On Thursday, the federal and New South Wales governments jointly announced a deal to bail out the Tomago aluminium smelter, at a cost of A$2.5 billion over ten years.

The smelter is Australia’s largest single user of electricity. Its majority owner, mining giant Rio Tinto, had been warning higher electricity costs may force it to close.

Since coming to power, the federal Labor government has stepped in to save a number of struggling industrial facilities around the country – to the collective tune of billions of dollars.

However, this new deal to future-proof the Tomago smelter is different to those previous bailouts. It’s the result of more than a year of negotiations, with a return to the taxpayer, the workforce, the shareholders and the planet.

Avoiding leaving a ‘smelter-sized hole’

Tomago is Australia’s largest aluminium smelter. It contributes $2.2 billion to the Australian economy each year, with exports of around $3 billion. The facility employs more than 1,000 full-time workers directly, and supports many more in local supply chains.

Tomago is not only crucial to the Hunter region’s manufacturing base. It is also an important part of the national energy transition. Aluminium is vital to the jobs and industries of the future.

As Industry and Innovation Minister Tim Ayres said in May:

The full benefits of new industrial firms and technologies are less likely to materialise if there are smelter-sized holes in regional industry.

Australia’s biggest power bill

However, the fundamental challenge for Tomago is its power price, which is around 40% of its total costs. This is the largest electricity load in Australia, representing 12% of NSW’s total electricity demand.

Tomago has announced it wants to shift to 50% renewable energy by 2030 and 100% by 2035. This makes good sense. Solar and wind are now recognised to be the cheapest form of new power generation.

However, with its electricity supply contract expiring in 2028, Tomago needs to secure power, either coal-fired or renewable, at a commercially viable cost. The prospect of closure loomed with a massive loss of jobs and industrial capacity.

After bailouts of smaller facilities around the country, the federal government was reluctant to directly subsidise a global company of the scale and profitability of Rio Tinto. But nor could it allow Tomago to close.

A different kind of bailout

The government was in a bind, until an ingenious solution emerged.

This solution is based on the government’s ability to create so-called “specialist investment vehicles” (SIVs). These provide equity or loans across a range of co-investment opportunities – including clean energy – and are governed by independent boards.

What if the government were to use one of these specialist investment vehicles to provide electricity to Tomago at a price that enabled it to remain competitive in global markets?

This is the approach the government has chosen, and it offers a further benefit.

The investment vehicle can also provide concessional loans to investors prepared to build the renewable energy capacity that would supply the electricity. Government-backed finance lowers the cost of capital for new projects, guaranteeing Tomago a stable, long-term power price.

Snowy Hydro is the entity selected to perform this role. Its business model is already geared up to provide renewable energy and to optimise its use through pumped hydro. And it is well positioned to bring more renewables into the grid by de-risking investment.

Crucially, for every 1% reduction in the cost of capital, end-user energy costs are reduced by around 10%.

Reviving a 1980s solution

This is not a new idea. It’s a proven financial structure, used by Neville Wran’s NSW government in the 1980s to secure coal-fired power for industry. And it can be applied just as effectively today for the new era of clean energy transition.

However, there will inevitably be a gap at the initial stages between the market price for electricity and the price negotiated as part of a “power purchase agreement” with the company. And this is where the federal and NSW state governments have committed to underwrite the difference.

They will provide $250 million a year from 2028 over the following ten years in a time-limited arrangement, with the prospect of the governments recouping their investment through a combination of aluminium revenues and the contribution of Tomago to stabilising the grid.

In other words, there is every chance this arrangement will be cost-neutral over the decade, while at the same time turbocharging the energy transition and economic diversification of Australia’s most prominent industrial region.

A blueprint for other interventions

Too often in the past, governments have leaned on economic orthodoxy to justify inaction, or at most to confine themselves to addressing market failure. The consequence has been a hollowing out of Australia’s manufacturing capability, declining business research and development, and stalled productivity growth.

The approach taken to save Tomago aluminium smelter is an example of how governments can also shape markets. Once underway, it’s an approach that can be replicated and built upon in other places, such as Whyalla.

Importantly, it provides confidence that Australia can address the task of diversifying its narrow, resources-heavy trade and industrial structure and lay the foundations for a high-productivity, high-wage economy.

Roy Green, Emeritus Professor of Innovation, University of Technology Sydney

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

The seven million Australians who live and work in regional, rural and remote Australia are being “left behind” by telecommunications services, according to a new report released today by the industry ombudsman.

The report comes only weeks after an outage on the Telstra network crippled services across the country. It reveals people living outside the major cities sometimes have to wait months for technicians to fix issues and are unable to contact emergency services when they need help.

The Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman, Cynthia Gebert, said:

This report reflects what we continue to hear: how hard it can be to stay connected, and how much is at stake when telecommunications services fail.

Her ideas for what needs to be done to fix this are a good start.

Analysing more than 26,000 complaints

The ombudsman analysed 26,972 complaints received over the past two financial years from consumers living in regional, rural and remote areas. She closely reviewed a sample of more than 2,000 of these complaints and delivered four key findings.

First, many of the complaints were similar to issues experienced in urban areas. But remoteness and limited alternatives meant the issues were harder and took longer to resolve.

Second, mobile coverage in the regions is poor and connectivity is unreliable. The ombudsman noted that, for some, the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s new rules on standardised coverage maps might help resolve coverage concerns.

Third, people living outside the cities have limited options when it comes to choosing a technology type and plan that is appropriate for them. Adding to this is the fact there is often a lack of access to a reliable power supply, plus a lack of knowledge about what services and technologies are available.

Finally, planned and unplanned outages create significant risks to people’s safety and their businesses.

A complete overhaul is needed

The ombudsman made 12 recommendations to address these problems. Chief among them is “an overhaul of how telecommunications services are regulated”. Specifically, she has called on the federal government to undertake a comprehensive review of the entire regulatory framework.

The review should be aimed at reducing complexity and ensuring equitable access to essential telecommunication services. Gerbert said:

While the telecommunications sector has evolved significantly in response to technological innovation and changing market dynamics, the industry’s regulations have developed piece by piece.

On top of this, she recommended telco companies pause charges when consumers are waiting for a technician to install or repair a service. She called for a review of current telco authentication obligations which can force consumers to travel vast distances to physical stores for assistance. She also called for the introduction of individual remedies for significant delays in accessing mobile services.

Among the ombudsman’s other recommendations was for the government to develop an independent database where consumers can check what services are available to them, and establish Statutory Infrastructure Provider (SIP) service standards.

A SIP is a telecommunications carrier designated to supply broadband connections to premises in particular areas. The most common is NBN Co, which oversees the National Broadband Network.

Remedies should be made available to consumers when standards are not met, the ombudsman. said.

Where to from here?

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recently announced a year-long inquiry into regional mobile coverage across Australia. This will include domestic roaming and a radio access network service.

In the past month calls for the government to act on domestic roaming have been growing. These calls have come from the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, the National Farmers Federation and other community groups.

Domestic roaming would have many benefits. It would improve access, coverage, reliability, performance and competition – particularly in regional, rural and remote areas.

It’s well past time for a “Telecommunications Act 2027”. Even before the ombudsman’s new report, it was evident the current legislation is not fit for purpose.

Service standards, including improved compensation when standards are not met, are vital. This must be a focus moving forward. The ombudsman’s report into the experiences of telecommunications consumers living outside major Australian cities increases pressure on the government to act.

Mark A Gregory, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, RMIT University

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

The Productivity Commission has recommended undoing the controversial 2018 changes to the distribution of goods and services tax (GST) revenue between the states that has cost taxpayers A$23 billion.

It has proposed reinstating the system that existed before the Morrison government’s deal that gave billions of dollars in extra funds to Western Australia, at the expense of the other states.

The commission’s 124-page interim report finds the reforms were “a costly mistake” and “have not achieved their intent”. It says:

The 2018 changes tried to achieve too much and moved too far away from the system’s core objective. The result is a system that is now more complex, less consistent and more costly.

