The Albanese government has announced 20,000 home care packages will be brought forward to be delivered before the end of October – immediately after opposing doing so in the Senate.

The Coalition, Greens and crossbenchers passed an amendment to aged care legislation moved by ACT independent David Pocock.

The vote went through without a division, but the government recorded its opposition.

The new Minister for Aged Care and Seniors, Sam Rae, had been under pressure in the House of Representatives this week over the huge waiting lists for packages, a position made worse by the delay of the implementation of the new aged care system from July to November.

According to the latest figures, there are 121,000 people waiting to be assessed, and nearly 109,000 waiting for packages. The government admitted to the latter figure in the Senate on Wednesday.

Minister for Ageing Mark Butler announced soon after the Senate vote that there would be 20,000 home care packages brought forward for release between now and the end of October, after which the new aged care system starts.

Between November 1 and December 31, 20,000 packages would be put into the system, he said. In the first six months of next year, the remaining 43,000 packages would be rolled out.

Butler said this reflected “an agreed position” between the government and the Liberals, “the two parties of government”. He said there would be some additional cost in bringing the rollout forward.

He flagged this cleared the way for the government’s legislation to get through the Senate this week.

The opposition said Rae had repeatedly claimed the figure was “around 87,000 people waiting” at the end of March, rather than providing the updated figure.

Oppositon leader Sussan Ley and aged care spokeswoman Anne Ruston said in a statement, “Labor promised 83,000 new packages from 1 July 2025, but instead decided to withhold support – despite the sector and the Department being ready to deliver them. Because of Labor’s delays not a single new home care package has been released this financial year.

"As a result, the priority waitlist has blown out to more than 108,000, a 400% increase in just two years, whilst wait times have tripled.”

Pocock said: “The government should have never delayed these additional Home Care packages. My amendment to release additional packages got support in the Senate today despite the Aged Care Minister’s opposition.

"Now the Health Minister has stepped in and announced the government will release the 20,000 additional home care packages the crossbench has been calling for since June.

"This is a huge win for community advocacy and will make a huge difference to older Australians but there is still so much more to do.”

The opposition said Rae was excluded from the government-opposition negotiation over the changed arrangements.

Asked at question time why he had not given the updated 109,000 number to the House of Representatives, Rae pointed to a longstainding process of verification.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

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

After 85 years of continuous publication, Meanjin, Australia’s second-oldest literary journal, is closing. Editor Esther Anatolitis and deputy editor Eli McLean have been made redundant and the final issue will appear in December. Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), which has housed the magazine since 2007, has cited “purely financial grounds” for the decision.

The closure has been roundly condemned by writers across Australia, including Jennifer Mills, Anna Krien, Claire G. Coleman and Sian Prior, along with former editors including Sophie Cunningham, Jonathan Green and Sally Heath.

“The loss of Meanjin is devastating news for Australian writers and readers,” Mills, a Miles Franklin shortlisted author, wrote on Bluesky. “Always meant so much to see my work there. Some of my best experiences of being edited.”

Award-winning writer Anna Krien told The Conversation:

As an outsider, clearly I don’t have a detailed script of what went on behind closed doors – but the public statement that this turn of events is a financial decision is laughable. I highly doubt Meanjin, in its entire 85 years, has ever made money.

Krien said Meanjin was “a literary journal for emerging and established writers to practise and experiment with form and craft, to say the unsayable and yes, the trite as well. Its very existence was an expression of valuing critical and creative endeavour in literary form.”

“Disgusted” Noongar writer Claire G. Coleman, writing on Bluesky, called Meanjin’s closure “cultural vandalism of the highest order”; she pointed out the journal is older than the Sydney Opera House.

Founded in Brisbane in December 1940 by Clem Christesen, Meanjin is not just a magazine, but an important cultural institution whose pages recorded and provoked national conversation and debate for the best part of a century.

In 1945, the journal moved to Melbourne at the invitation of the University of Melbourne, where it found stability and national reach. For decades, Meanjin has provided one of the most vital stages for fresh new forms of Australian writing and cultural commentary.

Its issues have featured work by major Australian writers, including Helen Garner, Alexis Wright, David Malouf, Judith Wright, Patrick White and A.A. Philips, whose 1950 essay on the topic of “cultural cringe” gave a generation of readers an enduring name for the unease of colonial self-doubt.

In a statement, MUP chair Warren Bebbington said the board “found it no longer viable to produce the magazine ongoing”. He said “the two part-time staff of Meanjin were not involved in the decision”.

