Category: Evening Report

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ali Mamouri, Research Fellow, Middle East Studies, Deakin University

The Trump administration claims its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz is working, with nine ships complying with orders to turn around.

One of those was a Chinese-owned tanker called the Rich Starry that turned around in the Gulf of Oman on Wednesday to head back through the strait.

Iran, meanwhile, maintains it still has control over the strait and it will determine which ships transit through the crucial waterway. It also said if its ports are threatened, “no port in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman will remain safe”.

No matter how the blockade plays out, Iran will be in a far better position in the long term when it comes to maintaining control over the strait – not the US.

Iran’s powerful new tool

For decades, Iran had threatened to use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage against its adversaries. It avoided doing so, however, until the current war against the United States and Israel, which it sees as existential.

Ironically, while the US and Israel aimed to weaken Iran’s nuclear and missile capabilities, the conflict has given Tehran a powerful new tool – control of the strait.

Tehran is now likely to make this control a core part of its long-term strategic thinking. In fact, Iran’s negotiators in the recent peace talks with the US had added Iranian sovereignty over the strait to their list of demands.

This leverage serves at least three key purposes.

First, it provides significant revenue potential from the tolls and transit fees it is already charging ships going through the strait.

By imposing minimal transit-related costs — estimated at around US$1 per barrel or up to US$2 million (A$2.8 million) per tanker — Iran could reportedly generate some US$600 million (A$836 million) per month from oil and another US$800 million (A$1.1 billion) per month from gas shipments.

Economists say at least 80% of the tolls would be paid by the Persian Gulf states – or as much as US$14 billion (A$20 billion) a year on oil alone.

Second, the strait functions as a security guarantee. By demonstrating its ability to disrupt a critical global energy artery, Iran has raised the cost of any future military action against it. This creates deterrence through economic risk rather than purely military means.

Third, it gives Iran geopolitical leverage, particularly with countries in the Global South. Control over the strait allows Iran to bargain with energy-dependent states, encouraging them to circumvent US sanctions on the regime and deepen economic engagement in exchange for concessions accessing the strait.

The US is now trying to neutralise Iran’s leverage over the strait. Yet, this “siege of a siege” faces clear structural limitations.

For one, Iran’s control over the strait is much easier to maintain than a US blockade in international waters. Even with allied support (which has yet to materialise), the US would struggle to restrict access to the strait for an extended period. Such an effort would be highly costly for the US military and would have significant consequences for the global economy.

In this sense, Hormuz risks becoming America’s Suez moment — a strategic chokepoint that reveals the limits of power rather than its reach.

How will China react?

But could China, which buys more than 80% of Iran’s oil, play a role in pressuring Iran to relax its control over the strait?

It has not done yet, and is unlikely to do. So far, China is blaming the US and rejecting its blockade.

In fact, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun used forceful language this week, calling the blockade “dangerous and irresponsible”.

Although one Chinese tanker has been turned around, others have transited through the new “tollbooth” system in recent days. This is an indication of China’s need and willingness to abide by Iran’s new rules – at least for the moment.

While China is exposed to the US blockade – about 40% of its oil imports come through the waterway – it has prepared for this moment.

It has diversified its oil imports to avoid being too reliant on any one supplier. And China is believed to have enough petroleum reserves to replace imports via the strait for up to seven months.

Still, it remains to be seen if China would support a toll system in the long term. Despite Beijing’s silence so far, some experts believe it would oppose this. China has repeatedly stressed the need to return to “normal passage” through the strait as soon as possible.

China’s expanding role in the region

China also stands to benefit from the political shifts that could come after the war.

The war has pushed the Gulf states toward a shared realisation that alignment with the US and partnership with Israel do not necessarily guarantee their security.

As a result, they may seek to diversify their relationships. This is reflected in the crown prince of Abu Dhabi’s visit to Beijing this week.

Trade between the Gulf states and China has grown significantly, with total exchanges reaching approximately US$257 billion (A$358 billion) in 2024, narrowly surpassing the Gulf’s combined trade with major Western economies.

China is also expanding its diplomatic footprint in the region, helping to mediate the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran in 2023 to normalise relations and playing an indirect role in the recent Pakistan talks between Iran and the US to end the war. It clearly sees a bigger role in the region in the future.

Looking ahead, Iran may seek to leverage this moment to pursue a more regionally based security framework with the Gulf states, potentially with China acting as a guarantor or facilitator. Such a development would mark a significant departure from the longstanding US role as the primary security provider in the region.

– ref. Iran has a powerful new tool in the Strait of Hormuz that it can leverage long after the war – https://theconversation.com/iran-has-a-powerful-new-tool-in-the-strait-of-hormuz-that-it-can-leverage-long-after-the-war-280442

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/iran-has-a-powerful-new-tool-in-the-strait-of-hormuz-that-it-can-leverage-long-after-the-war-280442/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Murat Ungor, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Otago

New Zealand and Australia like to think of themselves as food powerhouses.

But right now, a war in the Middle East and China’s fertiliser export restrictions are exposing a dangerous blind spot: their farms depend on imported fertiliser, and they have no plan for when it stops arriving.

As much as fertiliser might seem like a background detail in farming, it isn’t. Fertilisers supply the nutrients – mainly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium – that help crops grow faster and animals feed better.

New Zealand is one of the world’s largest exporters of dairy, beef and veal. Australia exports around 70% of what it grows. Without fertiliser, those exports shrink. Without exports, the entire economy will feel the impacts.

For these neighbouring nations and other major agricultural players, the big problem is that fertiliser production is concentrated in just a handful of countries.

More than 80% of countries import at least 75% of the fertiliser they use. That means a disruption anywhere in the supply chain – whether from a war, a trade ban, a blocked shipping lane – affects everyone.

The world’s fertiliser highway is under threat

For shipping imports, the most serious chokepoint right now is the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula. It carries about a quarter of all seaborne oil, along with large quantities of natural gas and fertiliser.

The ongoing US-Israel conflict with Iran has put this passage under serious threat. When cut off, by Iran or a US counter-blockade, supplies risk being halted for weeks or months.

Unfortunately for those countries needing fertiliser, the Gulf region dominates the market. Between 2023 and 2025, Gulf countries, led by Iran, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, supplied 36% of all global exports of urea, the most widely used nitrogen fertiliser in New Zealand and worldwide.

And because urea is made from natural gas, when gas prices rise – as they have since the war escalated – it becomes more expensive, too. Consumers ultimately pay the price at the supermarket checkout.

On top of this, China, another of the largest producers in the market, has restricted its fertiliser exports. This also sends global prices up and availability down.

Unsurprisingly, the world’s top economic bodies are growing increasingly alarmed at the situation.

Earlier this month, the heads of the International Energy Agency, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank met to coordinate their response. Their joint statement is direct: the war “has led to higher oil, gas and fertiliser prices, triggering concerns about food security”.

The IMF’s freshly-issued “Global Prospects and Policies” report warns that food security “could be threatened, with disruptions to fertiliser markets ahead of the planting season leading to substantial food price inflation”.

In essence, farmers need fertiliser most just before they plant their crops. If it does not arrive on time, or arrives at a much higher price, harvests will be smaller, resulting in higher supermarket prices.

We have a potential crisis – but what about a plan?

Chief executive of Eat New Zealand Angela Clifford has been asking for years what the country’s food security plan actually is. She recently warned that New Zealand tends to “lurch from crises to crises without doing the work in between times to make us more resilient for the next time”.

Australia’s peak grain body, GrainGrowers, has meanwhile called on its government to set up a fertiliser taskforce, create strategic reserves and diversify suppliers.

Certainly, there are things that could be done differently to provide more stability.

