Attributable to Inspector Simon De Wit, Acting Wairarapa Area Commander:
Police will maintain a highly visible presence in Masterton on Friday in response to a gang-related funeral scheduled to occur in the area.
We anticipate an influx of gang members travelling into Masterton from across the Wairarapa and other regions to attend the event.
Police have been clear in communicating expectations, ensuring there is no threatening or intimidating behaviour, and that gang insignia is not worn or displayed in any public place in breach of current legislation.
Officers will be actively monitoring the situation and will respond swiftly to any issues that arise. Any reports of unlawful behaviour will be dealt with appropriately.
We encourage anyone who witnesses illegal activity to contact Police immediately on 111. Non urgent matters can be reported via 105, either online or by phone.
Pharmac is proposing to fund new treatment options for people living with cystic fibrosis with eligible mutations, including young children, from 1 April 2026.
The proposal includes:
widening access to Trikafta (elexacaftor/tezacaftor/ivacaftor) and Kalydeco (ivacaftor) for all people with eligible mutations,
funding a new treatment, Alyftrek (vanzacaftor/tezacaftor/deutivacaftor).
Around 35 people are expected to benefit in the first year, increasing to 47 people after five years.
“Trikafta has already changed the lives of hundreds of New Zealanders with cystic fibrosis,” says Pharmac’s Director Pharmaceuticals, Adrienne Martin.
“Since we funded it in 2023 for people aged 6 years and above, over 400 people have benefitted. We are now proposing to fund Trikafta for more people so it can be used as soon as clinically appropriate, regardless of age.”
Cystic fibrosis is a long‑term condition that affects around 500 New Zealanders, including children. There is no cure, and people with the condition often have shorter lives.
“Cystic fibrosis starts causing harm very early in life. Funding these medicines for all age groups would help more young children with Cystic fibrosis live longer, healthier lives,” says Martin. “It would also mean children could begin treatment as soon as clinically appropriate, giving families greater peace of mind.”
Currently, Trikafta has Medsafe regulatory approval for use in people aged two years and older, and Alyftrek for children aged six and older.
“Funding these treatments would also benefit the health system,” says Martin. “People wouldn’t need to visit the hospital as often and they’d need less treatment.”
Pharmac is seeking feedback on the proposal from people with cystic fibrosis, their whānau, healthcare professionals, advocacy groups, and other interested people.
“Your feedback will help us make sure the proposal is workable, and improves access to treatment,” says Martin.
Consultation closes at 5pm, Wednesday 11 February 2026. Feedback can be submitted through the online form. All feedback received before the closing date will be considered before a decision is made.
All three medicines are CFTR modulators. CFTR (cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator) proteins play a key role in cystic fibrosis. For people with cystic fibrosis, these proteins do not work as well as they should, causing thick, sticky mucus to build up in the body.
These medicines work by helping the faulty CFTR protein function more normally, which makes the mucus thinner and less sticky. This helps reduce the damage caused by cystic fibrosis and improves overall health.
Trikafta combines three active ingredients (elexacaftor, tezacaftor, ivacaftor) to target the underlying cause of cystic fibrosis. It improves lung function, helps people gain weight, and reduces the risk of hospitalisation.
Kalydeco (ivacaftor) works for people with specific mutations by improving how the CFTR protein functions, helping to clear mucus and reduce symptoms.
Alyftrek (vanzacaftor/tezacaftor/deutivacaftor) is a newer CFTR modulator that works in a similar way to Trikafta, helping people with eligible mutations who may not respond to other treatments.
These medicines do not cure cystic fibrosis, but they treat the underlying cause and can help people live longer, healthier lives.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on January 24, 2026.
‘Thank God’ – parents of PNG conjoined twins grateful they defied medical advice By Margot Staunton, RNZ Pacific senior journalist The parents of rare conjoined twins say doctors in Papua New Guinea told them to take the boys home as they were beyond hope. “Thank God we [defied them] and we are where we are,” the boys’ dad Kevin Mitiam, who is also a twin, said in Tok
Federal government’s crackdown on free speech affects all Australians ANALYSIS: By Paul Gregoire Australia’s two federal combating antisemitism bills, the New South Wales laws providing the means to shutdown street protests and move on stationary public assemblies, along with the envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism and the Royal Commission into the same prejudice, have all been set in place following two ISIS-fuelled killers murdering
OpenAI will put ads in ChatGPT. This opens a new door for dangerous influence Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Raffaele F Ciriello, Senior Lecturer in Business Information Systems, University of Sydney OpenAI, The Conversation OpenAI has announced plans to introduce advertising in ChatGPT in the United States. Ads will appear on the free version and the low-cost Go tier, but not for Pro, Business, or Enterprise
The Mount Maunganui tragedy reminds us landslides are NZ’s deadliest natural hazard Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Brook, Professor of Applied Geology, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau Getty Images The tragic events in the Bay of Plenty this week are a stark reminder that landslides remain the deadliest of the many natural hazards New Zealand faces. On Thursday morning, a large landslide
Tokelau airport project scrapped despite multi-million dollar design By Kaya Selby, RNZ Pacific journalist New Zealand has scrapped a project to build an airport in Tokelau after sinking NZ$3 million into the design phase. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade told RNZ Pacific that the Tokelau government had been advised of their decision. Tokelau is completely inaccessible by plane,
The parents of rare conjoined twins say doctors in Papua New Guinea told them to take the boys home as they were beyond hope.
“Thank God we [defied them] and we are where we are,” the boys’ dad Kevin Mitiam, who is also a twin, said in Tok Pisin.
Tom and Sawong — who were fused at the lower abdomen — had unplanned emergency surgery to divide them at Sydney Children’s Hospital on December 7.
The surgery was brought forward as Tom, the weaker twin, was deteriorating rapidly. A large multi-disciplinary team took seven hours to separate the boys but Tom died soon after he was detached from his brother.
The team spent a further five hours working on Sawong, who is doing well and could return home by the end of February.
“The Port Moresby General Hospital paediatrician team told us [twice] to go back home, that there was no hope for them,” their mum Fetima said in Tok Pisin.
“We were even told not to trust Jurgen Ruh [the family’s spokesperson] because they said he was giving us false hope.
“I am happy and I laugh when I see my baby Sawong and think about that advice,” she said.
“I am full of hope, I cuddle him and talk to him every day, as he grows.”
Hospital response RNZ Pacific has asked Port Moresby General Hospital for a response.
The two-month-olds were medivacced from Port Moresby to Sydney on December 4, following medical advice that they undergo urgent surgery.
The move followed weeks of tense wrangling over the viability of separating them, which country would accept the case and perform the operation, and how it would be financed.
The boys shared a liver, bladder and parts of their gastrointestinal tract, but had their owns limbs and genitals.
They also had partial spina bifida — a neural tube defect that affects the development of a newborn’s spine and spinal cord. Tom also had a congenital heart defect, one kidney and malformed lungs.
Doctors at Port Moresby General Hospital initially explored the possibility of transferring the twins to Sydney, but the plans fell through when funding from a charity was pulled.
The hospital later made a u-turn and advised the couple to stay in PNG or face the death of either one or both of the boys.
Final decision The Medical Director, Dr Kone Sobi, said previously that multiple discussions led to their final decision, and added: “The underlying thing is that both twins present with significant congenital anomalies and we feel that even with care and treatment in a highly specialised unit, the chances of survival are very very slim.
“In fact the prognosis is extremely bad and the twin’s future is unpredictable.”
Manolos Aviation pilot Jurgen Ruh with Sawong at Sydney Children’s Hospital. Ruh flew Sawong and his conjoined twin Tom to Port Moresby General Hospital from their home in remote Morobe Province after they were born. Image: Jurgen Ruh/Manolo Aviation/RNZ
Ruh told RNZ Pacific on Thursday that although Sawong remained in intensive care, monitored constantly by a specialist nurse, he was “strong and doing well”.
He was no longer on a ventilator, did not need supplementary oxygen and was gaining about 50 grams a day in weight, he said.
“The hose fitting on his nose is simply to monitor his breathing and to assist a little with extra pressure in his lungs.
“Doctors have now closed up a hole in his stomach with stretched skin and he is improving every day, but it will be another month or so before he is released, possibly by the end of February.
“Occasionally Sawong gives the biggest smile on earth; he is just happy with what he has.”
100 days old The hospital recently celebrated Sawong reaching 100 days old with a simple but touching celebration.
“It threw a little party for Sawong, his parents and all the staff who have been part of his journey. Fetima cut a frozen cheesecake on his behalf,” Ruh said.
A massive funeral for Tom was held a month ago at the Mega Church in Hillsong, Sydney.
The family are expected to scatter his ashes after they return home to their remote village in PNG’s Morobe Province.
While the complex surgery was a success, the results were bittersweet for the parents.
“I thought it was amazing, after the surgery a nurse gave Tom to them and they spent hours just cuddling him,” Ruh previously told RNZ Pacific.
The parents had been through a “rollercoaster” of emotions since the twins were born on October 9.
“They had accepted that they would lose Tom and there’s been many tears shed along the way,” he said previously.
Funding search Ruh said last month that at one stage during negotiations the Sydney Children’s Hospital requested A$2 million to do the operation, but funds and guarantees could not be found.
RNZ Pacific understands that the parents had approached the PNG government for funding, but Ruh would not confirm this.
The ABC had reported that the hospital had asked for payment before the twins were transferred from PNG; however Ruh said as far as he knew no money had changed hands.
When asked how it was financed he said: “It’s a mixture of funding which took too long to organise.
“It should never have taken eight weeks to get the twins separated, it should have happened in eight days, but no referral pathway [to a foreign hospital] exists,” Ruh said.
He laid the blame on the PNG health system, and said babies born prematurely or with birth defects were lost in the system.
“It was a very disappointing ride we had, in terms of overall support from Port Moresby General Hospital. Then there were delays in getting them to Australia.
“We were exploring faster options, but we did not have any support.”
Private hospital The boys were eventually moved from the public hospital to Paradise Private Hospital in Port Moresby, which provided them with free care.
The family felt the twins would be “safer” and have less chance of cross-infection from other babies, particularly of malaria.
A multi-disciplinary team from Sydney Children’s Hospital flew to Port Moresby on November 21 to assess the twins, amid growing public pressure in Australia and PNG.