Credit to the Productivity Commission for producing a clear and rigorous report. The 2018 “reforms” were bad policy. The sooner they are unwound the better. The federal government should adopt its recommendations in full.

How WA benefits

The report confirms what critics have long argued: the deal benefits only WA, and taxpayers in every other state and territory foot the bill.

It also documents potential perverse outcomes. For instance, WA’s GST distribution would rise if another state is hit by a natural disaster and receives extra GST funding.

Estimates compiled from Treasury data by economist Saul Eslake suggest WA would by 2028–29 have received about $43 billion more than under the pre-2018 rules.

Why is the GST redistributed?

Every country with a federal system faces the same issues: which level of government should tax, which should spend, and how to divide revenue between them.

Australia, like other federations including the United States, Canada, Germany and Brazil, splits taxing and spending responsibilities between national and state governments.

All broadly agree on responsibilities for spending. National defence, economic stabilisation and broad social safety net programs sit naturally with the federal government, as they require national coordination.

States tend to do best on services closer to citizens, such as schools, policing, hospitals and local infrastructure. They are better positioned to understand and respond to local needs.

The division of taxation is less clear-cut, and different countries do very different things.

Australia concentrates almost all tax collection at the federal level. Personal income tax, corporate income tax and GST are all collected by the Commonwealth. State taxes, including payroll tax, stamp duty and land tax, account for less than 20% of total revenue.

This creates the first fundamental problem in Australia’s system of federal finance: how is revenue collected nationally distributed to the states to fund education, health and other services? Australia’s solution is to pass on the GST revenue (supplemented with Commonwealth grants).

How much should each state receive?

Before 2018, Australia operated on the principle that every citizen should have access to similar standards of government services.

However, simply dividing the GST pool on a per-person basis does not achieve equal service standards, for two reasons.

First, states differ substantially in their capacity to raise their own revenue. Some states have more valuable property markets, with larger stamp duty and land tax bases; some, such as WA, collect larger mining royalties than others.

Second, the cost of delivering a standard of service varies enormously by state. Providing healthcare, education and infrastructure costs much more per person in remote areas such as the Northern Territory.

Before 2018, both these factors were assessed annually by the Commonwealth Grants Commission, an independent body established in 1933. Since July 2000 that has included advice on how to distribute the billions in revenue collected nationally through the GST.

For most of its history, it took account of disadvantages and gave each state the funds to deliver a broadly equal standard of service provision for schools, hospitals and so on. States more able to raise their own revenue received a smaller GST share.

This approach is regarded internationally as best practice; scholars of federal systems point to Australia’s pre-2018 model as an example to emulate.

The picture changed in 2018

Then, in 2018, Australia largely abandoned its principles. The law was amended to replace full equalisation.

The new system gave all states a guaranteed minimum share of the GST pool, regardless of their actual revenue. This meant WA actually received more GST revenue than it needed to meet its assessed needs.

The new Productivity Commission review found WA received 113% of its needs, while other states only received 98% of their fiscal needs.

There were also billions of dollars in additional federal top-up payments to the GST pool to ensure no state was worse off. But this wasn’t free and was paid for by all Australian taxpayers.

This was a special deal for a single state, dressed up as a national reform.

Political dysfunction was a side effect

Beyond the direct costs documented in the Productivity Commission’s new report, the 2018 changes produced a further, less visible cost: they encouraged unproductive lobbying and interstate rivalry.

Rather than focusing on serving their own citizens, states increasingly focused on lobbying the federal government for special treatment resembling WA’s deal.

This poor use of political energy and public resources corrodes the cooperative federalism the original distribution model was designed to support.

Three options, one clear answer

The Productivity Commission’s report sets out three options.

Its recommended option is that the government “transition back to the pre-2018 system”, reversing the Morrison-era changes and restoring the Commonwealth Grants Commission’s original processes.

This is the right choice. The government should adopt it.

The alternatives are inferior. The second-best option it outlines has the federal government commit to direct payments to any state that is materially disadvantaged by a “dominant” state effect. This would essentially compensate states harmed by the 2018 formula on a case-by-case basis. In practice, this would amplify state-based lobbying for “special” recognition.

The final option effectively leaves current arrangements in place, preserving WA’s advantaged position indefinitely, at the continuing expense of taxpayers in every other state and territory. It would not address any of the problems the Productivity Commission has identified.

Australia built a budget equalisation system the rest of the world regarded as best practice, then dismantled it in 2018 for political expediency.

The Productivity Commission has handed the government a clear, evidence-based path back to a fairer and more defensible system. It’s a path the government should follow.

Robert Breunig, Professor of Economics and Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

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

It is now less than six years until the Brisbane Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Hosting the games will be a multi-billion dollar investment, with organisers committed to a participation legacy to encourage more people to play sports and be active.

However, Australian girls and women are dropping out of organised sports at alarming rates, especially around the ages of 14–15. These teenagers today will be 20 or 21 when the Brisbane games begin.

So, why is this happening and what can be done to reverse the trend?

What’s the problem?

As far back as 2016, research has shown almost two-thirds of Australian girls leave sport by 15, compared to just under half of Australian boys.

However, dropout can mean anything from switching sports, swapping to informal sport, or stopping altogether.

A more recent 2020 study tracked 29,225 girls and women who participated in Victorian organised sport for seven years. It found 55% of girls aged 4–14 dropped out of sport and never returned.

Australian Sport Commission research from 2025 lists girls aged 15 and older as the third least likely group to play organised sport (behind people 18 and older with a disability, or those with home duties).

More broadly, Australian sport is shifting, as informal and casual sports such as walking and working out at the gym become more popular.

But numbers in organised sport appear largely flat, or even slowly shrinking.

An eye to 2032

The Brisbane games are a huge investment: the Queensland and Australian governments are investing up to a combined A$7.1 billion, largely for venue infrastructure.

But the games aren’t just about stunning venues and sparkling medals.

The vision for the event is: “Believe. Belong. Become.”. This echoes Australia’s national sport strategy (2024–34) that seeks to prioritise inclusion and participation.

Organisers have also committed to a participation legacy, including a goal to ensure girls remain connected to sport.

A small number may believe they will be wearing green and gold in Brisbane. Many more may become administrators, coaches, leaders, officials and volunteers.

But the likelihood of many of these women getting involved in Brisbane 2032 appears to hit a roadblock when they reach age 15. So can Australia better support these future leaders and athletes when many are not sure they belong?

How to keep girls in sport

Many girls report they lack role models in sport, do not always feel they belong, and face issues with body image and gender stereotypes.

This sits in a wider sporting culture where women face three times as much online abuse as men, including many women athletes.

Retention has also failed to attract a great deal of concern or investment: researchers believe there are only five identified studies worldwide that have offered meaningful data into how to keep girls and women involved.

Researchers describe this area as “woefully under-researched”.

Work is being done though, with targeted programs aimed at finding out how to make sport more welcoming and fun for Australian girls and women.

Fair access to facilities and resources is needed: too often, the high-performance pathways for boys or men’s games take centre stage and pride of place on pitches, ovals and changing rooms.

More also needs to be done to develop, encourage and support women coaches, officials and administrators to design and run sport for girls at community levels and beyond.

The Australian government’s Play Our Way program is aimed at resolving these problems.

This will help ensure better representation of women in all roles and as leaders in organised sport environments.

More research is definitely needed.

All is not lost

Australia is fresh off a record-breaking haul of 171 medals, 70 of them gold, at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.

Australia’s women athletes won more than half of the medals.

So at the elite level, the pipeline looks healthy, especially after an uptick of investment in women’s sport that is going some way towards addressing decades of under-funding.

Beyond the government’s Play Our Way program, it is also working toward professionalising women’s sport and ensuring equal pay.

However, the picture could be even rosier if fewer girls dropped out of organised sports.

Much more needs to be done

As we have done with Glasgow, we should continue to celebrate Australia’s best and brightest athletes. But women’s sport needs better support at community and junior levels

Participation and retention need to be better understood, with a clearer picture of if, where, and how girls enter and leave organised sport.

If Australia doesn’t support girls of all ages, they might walk away before they get the chance to reach their potential.

