snippets.

However, this can sometimes promote conspiratorial beliefs. For example, one AI overview we analysed contained a source that linked to a book on sale on Amazon by a prominent conspiracy theorist.

A spokesperson for Google told The Conversation its AI overviews “operate like traditional search in that they aim to match content from the web to the words in your query”. They added:

We invest significantly in the quality of AI overviews and the vast majority provide accurate information. When issues arise – like if our features misinterpret web content or miss some context – we use those examples to improve our systems, and we take action as appropriate under our policies.

Tackling the spread of conspiracies

As a company connecting users to information in scenarios ranging from mundane to critical, Google has long denied it is a “publisher”. But as the search engine moves towards providing direct answers in AI-generated snippets or chats, it may become increasingly difficult to continue denying this role.

A court in Munich, Germany, recently found Google liable for false claims contained within its AI overviews – even though, as Google argued, users are warned about possible errors and can check the answers for themselves.

Search literacy is important and users are capable of considering the authority of sources, refining search queries, and comparing results across multiple search engines. Understanding how Google ranks its results and generates AI Overviews is a part of such literacy.

But this does not absolve the company (or any other search engine or chatbot operator) from the responsibility of establishing stronger guardrails to prevent the spread and legitimisation of conspiratorial beliefs.

The example of the more established conspiracy theory, “chemtrails”, demonstrates that Google has the capacity for such guardrails. They should be deployed across a broader range of topics, including more emergent beliefs.

Of course, what gets displayed on a search result page will never be perfect – and this is where stronger user literacy should come into play.

Kateryna Kasianenko, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology; Ashwin Nagappa, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Queensland University of Technology, and Caroline Gardam, Researcher, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology

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

I first heard about Harriet Taylor Mill when reading about her much more famous collaborator and future husband, the British philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill.

Appropriately for someone who remains in the margins of history despite her enormous contribution – including to her husband’s status – Taylor Mill was deeply angered by injustice. Throughout her life, she railed against the way society made it impossible for women to freely develop their individuality, arguing this was important for everybody – not just men.

In Enfranchisement of Women (1851), Taylor Mill’s only solo-authored essay published during her lifetime, she asked why women were still regarded as “mere appendages” to men without interests of their own. Her answer was characteristically blunt: “The only reason which can be given is that men like it.”

More than 20 years before her husband’s best-known work, On Liberty (1859) was published without any credit for her contribution, she had outlined what would become famous in that book as the “harm principle”: “Every human being has the right to all personal freedom which does not interfere with the happiness of some other.”

Her arguments were always on the side of independence, her sympathies with the powerless and oppressed. She astutely diagnosed the key political and economic question posed by the industrial revolution as being whether “the lot of the poor should be regulated for them, or by them”.

Taylor Mill was also a ferocious defender of “the pleasure of self-dependence” and the right to free speech. Her views were summarised in a programme of reform she outlined in the late 1840s that would be radical if instituted today, never mind two centuries ago.

She called for the establishment of secular educational schools and universities, complete freedom of speech, all occupations to be equally open to men and women, radical limits to the amount people could inherit – and for marriage “to be like any other partnership: dissoluble at pleasure”.

With words that were often witty and pithy, Taylor Mill cut to the heart of issues in political thought such as patriarchy, socio-economic justice and freedom. In my view, she is long overdue a more significant place in the canon of western social philosophy.

Vulnerable to abuse and exploitation

In the 1830s, while tending to three young children from her first marriage, Taylor Mill wrote for the Westminster Review on a variety of political and philosophical subjects, from colonialism in Australia to Plato via political biographies. Her critiques were always pro-democratic and anti-aristocratic.

She also wrote many unpublished articles on the social, political and economic structures which rendered women vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by their spouses – and on the ethics of love, marriage and divorce. Her invocation of the principle that “the higher the kind of enjoyment, the greater the degree” foreshadowed Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures in his book Utilitarianism, three decades later.

In the 1840s and ’50s, the Mills co-authored a series of excoriating newspaper articles on violence, especially domestic abuse. They railed at the unwillingness of the judicial system and police to tackle this issue, and the power inequalities which rendered people – especially women and those in subordinate positions – so vulnerable to brutality. Many of these arguments still resonate today.

Perfect equality was Taylor Mill’s ideal – in politics, the workplace and the home. But by this she did not mean equality of outcome. In their writings, the Mills endorsed a merit-based system of reward based on people’s efforts and talents, rather than what they had inherited.

They called for a “higher standard of justice” which would enable everyone to “work according to their capacity, and receive according to their wants”.

Ignored and even denied

Despite her lifelong commitment to fighting injustice and inequality, Taylor Mill’s immense contribution to her own husband’s work has largely been ignored – and even denied.

To be fair, Mill often sought to give authorial credit where it was due. But his earliest attempts were stymied by Harriet’s first husband, who felt it would draw too much attention to the Mills’ unconventional relationship.

When they eventually married in 1851, Mill tried to divest himself of the “power and control” over his wife which their marriage would legally grant him. He wrote: “I put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage … [and] repudiate all pretension to have acquired any rights whatever by virtue of [it].”

Later, Mill carefully catalogued in his autobiography how many of the works published as “his” were, in fact, his efforts as “a mediator” between Taylor Mill and the public. He highlighted his “interpretations” of her ideas – often combined with inputs from the many fields in which he was a scholar.

Mill also re-published the celebrated essay Enfranchisement of Women, which had originally been published anonymously, under Taylor Mill’s name – and set correspondents straight about its authorship when they wrote to congratulate him, thinking it was his work.

But curiously, Mill’s desire to sing her praises for her work was used as an excuse to ignore her. According to one 1874 essay, published shortly after Mill’s death: “Men have been blinded by affection and bewitched by womankind … [but] John Stuart Mill out-Herods them all.”

In the view of this and many other critics, Mill’s love for his friend and eventual wife completely clouded his judgment of her intellectual capacities, about which he had been entirely deceived – or, at the very least, been “myopic”.

A hundred years after this “Harriet Taylor Mill myth” emerged, it was given a Freudian twist. Mill was said to have chosen her as a partner because she had the same first name as his mother, but the personality of his father.

This view was echoed as recently as 2022 when a biography argued that Mill – brought up in a “totalitarian micro-state” by his father – needed someone else from whom to take “orders” after his death. Other academics such as Jo Ellen Jacobs have refuted such perspectives as misogynistic.

Taylor Mill may well have expected such shoddy treatment in the years after her death in Avignon, France in 1858. But in the 21st century, it is high time she were recognised as an incisive, influential thinker in her own right.

Helen McCabe, Professor in Political Theory, University of Nottingham

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

I first encountered her when my sister and I visited an exhibit at the Fairmount Water Works in 2022 that was called: “POOL: A Social History of Segregation.”

In the black-and-white photograph, a young Black woman named Inez Robie Patterson appeared to be captured right before she dived off the side of a pool wall. Her triceps were flexed, arms straight back with palms facing the ceiling. Her knees were bent, and her toes touched a thin, black-tiled line on the pool deck. Her hair was neatly covered in a white swim cap. Her eyebrows were beautifully thick, and her mouth formed a slight smile. Her white swimsuit had a lifeguard corps insignia, signaling her expertise in water safety.

As a Black woman, swim instructor, lifeguard and lifelong swimmer, I found myself drawn to her. My doctoral research in African American literature, history and environmental thought led me to study what I call Patterson’s “aquatic life”: the written and photographic record of her relationship to swimming.

I wanted to know: Who was this beautiful Black mermaid, and why was swimming so vital to her? How had she lifted her community?

I waded through the digital archive of The Philadelphia Tribune, the city’s oldest historically Black newspaper, to find out.

A role model for Black girl swimmers

Born in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1911, Patterson’s love of sports began at an early age.

As a girl, she excelled in hockey, basketball, and track and field. As a teenager at West Philadelphia High in the mid-1920s, she sharpened her swimming skills and entered a swim meet at the McCoach Recreational Center – now the Marian Anderson rec center – in South Philadelphia in September 1927. According to The Philadelphia Tribune, she took home six first-place finishes: in the underwater swim, the side stroke, the standing front dive, the running front dive, the swan dive and the front somersault.

Camaraderie was a priority for Patterson. Wherever I encountered her in the archive, whether walking through the Fairmount Water Works exhibit or reading old issues of the Tribune, she seemed to be looking forward to the progress being made by Black girl swimmers and the community they formed and shared in the water.

A young sports columnist on a mission

At 18 years old in 1929, Patterson started her Girls in Sports news column in the Tribune, where she encouraged other Black girls to join her in the pool. Although she feared that Black girls in West Philadelphia had little interest in swimming, she soon learned her community had “some young aspirants that show bright prospects in the swimming world.” In October 1929, she wrote: “I want to compliment these ‘little girls’ on their success and I hope they will continue in this comparatively new sport for women.”

In other editions of Girls in Sports, Patterson encouraged the Black West Philadelphia community to attend local swim meets and support the girls as they make “wonderful showings” in the water.

She also made a convincing case directly to Black girls in West Philly:

“There are many reasons why you should join … first of all you have the honor of being a member of the first ‘Colored Swimming Club’ in West Philly High, second, you will learn to swim if you are a beginner, and if you are advanced you will learn life-saving; third, you will develop yourself physically and add another popular sport to your list, and fourth, you can gain athletic credit.”

Reading her column, I imagined what it must have felt like to have been a teenage Black girl speaking directly to other Black girls and carving out space for the first “Colored Swimming Club” at West Philadelphia High.

Integrating Temple University’s swim team

After graduating high school, Patterson went on to integrate Temple University’s women’s swim team. She refused to swim during the hourlong “colored” practice time. Being the only Black woman on the team, she insisted on swimming whenever her white teammates swam and being “too busy” to swim during the segregated hour.

“Up to this time, no colored girls had taken part in any swim meets (at Temple),” Patterson told the Baltimore Afro-American in 1934 about her experience at the university. “The purpose of (the swim meet) was to foster intercollegiate spirit among the students so, ‘Why shouldn’t I go?’ I asked myself. Out of 500 girls present I was the only colored.”

These words demonstrate the righteous defiance in her personality and aquatic life. The pool was hers, too. Why shouldn’t it be?

Breaking new barriers

As I continued my journey through The Philadelphia Tribune archive, I learned of another local Black woman swimmer: Anne Marques Garrott.

Garrott was inducted into the Belmont-Southwest YWCA Athletic Hall of Fame in 1989 at the age of 75. An article about her induction detailed how Garrott, like Patterson, insisted upon being in the pool. She entered swim meets “wherever she traveled” and taught naval cadets how to swim at the University of Southern California, despite the pervasiveness of racism at USC against Black swimmers.

After crediting her parents for encouraging her to swim, Garrott thanked another mentor: Inez Patterson. She said Patterson “was one of the best-educated Black women I ever met” and also “a powerful swimmer (who) broke a lot of barriers.”

Inez Patterson passed away in 1944 from complications of a ruptured pelvic abscess. Though her life was cut short, she made a major impact on Black aquatic culture in Philadelphia. At 31 years old in 1942, she made history once more as the first Black woman – or what the Tribune called a “race girl” – to become a swimming official with the National Section of Women’s Athletics.

Black feminist scholar Brittney Cooper writes in “Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women” that to be a “race girl” or “race woman” was to be a Black woman “institution-builder” and “public thinker” who sought the betterment of her people in mind, body and spirit. Patterson’s aquatic life shows us how important the swimming pool was to her and the communities she served, from West Philadelphia High to Temple University, the Southwest Belmont YWCA to the YWCAs in Harlem and Jersey City.

One hundred years after Patterson swam at West Philadelphia High in 1926, I make a routine out of waking up early to swim at my outdoor neighborhood pool in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I pull the swim cap onto my mess of curly hair and fix the goggles to my eyes. I inhale and leap into the cold water. I think of Inez Robie Patterson, and I feel gratitude for her defiant dive.

See page 45 of the POOL: A Social History of Segregation magazine for the image of Inez Patterson preparaing to dive.

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Samantha Adams, Ph.D. in English and Women's & Gender Studies, University of Michigan

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

The Pantone colour of the year for 2026 is white. It’s called Cloud Dancer, which is described as a “lofty white”. This choice reflects a growing trend away from colour in our visual world.

You might have noticed this yourself. Where an area once had a distinct sense of place we are seeing more cookie cutter developments popping up. Take the London borough of Elephant and Castle, which has seen billions of pounds of development in recent years. The area has gone from a Latin American enclave full of distinct and varied buildings to what Oli Mould, professor of social, cultural and historical geography, has warned is an “identikit homogeneous gentrified place”, which risks “destroying the very thing that makes a community thriving and beautiful in the first place”.“

There is a similar increasing sense of uniformity and sameness in urban design around the world. In 1993, architect Rem Koolhaas travelled 360,000km around the world, observing the rationalisation of urban design (the movement towards efficiency rather than creativity in the process) through what he termed the "generic city”. Functional, efficient, but colourless.

Algorithms of taste

This trajectory towards blandness is reinforced and sustained by the increasing tendency to allow algorithms to mediate the choices we make. This has the effect of training perspectives to converge in “a strong pull toward sameness”.

Algorithms make predictions based upon our choices, from music to home furnishings. The algorithm takes that choice and suggests similar products based upon it, ultimately reinforcing and producing a monotonous and generic aesthetic taste. For instance, like a pop song by Sabrina Carpenter, you will then get served a lot of songs exactly like it until you find your Spotify Wrapped says that you are in the top listeners of something they’ve bafflingly called “Pink Pilates Princess Strut Pop”.

These sorts of algorithms in turn reinforce the production of products to meet those generic tastes, ultimately flattening the diversity of creative work, in everything from the songs we listen to to the urban surroundings in which we live.

Algorithmically driven taste results in a monoculture where art, pets and everything in between are chosen to match the generic palette of an algorithmic world.

This generic algorithmic taste is also having an impact at the design stage, particularly where metrics and investment desires overwhelm other considerations. Environments are increasingly considered by key decision makers like developers not in terms of their contribution to lived experience and cultural life, but as investment objects or financial assets, readily translated and transacted. The result is a flattening not only of our visual environment but also our engagement with that environment. And this loss is significant for our social wellbeing.

Back in 1983, the American sociologist George Ritzer introduced the concept of the “McDonaldization” of society to explain the business rationalisation of moving the design process towards faster, easier to manage, cheaper and more predictable outcomes. Like a McDonald’s burger, the production process becomes standardised. The burger is the same no matter where in the world you have one. Ritzer describes this happening in environments across a range of examples from restaurants to hospitals.

Ritzer acknowledged some of the advantages, like cost saving and customers knowing what to expect. However, the main problem he identified with this streamlining is there is no space for experimentation or personality because creativity and design are organised around efficiency. In this control of process we paradoxically lose control because we lose choice and creativity.

Living in colour

The issue goes beyond a loss of control of our spaces. The loss of colour is also a loss of expression. My work in law and aesthetics includes exploration of aesthetic welfare and the link between aesthetic experience and wellbeing. This includes how colour and expression in our built environment and surrounding spaces affects people.