At that point the boys only had a combined weight of 2.9kg, and Tom was relying on Sawong to keep him alive.
Sawong (left) and Tom while they were being treated in Port Moresby General Hospital’s neonatal unit last year. Image: Port Moresby General Hospital/RNZ
In a letter to doctors in PNG, the Sydney team said surgery was in fact feasible although Tom was not expected to survive it.
“The reason for the early separation is that Sawong is working hard to support Tom,” the letter said.
Urgent transfer The team had recommended the twins be urgently transferred in a specialised aircraft with intensive care facilities plus medical and nursing personnel.
The boys underwent multiple investigations at Sydney Children’s Hospital, including an MRI and CT scan to define their anatomy and vascular supply.
“Before the surgery, the medical team [in Sydney] said it was a miracle that Tom had survived for two months,” Ruh said previously.
A huge team including liver surgeons, colorectal surgeons and urologists, specialised cardiac anaesthetists, cardiologists, neonatologists and interventional radiologists were involved in the surgery, supported by a large team of nursing and allied staff.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Australia’s two federal combating antisemitism bills, the New South Wales laws providing the means to shutdown street protests and move on stationary public assemblies, along with the envoy’s plan to combat antisemitism and the Royal Commission into the same prejudice, have all been set in place following two ISIS-fuelled killers murdering 15 people at Bondi Beach six weeks ago.
While some of these measures were drafted in a hurry immediately post-Bondi in a theatrical attempt to prevent what had already occurred, much of the “combating antisemitism” smorgasbord of laws that serve to clamp down on free speech and the right to political communication in general, appear to have been waiting in the wings for the right political moment to enact.
These dramatic changes that have been foisted upon the country’s public square have been central to a broad campaign that the Zionist lobby has been progressing both locally and throughout the Western world, which is difficult to pin down as most of this advocating takes place behind closed doors, while when featured in the media, these positions are increasingly reflected as the norm.
A key outcome of the doctrine of Zionism is the displacement and genociding of Palestinians. And it is these truths, and the fact that the Gaza genocide is in progress, that make it necessary to progress the lobby’s agenda right now.
But while the Albanese government is implementing the envoy’s plan and a Royal Commission into antisemitism, which both include a definition of antisemitism that serves to block criticism of Israel at the behest of the lobby, the scope of the federal hate laws further reveal desperate Labor and Liberal parties attempting to shore up power in the face of a drastically shifting political climate.
McCarthyite Zionism While the Israel lobby has long been understood to have an excessive influence upon the US political establishment, the sway of the Zionist lobby in Australia had not been common knowledge among the broader public until Gaza, as over the past 26 months of the mass slaughter and starvation programme, the lobby’s propaganda machine has been actioned in an attempt to hide this.
As the internet filled with footage of Israeli state actors perpetrating horrific acts in the Gaza Strip in late 2023, the Australian public sphere became a place to attack constituents for speaking out about this worst atrocity since the genociding of Jewish people during the Second World War, and the key way to silence these critics was to charge them with antisemitism — the hate that stoked the Holocaust.
The central target of the local Zionist lobby has been the Palestine solidarity movement, which has been a loud secular voice sprung from a diverse constituency.
Yet, federal and state Labor leaders have been labelling these people, who have been calling for an end to the practice of exterminating humans to obtain land, as outright antisemites and further implied they’re somewhat terroristic.
According to US professors Noam Chomsky and Judith Butler, the Israeli state and the Zionist lobby commenced framing criticism of Israel as antisemitic in the late 1960s.
This idea is predicated upon Israel being a Jewish state. It denies the fact that many Jewish people globally don’t adhere to the doctrine of Zionism. And it rests on a flimsy link that only holds because of the force of the lobbyists.
This had appeared to be spurred by the moral panic around antisemitism, however it has since come to light that the envoy programme exists across the Western world, with the first US envoy appointed in 2004.
At its heart, the plan inserts the IHRA definition of antisemitism that blocks criticism of Israel into every level of Australian government and all its institutions. Further aspects involve the monitoring of tertiary institutions and the media for antisemitism or rather, anti-Israel sentiment.
The IHRA working definition of antisemitism comprises of two lines and 11 examples of hatred towards Jewish people, seven of which involve criticising Israel.
The body that produced it has never officially adopted it. However, as one of its drafters has been warning over the past decade, the Zionist lobby has been weaponising the definition to silence anti-Israel criticism globally.
The determination to hold a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion is the result of an all-pervasive campaign to see it established post-Bondi massacre, with the suggested reason being to understand how such a terrorist action was able to come to fruition.
Further moral panic However, the criminal case against one shooter rules this out, so the inquiry will likely serve to stoke further moral panic.
So, the blanket ban on protests, or the public assembly restriction declaration regime rolled out post-Bondi, can be understood as not only placating the Zionist lobby, via the silencing of Palestine solidarity rallies on Gadigal land in the Sydney CBD, but it’s also as a continuation of the closing of the public sphere.
The 50 pages of hate crime laws the Albanese government whipped out of its back pocket last week, appeared so broad that the suggestion is the measures were in the works long before the antisemitic attack in Bondi on 14 December 2025.
ASIO boss Mike Burgess hinted at a need for these last year, so as to stamp out groups, like the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network and Islamic group Hitz ut Tahrir, as they had both been understood to be hovering just beneath the threshold of criminal activity.
But further, these laws sitting on the books could likely be used by a future “true blue” führer, so that their opposition can be eradicated on taking office.
The fallacy of necessitated free speech denial NSW premier Chris Minns’ favoured mantra over the period of the Gaza genocide — or the rise in antisemitism in Australia if one is being “politically correct” — has been along the lines of “the reason NSW does not have free speech protections like they do in the United States, is that this state has a multicultural society and therefore, divergent voices must be tempered”. Yet, this is a lie.
During the 1890s drafting of the Australian Constitution, those involved determined not to enshrine rights in the founding document, as it might result in discriminatory laws already on the books that specifically applied to First Nations people and Chinese people becoming invalid, former High Court Justice Micheal Kirby has noted on occasion.
The premier is not only progressing this line when the moral panic around antisemitism is in full flight, but he is also suggesting that the right to free speech should not be protected in NSW, over and over again, after NSW MP Jenny Leong introduced the Human Rights Bill 2025 last October, which seeks to protect free speech, or “freedom of opinion and expression”, among other rights.
The failure to protect free speech in this country was initially about maintaining power when attempting to establish an ethnostate. But the ongoing denial of rights protections since Australia embraced multiculturalism commencing in the 1970s, has really been about politicians maintaining power, and not an attempt to save various ethnic groups living here from annihilating each other.
The idea progressed by Minns is that the broad free speech protections in the United States, which are contained in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, would be a problem in our community because it is multicultural.
However, while the US has traditionally been understood to have been a melting pot of different ethnicities, what is operating as societies in both countries today are based upon multiethnicities, and they’re pretty much the same.
The progression of the “combating antisemitism” laws and policies right now is all about placating the Zionist lobby, while Israel takes as many pounds of flesh as it desires upon occupied Palestinian territory, in order to prevent the ongoing mass civil society outcry over this ethnic cleansing, the mass starvation and mass murder, along with the genocidal tactics that are ongoing in the Gaza Strip.
Yet, the federal listing of prohibited hate group regime also provides the ability to the major parties to criminalise their political opponents as hate groups — think, the Greens — at a point in time when the long-term capture of holding government office by the majors is now under threat.
OpenAI has announced plans to introduce advertising in ChatGPT in the United States. Ads will appear on the free version and the low-cost Go tier, but not for Pro, Business, or Enterprise subscribers.
The company says ads will be clearly separated from chatbot responses and will not influence outputs. It has also pledged not to sell user conversations, to let users turn off personalised ads, and to avoid ads for users under 18 or around sensitive topics such as health and politics.
Still, the move has raised concerns among some users. The key question is whether OpenAI’s voluntary safeguards will hold once advertising becomes central to its business.
Why ads in AI were always likely
We’ve seen this before. Fifteen years ago, social media platforms struggled to turn vast audiences into profit.
The breakthrough came with targeted advertising: tailoring ads to what users search for, click on, and pay attention to. This model became the dominant revenue source for Google and Facebook, reshaping their services so they maximised user engagement.
Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) is extremely expensive. Training and running advanced models requires vast data centres, specialised chips, and constant engineering. Despite rapid user growth, many AI firms still operate at a loss. OpenAI alone expects to burn US$115 billion over the next five years.
Only a few companies can absorb these costs. For most AI providers, a scalable revenue model is urgent and targeted advertising is the obvious answer. It remains the most reliable way to profit from large audiences.
What history teaches us about OpenAI’s promises
OpenAI says it will keep ads separate from answers and protect user privacy. These assurances may sound comforting, but, for now, they rest on vague and easily reinterpreted commitments.
The company proposes not to show ads “near sensitive or regulated topics like health, mental health or politics”, yet offers little clarity about what counts as “sensitive,” how broadly “health” will be defined, or who decides where the boundaries lie.
Most real-world conversations with AI will sit outside these narrow categories. So far OpenAI has not provided any details on which advertising categories will be included or excluded. However, if no restrictions were placed on the content of the ads, it’s easy to picture that a user asking “how to wind down after a stressful day” might be shown alcohol delivery ads. A query about “fun weekend ideas” could surface gambling promotions.
These products are linked to recognised health and social harms. Placed beside personalised guidance at the moment of decision-making, such ads can steer behaviour in subtle but powerful ways, even when no explicit health issue is discussed.
Similar promises about guardrails marked the early years of social media. History shows how self-regulation weakens under commercial pressure, ultimately benefiting companies while leaving users exposed to harm.
Advertising incentives have a long record of undermining the public interest. The Cambridge Analytica scandal exposed how personal data collected for ads could be repurposed for political influence. The “Facebook files” revealed that Meta knew its platforms were causing serious harms, including to teenage mental health, but resisted changes that threatened advertising revenue.
More recent investigations show Meta continues to generate revenue from scam and fraudulent ads even after being warned about their harms.
Why chatbots raise the stakes
Chatbots are not merely another social media feed. People use them in intimate, personal ways for advice, emotional support and private reflection. These interactions feel discreet and non-judgmental, and often prompt disclosures people would not make publicly.
That trust amplifies persuasion in ways social media does not. People seek help and make decisions when they consult chatbots. Even with formal separation from responses, ads appear in a private, conversational setting rather than a public feed.