Monica Beazley of Monarch Management contributed to this article.

Alexander Rolfe Best, Lecturer, Sport Business, Edith Cowan University

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

Last week’s NAPLAN results landed with their usual media splash. There were headlines worrying about the significant proportions of students below certain benchmarks and specific questions about maths results for students in Year 3.

One important element missing from the debate so far has been how students from disadvantaged backgrounds are falling further behind their advantaged peers.

This gap was already a problem before the latest data. But the most recent results show how things are getting worse.

Another way of looking at the data

Many research studies and decades of school results tell us there is a “learning gap” between advantaged and disadvantaged students in Australia.

What is less clear is how much this gap is changing over time.

For a May 2026 report, we developed a methodology that allowed us to illustrate gaps between students from different socioeconomic groups.

We converted NAPLAN scores into years and months of learning, relative to average levels of achievement for each year level. We called this “equivalent years of learning”. So, instead of comparing students by achievement bands or results, we can look at their achievement in terms of the amount of years and months that set them apart from other groups of students.

We then used this measure to compare the NAPLAN results of students whose parents did not finish school, versus those who went on to university study. Parents’ level of education is often used as a proxy for a students’ socioeconomic background in combination with other variables.

In our report, we found large, persistent and growing learning gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students in Australia.

Updating our findings

We have now incorporated the latest NAPLAN results into our analysis. This shows us how gaps in reading continue to grow, particularly during high school.

Here, we focus on the last four years because in 2023, major changes to NAPLAN testing and reporting were introduced.

In 2023, the reading skills of Year 3 students whose parents did not complete school were one year and ten months behind the skills of students whose parents completed a bachelor’s degree or above. This year’s results show the gap has widened to two years and two months.

In high school these gaps are even wider and growing faster. For Year 7 they have gone from four years and 11 months in 2023 to five years and six months in 2026. For Year 9s, they have grown from six years to six years and eight months.

What about numeracy?

In the case of numeracy, learning gaps have narrowed slightly in primary schools over the last four years – particularly among students in Year 5. Here, the learning gap between students whose parents did not complete school and students whose parents completed a bachelor’s degree or above decreased from two years and ten months in 2023 to two years and five months in 2026.

In high schools, numeracy gaps are growing fast, without any evident improvements for disadvantaged students.

The numeracy gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students in Year 7 grew from five years and three months in 2023 to five years and eleven months in 2026. For Year 9s it increased from six years and eight months to seven years and nine months.

How can we fix this?

What we are seeing is that achievement differences emerge early, and then widen in later year levels.

The consequences of this reach beyond NAPLAN and other school results to students’ opportunities after school. Research shows there are broader social and economic consequences for those left behind, including reduced productivity, entrenched disadvantage, and weakened cohesion across society as a whole.

Addressing educational inequality is obviously not an easy fix – it continues to be an issue in many countries around the world, despite decades of national and international commitments.

The persistent and growing learning gaps observed over the last 20 years in Australia suggest the issues are structural rather than linked to short-term policies or factors.

In particular, my upcoming research suggests greater attention must be paid to the increasing concentration of disadvantaged students in already disadvantaged schools.

These schools and communities face the greatest challenges and therefore require targeted and effective support.

“Full-service schools” offer a promising approach here. These provide much more than lessons and extra-curricular activities. They provide services for student health, learning and wellbeing in partnership with community services. Research has shown that when implemented effectively, these models are cost-effective at lifting student attendance, engagement, learning, health and wellbeing.

This won’t necessarily address all the complex factors at play. But in order to reverse these trends, governments need to ensure every school in Australia can give students the chance to reach their full potential, no matter the sector or the location.

Andres Molina, Senior Research Fellow, Mitchell Institute/Centre for International Research on Education Systems, Victoria University

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

The government has finally tabled its News Bargaining Incentive legislation to make big tech companies pay for the Australian journalism they use on their platforms.

The government developed these laws to fix a problem with the original News Media Bargaining Code introduced under the Morrison government.

While the code generated between $200 million and $250 million a year through deals struck with Meta and Google, it allowed them to stop making deals with news companies by not carrying news on their platform.

The new laws aim to close this loophole by making social media and search companies strike deals with eligible news publishers, or pay a charge based on their Australian digital advertising revenue, which would be distributed to news organisations through the News Journalism Payment Scheme.

While setting up new revenue streams for struggling newsrooms is a welcome move, the laws themselves are far from perfect.

How would the laws work?

The News Bargaining Incentive is made up of a couple of parts.

First, the government wants large social media and search companies with an annual digital advertising revenue of more than $250 million in Australia – likely to include digital giants such as Google, Meta and TikTok – to enter deals with at least eight eligible Australian news businesses.

If they fail to strike enough deals, they will be forced to pay a charge: 2.5% of their Australian digital advertising revenue.

To encourage deals, the charge is offset by 150%, and this increases to 200% if the deal is with small or medium-sized businesses.

Revenue collected from the charge will be administered through the News Journalism Payment Scheme. These funds will support the production of core news content in Australia. That means, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s definition:

[…] content that reports, investigates or explains issues or events that are relevant in engaging Australians in public debate and in informing democratic decision making; or current issues or events of public significance for Australians at a local, regional or national level.

The scheme is primarily designed to sustain the employment of journalists and help build capacity of news organisations.

Funding to news publishers will be decided by a weighting formula based on the number of full-time equivalent journalists in each organisation.

In a welcome move, the definition of journalist has been broadened to include a range of essential news roles, such as:

• journalists

• photojournalists

• videographers

• data or visual journalists

• editors or producers who are involved in the production of news content

• and freelancers and volunteers (low-revenue organisations) who produce core news content.

Of the charge funds, 10% will be set aside for grants, including 5% to fund AAP (Australian Associated Press) in recognition of its public-interest role, and a further 5% for small organisations that are not eligible for funding from deals under this scheme.

Exactly how the collected funds are to be administered is not clear.

What will it mean for media companies?

On the positive side, the new laws will guarantee a steady flow of revenue for the Australian news industry, either through deals or charges.

This stops the digital platforms opting out of giving financial support to the news industry, which is welcome.

There has, however, been criticism from the news industry in four key areas.

1. A smaller funding pool

The pool of funding from which the charge is drawn is smaller than the original proposal. It was initially based on the annual revenue of the platform in Australia. Now it will be drawn from its digital advertising revenue.

While there has been a small increase in the charge, from 2.25% to 2.5%, it might not make up the shortfall.

More importantly, for this to work we need a more accurate definition and estimate of advertising revenues earned by digital platforms in Australia.

2. Uneven expenditure rules

The minimum number of deals that need to be struck to avoid the charge was doubled from four to eight.

But the maximum share of expenditure per news business is 25%, which means a platform can give four companies 99% of the money and split just 1% among four additional companies.

This could continue the problem of propping up the larger mainstream news outlets at the cost of smaller publishers, which are playing an increasing role in the way audiences access news and information.

3. Favouring larger organisations

The charge distribution mechanism also favours larger organisations. To be included on the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s register of eligible news businesses you must generate more than $150,000 in annual revenue.

This excludes many small and independent outlets. For example, among roughly 200 Local and Independent News Association (LINA) members, 35% earn less than the threshold. The 5% grant built into the scheme is promising, but not sufficient to support the diverse range of publishers operating in Australia, particularly in regional areas.

4. No AI companies included

The government chose not to include AI companies in the scheme.

Excluding AI services creates a significant regulatory gap. AI platforms have become an increasingly dominant source of news and information for the Australian public.

With the advent of generative AI-enabled platforms, news organisations are now facing a “zero-click” era as artificial intelligence (AI) summaries reduce referral traffic to news websites.

This is clearly a missed opportunity at the precise moment when their market power and impact on journalism are accelerating.

Are the laws likely to be effective?

Overall, the new laws will channel badly needed funds into the struggling news industry.

However, while the government has made small changes to the News Bargaining Incentive legislation, they don’t go far enough to reflect the industry’s feedback and support the diversity and sustainability of public interest journalism.

