A group of Australian Palestine supporters in the state of Victoria have been attacked as tensions continue over the right to protest against Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the wake of the Bondi massacre last month.
As Geelong and Victoria Southwest branch members of Independent Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) were packing up their “Peak Hour for Peace in Palestine” action — the first for the year on Friday — they were attacked.
A lone provocateur, on foot, snatched a Palestinian flag from one, ripping it and clipping the activists’ ear with the flagpole, before taunting and pushing another onto the road, before fleeing the scene.
Police and an ambulance were called and an older activist was transported to hospital — they needed hip replacement surgery for a broken hip.
IPAN said the attack was “unprovoked”, given the network was “peacefully exercising their democratic, legal right to protest against the continuing genocide in Gaza”.
One IPAN member, who tried to retrieve the Palestine flag, told Green Left the attacker had called them “a bunch of terrorist bastards”.
IPAN Geelong and Victoria Southwest organiser Jaimie Jeffrey told GL that politicians and the media have whipped up a “blame game” that is “dangerously divisive”.
Blaming protest movement “They have tried to blame the Palestine movement for the horrific Bondi massacre. This is outrageous, because the Palestine movement opposes violence, opposes all forms of racism, including antisemitism and is trying to stop a genocide.”
The group started a weekly action in April 2024 with three activists; it has now grown to a regular group of 15–20 activists flying Palestinian flags and holding signs opposing genocide and local weapons manufacturing that assists in arming Israel.
IPAN said that, before the cowardly attack, it had noticed “more supportive toots and less abuse than . . . towards the end of last year”.
It said government and media spin about “hate speech” and “improving social cohesion” is “having the opposite effect”, by “tacitly encouraging violence against those of us campaigning to stop the genocide”.
“We have never let aggression from those who disagree with our views deter us from protesting the Israeli genocide of Palestinians or any other injustice,” IPAN said.
“We won’t be deterred after this latest incident. Because we are on the right side of history and our commitment is unshakeable.”
Ask people how Stonehenge was built and you’ll hear stories of sledges, ropes, boats and sheer human determination to haul stones from across Britain to Salisbury Plain, in south-west England. Others might mention giants, wizards, or alien assistance to explain the transport of Stonehenge’s stones, which come from as far as Wales and Scotland.
But what if nature itself did the heavy lifting in transporting Stonehenge’s megaliths? In this scenario, vast glaciers that once covered Britain carried the bluestones and the Altar Stone to southern England as “glacial erratics”, or rocks moved by ice, leaving them conveniently behind on Salisbury Plain for the builders of Stonehenge.
This idea, known as the glacial transport theory, often appears in documentaries and online discussions. But it has never been tested with modern geological techniques.
Our new study, published today in Communications Earth and Environment, provides the first clear evidence glacial material never reached the area. This demonstrates the stones did not arrive through natural ice movement.
While previous research had cast doubt on the glacial transport theory, our study goes further and applies cutting-edge mineral fingerprinting to trace the stones’ true origins.
However, near Stonehenge, these tell-tale clues are either missing or ambiguous. And because the southern reach of ice sheets remains unclear, the glacial transport idea is open to debate.
So, if no big and obvious clues are present, could we look for tiny ones instead?
If glaciers had carried the stones all the way from Wales or Scotland, they would also have left behind millions of microscopic mineral grains, such as zircon and apatite, from those regions.
When both minerals form, they trap small amounts of radioactive uranium – which, at a known rate, will decay into lead. By measuring the ratios of both elements using a technique called U–Pb dating, we can measure the age of each zircon and apatite grain.
Because Britain’s rocks have very different ages from place to place, a mineral’s age can indicate its source. This means that if glaciers had carried stones to Stonehenge, the rivers of Salisbury Plain, which gather zircon and apatite from across a wide area, should still contain a clear mineral fingerprint of that journey.
Searching for tiny clues
To find out, we got our feet wet and collected sand from the rivers surrounding Stonehenge. What we discovered was striking.
Despite analysing more than seven hundred zircon and apatite grains, we found virtually no mineral ages that matched the bluestone sources in Wales or the Altar Stone’s Scottish source.
Zircon is exceptionally tough: grains can survive being weathered, washed into a river, buried in rocks, and recycled again millions of years later. As such, zircon crystals from Salisbury Plain rivers span an enormous stretch of geological time, covering half the age of the Earth, from around 2.8 billion years ago to 300 million years ago.
However, the vast majority fell within a tight band, spanning between 1.7 and 1.1 billion years old. Intriguingly, Salisbury River zircon ages match those from the Thanet Formation, a blanket of loosely compacted sand that covered much of southern England millions of years ago before being eroded.
This means zircon in river sand today is the leftovers from ancient blankets of sedimentary rocks, not freshly delivered sand from glaciers during the last Ice Age 26,000 to 20,000 years ago.
Apatite tells a different story. All grains are about 60 million years old, at a time when southern England was a shallow, subtropical sea. This age doesn’t match any potential source rocks in Britain.
Instead, apatite ages reflect the squeezing and uplifting caused by distant mountain-building in the European Alps, causing fluids to move through the chalk and “reset” apatite’s uranium-lead clock. In other words, the heating and chemical changes erased the mineral’s previous radioactive signature and started the clock ticking again.
Much like zircon, apatite isn’t a visitor brought in by glaciers but is local and has been sitting on Salisbury Plain for tens of millions of years.
A new piece of the Stonehenge story
Stonehenge sits at the crossroads of myth, ancient engineering and deep-time geology.
The ages of microscopic grains in river sand have now added a new piece to its story. This gives us further evidence the monument’s most exotic stones did not arrive by chance but were instead deliberately selected and transported.
Anthony Clarke receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Chris Kirkland 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.
The federal Coalition was imploding on Wednesday night, with all Nationals frontbenchers, including leader David Littleproud, quitting the shadow ministry.
They were retaliating against Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s insistence three Nationals senators must resign for defying shadow cabinet solidarity.
The Nationals ratified the mass walkout in a special party hook up at 6pm. This followed Ley accepting the resignation of the trio – Bridget McKenzie, Ross Cadell and Susan McDonald – who voted, in accordance with their party’s decision, against the government’s hate crime bill, which passed with Liberal support on Tuesday night.
The chaos deepened further when Ley declined to accept the latest batch of resignations.
As she desperately tries to hold the disintegrating opposition together, she said in a 9pm statement,
This evening, I spoke with Leader of the Nationals, David Littleproud, and strongly urged him not to walk away from the Coalition.
I have received additional offers of resignation from National Party Shadow Ministers, which I and my Liberal Leadership Group have determined are unnecessary.
The Liberal Party supports the Coalition arrangements because they deliver the most effective political alliance for good government. I note that in David’s letter, he has not indicated that the Nationals are leaving the Coalition.
No permanent changes will be made to the Shadow Ministry at this time, giving the National Party time to reconsider these offers of resignation.
The crisis plunges Ley’s leadership into fresh turmoil, and is also putting Littleproud under pressure.
While the resignations do not automatically break the Coalition, its future appears untenable in the present circumstances. Ley sent Littleproud a message on Wednesday evening, asking him to pass it on to Nationals colleagues, in which she said maintaining a strong and functional Coalition “is in the national interest”.
Early Wednesday Littleproud warned Ley of the walkout if the Senate trio was forced off the frontbench.
The Nationals had put the Liberal leader in a diabolical position. The party’s Senate frontbenchers had defied the principle of shadow cabinet solidarity, and convention would indicate they should resign or be sacked. As Cadell told Sky early Wednesday, “I understand if you do the crime you take the time”.
But the question for Ley was: should she press the convention, or let the “crime” go unpunished, to avoid a blow up?
To turn a blind eye, however, would be seen as weakness and further harm her fragile leadership. To let the Nationals get away with their defiance would be interpreted as a dramatic case of the tail wagging the dog.
Liberals, who are now getting blowback for voting for the hate crime legislation, would have been infuriated if the Nationals had been shown lenience.
Former Liberal prime minister John Howard backed Ley, telling The Australian, “She had no choice. She behaved absolutely correctly.”
After hours of public silence in which she consulted with her senior colleagues, Ley issued a statement just before 3pm, indicating the three Nationals would pay the price for their action.
“Shadow Cabinet solidarity is not optional. It is the foundation of serious opposition and credible government,” she said.
She said shadow cabinet had on Sunday night examined the government’s hate crime legislation. “The unanimous Shadow Cabinet decision was to negotiate specific fixes with the government and having secured those amendments, members of the Shadow Cabinet were bound not to vote against the legislation.”
Ley said that when the Coalition re-formed after last year’s brief split, “the foundational principle underpinning that agreement was a commitment to Shadow Cabinet solidarity”.
She said she’d made it clear on Tuesday to Littleproud “that members of the Shadow Cabinet could not vote against the Shadow Cabinet position”.
Littleproud understood action was now required, she said.
But a letter Littleproud sent Ley early Wednesday made it clear the Nationals’ leader disputed her version of events.
He wrote that there was “also a conventíon of shadow cabinet that a final bill position must be approved by shadow cabinet”.
“This did not take place for this bill, nor was the position presented to the joint partyroom,” he said.
Littleproud wrote that, “If these [three] resignations are accepted, the entire National Party ministry will resign to take collective responsibility.
“Opposing this bill was a party room decision. The entire National Party shadow ministry is equally bound.”
In her statement Ley said the three senators had offered their resignations from the shadow cabinet, “as is appropriate, and I have accepted them”.
“All three Senators have written to me confirming that they ‘remain ready to continue serving the Coalition in whatever capacity you consider appropriate,’” and she’d asked them to continue serving “in the Coalition team”, outside the frontbench.
She’d also asked Littleproud to nominate replacements.
Last year, Ley was seen as emerging well in her post-election tussle with the Nationals, even though Littleproud extracted concessions.
Anthony Albanese, who a week ago had been on the defensive over his legislation has now had passed much (albeit not all) of what he initially wanted, and had the additional advantage of seeing the opposition thrown into chaos. The political wheel can turn very fast.
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.
When we think of the world’s oldest art, Europe usually comes to mind, with famous cave paintings in France and Spain often seen as evidence this was the birthplace of symbolic human culture. But new evidence from Indonesia dramatically reshapes this picture.
Our research, published today in the journal Nature, reveals people living in what is now eastern Indonesia were producing rock art significantly earlier than previously demonstrated.
These artists were not only among the world’s first image-makers, they were also likely part of the population that would eventually give rise to the ancestors of Indigenous Australians and Papuans.
A hand stencil from deep time
The discovery comes from limestone caves on the island of Sulawesi. Here, faint red hand stencils, created by blowing pigment over a hand pressed against the rock, are visible on cave walls beneath layers of mineral deposits.
By analysing very small amounts of uranium in the mineral layers, we could work out when those layers formed. Because the minerals formed on top of the paintings, they tell us the youngest possible age of the art underneath.
In some cases, when paintings were made on top of mineral layers, these can also show the oldest possible age of the images.
The oldest known rock art to date – 67,800-year-old hand stencils on the wall of a cave. Supplied
One hand stencil was dated to at least 67,800 years ago, making it the oldest securely dated cave art ever found anywhere in the world.
This is at least 15,000 years older than the rock art we had previously dated in this region, and more than 30,000 years older than the oldest cave art found in France. It shows humans were making cave art images much earlier than we once believed.