Messages placed beside personalised guidance – about products, lifestyle choices, finances or politics – are likely to be more influential than the same ads seen while browsing.
As OpenAI positions ChatGPT as a “super assistant” for everything from finances to health, the line between advice and persuasion blurs.
For scammers and autocrats, the appeal of a more powerful propaganda tool is clear. For AI providers, the financial incentives to accommodate them will be hard to resist.
The root problem is a structural conflict of interest. Advertising models reward platforms for maximising engagement, yet the content that best sustains attention is often misleading, emotionally charged or harmful to health.
This is why voluntary restraint by online platforms has repeatedly failed.
Is there a better way forward?
One option is to treat AI as digital public infrastructure: these are essential systems designed to serve the public rather than maximise advertising revenue.
This need not exclude private firms. It requires at least one high-quality public option, democratically overseen – akin to public broadcasters alongside commercial media.
Elements of this model already exist. Switzerland developed the publicly funded AI system Apertus through its universities and national supercomputing centre. It is open source, compliant with European AI law, and free from advertising.
Australia could go further. Alongside building our own AI tools, regulators could impose clear rules on commercial providers: mandating transparency, banning health-harming or political advertising, and enforcing penalties – including shutdowns – for serious breaches.
Advertising did not corrupt social media overnight. It slowly changed incentives until public harm became the collateral damage of private profit. Bringing it into conversational AI risks repeating the mistake, this time in systems people trust far more deeply.
The key question is not technical but political: should AI serve the public, or advertisers and investors?
Raffaele F Ciriello is a voluntary, temporary member of the eSafety Commissioner’s Parent Advisory Group, advising on caregiver and youth responses to Australia’s Social Media Minimum Age laws. This article draws on his independent research.
Kathryn Backholer is Vice President (Policy) at the Public Health Association of Australia. She receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council, UNICEF, The Ian Potter Foundation, The National Heart Foundation, VicHealth, the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, QUIT, the .auDA Foundation and the Victorian Department of Justice and Community Safety for work related to the health-harms of online advertising.
The tragic events in the Bay of Plenty this week are a stark reminder that landslides remain the deadliest of the many natural hazards New Zealand faces.
On Thursday morning, a large landslide swept through the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park at the base of Mauao, triggering a major rescue and recovery operation that will continue through the weekend.
Hours earlier, two people were killed when a separate landslide struck a home in the Tauranga suburb of Welcome Bay. As of Friday evening, six people remain missing at Mount Maunganui.
These events occurred at the tail end of a weak La Niña cycle, which typically brings wetter conditions to northern New Zealand. At the same time, unusually warm sea-surface temperatures have been loading the atmosphere with extra moisture, helping to fuel heavier downpours.
In parts of northern New Zealand, more than 200 millimetres of rain fell within 24 hours in the lead-up to last week’s events – well above the typical thresholds known to trigger landslides.
Regions such as the Bay of Plenty, Coromandel, Northland and Tairāwhiti are especially vulnerable to intense rainfall, which weakens surface soils and the highly weathered rock beneath them, allowing shallow landslides to detach and flow downslope.
Most landslides in New Zealand are triggered by heavy rainfall, through a complex interplay of intrinsic factors – such as slope angle, soil and rock strength, and vegetation cover – and extrinsic factors, including rainfall intensity and how wet the ground already is from prior rainfall when a storm arrives.
Much of this risk is invisible, accumulating quietly beneath the surface until a sudden collapse occurs.
This helps explain why landslides have long proved so dangerous. Since written records began in 1843, they have been responsible for more deaths than earthquakes and volcanic eruptions combined.
Much of New Zealand’s steep, geologically young landscape is pockmarked by the evidence of millions of past landslides, most occurring on pasture and remote areas, far from people.
When landscapes tell a story
At Mount Maunganui, the shape of the land itself tells a story. The surrounding hill slopes are riddled with the scars of past landslides, revealing a landscape that has been repeatedly reshaped by slope failure over time.
New high-resolution mapping now allows scientists to see this in unprecedented detail. A 2024 LiDAR-derived digital elevation model, which effectively strips away vegetation to reveal the bare land surface, shows numerous landslide features across the slopes.
Many cluster along the coastal cliffs, but two particularly large ancient landslides can be seen directly above the holiday park.
A high-resolution elevation map of Mauao and surrounding land at Mount Maunganui, drawn from Land Information New Zealand data, showing landslide features. Two ancient landslides, or paleolandslides, above the campground site are labelled L1 and L2. Author provided, CC BY-NC-ND
These older slips left behind prominent head scarps – steep, crescent-shaped breaks in the hillside – indicating where large volumes of material once detached and flowed downslope onto flatter ground below.
Subsurface evidence reinforces this picture. A geotechnical investigation carried out in 2000, near the northern end of the campground’s toilet block, found a 0.7 metre layer of colluvium – loose debris deposited by earlier landslides and erosion – buried beneath the surface.
In other words, the site itself sits atop the remnants of past slope failures.
This image provides two views of the slopes above the campground at Mauao (Mount Maunganui). On the left (A) is a 2023 aerial photo showing the steep hillside and the location of earlier ground testing. On the right (B) is a detailed elevation map revealing two ancient landslides (L1 and L2) hidden in the landscape. The star marks the approximate starting point of the January 22 landslide. Author provided, CC BY-NC-ND
The January 22 landslide appears to have initiated in the narrow zone between the two earlier slips. This is a particularly vulnerable position: when neighbouring landslides occur, the remaining wedge of land between them can lose lateral support, becoming unstable, like a rocky headland jutting out from a cliff face.
Over long timescales, this kind of progressive slope collapse is a normal part of landscape evolution. But when it unfolds in populated areas, it can turn an ancient geological process into a human disaster.
From prediction to prevention
Predicting how far a landslide will travel, and which areas it might inundate, is critically important – but it remains an inexact science.
At its simplest, this can involve rough rules of thumb that estimate how far a landslide is likely to run based on slope height and angle. More sophisticated approaches use advanced computer models, such as Rapid Mass Movement Simulation (RAMMS) which simulate how landslide material might flow across the landscape.
These models were used, for example, to assess landslide risk at Muriwai, Auckland, following Cyclone Gabrielle.
By adjusting inputs such as rainfall intensity and soil properties, scientists can explore a range of possible scenarios, generating estimates of how far future landslides could travel, how deep the debris might be, and which properties could be affected.
The results can then be translated into landslide hazard maps, showing areas of higher and lower risk under different rainfall conditions. These maps are not predictions of exactly what will happen, but they provide crucial guidance for land-use planning, emergency management and public awareness.
New Zealand has made major progress in mapping floodplains, and most councils now provide publicly accessible flood hazard maps that influence building rules and help communities understand their exposure.
In the future, developing similarly detailed and widely available maps for landslide hazards would be a logical – potentially life-saving – next step.
Martin Brook receives funding from the Natural Hazards Commission Toka Tu Ake.
New Zealand has scrapped a project to build an airport in Tokelau after sinking NZ$3 million into the design phase.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade told RNZ Pacific that the Tokelau government had been advised of their decision.
Tokelau is completely inaccessible by plane, with visitors and its roughly 2600 residents required to travel via boat from Samoa. A return fare on the boat, which runs once every two weeks, is approximately NZ$306, with a travel time of around 24-32 hours.
“This decision was made in the context of the high cost of the project and the constrained fiscal environment currently facing the New Zealand government,” MFAT said in a statement.
“We recognise that air services have been a long-held aspiration of the people of Tokelau. ”
The government had spent around $3 million on feasibility, design, business casing and procurement planning since 2020, with funding agreed to the year before. The project faced delays due to COVID-19.
Stuff reported in 2022 that tenders for the project that had been put out for one provider who would be willing to work with the council of elders, or Taupulega, on a design concept.
Intended design An Official Information Act request from October 2024 confirmed that the intended design included one terminal with an 800m by 30m runway on Nukunonu, the largest of Tokelau’s three atolls.
A tender for a construction contractor had been placed as late as September 2025, with an expected timeline reaching out to 2030, according to MFAT’s DevData tool.
Children collecting inati (part of a fundamental cultural system of resource sharing) for their families. Image: Elena Pasilio/RNZ
John Teao, former chairman of the Wellington Tokelau Association, said he was personally pleased to see the project come to its end.
“There’s not enough land to have an airstrip . . . and it’s also the environmental impact — it’s a pristine environment,” Teao said.
“I just don’t see any any justification for an airport.
“Maybe in the future, if they have sea planes or things like that.”
Teao said he hopes to see the money spent on something more useful, such as improving the existing boat system.
Bridging the gap The New Zealand Labour Party’s Pacific spokesperson, Carmel Sepuloni, said this project was intended to bridge the gap between Tokelau and the world.
“While the details are unclear, it’s disappointing to hear this news,” she said in a statement.
“There are real risks that come with having no access to an airstrip. With a population of about 2500 and almost 10,000 Tokelauans living in New Zealand, travel to and from Tokelau is difficult.
“There’s a clear need and given Tokelau is within the realm of New Zealand, I’d expect the government to offer a clear explanation as to why they’ve scrapped these plans.”
An election in Tokelau for their General Fono is set for January 29. Each village is selecting their candidates for just over a week of campaigning.
The Fono consists of three Faipule, or village leaders, three Pulenuku, or village mayors, and 14 general delegates, elected for a three-year term.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on January 23, 2026.