Over 50 years ago, the American philosopher Monroe Beardsley introduced the concept of “aesthetic welfare” to explain the quality and availability of aesthetic experience through our environment, including colour and the impact it has on social and cultural wellbeing and resilience.

Attention to colour in our surroundings is linked to environmental enrichment as well as social and cultural participation through that environment. One study observed that students exposed to art under controlled experimental conditions expressed and engaged with colour differently from those without such experiences, consistent with the “pivotal role” of colour “in visual communication and emotional expression”.

Lack of opportunities to engage with colour and contrast in our environment risk making us less able to understand, appreciate, and use colour effectively. And this is particularly concerning if the primary way in which colour is otherwise delivered into our lives is through screens.

It is perhaps no coincidence that an idiom for malaise is to be “off-colour”. We need to move away from rational design and stop letting algorithms make our choices. We need to live in more colour.

Johanna Gibson, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Queen Mary University of London

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

When Star Trek first appeared on television screens 60 years ago, audiences expected science fiction to offer aliens, monsters and futuristic technology. What they encountered was something far more ambitious.

From its very first broadcast episode on September 8 1966, Star Trek established that its true subject was the exploration of humanity itself. For all its reputation as an action-packed space adventure, the franchise has endured because it repeatedly returned to a universal question: what does it mean to be human?

In that first episode, entitled The Man Trap, the alien antagonist survives by appearing to each observer as the person they most wish to see. Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy meets a lost love from his past; others see figures shaped by memory, expectation, desire and longing.

The creature, soon dubbed the “salt vampire” by fans of the series, is not simply a shape-shifter. Its power lies in exploiting human perception. Rather than asking viewers to fear an alien with superior strength or advanced weaponry, the episode asks a more profound question: can we trust our experience of reality?

Sixty years on, this question looks remarkably prescient. Modern neuroscience increasingly suggests that perception is not a passive recording of the external world. According to theories of predictive processing, the brain continually generates expectations and compares them with incoming sensory information.

The philosopher Andy Clark has described the brain as a “prediction machine”. Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues that our experience of reality can be understood as a form of “controlled hallucination”, generated by the brain but constrained by evidence from the senses.

Long before such ideas were articulated, The Man Trap imagined a world in which people confront the same reality, but perceive it in profoundly different ways – based not only on what they see, but what they want to see.

This insight links the episode to a much older intellectual tradition. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s allegory of the cave imagined people mistaking shadows for reality, confusing appearance with truth.

The USS Enterprise crew’s first alien encounter offers a 20th-century variation on the same theme. They actively participate in their own deception because the creature reflects their hopes, memories and desires.

This helps explain why The Man Trap feels strikingly contemporary. In today’s world, shaped by algorithmically curated information, political polarisation and increasingly personalised media environments, disagreement is often less about opinions than competing versions of reality itself.

The nature of humanity

Star Trek’s memorable debut was not an isolated exploration of a philosophical problem. It was the beginning of a broader inquiry into the nature of humanity.

The Devil in the Dark (first aired March 1967) explores empathy and the challenge of understanding the unfamiliar. The apparently monstrous Horta is revealed to be an intelligent life-form protecting its offspring, forcing viewers to reconsider assumptions about difference and otherness.

The Enemy Within (October 1966) shifts the inquiry inward, splitting Captain James T. Kirk into opposing aspects of his personality and challenging the assumption that human beings can divide their virtues from their vices.

The episode argues that the qualities that make Kirk an effective leader – courage, decisiveness and resolve – are inseparable from darker instincts such as aggression and desire. Rather than presenting humanity as a triumph over these impulses, the episode suggests that human identity itself depends upon their integration.

The City on the Edge of Forever (April 1967), regarded by many as the series’ masterpiece, shifts the focus to ethics. Kirk discovers that saving the woman he loves would alter history catastrophically, forcing him to choose between personal happiness and moral responsibility.

Together, these and many more of the 79 original Star Trek episodes form a remarkable investigation into human nature. The progression reveals a series less interested in strange new worlds than the human beings who encounter them.

Philosophical inquiry

While many science-fiction programmes have aged with their technologies, Star Trek has endured because its deepest questions remain unresolved. We still debate perception, identity, empathy, consciousness and moral responsibility, because they are permanent features of human existence.

At its best, Star Trek engaged science fiction as a form of philosophical inquiry. Alien civilisations became thought experiments about prejudice and empathy. Time travel became a vehicle for exploring ethics. Artificial intelligence became a means of questioning consciousness and identity. The future it imagined served as a laboratory for understanding ourselves.

The closing moments of The Man Trap illustrate this perfectly. Reflecting on the death of the salt vampire, Kirk recalls his conversation with the archaologist Robert Crater, who has long been working on the planet, about the fate of the American bison – driven to the brink of extinction by humans.

This comparison transforms what might have been a conventional monster story into something morally complex. The creature is dangerous yet is also the last of its kind. Is it merely a predator, or the victim of a larger tragedy?

The episode, like many others, offers no simple answer. Crater views the creature from a perspective of compassion and preservation. Kirk simply sees an immediate threat to his crew. Both are responding to the same reality, yet they arrive at different conclusions.

The original Star Trek’s lasting legacy is not technological prophecy, but a sustained exploration of what it means to be human. Its enduring achievement lies not in predicting mobile phones, iPads or video calls, but in recognising that the most fascinating and vexing mystery remains humanity itself.

The final frontier, it suggests, lies not among the stars but within ourselves.

Stephen McVeigh, Professor of History, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Swansea University

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

The most striking example of performance politics in Joshua Black’s entertaining book comes when an audience member at a 2010 taping of the now-defunct ABC show Q&A throws a shoe at former prime minister John Howard. (It echoed a famous moment two years earlier, when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at then US president George W. Bush.)

Howard, who laughed it off, was on the show to promote his memoir, Lazarus Rising.

Performance Politics is informative and interesting, but has a somewhat misleading title. Black’s use of the term “performance” is so broad it becomes almost meaningless. In his introduction, he claims “performances are ephemeral”, but the bulk of his analysis is based on a discussion of book publishing and television documentaries. These are not usually regarded as primarily performative.

Review: Performance Politics – Joshua Black (New South)

It may be more accurate to read this book as an account of what Black, citing historian Melanie Nolan, calls life writing. It is scrupulously researched, involving more than 40 hours of interviews with 46 participants: “politician-authors, publishers and editors, collaborators and journalists”.

Historians, Black writes, need to understand both knowledge and emotion.

In this sense, politics today is perhaps less changed over the centuries than Black suggests. Indeed, he offers examples of performative politics from the 19th century, involving street marches, “burning effigies and torchlit oratory”, which seem to deserve the term more than the appearance of politicians on morning television programs.

Late in the book, Black tells us that after the 2025 elections, a third of parliamentary time was devoted to “’political theatre’ for its own sake”. Certainly, much of parliament’s time is clearly performative, whether it’s Pauline Hanson appearing in a burqa in 2017, or Lidia Thorpe refusing to swear allegiance to the monarch in 2024.

One of the clearest moments of parliamentary performance came when Liberal Tim Wilson used the vote to recognise same-sex marriage to propose to his partner in the gallery. Oddly, these are not the sort of examples Black discusses.

It is an indication of his book’s emphasis that the longest discussion of Hanson concentrates on her now-forgotten 2007 autobiography, Untamed & Unashamed, rather than her recent surge to prominence.

Battles of the books

But if I am unconvinced by the title, Black has written an important study of the past 70 years of Australian politics. The major change he points to is the explosion of books written by serving and former politicians.

Two major themes run through his book: the importance of leadership and the role of publishing in creating a political persona. Black discusses every prime minister from Gough Whitlam to Anthony Albanese, with considerable emphasis on their role as authors.

His account of the 1975 dismissal of Whitlam by Governor General Sir John Kerr, titled “publishing coups”, explores the ways the two protagonists sought to use books as self-justification for their own roles in the affair. It appears Whitlam’s The Truth of the Matter had a better reception – and greater sales – than Kerr’s Matters for Judgement.

For Black, this battle of the books marked “a more emotionally charged and expressive public culture”. Every subsequent prime minister – and surprising numbers of cabinet ministers – would now see producing a book as an essential step towards ensuring their legacy.

The one exception was Paul Keating. Not only has he not written his memoirs, but he was scathing about his former speechwriter Don Watson’s account of his career. Launching Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, he poured scorn on the author: “Don has the inclinations of a fruit bat,” he remarked, “he always heads back to the darkness.”

Yet Watson’s book has been one of the most successful prime ministerial biographies. It’s one I would rate, with Judith Brett’s The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, as enthralling for its psychological insights as much as for its political revelations.

Publishing’s ‘director for the stars’

The flurry of political autobiographies and memoirs of the past 30 years owed much to the enthusiasm and energy of Louise Adler, publisher at Melbourne University Press between 2003 and 2019.

While working at William Heinemann, Adler had already signed up Bob Hawke, for what was in 1992 an extraordinary advance of A$350,000. One significant political figure she did not publish was Howard, whose Lazarus Rising (HarperCollins), may be the most successful political memoir published in Australia. It sold more than 100,000 copies.

Starting with Malcolm Fraser, Adler commissioned books across the political spectrum, ranging from once Labor leader Mark Latham’s The Latham Diaries (2005) to former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott’s Battlelines (2009).

If, as Black claims, the political memoir is a form of performance, Adler emerges as the director for the stars. (There is a parallel account of her career at MUP in Stuart Kells’ MUP: A Centenary History, commissioned by the publisher. The result is illuminating, but in striving for “neutrality”, it falls short.)

Selling books certainly does involve performances; Black quotes Howard comparing a book tour to a political campaign. But books take on a life of their own, even if most of the titles he discusses now linger unread on back shelves.

Empty fruit bowls and ‘witches’

Black is also sensitive to gender, in particular to the double standard applied to women politicians. But his almost exclusive focus on federal politics means he does not discuss the role of women in state politics. All but one state (South Australia) has now been led by a woman premier.

He does write about the infamous photograph of Julia Gillard that showed her table with an empty fruit bowl, seized upon as evidence of her failings as a housewife, and that “unmarried women without children were politically suspect and might not be palatable to the public”. More distressing were the signs proclaiming “Ditch the Witch”, a slogan which resurfaced a few months ago, against former Victorian premier Jacinta Allen.

Black’s primary example of the double standard comes from the career of Cheryl Kernot, who left her position as leader of the Australian Democrats in 1997 to join the Labor party, only to lose the seat of Dickson to Peter Dutton four years later.

After her defeat, Kernot won a major book contract with HarperCollins. But on the eve of the 2002 publication of Speaking For Myself Again, the media unleashed the story of her affair with former foreign minister Gareth Evans. Her publishers cancelled a planned book tour.

Black claims Kernot’s book “became a synonym for the dangers of women’s autobiographical storytelling in Australian politics”. One wonders whether her publishers would have behaved differently if she had acknowledged the affair in her memoir.

It would be instructive to compare the way Kernot was treated with the response to revelations about the private lives of male politicians, such as Barnaby Joyce (who started his relationship with his wife, Vikki Campion, when he was married and she was his staffer) and former attorney-general Christian Porter (who left politics over historical rape allegations that surfaced in 2021). I doubt any Australian politician could be as successful as Donald Trump in brushing aside repeated stories of sexual misconduct.

Enthralling reading for political junkies

“How,” asks Black, “did our politics become so personal, autobiographical and focused on story telling?” It does seem true, as he argues, that there is an increasing merging of the personal with the political. It’s symbolised, perhaps, by the soft approach of Annabel Crabb’s television series Kitchen Cabinet, in which she deliberately sets out to humanise our politicians.

Still, the ABC has made a number of serious attempts to chronicle recent Australian political history, through programs such as The Killing Season, about Labor’s Rudd/Gillard years and Nemesis, looking at the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison years. By portraying the internal battles within successive governments, and the series of leadership coups involving five prime ministers in a ten-year period, political history becomes more immediate – if less impressive.

What is striking in Black’s account of the past 50 years is less the performative element than politicians’ need to use books as a way of marking their legacy and influencing political debate.

His book is as much a contribution to the history of Australian publishing as it is an account of the past half-century of federal politics. Even — perhaps especially — political junkies will find it enthralling reading.

Dennis Altman, Vice Chancellor's Fellow and Professorial Fellow, Institute for Human Security and Social Change, La Trobe University

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

Well before I start collecting coats, keys or shoes, my dog always knows when we’re about to leave. By picking up on subtle cues, he anticipates our next movements, reminding me he’s smarter than often shows.

But anticipation isn’t always about the brains. Our new research reveals even an animal with no brain at all can anticipate what’s coming next.

The metamorphosis of the sea sponge

Sea sponges are one of our most distant animal relatives, lacking all the familiar sensory apparatus. They have no brain, no nerves and no neurons. Being not much more than well-organised collections of specialised cells, they’re pretty much as simple as animal life gets.

And yet, sea sponges carry out a wildly complicated process much like a backwards version of a caterpillar’s transformation, from squidgy grub to free-flying bug. Starting out as free-swimming larvae, about half the size of a chia seed, they transfigure themselves into shapeless, spongy lumps, cemented in place.

My colleagues and I have researched this miraculous metamorphosis for years. We have discovered that environmental cues play a very important role.

For instance, swimming larvae are all looking for a suitable alga – the perfect spot to settle on and make their forever home. But in 2020, our group found that if we prevent larvae from experiencing sunset, they never settle, even if in the vicinity of some 5-star algae.

How could missing sunset disrupt such an important event in a young sea sponge’s life?

What sunset does to sea sponge DNA

In a new study, our team shows that sunset is a critical signal that pre-emptively tells sea sponge larvae to “get set”.

While the larvae are still freely swimming, long before settlement is on the cards, sunset triggers modifications to parts of their DNA. Sponge larvae anticipate their big moment by pre-organising parts of their DNA to be primed and ready for “go” time.

By measuring changes in the animals’ DNA (which carries their genetic material) and RNA (which shows which genes are switched on), our team captured genetic freeze-frames from before and during the transformation.

Measuring RNA is like recording all the notes being played at any one time by a musical ensemble. But capturing DNA, using an approach known as chromatin accessibility profiling, tells us something different.

The technique maps open or “accessible” regions of an animal’s genome, versus regions considered “inaccessible” or closed. If a region is accessible, previously dormant genes can be “read” and spring into action. You can imagine this as like selectively highlighting lines of a musical score to indicate which sections the musicians should play.

Our new results reveal that regions of DNA encoding genes related to settlement and metamorphosis get primed (made “accessible”) long before the genes themselves get switched on. In other words, lines of the musical score get marked up well before the musicians begin playing the notes.

The mystery of a rapid transformation

The larvae’s anticipatory genetic action means that, when the right time comes, they can initiate metamorphosis at a jaw-dropping speed. In around 30 minuets, the time it takes glue to dry, they become firmly attached and begin disassembling their larval body.