Photograph of the dated hand stencils (a) and digital tracing (b); ka stands for ‘thousand years ago’. Supplied
This hand stencil is also special because it belongs to a style only found in Sulawesi. The tips of the fingers were carefully reshaped to make them look pointed, as though they were animal claws.
Altering images of human hands in this manner may have had a symbolic meaning, possibly connected to this ancient society’s understanding of human-animal relations.
In earlier research in Sulawesi, we found images of human figures with bird heads and other animal features, dated to at least 48,000 years ago. Together, these discoveries suggest that early peoples in this region had complex ideas about humans, animals and identity far back in time.
Narrowed finger hand stencils in Leang Jarie, Maros, Sulawesi. Adhi Agus Oktaviana
Not a one-off moment of creativity
The dating shows these caves were used for painting over an extraordinarily long period. Paintings were produced repeatedly, continuing until around the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago – the peak of the most recent ice age.
After a long gap, the caves were painted again by Indonesia’s first farmers, the Austronesian-speaking peoples, who arrived in the region about 4,000 years ago and added new imagery over the much older ice age paintings.
This long sequence shows that symbolic expression was not a brief or isolated innovation. Instead, it was a durable cultural tradition maintained by generations of people living in Wallacea, the island zone separating mainland Asia from Australia and New Guinea.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana illuminating a hand stencil. Max Aubert
Getting there required deliberate ocean crossings, representing the earliest known long-distance sea voyages undertaken by our species.
Researchers have proposed two main migration routes into Sahul. A northern route would have taken people from mainland Southeast Asia through Borneo and Sulawesi, before crossing onward to Papua and Australia. A southern route would have passed through Sumatra and Java, then across the Lesser Sunda Islands, including Timor, before reaching north-western Australia.
The proposed modern human migration routes to Australia/New Guinea; the northern route is delineated by the red arrows, and the southern route is delineated by the blue arrow. The red dots represent the areas with dated Pleistocene rock art. Supplied
Until now, there has been a major gap in archaeological evidence along these pathways. The newly dated rock art from Sulawesi lies directly along the northern route, providing the oldest direct evidence of modern humans in this key migration corridor into Sahul.
In other words, the people who made these hand stencils in the caves of Sulawesi were very likely part of the population that would later cross the sea and become the ancestors of Indigenous Australians.
Rethinking where culture began
The findings add to a growing body of evidence showing that early human creativity did not emerge in a single place, nor was it confined to ice age Europe.
Instead, symbolic behaviour, including art, storytelling, and the marking of place and identity, was already well established in Southeast Asia as humans spread across the world.
Shinatria Adhityatama working in the cave. Supplied
This suggests that the first populations to reach Australia carried with them long-standing cultural traditions, including sophisticated forms of symbolic expression whose deeper roots most probably lie in Africa.
The discovery raises an obvious question. If such ancient art exists in Sulawesi, how much more remains to be found?
Large parts of Indonesia and neighbouring islands remain archaeologically unexplored. If our results are any guide, evidence for equally ancient, or even older, cultural traditions may still be waiting on cave walls across the region.
As we continue to search, one thing is already clear. The story of human creativity is far older, richer and more geographically diverse than we once imagined.
The research on early rock art in Sulawesi has been featured in a documentary film, Sulawesi l’île des premières images produced by ARTE and released in Europe today.
Maxime Aubert receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Google Arts & Culture and The National Geographic Society.
Adam Brumm receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Adhi Oktaviana receives funding from The National Geographic Society.
Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
For many people this summer – especially those across Northland Auckland and Coromandel – showery days and bursts of heavy rain have become all too familiar.
This week, fresh downpours on already saturated ground have again triggered flood warnings and road closures across the upper North Island. These are individual weather events, but they are unfolding against unusually warm seas that load the atmosphere with extra moisture and energy.
Understanding ocean heat – and how it shapes rainfall, storms and marine heatwaves – is central to explaining what we experience on land.
Looking beyond the surface
For decades, scientists have recognised sea surface temperatures as a key influence on weather and climate. Warmer surfaces mean more evaporation, altered winds and shifting storm tracks.
But surface temperatures are only the skin of a deeper system. What ultimately governs how those sea surface temperatures persist and evolve is the ocean heat content stored through the upper layers of the ocean.
A clearer global picture of that deeper heat began to emerge in the early 2000s with the deployment of profiling floats measuring temperature and salinity down to 2,000 metres worldwide.
Those observations made it possible to extend ocean analyses back to 1958; before then, measurements were too sparse to provide a global view.
While sea surface temperatures remain vital for day-to-day weather, ocean heat content provides the foundation for understanding climate variability and change. It determines how long warm surface conditions last and how they interact with the atmosphere above.
Recent analysis by an international team, in which I was involved, show ocean heat content in 2025 reached record levels, rising about 23 zettajoules above that of 2024’s. That increase is equivalent to more than 200 times the world’s annual electricity use, or the energy to heat 28 billion Olympic pools from 20C to 100C.
Ocean heat content represents the vertically integrated heat of the oceans, and because other forms of ocean energy are small, it makes up the main energy reservoir of the sea.
The ocean’s huge heat capacity and mobility mean it has become the primary sink for excess heat from rising greenhouse gases. More than 90% of Earth’s energy imbalance now ends up in the ocean.
For that reason, ocean heat content is the single best indicator of global warming, closely followed by global sea-level rise.
This is not a passive process. Heat entering the ocean raises sea surface temperatures, which in turn influence exchanges of heat and moisture with the atmosphere and change weather systems. Because the ocean is stably stratified, mixing heat downward takes time.
Warming of the top 500 metres was evident globally in the late 1970s; heat in the 500–1,000 metre layer became clear in the early 1990s, the 1,000–1,500 metre layer in the late 1990s, and the 1,500–2,000 metre layer around 2004. Globally, it takes about 25 years for surface heat to penetrate to 2,000 metres.
Ocean heat content does not occur uniformly everywhere. Marine heatwaves develop, evolve and move around, contributing to impacts on local weather and marine ecosystems. Heat is moved via evaporation, condensation, rainfall and runoff.
As records are broken year after year, the need to observe and assess ocean heat content has become urgent.
What happens in the ocean, matters on land
It is not just record high OHC and rising sea level that matter, but the rapidly increasing extremes of weather and climate they bring.
Extra heat over land increases drying and the risk of drought and wildfires, while greater evaporation loads the atmosphere with more water vapour. That moisture is caught up in weather systems, leading to stronger storms – especially tropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers, such as one that has soaked New Zealand in recent days.
The same ocean warmth that fuels these storms also creates marine heatwaves at the surface.
In the ocean surrounding New Zealand and beyond, these marine heatwaves are typically influenced by the El Niño–Southern Oscillation. This Pacific climate cycle alternates between El Niño, La Niña and “neutral” phases, strongly shaping New Zealand’s winds, temperatures and rainfall from year to year.
During 2025, a weak La Niña, combined with record high sea surface temperatures around and east of New Zealand, has helped sustain the recent unsettled pattern. Such warm seas make atmospheric rivers and moisture-laden systems more likely to reach Aotearoa, as seen in early 2023 with the Auckland Anniversary Weekend floods and Cyclone Gabrielle.
For these reasons, continued observations – gathering, processing and quality control – are essential, tested against physical constraints of mass, energy, water and sea level.
Looking further ahead, the oceans matter not only for heat but also for water. Typically, about 40% of sea-level rise comes from the expansion of warming seawater; most of the rest is from melting glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
Sea levels are also influenced by where rain falls. During El Niño, more rain tends to fall over the Pacific Ocean, often accompanied by dry spells or drought on land. During La Niña, more rain falls on land – as seen across parts of Southeast Asia in 2025 – and water stored temporarily in lakes and soils can slightly reduce the amount returning to the ocean.
A striking example occurred in Australia in 2025, when heavy rains from May through to late in the year refilled Lake Eyre, transforming the desert saltpan into a vast inland sea. Such episodes temporarily take water out of the oceans and dampen sea-level rise.
Monitoring sea-level rise through satellite altimetry is therefore an essential complement to tracking ocean heat content. Tracking both heat and water is crucial to understanding variability and long-term trends.
Kevin Trenberth 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.
In Hamnet, Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) asks William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) to introduce himself by telling her a story. It is her way of seeing who this man really is.
Here, storytelling becomes a mirror held up to the heart. Are we, as human beings, moved by the same things? Are our hearts shaped from the same material?
Chloé Zhao knows how to make people feel. Hamnet sees a new phrase in her artistry, turning a Western literary classic into a quiet meditation on grief, love and the enduring power of art.
From Beijing to the world
Born in Beijing in 1982, as a child Chloé Zhao (赵婷, Zhào Tíng) loved manga, drawn to Japanese Shinto ideas, where every object carries a spirit.
She wrote fan fiction, went to movies and fell in love with Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together (1997), a life-changing film she still rewatches.
At 14, she was sent to a boarding school in England, speaking almost no English. The isolation forced her to look beyond language. “A smile is a smile, a touch is a touch,” she later told the BBC. That attentiveness to gesture and silence became a signature of her filmmaking.
Allured by Hollywood, Zhao moved to Los Angeles for high school, then studied political science at college. She eventually found her way to cinema at New York University, where Spike Lee encouraged her to trust her own voice.
Open landscapes to inner lives
In 2015, Zhao started directing small-scale, slow-burn features set in the American heartland.
Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017) capture the vast, lunar beauty of South Dakota’s badlands and the dignity of the people who live there. She often used non-professional actors, achieving a documentary-like naturalism.
Nomadland (2020), her third film, brought this style to a global audience. The story is about a stoic, hard-working widow in her early 60s who loses everything in the Great Recession and finds a new life on the road.
Receiving the Oscar for best director, she quoted a classic Chinese text teaching Confucian morality, history and basic knowledge: “people at birth are inherently good (人之初，性本善)”.
By focusing on nomads, cowboys and Indigenous communities, her first three films make space for those who are rarely seen.
“I’ve spent my whole life telling stories about people who feel separated, who feel they don’t belong,” she said, linking that to her own experience as “an outsider”.
With Hamnet, that sensibility turns inward. The immense skies and wide-open landscapes are replaced by forests, quiet rooms and the raw inner world of parental grief.
Through East and West
That Shakespeare, the wellspring of Britain’s national mythology, is being reinvented by an Asian director is striking.
Zhao initially turned down adapting and directing Hamnet, as she neither grow up with Western reverence for Shakespeare nor felt a cultural connection to his grief-filled family life. But after reading Maggie O’Farrell’s book, she felt something intimate and universal that drew her in.
Her approach to demystifying that feeling reflects a sensibility shaped equally by Eastern and Western philosophy.
From the Chinese practice of qi (气, life force), Zhao shows life flowing through wind, breath and Agnes’s bond with the forest, where she gives birth to her first child.
From the Hindu Tantra, she blurs the line between the actors and their surroundings, showing the world as an extension of the self.
From the ideas of Carl Jung, she explores opposing forces within the self, guiding the actors to reveal both masculine and feminine qualities in Agnes and William.
All three of these philosophies talk of accessing deeper wisdom within the self and the symbolic nature of creation.