Biofertilisers, which use living micro-organisms in the soil to help plants access nutrients naturally, offer one alternative to the status quo. They are less dependent on global supply chains and gentler on the environment. AgroBioTechNZ argues they represent a genuine path forward.

There is also a long-term opportunity in producing urea locally from green hydrogen.

The government-industry Kapuni Project – a first-of-its-kind effort to combine wind energy, renewable electricity and green hydrogen production – is one case in point. Due to begin operating in 2027, it will augment natural gas feedstock at the urea plant to produce “greener” nitrogen fertilisers and lower emissions.

The fertiliser challenge now facing New Zealand’s all-important agricultural sector isn’t new. Fertiliser prices spiked after the COVID-19 pandemic and again after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

New Zealand’s geography and exposure to extreme weather events add yet another layer of risk to an already fragile food supply chain. Experts have called for a national food strategy. But nothing has happened.

The war in the Middle East and major exporters’ trade restrictions are the latest warning in a long line. The question, once more, is whether New Zealand acts this time or simply waits for the next costly crisis.

– ref. The Middle East crisis has exposed NZ to a global fertiliser shock. Where is its plan? – https://theconversation.com/the-middle-east-crisis-has-exposed-nz-to-a-global-fertiliser-shock-where-is-its-plan-280262

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/the-middle-east-crisis-has-exposed-nz-to-a-global-fertiliser-shock-where-is-its-plan-280262/

RNZ Pacific

Ten people have died in a landslide in Gazelle district in Papua New Guinea’s East New Britain Province following continuous heavy rain, according to local news media reports.

The disaster occurred after the Toriu River burst its banks after intense rainfall and severe weather conditions experienced across the region over the past few days due to Cylcone Maila.

Local media is reporting that the incident happened on Sunday in the Gazelle Baining Local Level Government area.

The Post-Courier reports the victims included a five-month-pregnant woman and three toddlers.

Provincial Administrator Levi Mano said the landslide was a result of adverse weather conditions brought by the cyclone.

Gazelle MP Jelta Wong confirmed the deaths.

Wong said recovery teams faced challenges reaching the disaster area because of its remoteness, but the recovery was eventually successful.

According to the Post-Courier, East New Britain Governor Michael Marum visited the site by helicopter to inspect the damage and coordinate relief supplies.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/deadly-landslide-claims-10-lives-in-pngs-east-new-britain-reports-local-media/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hal Swerissen, Emeritus Professor of Public Health, La Trobe University

The way Australians are assessed for home-based aged-care funding is being investigated by the Commonwealth ombudsman.

Critics say assessment for funding under the Support at Home program is flawed, leaving some older people unable to access the right level of care they need to safely live at home.

Complaints about the process are increasing significantly. Even an expert who helped design the system is unhappy.

Here’s why the Commonwealth should reconsider its approach.

What’s the key issue?

The new Support at Home program was introduced in 2025. One of its aims is to support more Australians to remain at home rather than moving into residential aged care.

When an older person wants to join the program, they are assessed in an interview with a structured digital assessment known as the “Integrated Assessment Tool”. This tool assesses the support they need – physical, cognitive and psychosocial. It also assesses the urgency and the level of assistance required.

An algorithm then analyses the answers and determines Support at Home funding levels.

To be useful, assessments need to predict the actual service levels required for high-quality outcomes for older people with different levels of need.

In developing assessment tools, the gold standard is to first conduct a large number of assessments to see what kind of care older people need, and at what level. The next stage is to determine if the services actually provided produce high-quality outcomes for people with different levels of need.

But there is no publicly available evidence this has been done.

Instead, a second-best option was adopted. Experts gave a score to estimate what level of support someone would need based on answers to assessments.

But there is room for expert disagreement even when they use well developed tools.

The Integrated Assessment Tool includes 11 separate validated tools, each with an inherent error rate. These error rates compound when they are combined.

Worse, given there are no studies of the extent to which integrated assessments predict actual services and outcomes, it is difficult to say how good the algorithm is. Lack of transparency means it’s a black box, which is why the ombudsman’s inquiry is welcome.

This is particularly true because funding determined by the algorithm may be systematically lower than funding determined by experts. This means elderly people may have their cognitive, safety and complex care needs underestimated.

How about human oversight?

Despite the limitations and against expert advice, the Commonwealth has explicitly removed the power to manually override the algorithm’s allocation of support levels. The idea is for the algorithm to provide consistent results for thousands of older people.

However, this approach has a number of serious potential consequences.

The Support at Home Program has eight levels of support ranging from A$10,731 a year for level 1 (the most basic support) to $78,106 a year for level 8 (the highest level of support).

If the algorithm allocates one level of support higher or lower than what a person actually needs, this can mean a difference of between $5,300 and $20,000 a year depending on the level.

Appeals are increasing

If an older person or their family wants to question the funding allocation, they can appeal. But they often don’t know the specific reasoning behind the scoring that led to their allocation. And the appeals process can be cumbersome and stressful.

Some 800 older people have requested a review of their assessment since the introduction of the new system.

The Older Persons Advocacy Network says requests for information and advocacy have gone up by 50% in the three months in the same period.

One of the system’s designers, Lynda Henderson, said she felt “fury” that the tool she helped design has been turned into a prescriptive algorithm.

What needs to happen next?

The Robodebt Royal Commission warned government agencies that automated systems must ensure transparency, fairness and human oversight.

But this has not happened when assessing individuals’ circumstances for home-based aged-care funding.

The best approach is to use the algorithm as a guide for making individual decisions about older people’s support needs and to allow assessors to override the algorithm when the circumstances warrant it.

Systems-level data should then be used to refine the algorithm and provide guidance to assessors as the system matures.

– ref. Australia’s aged care algorithm is under fire. At last, someone’s listening – https://theconversation.com/australias-aged-care-algorithm-is-under-fire-at-last-someones-listening-280712

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/australias-aged-care-algorithm-is-under-fire-at-last-someones-listening-280712/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annabel Blake, PhD Candidate, Human-Computer Interaction, University of Sydney

In 2022, the founders of chatbot startup Character.AI launched a platform where anyone could create interactive characters powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

The app exploded, quickly growing to more than 20 million users who created more than 10 million chatbot characters.

Many of the users creating those characters were young people – until they weren’t. In November 2025, under mounting public and legal pressure surrounding youth suicides linked to its use, Character.AI banned users under 18. The decision was made after a number of attempts to improve youth safety, including parental controls and stricter content filters.

The ban is an attempt to keep teens safe from potential harm. But the more creative, playful and emotionally expressive AI experiments they were doing have also been silenced.

Our new research, published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference 2026, captures and preserves the new ways youth are experimenting with AI, so that we can build towards something better.

What do teens actually use AI chatbots for?

In 2026, three in ten US teenagers use AI daily. The idea of using AI for companionship has dominated media headlines and app stores, with hundreds of apps on offer.

Media coverage of AI companions taps into two primary fears. One is that young people will replace human friendships with AI. The other is that engaging with sycophantic chatbots instead of real people will result in teens losing their social skills.

These concerns are important. But companionship accounts for a surprisingly small share of why young people actually use AI. A recent Pew Research Center survey found the top uses by teens are seeking information (57%), doing homework (54%) and “for fun” (47%). Only a small percentage (12%) used AI for emotional support or advice. Romance and loneliness alleviation frequently rank among the lowest motivations for teen AI use: 4–6% and 8–11%, respectively.

When the public narrative almost exclusively frames AI chatbots as companions, it risks overlooking the bulk of how teenagers spend their time with AI.

Our team set out to understand what young people choose to do with AI when they’re free to use it outside of school contexts – seeking fun, messing around, and creating characters of their own design.