Sea sponges aren’t the only marine invertebrates to change form. Corals, sea urchins and oysters metamorphose too. And they all do it out in the open, without any protective structure like a caterpillar’s cocoon. Being exposed to dangers while transforming, they need to be fast.

But how they achieve this speed has been a longstanding mystery. We think the anticipatory approach found in sea sponges may be broadly used by diverse species to initiate rapid metamorphosis.

Familiar genes

To coordinate such a complex biological transformation with the daily timing of sunset is an extraordinary feat for an animal without a brain. As it turns out, many of the sponge genes controlling this are also used within our own bodies. For instance, a gene called CLOCK, which is involved in sponge metamorphosis, also sets our circadian rhythms.

Despite appearances, there’s a lot we can learn from sponges about genes like these, which are fundamental to animal life.

After all, with an ancestry dating back some 700 million years, sea sponges are one of the oldest animal groups still alive today. Research into these unusual creatures opens a valuable window onto early animal evolution — including how the first animals came to use the tempo of the planet to anticipate what’s coming next.

Olivia Hewitt, Postdoctoral researcher, School of the Environment, The University of Queensland

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

Feminist activist Gloria Steinem has died aged 92.

Known almost as much for her trademark mid-parted hair and large aviator sunglasses as for her acute intelligence, courage and wit, she will long be known for setting feminist torches alight globally over her six-decade career as a journalist, activist and feminist icon.

Growing up too quickly

Steinem has always been candid about the impact her early life had on the decisions she later made.

Ten years after she was born in Toledo, Ohio (March 25 1934), her parents divorced. Following the departure of her travelling salesman father, young Gloria was left taking care of her mentally ill mother until she graduated from high school and her sister took over.

Years later she reflected that she “became a grown-up too early, from ten to 17, a small person responsible for a big person”.

Rejecting marriage, she said she did not want to end up taking care of someone else (although much later, in 2000 at the age of 66, she did marry entrepreneur and activist David Bale, who died of lymphoma four years later).

Studying government at Smith College, Massachusetts, she graduated with distinction, then spent two years studying and researching in India thanks to a Charles Bowles Fellowship, an experience she credited with inspiring her interest in grassroots activism.

Toe to toe with Hugh Hefner

Like many female journalists starting out in the 1950s and 60s, Steinem’s initial assignments were limited to “women’s pages”. These typically reported on “women’s issues”, such as health and fashion.

When she suggested writing political stories to her editor at The New York Times Sunday Magazine, he “just said something like, ‘I don’t think of you that way’”.

She came to national attention as a journalist in 1963 with her expose, I Was a Playboy Bunny, based on the 11 days she worked undercover at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Club.

Although she still wasn’t taken seriously as a reporter, the publicity raised by this experience showcased the sharp and uncompromising intelligence for which she would later become known. In an exchange between the two published a few years later, Hefner declared he was “all in favour of women being able to vote, own property, and all that. But I want women to be attractive to men”.

Steinem responded to this long overdue endorsement of rights that had been afforded to at least white women as far back as the late 19th and early 20th century, that she wanted “men to be attractive to women. But I don’t want their whole identity to rest on that”. She concluded: “what Playboy doesn’t know about women could fill a book.”

Going her own way

In 1971, frustrated by the mainstream press’s stymieing of feminist reporting, Steinem and fellow journalists established Ms. Magazine as an insert in New York magazine.

By 1972, Ms. Magazine had established itself as an independent paper, with which she maintained a close association throughout her life.

While Ms. became an influential platform for contemporary women’s politics, it also brought feminist history to life. In its series Lost Women, it introduced Women’s Liberation era readers to pioneering feminists from around the world whose achievements had gone unrecognised.

Steinem also authored books and memoirs including An Unexpected Life, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off, and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, among others.

Her lifetime of writing has been recognised with a multitude of awards.

A lifetime of grassroots activism

But Steinem was not one to report from behind a desk. She became an iconic face of feminism, gracing magazine covers and TV screens, interviewing, speaking, marching, and advocating for girls’ and women’s rights for more than six decades.

In 1969, she addressed a crowd in New York State about legalising abortion. She told them about the abortion that she had had in London when she was 22.

Indeed, so dedicated was she to women gaining and retaining control over their bodies and reproductive choices that she dedicated her book, My Life On The Road, to the London physician John Sharpe, “who carried out her abortion back when it was illegal to do so”.

In 2017, she spoke at the Women’s March on Washington, galvanising anti-Trump demonstrators and urging younger generations to keep up the fight.

Steinem also believed in structural pathways to reform, helping fellow feminists to establish, among other activist organisations, the National Women’s Political Caucus (that works for gender equality in public office), the Women’s Action Alliance, (which promotes non-sexist, multi-racial children’s education), the Women’s Media Center (to promote positive images of women in media) and the Ms. Foundation for Women.

‘We’ve been too nice’

There is no doubt Gloria Steinem will be remembered for all of these remarkable achievements. Her life was one of seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm, passion and frustration, action and activism.

After all, these accomplishments have been marked by high profile acknowledgements, from the Presidential Medal of Freedom that President Barack Obama presented to her in 2013, to the establishment in 2017 of The Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University.

However, those closest to her, or even those just fortunate enough to have encountered her, say it is her ethos of connecting across groups, regions and time that will define her legacy.

Illinois Lieutenant Governor Juliana Stratton, the sixth Black woman senator in the US, got Gloria Steinem’s endorsement. Stratton said she would remember the iconic feminist for her inspirational work behind the scenes:

she made the case for intersectional feminism and for the fight for racial equality in New York magazine in 1969, in a popular article headlined ‘After Black Power, Women’s Liberation’ and continued that work throughout her life.

This was an essay in which Steinem declared that if the women’s movement could form alliances with the less radical middle classes, then it should be easy for them to do the same with “poor women of all colours”.

She also adopted a mixed approach to the emotional dimensions of feminism.

She embraced warmth and connection, viewing the women’s movement “like a big chosen family” and feeling “excited by young women now”.

But she wasn’t afraid to teach or correct those younger women.

The #MeToo movement, she said, was not an unprecedented event. It was the continuation of a long campaign that had begun in the early 1970s, “when women college students first coined the term ‘sexual harassment’ to describe what happened to them on summer jobs”. She highlighted the contributions of the Black women who had brought cases before the courts, thereby educating the nation.

At a packed Town Hall meeting in Melbourne in 2016, she told the young woman who asked her what the women’s movement had done wrong: “I think we’ve been too nice.”

Nice or not, Steinem believed the women’s movement would only survive and thrive if her generation was to prepare the next. While alive, she said she was not passing the baton:

I’m keeping my torch, thank you very much – and I’m using it to light the torches of others.

Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Professor in History, University of Wollongong

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

Mortgage holders know interest rates have risen over the past year, as the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) lifted the cash rate to fight inflation. But mortgage holders are not alone: governments and business borrowers are facing the same pressure.

Australia’s government now has to offer investors more than 5% on its 10-year bonds, which hit a 15-year high on Tuesday after a long period of low interest rates since the global financial crisis in 2008.

In the United States, 10-year interest rates sit around 4.7%, surging nearly half a per cent just this year, while the benchmark 30-year bond is near a two-decade high. In the UK, 10-year bond rates on Tuesday hit the highest level since the global financial crisis.

Higher rates mean higher interest payments for governments too, leaving less room for other spending or for tax cuts.

This applies not just to the federal government here but to the states, whose borrowing costs have also jumped. For example, Victoria’s 10-year bonds now pay an interest rate of 5.55%.

So what’s actually driving market interest rates higher?

Supply and demand

Governments issue bonds to raise money and finance spending that isn’t covered by tax revenue.

Like any asset, the price of a government bond depends on supply and demand. Less bond supply means issuers (governments or companies) don’t need to offer higher rates to attract buyers; more supply pushes rates up.

Bond issuance comes from three main sources:

1. households – borrowing for mortgages, which the banks can then repackage into bonds and sell to investors.

2. businesses – issuing bonds to fund operations. In the US, AI-sector firms such as Amazon and Microsoft have issued about US$240 billion in debt to fund data centres. Even in Australia, Google owner Alphabet launched a huge A$5.5 billion bond last month.

3. governments – governments often have large debts they have built up because of their past budget deficits. Like anyone, if you spend more than you earn, you need to borrow.

The main driver is government debt

The larger a government’s debt, the more bonds it must issue – and the higher the interest rates needed to attract investors.

US national debt has grown to more than US$40 trillion – more than 20 times the size of Australia’s entire economy – while Australia’s federal government debt recently passed A$1 trillion.

Funding debts of this size is pushing up interest rates worldwide. At the same time, some bond investors are getting concerned by the high levels of US government debt and the lack of plans to curb spending, so they are demanding higher interest rates on government bonds.

What central banks can do

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) manages interest rates through the “cash market” – short-term borrowing of less than a day – using the cash rate to influence demand for borrowing. Raising interest rates ultimately dampens economic demand and reduces inflation.

The RBA cash rate affects borrowing costs across the economy for all other forms of debt – car loans and credit cards as well as mortgages, and corporate debt.

But the RBA can’t directly influence longer-term interest rates such as 10-year bonds, which are market rates and fluctuate constantly based on investors’ demand.

If the RBA cut rates sharply right now, for instance, bond investors would likely read this as inflationary – pushing up inflation expectations and, in turn, the interest rates demanded on longer-term bonds. The RBA’s action would end up being counterproductive.

America’s ‘exorbitant privilege’ – and its limits

The US has long enjoyed a unique position in global markets: it can issue growing volumes of government bonds without needing to offer higher rates to attract buyers.

This “exorbitant privilege” stems from the US dollar’s dominance in global trade and financial transactions, and the widespread trust that central banks and private investors place in US government debt.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has tried to capitalise on this by intervening in the bond market, aiming to shrink supply and push market interest rates lower. That would reduce the interest bill for the US government.

The US Treasury increased the amount of debt it is buying back, but the buybacks only had a brief impact on the market.

Investors concluded the buybacks don’t change the underlying picture: increasing US government financing needs, fears of rising inflation, as well as growing corporate bond issuance to fund AI and data centres. All these forces tend to push interest rates higher over the medium to long term, and no financial engineering can undo this reality.

Rates are rising around the world

Across many countries, bond market rates are rising because higher inflation is eroding the real returns for investors. They are demanding more compensation to protect their spending power.

This is compounded by rising bond issuance from both governments and companies. No amount of financial engineering from the US Treasury can reverse these forces.

Central banks and governments can influence short-term interest rates to some degree.

But longer-term debt such as 10-year bonds are ultimately priced on three things:

• expected inflation
• the scale of government debt and financing needs
• and the level of corporate and household borrowing.

The best thing any central bank can do to keep market interest rates low is set policy so inflation remains low.

That’s the purpose of the RBA’s inflation target of 2–3%. As well as keeping a lid on consumer inflation expectations, it lets bond investors know inflation should return to that level in the medium term, and so market interest rates don’t get too high.

Mark Crosby, Professor of Economics, Monash University

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

Richard Denniss is an economist and head of the Australia Institute, a Canberra-based policy think tank. His monograph More Fool Me: How the Gas Industry Tricked Australia is an impassioned plea for ordinary Australians to lobby relevant federal ministers to more effectively tax the export gas industry.

The ineffectiveness of the current Petroleum Resources Rent Tax (PRRT), which also covers gas, is evident in the dismal tax revenues. This could have been further examined by Denniss, but his focus is a 25% export tax.

Review: More Fool Me: How the Gas Industry Tricked Australia – Richard Denniss (Australia Institute Press)

Woe was the day in 1988 that the Hawke government listened to lobbyists and changed the old petroleum royalty system.

The 1980s rhetoric claimed that the PRRT, which replaced the old system, was necessary to attract vital investment into Australia, though petroleum executives campaigned against the new tax at the time. They cried “sovereign risk”. (Denniss could have included the history of the minerals industry’s hackneyed complaints about taxation.)

The PRRT differs from a royalty system, in that it is levied on profits.

Royalties are usually calculated on either production volume or production market value. Even if a company has no taxable income, it still pays a royalty based on production.

In other words, any company that extracts resources will always pay a royalty.

Oil is very profitable and low-cost to extract. Once it is extracted, it is pumped onto tankers or a pipeline and sent to customers. The PRRT was an effective tax for oil, but Australia’s oil resources are now almost completely exhausted.

Gas is not as profitable as oil, as it requires costly infrastructure to convert it into liquefied form for export. The PRRT laws allow companies’ capital costs and operating costs to be covered by gas revenues before the tax is paid.

This is a huge concession to gas producers, which results in the gas being “free” of a resource tax. Currently, across all offshore petroleum companies operating in Australia, the PRRT system has around AU$282 billion in expenditure carried forward. In other words, the gas companies need to generate up to AU$282 billion in revenue before they pay any PRRT.

The 2017 Callaghan Report into the PRRT spotlighted the political failures in taxing gas in Australia, but unfortunately it only led to minor tweaks to the system.

A 25% gas export tax?

Denniss notes how our politicians overlook the fact that Australia’s GDP figures are boosted by including the value of gas exports, “even though the stock is not paid for”. He points out that export revenues mostly go to foreign shareholders.

To address this problem, Denniss advocates a specific 25% tax on exported gas, but his argument is tainted by resorting to various charges of the gas industry being “con artists” who resort to “trickery”.

A better approach would have been to focus on the reluctance of successive Australian governments to repeal the ineffective PRRT. Their inaction has increased gas industry revenue to the detriment of the Australian public and our standard of living.

Denniss does not explain the workings of his proposed tax. For instance, would the imposition of a 25% export gas tax involve the repeal of the PRRT? Would the 25% export gas tax be applied to gas export volumes or gas export value? At what point in the production process would the tax be levied?

The essay could have helpfully included a discussion of the gas production process chain. Woodside’s North West Shelf Project in Western Australia, for example, extracts gas from the seabed to the wellhead at the surface, then pumps the gas by pipeline to onshore facilities for processing. At this point, the gas is metered and PRRT is calculated.

The gas then flows to the liquefaction plant, where it is lowered in temperature to liquid form (liquefied natural gas or LNG) and exported via LNG tankers.

In contrast to the current PRRT or a gas tax, the taxing point of a typical royalty system is at the wellhead, where gas is first extracted.

The alternative taxing point of a 25% export tax might be when a tanker leaves Australia. That tax calculation is likely to be complex. It would need to be further negotiated, as it would include other ongoing costs, such as marketing.

Gas export tax inequity

Denniss’ focus on a gas export tax also has some inequities. His essay makes the valid point that the stock of gas extracted from Commonwealth waters for “free” should be paid for by gas companies through a more rigorous taxing system.

However, he does not mention that 15% of gas extracted in WA – by Chevron, for instance – is reserved solely for consumers and business use in that state.

Under the proposed 25% gas export tax, stocks of domestic gas would be untaxed. This is potentially unfair to those in states of Australia that rely on other sources of energy, such as solar or hydro.

Denniss mentions the effective gas taxation system in Saudi Arabia and Norway, as well as Qatar’s successful royalty system. In all three countries, the government participates in gas projects on an equity basis. This is not the case in Australia.