Zhao also assigns chakra colours to Hamnet’s protagonists. In Hindu and Buddhist traditions, chakras are energy centres in the body, each linked to a colour and connected to physical, emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
In Zhao’s telling, Shakespeare often appears in blue, echoing the colour of throat and third-eye chakras, which symbolises openness, clarity and intuition. Agnes appears in red, reflecting the root chakra: the beating heart of the earth. This visual language also draws from Taoist philosophy, which understands humans as existing within nature.
Like Ang Lee, Zhao brings an East Asian sensitivity to interiority and emotional restraint. Both filmmakers have bridged art-house cinema and mainstream Hollywood, achieving rare critical recognition while remaining deeply focused on human experience.
The deeply human
Hamnet imagines the world surrounding Shakespeare and his wild-hearted wife, Agnes, and the tragic death of their 11-year-old son from the plague.
In the final sequence of the film, we watch the first performance of Hamlet. Their son returns on stage as the prince, speaking lines Shakespeare has written out of loss.
As Hamlet is poisoned, the audience inside the theatre – nobles and labourers alike – break into tears. They do not know the child behind the character, but they feel loss all the same.
In a crowded audience, only Agnes sees the boy onstage as her son. Focus Features
Among them stands Agnes. Through her eyes, we see how art turns personal sorrow into something others can share. She alone recognises that the story being told is a memory. The woman history remembers merely as “Shakespeare’s wife” becomes the very soul of Hamnet.
Hamnet, in Zhao’s retelling, is not an escape from pain but a way of living with it. Buckley’s stirring performance feels not only Oscar-worthy, but emblematic of Zhao’s humanist cinema.
Her cinema reminds us of what cannot be automated: the deeply human capacity to feel, to grieve and to love.
Yanyan Hong 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.
Truth in world affairs is not a single expert-narrated story.
National Politics
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
In our ‘official’ ‘United Nations’ world – the world referenced by the expression the international rules-based order – there are about 200 sovereign nation states (ie ‘countries’) which are equal members of the global community of nations. We mean equal in a juridical sense, not an economic or demographic sense; as recognised by ‘one nation, one vote’ in the United Nations General Assembly. Further, in this sanctioned and sanctified view – using the verb ‘sanction’ in its original old-fashioned sense – neither history nor geographical proximity matter; Mexico is as independent of the United States as it is of India.
Before moving on to geopolitics, there are four exceptions allowed within this official view. First is that there are numerous pieces of territory which are understood as too small – in population and/or land area – to be viable independent sovereign nation states. Second, some sovereign nation states – usually neighbours – may form a voluntary Union, whereby certain aspects of their sovereignty are ceded to centralised institutions. Third is that many citizens do not reside in the territories associated with their nationalities. And three exceptions not allowed for, but acknowledged to varying extents: countries that don’t exist but do exist; territories subject to internationally tolerated military occupation; and territories within recognised nation-states pushing for secession, though falling well short of either self-government or union with similarly-placed neighbouring territories.
An example of the first type of exception is Greenland, accounted for as a ‘realm’ territory of Denmark. (Other familiar realm territories are: Cook Islands [in the realm of New Zealand], American Samoa, and New Zealand’s closest foreign neighbour [Norfolk Island, in the realm of Australia].) The second exception is the European Union (noting that, in some circumstances – consider FIFA – the United Kingdom is also a Union of [four] nations). Might Canada join the European Union this century?
The third exception – the diaspora exception – applies to a degree to all nation states; and it applies particularly to New Zealand. New Zealand possibly has more citizens resident outside of New Zealand relative to citizens resident inside New Zealand; at least if we only consider countries with resident populations in excess of one million. Is New Zealand its citizenry or its territory? Given the realities of dual-citizenship, it is probably better defined as its territory along with its residentcitizens and denizens.
The fourth generally accepted exception is territories that are formally non-sovereign. Our example here is Antarctica. We may add the Moon.
Re the unsanctioned exceptions, Taiwan is the obvious example of the first type (other examples include Abkhazia and Somaliland) and Palestine is the obvious example of the second type. For the third (secessionist) type, I would cite Eastern Congo in which substantial domestic forces are in reality more aligned to nearby Kigali than faraway Kinshasa; I would also mention Myanmar’s Rakhine state, home to the Rohingya people.
Geopolitics
While the above ‘national politics’ narrative is real and contains a legal structure satisfying to its liberal architects, it is overlaid by an equally real (and quite different) geopolitical layer. Conflicts of big ego and big ideology can neither be understood nor resolved without substantial reference to geopolitics. Geopolitics is tied to both contested histories and geographical proximity. More than anything geopolitics is about empire (formal and informal), the unequal coalitions and powerplays among and between identities of people beyond and within territorial boundaries.
Geopolitics is about the centres of political power – the ‘great powers’ to use an expression from World War One – and their rival claims over the planet and its people. Geopolitical texts commonly refer to cities that are power centres, such as Washington and Berlin, rather than the countries in which those cities are located. Most conflict in the world can only be understood with recourse to geopolitics, which is largely the sociopathic politics of power masquerading as a set of struggles of ‘Good versus Evil’.
At least the president of the United States, DJT, is in a sense more honest than most ‘democratic’ leaders of powerful countries, in that he frames his acquisitive sentiments in the name of America rather than in the name of Good or in the name of God. Coveted Greenland looms larger in geopolitics than in national politics; in national politics it successfully hides in plain sight, as a large appendage of a semi-sovereign nation with a population barely larger than New Zealand.
Greenland: History
Greenland presently – at least formally – lies within the realm of Denmark, noting that ‘realm’ is itself a sanctioned rules-based exception. Denmark, as a member of the European Union, has delegated aspects of its sovereignty; from Copenhagen to Brussels and Paris and Berlin.
The first question to ask about Greenland is: why is it in the possession of the Kingdom of Denmark? Greenland was never conquered or colonised by Danes or by Denmark. Over 1,000 years ago, Greenland was colonised by Norse (ie Norwegian) Vikings. Greenland’s first people were Inuit, and the present population is substantially an Inuit/Norse mix. Around 500 years ago, Norway and Denmark formed a political union – a kingdom in which Denmark was the dominant partner – which lasted around 300 years. In that age of imperialism, Greenland became formally subject to that kingdom. This was a marriage between Denmark and Norway during the constrained period of the Little Ice Age. Greenland was ‘matrimonial property’ in this Union.
In 1814, Norway was passed on to Sweden through the Treaty of Kiel, in an era in which the wife was regarded as the property of the husband. Thus, Denmark formally gained Greenland as part of the divorce settlement. That remains the historical basis for Denmark’s claim over Greenland today. Though we remind ourselves that today’s reality is that Denmark is a somewhat junior partner in the polyamorous European Union. (Would Denmark get to keep Greenland if Denmark was to do a ‘Dexit’? Or would Greenland be passed on to the other husbands and wives?)
Greenland: Geography
Functionally, at least in geo-environmental terms, Greenland is the northern land-analogue of Antarctica. Arctica. While it doesn’t literally cover the North Pole (except that a large sheet of sea-ice extends from northern Greenland), it is near enough; and its land ice-sheet is certainly the northern analogue of the West Antarctica ice sheet. Based on this analogy, Greenland could become subject to a similar extranationalism to that which governs Antarctica. The difference of course is that Antarctica has no formally resident population; almost nobody was born there. The model could be adapted, with authentic Greenlanders becoming limited-power-landlords over an essentially international territory.
When I was a child, it was very common for families to have a globe in their living rooms, somewhere between the mantlepiece and the piano. About 15 years ago, I was lucky enough to have acquired a 3D jigsaw puzzle of the world; indeed, a small self-assembly globe. To see Greenland in perspective, it’s necessary to look at a globe. Short of that, see this satellite picture of North America from the Turtle Island page on Wikipedia.
(I was privileged to learn about Turtle Island when I visited Winnipeg in May 2019. When I walked through the Peace Park at The Forks, I learned for the first time about Turtle Island. See on YouTube: Winnipeg – the heart of Turtle Island. [And note this 16 December 2025 BBC story FBI foils New Year’s Eve terror plot across southern California, officials say relating to the Turtle Island Liberation Front.] I have a personal story about Greenland. While never having set foot there, I remember having a window seat flying from London to Los Angeles one October day. I saw the sun set somewhere northwest of Scotland; then a couple of hours later I saw it rise again, from the west, over Greenland. This was only possible because at such polar latitudes, an east-west flight is fast enough to be able to reverse the sunset.)
The map, in correct perspective, very much shows Greenland as a not-very-green part of North America. Its closest neighbour is of course Canada; indeed since 2022 Greenland has shared a land border with Greenland, on Hans Island in the Kennedy Channel, following the resolution of the Whisky War between Canada and Denmark. (It is unknown whether the Kennedy Channel was named after a Canadian fur-trader and politician, or the guy who was United States Secretary of the Navy in 1852 and 1853. If the latter, this might give false credence to DJT’s claim on Greenland for the United States.)
Greenland certainly looks to be geographically American – just as Norfolk Island geographically connects to New Zealand (on the Zealandia continent). But a geographical argument must also based on the connectivity between population centres. The flight distances from Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, to other capital cities are: Reykjavik, Iceland (1,430 km); Ottawa, Canada (2,560km); Dublin, Ireland (2,800km); Oslo, Norway (3,150km); London, UK (3,250km); Washington DC, US (3,260km); Brussels, EU (3,520km); Copenhagen, Denmark (3,530); Berlin, Germany (3,820); Moscow, Russia (4,630km); Beijing, China (8,400km).
Washington is closer to Nuuk than is Copenhagen. Dublin is the closest EU capital city to Nuuk, and is a more economically connected city to the North Atlantic than is Copenhagen. Brussels, formal capital of the EU is the same distance from Nuuk as is Copenhagen. Berlin, the geopolitical capital of the EU, is nearly 4,000 km from Nuuk (whereas New York, the power capital of the US is less than 3,000km from Nuuk). Moscow and Beijing are both much further from Greenland, have had no geopolitical influence there, and constitute no plausible geopolitical threat; future security issues in Greenland are more likely to emanate from piracy than from power centres in Asia.
While there is no argument in favour of the United States annexing or otherwise acquiring Greenland, the case for European Union control of Greenland is even weaker than that of the United States. The only European countries with credible claims to form a Union with Greenland are Norway and Iceland, on the basis of shared history and shared maritime geography.
Greenland: Demography
Greenland’s population of just under 60,000 is only slightly higher than the populations of the American realm territories of American Samoa and the Northern Marianas Islands. Guam has three times more people than Greenland. The American Virgin Islands, with 100,000 people, is more populated than Greenland. The largest American realm territory, Puerto Rico, has 300 times as many people as Greenland. Of these ‘countries’, only Puerto Rico is a serious candidate to become the 51st state of the United States. The Virgin Islanders don’t even drive on the same side of the road as the rest of the United States.
I suspect that the DJT vision for Greenland is for it to become something like the former Panama Canal Zone; a former American territory that existed when I sailed through the Panama Canal in 1974. Of course we are aware that DJT would like to re-acquire that Panamanian territory for the United States.
Greenland is different though, in the same way that Antarctica is. It has many potentially valuable mining resources; and it lies on economically significant sea channels which are becoming more navigable thanks to climate change. And it has global environmental values. A collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet would drown all of Manhattan and most of the rest of New York; as well as much of other cities mentioned above such as Dublin, London and Copenhagen.