Caroline Fisher, Adjunct Associate Professor of Communication, University of Canberra and Sora Park, Director, News & Media Research Centre, University of Canberra

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

From next Monday, August 17, thousands of food delivery workers across Australia will benefit from new workplace protections – including new minimum hourly rates of pay.

That’s because on Tuesday, a new minimum standards order was handed down by an expert panel of the Fair Work Commission. The order covers “employee-like” workers at digital on-demand delivery platforms.

This is the first order of its kind, and as such it sets a benchmark for separate applications currently underway covering rideshare and parcel delivery workers.

It is the result of almost two years of negotiations between the Transport Workers’ Union and two major platforms, Uber Eats and DoorDash, through proceedings at the Fair Work Commission. While these groups ultimately managed to reach a consensus about the new protections, the reforms weren’t always warmly welcomed.

So, what’s actually changing for on-demand delivery workers? And what could it mean for the price of food deliveries?

New minimum standards

The major change for food delivery workers is that the “interim” minimum standard order will create a new “earnings floor”. This won’t work in quite the same way as a minimum wage for employees.

Workers will be entitled to a minimum hourly rate for their “engaged time”: the period between accepting a delivery and completing it.

These minimum rates differ slightly across different types of delivery vehicle.

For pedal-powered bicycles or e-bikes, the rate is $31.30 an hour. For motorcycles it’s $31.80 an hour. For cars, $32 an hour.

Platforms will have to calculate a worker’s total earnings over a 21-day period. If a worker has been paid on average less than the earnings floor for their engaged time, the platform will have to top up their earnings to meet it.

This system does not compensate workers for time spent waiting for a job. But it does include the time spent waiting for an order at a restaurant, if they have already accepted it.

Clearer rules

The minimum standards order has also clarified the rules on insurance cover. Delivery workers are required to take out their own compulsory third-party insurance on their vehicles, at their own expense.

But platforms must now cover the cost of offering all workers a “reasonable minimum level” of personal accident cover. Other changes include:

• granting workers access to a feedback forum to raise questions or concerns about platform operations that impact their delivery work
• a clearer procedure for resolving disputes
• a right to (unpaid) time away.

A long road

Food delivery apps first launched in Australia in the mid-2010s. Many once-prominent platforms – such as Deliveroo and Menulog – have exited, and the market is now dominated by Uber Eats and DoorDash.

While popular among consumers, there have been significant criticisms of food delivery gig work. Workers have often earned both extremely low and variable income, faced safety risks, and had limited opportunity to resolve workplace problems.

According to the Transport Workers’ Union, there have been at least 23 fatalities among gig workers since 2017.

Closing some loopholes

For a long time, on-demand workers didn’t receive any of the workplace protections granted to employees, because platforms such as Uber and DoorDash engaged them as independent contractors.

In 2024, the Albanese government, backed by the Greens and some independents, legislated to provide some (not all) gig workers with limited protections, as part of its Closing Loopholes reforms.

This included giving the Fair Work Commission new powers to regulate gig work by making legally enforceable minimum standards orders.

As Tony Burke, then minister for employment and workplace relations, explained at the time:

If you are an employee, you have a whole series of rights. If you’re not an employee, all of those rights – all of them – fall off a cliff. What we want to do is turn that cliff into a ramp.

What does it mean for food delivery prices?

In 2023, before they became law, platforms and business groups pushed back on these reforms.

Uber claimed they would lead to “catastrophic” job losses.

Uber also said they could increase the average cost of meal delivery by up to 85%. DoorDash went further, claiming average prices could more than triple.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry claimed the government was taking the country backwards by decades. And based on a “back-of-the-envelope calculation”, the Centre for Independent Studies predicted consumer spending on the gig economy would shrink by A$630 million.

However, with the benefit of hindsight, many of these past claims look unlikely to come true.

Why? Because over the past two years, we’ve seen a collaborative process between the Transport Workers’ Union, and the two biggest platforms, Uber Eats and DoorDash. The new minimum standards order is the result of consensus.

Will delivery prices rise to cover better pay and standards? Almost certainly, though we’re yet to hear by how much.

However, given how actively involved both companies were in striking this deal, it would be surprising if we now saw them double or triple their prices, as they once claimed they might have to.

What does it mean for other workers?

For now, the minimum standards coming into effect from Monday are only applicable to those involved “on demand” food delivery, which includes supermarket grocery deliveries.

There are, however, applications already underway for “last mile” parcel delivery workers and rideshare drivers.

This change will give a vulnerable group of workers more rights. We’ll have to wait and see whether consumers are willing to pay more. But, from Monday, maybe that next food delivery order can come with a side of a little less guilt.

Alex Veen, Senior Lecturer and University of Sydney Business School Emerging Scholar Research Fellow, University of Sydney; Caleb Goods, Senior Lecturer, Management and Organisations, UWA Business School, The University of Western Australia, and Tom Barratt, Senior Lecturer, Management and Organisations, The University of Western Australia

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

Burn it, slash it, bury it – this is what clothing brands have been doing for years with their unsold stock.

But in the European Union, this is now changing. New rules banning the destruction of unsold garments have come into force. These mean brands must find alternative pathways for their unsold stock such as resale and donation. They must also declare on their websites their volumes of unsold stock. Destruction of garments will only be permitted for items that are damaged or unsafe.

These rules come under 2024 regulations, which are designed so that clothing sold in the EU will be more durable, reusable and recyclable. At first, the new rules apply to large retailers, but from 2030, they will apply to medium-sized retailers too.

Here in Australia, we don’t have reliable estimates of the size of the problem, but we could learn from the EU model.

So how big is the problem of unsold stock?

Also known as “surplus”, “deadstock”, or “excess inventory”, unsold stock includes clothing that has been produced but never sold to a consumer, as well as clothing that has been returned by a customer.

The size of the problem is difficult to quantify as there has been no requirement to declare unsold stock. A meta-analysis of multiple studies from Europe calculated the average share of unsold stock is 21% of all clothing placed on the market. While some of this unsold stock is redistributed to charities, the EU estimates 4%-9% of all new clothing is destroyed.

This percentage may be even higher for online retailers, as retail returns alone are estimated to range from 10% to as high as 60% for some categories of clothing.

This is due to practices such as consumers buying multiple sizes of one garment (known as “bracketing”) and then returning the ones that do not fit.

From fast-tracked to forgotten

Fast fashion has made the problem of unsold clothing far worse by constantly releasing new collections and styles. In 2022, H&M released 4,400 new styles across the year, and Zara 6,850 new styles.

Ultra-fast fashion accelerated this turnover even more, with Shein adding up to 10,000 new designs on peak days, according to Greenpeace. This means thousands of clothes remain unsold. And this is not limited to fast fashion; luxury brand Burberry destroyed £90 million (A$170 million) worth of products over five years.

In Australia, we do not know the volume of unsold stock, but it is possible to estimate it using the EU percentages.

In 2024, Australia imported 1.55 billion units of clothing into the country. This figure only includes large shipments to retailers, not individual purchases by consumers or smaller restocking by brands.

One industry estimate suggests at least 3% of all clothing imported into Australia remains unsold, equivalent to 47 million units or 11,700 tonnes. It is unknown how much of this would be destroyed.

However, applying European estimates to the Australian market would produce a less optimistic picture. If the European estimates apply, with 4-9% of unsold clothing destroyed annually, then this would equate to 62-132 million units of clothing destroyed each year in Australia, or 15,500-33,000 tonnes.

Whatever the precise figure is, we know there are tens of thousands of tonnes of unsold stock in Australia. This represents a colossal waste of the materials, energy and labour that went into making and shipping them.

What can be done about it?

There are local solutions to avoid the destruction of new clothing. Australian company Thread Together works with 2,000 Australian brands to distribute unsold clothing to people in need.

Seamless, an Australian scheme to encourage a circular clothing economy by diverting clothing from landfill, has made several recommendations:

• establish a shared definition of unsold stock
• map where and why it accumulates across planning, production, retail and post-season stages
• and provide practical tools to calculate its true business cost.