Trump’s Greenland grab is part of a new space race – and the stakes are getting higher Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Marie Brennan, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of Waikato Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, in northern Greenland. Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images US President Donald Trump’s position on Greenland has shifted almost daily, from threats to take it by force to assurances he
Scott Morrison and Dan Andrews got it wrong. Here are 7 ways to get crisis leadership right Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Newstead, Senior Lecturer in Management, University of Tasmania Five years ago, as Australia burned through the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison was photographed relaxing on a Hawaiian beach. When he returned, his now-infamous words – “I don’t hold a hose, mate” – epitomised
Caitlin Johnstone: Oppose Israel’s abuses while you still can COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone I’ve seen some Australians expressing confusion as to whether or not they can still legally criticise Israel online after new “hate speech” laws were passed on Tuesday under the pretence of combatting “antisemitism”. The answer is yes, and you definitely should keep opposing Israel and its genocidal atrocities. I am worried
Digital ‘tokenisation’ is reshaping the global financial industry. Is NZ ready? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Murat Ungor, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Otago Getty Images Imagine investing in a premium Central Otago vineyard, or owning a slice of prime Wellington commercial property, all without needing millions in upfront capital. Through asset “tokenisation”, this is becoming a reality. Essentially, tokenisation converts physical
How to get managers to say yes to flexible work arrangements, according to new research Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa A. Wheeler, Senior Lecturer, Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University Diva Plavalaguna/Pexels In the modern workplace, flexible arrangements can be as important as salary for some. For many employees, flexibility is no longer a nice-to-have luxury. It has become a fundamental requirement for staying
Why are human penises so large? New evolutionary study finds two main reasons Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Upama Aich, Forrest Research Fellow, Centre for Evolutionary Biology, The University of Western Australia Rock formations in Love Valley, Cappadocia, Turkey. Nevit Dilmen/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY “Size matters” sounds like a tabloid cliché, but for evolutionary biologists the size of the human penis is truly a puzzle.
What’s the best way to remove a splinter? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Woods, Lecturer, Nursing, Faculty of Health, Southern Cross University Splinters are everyday injuries commonly involving a small shard of wood, glass, metal, plastic or a thorn that becomes embedded in the skin and the soft tissue underneath. The outer skin layer, known as the epidermis, has
Grattan on Friday: Coalition split is massive blow for Ley but the fault lies with Littleproud Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Sussan Ley may pay the price for the implosion of the Coalition, but the blame rests squarely with Nationals leader David Littleproud. He’s the one whose leadership should be on the line. When you stand back from it, the behaviour
From grand harbour spectacular to intimate perfection: the varied dance at Sydney Festival 2026 Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erin Brannigan, Associate Professor, Theatre and Performance, UNSW Sydney Stephen Wilson Barker/Sydney Festival Of all the arts, dance has a special capacity to create worlds. Centred around the moving body, these worlds draw on other art forms – music, visual art, design, projection – to fill-out visions
Eugene Doyle: Mark Carney’s moment – a new non-aligned movement? COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech at Davos this week that signals there may still be a leader in the West worth following. “Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he warned. The Canadian PM was brutally honest about Western
Instead of a marriage, the Coalition should be an on-again, off-again affair Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Linda Botterill, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University The short-lived split between the Nationals and the Liberal Party after last year’s election has been followed by another breakup less than nine months later. The Nationals are publicly stating they cannot work under Sussan
Ian Powell: Bondi Beach’s murderous terrorism aftermath – an Aotearoa perspective COMMENTARY: By Ian Powell On 14 December 2025, a father and son, reportedly linked to the ISIS clerical fascist organisation, committed a murderous attack on innocent participants at a Jewish celebration on Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach. Fifteen were killed and around 40 seriously injured. There is no way this horrific event can be minimised. It
RSF condemns verdict in ‘fabricated’ case against Filipino journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio Pacific Media Watch The Paris-based global media freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has condemned the guilty verdict against Filipino journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio whose case has been challenged since her arrest almost six years ago. Cumpio was found guilty today on a charge of “financing terrorism” in the Philippines, and now faces a sentence
US President Donald Trump’s position on Greenland has shifted almost daily, from threats to take it by force to assurances he won’t. But one thing remains consistent: his insistence the Arctic island is strategically vital to the United States.
Within hours of the president’s speech at this week’s Davos summit, Reports began circulating that Washington and Copenhagen had quietly discussed giving the US small, remote patches of Greenland for new military sites. Nothing confirmed, everything whispered, but the speed of the speculation said a lot.
What once felt like Trumpian theatre suddenly looked like a real geopolitical move. It was also a hint Arctic power plays are now bleeding into the politics of outer space.
This all happened very quickly. The notion the US might buy Greenland from Denmark (which resurfaced in 2019) was at first treated like a late-night comedy sketch.
But behind the jokes lay a growing unease the Trump administration’s fixation with Greenland was part of a wider geostrategic ambition in the “western hemisphere” – and beyond.
That’s because Greenland sits at the crossroads of two fast-shifting frontiers: a warming Arctic that will change shipping routes, and an increasingly militarised outer space.
As global tensions rise, the island has become a geopolitical pressure gauge, revealing how the old international legal order is beginning to fray.
At the centre of it all is Pituffik Space Base, formerly known as Thule Air Base. Once a Cold War outpost, it’s now a key part of the US military’s Space Force hub, vital for everything from missile detection to climate tracking.
In a world where orbit is the new high ground, that visibility is strategic gold.
Space law in a vacuum
Trump has leaned hard into this logic. He’s repeatedly praised Thule as one of the most important assets for watching what happens above the Earth, and has urged the US to “look at every option” to expand its presence.
High latitude sites are ideal for launching payloads into polar- and sun-synchronous orbits. Greenland’s empty expanses and open ocean corridors make it a potential Arctic launch hub. With global launch capacity tightening due to fewer available sites and access problems, the island is suddenly premium real estate.
But American interest in Greenland is rising at the same time as the post-war “rules-based international order” has proved increasingly ineffective at maintaining peace and security.
It also never anticipated that Earth-based sites such as Thule/Pituffik would decide who can monitor or dominate orbit.
As countries scramble for strategic footholds, the treaty’s core principles are being pushed to breaking point. Major powers now treat both the terrestrial and orbital realms less like global commons and more like strategic assets to control and defend.
Greenland as warning sign
Greenland sits squarely on this fault line. If the US were to expand its control over the island, it would command a disproportionate share of global space surveillance capabilities. That imbalance raises uncomfortable questions.
How can space function as a global commons when the tools needed to oversee it are concentrated in so few hands? What happens when geopolitical competition on Earth spills directly into orbit?
And how should international law adapt when terrestrial territory becomes a gateway to extraterrestrial influence? For many observers, the outlook is bleak. They argue the international legal system is not evolving but eroding.
Greenland, in this context, is not just a strategic asset; it’s a warning sign.
For Greenlanders, the stakes are immediate. The island’s strategic value gives them leverage, but also makes them vulnerable. As Arctic ice melts and new shipping routes emerge, Greenland’s geopolitical weight will only grow.
Its people must navigate the ambitions of global powers while pursuing their own political and economic future, including the possibility of independence from Denmark.
What started as a political curiosity now exposes a deeper shift: the Arctic is becoming a front line of space governance, and the laws and treaties designed to manage this vast icy territory and the space above it are struggling to keep up.
The old Thule Air Base is no longer just a northern outpost, it’s a strategic gateway to orbit and a means to exert political and military power from above.
Anna Marie Brennan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Five years ago, as Australia burned through the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison was photographed relaxing on a Hawaiian beach.
When he returned, his now-infamous words – “I don’t hold a hose, mate” – epitomised a crisis leadership approach that came across as being built on detachment and dominance.
Fast forward to January this year and Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan is standing in fire-devastated Natimuk, announcing mental health support packages and expressing concern for traumatised livestock.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese promises those affected: “we’ve got your back”.
Our new research suggests something is shifting with crisis leadership – although we still have a way to go.
This isn’t a story about men versus women leaders, nor Labor versus Liberal.
Rather, these contrasting responses reveal a tentative movement toward a more virtue-based approach that centres ethical considerations and away from the “strongman” prototype that has long dominated.
The masculine crisis leader prototype
Popular culture and much crisis leadership research have long celebrated a particular kind of leader in times of crisis: tough, decisive, emotionally detached and domineering.
Think of US President Donald Trump’s COVID response – confident, dismissive of experts and unmoved by growing death tolls – or former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s famously tough “Iron Lady” approach to the Falklands War.
These leaders emphasise speed over deliberation, command over collaboration and displays of strength over expressions of care. It’s a style linked to ideals of masculinity that have shaped expectations for generations.
This prototype doesn’t just disadvantage leaders who don’t fit the mould (particularly women and those who embody characteristics culturally coded as feminine). It also sidesteps the deeply ethical nature of crises, where decisions about who gets help, who is protected and who bears the burden carry profound moral implications.
Morrison’s Black Summer response exemplified these failures. He appeared to many to demonstrate physical and emotional detachment rather than accountability.
His forced handshakes with devastated community members in Cobargo came across as performative dominance rather than genuine compassion.
His refusal to meet with former fire chiefs advocating for climate action risked being widely interpreted as a closed-minded approach.
The result? Communities felt abandoned precisely when they needed leadership most.
This pattern extends beyond any single leader or political party.
During Victoria’s COVID lockdowns, then-Premier Daniel Andrews was widely criticised for appearing to take a highly centralised, heavy-handed approach while appearing to lack empathy for what people were experiencing.
His leadership hinged on the command-and-control elements of the masculine prototype, even while working toward public health goals.
The 7 key virtues
Our research identifies how seven key virtues inform effective, ethical crisis leadership: courage, humanity, justice, prudence, temperance, transcendence and wisdom.
By analysing 67 speeches given by heads of state, we identified the distinct role each virtue plays in crisis leadership and how their combined use offers a richer approach.
Different virtues serve distinct purposes in crisis leadership.
Leaders can showcase their own humanity, courage, wisdom and justice to build trust. They ask citizens to demonstrate temperance, humanity and wisdom to ensure cooperation. And they emphasise shared courage and transcendence to unite everyone in the belief the crisis can be overcome.
This approach offers a more effective way to lead – a shift we have seen hints of in the response to the natural disasters rocking Australia in the early months of 2026.
Let’s unpack these seven virtues:
Courage is increasingly framed as a collective attribute (we are courageous), rather than an individual one (he is courageous). Instead of awaiting a lone heroic strongman, the emphasis increasingly falls on communities’ collective resilience, even if traditional imagery of bravery still features prominently.
Humanity sits at the heart of current responses, encompassing empathy, care and compassion. Tangible responses include mental health support, concern for animal welfare and case workers to help navigate complex recovery needs. This isn’t “soft” leadership, it’s recognising that care for those suffering is foundational to effective crisis response.
Justice involves standing with communities, indicating accountability and ensuring everyone has support – even if the adequacy of that support remains contested.
Prudence (practical wisdom applied to difficult decisions) allows leaders to balance multiple perspectives and navigate complexity. While Morrison and many leaders in the past dismissed expert warnings about climate-intensified fire risk, current Australian leaders publicly reference the need to work with emergency services and consider multiple perspectives.