AI as entertainment

Before the ban, Character.AI was a popular “AI entertainment” destination for young people. It still has a viral TikTok channel, and has characters from popular youth media, from Peppa Pig to Call of Duty.

Our team spent more than eight months, between July 2024 and March 2025, immersed in Character.AI’s official community on online chat platform Discord, with more than 500,000 members. We systematically analysed 2,236 posts by young people aged 13–17. Of those users the majority, 68.2%, identified as female or non-binary; and 59% had created their own AI characters.

Through an analysis of youth discussion on the platform, we identified three core intents behind engagement with Character.AI: restoration, exploration and transformation.

Restoration

my favourite period comfort bot is Percy Jackson

Young people used characters for emotional comfort, venting, escapism and mood management. Rather than mirroring a formal clinical practice, we observed youth discussing “comfort bots” where young people engaged in soft, tender and gentle roleplay with familiar characters.

Beloved book characters would comfort people on their period, or characters from popular comics would give someone a pep talk for an upcoming math test.

Exploration

Character.AI has helped me find that creative spark within myself

Young people explored boundaries, engaged in creative world-building, and extended their fandoms. One teen wrote a three-book-long saga through character interactions. Another created a troupe of travelling theatre characters inspired by their love of theatre. They reported this use transferred skills into the real world, boosting creativity and improving their writing.

Transformation

I have characters who struggle with mental health issues and I tend to project on my personas during RP [roleplay]

Young people used AI to try on different identities, process real-life relationships, and re-author difficult real-life scenarios. Some people created “clones” of themselves, with superpowers or self-affirming versions of themselves.

Inspired by reality, they discussed creating characters that reflected real-world challenging relationships, such as “toxic friends”, “annoying sister”, or “foster care agent”.

Characters created with purpose

We also mapped seven distinct character archetypes young people were creating and discussing:

• Soother – emotionally supportive figures
• Narrator – a cast of characters for roleplays
• Trickster – jesting, testing and transgressive chats
• Icon – remixed celebrities or fandom figures
• Dark Soul – angsty, emotionally complex characters
• Proxy – modelled after real people in their lives, and
• Mirror – clones of the self.

These archetypes are a central finding of our research. Instead of sycophantic or romantic chatbot engagement, young people are purposefully creating characters that are angsty, transgressive, playful, creative and reflective.

This shows we need to stop treating “companion AI” as if it’s one homogeneous thing. Treating AI chatbots as a single category is like treating all screen time as the same experience, whether a child is watching Bluey with family or doomscrolling short-form content at night, alone on their phone when they should be sleeping.

Towards better chatbots

The American Academy of Paediatrics recently shifted screen-time guidelines from set time limits to a framework that accounts for the individual child, their use, family relationships and their environment.

The same logic should apply to AI chatbots. This means moving beyond asking adults about their child’s use of AI, testing AI products with fake accounts that assume certain use cases, and banning access before listening to young people – their experiences, their experiments and their ideas for the future.

Banning is a reaction to bad design, but it doesn’t lead to better, safer AI products for teens.

The answer is not to permanently keep young people away from AI. Rather, it’s to build AI that deserves their trust, fosters their creativity and keeps them grounded in the physical world with families, friendships and communities.

– ref. How do teens really use AI companions? With more creativity than you might think – https://theconversation.com/how-do-teens-really-use-ai-companions-with-more-creativity-than-you-might-think-278532

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/how-do-teens-really-use-ai-companions-with-more-creativity-than-you-might-think-278532/

COMMENTARY: By Lim Tean

Most of Iranian oil — 96.7 percent — is destined for China. If you note this figure, you will realise that the Americans are really trying to choke off the supply of Iranian oil to China by blockading the Strait of Hormuz.

This is a major part of the American containment strategy against China.

Now that America will most likely lose control of the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, they are shifting their attention to the other most critical chokepoint in the world — the Strait of Malacca.

About 80 percent of China’s imported oil has to pass through the Strait of Malacca. Vessels come down the Strait, sail past Singapore which is at the southernmost tip of the Strait, before they swing upwards into the South China Sea to go to the Philippines and East Asia, including China.

The two most important countries which border the Malacca Strait are Indonesia and Malaysia, one on either side of the Strait.

A very interesting development took place on Monday in Washington when the Defence Minister of Indonesia Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin signed a cooperation agreement with US War Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Speculation on details
People are speculating about the details of the agreement:

• Will it allow the Americans to base troops in Indonesia and use Indonesian airspace for their air assets?
• Will American naval vessels be allowed to dock at the old Dutch port of Belawan, near Medan, in Northern Sumatra, which is near the opening to the Strait?
• Will the Malacca Strait now become the focal point in this great power struggle between America and China?
• What will Indonesia’s other BRICs partners, principally China and Russia think of Indonesia’s move in signing this agreement with the Americans?

To spice things up, Indonesian President Probowo Subianto was in Moscow a few days ago meeting with President Putin.

Lim Tean is a Singaporean lawyer, politician and commentator. He is the founder of the political party People’s Voice and a co-founder of the political alliance People’s Alliance for Reform.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/trumps-naval-blockade-of-strait-of-hormuz-actually-targets-china/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Beers, Professor of History, American University

At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest check as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement Bartz v. Anthropic.

In 2025, the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, best known for creating the chatbot Claude, agreed to pay up to US$1.5 billion to thousands of authors after a judge ruled that the company had infringed upon their copyrights.

When I first learned about the settlement, I assumed that Anthropic was primarily interested in teaching Claude about the subject of my stolen work, former socialist activist, British Labour politician and feminist Ellen Wilkinson.

It did not initially occur to me that Claude might also be learning about how I, Laura Beers, political historian, craft my sentences and translate my voice to the page.

Yet there is increasing evidence that chatbots like Claude can be trained not only to regurgitate an author’s content, but also to mimic their voice. In March 2026, journalist Julia Angwin filed a class action suit against the owners of Grammarly, alleging that the company misappropriated her and other writers’ identities to build its “Expert Review” AI tool, which offers to give editorial feedback in the voices of various authors, living and dead.

That a machine might use my writing not only to learn about my subject matter, but also to analyze and ultimately mimic my authorial voice, points to a future that George Orwell envisioned with eerie prescience. In his 1949 dystopian novel “1984,” Orwell imagined “novel-writing machines” capable of mass-producing literature, employing programmed mechanical “kaleidoscopes” as substitutes for individual artistic process.

‘In place of a human mind, a statistical average’

To what extent, I wondered, could Claude mimic my own voice?

I prompted the chatbot to write an essay “in the style of Laura Beers” about an early 20th-century politician. I struggled to recognize myself in the resulting prose. But maybe Claude, having only consumed one of my books, didn’t have enough to go on to really nail my tone.

I decided to try again. This time, I would ask it to write a brief essay in the style of Orwell. The subject of my book “Orwell’s Ghosts: Wisdom and Warnings for the Twenty-First Century,” Orwell is one of the most distinctive literary essayists and prose stylists of the 20th century.

Most of Orwell’s work is in the public domain, meaning it could have legally been used to train Claude.

I prompted Claude to write an essay “in the style of George Orwell about the threat to individual identity and freedom of thought posed by AI and particularly by the ability of ‘novel writing machines’ to produce literature.”

Primed with ample source material, the AI did a passable job:

“Here is a type of comfort, familiar to anyone who has ever been slowly dispossessed of something, that consists not in denying the loss but in not yet noticing it. The frog does not leap from the gradually heated water. The citizen does not protest the gradual narrowing of the permitted thought. And the reader, it seems, does not mourn the novel until the novel has already been replaced by something that resembles it in every outward particular – same chapters, same characters, same approximate sequence of feeling – yet contains, in place of a human mind, a statistical average of all the human minds that came before it.”