These measures would improve forecasting and collaboration, helping brands deal with excess stock before it must be discounted, donated or discarded.

Efficiencies can be made through better inventory management and resisting constant style changes. A recent industry report highlighted that efficiencies are possible. Uniqlo increased its profits by 70% over seven years while resisting constant trend turnover, producing only two collections annually and maintaining a relatively limited range. Half the range is carried over from the previous season.

The bottom line

In today’s fashion system, surplus is a feature, not a bug. Fashion brands are locked into unsustainable practices.

The EU laws are a step towards holding brands accountable for the resources they use and waste – and because the rules apply to everyone, everyone must work together to change how the overall system works.

Here in Australia, we also need a level playing field, as no one fashion brand can change their practices alone.

The Australian government has an opportunity to strengthen the rules on “product stewardship” – where businesses take responsibility for a product across its entire lifecycle – and encourage retailers to keep new, unsold clothing out of landfill.

Alice Payne, Professor and Dean of the School of Fashion and Textiles, RMIT, RMIT University and Yassie Samie, Postdoctoral Researcher in Fashion and Textiles, RMIT University

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

You know the feeling. Your account is suspended, your refund request is refused, or you’re still being charged for a cancelled subscription.

So you go to the company’s website for help and you find a chatbot. It offers a menu that doesn’t include your situation. There is no option to speak to a person. Eventually you give up.

Since the start of 2023, Australians have made 1,780 complaints about online retailers, marketplaces, search engines and social media platforms to the telecommunications industry ombudsman. In 2025, complaints were up 20% on the year before.

Account access problems were the most common problem, followed by disputes over charges and fees. More than seven in ten involved just five companies: Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Hubbl.

Unfortunately, all those complaints about online services made to the telecoms industry ombudsman fall outside its jurisdiction. No existing ombuds scheme can make a binding decision about them.

We need a dispute resolution system that can deal with these complaints, and there are precedents for this.

Digital problems cost the economy

The Consumer Policy Research Centre found four in five Australians had a problem with a digital service in the past year, and that unresolved problems cost an estimated $497 million annually. Two in three who complained were left dissatisfied.

Dissatisfaction was highest over refunds people believed they were entitled to (84%), followed by having no way to contact someone who could help (83%).

The centre says when people complained to online businesses and platforms, many had to deal with virtual customer service portals and AI chatbots that are unhelpful, give no explanation or offer inaccurate advice.

Who can deal with these complaints?

The government’s scams prevention framework offers a model. It requires banks, telcos and global digital platforms to join an external dispute resolution scheme run by the Australian Financial Complaints Authority by September 1.

However, this scheme is limited to scams and won’t cover the sort of account or platform issues outlined above.

Under Europe’s Digital Services Act, platforms must have a proper complaints process, and decisions cannot be made by machines alone. Qualified staff must supervise them. If the platform still gets it wrong, users can take the dispute to an independent body certified by the government, which must decide within 90 days.

For example, one dispute settlement body, Appeals Centre Europe, has ruled on 1,500 disputes and overturned more than three quarters of the platforms’ original decisions.

Maybe AI could be part of the solution

Any dispute resolution scheme covering online platforms would face huge numbers of cases with similar problems. This is where chatbots and AI could actually become part of the solution.

British Columbia’s Civil Resolution Tribunal guides people through an interactive Solution Explorer, a rules-based chatbot that asks set questions and returns tailored information based on set rules, before any human decision-maker gets involved.

In research my colleagues and I published in the UNSW Law Journal, we compared rules-based chatbots with generative AI chatbots to see how they can help people with small-value claims.

Generative AI’s ability to provide personalised and targeted responses is genuinely attractive.

But generative AI also hallucinates, confidently inventing legal rules and cases that don’t exist. Even when it isn’t fabricating a source, it can produce highly convincing advice that is simply wrong.

That risk falls hardest on the people these systems are meant to help. A consumer who can’t afford a lawyer is also the person least equipped to notice when an AI has made up the law. And the error is invisible: told wrongly that you have no claim, you simply walk away, and nobody ever finds out. No feedback reaches the system that produced the error.

Getting the design right

The Victorian Law Reform Commission sets out sensible principles in its report on AI in Victoria’s courts, including one clear recommendation that AI must not make the final decision. A person must decide the outcome.

Before any new resolution scheme integrates AI tools, it must decide which tools will be used, for what functions, and what safeguards will reduce potential risks.

The chatbots people are stuck in today aren’t broken. They are working exactly as designed – for the online companies that built them.

Australia rarely gets to design a dispute resolution scheme from scratch, and it is building one now as part of its scams prevention framework.

Whether technology ends up serving consumers or stonewalling them is not a question about AI. It’s a question about who the system is designed for, and whether there is always, at the end of it, someone to turn to.

Vivi Tan, Lecturer in Law, RMIT University

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

On December 14, 2025, 15 people were killed and dozens wounded in a terror attack during a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s Bondi Beach. In the wake of the deadliest terror attack on Australian soil, the Albanese government established the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in January 2026.

This violence against the Jewish community was not an isolated incident. Evidence indicates that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks outside Israel in 30 years.

In Australia, the Bondi terror attack followed two years of rapidly escalating antisemitism, including arson at the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne – designated as a terror attack – and another arson attack at a kosher restaurant in Sydney. Both events have since been attributed by ASIO to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

There have also been threats towards and the targeting of Jewish schools and community leaders. Online abuse has frequently resulted in criticism of Israel being extended to hostility to Jews, irrespective of their political views.

This hostility and hatred has been extended to royal commission witnesses. People who have described their experience of antisemitism to the commission have been subjected to significant online antisemitic abuse in the hours and days after.

I study extremism in all its forms. Since the commission’s hearings began on May 4, I’ve worked with the Dor Foundation – a charity researching antisemitism in Australia – to document and verify more than 1,300 such posts directed at witnesses. We then submitted them to the commission as evidence.

What the monitoring shows

Dor used social media monitoring tools alongside daily manual searching to identify antisemitic posts. A second analyst then viewed the post for confirmation. We applied a conservative threshold to separate legitimate political criticism and debate from abuse and antisemitic material.

The exercise was not exhaustive. Many examples remain uncaptured.

Because of the way we collected the data, our analysis focuses on the nature and severity of the content, not how prevalent it is.

The posts came from 1,137 distinct accounts across social media platforms, which rules out the possibility of a single organiser. Witnesses appearing under a pseudonym were also targeted.

Much of the antisemitic activity sits in comment threads under clips posted by alternative and independent media pages. While Dor’s analysts generally coded the clips themselves as negative or neutral rather than hateful, the comments were more extreme. Five clips from one page drew more than 4,000 comments.

Witnesses were also targeted on their own accounts. One prominent Jewish leader received more than 2,200 comments across four posts about his evidence, including violent language and characterisation as a “baby killer”.

The content crosses ideological lines. Neo-Nazi material is common, including the Happy Merchant caricature, the trope of “109 expulsions” (which falsely suggests Jews have been expelled from 109 countries), and Holocaust denial.

This appears alongside conspiratorial claims about globalist Jewish control, “paid Mossad operatives”, “the Jewish lobby” and imagery associated with Hamas propaganda.

While the ideologies underpinning the abuse differ, they share similar themes about Jewish power, conspiracy and disloyalty to their home countries.

Testimony as a target

The most severe material has called for witnesses and Jewish people to be executed, hanged, shot, firebombed and interned in concentration camps.

Witnesses were compared to rats, cockroaches and vermin, and described as filth requiring eradication.

There was Holocaust denial and mockery, deportation demands and sexually degrading abuse. One witness was depicted in a digitally generated image inside a gas chamber.

Witnesses were called paid actors and crisis actors, accused of giving evidence for shekels (the Israeli currency), and told they were not really Jewish so had no business speaking about antisemitism.

Some were accused of helping to orchestrate the Bondi attack and the Adass Israel arson for financial gain.

Our monitoring also captured a small amount of targeting of Jewish witnesses who criticised mainstream communal responses. They were labelled “Kapo”: a prisoner forced to work as an overseer in Nazi concentration camps.