Greenland as Arctica
Greenland’s people can become landlords – but not landlords with monopoly power – able to procure citizens’ royalties (public property rights) from both extractive industries and the use of its sea-lanes. Greenland requires a Treaty of Nuuk, with a limited concession of sovereignty in return for those benefits; but a concession that leaves property rights in Greenland essentially the same as property rights in Antarctica.
The Greenland question needs to be addressed. It is not sufficient for it to become a de facto territory of Europe – which eventually means Berlin. And it is too large a landmass to be independent in the way that Iceland is.
Warning
By understanding Greenland essentially as an inhabited Anti-Antarctica – as Arctica – we have to realise that the present United States regime may seek to undermine (literally and metaphorically) current arrangements for Antarctica. And when DJT turns his gaze southwards, he may look upon independent sovereign countries in the South Pacific as parts of his growing fiefdom. The South Pacific is America’s gateway to McMurdo Sound, in Antarctica. A number of ‘independent’ and proud countries in the South Pacific – Tonga, for example – already dutifully vote largely according to the United States’ say-so in the United Nations.
If Antarctica becomes a template for Greenland, that’s a definite improvement on the present accidental and unsustainable arrangement; but only if Antarctica’s present governance arrangements are preserved.
Watch what happens if Nasa’s Artemis Program successfully re-lands American men on the Moon. The Washington regime may lay claim to privileged property rights over the Moon – much as Wentworth acquired New Zealand’s South Island in 1839, requiring a treaty (Treaty of Waitangi) to repudiate that claim. If the United States believes it owns the Moon, it may stake a similar claim on Antarctica; and also seek to extend its Pacific realm. Citing America’s security! And breaking the Seventh and Tenth Commandments.
While current American-led geopolitics poses a deeply problematic story for resource-rich and low-populated territories, the expert-led official story of international politics is problematic too. The status-quo is not necessarily the best solution.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
In an otherwise mixed month for the Pacific Regional Environmental Programme (SPREP), its leadership is hailing a win for Pacific conservation efforts with the UN Treaty on the High Seas coming into effect.
The legally binding UN High Seas Treaty officially received more than 60 ratifications, and following years of negotiations, has this month become international law.
It is a welcome positive development for Pacific conservation in a month when the US announced it was going to leave SPREP.
SPREP’s Director-General Sefanaia Nawadra described the treaty coming into effect as a testament to the long-running work by Pacific Island countries on ocean governance.
The treaty will give Pacific Island countries the ability to better manage high seas pockets in between their national waters, he said.
“The Pacific is peculiar in that within the national jurisdictions of countries in the Pacific, in between, there are what I call donut type spaces, international waters,” he said.
“So this [treaty] allows us to implement management measures beyond our national jurisdictions into these areas that are of particular concern to countries within our region.”
“So it’s a very important agreement for us, and is the continuation of the global leadership that Pacific Island countries have shown on oceans throughout the history of global oceans management, starting off with UNCLOS [United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea], which is the primary instrument that governs oceans.”
A Pacific Ocean marine ecosystem . . . Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument is an area spanning more than 1.2 million sq km of ocean. Image: USFWS
Asked whether the treaty might make it easier for deep sea mining to take place in the Pacific, Nawadra said: “Primarily it’s meant to be a conservation or sustainable management instrument. So you would allow conservation and protection in some cases, but in other cases, you would allow for managed activities”.
He said the onus would be on Pacific countries to work together in groups or sub-groups to settle on what activity is allowed.
The US retreat Nawadra was philosophical about the US withdrawal from SPREP, but uncertainty lingers over what it means for the various programmes which the Pacific community cooperates with the US on.
Greater impact than withdrawal of US funding is likely to be on the work SPREP does with various US government agencies. Image: RNZ/Johnny Blades
He said he was not worried about the removal of US funding, but indicated the greater impact is likely to be on the work SPREP does with various US government agencies.
“We do a lot of joint activities with NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmoshperic Administration], with US CPA, US Department of Agriculture, Geological Service,” Nawadra explained.
“Those are joint activities that benefit the US as much as it benefits the Pacific. I’m not sure how that will pan out going forward over technical cooperation. That’s something that we have to work through with the US.”
Meanwhile, the director-general denied media reports that China’s latest funding offer to SPREP was about filling the gap left by the US.
Shortly after the US announcement, China, which is not a member of SPREP, announced a donation to the organisation of US$200,000 — which is approximately the amount of the funding shortfall created by the US departure.
The timing and amount of China’s donation was merely coincidental, Nawadra said.
“They didn’t step in because of the US. We’ve received funding from China for almost 10 years now,” he said.
“So it’s just a continuation of the annual contribution that they voluntarily give to SPREP. So it wasn’t additional to what they normally donate.”
He said the US retreat was not because of anything outside SPREP’s mandate that the organisation had done.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
US cybersecurity company Palantir has received a high-level Australian government security assessment despite concerns about its surveillance and complicity in the Gaza genocide in occupied Palestine.
In November 2025, Palantir Technologies was assessed as meeting the protected level under the Australian Information Security Registered Assessors Programme (IRAP). This protection is a key requirement for companies seeking to handle sensitive government information.
The assessment enables a broader range of Australian government agencies and commercial organisations to use Palantir’s Foundry and artificial intelligence platform, AIP.
In a statement, Palantir said the assessment was conducted by an independent third party assessor in line with requirements set by the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), and demonstrated its ability to meet “stringent national security and privacy standards”.
The company described Australia as an “important market”, saying the clearance would open “new opportunities” across the public and private sectors.
Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp . . . experts warn that the company’s technology enables mass surveillance and data collection with limited accountability. Image: palantir.com/MWM
Mass surveillance without accountability Palantir has been mired in controversy internationally over how its data analysis and AI tools are deployed by government and military clients, with experts warning that the company’s technology enables mass surveillance and data collection with limited accountability.
An ASD spokesperson stated that IRAP status should
not be interpreted as government approval or endorsement of a company’s broader conduct or use of data.
“IRAP assessments are third-party commercial arrangements between IRAP assessors (or companies offering ‘IRAP assessment’ services) and assessed entities,” an ASD spokesperson said.
“ASD does not sign off or approve IRAP assessments.”
Journalist Stephanie Tran . . . Palantir has quietly built a substantial footprint in Australia. Image: Michael West Media
Lobbying push amid political pressure Palantir’s expanded access to Australian government work comes amid growing political scrutiny. According to reporting by Capital Brief, in July 2025, the company hired lobbying firm CMAX Advisory, after the Greens called for an immediate freeze on government contracts with the company.
I want to talk to you about Palantir and its expanding footprint in Australia. TLDR: You should be worried.
This US surveillance tech company has secured multiple Defence contracts worth over $11 million. We need transparency about what data they’re accessing & why. 🧵
— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) July 7, 2025
CMAX Advisory was founded by Christian Taubenschlag, a former chief of staff to Labor Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, who is a special counsel at the lobby firm. CMAX Advisory represents a number of major defence contractors, including EOS and Raytheon.
Gaza, ICE and Coles Palantir has faced sustained criticism globally over how its software is used by government clients.
In April 2025, CEO Alex Karp dismissed accusations that Palantir’s technology had been used to target and kill Palestinians in Gaza, saying those killed were “mostly terrorists”.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, has said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Palantir had “provided automatic predictive policing technology, core defence infrastructure for rapid and scaled-up construction and deployment of military software, and its Artificial Intelligence Platform, which allows real-time battlefield data integration for automated decision-making”.
In the United States, Palantir has long worked with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). An investigation by 404 Media revealed that the company was developing a tool that generated detailed dossiers on potential deportation targets, mapped their locations and assigned “confidence scores” to their likely whereabouts.
The company has also attracted attention in Australia for its work with private sector clients, including Coles, where they were hired to cut costs and “optimise” the company’s workforce.
‘We kill enemies’ Karp has been blunt about Palantir’s mission. Speaking to shareholders and investors last week, he described the company’s purpose as helping the West “scare enemies” and, “on occasion, kill them”.
Karp also joked about “getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us”.
Millions in government contracts Despite the controversy, Palantir has quietly built a substantial footprint in Australia.
According to Austender data, the company has secured more than $50 million in Australian government contracts since 2013, largely across defence and national security-related agencies.
The 2024 financial report of its Australian subsidiary, Palantir Technologies Australia Pty Ltd, show $25.5 million in revenue from customer contracts in 2024, though the company’s local financial reports are not audited.
In 2020, Palantir recommended that the Australian government consider “expanding the exemption from public access to disclosure documents”, arguing that filing financial reports with ASIC “is expensive” and “gives competitors access to confidential information”.
Stephanie Tran is a journalist with a background in both law and journalism. She has worked at The Guardian and as a paralegal, where she assisted Crikey’s defence team in the high-profile defamation case brought by Lachlan Murdoch. Her reporting has been recognised nationally, earning her the 2021 Democracy’s Watchdogs Award for Student Investigative Reporting and a nomination for the 2021 Walkley Student Journalist of the Year Award.This article was first published by Michael West Media and is republished with permission.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
One Nation continues to surge after the Bondi terror attack, as a Morgan poll has them gaining six points at the Coalition’s expense.
A national Australian Morgan poll, conducted January 12–18 from a sample of 1,630, gave Labor a 53.5–46.5 lead by respondent preferences, a 1.5-point gain for Labor since the January 5–11 Morgan poll.
Primary votes were 28.5% Labor (down 1.5), 24% Coalition (down 6.5), 21% One Nation (up six), 13.5% Greens (steady) and 13% for all Others (up two). By 2025 election preference flows, Labor led by 53–47, a one-point gain for Labor.
It’s very unlikely One Nation actually surged six points in one week, and much more likely the previous poll was a pro-Coalition outlier. Resolve is now the only poll that gives the Coalition a clear lead over One Nation (ten points), with all other recent polls now between a one-point lead for One Nation (Newspoll) and four-point Coalition lead (Fox & Hedgehog).
Morgan also had a special SMS poll on Australia Day that was conducted January 14–16 from a sample of 1,311. By 72–28, respondents thought January 26 should be known as “Australia Day”, not “Invasion Day” (68.5–31.5 two years ago). By 60.5–39.5, they thought Australia Day should not be moved from January 26 (58.5–41.5 previously).
Further results from Resolve poll
I covered the Australian national Newspoll and Resolve poll on Monday. In further questions from the Resolve poll for Nine newspapers, supported a royal commission following Bondi by 61-10 (change from 48–17 in late December). By 37–35, respondents thought social cohesion was good rather than poor (37–30 in late December).
On gun laws, 66% wanted them toughened (down ten since late December), 21% kept as they are (up 11) and 7% wanted gun laws relaxed (up one). A big majority still wants tougher gun laws, but right-wing voters are now more opposed than in late December. The Coalition’s opposition to Labor’s gun control laws has probably contributed to increased public opposition.
NSW Resolve poll has strong support for post-Bondi measures
The New South Wales Resolve poll would normally have combined results from the early December and January federal Resolve polls. But the early December poll was pre-Bondi, and it appears The Sydney Morning Herald wants to wait for a complete post-Bondi poll before giving voting intentions.
What we have are questions from the January NSW sample of 550. By 49–19, respondents thought Labor Premier Chris Minns and the state government had had a strong rather than weak response to Bondi. By 67–16, they supported the state government’s gun reforms.