The final sentence about the statistical average rings false. But Orwell would, I suspect, have liked the image of the slowly boiling frog. “Here is a type of comfort” is also a phrase that Orwell might well have written.

I am skeptical that anyone would classify Claude’s efforts as indistinguishable from Orwell’s prose. But when it comes to machine-produced “literature,” perhaps it doesn’t really matter whether it can fully approximate original art, as long as it’s good enough to function as entertainment and distraction for the masses.

Jam, bootlaces and books

This was Orwell’s own dispirited suggestion in “1984.

With the help of “novel-writing machines,” the employees of the Ministry of Truth – the government department responsible for controlling information and rewriting history – are able to mass-produce not only novels, but also “newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes [and] plays.” They churn out “rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes” and “films oozing with sex,” along with cheap pornography intended for the “proles,” as the uneducated working classes of Big Brother’s Oceania were known.

The technology disgusts Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, who pointedly decides to purchase a diary and pen to write down his own independent thoughts. But to Julia, Winston’s nymphomaniac, anti-intellectual lover who works as a mechanic servicing the machines, “Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.”

‘Full-Length Novels in Seconds’

According to estimates, thousands of books for sale on Amazon have been written in whole or in part using AI.

In other words, today’s AI is also being used to mass-produce literature like jam or bootlaces.

Many of these works are not fully machine-written. Instead, they’ve been, as the AI writing tool Sudowrite advertises, “polished by AI.” With its “Rewrite” function, the company promises to give users an opportunity to “refine your prose while staying true to your style, with multiple AI-suggested revisions to choose from.” The service is akin to the “touching up” provided by the Ministry of Truth’s Rewrite Squad in “1984.”

Other books for sale on Amazon are, however, entirely machine-generated. The AI writing tool Squibler promises that if you give it an overarching prompt, it can produce “Full-Length Novels in Seconds.”

The potential of AI-generated “literature” to turn a quick-and-easy profit ensures that readers will continue to encounter more of this content in the future, especially as AI’s large language models become more refined. Already, studies have shown that readers cannot easily distinguish AI-generated forgeries from original prose.

Last year, I had lunch with a screenwriter friend in Los Angeles. He told me that his colleagues are particularly nervous about the use of AI to produce sequels. Once you have an established cast of characters for a movie franchise like, say, “Fast & Furious,” audiences will likely see the next installment whether it’s written by man or machine.

Yet my own brief experiments with Claude give me at least some hope for the future of literary art. A chatbot like Claude might be able to absorb and analyze “a statistical average of all the human minds that came before it,” but without the input of actual human experience and sensibility, it is hard to envisage them ever producing true art.

Whether AI can produce the next George Orwell novel or essay remains to be seen. That it can and will churn out an increasing volume of popular fiction and screenplays like “Fast & Furious 25” seems less in doubt.

– ref. Thousands of AI-written, edited or ‘polished’ books are being sold – an eerie echo of Orwell’s ‘novel-writing machines’ – https://theconversation.com/thousands-of-ai-written-edited-or-polished-books-are-being-sold-an-eerie-echo-of-orwells-novel-writing-machines-276008

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/thousands-of-ai-written-edited-or-polished-books-are-being-sold-an-eerie-echo-of-orwells-novel-writing-machines-276008/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Talar Moukhtarian, Assistant Professor in Mental Health, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick

It’s 3am. The room is dark, the house is silent, but your brain is suddenly wide awake.

Many people find themselves waking at roughly the same time each night and start to wonder whether something is wrong with their sleep.

Waking during the night is actually a normal part of sleep. Most people wake briefly several times, but usually fall back asleep so quickly they do not remember it the next morning. It becomes more of a problem when those awakenings last longer, or start happening at the same time every night, leaving you less refreshed the next day.

Sleep does not unfold in one long, uninterrupted stretch. Throughout the night, the brain moves through repeating sleep cycles that last around 90 to 110 minutes. Each cycle includes several stages: light sleep, deep sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when most dreaming occurs. Most adults go through four to six of these cycles each night.

Towards the end of each cycle, sleep becomes lighter, making brief awakenings more likely. Deep sleep also occurs mostly in the earlier part of the night and becomes less frequent as morning approaches. That means waking in the early hours is not unusual.

Stress can make these awakenings feel much more noticeable. In the early morning, the body begins preparing to wake up and levels of cortisol, a hormone involved in alertness, start to rise. This increase is part of the body’s normal daily rhythm and helps us feel more awake as morning gets closer.

But if your mind is already crowded with worries about work, relationships or everyday pressures, a brief awakening can quickly turn into a full spell of overthinking. At night there are fewer distractions, so thoughts that might seem manageable during the day can feel louder and harder to escape. Unsurprisingly, stress and rumination are strongly linked to insomnia symptoms, and can make it much harder to fall back asleep after waking.

Daily habits can also shape when and how often people wake during the night. Alcohol, for example, may help people fall asleep faster, but it often fragments sleep later on and increases awakenings in the second half of the night. Caffeine can have a similar effect. Even when consumed in the afternoon, it can linger in the body for hours, making sleep lighter and increasing the likelihood of waking. Caffeine taken up to six hours before bedtime can still interfere with sleep.

Other factors matter too. Irregular sleep schedules, going to bed much earlier than usual to catch up on rest, late-evening light or screen exposure, or a bedroom that is too warm or too cold can all reduce sleep quality and make waking during the night more likely.

For some people, repeated awakenings can become part of a vicious cycle and, if they persist, develop into insomnia. After enough nights spent lying awake and worrying about sleep, the brain can start to associate nighttime with stress and alertness rather than rest. The more someone worries about being awake, the harder it can become to drift off again.

Small habits can strengthen this pattern. Checking the clock during the night, for example, can increase frustration and make the mind more alert. Treatments such as cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia aim to break this cycle by changing the thoughts and behaviours that keep the brain switched on at night.

Small changes in routine can help the body settle into a steadier rhythm. These are often referred to as good sleep hygiene: habits that support healthy sleep. Keeping a consistent wake-up time, even after a poor night, helps anchor the body clock and stabilise sleep patterns.

Allowing time to unwind before bed, limiting caffeine and alcohol later in the day, and creating a calm sleep environment can also reduce night awakenings. If you lie awake for a long time, it can help to get out of bed briefly and do something relaxing until you feel sleepy again. That helps break the link between bed and wakefulness.

Managing stress during the day can also make a difference, reducing the chance of going to bed already tense and alert. Journaling, yoga, meditation, breathing exercises and mindfulness can all help calm the mind before sleep.

So while waking at 3am can feel unsettling, occasional nighttime awakening is part of how sleep works. Understanding what is happening in the body, and how stress and daily habits can shape sleep, can make those middle-of-the-night moments feel a little less alarming.

– ref. Waking at 3am every night? Here’s what may be going on – https://theconversation.com/waking-at-3am-every-night-heres-what-may-be-going-on-278264

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/waking-at-3am-every-night-heres-what-may-be-going-on-278264/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samarth Kulshrestha, Research Fellow in Molecular Biology, University of Canterbury

Plants are often seen as passive organisms, rooted in one place and largely unable to react to the world around them.

But a new field of research is challenging these assumptions and showing that plants are as sophisticated as animals in detecting and adjusting to environmental signals.

Plants can perceive light through specialised proteins, detect sound vibrations and respond to touch via mechano-sensitive channels, recognise chemical signals released by neighbouring plants, and even retain memories of past experiences through changes in their DNA.