The commission itself was cast as a taxpayer-funded exercise run by and for Jews.

A woman who gave evidence as the daughter of a man killed at Bondi was abused in terms that named and degraded her father. A rabbi who described his daughter being wounded in the attack received the reply “Only wounded huh”.

Material directed at Liberal MP Julian Leeser included posts targeting his young son, characterising the boy as a liar and a “little Zionist”, speculating in graphic sexual terms about him, and in one instance proposing violence against him.

Posts such as these show anyone weighing an invitation to give evidence is weighing it on behalf of their children as well.

A royal commission depends on people speaking publicly and having their evidence weighed on its merits. But these attacks go well beyond reasonable political debate. They target individuals and the truth-seeking process at once, and amount to a direct repudiation of democratic process and the rule of law.

‘Undiluted level of hatred’

Commissioner Virginia Bell has sought to address this targeting of witnesses directly.

Opening a hearing in May, she reported a dramatic increase in online hate messages after witnesses gave evidence. She said the material displayed an “undiluted level of hatred and bigotry”, confirmed the commission was recording it, and disclosed that one matter had been referred to the Australian Federal Police.

Around the hearing room, the physical protection of attendees is tangible: police presence and strict security protocols exist.

But simultaneously online, more than a thousand documented antisemitic posts have produced little to no action from social media platforms. More than 1,100 have been referred to the Australian Federal Police.

Of 150 live posts reported to one platform after an early hearing block, five were removed, with three more taken down after Dor identified them in public oral evidence, and a further three removed in the following weeks.

A post reading “JEW KISS ASS KILL ALL JEWS” was twice assessed as compliant with that platform’s community standards. It is still there.

Royal commissions in the digital age

Section 6M of the Royal Commissions Act makes it an offence for any person to use, cause or inflict, any violence, punishment, damage, loss, or disadvantage to a person because they have given evidence to a royal commission. The maximum penalty is one year’s imprisonment.

How it applies to conduct dispersed across a thousand primarily anonymous accounts, on platforms that decline to act on reports, has not been worked out. This legislation needs to be adapted to the digital age.

Remarkably, despite strong reservations, no witness appears to have withdrawn. It is unclear how many did not submit for this reason, though there are likely to be many.

On its own terms, the intimidation has failed, and Commissioner Bell’s final report is due in December.

What cannot be counted is who reads all this and quietly declines to come forward. Evidence an inquiry never hears leaves no trace in its transcript. It also will not record who is profiting from this abuse, be it for political or financial gain.

Josh Roose, Director of Research and Policy at The Dor Foundation and Associate Professor of Politics at Deakin University, Deakin University

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

Since the Bondi Beach terror attack last December, there has been heightened attention on antisemitism in Australia, as evidenced by the ongoing Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

As with any form of prejudice, combating antisemitism requires understanding how it operates, why it persists over time and across populations, and how it can be addressed effectively. And as with all forms of prejudice, these questions cannot be answered without high-quality research.

Yet, research on antisemitism faces a double bind, which is preventing progress.

On one hand, there is too little of it in Australia. The size of the Jewish population and the assumption that general research on prejudice can sufficiently address antisemitism limit its funding appeal.

On the other hand, the research that does exist can be subjected to intense contestation, especially when findings do not align with commonly held viewpoints.

A review I conducted of journal articles published by Australia-affiliated academics between 1990 and 2025 demonstrates this effect. I identified only 173 articles on antisemitism, compared with 3,640 on racism.

More significantly, most articles were on historical forms of antisemitism, with only 26 presenting new empirical research. By contrast, 13 articles presented no new data. Instead, they disputed the presence of antisemitism or argued that claims of antisemitism were being weaponised for political purposes.

Australia is not alone. In 2024, a US research team published one of the first quantitative studies of antisemitism in the US healthcare sector. It was soon criticised in an editorial in another journal for its methods and analysis. The authors responded by pointing out their methods were on par with research on other forms of prejudice.

This creates a vicious cycle. A limited evidence base is used as a reason to question how widespread or serious the problem is. Efforts to strengthen that evidence base are then challenged over their definitions, samples, methods or alleged political motives.

What we learn when we study antisemitism

The recent special issue of the journal American Psychologist on antisemitism and psychology provides a useful illustration of what’s possible when experts focus on how antisemitism operates in practice.

Some articles tackled prior assumptions about antisemitism. My article with Wen Shan of the Singapore University of Social Sciences tackled the assumption that perceived Jewish success drives prejudice against Jews. We found that people in China admire Jewish success and try to emulate it, both materially and morally, suggesting envy is not necessarily a driver of antisemitism.

Similarly, Maria Babińska of Université Libre de Bruxelles and her colleagues found that in Poland and Germany, antisemitism was a predictor of Holocaust distortions, while Holocaust distortions were not a predictor of antisemitism. This suggests collective guilt over the Holocaust is not a driver of antisemitism.

Other articles examined the role of ideology. Britt Hadar of Reichman University in Israel found a key driver of anti-Jewish prejudice is the stereotyping of Jews as powerful. However, the rationale for this differs, depending on political ideology. Those on the right perceive Jews as threatening to the dominance of their own group, while those on the left perceive Jews as obstructing equality between people.

Jordan Moon of the University of Southampton and his colleagues examined how ideology impacts people’s responses to prejudice against Jews. They found progressives reacted more negatively than conservatives to someone expressing anti-Jewish prejudice without justification. However, this changed when prejudice was justified by opposition to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

And several studies addressed the complex relationship between antisemitism and perceptions of Israel. Johannes Due Enstad of the Norwegian Institute for Social Research found those who believe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is equivalent to Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews are more willing to justify harassment or violence against Jews.

Rutgers University psychologist Kent Harber and his colleagues found negative attitudes toward Israel were partly driven by stereotypes that Jews are dishonest, care only about their own group, consider themselves superior and expect special treatment.

These attitudes were also shaped by conspiracy beliefs portraying Israel as secretly engineering or exploiting conflict to advance its interests, and portraying Jewish organisations as using money, pressure and allegations of antisemitism to build support for Israel and suppress criticism.

Finally, Gal Gutman of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Michael Gilead found negative Jewish stereotypes commonly found in the West also exist in large language models. This suggests artificial intelligence may reproduce and amplify anti-Jewish stereotypes.

What we need next

The key takeaway from these studies: antisemitism has distinctive features that cannot be assumed to operate in the same way as other forms of prejudice. This is why it warrants dedicated attention.

So let’s debate theories, challenge measures, improve samples and test competing explanations. But let’s not delegitimise research simply because we dislike the findings.

And to further advance our understanding of antisemitism, we need more research, involving larger studies. This will help us identify effective ways of reducing it.

Josh Keller, Professor, School of Management and Governance, UNSW

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

A “Free Palestine” party is registered to contest the Victorian state election in November. The conflict in the Middle East is notoriously complex. But what could be simpler than a single-issue political cause, with such a direct slogan as “Free Palestine”?

But here’s the catch. The party was founded by an Israeli-Australian and pro-Israeli YouTuber, Avraham “Avi” Yemini, who wants Palestine to stay under Israeli control. He says he hopes to dupe left-wing voters.

A movement that sincerely wants Palestinian liberation was affronted by Yemini’s provocation. It tried to register itself as the “Free Palestine Party”, but the Victorian Electoral Commission had to knock it back, because Yemini bagged the name first and the names are essentially the same.

Aren’t there laws to regulate party names? How can something as serious as a ballot paper be the site for such trolling?

How the laws about registering a political party work

Party registration has been around for a bit over four decades. Its main purpose is to aid voters. Voting is compulsory in Australia and people tend to vote for a party rather than a candidate. So having party names and corflutes at the point of casting your vote is important.

Party logos are now also part of that. Logos are used less to help voters with limited English literacy and more to help distinguish parties with similar names on big, upper house ballot papers.

To register a party you need to pay a fee, have a minimum number of members (more at national level than state level), and file an application with the relevant commission well ahead of election time. You also need to lodge a constitution. Your constitution sets your party’s name, but it doesn’t need to have any minimum content. It just needs to include, as one aim, a desire to run candidates.