Trump’s ratings in negative double digits after one year
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump’s US net approval has been in negative double digits since late October. Trump became United States president for a second time on January 20, 2025. A year into his second four-year term, Trump’s net approval in Nate Silver’s aggregate of US national polls is -13.0, with 55.0% disapproving and 42.0% approving.
Trump recorded a positive net approval in Silver’s aggregate at the start of his term, but his net approval went negative last March. Since late October, Trump’s net approval has been in negative double digits, with a low of -15.0 in November.
Silver has ratings for past presidents since Harry Truman. At this point in their presidencies, Trump’s net approval is ahead of only his own first term, with Joe Biden the next worst at -12.0 net approval.
On four issues tracked by Silver, Trump’s net approval is -9.5 on immigration, -15.6 on trade, -15.9 on the economy and -25.2 on inflation. Recently, Trump’s net approval on immigration has dropped while his net approval on the other three issues has risen.
Trump’s ratings on immigration may have fallen because of the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on January 7. On other issues, Trump’s ratings may have risen due to the continued strong stock market.
The benchmark S&P 500 stock market index has risen 7.8% in the last six months, hitting a new peak on January 12, although it slumped 2.1% in last night’s session owing to Trump’s threats of tariffs over Greenland. Trump’s ratings are unlikely to become very poor unless either the stock market or the broader US economy deteriorates markedly.
In a recent Ipsos poll for Reuters, by 47–17 Americans disapproved of US efforts to acquire Greenland, and by 71–4 they thought it was not a good idea to take Greenland using military force.
At midterm elections this November, all 435 members of the House of Representatives and 35 of the 100 senators will be up for election. In Fiftyplusone’s aggregate of the national generic ballot, Democrats lead Republicans by 43.6–39.8.
I wrote on January 7 that if Democrats win the national popular vote by the 3.8 points they lead by in current polls, they would be very likely to gain control of the House, but not the Senate. The two senators per state rule skews Senate elections towards low-population, rural states.
Adrian Beaumont 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.
The death of Rob Hirst from pancreatic cancer at the age of 70 is the close of a long and, in many ways, surprising career.
Hirst was the drummer and songwriter who, though far from the figurehead of Midnight Oil, was nonetheless an integral part – perhaps the backbone – of one of the most consistently adventurous and principled groups of the last half-century.
For most, Midnight Oil means Peter Garrett. But it was Garrett who answered an ad to join Farm, Hirst’s band with Jim Moginie and Andrew James, in 1972. Were it not for his arrival, the group might not have gone far beyond the northern beaches of Sydney: Garrett was striking as a performer and his singing was distinctive (though, like Jimmy Barnes, he did not sing all the great songs his band was famous for).
While Midnight Oil’s members recognised a common purpose and achieved an extraordinary amount on a range of fronts, Hirst’s memoir of their early 21st century United States tour shows there was always some measure of tension between them.
In 1980, Hirst told Toby Creswell of Rolling Stone he didn’t like Garrett’s taste, “and he doesn’t like mine […] You’re really putting together people who don’t get on socially or musically.”
Not there to compromise
Midnight Oil’s records were exceptionally high quality from the outset.
Their self-titled first album was what you’d expect from a group which took pleasure in Australian surfing “head” music bands like Tully and Kahvas Jute.
Their second, Head Injuries, was brash and stark: they had emerged, for better or worse, at the time of punk/new wave but fitted as uneasily with X or The Saints as with blunter, more traditional rock groups like AC/DC.
Their 12″ EP Bird Noises was as fine a summation of their approach as could be imagined. The Hirst/Garrett cowrite No Time for Games has a social message, a distinctive vocal from Garrett and of course, extraordinary drums, restrained when they had to be but ever servicing the song’s dynamics.
From the very beginning, they made it clear that they were not available to undertake the usual compromises the record industry expected for career furtherance.
Famously, they refused to play Countdown. In hindsight, they would have been severely out of place there.
Nevertheless, they gave the major groups of the 70s their due; Hirst praised Skyhooks’ Greg Macainsh, for instance, for his use of Australian places and scenes, making it “possible for you to write about, in his case, Carlton and Balwyn […] [now] we’ve got this whole palette of Australian places we can use without a cringe factor.”
On their own terms
Sales and impact of subsequent Midnight Oil albums trace the rise of a group attaining international prominence on its own terms through hard work and consistent attention to detail.
The commercial peak came with the 1987 single Beds are Burning (a cowrite between Garrett, Hirst and Moginie): top ten in France, the US, the Netherlands, Australia and Belgium – and number one in Canada, New Zealand and South Africa.
That it was a song on the world stage highlighting Australian Aboriginal dispossession was perhaps an even greater achievement.
Hirst’s memoir Willie’s Bar and Grill gives a good sense of a group finding the very common way down from the top: the trajectory of the one-hit wonder, in this case experienced while touring post-9/11 US.
They disbanded soon afterwards, not for this reason but because Garrett had been picked by Mark Latham to stand as Labor candidate for Kingsford-Smith in the 2004 federal election. They reunited 13 years later.
A varied career
Hirst had other irons in the fire as early as 1991 when he formed Ghostwriters with Rick Grossman. Perhaps the band’s name signalled a frisson of bitterness about the concentration of attention Garrett garnered in Midnight Oil, but paradoxically its first album was essentially an anonymous release.
Two others followed, and Hirst was also involved in the Backsliders and the Angry Tradesmen.
In 2020 he recorded an album with his daughter, Jay O’Shea, who he had put up for adoption in 1974. In 2025 he released the second of two albums recorded with noted songwriter Sean Sennett.
A 50-year career is almost impossible to sum up briefly, but one song speaks volumes about Hirst. Power and the Passion, the 1983 Midnight Oil hit, features a simple (if infectious) drum machine and what might almost pass for a rap from Garrett, listing a host of demons besetting the citizen at the end of the 20th century, not least from Americanisation and corporatisation.
Hirst plays along with the beat then engages it in an epic battle, executing a remarkable solo which enhances the song while making a statement about working with and against the pernicious machine.
In a career of great work, it’s one highlight that speaks louder than words.
David Nichols 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bricklyn Priebe, Associate Lecturer in Criminology and Justice, School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast
Child sexual abuse cases involving female perpetrators are confronting and distressing. When these cases make the news, they often provoke shock and outrage.
Yet, in the United States, approximately 7.6% of confirmed cases are perpetrated by women or girls, though some US states report it to be as high as 36%.
In Australia, recorded sexual assault offences involving women and girls have increased from 222 offenders in 2008–09 to 678 in 2023–24: a 205% rise.
Public attention has long focused on male perpetrators and on what happens after abuse is uncovered (including prosecution and punishment or cases not proceeding to court).
Prevention, however, requires us to act earlier and to ask a different question: what might have prevented these women from sexually abusing a child in the first place?
We spoke directly with 18 women convicted of child sexual abuse offences in three states/territories in Australia.
These conversations were not about minimising or excuse-making, but about uncovering missed opportunities for support and intervention throughout their lives that they believe may have prevented them from sexual offending.
Many of these women described needing help long before they abused a child. Many had grown up experiencing their own abuse or neglect.
They talked about wanting counselling, mental health support, guidance around relationships and practical help with parenting.
For some, these unresolved needs and vulnerabilities were closely tied to their experiences in intimate relationships.
One participant who co-offended with her male partner reflected on how early support might have changed her situation:
It would have been good just to have the opportunity to get out of the relationship earlier […] so having resources or counselling or anything really. It got to a point where it was just too late. I was stuck.
Others spoke about repeated attempts to get help from support services, only to encounter barriers that left them feeling dismissed, unsupported and their concerns minimised. As one participant explained:
I really was trying to engage and get help […] they just turned [me] away, it’s like they didn’t want to help me.
Some women did not know what services existed to help them at different times in their lives. Others faced long waitlists and cost barriers.
Several women also described how shame and fear fuelled their silence, including fear of judgement or legal consequences. One woman said:
I should have opened up […] but I didn’t know how to. It’s not that I needed more people to talk to, it’s that I needed to know how to talk to them.
Together, these accounts highlight a key limitation in current prevention and early intervention efforts.
Availability of services alone is not enough; accessibility matters. If people cannot find, afford or safely connect to support then prevention efforts will likely fail.
It’s not just prevention that’s needed
We also acknowledge that while accessibility matters, not everyone will seek support.
In fact, a minority of women in our study admitted nothing would have prevented their offending.
Some felt they weren’t aware they needed help until it was too late, or they would not have accepted it at the time anyway.
This reinforces the necessity for both effective prevention and response.
The women’s accounts in our study reinforce growing calls for gender-responsive strategies.
While risk factors such as trauma, isolation and substance use are not exclusive to girls and women, they often intersect differently with gendered social roles and expectations compared with men.
For example, parenting stress, relationship toxicity and financial insecurity disproportionately affect women and can compound vulnerability.
By no means do these factors minimise or excuse offending, nor do they fully explain it.
Rather, it is about recognising that prevention and early intervention efforts need to address these gendered risks in order to better protect children from harm.
Importantly, these findings support much of the broader prevention work already underway in Australia, such as:
These are all designed to intervene earlier, reduce isolation and support people as ways to prevent harm and safeguard children.
Our findings align with a growing body of evidence suggesting prevention works best when it is practical and embedded from childhood through adulthood.
The challenge that remains is ensuring services are not only available but visible, accessible, nonjudgmental and clearly inclusive of girls and women.
The National Sexual Assault, Family and Domestic Violence Counselling Line – 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732) – is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week for any Australian who has experienced, or is at risk of, family and domestic violence and/or sexual assault.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Larissa Christensen is affiliated with the Daniel Morcombe Foundation.
Bricklyn Priebe, Nadine McKillop, and Susan Rayment-McHugh 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.
While period pain and heavy menstrual bleeding are common, they’re often dealt with privately. Yet they take a profound toll on a person’s health – and finances.
Now, our new study has calculated how much these menstrual symptoms cost the broader Australian economy.
Our study was based on a survey of 1,796 Australian working women and is published today in The Australian Journal of Social Issues. We found period pain and heavy bleeding costs the Australian economy about A$14 billion every year in lost productivity.
Women aged 35–44 reported significantly higher lost productivity than their younger counterparts.
Our findings highlight the substantial economic rationale for government and workplace policies to help people manage menstrual symptoms.
Periods can be debilitating
In Australia, girls experience their first period (menarche) around 12 years of age.
Periods (menstruation) typically happen every 21–34 days. Most women (and those who menstruate) have regular periods until around 45–55 years of age. Then, menstrual cycles become less regular before stopping altogether at menopause.
Most women will experience around 400–600 periods over their lifetime, unless their menstrual cycles are suppressed by hormonal contraception.
Two common causes of problematic periods are dysmenorrhea (period pain) and heavy menstrual bleeding.
The most common type of period pain (primary dysmenorrhea) affects around 90% of young women under 25 in Australia.
This type of period pain is often worst during the first two days of bleeding. It is primarily caused by high levels of prostaglandin hormones, which are responsible for cramps. Many women also feel fatigue, dizziness, back pain and headaches.
The stigma and taboo associated with menstruation means many women feel they must work very hard to conceal period problems at work. This labour is usually invisible and exhausting. Some women quit work altogether.