The basic principle for all natural resources in this country is that the stock must be paid for, as it is owned by Australians. The most effective way to achieve this is through a royalty system. Denniss’ essay does not consider that royalties are the uniform system for all resources in Australia – except for gas extracted from Commonwealth waters.

Onshore gas in Queensland, for example, was once taxed under the PRRT system, but its zero revenues led to the re-introduction of a royalty system, based on volume and price-tiered. The rates vary depending on whether it is export or domestic gas.

Denniss makes many valid points. He is correct in stating that gas companies will not get up and leave due to a changed tax system. The furphy of the necessity of trading our tax-free gas for overseas diesel, as the government has suggested, is called out.

The notion that taxing gas will harm stability in our region is rebutted. The claim that tax-free gas is an important transition fuel to net zero is swatted away. The proposition that there is a shortage of domestic gas due the cast-iron nature of gas export sales contracts is exposed as misleading.

Denniss’ call for a grassroots push for change might just work. Back in 2017 a grassroots movement for a petroleum tax review resulted in the Callaghan Report, but no real gains in revenue.

The inaction of successive Australian governments is the reason for the failure of the current gas tax. The gas industry is the major beneficiary of this gross inaction.

Diane Kraal, Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, Business Law and Taxation Dept, Monash Business School, Monash University

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

How important is it that kids learn to tell right from wrong?

Businessman and former university chancellor David Gonski recently called for ethics classes to be rolled out in all Australian schools to boost social cohesion.

At the moment, ethics does not get dedicated time in the school curriculum.

Some might argue children don’t need school ethics classes if they already learn ethics from their parents and other adults in their lives.

But our research shows formal ethics education can make a difference. In the largest ever review on the subject, we found teaching ethics can improve students’ ability to reason through ethical issues and prioritise doing the right thing.

Ethics education in Australia

Ethics has been part of the national Australian Curriculum for more than a decade. It sits alongside literacy, numeracy and four other subjects as a “general capability”. This means it’s a cross-curriculum skill every Australian child is supposed to learn in all subjects.

So in theory, ethics education is the responsibility of all teachers, even when teaching mathematics, art or biology.

In practice, no-one is responsible for teaching these skills. Australian research has found even teachers who value general capabilities, such as ethics, struggle to teach them explicitly. This is because the focus is on what gets tested. In turn, this means “the intentions of the Australian Curriculum […] are not being realised”.

In most Australian states, the only structured ethics offering in schools is during religious instruction. But these are only optional lessons, and families who want a secular alternative are often left without it.

Our study

We synthesised 92 randomised controlled trials – the most rigorous form of evidence in education. Together, the studies involved 12,693 students from primary school through to university.

The studies covered 20 countries, including Australia, and spanned nearly five decades.

Of those 92 randomised trials, 54 compared students receiving ethics lessons to those in control groups who did not learn ethics. The other studies compared different types of ethics instruction against each other.

The studies with control groups tell us how well students currently learn ethics without dedicated classes (such as from their parents or through other generalised learning at school).

What we found

Students who received formal ethics education were better able to recognise ethical issues (also called “moral sensitivity”), gave better reasons about the right thing to do (“moral judgement”) and wanted to prioritise doing the right thing (“moral motivation”). Four in five trials showed meaningful positive effects in these areas.

Our study did not measure kids’ actual behaviour over the long run. But we know higher moral reasoning capacity is associated with being more likely to help others and resist peer pressure. It is also associated with lower levels of juvenile delinquency.

We also found how you teach ethics matters.

Programs built around student discussion worked well. Programs built around lectures and readings alone did not, like in most subjects. You learn better when you can explain your thinking, safely make mistakes, and get feedback.

This is why ethics is so good to learn in schools: you can have discussions with peers and educators in a way that’s hard for most parents to reproduce at home.

Some Australian states do this well …

New South Wales already has a model for teaching ethics.

The free Primary Ethics program runs in about 500 NSW schools and reaches roughly 40,000 students each week using trained volunteers. Its curriculum is built around small groups, working through questions such as “Is it ever okay to break a promise?”

This is the kind of structured discussion our research identified as most effective for teaching ethics.

Primary Ethics runs during the same time slot as religious instruction lessons. It was introduced because growing numbers of students were opting out of religious classes, but had nothing meaningful to do instead. The classes are free because they’re delivered by trained volunteers.

… but most don’t

Dedicated ethics classes are patchy in other states. For example, Queensland and Western Australia have class time for religious instruction but there is no secular alternative. Students just get “other instruction” during this time.

Other states would need to amend their laws to allow (not require) secular ethics as a formal alternative to religious instruction, exactly as NSW did in 2010.

No new funding or teachers would be needed. If they run at the same time as religious instruction, there is already space in the school week for these classes.

New volunteers would be needed to run the discussions, but NSW has shown there’s a willing contingent of people who can deliver the program when the lesson plans are already prepared for them.

A more ambitious approach

A more ambitious change would be to treat ethics as a core subject in its own right, as in France and Finland.

This could mean having ethics education on the timetable, right alongside maths and languages. Every student would be taught by a trained specialist teacher, instead of asking trained volunteers or other teachers to cover it.

Our review showed ethics education helps at every level of schooling.

Which model works best is still an open question; whether to make room for one arguably is not.

We make time for maths, sport and music because we think they matter for a good life. If knowing right from wrong matters at least as much, it has earned at least a little time on the timetable.

Michael Noetel, Associate Professor of Psychology, The University of Queensland and Geetanjali Basarkod, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University

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

Major changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) are coming.

This includes the launch of Thriving Kids in October. This program will be co-funded by state, territory and federal governments and will replace some children’s individual NDIS funding with foundational supports.

Foundational supports are disability services such as physiotherapy, speech pathology, occupational therapy and psychology.

However, instead of being offered as a private service, funded by the NDIS, they will be integrated into other settings such as schools or community activities. The idea is children get the support they need wherever they already live, learn and play – without needing a referral to a specialist, or a diagnosis.

But Thriving Kids will only be for children aged 0–8 with developmental delay and autism who have low-to-moderate support needs.

What about children aged nine and over?

Those with higher needs will still be eligible for NDIS funding. But what if your child is no longer eligible for the NDIS, but too old for Thriving Kids?

There’s still a lot we don’t know

We don’t have exact numbers about how many children and young people would fall between the NDIS and Thriving Kids.

Health department documents seen by The Guardian in July estimated that – among those with developmental delay and autism no longer eligible for NDIS funding – 151,240 will be aged 18 or younger.

There is already concern among some experts that Thriving Kids will struggle to meet demand for those aged 0–8, and that support will be less individualised than the NDIS.

The federal government has not yet announced what supports it plans to offer for those aged nine and over who are no longer eligible for Thriving Kids, or how these would be funded.

But we know families are overwhelmed

Currently, many families end up doing the work to get their kids’ needs met, for example, by linking allied health (such as speech pathologists and occupational therapists) with their child’s teachers.

Research we (Sophie) have done with parents and caregivers shows they often feel overwhelmed and unsupported while advocating for their neurodivergent young people’s participation at school and in community activities.

The NDIS review in 2023 and the Thriving Kids advisory group’s recommendations in 2025 both called for better integration of disability services into the education system – and many families have supported this. This is what foundational supports are meant to address.

So how could foundational supports help?

As researchers and allied health professionals who work with children, we see this as a good opportunity to rethink how we support neurodivergent kids and young people.

Foundational supports for those aged nine and older will only work when they’re part of a broader system in which the professionals and adults around children work together.

This doesn’t mean teachers and schools simply absorbing more responsibility.

Foundational supports will need to involve:

Interprofessional collaboration

This means professionals from different fields (such as occupational therapy, psychology or social work) working together with children and their families to share information and agree on priorities for support (rather than a series of separate appointments).

As they get older, this process should increasingly involve young people themselves, supporting them to describe what they need, set their own goals and participate in discussions about the kind of support they get.

An informed support network

This means building the knowledge, skills and resources of educators, sport coaches, community workers – as well as family members and peers – to better understand developmental difference. Greater knowledge will ease the burden on families.

For example, this could involve education about why miscommunication can happen between autistic and neurotypical people because of natural variations in brain function (not because autistic people have an inherent deficit, as is sometimes assumed).

Different support levels

Some kids and young people will need more targeted or intensive support, such as a short burst of one-on-one therapy with a psychologist or speech pathologist. Others may benefit from group sessions, for example, a social worker at a community centre leading activities for teens focused on building skills and confidence for everyday life, such as getting a haircut or catching a bus.

Clear pathways for transition

Families shouldn’t have to work out which system they belong to and how to get the right support if needs change or their child ages out of Thriving Kids.

Let’s look at an example

Imagine a ten-year-old who finds the classroom overwhelming and is reluctant to attend school.

Rather than simply referring the child outside for weekly therapy, a coordinated approach could bring the teacher, family and relevant health professionals together to make a support plan.

The teacher and family might first talk about what they’re noticing and how the child feels, before deciding what practical changes are needed.

An occupational therapist linked to the school might then help identify environmental or sensory barriers. A social worker could help identify and address social challenges and build on strengths in the child’s school, home and community life.

Adults already helping this child where they play and learn will become better able to support them.

A trial in South Australia

In South Australia, the Self-Regulation Service has worked across 57 primary schools since 2024 to train teachers and teach students about self-regulation skills.

The program is an example of supporting all children – regardless of their background or specific ability – to develop skills such as planning, setting goals, anticipating obstacles and controlling impulses.

This will help them cope with difficult tasks now, as well as manage their own learning as they get older.

The takeaway

The goal of foundational supports is not simply to make children fit environments that don’t work for them. We have to transform our ways of working so children and young people of all ages can thrive as equal members of the community.

A child’s needs may change as they get older, but they don’t abruptly stop when they turn nine – so neither should their support.

Emma Cowie, Lecturer in Occupational Therapy, Deakin University and Sophie Goldingay, Associate Professor in Social Work, Deakin University

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

Public debate surrounding transgender and gender diverse (trans) people often centres on one fundamental question: what makes someone trans?

Most of us would agree that our gender is not a choice, but a core part of who we are. When our gender aligns with the sex listed on our birth certificate, it’s rarely ever questioned. Instead, it’s treated as a biological reality.

However, when it comes to trans people, an alternate explanation is frequently floated: that trans identities and gender diversity are the result of environmental influences, such as social trends or peer pressure.

This framing treats a trans identity as a choice that can – and, implicitly, should – be unlearned.

Such messaging is increasingly being used to deny the existence of trans people, restrict access to medically necessary health care, and fuel discrimination.

Our study of twins challenges this idea and shows the likelihood of being trans is influenced by your genes.

The power of twin studies

Twin studies are a powerful tool in research. Identical twins share 100% of their genes, whereas non-identical twins share 50% on average – the same as non-twin siblings.

By comparing these two types of twins, we can explore the extent to which genetics and the environment contribute to human traits.

If genes are involved, we expect identical twins to share traits (for example, both identifying as trans) more often than non-identical twins, simply due to their higher degree of genetic similarity.

Conversely, if genes aren’t involved, we expect to see similar rates of shared traits among identical and non-identical pairs.

Our research examined data from 463 twin pairs where at least one was trans – the most comprehensive analysis on this topic to date.

After determining whether twin pairs were identical or non-identical, we measured how often both twins were trans, compared to instances where only one was trans.

What we found

Our results showed that among identical twins, if one was trans, the likelihood that the other was also trans was 21.2%.

For non-identical twins, this rate was significantly lower, at 8.7% – though this was still well above the 1–2% prevalence of trans identities in the general population.

Non-twin siblings weren’t included in our research, but we’d expect their rate would be similar to that seen among non-identical twins.

If being trans were purely a social phenomenon, we would not see this step-wise difference where the chance of being trans goes up with increasing genetic similarity.

Our data thus provide strong evidence that genes are involved.

More than just genes

It’s also important to highlight another finding in our data – that most twin pairs, even among those who are identical, are not both trans.

This comes as no surprise to researchers who study twins, who have documented similar patterns for many other human traits.

Almost all human traits, such as personality characteristics, height, and sexuality, are shaped by both genetic and environmental factors.

It’s likely that gender identity is the same.

Interplay of genetics and the environment

Genes and the environment do not act independently, and the influence of genetics on any complex human trait does not stem from variations in a single gene.

Rather, hundreds or even thousands of genes work alongside and react to environmental influences to form an enormous range of human characteristics.

Environmental factors can affect the activity of our genes throughout the course of our lives. Such environmental influences encompass the full breadth of human experiences, all the way back to conception.

Both identical and non-identical twins share environmental experiences, especially within the womb and as children raised together in the same family.

But each twin also has unique experiences that contribute to their individual differences. So, it really is a complex interplay between genes and the environment.

Why this matters for public understanding

Many anti-trans arguments rely on a belief that gender diversity is entirely socially determined.

This myth is frequently weaponised to frame trans identities as optional or reversible. Too often, this becomes a justification for hostile public attitudes and for stripping basic legal protections from trans people.

The belief that being trans is purely a social phenomenon also provides a rationale for harmful identity change and suppression practices (also known as conversion therapy).

Every major Australian and United States medical association has condemned these practices.

However, a recent US Supreme Court case and other national and state policy developments in the US in particular are increasingly providing cover for those performing these harmful practices.

A complex and enduring human trait

Our findings provide a crucial correction to this harmful public discourse. They confirm that genes and their related biological pathways play a role in shaping gender identity.

Fears of trans identities being a social trend or response to peer pressure – and related shifts in policies to restrict trans people’s basic rights – are at odds with the scientific evidence.

Gender diversity has existed across millennia and is an inherent part of human diversity. It’s time law and society caught up.

Ken Pang, Senior Principal Research Fellow and Group Leader, Transgender Health Research Group, Murdoch Children's Research Institute; Anja Ravine, Research Fellow, Transgender Health Research Group, Murdoch Children's Research Institute; Kellan Baker, Senior Advisor for Health Policy, Johns Hopkins University, and Will Conabere, Researcher, Murdoch Children's Research Institute

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

The way Australians consume news has been changing for the past 30 years, ever since internet use became widespread.

Long gone are the days when families routinely shared bits of the newspaper over breakfast, or crowded around the 6 o'clock television news at night.

Since 2017, we have been tracking young people’s media engagement, to understand how they get their news.

This time, we found some young people are bypassing traditional outlets, reducing their use of social media sources and getting their news from artificial intelligence (AI) summaries using platforms such as Google search and tools like ChatGPT.

Are young people interested in the news?

Every three years, we ask at least 1,000 children and teens to complete our online survey. We use quotas for age, location, gender and parental education level to ensure respondents reflect the diversity of today’s young Australians.

Our 2026 survey results show a significant shift in young people’s news engagement, with an overall decline for young people aged 10–16 years*.

Across nearly every indicator, young people are less engaged with news than they were in our previous survey in 2023.

Young people who report following up on news after hearing about something happening in the world fell from 70% to 59%. Those following social media accounts for news fell from 41% to 29%. Checking news websites or apps is down from 38% to 33%.