Crikey quoted from an internal email sent to staff by MUP chief executive and publisher Foong Ling Kong, which said in part, “the decision was not made lightly”. “The financial pressures of publishing a literary magazine in today’s world, however, are inescapable and considerable, and the readership is shrinking.”

Louise Adler, chief executive of MUP when Meanjin was placed under its administration, told Crikey:

Given the coffers of the University of Melbourne, one would have thought the paltry amount Meanjin requires on a yearly basis was small coin for the intellectual contribution the magazine, at its best, can make to our literary culture.

Former Meanjin editor Sally Heath, now a nonfiction publisher at Allen & Unwin, told The Conversation the journal should be recognised “as a valuable part of the University of Melbourne’s cultural portfolio, alongside the Melbourne Theatre Company and the Ian Potter Museum”.

When creative writing and publishing courses are booming and Australian Studies under threat, the merit of such an independent magazine should be celebrated and seen as an important part of the reading and writing landscape.

Why was Meanjin so important?

Meanjin’s name derives from the Yuggera word for the land on which Brisbane now stands. From the outset, Meanjin was conceived as a forum for serious literary debate and as a conduit for cultural engagement. To read through Meanjin’s archive is to trace the evolution of modern and contemporary Australian intellectual life.

Across its lifespan, the journal was also, notably, a platform for First Nations authors. Wiradjuri writer and editor Jeanine Leane was appointed poetry editor in 2023 and the magazine has published the work of Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Tony Birch and Ellen van Neerven – who has an essay planned for the final edition.

Publishing researcher Alice Grundy, managing editor of Australia Institute Press, likens the reason given for the closure to “measuring the success of aged care on how much revenue it generates for the economy”. Literary journals, she told The Conversation, are “key cultural infrastructure”.

So many Australian books have grown from essays or stories in literary journals. Sian Prior is one of those authors: her 2014 debut book, Shy: A Memoir, began life as a personal essay in Meanjin. “I am deeply upset and disappointed that the publishing company of my alma mater, Melbourne University, has failed to recognise and secure the vital role of Meanjin in the fragile and eternally under-resourced Australian literary ecosystem,” she told The Conversation.

Editors who work on journals such as these can develop their careers and financially support their writing through those jobs.

“Our literary magazines are facing attacks on multiple fronts, a "deeply shocked” Stephanie Holt, Meanjin editor from 1998 to 2001, told The Conversation. “That they keep going at all is often down to goodwill and unpaid or underpaid labour on the part of so many.”

As we grapple with the impact of AI on our reading, writing and thinking, they offer the important prospect of a trusted forum for the thoughtful, singular and defiant voices we are in danger of losing.

Cunningham told Crikey Meanjin’s closure “reinforces my sense that universities are no longer spaces that support or nurture literature or the arts in this country”. In the last several years, she said, universities have “shown themselves unable to manage robust debates or the complexities of freedom of speech.”

‘Managed destruction’

Last year, Tom Doig, author of a book on the Hazelwood mine fire disaster, won the Hilary McPhee Award for his Meanjin essay revisiting the disaster a decade later. He, too, questioned the reason for Meanjin’s closure. “Almost no literary journals” make money, he pointed out – and nor are they expected to.

Emmett Stinson, senior lecturer in creative Writing at Edith Cowan University, told The Conversation the news is “highly distressing”.

If the most prestigious university in Australia will not fund our most prestigious literary journal, then it makes you question whether or not universities actually care about Australian culture.

The timing of Meanjin’s closure comes on the heels of Writing Australia’s July launch, with considerable fanfare and significant funding: more than A$26 million over three years, plus ongoing annual support and the appointment of Australia’s first National Poet Laureate.

The coexistence of these two developments – a state-sponsored national literary initiative on the one hand, the managed destruction of a historic literary periodical on the other – invites a difficult, if necessary question.

If Writing Australia is to truly support and promote the sector (to borrow its official phrasing), what does it say about our literary culture when one of the sector’s most venerable organs is simultaneously allowed to vanish?

One wonders how, in the years to come, the sudden winding down of the journal will be remembered – as a minor footnote, or a revealing commentary on what the very idea of “supporting literature” has come to mean?

Meanjin was, in part, about “articulating the Australian cultural moment” and ensuring Australia could speak to itself – critically, insistently, sometimes uncomfortably. Its closure raises the question of whether we – as a society – are still interested in hearing that voice.