Pain inquiry finds gender bias.
What we did and what we found
Our research aimed to investigate:
how common period pain and other menstrual symptoms are for Australian women in paid employment over 18 years and
the impact of menstruation on work productivity (via presenteeism and absenteeism).
Presenteeism accounts for productivity losses at work while an employee is present but not working at full capacity. It’s like going to work with a migraine: you might be physically present but you aren’t doing your best work.
Absenteeism is being away from work on paid or unpaid sick leave.
We collected data via an online survey of 1,796 Australian working women.
Survey participants were over 18, currently living in Australia and had had at least one period in the last three months. They were in paid employment (including self-employment) and/or volunteering for at least three months.
Our study found that 97% of women who responded had period pain in the last three months, and 75% said they always have period pain when menstruating. Previous research in Australia has found that over 90% of young women report period pain and around 71% worldwide.
Because of this we used more conservative estimates of 90% of women experiencing period pain (high) and 70% experiencing period pain (low) to calculate our range of economic figures for the population.
We estimated lost productivity in Australia associated with menstrual symptoms at A$7,176 per person annually, with an estimated total annual economic burden of $14.005 billion.
Together, presenteeism and absenteeism accounted for 46% of total productivity loss.
And remember, our study only looked at paid employment among full‑time and part‑time workers. The implications for unpaid labour, particularly women’s unpaid care work and its profound economic and social importance, demands further study (which we are progressing).
We also note that the impact of menstruation on the Australian economy is more complex than is established through our current data set, which doesn’t account for things such as the economy-wide costs of medical care and treatment.
In other words, our estimate is conservative.
Why does this matter?
Given the substantive economic impacts demonstrated through our study, menstrual symptom management in the workplace is not a private concern to be managed by individual workers.
Menstrual symptoms affect the broader economy and society. Workplace policies and guidelines are needed to support employees experiencing period pain, fatigue and associated symptoms.
At the workplace level, employers have an opportunity to start a dialogue with staff about changes to workplace conditions that could enhance employee productivity, health and wellbeing.
This could, for instance, include things such as reproductive leave (on top of the usual sick leave provisions), remote and hybrid work arrangements and flexible time management policies (including rest periods).
Our study findings also highlight the significant economic rationale for government to address this workplace issue with laws and policies.
Enshrining minimum standards for workplaces to support employees impacted by menstrual symptoms reduces the burden on individual workplaces to formulate policies and eliminates reliance on senior management’s interest.
If governments and employers want to increase productivity, our research shows the answer could be hiding in plain sight.
Mike Armour receives funding from the MRFF for projects related to menstrual health literacy outside this work.
Michelle O’Shea 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.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s support for resettling Palestinian children orphaned by Israel’s genocide in Gaza barely rates a mention, reports Towards Democracy.
COMMENTARY:By Jeremy Rose
At the beginning of last month, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stood in front of an estimated 600,000 supporters in Zócalo Square and reflected on the achievements of her first year in office and the seven years since the Morena Party, which she heads, came to power.
It was quite a list: 13 million people lifted out of poverty; the minimum wage increased by 125 percent; Indigenous and Afro-Mexican communities allocated budgets to run their own affairs; a locally produced people’s electric car about to roll off production lines; a new fast rail system crossing the country; a national park spanning 5.7 million hectares across Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala; a 37 percent drop in homicides — and on it went.
Sheinbaum is Mexico’s first woman president, its first Jewish president, and a climate scientist who was part of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change team.
In short, she has a story to tell, but it’s not one our media pays enough attention to.
That speech — where she declared the end of neoliberalism in Mexico — barely rated a mention in the world’s English-language press.
The grope that trumped the anti-Trump In fact, Sheinbaum’s extraordinarily popular first year in office — El Paísreports she has an approval rating of over 70% — has been largely ignored by the English-language media, with three notable exceptions: when she was groped by a man on the streets of Mexico City last November, it made front-page news around the globe; a much-hyped series of “Gen Z” protests; and her dignified, and at times witty, responses to bellicose threats to Mexico’s sovereignty from the US president — which have seen her labelled the anti-Trump.
So why the lack of interest? Some possibilities, none of them edifying, spring to mind: if it doesn’t involve violence, Latin America rarely rates a mention in the media; Sheinbaum is a woman; and she’s leftwing.
But for each of those, there’s at least one counter-example that suggests this isn’t always the case.
Argentina’s right-wing libertarian president, Javier Milei, is widely reported on despite coming from a country with little over a third of Mexico’s population and GDP. Milei is a poster boy for right-leaning pundits from Auckland to London.
Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern — leader of a country of just five million people compared to Mexico’s 130 million — was widely reported on while in office, and with the recent publication of her memoir has been the subject of more feature articles in recent months than Sheinbaum has generated in a year in office.
And finally, and perhaps most interestingly, there was the saturation coverage of Zoran Mamdani’s run and eventual victory in the New York mayoral election.
Sheinbaum’s successful campaign to become the equivalent of mayor of Mexico City — with a population significantly larger than New York’s — in 2018 was barely reported, despite running on a similarly leftwing, if notably more ambitious, platform.
Mamdani’s campaign and victory were newsworthy but, on any metric, less significant than Sheinbaum’s time in office.
World’s most popular leader She is arguably the world’s most popular leader, delivering on promises more far-reaching and consequential than anything on offer in the Big Apple.
A promise by Mamdani to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit New York — something he almost certainly cannot deliver on — was widely reported, while Sheinbaum’s support for resettling Palestinian children orphaned by Israel’s genocide in Gaza barely rated a mention. (Mexico has also joined South Africa’s International Court of Justice genocide case against Israel.)
The contrast between the saturation coverage of Mamdani and the paucity of coverage of Sheinbaum holds true for both conservative and liberal media.
The Wall Street Journal ran 50-plus editorials and op-eds criticising Mamdani in the run-up to his election but just three or four on Sheinbaum in her first year in office, all focusing on her alleged failure to tackle violence and the cartels. (In fact, homicides are down, though still extremely high.)
Even Jacobin magazine, one of the few US outlets to provide in-depth coverage of Mexico’s so-called “Fourth Transformation,” has given far more coverage to Mamdani, with a recent podcast declaring New York the epicentre of global socialism.
Whatever the explanation for the scant coverage of Sheinbaum, the achievements and popularity of the Morena movement are worth talking about.
The Donroe Doctrine’s threat to Mexico There’s little doubt we’ll be hearing more about Mexico over the coming months, but the focus will almost certainly be on the threat from the north, not the achievements and promise of the Fourth Transformation.
After the illegal abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on January 3, President Trump turned his sights on Mexico, declaring Sheinbaum to be a “tremendous woman, she’s a very brave woman, but Mexico is run by the cartels”.
Having designated the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels as terrorist organisations at the beginning of his second term in office, Trump had already signalled the possibility of military intervention in Mexico.
Sheinbaum’s response to both the Venezuelan intervention and the implied threat to Mexican sovereignty was resolute and principled:
“We categorically reject intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. The history of Latin America is clear and compelling: intervention has never brought democracy, never generated well-being, nor lasting stability.
“Only the people can build their own future, decide their path, exercise sovereignty over their natural resources, and freely define their form of government.”
Trump has other ideas, recently declaring that the US military could attack the cartels without congressional approval.
“I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war,” he said. “I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.”
Trump has dubbed the new era the Donroe Doctrine — a reference to his regime’s embrace of the Monroe Doctrine, named for President James Monroe, who declared the Western Hemisphere an area of US influence in the 1820s.
200 years of brutal interventions It was the beginning of more than 200 years of brutal interventions by the US state, including a war on Mexico that resulted in the US taking over approximately 1.36 million sq km of Mexican territory — about 55 percent of the country.
Last year Trump hung a portrait of the country’s 11th president James Polk in the White House. Polk was responsible for the Mexican-American war of 1846-1848 which ended with the ceding of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming to the USA, in exchange for $15 million.
Trump has pointed to the portrait and told visitors: “He got a lot of land.”
His play on words with the Donroe Doctrine is characteristically narcissistic but also painfully accurate. It is the geopolitics of a gangster state.
In a world reeling from the criminal actions of that gangster state — from its continued bankrolling of genocide, to the extrajudicial killing of alleged drug smugglers, to SS-like round-ups of “foreigners” on its city streets, to threats to take over the sovereign territory of an ally — Mexico and its president, Claudia Sheinbaum, are a beacon of hope.
There is plenty I haven’t even touched on:
The election of an Indigenous lawyer, Hugo Aguilar Ortiz, as head of the Supreme Court;
The construction of 1.1 million affordable homes over the next six years, generating hundreds of thousands of jobs;
The launch of SaberesMX, a free national online platform designed to democratise access to knowledge and provide lifelong learning opportunities across Mexico; and
Sheinbaum’s daily morning press conferences, where she speaks directly to the nation.
If past experience is anything to go by, the mainstream media’s ignoring of Morena’s successes is unlikely to end any time soon.
The good news is that there are alternatives. Mexico Solidarity Media is a great source of original articles, translations from local media, and podcasts, and Substack writer and former Boston Globe and LA Times journalist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez regularly writes about Mexico from a progressive perspective.
Jeremy Rose is a Wellington-based journalist and broadcaster and his Towards Democracy blog is at Substack. This article was first published at Towards Democracy and is republished with permission.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on January 21, 2026.
Jeremy Rose: Mexico – the revolution isn’t being televised Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s support for resettling Palestinian children orphaned by Israel’s genocide in Gaza barely rates a mention, reports Towards Democracy. COMMENTARY: By Jeremy Rose At the beginning of last month, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum stood in front of an estimated 600,000 supporters in Zócalo Square and reflected on the achievements of her first
Period pain and heavy bleeding cost the Australian economy billions every year in lost productivity: study Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer, School of Business, Western Sydney University Photo by Karola G/Pexels While period pain and heavy menstrual bleeding are common, they’re often dealt with privately. Yet they take a profound toll on a person’s health – and finances. Now, our new study has calculated
We interviewed Australian women who sexually abused children. This is what we learnt Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bricklyn Priebe, Associate Lecturer in Criminology and Justice, School of Law and Society, University of the Sunshine Coast Hoi An and Da Nang Photographer/Unsplash Child sexual abuse cases involving female perpetrators are confronting and distressing. When these cases make the news, they often provoke shock and outrage.
Rob Hirst was not the figurehead of Midnight Oil – but he was its backbone Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Nichols, Professor of Urban Planning, The University of Melbourne The death of Rob Hirst from pancreatic cancer at the age of 70 is the close of a long and, in many ways, surprising career. Hirst was the drummer and songwriter who, though far from the figurehead
Morgan poll has One Nation surging at Coalition’s expense; Trump’s net approval in negative double digits Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne One Nation continues to surge after the Bondi terror attack, as a Morgan poll has them gaining six points at the Coalition’s expense. A national Australian Morgan
New study sheds light on the threat of ‘marine darkwaves’ to ocean life Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By François Thoral, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Marine Ecology, University of Waikato Surfers caught in a marine darkwave. Jean Thoral, CC BY-NC-SA Life in the ocean runs on light. It fuels photosynthesis, shapes food webs and determines where many marine species can live. Gradually, that light is fading.