Temperance (encompassing humility, patience and restraint) remains the most tentatively expressed virtue in the face of current crises. While leaders avoid aggressive dismissiveness, there’s room for more explicit acknowledgement of the mistakes inevitably made under pressure.
Transcendence – our connection to the intangible – allows leaders to bolster a shared belief that crises can be overcome.
Wisdom allows crisis leaders to consider more holistic data and diverse perspectives.
What still holds us back – and where to next?
Despite these shifts, the masculine prototype remains powerful. Technical, rationalist language still dominates. Stoicism, decisiveness and firm command are still celebrated.
And other acts of virtue by local leaders which help address the crisis remain largely invisible, such as the grassroots organising and outreach activities that let people know others genuinely care.
The shift we’re seeing represents real but tentative progress.
To consolidate and extend the shift we need to educate leaders in how to practice virtue-based crisis leadership and move on from the outdated strongman approach.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
I’ve seen some Australians expressing confusion as to whether or not they can still legally criticise Israel online after new “hate speech” laws were passed on Tuesday under the pretence of combatting “antisemitism”.
The answer is yes, and you definitely should keep opposing Israel and its genocidal atrocities.
I am worried that these new laws may indirectly have a bit of a chilling effect on pro-Palestine activism due to Australians not understanding these new laws and what people are allowed to do without being jailed.
So let’s clear this up thoroughly so we’re all on the same page.
To be perfectly clear: it is still legal for Australians to oppose Israel and to associate with pro-Palestine groups – and we should. What’s changed is that now those groups can be classified as “hate groups” and banned, similarly to how Palestine Action has been banned in the UK.
But this hasn’t happened yet, and hopefully never will. We need to push for these new laws to be repealed, because they look guaranteed to be abused at some point in the future.
It is still legal to criticise Israel. So we should criticise it as much as possible, because we don’t know how much longer we’ll have that right.
It is still legal to associate with pro-Palestine groups. So we should do so at every opportunity, because we don’t know when they’ll start listing them as “hate groups” and imprisoning anyone who continues to associate with them.
Unless you are in certain parts of Sydney while the post-Bondi protest ban remains in effect, it is presently fully legal to hold pro-Palestine marches. So attend as many as you are able, because you don’t know when they’ll be shut down altogether.
It is still legal to say that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state, and to share information and opinions about its abuses. So we should do so as much as we can, because we don’t know when that right will be taken away.
It is still legal to state the fact that Zionism is a racist and murderous political ideology and that everything we’ve seen in Gaza is the result of Zionists getting everything they want. So we should say it frequently, because that right could vanish at any time.
It is still legal to say “Fuck Israel, free Palestine.” So we should say it loud and say it often, because we don’t know how much longer we’ll be allowed to do so without getting thrown into prison.
Fuck Israel, free Palestine. Say it loud and say it often, because you won’t have the right to say it much longer.
The Israel lobby is working frenetically to crush free speech in Australia, and the swamp monsters in Canberra are either actively facilitating this agenda or doing far too little to stop it.
The more aggressively they work to take away our right to oppose Israel, the more aggressively we need to oppose both them and Israel.
We’re not just fighting for Gaza anymore, we’re fighting for our own civil rights, and for our children, and for our grandchildren. They’re actively assaulting our ability to speak critically of power and make this nation a more tyrannical place.
The only appropriate response to this is ferocious defiance.
Imagine investing in a premium Central Otago vineyard, or owning a slice of prime Wellington commercial property, all without needing millions in upfront capital.
Through asset “tokenisation”, this is becoming a reality.
Essentially, tokenisation converts physical and financial assets into digital records, called tokens, which are stored using blockchain technology.
The blockchain itself is basically a shared digital ledger distributed across computers, with transactions linked into a cryptographic chain. This decentralisation and transparency makes tokenisation both trustworthy and efficient.
Why tokenise assets?
For decades, investing in real-world assets has meant navigating lawyers, banks, brokers, registries, mountains of paperwork, hefty transaction costs and prohibitive minimum spends.
A $10 million commercial building, for example, might require investors to commit large proportions of the full amount, locking out all but the wealthiest buyers.
Tokenisation changes this equation for both buyers and sellers. That same building could be split into 100 digital tokens, each representing 1% ownership worth $100,000.
Like owning shares in a company, token holders benefit from rental income and property appreciation proportional to their stake. For sellers, it’s a way to raise capital by attracting many smaller investors rather than a few large ones.
Tokenisation is already happening
Digital assets are already woven into New Zealand’s economy. BlockchainNZ reports nearly NZ$8 billion of digital assets traded annually, with interest in digital assets becoming more common.
But New Zealand stands at an important juncture. Existing financial regulations weren’t designed with tokenisation in mind, meaning progress is slow and complex.
Industry bodies such as BlockchainNZ, the Banking Association and Payments NZ warn that even slight changes in a token’s features can alter its legal classification, making compliance confusing and expensive.
Without clear rules, New Zealand risks losing billions to overseas markets offering greater regulatory certainty.
Global momentum is undeniable
Executives from multinational investment company BlackRock have compared tokenisation today to the internet in 1996, something poised for explosive growth.
Accounting firm Deloitte projects US$4 trillion in global real estate will be tokenised by 2035, up from less than US$0.3 trillion in 2024.
Dubai launched its first tokenised real estate platform in May 2025, projecting US$16 billion in value by 2033. J.P. Morgan Asset Management has launched MONY, a tokenised cash fund that invests in relatively safe short-term debt securities.
BlockChainNZ held New Zealand’s first real estate tokenisation forum in Auckland in July 2025. Industry analysis suggests tokenising just 2–3% of the domestic property market could unlock over NZ$60 billion in transaction volume.
The regulatory conversation is underway, with the Financial Markets Authority releasing a discussion paper on tokenisation in September 2025.
But the Banking Association has identified a critical gap: while existing laws are technology-neutral, they lack clarity for tokenised products.
It recommends legislative reviews, controlled testing of tokenised financial products, and guidance for industry participants and consumers on regulation and compliance.
Ultimately, New Zealand will need a cohesive framework that actively enables safe innovation. As one industry insider has argued:
the rails for tokenisation are being laid now and if we don’t help build them, we’ll be forced to run on tracks designed by others.
Navigating the risks
Tokenisation also brings serious challenges. Local financial laws were written for paper certificates and bank vaults, not digital tokens and blockchain networks.
When an Auckland property developer tokenises an apartment building, or a Marlborough winery offers digital shares, which rules apply? Are these securities? Property titles? This uncertainty creates a compliance minefield.
Technology risks compound these problems: cybersecurity vulnerabilities, digital key theft or loss, bugs or flaws in blockchain code that hackers can exploit, and malfunctions in the technology infrastructure can all cause irreversible losses.
Tokenised assets can be highly volatile, with rapid price swings encouraging speculation and panic selling. Easy round-the-clock trading amplifies boom-and-bust cycles. When everyone can trade with a few clicks, panic can spread rapidly.
The Financial Markets Authority has warned that market manipulation becomes easier across multiple unregulated platforms, money laundering may be harder to detect in cross-border transactions, and fraud (from fake tokenised assets to digital Ponzi schemes) can scale quickly.
None of this means tokenisation should (or can) be avoided. The challenge for New Zealand is to keep up with this form of financial innovation, and to retain investment dollars that might otherwise migrate to other jurisdictions.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In the modern workplace, flexible arrangements can be as important as salary for some. For many employees, flexibility is no longer a nice-to-have luxury. It has become a fundamental requirement for staying in the workforce, especially after COVID.
This leaves many employees with a stark choice: either conform to standard, rigid office hours or look for better conditions elsewhere.
The stakes of these negotiations are remarkably high. For the employee, a successful deal can mean the difference between professional growth and total burnout. For the employer, it is a major lever for retaining top talent.
Yet, many employees approach these conversations as simple “asks”, unaware that the success of their requests often hinge on invisible factors that have little to do with their actual job performance.
In our new research, published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, we wanted to provide an evidence base for how to negotiate for flexible work, so both employers and employees can benefit.
Request for approval
To understand why some flexible work requests are approved and others are rejected, we ran two studies with more than 300 participants.
Successfully negotiating flexible working arrangements with a manager can be tricky. charlesdeluvio/Unsplash
Instead of asking people what they think influences flexible work approvals, we asked them to make real decisions on a series of requests presented to them.
To strengthen our findings, all participants had management experience.
In both studies, participants read short requests from hypothetical employees asking to work flexibly.
Each request was designed to look realistic, but was given a focus on one of four different things:
caring responsibilities
improved productivity
greater wellbeing via work-life integration
task completion instead of hours worked.
In the second study, we varied both the gender of the requester and how much flexibility they asked for: either two or four days working from home.
What we found
Across both studies, a clear pattern emerged. Requests related to caring responsibilities and improved productivity had the greatest success. Requests which focused on improved personal wellbeing or greater autonomy over their time were less successful.
However, contrary to what we expected, we found men and women were equally likely to be approved for flexible work.
This suggests that, at least at the approval stage, “gendered flexibility stigma”, or bias against workers (usually women) who access flexible work arrangements, may be less pronounced than earlier research has suggested.
Overall, we found managers have a clear preference for fewer days of flexible working. Requests for two days of flexible work were much more likely to be approved than requests for four days.
Our results indicate fathers won’t be penalised for asking for flexible work to provide care to their children. However, there’s an important caveat. While their requests were just as likely as women’s to be approved, our research cannot speak to the impact on men’s (or any workers’) careers after they take up flexible work.
The stigma against those who cannot be seen in the office or workplace – a perceived lack of commitment, judgements about decreased productivity, reduced likelihood of getting promoted – may still be present.
Workplace changes caused by the pandemic allowed fathers to become more engaged in caring. Vitaly Gariev/Unsplash
Other ways to make a strong case
Flexible work debates often focus on and even favour parents. That can leave non-parents with fewer options. Our research provides good news for those without caring responsibilities who still want to embrace the benefits of flexible work.
We found the business case was equally as effective as the child-care argument. Non-carers should strongly consider the mutual benefits to their employers and to themselves and be sure to make a strong case for how the company will reap the rewards.
For example, workers could highlight the possibility for increased productivity or fewer sick days.
Resources and tools are available to help employees construct their business cases, such as the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s page on legal requirements in Australia and evidence for a business case.