At this moment in Australian life, is cutting-edge literature more welcome in practice than in principle?

Once the final issue of Meanjin has been published in December, a lively 85-year thread of our cultural conversation will fall silent. Whether that disquieting hush says more about our universities, our elected officials or ourselves is something all Australians will have to decide.

Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English and Writing, University of Sydney

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

A year ago, Google faced the prospect of being dismantled. Today, artificial intelligence (AI) and a new court judgment has helped it avoid this fate. Part of the reason is that AI poses a grave threat to Google’s advertising revenues.

“Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment,” according to the decision.

Google must share certain data with “qualified competitors” as deemed by the court. This will include parts of its search index, Google’s inventory of web content. Judge Mehta will allow Google to continue paying companies like Apple and Samsung to distribute of its search engine on devices and browsers. But he will bar Google from maintaining exclusive contracts.

The history of this decision goes back to a 2024 ruling by federal judge Amit Mehta. It found that Google maintained a monopoly in the search engine market, notably by paying billions to companies including Apple and Samsung to set Google as the default search engine on their devices.

Almost a year later, the same US judge issued his final ruling, and the tone could not be more different. Google will not be broken up. There will be no choice screen on new phones.

The nature of the search engine market, where more users generate more data, and more data improves search quality, made it impossible for competitors to challenge Google, the court found in 2024.

The 2024 ruling itself was controversial. While high quality data enables a dominant firm to extract more profit from consumers, it also allows it to provide a better service. Decades of research in economics has shown that determining which effect is more important is not straightforward.

At the time, the US Department of Justice deemed the issue so serious that it considered breaking up Google as the only viable solution. For instance, it suggested forcing the company to sell its web browser, Google Chrome.

The government also proposed forcing device manufacturers to offer users a choice of search engines during set up, and compelling Google to share most of its data on user behaviour and ad bidding, where advertisers compete in auctions to get their ads shown to users for a specific search query or audience. These so-called “remedies”, measures Google would be required to implement to end its monopoly, aimed to restore competition.

Limited sharing

So, what has changed in a year to so radically change the perception of Google’s market dominance? The main answer is AI – and specifically, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Google’s own Gemini. As users increasingly turn to LLMs for web searches, Google responded by placing AI-generated summaries at the top of its search results.

The way people navigate the internet is quickly evolving, with one trend reshaping the business models of online companies: the zero click search. According to a Bain & Company survey, consumers now default to accepting AI-generated answers without further interaction. The data is striking: 80% of users report being satisfied with AI responses for at least 40% of their searches, often stopping at the summary page.

Threat to ad revenue

This AI-driven shift in consumer behaviour threatens not only Google’s business model but also that of most internet based companies. Advertising accounts for roughly 80% of Google’s revenue, earned by charging companies for prominent placement in search results and by leveraging its vast amount of user data to sell ad space across the web. If users stop clicking links, this revenue stream evaporates.

More importantly for this ruling, the market Google once monopolised may no longer be the relevant one. Today, Google’s primary potential competitors in search are not Microsoft Bing, but AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. In the global race for AI dominance, the outcome is far from certain.

From an antitrust standpoint, there is little justification for penalising Google now or forcing it to cede advantages to competitors. What would be the benefit for consumers of forcing Google to accept the £24.6 billion offer from Jeff Bezos’ Perplexity AI to buy the Chrome browser?

In essence, the judge acknowledges that Google monopolised the search engine market for a decade but concludes that the issue may resolve itself in the years ahead.

This situation echoes the first major monopolisation case: Internet Explorer. For years, European and US regulators battled Microsoft to dismantle the dominance of its web browser, which was bundled with the then-dominant Windows 95 operating system.

By the time all appeals were exhausted, however, the monopoly had vanished. Internet Explorer was partly a victim of the rise of smartphones, which did not rely on Windows. The new king in town was a newcomer: a certain Google Chrome.

How you view the economic and political power of tech giants will shape which lesson you draw from this story. An optimistic view I suggested (with the economist Jana Friedrichsen) is that winner-takes-all markets can intensify competition through innovation. In such markets, incremental investment is not enough; to challenge Google, a competitor must offer a vastly superior product to capture the entire market.

Precisely because they ruthlessly defend their monopoly positions, tech giants show competitors that the potential gains from radical innovations are massive. The pessimistic view, however, is that years of dominance have left these firms largely unaccountable, which could embolden them in future.

Renaud Foucart, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster University

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