4.87 tonnes of cocaine seized in French Polynesian waters – bound for Australia RNZ Pacific France’s High Commission in French Polynesia has reported the seizure of 4.87 tonnes of cocaine in its maritime zone. The armed forces in French Polynesia (FAPF), the national gendarmerie and the local branch of the anti-narcotics office (OFAST) were involved in the intercept. A statement from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) have congratulated
A stronger focus on prevention could help governments rein in health care and social spending Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela Jackson, Social Policy Commissioner, Productivity Commission, and Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Tasmania Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images At the start of the new year, many of us will commit to joining a gym, eating healthier or cutting back on drinking and smoking. We
How to cut down on trans fats if cooking from scratch isn’t an option Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Beckett, Senior Lecturer, Nutrition and Food Science, Australian Catholic University RDNE Stock project/Pexels Work is finished, and you’re tired and hungry. Maybe you’re rushing home or to daycare pickup. You know you should be cooking dinner from scratch for the healthiest choice but that isn’t going
A stronger focus on prevention could help governments rein in healthcare and social spending Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela Jackson, Social Policy Commissioner, Productivity Commission, and Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Tasmania Deb Cohn-Orbach/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images At the start of the new year, many of us will commit to joining a gym, eating healthier or cutting back on drinking and smoking. We
What Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story tells us about Mormonism Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brenton Griffin, Academic Status in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Flinders University Netflix The new Netflix documentary Evil Influencer: The Jodi Hildebrandt Story, directed by Skye Borgman, seeks to understand the shocking crimes of both Hildebrandt and business partner Ruby Franke. In 2023, Hildebrandt
How NZ can survive – and even thrive – in Trump’s new world of great-power rivalry Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Ross Smith, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Research on Europe, University of Canterbury Sean Gallup/Getty Images In the wake of the US military intervention in Venezuela and Donald Trump’s repeated threats towards Greenland, a wave of pessimism has swept the western world. For countries wedded
How NZ can survive – and even thrive – in Trump’s new world of great-power rivalry Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Ross Smith, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Research on Europe, University of Canterbury Sean Gallup/Getty Images In the wake of the US military intervention in Venezuela and Donald Trump’s repeated threats towards Greenland, a wave of pessimism has swept the western world. For countries wedded
How NZ can survive – and even thrive – in Trump’s new world of great-power rivalry Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Ross Smith, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Research on Europe, University of Canterbury Sean Gallup/Getty Images In the wake of the US military intervention in Venezuela and Donald Trump’s repeated threats towards Greenland, a wave of pessimism has swept the western world. For countries wedded
How NZ can survive – and even thrive – in Trump’s new world of great-power rivalry Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Ross Smith, Senior Research Fellow, National Centre for Research on Europe, University of Canterbury Sean Gallup/Getty Images In the wake of the US military intervention in Venezuela and Donald Trump’s repeated threats towards Greenland, a wave of pessimism has swept the western world. For countries wedded
The world is in water bankruptcy, UN scientists report – here’s what that means Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kaveh Madani, Director of the Institute for Water, Environment and Health, United Nations University The world is now using so much fresh water amid the consequences of climate change that it has entered an era of water bankruptcy, with many regions no longer able to bounce back
The world is in water bankruptcy, UN scientists report – here’s what that means Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kaveh Madani, Director of the Institute for Water, Environment and Health, United Nations University The world is now using so much fresh water amid the consequences of climate change that it has entered an era of water bankruptcy, with many regions no longer able to bounce back
The world is in water bankruptcy, UN scientists report – here’s what that means Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kaveh Madani, Director of the Institute for Water, Environment and Health, United Nations University The world is now using so much fresh water amid the consequences of climate change that it has entered an era of water bankruptcy, with many regions no longer able to bounce back
The world is in water bankruptcy, UN scientists report – here’s what that means Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kaveh Madani, Director of the Institute for Water, Environment and Health, United Nations University The world is now using so much fresh water amid the consequences of climate change that it has entered an era of water bankruptcy, with many regions no longer able to bounce back
View from The Hill: defiant Nationals break with Liberals over hate bill, putting strain on Coalition Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The Nationals have defied shadow cabinet solidarity, voting in the Senate against the government’s hate crime legislation, which passed late Tuesday night with the support of the Liberals. The Nationals’ action puts new strain on Coalition relations, and is destabilising
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela Jackson, Social Policy Commissioner, Productivity Commission, and Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Tasmania
At the start of the new year, many of us will commit to joining a gym, eating healthier or cutting back on drinking and smoking. We do this knowing that investing in our health today will pay off into to the future – that prevention is better (and cheaper) than the cure.
It’s advice the Productivity Commission thinks federal and state governments should also follow to improve Australia’s finances and productivity.
Late last year, my co-authors and I gave the federal government the final report of our inquiry on delivering quality care more efficiently.
We found preventative investments could save taxpayers billions of dollars in health and social care costs. But to achieve these gains, the way we think about investing in prevention needs to change.
Investing in early intervention
Australia’s spending on health and social care is growing as a share of the economy and now makes up five of the top seven fiscal pressures
facing the federal budget. The care sector is also absorbing more of our workforce – close to one-third of new jobs since the pandemic have been in the care sector.
In many respects this reflects changing preferences. As the nation has become wealthier, we care more about our health and wellbeing. But making the most of this spending is one of Australia’s key productivity challenges.
That means investing early to save costs later. Take for example the SunSmart skin cancer awareness campaign, which is estimated to have prevented more than 43,000 skin cancers from 1988 to 2010.
Investments like this save lives and money. We estimate that an investment of A$1.5 billion across all prevention programs over five years could be expected to save governments $2.7 billion over ten years. Factoring in the broader health, social and economic benefits, the total benefits would be about $5.4 billion.
Other countries are ahead of the game: Canada, the UK and Finland spend over twice as much of their health budgets on prevention as Australia.
Australia’s own health prevention strategy recommends that we increase spending on prevention from 2% to 5% of the health budget.
The big picture
Prevention goes beyond just health care. Investments in youth justice, out of home care and homelessness improve outcomes in a range of other areas, improving Australians’ quality of life and governments’ bottom lines.
For example, when people experiencing homelessness get stable housing, they tend to end up in hospital less often, make fewer trips to the emergency department, and in some cases, even avoid incarceration. It’s also easier to look for and hold down a job when you have a stable place to call home.
Such investments can also address systemic inequities in both access and quality of care.
One early childhood education program in outer Melbourne led to improved IQ and language development among socially disadvantaged Australian children, with participants reaching the same level of development as their peers within three years.
Evaluations of similar initiatives in the United States suggest that benefits can persist well into adulthood and even intergenerationally, through improved lifetime education attainment, employment and health, and reduced criminal behaviour.
A whole of government approach
Unfortunately, the way our government is structured can work against these investments. While it’s often one agency or level of government that needs to put up the money for these investments, they only enjoy part of the benefit.
The way governments think about and invest in prevention and early intervention needs to change. The Productivity Commission’s proposed solution is for a National Prevention and Early Intervention Framework to support strategic investments in programs that improve outcomes and reduce demand for future services.
The framework’s consistent approach to assessing interventions would bring all levels of government to the table, so that worthwhile investments no longer fall between the cracks.
It offers a practical way to put into operation the government’s Measuring What Matters framework. By directing funding towards outcomes and tracking progress against them, it would give federal and state governments confidence that they are investing in effective programs.
Like a person struggling with a new year’s resolution, policymakers often find it hard to delay gratification.
But given health and social care spending is only set to grow further, we need to start thinking long term to ensure we can afford to give future generations the standard of care we enjoy today. With a greater focus on prevention and early intervention, we can better care for future generations and put our care sector on a more sustainable path.
Angela Jackson is the Social Policy Commissioner at the Productivity Commission, as well as the chair of the Women in Economics Network. She has previously served on the board of Melbourne Health, which operates Royal Melbourne Hospital.
Work is finished, and you’re tired and hungry. Maybe you’re rushing home or to daycare pickup.
You know you should be cooking dinner from scratch for the healthiest choice but that isn’t going to happen for a variety of reasons. You just need something quick and easy.
Then, you remember those headlines about trans fats in some packaged convenience foods and you start to worry.
If this feels familiar, here’s what you need to know.
Unsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature. Saturated fats are solid at room temperature. It’s the saturated fats that are associated with health concerns as they can raise LDL (aka “bad”) cholesterol and increase inflammation.
Trans fats are technically unsaturated fats. But a slight difference in their molecular arrangement means they act more like saturated fats – in foods and the body.
Which foods have trans fats?
Small amounts of trans fats occur naturally in some animal foods, such as red meat and dairy. They can also be created when oils are heated to very high temperatures, such as with commercial deep-frying.
But most trans fats in our diets are “industrial” trans fats. These are made when unsaturated fats are deliberately turned into trans fats by a process called hydrogenation. This makes them act more like saturated fats – improving shelf life, taste and texture.
Industrial trans fats can be ingredients in pre-packaged foods such as shelf-stable cakes, pastries, fried savoury snacks and some frozen foods.
Why should we be cutting down on trans fats?
Initially, industrial trans fats were regarded as an innovation as they allowed manufacturers to replace expensive, unhealthy saturated fats.
But we now know trans fats don’t just act like saturated fats in foods. They also act like saturated fats in the body, raising LDL cholesterol and causing inflammation. This ultimately increases the risk of cardiovascular diseases (such as heart attacks and strokes) even if you don’t eat much of them.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends we keep trans fats to less than 1% of our total energy intake (which is about 2.2 grams per day if you are eating a standard 8,000 kilojoule diet). That means eating less than about four 300g serves of frozen lasagne a day.
Some countries have introduced regulations to limit the levels of trans fats allowed in foods. The WHO recommends foods contain no more than 2g of trans fats per 100g of total fats. This hasn’t happened in Australia despite some calls for it.
Because “industrial” trans fats are typically found in prepackaged discretionary foods (such as shelf-stable pastries, cakes and biscuits) and convenience foods (such as frozen meals), it’s tempting to revert to the simplified “just eat fresh whole foods and cook from scratch” style of recommendation.
But cooking from scratch may not be realistic
However, for many people, cooking every meal from scratch isn’t practical, affordable or enjoyable. But there are practical and meaningful ways to eat less trans fats even when eating convenience and discretionary foods, without changing your whole lifestyle or becoming a chef.
When shopping for snacks, frozen or other pre-packaged convenience products, check the labels for trans fats. But this can be a bit tricky as they’re not always mentioned, or may be called something else.
In Australia, it’s not mandatory to include trans fats on food labels, unless a manufacturer makes nutrition or health claim about fats or cholesterol. If this is the case, trans fat needs to be listed on the nutrition information panel.
The rest of the time, the trans fat content does not have to be listed, but manufacturers might declare it voluntarily.
You can also look for “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” in the ingredients list.
However, manufacturers only have to declare hydrogenation if a specific vegetable oil is listed. If the ingredient is generic “vegetable oil”, the manufacturer doesn’t have to specify whether that oil has been hydrogenated.
So, for certainty, look for products that specifically list the unsaturated fats they use as ingredients (for instance, canola oil, sunflower oil or olive oil), as these would have to include the extra detail.
Don’t stress about cooking with oils at home, as they don’t get hot enough to produce a meaningful amount of trans fats. Most margarines and shortenings in Australia have now been reformulated to have little to no trans fats.