My own research focuses on how plants detect the passage of time as part of their seasonal cycle, but that it merely one aspect of a major reconsideration of their sensory capacity – and the parallels with animal senses.

Plants can see colours

Anyone who has noticed a flower turning its head to track the sun knows plants can detect light. Like animals, plants sense light signals using specialised receptors, each for a different wavelength (or colour) of light.

Phytochromes detect red and far-red light and cryptochromes and phototropins respond to blue and ultraviolet light. These sensors transform light cues into molecular signals to coordinate a plant’s daily circadian rhythms.

Emerging research suggests trees can even identify the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. This cue may act as a seasonal switch, triggering a transition in key physiological processes such as leaf ageing and bud setting.

My research identified a specific gene, known as Early-Flowering-3, in European beech trees (Fagus sylvatica) which seems to control seasonal responses such as energy storage, changes in plant hormone signals and preparing for winter.

But light detection is only one sense plants use to perceive their world.

Tuning into their environment

Plants can also listen. Studies show they can detect vibrations caused by chewing insects or the buzz of pollinating bees, and they respond to the sound of flowing water by directing roots towards it.

Plants can also generate their own vibrations. When under stress, tobacco and tomato plants emit ultrasonic clicks that provide information about the plants’ condition, including the level of dehydration or injury. These clicks can be heard using a sound recorder.

Scientists also documented what happens when they play sounds to plants. They observed changes in the membranes of their cells and the chemical signalling along ion channels. While plants do not have nerves, these channels functions in a similar way, acting as tiny gateways to transmit information in and out of cells.

The exact receptors plants use to perceive sound remain unclear, but we are now investigating whether they sense vibrations through tiny hair-like structures on leaf surfaces.

Don’t touch me

Beyond vibrations, plants also respond directly to physical touch, often in striking ways.

Familiar examples include the touch-me-not plant (Mimosa pudica) or the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), which respond to touch by rapidly closing their leaves.

These examples illustrate plants’ ability to perceive and respond to mechanical stimuli. But beyond these rapid movements, plants also detect rain and damage caused by browsing herbivores. The latter prompts plants to activate defence responses such as the production of toxins or depositing lignin to make themselves less palatable.

Just like animals, plants contain specialised proteins that detect these physical forces. These mechanical sensing proteins convert physical stimuli into biochemical signals, often through calcium signalling.

Plants remember the past to decide the future

Changes in temperature provide a good example of plants remembering that winter has passed. Remembering cold temperatures helps them flower at the right time when spring arrives.

As observed in animals, these memories are stored through epigenetic mechanisms – chemical changes to DNA that don’t affect the genetic code.

Epigenetic changes alter the way genes are packaged and read, creating a molecular record of past conditions.

In New Zealand, for example, trees remember temperatures from previous summers to synchronise their reproduction across entire forests – a phenomenon known as masting.

Masting triggers widespread seed production – and subsequent pest outbreaks that can threaten native wildlife. Researchers revealed that removable markers generate temporary chemical tags that can switch genes off. This allows masting plants to carry information from one year to the next.

Together, these findings show that plants can see, hear, feel and remember in ways parallel to our own sensory systems. Far from being passive or unresponsive, plants respond to environmental clues in sophisticated and complex ways.

Rethinking plant life in this way challenges long-held ideas about intelligence, awareness and communication in the natural world.

– ref. The secret sensory life of plants: researchers are discovering how they see, hear, feel – and even remember – https://theconversation.com/the-secret-sensory-life-of-plants-researchers-are-discovering-how-they-see-hear-feel-and-even-remember-277076

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/the-secret-sensory-life-of-plants-researchers-are-discovering-how-they-see-hear-feel-and-even-remember-277076/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Lawson, Academic Registrar at St Barnabas College in the University of Divinity, PhD Candidate in Ancient Linguistics, Faculty of Arts and Education, CSU, Charles Sturt University

Most of us are used to thinking of “religion” in terms of a belief in God or gods. Perhaps the big hitters of world belief systems come to mind – Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism or, in Australia, the Dreamtime.

But philosophers of religion and human belief systems tend to make it a bit more complicated for us. They like to expand what we think of as religious belief.

One philosopher, William James, defined religion as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves [to it]”.

When we think of religion this way, we can conceive of a lot more “unseen orders” or religions in the world than just the big, organised religions and belief in supernatural phenomena.

For example, most of us believe in the unseen order of “queuing” and believe that our greater good comes from harmoniously adjusting ourselves to its rules. These might include “first come, first serve,” “no cuts,” “join at the end,” “leaving the queue forfeits your place” and more.

Other unseen orders we interact with daily might include “manners”, “tall-poppy-ism,” or even “civil law”. James helps us understand how these beliefs function cognitively and emotionally, and how they affect our behaviour just like a traditional religion.

In Bluey, one of the most interesting religions is “Play”.

Play, religion and Bluey

Play functions as a unifying unseen order all the characters align themselves to throughout the show.

The cast whole-heartedly believe in this unseen order of Play, with rules which ought to be harmoniously followed in order to reach the supreme good. This unifying belief centres the characters on the good of bonding, love and fun.

The pursuit of these ideals is rewarded both within the show by the characters and metatextually as the “gods” of the show (Joe Brumm and the other writers) bend the world towards them.

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So, what are the central beliefs of the religion of Play in Bluey? My research found four key rules which the characters consistently adjust themselves to.

1. Don’t interrupt or stop. No one in the show ever willingly interrupts or stops mid-game, best illustrated by the episode Stumpfest.

2. Follow the agreed rules. Rules and “playing properly” are very important to the characters, most aptly illustrated by the episodes Shadowlands and Library.

3. Be enthusiastic. There are no half-measures or dissent allowed, illustrated by Octopus and Whale Watching.

4. Games should have happy endings, because the real world often doesn’t. This is the theme of the 2024 special The Sign.

‘Contextualising’ religions

The religion of Play is not without difficulties. The show spends a surprising amount of time questioning and exploring these rules, especially when they harm or hinder rather than help the characters seek good.

This is parallel to the process of “contextualising” real-life organised religions. Contextualising is when the practices or beliefs of religions are explored and changed over time to better suit the time and place the religion finds itself in and allow more people to comfortably and positively engage with the greater good of the religion.

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For example, many houses of worship have adjusted standing and kneeling practices for prayer to accommodate folks with physical disabilities and an ageing population. Likewise, many religious services that were once performed in ceremonial languages (like Latin, Sanskrit or Classical Arabic) are now done in the contemporary language of the community.

Bluey can offer us some lessons in contextualising our own religions, beliefs or non-religion.

In the episode Shop we see worrying too much about how the unseen order works (the rules of a game) can stop you from engaging in the unseen order (having fun). Engaging is far more important than rules.

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Episodes Charades and Helicopter teach inclusion and flexibility in play. Modifying the rules is acceptable so that more people can join in.

In Copycat we see the benefit of stories and playing out games with sad or unexpected endings. Different practices can illuminate more depth or diversity.

In Driving, Chilli interrupts to understand the game better, and can then better align her enthusiasm to the game. Some rules are less important than others – breaking a minor rule might be necessary to follow a more important rule.

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And in Pass the Parcel, a parent changes the practice of the game, back to how he played as a child with only one prize rather than a prize in every layer. This change to the unseen order is at first taken with great difficulty by the children and parents alike, but in the end is appreciated: the reward is greater than the growing pains.

Adjustment and contextualisation can be hard, but also rewarding.

What we can learn about practicing religion

The rules of the belief system are only a means to an end. The rules are a way of aligning oneself with the unseen order for the greater good. The rules are not the greater good in and of themselves.

