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.