Under electoral law, then, parties can be little more than electoral brands. To respect freedom of association, the law doesn’t say that you have to charge a minimum membership fee or let members rather than party leaders run the show. A party’s rules and positions are up to the party.

As for names, there are some formal restrictions. No more than six words, nothing too closely resembling an existing registered party, and nothing “obscene, frivolous or vexatious”. Obscene doesn’t mean politically objectionable – a White Australia Party, for example, could yet appear.

This means the law protects existing party names, to minimise voter confusion in the ballot box. But it also makes no attempt to guide voters on substance. A party can have a name that is sarcastic, or even completely topsy-turvy and deliberately misleading as in the “Free Palestine” case.

Voter beware

This all is, sadly, consistent with the absence of “truth in politics” rules in most of Australia. (Only South Australian and Australian Capital Territory elections have such rules, but then only to cover electoral advertising). This absence jars when contrasted to the rules against misleading consumers in commercial marketing.

Proponents of such soft-touch treatment of politics, however, warn that regulation could swallow a spider to catch a fly. In other words, they fear asking electoral commissions to judge truth or sincerity in electoral language will, at best, swamp those bodies. Or, at worst, expose them to accusations of becoming partisan overlords.

Those warnings may sound alarmist, in the face of blatant manipulation such as the “Free Palestine” registration. But drawing a line is not easy. Is the Labor Party a working person’s party anymore? Are there many liberals left in the Liberal Party? Political discourse is inevitably nuanced and unfixed.

There is also a risk that incumbent parties will use regulation as hooks to give prominence to their own hats. Indeed, in 2021, the major parties stretched the rules against misleadingly similar names, to try to protect the Liberal Party from the Liberal Democratic Party and the Labor Party from the Democratic Labour Party. (The High Court let them.)

Ultimately, the law runs on caveat elector – let the voter beware. This doesn’t mean there are no tweaks worth adopting. It is too easy to register a single-issue party purely to attract attention: and we live in an age of stunts and trolls.

Yemini was able to recruit 500 “members” via a social media call to his pro-Israel followers, without any of them needing to pay a fee or consent to any of the traditional obligations of party membership. A registered party should not be a hollow shell.

On the upside, Yemini cannot squat on the “Free Palestine” party name forever. Not unless he runs candidates at every general election. His candidates will, in any case, forfeit deposits of $350 each, too, unless they score 4% of the vote.

As for Victorians heading to the polls in November: caveat elector. You are choosing representatives to govern you, not shopping in Memeland.

Graeme Orr, Professor of Law, The University of Queensland

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

The Roman emperor Julian (332–363 CE) called bread the food that “among us is thought to be the most nourishing”.

Bread and other cereal-based foods were indeed central to ancient Mediterranean diets. This was supplemented by pulses, oil, wine and whatever seasonal produce people could obtain.

This is not quite the “Mediterranean diet” we think of today, with its vegetables, olive oil and grilled fish.

Although bread was fundamental to Julian’s Roman world, it wasn’t universally appealing. The Ethiopians, who lived on meat and milk, thought bread was terrible food that lacked nourishment.

They wondered how the Mediterraneans could live on this “diet of dung”.

Galen’s overview

The physician Galen (129–216 CE), provides our fullest account of the ancient Mediterranean diet.

In his book On the Properties of Foodstuffs, he first discusses cereals and pulses, then plants, and finally animal foods and fish. Wheat was, he says, the most widely used and “valuable” food.

Bread was not merely an accompaniment. For many people it supplied the bulk of a meal. Galen distinguishes between different types of bread. The finest white bread was “the most nourishing”. Bran bread ranked lowest, though Galen suggested it emptied the bowels more effectively.

Preparation mattered too. The best bread was “most leavened and very well kneaded” and baked “with moderate heat”.

An excessively hot oven produced a crust that was “dry and like pottery” while leaving the centre raw. Completely unleavened bread, Galen thought, suited almost nobody.

Galen learned the importance of processing wheat through an unpleasant personal experience. During a country journey with some of his friends, a poor peasant woman served them boiled whole grains because her household had run out of bread:

Throughout the next day we had no appetite because of indigestion, so that we could eat nothing, were full of wind and suffered from headaches and blurred vision. For there was not even any bowel action, which is the only remedy for indigestion.

The same grain became nourishing only after milling, sieving, kneading, fermenting and baking.

What else was on the menu?

Ancient people certainly ate fruit and vegetables. Galen discusses lettuce, cabbage, onions, gourds, figs, grapes, apples, pears and pomegranates. But he did not automatically regard them as the basis of a healthy meal.

Many plants were valued chiefly for medicinal effects: they might loosen the bowels, thin bodily fluids or stimulate urine, while supplying little nourishment.

The plant-rich diet could also reflect poverty rather than a healthy choice. Galen calls oats “food for draught animals, not for men”, except when “the extreme of hunger” forced people to make bread from them.

Pulses were more important than modern images of Mediterranean cuisine suggest. Lentils, chickpeas, lupins and various flowering legume plants supplied substantial nourishment.

Galen describes an Alexandrian physician who lived for four years largely on pulses. His diet sounds strikingly modern – until Galen reveals the physician seasoned them with fish sauce.

Fresh fish, meanwhile, was not necessarily an everyday staple. Access depended on location and wealth, as fish could be expensive.

Fish caught near Rome could also be contaminated by waste flowing into the river Tiber from “latrines, bathhouses or kitchens”.

Is there a single ‘Mediterranean diet’?

The Greek writer Athenaeus shows why we should be careful when speaking about “the” Mediterranean diet.

Athenaeus wrote around 200 CE and imagined a long dinner party at which the guests discussed food, wine and dining customs. His examples reveal that what people ate depended heavily on where they lived and how much money they had.

He begins one book with an account of Lusitania, in modern Spain. Seafood there, he says, “in point of abundance, excellence, and beauty, far exceeds that found in our sea”.

Wheat, barley, wine, figs and meat were remarkably cheap. Wild game was worth so little that sellers sometimes gave it away “as a bonus for goodwill”.

In other places, fish was expensive. Athenaeus quotes a diner complaining:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen fish more expensive. Poseidon, if you got 10% of what’s spent on them every day, you’d be far away the richest god there is!

Nor was fish always served simply. Athenaeus preserves a recipe by the 5th-century BCE Sicilian cook Mithaecus:

Clean the insides of a ribbon-fish after cutting off the head, wash and cut into slices, and pour cheese and oil over them.

The fish and olive oil sound familiar. The thick covering of cheese and oil clashes with today’s image of healthy, lightly grilled seafood.

The Mediterranean diet vs ‘the Mediterranean diet’

Most ancient Mediterraneans could hardly live without bread. Cereals supplied the bulk of their calories; pulses, oil, vegetables, fruit and fish varied according to region, season and wealth.

The ancient evidence leaves us with no single ancient Mediterranean diet. There were many: one for regions where food was plentiful, another for poor people just trying to survive, and another for wealthy diners able to pay extraordinary prices for expensive delicacies.

The modern Mediterranean diet is, therefore, not an ancient menu preserved unchanged. It is a selective reconstruction, highlighting olive oil, vegetables and seafood while quietly removing the mountains of bread and cheese.

Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia

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

Shingles (herpes zoster) is often thought of as an older person’s disease.

But in the past two decades, we’ve seen a rise in reported cases of this viral disease – which causes a painful, blistering rash and nerve pain – among younger adults aged 25–49.

To what extent this represents a real rise in cases, or just increased reporting, is not clear. Some people with shingles may not even see a doctor.

Shingles is a reactivation of the virus that causes chickenpox (varicella zoster). After a chickenpox infection, the virus lies dormant in nerve tissue and can reactivate after many years. This can happen more than once.

Older people are more at risk, both of the virus reactivating and of developing severe illness and needing to be hospitalised.

This is why those aged 65 and over are eligible for a free vaccine, as are other groups most at risk: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged 50 and over, and immunocompromised people aged 18 and over.