Bluey teaches us three important lessons about practicing religion through its depiction of the religion of play:

• participation in the unseen order is more important than the specific rules

• extreme and rigid adherence to the rules can be harmful to those around us and ourselves

• there is more than one way to practice an unseen order without giving up the supreme good that we all seek.

There is more than one way to play a game, just as there is more than one way to practice a religion.

– ref. Can we consider ‘play’ to be a religion? Bluey certainly thinks so – https://theconversation.com/can-we-consider-play-to-be-a-religion-bluey-certainly-thinks-so-274977

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/can-we-consider-play-to-be-a-religion-bluey-certainly-thinks-so-274977/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director of Nutrition and Food Sciences, Accredited Practising Dietitian, Adelaide University

Hot flushes, night sweats or swinging mood changes are some of the most common symptoms of menopause – the stage of a woman’s life when menstrual periods stop permanently, and she is no longer fertile.

Some women choose to ride out the symptoms. Some choose hormone replacement therapy (HRT), also known as menopausal hormone therapy or MHT. This contains oestrogen, progesterone or combined therapies. Others use complementary therapies.

But do complementary therapies such as acupuncture and herbal medicines actually help?

Remind me, what’s going on with menopause?

Menopause is a normal part of ageing, as is the menopausal transition (or perimenopause), which occurs for several years before it. Some women’s periods stop earlier than others. But most women become menopausal naturally between the ages of 45 and 55.

During menopause, women often have a range of symptoms. These can include hot flushes, night sweats, mood swings, joint discomfort, sleep disturbances, decreased libido, headache or migraine, cardiometabolic disturbances (such as high blood pressure), weight gain, and loss of bone mineral density.

These symptoms can be distressing and can affect women’s quality of life.

Why complementary therapies?

Some women prefer to use complementary therapies alongside conventional treatment, or instead of it, due to side effects of menopausal hormone therapy.

Other women cannot use MHT because of other medical conditions, such as breast cancer, or being at risk of venous thromboembolism (blood clots in the deep veins of the leg, which can be fatal if they travel to the lungs).

But what does the evidence say about complementary therapies used in menopause?

Earlier this year, we and our colleagues published a large review to draw together the evidence. We analysed 158 clinical trials and systematic reviews conducted in women over 40. These studies looked at 86 complementary therapies, such as acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, vitamin and nutrient supplements, and mind-body approaches.

Most studies were of low or very low quality. This could be because they included a small number of participants, were not double-blinded (when neither the participants nor the researchers knew which people were given which therapy) and sometimes did not use placebos.

So clinicians don’t have sufficient evidence to recommend them.

Now, the detail

Most studies in the review asked women to report the frequency and severity of their symptoms. Some used questionnaires covering a range of symptoms to give an overall menopause score. Others just asked about hot flushes.

Here are some of the findings.

Black cohosh is a flowering plant that improves overall menopausal scores, and hot flushes. Studies found benefits when taken from four to 52 weeks. Women took different products containing black cohosh, on its own or with other herbs. None of these studies reported serious side effects.

Isoflavones also known as phytoestrogens are found in soy and other legumes, and mimic oestrogen in the body. Soy-derived isoflavones improve hot flushes as well as overall menopausal scores. However in the same study, red clover-derived isoflavones did not reduce hot flushes. Side effects to isoflavones are generally mild and improve quickly without needing medical intervention.

Our ability to make vitamin D from sunlight reduces as we get older. In women, this decline starts at about the same time as menopause. For reducing the risk of fracture, women who have diagnosed osteoporosis need to take 800 IU (international units) vitamin D and 1,200 milligram calcium daily under medical supervision. But vitamin D plus calcium are not recommended to women without osteoporosis and without low vitamin D levels. This is because long-term use (over seven years) may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease (such as a heart attack).

Chinese herbal medicines can be combinations of multiple herbs (often between five and 20) in a formula. Seventy studies, using a variety of formulas, showed taking Chinese herbal medicines for seven days to three months improved menopausal scores and sleep quality. The most common formula was Suan Zao Ren Tang. Short-term use (up to a year) appears to be safe, but there are no studies looking at its longer-term use.

Another meta-analysis on Chinese herbal medicines using Rehmannia as the main herb found 17 studies. When taken for two weeks to three months there was an improvement in overall menopausal scores. No adverse events were reported.

Acupuncture comes in several forms and you can have it with and without other therapies. We found no evidence to recommend regular acupuncture for hot flushes. Acupuncture with Chinese herbal medicines improves sleep quality, but only in perimenopausal women with insomnia. Electro-acupunture is a form of acupuncture that passes a gentle current between two needles into your skin. It improves hot flushes.

In summary, most treatments included in our review did not show enough evidence to be able to recommend them clinically. Complementary therapies including soy-isoflavones, vitamin D, black cohosh and Chinese herbal medicine may help some menopausal symptoms, but more high-quality research is needed to understand how effective and safe these treatments truly are.

So what should I do?

The International Menopause Society recommends that if women in midlife choose complementary therapies, these should be alongside MHT.

So always talk to your GP about your plans, and only consider using the complementary therapies that have good evidence for the symptoms you currently have. Your GP can help you think about the risks and benefits for you, and help you make a decision based on the best available scientific evidence.

A healthy lifestyle – including eating well, staying active, looking after your mental wellbeing, getting restorative sleep, maintaining healthy relationships, and avoiding drugs and alcohol – are all important in menopause care.

These are linked with benefits including fewer hot flushes, a healthier weight, a lower risk of heart disease and diabetes, and a lower risk of falls and fractures.

Complementary therapies should not replace these fundamental lifestyle habits.

– ref. Thinking about acupuncture or herbs for menopause? Read this first – https://theconversation.com/thinking-about-acupuncture-or-herbs-for-menopause-read-this-first-277612

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/thinking-about-acupuncture-or-herbs-for-menopause-read-this-first-277612/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Bryson, Lecturer in Science, CQUniversity Australia

Most of us want to recycle, but it can sometimes be hard to know exactly how.

Do jar lids and bottle caps go in the yellow bin? What kinds of plastic can be recycled?

And given that food residue can mess up the machines used to recycle waste, how clean do things need to be before they get recycled?

Much depends on where you live

The first thing to know is what’s accepted in your yellow-lidded kerbside bin depends on where you live and what your local material recovery facility can actually recycle.

Online search tools such as Recycling Near You and the Australasian Recycling Label’s “check locally” feature let you enter your postcode and look up how to dispose of specific items.

When in doubt, check for Australasian Recycling Labels on packaging before you bin it. A “chasing arrows” symbol indicates the item is accepted in more than 80% of kerbside recycling bins. However, not all packaging has these labels. Some carry multiple labels.

Aluminium

Aluminium is what soft drink cans are made from, and it’s a high value metal. It’s worth recycling, but size matters.

Aluminium doesn’t contain iron, so it’s not magnetic.

In other words, the magnets used in waste recycling facilities to separate metals from other recyclables won’t pick up aluminium cans or foil.

Instead, aluminium items are sorted using a process known as eddy current separation.

When items travel along a conveyor belt at a sorting facility, they move past a fast-spinning magnetic rotor at the end. This rotor creates a repelling force that flicks the aluminium items off the conveyor belt and into collection bins.

But this force isn’t strong enough to recover small items like jar lids and wine bottle caps.

When it comes to recycling metal jar lids and metal or plastic bottle caps, every recycling facility has different rules.

Some need the lids to be left on their containers. Others require lids larger than 5cm to be removed before placing them in your mixed recycling bin or dropped off at a collection site.

If you’re not sure, ask your local council or search Recycling Near You or the Australasian Recycling Label site.