What the law says
Anyone can ask for flexible working arrangements; your boss might say no, but it’s worth a shot. At a national level, in Australia where this study was conducted, employers cannot unreasonably refuse flexible working arrangements for people in certain circumstances, including those who have worked for the same employer for more than 12 months and who are:
pregnant
a person with disability
have various caring responsibilities
55 or older
experiencing family and domestic violence
providing care for someone who is experiencing family and domestic violence.
Employers are legally required to respond to such flexible work requests in writing within 21 days, and make their approval decisions based on “reasonable business grounds”.
Room to make things fairer
Together, our findings show that flexible work is still not doled out fairly. Because these negotiations often occur on a one-on-one basis, they are highly susceptible to individual bias, favouritism, and assumptions about who deserves to work flexibly.
One factor outside an employee’s control is their manager’s attitude. Our research found managers who held positive views about flexible work were more likely to approve requests of any kind. Those with negative attitudes were more likely to say no, regardless of how the request was framed.
Ultimately, success depends on how the request is framed, how much flexibility is asked for, and who is making the decision.
Melissa Wheeler has engaged in paid and pro-bono consulting and research relating to issues of applied ethics and gender equality (including Our Watch, Queen Victoria Women’s Centre, VicHealth). She has previously worked for research centres that receive funding from several partner organisations in the private and public sector, including from the Victorian government. She holds a Board of Directors role with the Frankston Social Enterprise and Innovation Hub.
Anne Bardoel, Asanka Gunasekara, and Lindsie Arthur do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
“Size matters” sounds like a tabloid cliché, but for evolutionary biologists the size of the human penis is truly a puzzle.
Compared to other great apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, the human penis is longer and thicker than expected for a primate of our size.
If the primary role of a penis is simply to transfer sperm, why is the human penis so much larger than those of our closest relatives?
Our new study, published today in PLOS Biology, reveals a larger penis in humans serves two additional purposes: to attract mates and to threaten rivals.
Why so prominent?
Understanding why the human body looks the way it does is a popular topic in evolutionary biology. We already know that physical features like greater height and a more V-shaped torso increase a man’s sexual attractiveness.
But less is known about the effect of a larger penis. Humans walked upright long before the invention of clothing, which made the penis highly conspicuous to mates and rivals during most of our evolution.
Might this prominence have been selected for greater size?
Thirteen years ago, in a landmark study we presented women with life-sized projections of 343 videos of anatomically correct, 3D computer-generated male figures that varied in their height, shoulder-to-hip ratio (body shape), and penis size.
We found that women generally prefer taller men with broader shoulders and a larger penis.
That study made global headlines, but it only told half the story. In our new study we show that men also pay attention to penis size.
In many species, traits that are more strongly expressed in males, like a lion’s mane or a deer’s antlers, serve two roles: they are attractive to females, and they signal fighting ability to males. Until now, we didn’t know if the human penis size might also serve such a dual function.
In the new study we confirmed our earlier finding that women find a larger penis more attractive. We then tested whether men also consider a rival with a larger penis as more attractive to women and, for the first time, we tried to determine if men treat a larger penis as a signal of a more dangerous opponent when it comes to a fight.
To find these answers, we showed more than 800 participants the 343 figures that varied in height, body shape and penis size. The participants viewed and rated a subset of these figures either in person as life-sized projections, or online where they were viewed on their own computer, tablet or phone.
An example of the figures used in the study. Aich U, et al., 2025, PLOS Biology
We asked women to rate the figures’ sexual attractiveness; and we asked men to assess the figures as potential rivals, rating how physically threatening or sexually competitive each figure appeared.
What we discovered
For women, a larger penis, greater height, and a V-shaped upper body all increased a man’s attractiveness. However, there was a diminishing effect: beyond a certain point, further increase in penis size or height offered smaller returns.
The real revelation, however, came from the men. Men considered a larger penis as an indicator of a rival with both greater fighting ability and as a stronger sexual competitor. Males also rated taller figures with a more V-shaped torso in the same fashion.
However, in contrast to women, men consistently ranked males with ever more exaggerated traits as stronger sexual competitors, suggesting that men tend to overestimate the attractiveness of these characteristics to women.
We were surprised by the consistency of our findings. The ratings of the different figures yielded very similar conclusions regardless of whether participants viewed life-sized projections of the figures in person, or saw them on a smaller screen online.
We now have evidence that the evolution of penis size could have been partly driven by the sexual preferences of females, and as a signal of physical ability used by males.
Note, however, that the effect of penis size on attractiveness was four to seven times higher than its effect as a signal of fighting ability. This suggests that the enlarged penis in humans evolved more in response to its effect as a sexual ornament to attract females than as a badge of status for males, although it does both.
Interestingly, our study also highlighted a psychological quirk. We measured how quickly people rated these figures. Participants were significantly quicker to rate figures with a smaller penis, shorter height, and a less V-shaped upper body. This rapid response suggests that these traits are subconsciously almost instantly rated as less sexually attractive or physically threatening.
There are, of course, limitations to what our experiment reveals. We varied male height, penis size and body shape, but in the real world characteristics such as facial features and personality are also major factors in how we rate others. It remains to be seen how these factors interact.
Additionally, while our findings were robust across both males and females of various ethnicities, we acknowledge that cultural standards of masculinity vary across the world and change over time.
Upama Aich receives funding from the Forrest Research Foundation to be based at the University of Western Australia and received a Monash University Research Reactivation Grant to conduct the study.
MIchael Jennions does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Splinters are everyday injuries commonly involving a small shard of wood, glass, metal, plastic or a thorn that becomes embedded in the skin and the soft tissue underneath.
The outer skin layer, known as the epidermis, has a high level of pain receptors. The layer just underneath, called the dermis, has even more of them, potentially making such injuries very painful.
Knowing how to remove a splinter may not be a matter of life and death. However, good technique can relieve someone from ongoing pain or subsequent complications.
There’s little in the medical literature
Despite pain relief being an important topic in health care, splinters have drawn little academic interest.
In 2004, a team of clinicians wrote that “no controlled studies have been done comparing different techniques, leaving physicians to rely on anecdotal experiences”. A 2025 search of the medical literature on splinters only reveals a longstream of case studies and anecdotal evidence.
Online sites and TikTok videos are awash with “hacks” and tips that suggest using vinegar, duct tape, glue, onion slices and banana peels among other methods. There’s limited evidence to support or refute such practices, but some of them may cause irritation of the skin, or even allergic reactions.
Ultimately, you don’t need any hacks to remove splinters. Here’s how to do this correctly and safely – and when to seek medical advice.
First, where is the splinter?
The location of the splinter is the first triage point. If an eye or eyelid splinter is suspected, you should seek urgent medical care through a general practice, urgent care clinic or emergency department. Do not attempt to flush or irrigate your eye; this needs to be done by a health practitioner with sterile saline in a controlled environment.
Splinters stuck under a fingernail or toenail, known as subungual splinters, also often require surgical removal.
Second, what is the splinter made of?
The type of splinter can also determine if you need help from a medical professional.
Care needs to be taken with glass splinters as they can break off or shatter, leaving fragments that can be difficult to remove and may cause ongoing pain, inflammation or infection.
Outdoor splinters from wood, thorns or rusty metal can also be a source of tetanus and a tetanus vaccine booster may be required. People who are immunosuppressed or who have had lymph gland surgery should seek a medical appointment, as they may need antibiotics.
What you will need to remove the splinter
If none of the above apply and you can clearly see the splinter, the best way to approach removing it is with tweezers.
If the end of the splinter is near the surface, consider using a bevelled needle (available from chemists) to gently lift the top layer of skin to expose the splinter. Be careful not to enter deeper layers of skin as this will be painful.
Before attempting removal, if the splinter isn’t from wood, soaking the impacted area in warm water may help to soften the skin. Epsom salts, baking soda or hydrogen peroxide are sometimes recommended, but there’s no scientific evidence to support their use.
Don’t soak wood splinters, as this may cause the wood to swell and make it harder to pull out.
Sterilise the tweezers (and needle, if using) by rubbing or dipping the tips in the same sanitiser gel. Allow the tweezers to dry and do not place them back down before use.
If needed, use reading glasses to magnify the splinter. This will avoid bumping the splinter (further pain) and facilitate a good grip with the tweezers. For metal splinters only, consider using nail clippers to pinch the splinter for better grip.
Remove the splinter following the path of entry – pull it gently back from the direction it went in.
Once the splinter is removed, wash the area with soap and water or an antiseptic solution. Cleaning with alcohol-based hand gel may cause stinging.
If the wound is bleeding, cover with a plaster or small dressing.
For splinters close to the surface, you’ll likely be able to see if the whole splinter was removed. For splinters that penetrate at a steeper angle, it may be difficult to know if you got it all out. Deep splinters may even require medical diagnostic imaging to locate them.
After removing the splinter, monitor over the next few days for ongoing pain and signs of infection, such as redness, swelling, pain or discharge. Wound infections that are left untreated can lead to sepsis, a potentially life-threatening medical condition.
Andrew Woods does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Sussan Ley may pay the price for the implosion of the Coalition, but the blame rests squarely with Nationals leader David Littleproud. He’s the one whose leadership should be on the line.
When you stand back from it, the behaviour of the Nationals has been extraordinary and, many would argue, reprehensible.
What was the issue the Nationals chose to make their stand on? It was the provision in the government’s legislation that will enable the banning of hate-spruiking groups, notably the Islamist extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, and neo-Nazi groups.
The Nationals said this was too broad, and endangered free speech. However important the principle of free speech is, dealing with these purveyors of hate outweighs it in this instance. Also, the measure as passed is surrounded by reasonable guardrails.
The Nationals’ claims they want radical Islamists dealt with are hollow when they oppose this measure – which is also attacked, it should be noted, by some on the progressive side of politics, in the name of free speech. The antisemitism issue has produced a convergence of sections of the right and the left, aligned against the pragmatic centre.
In the run up to the Coalition crisis, a Sunday night meeting of shadow cabinet, which included Littleproud, decided to seek changes to the hate crime legislation; on Monday the opposition obtained concessions from the government.
Ley says that was the proper end of the process, clearing the way for the opposition to support the bill, and therefore the Nationals frontbench senators who voted against it had broken shadow cabinet solidarity.