If you are ordering takeaways or fast foods, deep frying at high temperatures can lead to a modest increase in trans fats. Choosing outlets that use liquid vegetable oils reduces this risk. Most fast-food chains in Australia use high-oleic canola oils or blends that don’t contain trans fats.
We don’t need to turn into chefs overnight
At the end of the day, trans fats are not necessary, nor are they health-promoting.
But we don’t need to overhaul our lives, cook every meal from scratch or track every gram of fat we eat.
With a little bit of label-reading, a few simple swaps, and a general pattern of choosing foods made with plant-based oils instead of solid fats can give you the confidence you are minimising your exposure to trans fats.
Emma Beckett has in past years received funding for research or payment for consulting from Mars Foods, Nutrition Research Australia, FOODiQ Global, NHMRC, ARC, AMP Foundation, Kelloggs, Hort Innovation, and the a2 milk company. She is the author of ‘You Are More Than What You Eat’. She is a member of committees/working groups related to nutrition and food, including with the Australian Academy of Science and the National Health and Medical Research Council. She is a Registered Nutritionist, and a member of the Nutrition Society of Australia and the Australian Institute of Food Science and Technology.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela Jackson, Social Policy Commissioner, Productivity Commission, and Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Tasmania
At the start of the new year, many of us will commit to joining a gym, eating healthier or cutting back on drinking and smoking. We do this knowing that investing in our health today will pay off into to the future – that prevention is better (and cheaper) than the cure.
It’s advice the Productivity Commission thinks federal and state governments should also follow to improve Australia’s finances and productivity.
Late last year, my co-authors and I gave the federal government the final report of our inquiry on delivering quality care more efficiently.
We found preventative investments could save taxpayers billions of dollars in health and social care costs. But to achieve these gains, the way we think about investing in prevention needs to change.
Investing in early intervention
Australia’s spending on health and social care is growing as a share of the economy and now makes up five of the top seven fiscal pressures
facing the federal budget. The care sector is also absorbing more of our workforce – close to one-third of new jobs since the pandemic have been in the care sector.
In many respects this reflects changing preferences. As the nation has become wealthier, we care more about our health and wellbeing. But making the most of this spending is one of Australia’s key productivity challenges.
That means investing early to save costs later. Take for example the SunSmart skin cancer awareness campaign, which is estimated to have prevented more than 43,000 skin cancers from 1988 to 2010.
Investments like this save lives and money. We estimate that an investment of A$1.5 billion across all prevention programs over five years could be expected to save governments $2.7 billion over ten years. Factoring in the broader health, social and economic benefits, the total benefits would be about $5.4 billion.
Other countries are ahead of the game: Canada, the UK and Finland spend over twice as much of their health budgets on prevention as Australia.
Australia’s own health prevention strategy recommends that we increase spending on prevention from 2% to 5% of the health budget.
The big picture
Prevention goes beyond just health care. Investments in youth justice, out of home care and homelessness improve outcomes in a range of other areas, improving Australians’ quality of life and governments’ bottom lines.
For example, when people experiencing homelessness get stable housing, they tend to end up in hospital less often, make fewer trips to the emergency department, and in some cases, even avoid incarceration. It’s also easier to look for and hold down a job when you have a stable place to call home.
Such investments can also address systemic inequities in both access and quality of care.
One early childhood education program in outer Melbourne led to improved IQ and language development among socially disadvantaged Australian children, with participants reaching the same level of development as their peers within three years.
Evaluations of similar initiatives in the United States suggest that benefits can persist well into adulthood and even intergenerationally, through improved lifetime education attainment, employment and health, and reduced criminal behaviour.
A whole of government approach
Unfortunately, the way our government is structured can work against these investments. While it’s often one agency or level of government that needs to put up the money for these investments, they only enjoy part of the benefit.
The way governments think about and invest in prevention and early intervention needs to change. The Productivity Commission’s proposed solution is for a National Prevention and Early Intervention Framework to support strategic investments in programs that improve outcomes and reduce demand for future services.
The framework’s consistent approach to assessing interventions would bring all levels of government to the table, so that worthwhile investments no longer fall between the cracks.
It offers a practical way to put into operation the government’s Measuring What Matters framework. By directing funding towards outcomes and tracking progress against them, it would give federal and state governments confidence that they are investing in effective programs.
Like a person struggling with a new year’s resolution, policymakers often find it hard to delay gratification.
But given health and social care spending is only set to grow further, we need to start thinking long term to ensure we can afford to give future generations the standard of care we enjoy today. With a greater focus on prevention and early intervention, we can better care for future generations and put our care sector on a more sustainable path.
Angela Jackson is the Social Policy Commissioner at the Productivity Commission, as well as the chair of the Women in Economics Network. She has previously served on the board of Melbourne Health, which operates Royal Melbourne Hospital.
France’s High Commission in French Polynesia has reported the seizure of 4.87 tonnes of cocaine in its maritime zone.
The armed forces in French Polynesia (FAPF), the national gendarmerie and the local branch of the anti-narcotics office (OFAST) were involved in the intercept.
A statement from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) have congratulated authorities in French Polynesia over the reported seizure, with the drugs reportedly bound for Australia.
Gulf News reported the cocaine was being transported on a ship sailing under Togo’s flag, according to a source close to the investigation.
AFP commander Stephen Jay said police staff posted in the Pacific, and members of Taskforce Thunder, would seek to work with French Polynesia authorities to identify people linked to the seizure.
Taskforce Thunder, launched in October, targets illicit commodities and the forced movement of people through the Pacific.
Jay said the AFP was committed to working closely with its law enforcement partners to deliver maximum impact against transnational criminal syndicates targeting Australia, the Pacific and throughout Europe.
‘Exceptional work’ “I would like to thank the exceptional work of our partners in French Polynesia, who have prevented a significant amount of illicit drugs from reaching Australia,” Jay said.
“The harm caused by organised crime syndicates attempting to import illicit drugs into Australia is significant, and extends beyond individual users to a myriad of violent and exploitative crimes.”
Australian Border Force acting commander Linda Cappello said Australia’s strongest defence against transnational organised crime was the depth of its relationships across the Pacific and beyond.
“For those seeking to exploit maritime and supply chains to move illicit drugs the message is clear: coordinated vigilance across the region significantly increases the risk of detection and disruption.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Alarming as this picture is, focusing only on gradual darkening may miss the most ecologically damaging part of the story.
Our newly published study introduces the phenomenon of “marine darkwaves”: sudden, intense episodes of underwater darkness that can last from days to months and push marine ecosystems into acute stress.
Darkness events are often triggered by storms, floods, sediment plumes or algal blooms. As with marine heatwaves, these short, intense episodes can be just as ecologically disruptive as slow, long-term trends.
Unusual underwater darkness is harmful for a range of marine ecosystems, yet the phenomenon did not have a name and definition until the marine darkwave framework was developed. Artwork of a darkened algal forest by Cassandre Villautreix, underwater picture by Leigh Tait.
Why light matters underwater
When light within the ocean drops suddenly, even for a few days, marine ecosystems can suffer. Prolonged darkness can slow growth, reduce energy reserves and in severe cases lead to dieback or mortality.
Fish, sharks and marine mammals can also change their behaviour when visibility drops, altering feeding and movement patterns.
Until now, scientists have examined ways to track long-term coastal darkening but have lacked a consistent way to identify, measure and compare extreme short-term light-loss events across regions and depths.
In other words, we have known this phenomenon exists – but we haven’t had a shared language to define and describe it. With marine darkwaves, we now have an event-based framework for extreme underwater darkness.
Darkwaves occur when underwater light falls below a depth-specific threshold for a minimum duration, relative to what is normally expected at that location. This allows scientists to identify when conditions shift from merely dim to unusually dark.
Importantly, this framework works across different depths, where light conditions naturally vary; across local to regional scales, from coastal reefs to entire coastlines; and across multiple data sources, including light sensors and satellite observations.
Its consistency enables meaningful comparison of events that were previously difficult to place into broader contexts.
What our research revealed
Our study used long-term datasets from both hemispheres in markedly different coastal regions.
In California, 16 years of underwater light measurements revealed repeated darkwave events, some lasting several weeks. In Aotearoa New Zealand, ten years of monitoring data from Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf showed rapid drops in underwater light during storms, at depths of seven and 20 metres.
Satellite data extending back 21 years revealed a broader pattern. Along New Zealand’s East Cape coast, up to 80 marine darkwaves have occurred since 2002, most linked to storms and river-driven sediment plumes.
Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 provided a stark example. The storm delivered vast amounts of sediment to coastal waters, smothering many reefs and creating prolonged underwater darkness over large areas.
In some places, the seabed received almost no light for several weeks.
Heavy sediment runoff around Waihau Bay, in New Zealand’s Eastern Bay of Plenty. This was observed following Cyclone Gabrielle on February 14, 2023 – an event that created marine darkwaves for several weeks, with continuing ecological impacts. Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), CC BY-NC-SA
Long-term averages are important, but they can smooth over the very events that cause the greatest ecological damage.
Just as a single marine heatwave can devastate kelp forests and coral reefs, a single marine darkwave can sharply reduce photosynthesis and disrupt ecosystems already stressed by warming, acidification and nutrient pollution.
Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and intensity of these events. Heavier rainfall, stronger storms and intensified land use all increase sediment and organic matter flowing into coastal waters, reducing water clarity and light availability.
Our framework allows identification of discrete periods when light thresholds critical for ecosystem function are crossed.
By focusing on extremes, it provides clearer insights into acute stress on coastal ecosystems. In New Zealand particularly, this information is increasingly important for iwi (tribes) and hapū (sub-tribes), coastal communities, conservation groups and environmental managers making decisions about land use, restoration and marine protection.
Related monitoring work is already underway in parts of New Zealand, where expanded sensor networks aid in linking land-based processes to changes in underwater light, and linking these to ecological changes on coastal reefs.
Ultimately, marine darkwaves remind us that the ocean doesn’t always change slowly. Sometimes, it changes abruptly and quietly if we don’t pay attention.
There is also reason for cautious optimism. Many marine darkwaves are driven by land–sea connections, so their frequency and intensity are not inevitable.
Reducing sediment runoff through nature-based solutions, such as restoring wetlands, stabilising riverbanks, improving harvest techniques of exotic forests, and replanting native forests in vulnerable catchments can directly increase water clarity and underwater light.
Understanding marine darkwaves is not only about detecting change, but also about identifying practical pathways to protect coastal ecosystems before further darkness descends.
The authors acknowledge the contribution of Rahera Ohia, Ngāti Pūkenga, Jean Thoral, Leigh Tait and Cassandre Villautreix.
François Thoral receives funding from the NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment MBIE (Endeavour Fund Tau Ki Ākau UOWX2206). He is affiliated with the University of Waikato, University of Canterbury and Earth Sciences New Zealand.
Christopher Battershill receives funding from the NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment MBIE (Endeavour Fund Tau Ki Ākau UOWX2206 is relevant to this project). He is employed with the University of Waikato and also receives contestable grant funding from other agencies (eg Regional Councils and Department of Conservation).
David R Schiel receives funding from the New Zealand government public good research fund (via the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment; Endeavour Fund Tau Ki Ākau UOWX2206).
Shinae Montie receives funding from The Australian Research Council and the Winifred Violet Scott Charitable Trust. She is associated with the University of Western Australia.