Plastic

Recycling plastic is great, but only about 46% of collected plastic is processed domestically, with a lot sent overseas for processing.

Most plastic still ends up in landfill due to contamination and low recovery rates.

Packaging made from a single type of plastic, such as translucent high-density polyethylene (HDPE) milk bottles, are easiest to recycle into new products.

But only around 40% of these get collected for recycling through kerbside bins and dedicated drop-off locations; the rest don’t get collected at all.

Plastic caps and labels on HDPE bottles are often made from a different type of plastic (polypropylene), so they should be removed before recycling.

Rigid plastics, such as drink bottles, are easier to recycle than soft plastics, but their quality degrades with each recycling cycle.

Most single-use soft plastic packaging ends up in landfill.

Chemical recycling for soft plastics is a relatively new technology in Australia. However, it’s not widely available, is expensive and comes with environmental and health concerns.

Contamination

Recycling systems can only work effectively when packaging is clean and free from contaminants.

Food and liquid remnants, labels and small pieces of packaging can get tangled in machinery. Even small amounts of food residue can introduce germs and odours into recycling loads.

This is difficult and costly to remove, and ultimately reduces the quality of recycled materials, especially those intended for food packaging.

Packaging doesn’t need to be squeaky clean, but it should be rinsed and placed in the recycling bin dry.

Labels and seals on packaging are also an issue. Paper labels and water-soluble glues generally wash off during processing. However, tamper-proof seals – such as the ring around the base of a soft drink bottle lid – and plastic-coated labels don’t. These materials are hard to remove and can contaminate the recycling process.

Plastic-coated and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) labels – which you sometimes find on, for instance, a punnet of strawberries or milk bottle – are a challenge. They’re usually made from a different plastic than the container itself, which means they can’t be recycled together.

Removing them before disposal helps ensure a cleaner, more recyclable product.

Multi-layered packaging is another problem. Cardboard-like items such as long life milk cartons and potato chip tubes are made from layers of paper, plastic and sometimes metal foil – all laminated together.

Since these layers can’t be separated easily or efficiently, the packaging can’t be recycled through most kerbside bins. It usually ends up in landfill.

The bigger picture

Consumers still bear the burden of responsibility on knowing what can and can’t be recycled. At the end of the day, recycling infrastructure is still limited and too much is being landfilled.

We must redesign packaging for reuse and to work within the system we have.

– ref. What can you actually put in your yellow recycling bin? An environmental scientist explains – https://theconversation.com/what-can-you-actually-put-in-your-yellow-recycling-bin-an-environmental-scientist-explains-278077

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/what-can-you-actually-put-in-your-yellow-recycling-bin-an-environmental-scientist-explains-278077/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nathan Fioritti, Lecturer in Politics, School of Social Sciences, Monash University

The appointment of former high profile Greens federal housing spokesperson and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s arch nemesis, Max Chandler-Mather, as executive director of the party’s think tank – the Green Institute – raises several important questions.

First, what are party think tanks and what purpose do they serve in Australia’s party system?

And second, what does the decision to appoint Chandler-Mather signal for the future strategic direction of the Greens?

What are party think tanks?

Despite party think tanks operating in Australia since the late 1990s, it’s likely most Australians are unaware of their existence and the role they play in our democracy.

Party think tanks are organisations that operate for the benefit of a particular political party. They perform a range of functions, including conducting research, undertaking policy development, member and public outreach and events, and training.

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Read more: The rise of think tanks in Australian politics

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Party think tanks are distinct from other think tanks, such as the right-leaning Institute of Public Affairs and left-leaning Australia Institute. While the former are official think tanks affiliated to a party, the latter are independent organisations, even if they may enjoy a close relationship with particular parties.

Australian party think tanks are also state-funded. Grants are awarded to the governing party and the major opposition party. Minor parties are eligible if they have at least five members of parliament.

For this reason, only Labor (Chifley Research Centre), the Liberals (Menzies Research Centre), Nationals (Page Research Centre) and Greens (Green Institute) have think tanks.

Value for money?

Despite being state-funded, Australian party think tanks are generally small-scale operations.

The amount of state funding think tanks receive depends on their affiliated party’s representation in parliament. As a result, the governing and opposition parties receive comparable, and higher, levels of financial support. Recognised minor parties receive significantly less.

Regardless, public funding makes up an important share of their respective income. Only the Liberals’ think tank, and to a lesser extent the Nationals’ Page Research Centre, seem capable of keeping their doors open without public funding.

While the $1 million party think tanks receive in state funding pales in comparison to the election funding some parties earn, one might ask what benefits party think tanks produce for taxpayers.

Public funding enables parties to offset the costs of research, policy development, outreach and training. But it’s more difficult to discern what larger democratic principle is served by funding these institutions.

‘Relaunching’ the Green Institute

Leaving aside the questions of the public value of state-funded party think tanks, the appointment of Max Chandler-Mather raises interesting questions about the future direction of the Greens.

In his leadership announcement, Chandler-Mather set out a bold plan not just for the Green Institute but for the party more broadly.

On one level, Chandler-Mather’s vision for the relaunched Green Institute is very much in keeping with his personal and party brand.

Chandler-Mather intends to use the institute to “reforge direct connection with ordinary people”.

The institute is being reimagined as a vehicle to train volunteers and undertake movement-building activities, chiefly by conducting what he claims will be “the largest face-to-face survey of Australians outside the Census”.

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This, Chandler-Mather says, will enable the party to tap into the policy issues that matter most to voters. His reputation as an innovative grassroots campaigner makes what is otherwise an ambitious goal less lofty.

Similarly, Chandler-Mather’s description of the major parties as being disconnected because of their reliance on “corporate polling and focus groups” is a familiar reproach that offers a contrasting vision of the Greens as a grassroots social movement party.

But there are elements of Chandler-Mather’s vision for the Green Institute that may sit less comfortably with the party.

First, his pursuit of “progressive economic populism” and the commitment to “transforming our economic system in a way that ensures everyone has what they need to live a comfortable, meaningful life, free of financial and housing stress”, suggests a much stronger emphasis on bread and butter concerns.

While the Greens have never been a single issue party, Chandler-Mather’s priorities appear to be more focused on materialist issues. But what exactly this “progressive economic populism” looks like in practice is yet to be clarified.

Second, Chandler-Mather seems to concede the Greens are languishing, and only a return to the party’s original goal of replacing the establishment parties can overcome this.

This stance sits in contrast to the more constructive and cooperative approach signalled by the party following last year’s election.

There are also parallels with the approach the Green Party in the United Kingdom is taking under leader Zack Polanski. There, a pitch around the Greens being a genuine left-wing alternative to Labour has seen the party surge.

Of course, as executive director of a party think tank, Chandler-Mather cannot impose his vision over the party. But he can use the institute to amplify his message in ways that he could not do as a member of the Greens party room. He can also recruit others to help bring this vision to life.

And it seems that taxpayers, whether they see the value of state-funded party think tanks or not, will be required to underwrite these efforts.

– ref. The Greens are relaunching their party think tank. What do these organisations do? – https://theconversation.com/the-greens-are-relaunching-their-party-think-tank-what-do-these-organisations-do-280265

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/the-greens-are-relaunching-their-party-think-tank-what-do-these-organisations-do-280265/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clinton Free, Academic Director, Executive Education, Business School, University of Sydney

There has been no shortage of bold claims recently about artificial intelligence (AI) and jobs — from mass unemployment to over-hyped distraction. Much of this debate is speculative. Often, coming from the tech giants promoting their own products, it is self-serving.

But beyond the hype, my analysis of new labour market data from the United States shows how AI is already starting to reshape work — and what may soon follow in Australia.