Littleproud argues there should have been further processes. He claims it was “persecution” to insist on the resignation of the three frontbenchers who voted against the bill, who were following the orders of their party room.
Regardless of the argument over process, Ley ended up with no choice but to discipline the three senators. Liberals (some with reservations) who had stayed in line with the decision to vote for the bill would have been appalled if their leader had then turned a blind eye to the Nationals’ action. That is especially the case given many of the Liberals are enduring blowback on social media for their stand.
Occupying the same kennel requires give and take. Liberals point out that some of their frontbenchers would have preferred to vote for the government’s gun reform bill. But they accommodated the Nationals, and their own rural members, by opposing it. There was no quid pro quo from the Nationals.
If Littleproud had wanted, he could have found a middle course over the hate-crime legislation, potentially avoiding a crisis: he could have had the Nationals abstain on the vote. That may perhaps have allowed a skate-through for both leaders. But Litteproud and his party chose to be as provocative as possible.
The Nationals showed poor judgement in deciding to oppose the legislation. Their subsequent breaking of the Coalition is a massive blow for an already enfeebled opposition. Moreover, Littleproud’s announcement on the day of national mourning over the Bondi massacre was completely tone deaf. Sources said Ley had counseled him all media should be paused for 24 hours, advice he did not take.
The Nationals are self-indulgent. They have become more overbearing in recent times, preempting the Liberals on the Voice and insisting they agree to demands after the election. Littleproud likes to point out the Liberals can’t reach government without them (which is true).
His lack of respect for Ley goes back a long way. In Thursday’s comments, he painted Ley as the villain in the crisis and declared, “Sussan Ley has put protecting her own leadership ahead of maintaining the Coalition”. He made it all as personal as possible, and essentially told the Liberals to get a new leader. “There is no [Nationals] shadow minister that wants to be ultimately serving in Sussan Ley’s shadow ministry,” he said.
But the Nationals are not just self-indulgent – they are deeply frightened. They’re spooked by the One Nation vote surge and the defection of Barnaby Joyce. The Newspoll published at the weekend had One Nation on 22%, with the Coalition 21%.
Given Joyce couldn’t lead the Nationals again, he is trying to make One Nation the replacement for his old party in regional Australia. He responded to the Littleproud announcement by saying:
David just hasn’t thought this through. It is going to be a cartwheel cluster. […] Maybe they’re on a recruitment drive for One Nation. Of course, it’s going to help us.
The Liberals are furious with Littleproud, and scathing in their personal descriptions of him. But that doesn’t mean they will stick by their leader, reluctant as some might be to appear to reward the Nationals, whose departure has left the official opposition with just 28 in the House of Representatives and forced Ley into yet another reshuffle.
Even before this crisis it was generally accepted Ley would not survive for long. This has made the prospect of her demise as leader even more likely, although the timing is uncertain. That could be influenced by the opinion polls to come.
But where do the Liberals turn? The alternatives, Andrew Hastie and Angus Taylor (who has been overseas and missed the crisis), are both deeply flawed as potential leaders. Taylor, though a conservative and a poor performer as shadow treasurer last term, may have more appeal to moderates who fear some of Hastie’s hard right views. But Hastie could appeal to the younger Liberals, looking for generational change.
To replace Ley, the Liberals first need to agree on a contender. If both Hastie and Taylor ran, and Ley (who doesn’t lack guts) contested too, she might come through the middle. That would just prolong the agony.
While timelines are totally unclear, this week’s events will trigger numbers-counting by supporters of the aspirants.
With little fix on what will or should happen now, or when the next eruption might come, many shell-shocked Liberals are comforting themselves by unloading their feelings about Littleproud and his band of bomb throwers.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Of all the arts, dance has a special capacity to create worlds. Centred around the moving body, these worlds draw on other art forms – music, visual art, design, projection – to fill-out visions in time-space.
Dance at this year’s Sydney Festival ranged from a 20 minute, salon-style performance for two dancers, to an outdoor, multimedia, participatory sunset event with Sydney Harbour as a backdrop.
Garrigarrang Badu
Jannawi Dance Clan’s premiere of Garrigarrang Badu by Peta Strachan is the perfect work to orient audiences to the Dharug Country at the heart of Sydney Festival.
Jannawi is an all-female group with members from across the country who work collaboratively with artistic director Strachan, a Dharug woman of the Boorooberongal clan. Strachan’s role as a Dharug Knowledge Holder informs the language-revitalisation-in-action that grounds and filters through this work.
In this full-length dance work in local language, lyrics to a song-cycle by Matthew Doyle are linked to places, materials, costumes and objects that fill each dance in a series that flows.
In Dharug, garrigarrang means salt water and badu fresh water. The title speaks to where the two meet in our water systems at Sydney Harbour where we gather on the sweltering night of the performance.
The work is shaped around women’s knowledge, artisanship, music and movement. They present to us an intergenerational connection to land, water, sky and all that they hold.
Garrigarrang badu is shaped around women’s knowledge, artisanship, music and movement. Stephen Wilson Barker/Sydney Festival
To see this all female performance, intimately and proudly connected to Country, is a moving occasion. Dancers Dubs Yunupingu and Buia David are stand-outs as the central protagonists of the loose narrative.
Digging sticks, eel traps and Nawi (canoes) focus our attention on a skilful, ethical and balanced collaboration with resources. Alongside the ephemeral cultural materials of music and dance, the whole presents as a living archive of the Dharug people.
Strachan’s choreography, with co-credits for the cast, Albert David and Beau Dean Riley Smith, reflects influences from her time at NAISDA (Australia’s National Indigenous Dance College) and with Bangarra (2000–04), and as a cultural performer and teacher.
Low shuffling walks, softly curved spines and mimetic hand gestures are combined with contemporary elements such as barrel jumps and high-leg extensions, reminiscent of the Bangarra vocabulary.
Garabari
We later moved outside for Melbourne-based, Wiradjuri choreographer Joel Bray’s Garabari, one of Bray’s first full-length, ensemble works, following his earlier solo pieces.
He describes himself as a gay Indigenous man raised in a white Pentecostal home, training at both NAISDA and the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts, and with an international career as a dancer prior to his first solo choreographies.
Garabari was developed across multiple cultural and artistic encounters. Time as a performer and artist-in-resident with Chunky Move may have supported the lean into popular culture in his work. The movement language draws on traditional, contemporary and popular vocabularies with a formal or shaped-based quality that perhaps reflects ten years Bray spent dancing in Israel, where a certain modern aesthetic associated with Ohad Naharin’s Gaga technique dominates.
In Joel Bray’s work, gradually we all become part of a whirling human garabari. Stephen Wilson Barker/Sydney Festival
At a language workshop I attended, led Bray and his father Christopher Kirkbright, Bray explained how this work came about. Consultation with the Wiradjuri community in Wagga Wagga led to conversations with local Elder, the late Uncle James Ingram.
Ingram shared the story of the birth of the Murrumbidgee River with Bray, the greedy Goanna men thwarted by a heroine, Ballina, which forms the core narrative of the work.
Garabari begins with some words of welcome from Bray, explaining that the title of the show is an Anglicised Wiradjuri word for corrobboree.
As the sky darkens, we are led to the furthest boardwalk of the Opera House where the Harbour Bridge looms large. We move through a smoking ceremony and wander among quiet dancers in white on multiple open-air stages. We hear recounted stories and watch danced dramas.
Gradually we become part of a whirling human garabari, with music by Byron Scullin and projections by Katie Sfetkidis coming into their own. The crowd swarms and pulses under the dancers’ instructions.
Featuring excellent dancers such as Luke Currie-Richardson and Zoe Brown Holten, this is a work with an inclusive, celebratory and contemporary spirit.
Exxy
A few days later I am back at the house to enter another world – Dan Daw Creative Project’s Exxy.
Based in the United Kingdom, this disabled-led company’s model of “theatre, dance and activism” is connected to Australia’s Restless Dance company in Adelaide through Daw, an ex-performer in the company.
The suburban, slightly grimy and claustrophobic scenography becomes a platform for vibrant truth-telling and venting. Emotional charge and physical excess go head-to-head in this relentless work that ends with both performers and audience crying to The Power of Love.
Dan Daw Creative Project’s Exxy is a work of vibrant truth-telling and venting. Neil Bennett/Sydney Festival
In the opening scenes, Daw takes time to care for his audience and introduce his collaborators Tiiu Mortley, Sofia Valdiri and Joe Brown. This introduction gives little indication of what is to come.
Like Garabari, this work grows in complexity and mood as each artist on stage shares autobiographical snippets through word and action.
The performers tell stories of lying about sports injuries and offensive sexual encounters. They perform drooling, running under duress and shaking. These stories and actions are connected by a repeated skipping or tripping movement to create a circle of unity. Interspersed are solo dances of delicate devastation.
Daw dances high and light on his feet with arms reaching above and around him. Mortley maps dramatic shapes with her arms and torso. Brown repeats actions punishingly in response to commands from off-stage and Valdiri stims violently on the floor.
Saltbush – a plant that can thrive in the harshest environments – becomes a central metaphor in this work about being not only unapologetic about disability, but expressing it with relish, abandon and anger.
Save the Last Dance for Me
Two shows at Sydney Town Hall in the Vestibule Room top off the dance program with lessons in refinement.
Italian choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni’s Save the Last Dance for Me is a 20 minute piece of perfection.
Dancers Gianmaria Borzillo and Giovanfrancesco Giannini, simply with a sound score and stylish outfits, perform a dance from the early 20th century Bologna called Polka Chinata.
Save the Last Dance for Me is a 20 minute piece of perfection. Stephen Wilson Barker/Sydney Festival
Recently rediscovered by Italian dance historians, like the Argentinian tango Polka Chinata is a male social dance form created to seduce a female audience.
Sciarroni simply adds a contemporary frame and the dance does the rest. It is intense, virtuosic and sexy.
Echo Mapping
Azzam Mohammed has emerged from the hip hop community in Sydney, winning competitive events and performing in Nick Power’s contemporary-street dance works.
A recent Sydney Festival staple, his new collaboration with composer and artist Jack Prest is Echo Mapping.
Echo Mapping is mesmerising. Victor Frankowski/Sydney Festival
This pared-back duet is mesmerising. Mohammed, trance-like, summons movement and vocalisations that shift across Africanist angular static forms, percussive geometric patterning and echoes of the most recent iteration of this deep lineage in the popping and locking that Mohammed excels in.