Where do young people get their news?

Across the four surveys since 2017, family has always been the most common and trusted source of news for both children and teenagers.

But as children move into their teenage years, they also turn to other sources.

Social media has become a common source of news for young people since our first survey, rising from 53% in 2017 to 61% in 2020, during the early days of the pandemic.

But this trend has since reversed, falling to 41% in 2026. The latest decline is likely to be linked in part to the social media ban. This became law in December 2025, two months before our survey was in the field.

AI as a news source is new

In the latest survey, for the first time we asked young people about their use of AI to get news.

Already, 28% of children aged 10–12 report they are using an AI tool to ask about news often or sometimes, rising to 41% among teens aged 13–17.

This could be via AI summaries of the news (which are hard to avoid on Google) or by asking AI tools a question. For example, by typing in “what happened in Nepal?”.

This makes Al tools the second most common way young people proactively seek out news. It is also level with news websites or apps and ahead of social media, TV and radio.

This widespread use of AI to get news raises questions about whether young people are being prepared in school for this kind of news engagement, particularly when we know AI can sometimes be wrong or biased.

What’s happening in schools?

Encouragingly, more than half (61%) of young people discussed a news story in school in the past year often or sometimes. However, only around a quarter (26%) learned how to write or produce their own news stories.

Through the process of making their own news stories, students can learn about key elements of high-quality news: fact-checking, fair representation and the right of reply.

Students can also learn how the news can intersect with their own interests and how they can have a voice in their communities.

Decades of research tells us news engagement and civic engagement are closely entwined: when people feel informed about social issues and events, they are more likely to respond and take action.

Our survey findings reflect this. For example, 80% of young people who are highly engaged with news report working with others to address local problems, compared with only 43% of those who have low engagement with news. They are also much more likely to become involved in a cause and volunteer.

Why this matters

Children and young people have as much right to be informed about their communities and societies as anyone else. It’s also important for our democracy that young people’s voices are heard by adults on the issues that impact them.

To address this, families can support discussion of news in the home, and news providers can increase the representation of young people in the news.

Meanwhile, schools can draw attention to the importance of news and provide opportunities for young people to engage with and produce their own news. Schools can also support discussions about the benefits and risks around different forms of news, including news that is generated by AI.

*Previous surveys included young people aged 8–16 while the 2026 survey includes those aged 10–17. When comparing results across surveys we only include those aged 10–16. In all other cases we included data for those aged 10–17.

Sora Park and Simon Chambers were coauthors of the report mentioned in this article.

Tanya Notley, Professor in Digital Media, Western Sydney University; Jee Young Lee, Lecturer, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra, and Michael Dezuanni, Professor, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology

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

Artificial intelligence (AI) should help Australia achieve its long term productivity target, while having “profound” effects on the labour market.

These are among the conclusions of a detailed analysis of the economic implications of AI prepared by Treasury for Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

As of March, Australia had 162 operational data centres. Another about 130 centres are proposed, taking Australia to nearly 300 operating or planned facilities.

The government is preparing legislation to cover conditions including requirements for the centres on their energy and water use. Data centres will have to bring new renewable energy sources although at last week’s National Cabinet Minister Anthony Albanese agreed to give Queensland and the Northern Territory some flexibility on this.

While the Treasury analysis is generally positive, it is also hedged with uncertainty about the longer term implications of a technology that is still in its early stages.

The analysis says that on current evidence AI will support its assumption of a long term growth in productivity of 1.2% annually. But it won’t be able to do it alone.

In 2024–25 labour productivity declined, and over the past decade it has been mostly flat.

“Reaching the long term productivity growth assumption of 1.2% per annum requires a significant improvement in growth over the transition period,” the paper says.

“The [Productivity Commission’s] quantitative estimates imply that AI will generate some, but not all of the baseline productivity growth in Treasury’s assumption.”

But there are possible risks to this progress, such as trade barriers and geopolitical tensions. Treasury spells out upside and downside scenarios.

There is a plausible upside scenario in which high rates of AI-driven innovation at the global frontier and its diffusion to Australia lift long-term productivity growth to within the range of 1.5–2%.

However, there is also a realistic downside scenario in which the pace of AI innovation and diffusion are weak, and offsetting structural headwinds keep productivity growth around its current underlying rate (0.5–0.8%).

Who’s using AI in Australia?

So far, AI has had limited effects on the labour market, but they will accelerate, albeit unevenly across sectors, the paper says.

“AI will not affect all workers or places equally. It may shift the division of labour across occupations, regions and sectors, depending on exposure, skills and capacity to adapt.”

Information, telecommunications, professional services, finance and insurance are presently having the highest rates of adoption.

While two-thirds of businesses in Australia report adopting AI in some form, less than 10 per cent describe their adoption as significant. This likely reflects the stage of AI development, with many more ways to use AI developing over time.

The paper says AI has the potential to have a bigger impact on high-skilled non-routine and cognitive jobs, augmenting some and automating others. Earlier GPT waves primarily automated physical and routine jobs.

Larger firms may adopt AI faster, while smaller firms may face barriers associated with skills, data, computing capacity, cloud infrastructure and access to foundation models.

Because AI has the potential to automate a significant share of cognitive, non-routine tasks currently performed by high-skilled workers, and accelerate productivity and economic growth, labour market impacts could be materially different to past waves of technology.

The effects are likely to be profound. The ability of the labour market to adjust will depend on the magnitude and timing of the positive technology shock, how it is adopted and diffused throughout global and domestic economies, and how well policy settings adapt to the changing economic environment.

Treasury says where workers use AI to perform better, output per worker increases. “This supports wage growth, labour’s share of income and employment.”

Implications for interest rates

With AI in a phase of high investment, there could be a change to the “real neutral interest rate”, the paper says. (This rate is the point at which monetary policy is neither restricting or stimulating the economy.)

AI hyperscalers are increasingly resorting to issuing debt to fund their capital expenditure programs, demonstrating that AI-driven demand on the global savings pool is already beginning to grow.

This could be partially offset by increased household savings, either as precautionary saving from households who are uncertain about AI’s impact on their future employment and income or in expectation of a longer retirement from an AI advancement driving longer life expectancy.

The pressure would be reduced if productivity impacts are lower than expected or if external factors like geopolitical risks affects investment, the paper says.

Its discussion on interest rates is in a generic context, rather than specifically referring to Australia.

Chalmers said that AI “is shaping up to be the biggest economic transformation in our lifetime.” It would affect every aspect of the economy and society.

“I’m confident we can maximise the economic upside and minimise the risks.”

He said AI would be “front and centre” in the Intergenerational Report to be released in September.

“Almost every advanced economy is grappling with how to lift productivity, but as Treasury puts it, AI is the first substantive and credible productivity growth accelerant in almost two decades.

"Advances in AI are coming thick and fast, with frontier labs reaching new milestones in a matter of weeks, not years.”

Chalmers said the government was acting to ensure Australians reap the productivity, investment and jobs benefits from AI.

“We’re working with the states, private sector and the broader community to build a thriving and sustainable data centre industry, attract investment to train AI models here and make Australians beneficiaries from the entire AI supply chain.

"We’re helping businesses and workers access the tools they need to adopt and adapt to AI, and developing world-leading principles to do all this in the safe, responsible way Australians expect.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

The 1960s were a time of great change in technology, culture and politics. Television was radically altering the media environment, and nobody was quite sure how to think about it.

As the world struggles with the impact of another new high-tech medium – generative artificial intelligence (AI) – two thinkers from that era have acquired new relevance for understanding what is happening and where we’re heading.

Investors are sinking billions of dollars into AI companies and data centres in the belief that AI will change the world. But how should we think about AI? Is it a powerful tool we should embrace to avoid becoming Luddites? A type of intelligence we should be collaborating with?

A different view is to consider the likes of ChatGPT and Claude as new mediums that are reshaping our communicative environment. This is where our 1960s thinkers can help: Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan and French theorist Guy Debord both offered key lessons in how media work and how they affect society.

AI as medium

In the early days of the printing press, it was used to produce copies of the Bible. TV relied on theatre and radio for much of its early content. The internet was first mostly used for sending electronic “mail” and exchanging “files”.

McLuhan noticed the pattern here. New media are initially used to recreate content from old media. But then we see novel kinds of content appear that are native to the new media. Television, for example, led to the advent of reality TV, 24-hour news coverage, and other forms that uniquely suited the medium.

We’re still in the early days with generative AI. People use it to produce old content in a new medium: writing essays, generating pop songs, spawning web pages, and so on.

Hints of genuinely new forms of AI-enabled communication are starting to emerge. Google’s Project Genie generates explorable worlds in real time on demand. In academia, we are seeing experiments with books as linked modules with embedded prompts.

This matters because, in McLuhan’s famous phrase, “the medium is the message”. Whether you’re watching live-streaming influencers or nature documentaries, you’re still staring at a screen. If you’re interfacing with AI systems instead of humans over a long period of time, it will change how you experience the world.

Living inside the spectacle

What kinds of technologies get developed in our society? Debord argued that capitalist societies proliferate media technologies that turn our lives into a sequence of engagements with commodified representations.

In his 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle, Debord predicted that much of what was simply experienced would become mediated by technologies. At that time, TV was the dominant new medium.

In the mobile era, that trend went further. People started to keep in touch with friends through social media, to meet romantic partners online, to conduct political activity through clicks, and to entertain themselves with “content” anywhere, anytime.

Things that used to be spontaneous were now happening through a medium, and could hence be monetised. AI has expanded what can be mediated and commodified even further.

There is no conspiracy here. But companies have an enormous incentive to invest in developing and using new technologies to hack the human psyche.

Anything that can capture our attention and shape our behaviour is worth serious money. Whoever invents the next Facebook or TikTok will reap a huge payout.

Debord would suggest the way to predict AI’s trajectory is to consider what’s left in a human life that’s outside the economy and then ask, “how might some kind of AI-infused medium take this over?” Entertainment, exercise, sleep, friendships, romance, food and so on.

AI will take technological mediation of our lives even further. As Debord wrote in 1967:

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings – dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behaviour.

Media technologies will continue to make us more alienated from one another. They will divert our attention from the sensory experiences of our lives towards consuming content and goods. All of which is great for GDP, but dubious with regard to the quality of human lives or the environment.

Cutting through the narratives

Humans are a social species. Our lives are built on communication through media, whether that be with friends and family through speech, dead authors through print, or an AI girlfriend through a large language model.

Thinking about AI as media, rather than as a tool or an intelligence, lets us ask the right questions. Instead of asking “what can AI do?” we should be asking “how does AI change our media environment?”

AI could change the media environment in a positive way. It could lead to less time responding to emails, filling in administrative forms, doing menial work tasks or conducting performative assessments in schools. Less time in front of a computer screen and more time in the park with friends.

Debord’s idea suggests this is not the future we will get unless we radically change course. The current huge investment of capital in AI can be read as a bet on a future media environment that ensnares more human attention and mediates our lives in new and invasive ways.

Things don’t have to go this way. As McLuhan wrote almost 60 years ago:

There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.

Nick Kelly, Associate Professor in Interaction Design, Queensland University of Technology

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

For 30 years, the world wide web has run on a surprisingly profound social contract: most sites are free for search engines to access, but if you use their content you give credit by linking to the source.

Recently, that social contract has begun to collapse. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are crawling sites not to link to them, but to train models and generate answers (which may or may not be accurate).

When you search for something, ChatGPT’s response or Google’s AI Overviews may still include links to sources, but they’re a kind of optional extra to the main answer.

This has triggered a bad dynamic for website owners, the public, and even AI companies themselves: as websites lose traffic (and revenue), many are beginning to block AI scraping tools, meaning AI results depend more on low-quality websites (many of which are also generated by AI). As a result, good information can be harder than ever to find.

How we got here

In the early days of the world wide web, search engines and content creators came to an agreement about crawling (the practice of technologically examining a site to index it, so it can be served up in search results). Content creators would provide access to their sites for free, and even allow search engines to reproduce small snippets of text.

In return, search engines provided links to the sites owned by content creators, who benefited from that web traffic. If content creators didn’t like the deal, they could prevent search engines from crawling their site with instructions in a file called robots.txt.

But if AI tools no longer provide web traffic, it cuts content creators out of the economic loop. There are also other costs associated with each visit to a website, so AI crawling can cost website providers money while not giving them any of the ad or other revenue that would come from human traffic. AI crawlers also crawl more deeply and more intensely than traditional web crawlers, magnifying that cost.

This change in traffic patterns isn’t a small or hypothetical problem. Cloudflare, a web hosting and service company that manages 30% or more of the top 10,000 sites on the internet, estimates over half of all web traffic is now AI bots.

Some of this will be AI agents supervised directly by people, but the majority will be crawlers. Site owners can use robots.txt to ask AI crawlers to stay off their sites – but some AI companies may ignore this polite request.

If the AI companies do honour the request, that can create a different problem. Sites containing misinformation are far less likely to ban AI crawlers, so the AI answers won’t be informed by high-quality sources.

What’s happening in the short term

On the horizon is an event dubbed “Google Zero” – the day when through-traffic from Google drops to nothing. While some greyhaired diehards (like one of the authors of this piece) might still click through to verify AI answers, this traffic is rapidly dwindling, as a direct result of AI summaries.

A study of Wikipedia confirms this, showing that traffic in the English language version of the site dropped off quickly with the launch of AI summaries on Google in English, and that the same pattern occurred in other languages as AI summaries were rolled out. Never having to click through to get an answer might seem great for information seekers, but the reality is more complex.

Many sites are now blocking AI crawlers altogether. Site owners who decide to block AI crawlers are less likely to be linked in AI Overviews answers, even when the AI tool can still access the content to ground its answers (using a technique called retrieval-augmented generation).

Alternative “pay to crawl” models have been suggested as a way to compensate content creators, but haven’t gained traction.

Come September 15, Cloudflare sites will block AI crawlers by default on pages that contain advertising (and therefore make money for content creators).

This means up to 30% of the world’s top sites will no longer appear in Google AI Overviews summaries. It also means that much of what AI is being trained on will itself be AI-generated text.

What it means for you

So what does this mean when you’re looking for information? The quality of AI summaries is likely to go down, at least in the short term, while the new economics of the web get sorted out.

This will happen for two reasons. The first is that high-quality content is less likely to go into those AI summaries – one recent study found that already, around 1 in 6 sources used by AI search tools is itself an AI-generated website.

The second reason is that, as AI models are trained on more AI text, their output may degrade (a phenomenon known as model collapse).

As a result, search engines that depend less on AI may become more reliable. The challenge is finding one that doesn’t use an AI-based crawler. They do exist: ZDNet recommends Mojeek, PCMag recommends Brave, and Ban the Bots lists several, including one specifically for “small producer” content such as blogs.

For now, whatever search engine you’re using, the best thing you can do is to scroll down and click on some actual search results. This benefits content creators, and is also more likely to give you more accurate information.