For those who want the vaccine but aren’t eligible under the free program, the price tag for the two doses is around A$560. It’s recommended, but not free, for anyone aged 50 and over.

But with reported cases up in younger adults, should the free vaccine be expanded?

We asked five experts. Four said no, and one said yes.

Allen Cheng receives funding from the Australian Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. He was a member of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation which provided advice on Shingrix to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee in 2023.

Sarah Annesley receives funding from the Judith Jane Mason & Harold Stannett Williams Memorial Foundation, ME Research UK, National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council.

Meru Sheel receives funding from Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the National Health and Medical Research Council. She is a member of the World Health Organization’s Immunization and Vaccines related Implementation Research Advisory Committee (IVIR-AC).

Ibrahim Javed receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Jing Jing Li receives funding from the Australian government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, providing independent evaluations of company submissions to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) for listing on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) and the National Immunisation Program (NIP). This work can also include conducting evaluations for the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI).

Ruth McHugh-Dillon, Deputy Health Editor, The Conversation

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

Affordable housing options, jobs for young people and climate change are the top three issues young people say need immediate action, according to our new youth survey published today.

Our research, which involved 150 interviews and more than 2,700 survey responses over five years, tracked the challenges Australians aged 18–24 experienced during the COVID pandemic and its aftermath.

While there are signs of recovery in some areas, deep challenges persist in others. Importantly, our data provide insight into how young Australians experience interconnected pressures that reflect a “polycrisis”.

A polycrisis involves the convergence of overlapping economic, environmental, political, social and technological emergencies.

Each emergency worsens the others, resulting in compounded effects with typically unpredictable consequences.

What we did and what we found

Each year from 2021 to 2025, our Australian Youth Barometer gauged the interconnected pressures experienced by young Australians through this nationally representative sample of surveys, complemented by deep-dive interviews.

Our team analysed areas such as finances, work, wellbeing, relationships and young people’s civic participation in society.

While our surveys each year show an easing of pandemic‑related impacts on mental health, young people are still experiencing some of the highest rates of mental ill-health in Australia.

Young people continue to experience disproportionate labour-market vulnerability since COVID lockdown disruptions, workforce change and amid current cost of living pressures.

Insecure work, for example, is common.

The number of unemployed young people in our cohort fell from 60% in 2021 to 44% in 2025. However, the number who were casually employed grew from 18% to 32% across the five years.

Many young Australians more broadly are contending with a pandemic-related ripple effect of “employment scarring” – which is where a history of unemployment starts to make a candidate “look bad” in the eyes of future employers. This can hinder long-term employment prospects for young people entering weak labour markets.

Workforce insecurity in these critical years can lead to lower earnings over time, harm wellbeing and delay big life decisions, such as starting a family.

We found financial stress was widespread across all five years, with 82–90% experiencing some difficulty each year. Family was the main source of financial support.

One 20-year-old Queenslander’s big concern was

this cost of living at the moment […] I’m just worried that it’ll be harder for me to get a job from my course or whatever, or that if stuff like cost of living and everything keeps going up, no matter if I get a job, I wouldn’t be able to, like, stay on top of that.

Fewer young people were able to save regularly (declining from 49% to 43% across the five years). Confidence in achieving financial security declined from 53% to 46%.

Those believing they could afford a comfortable home in the next year dropped from 46% to 30%. Longer‑term optimism about securing home ownership fluctuated between 41% and 49%.

Responding to polycrisis

Looking ahead to those coming years, what do young Australians think needs immediate attention? Our respondents called for:

• affordable housing options (increasing from 60% in 2022 to 82% in 2025)
• employment opportunities for young people (increasing from 48% in 2022 to 64% in 2025), and
• climate change (decreasing from 47% in 2022 to 44% in 2025 – but last year only 24% believed it likely or very likely climate change will be combated in future).

These issues were consistently the top three issues identified by young people that need immediate action. They are connected.

Wider research on global polycrisis conditions in housing markets highlights the interaction of inflation, labour insecurity, energy crises and financial instability.

Young people are entering a world of escalating climate change and geopolitical instability – and are acutely aware of it.

Arguably, many young people have been navigating a polycrisis since the global financial crisis of 2007–9. This might seem dramatic, but for young people these pressures are compounded and coalesce. One 19-year-old female interviewee told us last year:

Cost of living and housing crisis are pretty big barriers at the moment, but also just for me particularly it’s […] a lot of mental health difficulties and then the physical health stuff on top of that doesn’t help either […] There is heaps of stuff going on in the world so I don’t even know what things are going to look like in the next five years and there could be new barriers popping up.

For young people living through today’s polycrisis, the pandemic may have receded from view, but the horizon looks more uncertain.

Policymakers must understand young people’s interconnected pressures, rather than treating them as isolated issues. Year on year, interviewees saw these connections between the psychological, economic, social and political aspects of their lives.

It’s time policy makers see them as interconnected too – and act accordingly.

Lucas Walsh, Professor of Education Policy and Practice, Youth Studies, Monash University

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

What causes a dog to slink away from a cranky person, when they will quietly approach and lean against someone who is weeping? We’ve all seen it – they can respond to our feelings. And science agrees dogs have emotions too.

These social skills could underpin dogs’ success in living with us. But do you think your dog could tell an angry person’s face from a sad or fearful one?

New research published in the journal iScience explored that question, and revealed interesting findings from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of dogs’ brains.

Scanning dogs’ brains

Dogs are sensitive to human faces. They look longer in response to our emotional expressions and sounds compared with neutral ones.

Scientists weren’t sure whether dogs were just differentiating “good mood” (happy) from “bad mood” (angry, fearful or sad), or treating these expressions as genuine indicators of different emotions.

The new study, by Raúl Hernández-Pérez, a neuroscientist at the University of Vienna, and colleagues, explored this gap using MRI to scan pet dogs’ brains while they were viewing photos of human faces.

Building on their earlier work, the researchers found evidence that dogs do process images of our distinct emotional expressions differently.

The researchers used machine learning and showed that when looking at a dog’s whole brain, a different brain region was activated to distinguish between fear and sadness (the right rostral suprasylvian gyrus, to be precise), than between fear and anger (this was in the right mid ectosylvian gyrus and left splenial gyrus).

The analysis didn’t detect a difference in the brain areas activated when dogs were shown images of human anger and sadness. Fear stood out from the other negative emotions.

This raises the question: why?

It might be that fear and anger are simply more attention-grabbing than sadness.

Other research has found dogs react to fear and anger faster, and with a bigger physical response, such as a raised heart rate. This is likely because they’re the expressions most likely to call for a quick response from dogs to stay safe.

Sadness is less likely to pose a direct threat to dogs living with people, so they experience less urgency to respond to it. We know some dogs don’t respond with the heroic Lassie behaviour we might like when we are in distress.

Although the numbers in this new research were small (eight and twelve dogs across the two parts of the study), this is the first MRI-based proof-of-concept evidence that dog brains can distinguish between two human facial expressions of distinct negative emotions. It indicates dogs’ neural representation of our emotion goes beyond a simple valence (good/bad) split.

This shows us that perceiving emotion in others (even across species) isn’t handled by one single “emotion centre” in the brain – in dogs, in humans, or in other animal species. It’s spread across a network of regions working together as part of living socially.

A sense-ational result

The authors of this study point out that using still images of humans is a very people-centred way to explore how dogs interpret our emotional states.

We know dogs live in rich sensory worlds where the scent and sound of our speech also convey emotions, shaping how dogs respond to us.

In fact, even wolves who have grown up around people show the same kind of response to the odour of human fear as dogs. This highlights the important role of learning, as distinct from evolutionary differences in canid bodies or how they respond to people. Dogs (and wolves) are learning about us in every interaction we have with them.

Dogs are adept at watching, smelling, and listening to our emotions, learning how these signals predict our behaviours toward them, and using this information to live with people harmoniously.

Returning the favour, learning more about how dogs express their emotions seems like the least we can do.

Mia Cobb, Research Fellow, Animal Welfare Science Centre, The University of Melbourne

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