The music-dance dialogue between the two artists matches yearning trumpet calls to melodic cries and drum beats to looping running steps.
The perfect venue for this intimate spectacle.
Erin Brannigan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech at Davos this week that signals there may still be a leader in the West worth following.
“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he warned.
The Canadian PM was brutally honest about Western conduct in the world but shone a bright light on a better path forward.
At a time when the US has pivoted to a smash-and-grab deployment of hard power that now extends to its closest allies, Carney stepped up.
The speech wasn’t a rhetorical tour de force; it was better than that: it was a declaration by the leader of a major, middle ranked Western power that the snivelling compliance, the fawning and the keep-your-head-down approach that has typified the collective West’s response to Trumpism is at a strategic dead end.
Nostalgia is not a strategy “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy,” Carney said.
At a time when the US is led by a criminal toddler who can’t stop whining about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize even as he attacks country after country, it is refreshing to encounter a leader who thinks and speaks like a statesman of the first rank.
“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.
“But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” Carney said.
A modern non-aligned movement Carney did not reference the Non-Aligned Movement formed at the Belgrade Conference in September 1961 but it leapt to my mind when I heard him say:
“In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact.”
Carney also reaffirms the importance of the institutions that the West itself, including Canada, has severely weakened in recent years — WTO, UN and COP to name three. Russia, with its invasion of Ukraine, comes in a distant second in this regard.
With an assertive, aggressive US hell-bent on getting whatever it wants, Carney looks on the times we have entered with much-needed clarity. His call is for an alliance of middle powers.
In a word: collectivism.
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and what Carney is proposing have similarities, particularly structurally, but also significant differences, particularly ideologically.
Not least Carney is a reformer and not at heart an anti-imperialist. He is the former head of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada and will not be seen in a Che Guevara t-shirt any time soon.
As with the NAM, however, Carney advocates collective leverage, resistance to client-state dependency and using internationalism to resist divide-and-rule by great powers.
“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the ‘performance’ of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
The giants who formed the Non-Aligned movement were Josip Broz Tito (Yugoslavia), Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt), Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana), and Sukarno (Indonesia). They gathered nations around the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence”: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference, equality and mutual benefit, peaceful coexistence.
In a nutshell: the polar opposite of the Western Rules-Based Order. Carney’s speech echoed many of the same sentiments.
“The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.
“And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.”
Brilliant. But converting a speech into a movement that mobilises countries in an effective way requires commitment and resources we need to see emerge at pace.
In the 1960s and 70s, it was about small and middle powers navigating a course between two superpower blocs — a passage between Scylla (Soviet Union) and Charybdis (United States). Today we all must navigate the rough and rowdy world of the US, China and a resurgent Russia.
Canada’s astonishing resistance to the Empire What is astonishing is that this time around, the impulse to rally together comes not from a socialist country like the former Yugoslavia or a “black Third World country” (in 1960s parlance) like Tanzania, but from the beating heart of the white-dominated Western world – from Canada, one of the capitals of the Western empire. My, how times have suddenly changed.
This should act as shock therapy to somnolent countries like Australia and New Zealand who cleave to a past that no longer exists. Carney has shown the power of looking at the world through untinted lenses (though Macron did look pretty cool in Davos in his blue sunnies).
A rare moment of honesty about Western conduct I don’t recall a Western leader being so open about the ear-splitting hypocrisy and double-dealing of the West. Most impressively, Carney gives a clear signal of what needs to be done to survive in this world of jostling hegemons.
More submissive leaders like Christopher Luxon of New Zealand and Australia’s Anthony Albanese should take careful note because, as Carney says, we are at a turning point in the world.
Carney, who previously mumbled his way through issues like Venezuela and Gaza, made a valuable contribution to confronting the desolation of reality:
“First it means naming reality. Stop invoking ‘rules-based international order’ as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.”
In time, this may open the door to Truth and Reconciliation. The genocide in Gaza is an example par excellence of the falsity of the rules-based order; Venezuela’s recent rape by the Americans, greeted with shuffling indifference by the West, traduced international law. The lawless bombing of Iran, the starvation of hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians in a blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia and armed by the US and UK are just a few of many such examples.
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” Carney said.
Noting the standing ovation Carney received, the threat to Greenland has clearly acted on the Western countries as a shock therapy that the Gaza genocide, the bombing of Iran and the attack on Venezuela failed to deliver.
Carney stands on the shoulders of giants I would point out that former leaders like prime minister Helen Clark of New Zealand have been arguing along these lines for years, advocating, for example, for a nuclear free Pacific and recommending “that we always pursue dialogue and engagement over confrontation.”
Warning that Trump was too unstable to be relied on, she told a conference in 2025 that New Zealand “should join forces with other countries across regions who want to be coalitions for action around these issues, not just little Western clubs.”
I’ll give the last word to the late Julius Nyerere, first President of Tanzania, from a 1970 speech to the Non-Aligned Movement. It expresses a worldview in accord with Carney’s speech but which is the polar opposite of 500 years of Western conduct from Christopher Columbus to Donald Trump:
“By non-alignment we are saying to the Big Powers that we also belong to this planet. We are asserting the right of small, or militarily weaker, nations to determine their own policies in their own interests, and to have an influence on world affairs which accords with the right of all peoples to live on earth as human beings equal with other human beings.
“And we are asserting the right of all peoples to freedom and self-determination; therefore expressing an outright opposition to colonialism and international domination of one people by another.”
Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and he contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts the public policy platform solidarity.co.nz
The short-lived split between the Nationals and the Liberal Party after last year’s election has been followed by another breakup less than nine months later.
The Nationals are publicly stating they cannot work under Sussan Ley’s leadership. Provided there’s no rekindling of the relationship, this is the end of a coalition arrangement that’s survived for more than a century, albeit with the occasional hiccup.
As dramatic as this seems, it’s not the first time it has happened. Earle Page resigned as leader of the (then) Country Party in 1939 because he could not work under Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies, leading to a temporary breakup.
Even earlier, the Country Party made it a condition of establishing the first Coalition that Prime Minister Billy Hughes be replaced by the Nationalist Party’s Stanley Bruce.
But this time, the Nationals are much weaker than they were in the past. Facing perceived political threats from One Nation and a revolving door of leaders in the past decade, the party may benefit from some time to regroup.
Access to power
The Country Party emerged as a rural counterweight to the perceived urban bias of the other political parties in the first quarter of the 20th century.
In a clear statement of independence, the Country Party’s first federal leader, William McWilliams told the parliament in March 1920 the party was not seeking any alliances or “collusion”. It would steer its own course.
This, however, did not last long. The Coalition has been a consistent feature of the political landscape since 1923.
The Country Party, which would go on to become the National Party, is Australia’s second oldest, after Labor. Because of the coalition arrangement, it has been in government more often than not over that period. As a result, the party has wielded policy power arguably out of proportion to the number of votes it attracts.
The Liberal National Party arrangement in Queensland aside, the Nationals have resisted calls for the parties to amalgamate. Both the Liberals and the Nationals have benefited from the coalition.
The Liberals have relied on National Party numbers on all but two occasions to form government. Meanwhile, the Nationals have gained access to key cabinet posts of importance to rural Australia, such as trade and commerce.
Particularly under John “Black Jack” McEwen – who had a brief prime ministerial stint in the 1960s – the party wielded real influence over Australia’s economic policy direction. For instance, he drove the negotiation of a trade agreement with Japan. More broadly, McEwen successfully pushed for tariff protection for Australia’s manufacturing industries.
Over the years, the Nationals have crossed the floor over tariff policy, the restructure of the Australian Wheat Board and other issues of direct concern to the party’s constituency.
Each time, these events have highlighted something that many tend to forget: the Coalition was never one party, but two distinctly different ones, with different constituencies and often different priorities.
History repeating
The events of this week are also not the first time the parties have disagreed while in opposition, with the Liberals supporting a Labor government bill and the Nationals voting against it.
In 1973, the Nationals opposed the Whitlam government’s Industries Assistance Commission Bill. They argued the commission (the predecessor to the Productivity Commission) would introduce central planning by stealth and “be usurping the functions of many government departments”.
But there’s an important difference. Between 1972 and 1974, the then Country Party and the Liberals were not in coalition. They did not re-form the Coalition after Labor won the 1972 election. In the interim, both parties were free to vote in parliament in line with their own policies.
Why stay together?
While coalition makes sense to form government, the persistence of the arrangement when in opposition is more perplexing.
The Liberal-National Party Coalition is a very peculiar beast. It’s unlike any coalition arrangement anywhere in the world. Elsewhere, minor parties come together only after an election and negotiate a way to form government.
The apparent permanence of the Australian arrangements has contributed to the current unedifying situation. There is no reason why two different political parties in opposition would agree with one another on everything and vote accordingly in parliament.
The crisis here is a direct result of the two parties, largely for historical reasons, persisting with an uncomfortable coalition that is not necessary while they are in opposition, as was demonstrated between 1972 and 1974.
And over the past four decades, the Nationals have faced a different Australia from the one in which McEwen was so influential. The deregulation of the economy in the 1980s and 1990s, which included reduced support for the agricultural sector, put the Nationals on the back foot in policy terms.
Rather than being the driver of pro-rural policies, they were defending Coalition policies their supporters disliked. Gun reforms introduced after the Port Arthur tragedy in 1996 is a case in point. Nationals leader Tim Fischer played a central role in supporting Liberal Prime Minister John Howard’s position.
It’s left the Nationals in a weaker electoral position over time. In the current parliament, Labor and the Liberals (including Liberal-aligned Liberal National Party members) each hold more rural seats than the Nationals. Ironically, given recent events, Tim Fischer’s old seat is now held by Ley.
There’s also the rural independents, making inroads into former National Party strongholds.
Depending on what recommendations are in the currently unpublished report into the Liberals’ performance at the 2025 election, the Nationals may find that this time, the Liberals will decide the coalition agreement is not worth the grief while in opposition.
A break would provide Sussan Ley and her team with the opportunity to reassess their party’s values and rebuild in a way that improves their chances of picking up the urban seats they so desperately need to form government. They may conclude this is easier to do without the Nationals.
Linda Botterill has in the past received funding from the Australian Research Council.