Dana McKay, Associate Dean, Interaction, Technology and Information, RMIT University and Damiano Spina, Senior Lecturer, School of Computing Technologies, RMIT University

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

The Australian government’s debt has just hit A$1 trillion again. And, unlike when it briefly hit that mark for the first time in mid-August, this time it’s set to stay above $1 trillion and keep climbing.

The federal government expects it to rise above $1.2 trillion by 2030, the equivalent of 35% of Australia’s gross domestic product (GDP) – seven times higher than it was a generation ago.

If you also add in the debt from state and territory governments, the total is already above 50% of Australia’s GDP.

How did we get here? And what does it cost us in growing interest bills?

How debt rose over a generation

In 2002 under the Howard government, net debt was about 5% of GDP, down from around 19% in 1996-1997.

For consecutive years, the federal government collected more money than it spent and did not issue debt – that is, it didn’t need to borrow more money because the federal budget was in surplus. This was widely celebrated.

But financial markets raised concerns that if the government stopped selling government bonds, it would risk financial instability. So the Howard government continued to issue government bonds.

With the global financial crisis (2008-09) and COVID-19 pandemic (2020-21) demanding governments spend more than they could collect in revenue, successive Labor and Coalition governments sold bonds to meet this shortfall.

What does it cost us in interest?

Apart from promising to repay any borrowed money, the federal government makes interest payments on its outstanding debt.

The 2026 budget showed public debt interest payments have been the fastest growing area of federal spending.

How do we compare globally?

Australian government debt relative to the economy is similar to New Zealand (56.7% of its GDP) and South Korea (54.4%). And it’s lower than the average for advanced economies (108.2%).

Is there a debt limit?

In theory, yes. In practice, no.

In 2008, a law was passed to limit the federal government’s debt to no more than $75 billion without parliamentary approval – but it didn’t last long. In 2013, that hard debt ceiling was scrapped, under a deal between the Coalition government and the Greens. Instead, the treasurer can now update the debt limit.

Since 2008, both Labor and Coalition governments have increased the limit multiple times. Today it’s set to $1.2 trillion.

Looking ahead

The federal budget is projected to return to balance in 2034–35, with a surplus of 0.8% of GDP in 2036–37. However, the independent Parliamentary Budget Office cautioned in July that that forecast was built on an “unrealistic” assumption that future governments wouldn’t provide more personal income tax cuts for a decade.

Since 2003, under both Coalition and Labor governments, Australia has maintained a triple-A credit rating with the world’s three big credit ratings agencies. This means Australia is perceived to be at the lowest risk of defaulting on its debts.

We should take comfort knowing that since 1911 there has been a law that guarantees the federal government will repay its debt.

The size of the government’s debt is monumental. And the interest repayments are large, and still growing.

But our debt is more manageable than many other comparable developed countries. And the federal government has never missed a repayment on its debts, no matter who’s been in charge.

There is little reason to think that will ever change in future.

Matthew Crocker, Graduate Researcher Teaching Fellow, Deakin University

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

The southern humpback whale migration is in full swing. Tens of thousands of whales are now making their journey from warm Australian waters in the north to their cold feeding grounds in Antarctica.

But snacking along the way provides much welcome replenishment.

In a new study, published in Marine Mammal Science, we have investigated feeding behaviour of humpback whales on the east coast of Australia using information from citizen science and social media. We found that mid-latitude feeding is a common and widespread strategy amongst humpback whales.

This discovery challenges a long-held assumption about where and when whales feed. And it could help us better protect these magnificent animals.

Feast or famine?

For many years, humpback whales have been described as “capital breeders”.

This theory suggests that the whales spend summer feeding on krill in Antarctica to build up fat reserves, then travel thousands of kilometers to low-latitude breeding grounds to mate and give birth. Warm tropical waters are nutrient poor, offering little opportunity to feed.

Historically, whaling and stranding records also supported this “feast or famine” theory, with the vast majority of humpback whales caught during mid-latitude migration in Australian waters having empty stomachs.

It was widely assumed that they relied solely on their fat stores to sustain their migration, mating, and the intense energetic demands of nursing newborn calves.

Screening the digital world for information

Conducting long-term, large-scale systematic research surveys across thousands of kilometres of the Australian coastline isn’t feasible due to the huge cost involved.

Instead, like other researchers turning to public photos and footage, we sourced information about feeding events from social media.

We searched platforms such as Facebook and Instagram for public posts from whale-watching companies, drone pilots, and dedicated whale enthusiasts. Only posts featuring clear visual evidence of defined feeding behaviour were included.

This included whales opening their mouths, lunging through the water column with expanded ventral pleats (the accordion-like grooves that cover a whale’s underside), bubble-net feeding, or surfacing directly through dense schools of baitfish.

Our search resulted in 199 distinct feeding observations, representing an estimated 1,417 individual humpback whales documented feeding in Australian waters between 2013 and 2024.

Major feeding hotspots included the NSW south coast – in particular, near Eden, Merimbula and Bermagui – which accounted for 45% of all verified feeding events. Other hotspots included eastern and southern Tasmania, and the Victorian coast, which accounted for 28% and 12% of the records, respectively.

Importantly, our study also highlighted feeding regions that were previously underrepresented in records. These included coastal areas near Phillip Island in Victoria and across northern Tasmania. We found that observations increased between August and October each year, coinciding with the southbound migration of humpback whales.

This is a time when the whales’ energy reserves are at their lowest.

Driven by nutrient-rich coastal upwellings generated by the East Australian Current, these hotspots provide temporary krill and baitfish bonanzas. On 16 occasions, we verified massive “super-groups” of 20 to over 150 individual whales feeding in the same area.

Why these observations matter for whale protection

Understanding whale behaviour, and how it may shift over time, is critical to protecting them. Migratory corridors aren’t just highways from one place to another; they are critical habitats.

Unfortunately, these coastal feeding hotspots overlap with intense human activities.

Commercial fishing means humpback whales feeding and staying for prolonged time face a high risk of fishing gear entanglements.

Additionally, vessel strikes from commercial shipping lanes and acoustic disturbances from expanding offshore developments pose threats along the coasts.

We need to adapt whale protection management strategies.

This could mean implementing seasonal and mobile management areas with voluntary or mandatory ship speed reduction during peak feeding months. It could also mean changes to seasonal fishing regulations to reduce gear density and gear type.

Our research shows that such areas are dynamic but localised, with feeding intensity limited to only a few weeks each year.

As the humpback whale population continues its recovery from whaling, more eyes on the water will help us track how these magnificent creatures adapt to a fast-changing environment.

Olaf Meynecke, Research Fellow in Marine Science and Manager Whales & Climate Program, Griffith University and Sarah Mcculloch, PhD Candidate, Marine Science, Griffith University

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

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch this weekend aboard a SpaceX rocket from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. When it becomes operational early next year, it will transform our view of the universe.

With a mirror the same size as the one in the Hubble Space Telescope but a field of view over 100 times larger, NASA’s newest tool is designed to survey vast swaths of sky quickly. It will hunt for dark energy’s fingerprints and detect perhaps 100,000 exoplanets.

In August 2018, just four months before she died on December 25, I had the great fortune to fly from Sydney to Washington DC to interview the woman this telescope is named after. She was 93-years-old and over the hours we spent talking, she shared with me her remarkable life story.

A childhood passion for the stars

Nancy Grace Roman was born on May 16 1925, in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up captivated by the night sky. Her mother, Georgia Frances Smith Roman, encouraged this early curiosity, walking with her young daughter to point out constellations and the aurora borealis.

By age eleven, Nancy Grace – never Nancy! – had already organised an astronomy club among her classmates in Reno, Nevada, where the family briefly lived. By high school she had decided, against the advice of nearly everyone around her, that she wanted to become a professional astronomer.

That ambition ran headlong into the sexism of 20th century academia. When Nancy Grace asked her high school guidance counsellor for permission to take a second year of algebra instead of yet more Latin, the counsellor reportedly asked her, “What lady would take mathematics instead of Latin?” She took the maths anyway. She went on to Swarthmore College, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy in 1946, and then to the University of Chicago, where she completed a PhD in astronomy in 1949.

Her doctoral research focused on stellar dynamics and the motions of stars in the Milky Way, work that would foreshadow her lifelong interest in stellar populations and galactic structure.

After earning her doctorate, Nancy Grace remained at the University of Chicago and worked at the Yerkes Observatory, where she conducted research on stellar spectroscopy. This is the technique of spreading a star’s light into a rainbow and then analysing faint features in the spectrum.

She made a name for herself with a landmark 1955 paper demonstrating a correlation between a star’s motion through the Milky Way and its chemical composition. Younger, metal-rich stars tend to move in more circular orbits, while older, metal-poor stars follow more eccentric ones.

This finding provided important evidence for how galaxies like the Milky Way evolve over time. Despite this success, she recognised that as a woman in academic astronomy, she faced a ceiling on promotion and tenure that her male colleagues did not. So she began looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Taking on an extraordinary responsibility

In 1955, Nancy Grace took a position at the Naval Research Laboratory, where she worked on radio astronomy, a field still in its infancy. It was there that she gained a reputation not just as a skilled researcher but as an effective administrator and communicator of science. These skills would soon define the second, more consequential half of her career.

In 1959, Nancy Grace was recruited by the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration to help build its space science program essentially from scratch. She became NASA’s first chief of astronomy, the first woman to hold an executive position at the agency.

It was an extraordinary responsibility. NASA had no established framework for space-based astronomy, and Nancy Grace was tasked with defining what such a program should even look like.

Nancy Grace’s most enduring legacy grew out of an idea she championed for decades (along with American astronomer Lyman Spitzer) before it became reality: a large space telescope that could observe the universe without the blurring and light pollution imposed by Earth’s atmosphere.

The project she nurtured through its most difficult years became the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990. Because of her foundational role in conceiving, justifying, and organising the mission decades before it flew, Nancy Grace became widely known as the “Mother of Hubble”.

An extraordinary legacy

Beyond Hubble, Nancy Grace also helped establish several other NASA astronomy missions. These included the Orbiting Solar Observatory series and the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, precursors that helped prove the value and feasibility of space-based observation.

She retired from NASA in 1979. She received numerous honours over her lifetime, including election to the National Women’s Hall of Fame and an asteroid, 2516 Roman, named in her honour.

In May 2020, NASA announced that its next-generation flagship observatory would be named the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, making her one of the very few scientists honoured with a major space telescope named after them.

Nancy Grace’s career stands as a testament to persistence against institutional barriers and to the outsized impact that scientific vision can have. All astronomers continue to benefit from her extraordinary legacy.

Joss Bland-Hawthorn, Laureate Professor, Director of Sydney Institute for Astronomy, Faculty of Science, University of Sydney

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

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is encapsulated within the payload fairing at the agency’s Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, ahead of mating to a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket for launch last Sunday US Time - August 30 2026. Credit: NASA/Sydney Rohde (Rocz)

Last weekend, Lucas Herrington made his debut for Hull City in the English Premier League (EPL) after breaking the transfer record paid for an Australian soccer player.

The 18-year-old signed a five-year deal with the transfer fee estimated to be A$33 million. It shattered the $26 million fee Leicester City paid for Harry Souttar’s move from Stoke City in 2023.

Herrington’s signing wasn’t the only recent mega-money deal for the 2026 Socceroos World Cup squad:

• just days after Herrington’s move, Alessandro Circati signed with Portuguese powerhouse Benfica, equalling Herrington’s $33 million transfer fee
• Nestory Irankunda agreed a deal with Portuguese giants Sporting for around $25 million
• goalkeeper Patrick Beach signed for an undisclosed fee with French club Troyes.

But does Australian soccer, and the A-League, benefit from these massive transfer fees?

A fast rise and an eye-popping opportunity

In September 2024, Herrington signed a three-year contract with Brisbane Roar. But in August 2025, he transferred to US Major League Soccer (MLS) side Colorado Rapids on a contract running until 2029. Colorado paid Brisbane $800,000 for Herrington.

After Herrington’s breakout World Cup performance, Hull targeted him, and on August 12 he signed a deal that broke the Rapids’ transfer fee record.

These transfer fees flow from club to club, with the athlete also having to agree on a salary with their new club.

Transfer fees are regularly made public but salaries are usually not disclosed.

How the money flows

Generally speaking, clubs can generate revenue from player transfers through three main mechanisms: direct transfer fees, sell-on clauses and FIFA training awards.

A direct transfer fee is the initial payment made from the acquiring club to the selling club.

A sell-on clause allows the former club to receive a percentage of any future transfer fee if the player is subsequently transferred.

FIFA training awards provide two forms of financial recognition for clubs involved in a player’s development: training compensation and solidarity contribution.

Training compensation is intended to reimburse clubs for the costs associated with developing a player. Solidarity contributions provide eligible training clubs with a share of certain international transfer fees based on the period they contributed to the player’s development.

In Herrington’s case, while Hull City paid about $33 million to acquire him, Brisbane Roar only received the award fee set by FIFA: $500,000.

Brisbane missed out on the other fees, having sold their sell-on percentage to the Colorado Rapids ahead of the Hull offer.

It is perhaps one of the greatest blunders in Australian soccer transfer history.

But the lack of financial stability in the A-League competitions, both men’s and women’s, may have played a part in the Roar’s decision: they may have been keen for an immediate cash injection.

However, the failure of Australian clubs to capture the full financial value of their players is not inevitable.

One club showing the way

Sydney FC provides an alternative model. Over the past two years, the club has generated more than $5 million from the transfers of academy graduates Patrick Yazbek, Jake Girdwood-Reich, Hayden Matthews and Adrian Segecic, who were developed in the club’s academy from a young age. All moved to European clubs except for Girdwood-Reich, who signed with St Louis in the MLS.

Sydney FC has openly identified player development and overseas transfers as part of its broader financial strategy.

In this sense, the club appears to have recognised something with which Australian soccer has historically struggled. That is, developing talented players is only half the challenge – the other half is ensuring the clubs responsible for their development retain enough of the financial value generated when those players enter the global transfer market.

Timing is crucial – the selling club has to act before the player’s contract expires if they want to maximise value from the player. If their contract expires, they can leave without a transfer fee.

Sydney FC’s strategy is built around creating a cycle in which academy investment produces talented players who then generate transfer income that be reinvested into developing the next generation.

The pros and cons

The success of Australian players overseas may encourage greater international interest in the local game, with overseas clubs, scouts and investors increasingly looking towards Australia as a source of talented players.

That is undoubtedly a positive for the sport locally. But in most transfer cases, little money flows down to the local game.

Meanwhile, A-League clubs that develop but then sell players to generate income can be hamstrung because a player who might otherwise help them in their pursuit of a successful season is suddenly gone.

The league can also suffer if its best players head overseas.

So while there are many obvious benefits when an Australian soccer player signs a big contract to play overseas, there can be real disruption to A-League clubs, academies and institutions that develop young talent.

Steve Georgakis, Senior Lecturer of Pedagogy and Sports Studies, University of Sydney

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

Weaving is an ancient craft that is still practised as a hobby by many people around the world. In recent years, it has found new life as more people have returned to hands-on making as a way to slow down, reconnect with materials and step away from screens.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people turned to crafts and DIY hobbies — including sewing, baking and gardening — to support their well-being. I remember trying to buy a sewing machine in 2021 and finding none available in stores.

More recently, textile crafts have become popular among Gen Z, with so-called “grandma hobbies” such as crochet, knitting and quilting seeing a resurgence. These slow, tactile, screen-free pastimes have become a form of digital detox from screen burnout.

It has also become a social media trend to share handmade projects through #WIP (“work in progress”) posts as part of the cozy “grandmacore” lifestyle aesthetic.

What most hobbyist weavers may not realize, however, is that their craft helped shape modern computing. Today, makers are once again using textiles to imagine the future of technology.

Hobbies can bring joy, wellbeing and focus to our busy lives, but so many of us don’t have one. If you’re ready to replace scrolling with stitching, or hustle with horticulture, The Hobby Starter Kit (a new series from Quarter Life) will help you get going.

The invention of the jacquard loom

In 1804, a French weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard patented a loom that could weave intricate patterns using punch cards — paper cards with encoded holes.

Once they pass through the loom, the presence or absence of a hole tells the loom which warp thread to raise or lower, acting as the earliest form of binary code programming. Weaving that once required a master weaver and an assistant could now be done by craft hobbyists.

This same concept later influenced early computers, inspiring us on how such a craft can be a source of a technical revolution. In the 1830s, Charles Babbage drew directly on Jacquard’s punch-card mechanism by realizing he could apply the same concept to algebric patterns, instead of textiles, to program his Analytical Engine.

Mathematician Ada Lovelace advanced his work beyond maths to envision programming any information represented by symbols, including musical notes or graphic designs. By doing this, she brilliantly split the logical instructions or software (punch-cards) from the hardware (physical machine) for the first time.

User interfaces in websites and mobile apps (also known as graphical user interfaces) evolved from command-line interfaces, which in turn, was a revolution over its predecessor: the punch cards.

My mother-in-law told me stories about how, as an undergrad in electrical engineering in the 1960s, she used to write programs’ code by punching stacks of cards. I teach undergraduates today the history of user interfaces, and how we went full circle to have digital looms now that create smart e-textiles.

Weaving is still shaping technology

Weaving and other textile crafts are still influencing how people build technology today, often through hobbyists and makers as well as trained engineers.

As a professor of physical computing and e-textiles, I lead a research group that uses a computational weaving machine to create smart fabric using both natural and conductive yarns, in what we call hybrid craft. We prototype future wearables and soft furnishing that have sensing and electronic capabilities literally woven as threads within.

Some of our designs aim to cut down on e-waste using hybrid crafts and digital fabrication. Our most recent work uses computational looms and knitting machines to build fabric-based electronic breadboards designed by and for women in e-textiles. Another recent study used hybrid crafting to make prototyping more inclusive, with a focus on women and people with physical disabilities.

When we run workshops in our community, people are excited to stitch their own e-textile circuits using needles and conductive thread. These experiences show how hands-on STEM outreach and maker culture can bring diverse individuals into technology and give them a role in shaping its future.

Why this matters for crafters

This kind of work is part of a wider shift. Open-source tools such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the BBC micro:bit have lowered the cost of entry to physical computing, while makerspaces and fablabs have opened technology development to people who do not see themselves as programmers or engineers.

The same spirit that draws people to textile hobbies — experimenting with materials, learning through making and adapting designs through trial and error — is also transforming how we create technology.

Craft knowledge, open-ended experimentation and lived experiences can all become sources of innovation. This approach also gives people who are often excluded from mainstream technology a greater voice in creating it.

A Newcastle University project called Empowering Hacks is one example: two co-researchers who identify as disabled worked with the university’s Open Lab to design a set of 3D-printed handles for powered wheelchairs.

Another project at Queen’s University experimented with 3D-printing on textiles and invented Fabric-Lego for assistive wearables to customize and personalize the medical aesthetics of finger braces and arm slings.

The same way weaving looms paved the way for modern computers, other hybrid crafts can inspire innovation and practical inventions. So the next time you pick up a weaving, crochet, knitting or sewing project, you are not just making something — you are experimenting, problem-solving and creating the possibilities for new ideas.

Sara Nabil, Associate Professor of Human-Centered Computing, Queen's University, Ontario

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

The world has lost a music legend in Dolly Parton, who has died at 80 after a “brief battle” with cancer. She’s remembered for her twanging country vocals, decades of hit recordings, Grammys, Emmys and a liberal splash of acting.

But the biggest legacy Parton leaves is her songwriting, and three songs define her more than any others.

Jolene, I Will Always Love You and 9 to 5 are not just memorable Parton songs – they are integral to popular music history. They show a skilful musician who knew how to blend the story of lyrics with the drama of music.

Like many songwriters, Parton had things to say. What makes her contribution notable was when her lyrics told a story, and her music matched it.

Jolene

In Jolene, released in 1974, Parton’s lyrics capture the torment of watching your lover flirt with someone else.

It’s a powerful human experience – particularly for women despairing over how easily the next pretty young thing grabs male attention. Parton’s desperate begging for Jolene not to take her man “even though you can” is comfortingly raw and honest.

The song’s lyrics are a startling contrast to the common songwriting themes of the time about finding or losing love – such as The Carpenters’ Close to You (1970), Stevie Wonder’s You are the Sunshine of My Life (1972) and Carole King’s It’s Too Late (1971).

Instead, Jolene sits on the precipice of change, telling a vivid story of how seeing a stunning young woman can make another woman insecure.

Musically, the chords pound out an appropriately bleak minor key, ascending to higher chords with each dramatic call of the name “Jolene”. Accompanying the vocals sits an intriguing, rapid-fire, finger-picking guitar, performed in the recording studio by session musician Chip Young. It keeps an incessant motion that not only adds tension but draws admiration for skilful playing.

I Will Always Love You

I Will Always Love You was also released in 1974 and – remarkably – possibly was written on the same day as Jolene.

This song shows Parton’s ability to once again blend story and music in an excellent pairing. The fear pumping through Jolene is replaced by the grief of farewelling a deep love because, while love endures, it is not always enough of a reason to remain in a relationship.

Again, Parton captures a more sophisticated theme than the excitement and wonder of love. She knows that love can mean letting go.

The lyrics are sparse and the story of “bittersweet memories” is sketchy, but Parton once again nails the essence of human experience. We don’t need the details of what happened to relate with our own painful farewells.

The elongated singing of the word “I” translates almost as a cry of agony in Whitney Houston’s extraordinary cover version.

The chord progression Parton chose to underpin the chorus is one of the most familiar, hit-producing patterns in popular music history. It appears in songs ranging from Stand By Me (1961), Blue Moon (1934), Crocodile Rock (1973) and Every Breath You Take (1983).

But Parton’s usage is unique: the melody and lyrics don’t move with the progression. Instead, the melody holds one single note (with a few embellishments) and lets the chords do the work.

9 to 5

Parton wrote the song 9 to 5 for the movie of the same name in 1980, in which she starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. It needed to match the vibe to describe the bustle of a working week.

To achieve this, Parton swapped her previously drawn out lyrics of love for the relentless patter describing the morning routine. Here Parton uses clever imperfect rhymes such as matching “kitchen” and “ambition” to sell the story.

The melody in the verse rises with each cluster of words, building the energy like the start of the day she describes. The chorus nails the hook by changing the rhythm, to let the phrase “9 to 5” ring out.

In 9 to 5, Parton moved away from love songs to a feminist theme that belted out the injustices of working tirelessly in a work place like any other employee yet not able to get a “fair promotion”. The description of the “rich man’s game” and how “they never give you credit” highlights workplace inequalities that are sadly still prevalent today. 

Wendy Hargreaves, Academic in the School of Education and Creative Arts, University of Southern Queensland

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

My copy of Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow was given to me by my mother in 1982, when I was 14 – the same age as the novel’s protagonist, Abigail Kirk. A sticker inside shows that my mother bought it at the Feminist Bookshop in Balmain, a shop I remember visiting with her more than once. The shop is long gone, and the Sydney where my mother bought the book has constantly been altered.

“In the first place, Abigail Kirk was not Abigail at all” is the novel’s striking opening sentence. Immediately, Park gives us a girl who feels out of place. It turns out she is not at home in her name or her family. Soon, her home city of Sydney will become strange to her too.

Almost half a century after its first publication in 1980, Playing Beatie Bow (also a 1986 film) has never gone away. It remains in print, with a new hardback edition appearing next month in Penguin’s Modern Australian Classics series. It is an Australian children’s classic whose great subject is time.

The books we read as children can shape us forever – as readers and people.

In this series, we ask experts to reflect on some of Australia’s most beloved children’s classics, spanning the 19th century to the new millennium.

A time-slip novel

Playing Beatie Bow is a time-slip novel: it takes a girl living in Sydney in 1980 and makes the city’s past a physical reality to her. Time operates here at several scales. Abigail is 14, poised between childhood and adulthood; the Sydney she inhabits, including The Rocks, is being remade.

At the novel’s opening, Abigail is already caught between past and future. Her father, Weyland Kirk, has left the family for another woman. Angry at his departure, Abigail rejects Lynette, the name by which he knew her, and renames herself Abigail – a name associated with witches, fictional and historical.

She and her mother live in a high-rise designed by her father’s architectural firm, a “glistening spike of steel and glass” rising among the “tiny meek cottages and old bond stores” of The Rocks.

When Abigail learns that her parents plan to reunite, she is appalled. How could a woman as capable and independent as her mother allow herself to be treated like a “worn-out glove”? Abigail is “outraged” that she could be “so … so – female”. It is at this moment that she is transported into another moment in the life of her city.

The way into the past has itself travelled through time. Abigail watches children playing an old game called Beatie Bow, circling a girl chosen by a counting-out rhyme:

Oh, Mudda, what’s that, what can it be?
The wind in the chimney, that’s all, that’s all.

The past also survives as an object. Abigail finds a discarded yoke from an old garment, its embroidered flowers faded almost beyond recognition, and sews it onto a bottle-green dress. Wearing it, she follows the strange child who has been watching the game – and finds herself in The Rocks in 1873.

There she meets Beatie and the Bows and Talliskers, immigrants from the Orkney Islands, who take her in. The living Rocks she encounters is recognisable, but utterly strange, a working community where sickness and death remain close at hand.

Sydney history made strange

Park had already immersed herself in Sydney’s history, most notably in her magisterial The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973). Another past comes into view in its opening chapter. Among the female convicts aboard the Lady Penrhyn was a “thirteen year old”; the women were “milliners, lace-weavers, stay-makers, glove-makers, barrow women and servants”.

From the ship’s rails, they saw Sydney’s “low hills”, “tawny blonde with summer”. Park also describes “a thirty-foot depth of bleached white shells left behind after thousands of years of Aboriginal picnics on this bountiful shore” – a shell midden, though she does not call it one. The sentence briefly opens a much deeper measure of Sydney time.

In Playing Beatie Bow, Park makes the city’s history strange again, seen through the eyes of a girl who has pursued another girl into the past.

Almost immediately, readers saw that Playing Beatie Bow looked both ways in time. The novel won the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year Award in 1981, followed by the US Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Fiction in 1982.

The Australian judges praised Park’s recreation of “the sights, sounds and smells” of The Rocks in 1873, but historical reconstruction was not an end in itself. They singled out her use of the past “to foreshadow and illuminate the present and future” – a striking description of a novel in which time is never simply a matter of then and now.

‘You can’t write down to kids’

Park also trusted the imaginative capacities of young readers. She was writing at a moment when “young adult” was becoming a new publishing category, whose possibilities intrigued her. In journals, letters and interviews, she repeatedly stated that children’s writers should write for children, not to impress other children’s writers.

“You can’t write down to kids,” she said after winning the award. “Kids have an intuitive feeling about motivation. They can always detect insincerity.”

That principle is at the heart of Playing Beatie Bow. Park asks Abigail – and her readers – to imagine themselves elsewhere. In 1873, Abigail falls in love with Beatie’s older brother Judah Bow, only to discover that he is promised to Dovey Tallisker, his cousin and a member of the Bow household. Abigail, who had condemned her father for desiring another woman and her mother for taking him back, now finds herself in the place of the one who wants what she cannot have.

Time travel has displaced her in more ways than one. The Sydney to which she will return is itself changing. Park had been writing about that city since The Harp in the South (1948), her famous novel of working-class Surry Hills, and had watched its inner neighbourhoods change around her.

By the late 1970s, The Rocks was undergoing redevelopment and gentrification, as buildings were demolished, preserved or restored and the colonial precinct was remade as heritage.

Park makes that transformation visible from the opening pages, with Abigail’s “glistening spike of steel and glass” among the old cottages and bond stores. In the decade leading to the bicentenary of 1988, when Australians were reflecting on how the past should be remembered, Playing Beatie Bow offered its own answer.

History of ordinary lives

As in The Companion Guide, with its oysters, mussels and Aboriginal picnics, Park looks for the past in what lies close to hand. History resides not only in restored buildings and official commemorations, but in games, stories and ordinary things.

At one point, Abigail understands why her mother’s secondhand shop contains no working-class Victorian clothes: they had been “worn out by unceasing labour a hundred years before.” The past survives unevenly. Some lives leave fewer things behind.

Such attention to what survives — and what is easily overlooked – is one reason the novel still speaks to readers. Park brings the working-class and immigrant Rocks vividly into view: the Bows and Talliskers, Chinese workers, sailors and “high-steppers” or prostitutes.

Her history is crowded with ordinary lives, vivid precisely where the record grows faint. Sometimes, as with those 30 feet of shells marking thousands of years before European settlement, what remains measures time differently.

What remains as people, families and cities change? The novel asks how objects can carry one time into another. Which brings me back to the book my mother bought at that bookshop in Balmain. In 1982, it was an almost new book about a girl my own age travelling into Sydney’s past. Forty-four years later, the book carries its own past.

Monique Rooney, Senior lecturer in literature, Australian National University

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

After legislating controversial reforms to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) last week, the government’s plan to cut 160,000 NDIS participants and save A$37.8 billion over four years is underway.

The legislation tightens access to the NDIS by:

• altering the way a person’s needs are assessed
• introducing stricter rules to show a disability is permanent
• allowing automated tools to assess eligibility and plan supports.

But we still don’t know exactly what the new process will look like. Much of the detail has been left to rules, instruments, assessment tools and implementation processes that are still in development.

A new technical advisory group has been set up to advise government. It is expected to complete much of its work by late 2026 and report to government by March 2027. The eligibility changes take effect from January 2028.

People who are already accessing the NDIS will also begin to be reassessed based on the new criteria from 2028. This will happen progressively over three years.

Assessing how your disability impacts daily life

These reforms are designed to move away from assessing NDIS eligibility based on a person’s diagnosis.

Instead, the aim is to have a more consistent and robust approach that assesses a person’s “functional capacity”. This means how much their disability affects their daily life.

A person seeking access to the NDIS needs to demonstrate they have substantially reduced functional capacity and that it’s permanent.

The new assessment process will establish standardised definitions and thresholds for both functional capacity and permanence.

Part of the technical advisory group’s role will be to advise on the criteria and methods used to determine those thresholds. This could involve setting thresholds around particular activities such as dressing, washing, preparing meals or working a paid job.

While there’s a legitimate case for greater consistency in decision-making, standardisation also carries risks. People being assessed often have very different lives and experiences of disability.

The fairness of the system will ultimately depend on how the tools are implemented, and by whom.

It will be harder to show your disability is permanent

Another significant change relates to how a disability is established to be permanent.

The new legislation requires people to have tried all “appropriate treatment options” that could improve or alleviate their impairment. These need to be widely accepted and receive public funding, through Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) or public hospitals.

The technical advisory group will now consider how this requirement should operate in practice.

The difficulty is that what counts as having tried all appropriate options will depend on the availability and accessibility of treatments.

A person’s treatment may be unaffordable (even if partly covered by Medicare or the PBS) or unavailable in their local area, for example, or may be delayed for reasons outside their control. That person may not be seen to have tried “all appropriate treatment”, despite it being practically out of reach.

People may also feel compelled to pursue treatment for the purposes of NDIS eligibility rather than because it’s the most appropriate or effective option for them.

Disability organisations have already raised concerns about the impact of these rules on autistic people, people with psychosocial disability (resulting from severe mental distress), and people with fluctuating, episodic or cumulative disabilities. For those living in regional and remote areas, assessments and treatments can also be difficult to access.

If a particular treatment is not available and reasonably accessible – or it’s not available in a person’s language, or is culturally unsafe – it shouldn’t be treated as an option the person has simply failed to pursue.

Some decisions will be automated

If Labor has learned anything from the Robodebt episode, it’s that automated decision-making needs a clear legal basis.

The new legislation provides an explicit legal authorisation for the use of automated decision-making.

But it goes further than that. The legislation permits computer programs to undertake any administrative action involving “a discretion being exercised, an evaluative judgement being made, [or] a state of mind being formed”.

That is an exceptionally broad remit, especially for such high-stakes decisions.

Yet there is a striking absence of safeguards.

These are needed because automated systems can reproduce existing inequalities when they rely on biased data or historical patterns of decision-making.

A system can appear neutral while embedding the assumptions and exclusions contained in the data it was built on.

The Multicultural Women’s Alliance, for example, has pointed out that culturally and linguistically diverse women with disability tend to spend less on supports because appropriate services are inaccessible or non-existent. They’re also less likely to have formal documentation of functional capacity in the required formats.

These structural barriers shouldn’t be mistaken for evidence of lower need.

The assessment tools should be tested for cultural and linguistic bias before they are introduced, and testing needs to continue once the system is operating.

The work ahead

While the legislation has passed, the most important details are still being thrashed out. That makes the work of the technical advisory group crucial.

Previous attempts to redesign assessment systems, both here in Australia and overseas, offer important lessons for what comes next.

The government has also received extensive evidence through its parliamentary inquiry into the bill and its potential impacts.

That evidence provides a clear warning about the risks that must be addressed as the new system takes shape.

Perhaps most importantly, if these reforms are to deliver fairer and more consistent decisions, people with disability and disability representatives need to be central to that work, not simply consulted after the key decisions have been made.

Georgia van Toorn, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Politics, UNSW

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

When Aldi opened its first supermarket in Sydney in 2001, the stage was set for a fight with Woolworths and Coles. At the time, Australia’s two biggest supermarkets controlled about 71% of the grocery market.

Aldi was an unknown brand, stocked fewer products than its rivals, and premium real estate was already taken.

To be successful, it needed a trump card. Its strategy? To make 90% of its products “own brands”, often sold at lower prices.

By about 2015, it had captured about 9% of Australian supermarket sales.

But recent reports show Woolworths and Coles are holding their smaller competitors at bay. In part, they’ve done it by adopting some of Aldi’s own sales tactics.

Where Australians get their groceries

Last year, the national competition watchdog – the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission – estimated Woolworths had 38% of national supermarket grocery sales, followed by Coles with 29%. That’s a combined total of 67% – not far below their joint total in 2001.

Meanwhile, Aldi had about a 9% market share in 2025, the same as more than a decade ago. Metcash (as a proxy for the independent supermarkets it supplies) had 7%.

More recent figures from analysts UBS suggest Woolworths’ market share has crept higher to 40% – meaning the two biggest players have a joint share that’s barely changed since 2001.

So how have Woolworths and Coles been hanging onto customers?

‘Own brands’ with many names

One of their key strategies has been to follow Aldi’s lead: adding thousands of “own brand” products over recent years.

More commonly known in the past as “home brands”, “own brand” products offer an alternative for consumers looking for better value for money.

Once seen as low-quality, they now have a better reputation and can be found everywhere, from ice creams to laundry powder.

Some are obvious, with names such as Coles Simply or Woolworths Essentials. But there are many products that are simply “own brands” by another name, such as Woofin’ Good pet food (Coles) or Smitten (Woolworths cat food).

Strong demand from shoppers

In the past week, Coles and Woolworths released their 2026 annual reports.

On Tuesday, Coles reported a A$1.09 billion net profit to June 28 this year.

Its report highlighted Coles now has around 5,600 “exclusive to Coles products”. That’s up by 1,600 in the past year alone.

Coles’ sales revenue rose to almost A$41.5 billion, up 5.1% (excluding tobacco sales). But with cost-of-living pressures making shoppers “highly value-conscious”, Coles’ own brand products performed even better:

Our Exclusive to Coles portfolio remained an important source of value and differentiation, with sales continuing to outpace overall sales growth, increasing 6.1%, and Coles Finest growing 9.2%.

With market penetration reaching 35%, Coles’ own brands are now purchased by more than one in three customers who shop at their stores.

On Wednesday, Woolworths reported a A$1.14 billion net profit for the year.

While Woolworths’ annual report contains less detail on its own brands, it confirmed more than 445 new and 680 “refurbished” own and exclusive brands were launched in the past year alone.

Woolworths’ Australian supermarket sales rose to $53.9 billion over the year to June 28, up 5.9% excluding tobacco sales. Sales of own and exclusive brands grew almost as fast, up 5.5%, particularly in meat and fresh food.

More own brands coming

Independent surveys regularly show Aldi is a cheaper place to shop than Woolworths, Coles or IGA.

Yet Aldi is fighting to retain customers, with industry analysts recently concluding its bigger rivals are “winning share” among shoppers.

Looking ahead, Coles and Woolworths have more own brand expansions on the way. For instance, Woolworths plans to build on its current “La Mesita” Mexican, “La Gina” Italian and “Lantern Alley” Asian food ranges – none of which are obvious own brands – with new Middle Eastern and South Asian food ranges.

Why suppliers may be wary

For supermarkets and shoppers, more own brands may seem like a win-win.

Supermarkets have the potential to increase their profitability by selling their own products, as long as they keep a full range of merchandise. And consumers have more own brand options to choose from, which can be quality products at lower prices.

It’s more complicated for supermarket suppliers. These can be companies vying for space on crowded supermarket shelves, through to farmers supplying products like milk for supermarkets to sell under their own brands.

A recent Food and Grocery Code Supervisor, survey of 419 suppliers found some positive trends. More than half (56%) reported they were always treated fairly and respectfully by the big four supermarkets: Woolworths, Coles, Aldi and Metcash, while 74% reported “no issues at all” with them.

But there were still some areas of concern, including almost half of suppliers describing price negotiations as involved or challenging.

Many smaller businesses noted “they cannot absorb costs in the same way as larger competitors”. One supplier said “supermarkets’ internal structures favour corporate fruit production, not family farms”.

An international trend to watch

Looking overseas, there has been a trend for some big retailers to take over some of their suppliers’ business, in what’s known as “vertical integration”.

In the United States, Costco and Walmart aren’t just retailers anymore; they’re also food producers. For instance, Costco set up a US$450 million poultry facility to own the supply chain for its discounted rotisserie chickens: locking in control over costs from farm to the store.

But this isn’t without risks. The more things you do, the greater the risk – like having all your eggs in one very large basket.

Australia hasn’t seen that level of vertical integration yet. But it’s a trend worth watching in future.

Flavio Macau, Associate Dean, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University and Reza Kiani Mavi, Senior Lecturer, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

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

Dolly Parton had first-hand experience of the effects of limited literacy. Her father could not read or write. He was, she once said,

the smartest man I have ever known but I know in my heart his inability to read probably kept him from fulfilling all of his dreams.

This sentiment fuelled her passion for encouraging childhood literacy. It drove her to establish the Imagination Library, with the goal of inspiring “a love of reading and learning from a young age”.

Launched in 1995, the Imagination Library sends children enrolled in the program a free, age-appropriate, culturally inclusive book in the mail every month from birth until their fifth birthday. The program began in Sevier County, Tennessee – Parton’s home county – before spreading across the world. It has established roots in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and Ireland.

To date, the Imagination Library has distributed 318 million books, with 3.4 million books sent out monthly across these regions.

The Australian program was officially launched in 2013 and now operates in more than 430 locations. Currently, nearly 50,000 Australian children are receiving a free book every month.

Building foundational skills

For the past five years, I have been working firstly on a research project in Tamworth into the effects of the Imagination Library program. As Head of Research at United Way Australia, distributors of the Imagination Library in Australia, I am not involved in the delivery of the program itself. All the data I analysed was de-identified.

The Tamworth region has produced rich data on early childhood literacy. It boasts 98% enrolment of newborns in the Imagination Library program.

The research conducted in Tamworth was then extended to a global sample. Data has been collected from over 86,000 caregivers across the five countries the Imagination Library is delivered in. This study is currently the largest dataset in the world on shared book reading in the home.

One of the key findings from Tamworth was that the program encouraged caregivers to read to their children. Compared to the average Australian child, children in the Imagination Library in Tamworth were found to be read to more often, for longer, and have more books in the home. Further, these early reading routines were maintained.

The worldwide evidence showed that children enrolled in the Imagination Library were significantly more likely to display foundational early literacy skills and to develop an interest in reading compared to those not on the program. In Australia, enrolled children were found to be nine times more likely to be interested in books, 17 times more likely to join in during shared book reading, and six times more likely to demonstrate key emerging literacy skills than those who were not enrolled.

Participants in the study also reported improvements in family interactions during shared book reading. These benefits were evident across socioeconomic differences.

The effects of the program are represented by Abby and her partner, who are raising two boys in regional NSW, aged three and 10 months. They heard about the Imagination Library through a midwife at Tamworth Hospital. Both parents work full time. Although they value reading, they struggled with consistency.

The monthly book delivery removed the guesswork: no browsing, no uncertainty about developmental fit. Says Abby: “It’s simple, it’s free, and the impact goes beyond just the books. It creates connection, routine and joy.”

Lifelong reading

These results reflect studies into similar book distribution programs. Developing early literacy skills is known to correlate with reading success in later life. The most frequently reported benefit was a strong love of books and reading. Three quarters of participating children in Tamworth asked to be read to daily.

In Australia, the NAPLAN results in 2026 show that a third of Australian children are not meeting Year 3 reading benchmarks. For a skill so fundamental to success across all areas of life, this is a disconcerting reality for a country that prides itself on its education.

A report for the Australian government in 2024 found that children with little to no reading in the home were ten times more likely to grow up with poor language and cognitive development.

The simple act of getting more books into the hands of more children has a significant effect. Over the years, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has spread the gift of reading to households across the world, regardless of their circumstances. Her dream was to ensure all children grow up with books, instilling a lifelong love of reading.

Every 1.3 seconds, a child somewhere in the world receives a free book from Dolly, and her legacy is rekindled.

Claire Galea, Adjunct Fellow, Western Sydney University

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

Pressure has been building on the federal government in recent weeks to scrap the algorithm currently being used in aged care assessment decisions. Criticism has been of the algorithm itself, but also the fact there is no possibility for humans to override its final decision.

Aged care assessments determine how much government funding an older person can receive, so they can live independently at home for longer.

Some older Australians may now be feeling anxious and confused about this process. It doesn’t help that the algorithm and the independent assessment tool are sometimes talked about in the same breath. But the independent assessment tool is actually a questionnaire, not an algorithm.

So, what does this questionnaire involve? And how should you prepare?

While important questions remain about the algorithm, understanding how aged care assessments work will help you prepare better and may give you more choice and control over the care you receive.

How do you get an assessment?

The best time to think about aged care support is before you need it. If you’re 65 or older (or 50 and older if you’re Indigenous or experiencing homelessness) and daily tasks are becoming more difficult, or you’re relying more on family, friends or neighbours, it might be time to start this process.

You must register with My Aged Care before you can access government-funded aged care services – this can be by phone or online.

You’ll be asked about your current living situation, health and daily activities. This is the first opportunity to discuss your support needs. Keep the ID code they give you safe, as it tracks your progress.

An assessment organisation will then call you to discuss your needs and arrange a date for the assessment.

Assessors are qualified health professionals (such as nurses, social workers, and occupational therapists) who work for independent, government-contracted organisations.

What happens in an assessment?

The assessor will usually come to your home, but you can also arrange another location or do it via telehealth or over the phone. Assessments typically take 60–90 minutes, but this can vary depending on your circumstances.

The assessor will ask about the factors that affect your ability to live safely and independently, such as your:

• physical and mental health

• safety (including identifying any risks within your home environment)

• ability to complete daily tasks such as bathing, dressing and housework by yourself

• current supports

• goals

• cultural needs.

Although it might be tempting to focus on your “good days” here, it’s important to describe what happens on most days, not just the best ones, to get the appropriate support plan in place.

How to get ready

You can have a support person – such as a family member, friend or carer – present during the assessment.

You may choose to register a support person in the My Aged Care system (this is free). Registered supporters can help you make and communicate decisions. They can also request, access and receive information about you.

If you need an interpreter, you can contact My Aged Care through the Translating and Interpreting Service by calling 131 450. My Aged Care also has a range of accessible contact options and resources.

You’ll need to have some documents to show the assessor, including your Medicare card, an additional ID document such as a driver’s licence, and any GP referrals or current health supports, as well as details of any specific supports (for example, cleaning or help bathing and dressing) you want to discuss.

Think about what questions you might have for the assessor.

Ask yourself: “What support do I need to stay safe, well and independent at home?”.

Then ask the assessor: “How is that support funded, and what will I personally pay?”.

The Older Persons Advocacy Network can also help you, by providing free information about your rights (both before and after an assessment) and advocating for you.

What outcomes can you expect?

Following assessment, you will be sent a notice of decision letter. This will include information about the services you have been approved to receive, the reasons behind the decision, and your rights to raise any concerns about your assessment outcome.

You may be referred to a Commonwealth Home Support Package. These provide entry-level support with specific everyday tasks so you can stay independent at home. Services could include help with housework, meal preparation, personal care such as help bathing and dressing, or nursing and allied health care.