What history tells us about technological change

Exposure to new technology does not necessarily mean jobs will be lost. Technology often reconfigures tasks or boosts productivity.

But when change happens quickly, it can still lead to disruption and widespread job cuts – as seen recently at tech firms Atlassian, Block, and WiseTech.

To make sense of this moment, it is helpful to look back. Researchers have long studied how major “general purpose technologies” reshape economies.

Although each wave of innovation – from steam power to electricity to computing – has its own features, a common pattern emerges. Technological change tends to follow a recognisable trajectory: the technology emerges, adoption spreads, some jobs are displaced, and work is reorganised before a new equilibrium is reached.

The key question is: what stage are we at now?

The emerging jobs data suggest we have already moved into the displacement phase — and are entering a broader reorganisation of work.

What Australia can learn from the US

For Australia, the United States offers a useful leading indicator, because it sits at the frontier of technology adoption. The pattern emerging in the US is not one of widespread collapse, but of uneven and targeted disruption.

Recent data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show the sharpest declines in routine, information-processing roles — especially customer support, administrative work, and software and IT services. There are more moderate declines across marketing, banking, travel and retail.

These are precisely the kinds of sectors that employ large numbers of people in the Australian economy, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force data.

A second group of jobs tells a different story. These roles are not yet shrinking, but growth has stalled.

That slowdown may be the clearest signal of where AI is heading next.

Employment in finance, consulting, management and corporate support has largely stalled after decades of steady growth. These functions underpin modern organisations, suggesting the next phase of disruption may already be taking shape.

The hidden signal: entry-level jobs

Perhaps the clearest warning sign is not layoffs, but a decline in entry-level jobs.

In the United States, the unemployment rate for recent college graduates has risen to about 5.6% — above the economy-wide unemployment rate (about 4%) and experienced graduates (about 3%). For younger graduates, it is around 7%, with 42.5% underemployed, meaning they are working in jobs that do not require a degree.

These figures demonstrate AI may be taking the jobs of the youngest workers.

The resilience of blue-collar work

AI is also beginning to reshape the composition of the workforce.

For decades, US job growth was led by white-collar work. But over the past three years, that pattern has shifted: my analysis reveals that blue-collar employment has added roughly one million more jobs than white-collar roles, with manual work rising modestly as office-based employment edges down.

The gains are concentrated in sectors such as construction and maintenance — areas less exposed to current AI capabilities. If sustained, this would mark a significant shift in how work — and opportunity — is distributed across the economy.

Why this time might be different

There are strong reasons to think this transition may be more abrupt than previous eras of technological change.

First, the speed of development is unprecedented. OpenAI’s ChatGPT reached over 100 million users within two months — one of the fastest adoptions of new technology in history — and its capabilities are improving rapidly.

This compressed timeline leaves far less room for a gradual labour market adjustment.

Second, AI is no longer limited to routine tasks. It is increasingly performing cognitive work once done by professionals — drafting legal documents, writing code, analysing financial reports and generating marketing content. This marks a clear break from earlier technologies, which mainly displaced manual or repetitive work.

Third, AI’s reach is economy-wide. Unlike past technologies that reshaped specific sectors, AI cuts across many industries — from finance and law to logistics and customer service.

What comes next?

The key question is no longer whether AI will change jobs — it already is. The real question is how quickly, and who bears the cost.

As AI anxiety grows, there is an urgent need for a national conversation on policies to navigate the impact on jobs.

This includes the likely need for transitional income support, labour market reskilling at scale, and structural reform of secondary and tertiary education.

The AI job apocalypse may be overstated. But the early warning signs are already here — and they are increasingly difficult to ignore.

– ref. Employment data shows the early signs of AI job disruption are already here – https://theconversation.com/employment-data-shows-the-early-signs-of-ai-job-disruption-are-already-here-280273

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/employment-data-shows-the-early-signs-of-ai-job-disruption-are-already-here-280273/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

The Albanese government will increase defence spending to about 3% of GDP by 2033 in its 2026 National Defence Strategy to be unveiled on Thursday.

But it is using a revised definition that, in effect, makes the defence spend appear larger than it is.

The Trump administration has repeatedly made it clear Australia should boost its defence spending. Last year, a top Pentagon official, Elbridge Colby, cited the 3% figure in pushing for Australia to spend more.

The Coalition at the last election committed to increase spending to 3%. Defence spending presently is around 2% of GDP and was headed to about 2.3%-2.4% by 2034 under the narrower definition.

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Read more: Should Australia increase its defence spending? We asked 5 experts

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Defence Minister Richard Marles is due to release the 2026 National Defence Strategy and Integrated Investment Program on Thursday. He will announce the government will invest an extra A$14 billion in defence over the next four years and an extra $53 billion over the next decade. This is above the trajectory set out in the 2024 National Defence Strategy.

The government says the 3% of GDP defence spending figure is “in NATO terms”. NATO’s definition of defence spending can include some tangential items.

At last year’s NATO Summit, the members pledged to boost their defence spending commitment to 5% of GDP by 2035, with 3.5% allocated specifically to “core defence requirements”. The other 1.5% is committed to other investments, some loosely tied to defence.

Under the NATO definition, Australia is already spending about 2.8% of GDP on defence.

In the spending increase, total funding across the defence portfolio will be $887 billion through to 2035-36. Of this, about $425 billion will be allocated to capabilities, up from $330 billion in the 2024 program.

“We are now seeing the biggest peacetime increase in defence spending in our nation’s history,” Marles will say on Thursday.

“Australia faces its most complex and threatening strategic circumstances since the end of World War II.

“International norms that once constrained the use of force and military coercion continue to erode. More countries are engaged in conflict today than at any time since the end of World War II, and this is occurring across every region of the world,” he will say.

“In the face of this, the Albanese government is pursuing every avenue of increasing defence capability quickly: mostly through bigger defence appropriations but also through accessing private capital.”

Additional funding in the 2026 program includes new and increased investment in capabilities to improve the Australian Defence Force’s ability to deter and respond to current and emerging threats. This includes spending between $12-15 billion on drones and counter-drone systems over the next decade.

There will also be investment in the longer term to build more self-reliance.

Marles will say the 2026 National Defence Strategy “reflects a clear-eyed assessment of a more dangerous and uncertain world – and a confident response to it.

“It puts Australia on a path to strengthen our defence self-reliance. It reinforces the industrial and national foundations of defence. And it situates Australia firmly within a network of trusted regional and global partnerships.

“Above all, it ensures Australia remains secure, sovereign and ready – not just for today’s challenges, but for the decade ahead.”

– ref. Albanese government will commit to boosting defence spending to 3% of GDP, but under a revised definition – https://theconversation.com/albanese-government-will-commit-to-boosting-defence-spending-to-3-of-gdp-but-under-a-revised-definition-280582

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/albanese-government-will-commit-to-boosting-defence-spending-to-3-of-gdp-but-under-a-revised-definition-280582/

Asia Pacific Report

A massive Stop Wars Aotearoa coalition rally and march on the US Consulate took place in Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau last Saturday, 11 April 2026.

“We’re going to stand up for the people of Iran, stand up for the people of Palestine, stand up for the people of Lebanon, stand up for the people of Venezuela, stand up for the people of Cuba, stand up for this fight against the American empire,” declared organiser Joe Carolan.

US and Israeli imperialism was strongly denounced by political, civil society, human rights and migrant speakers.

Protesters staged a “die-in” on the street in front of the consulate to mark the targeted slaughter of 168 children at the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab by US bombs. This tragedy took place on February 28, the opening day of the illegal and unprovoked US-Israel war on the Islamic Republic.

Photographs: David Robie

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/16/gallery-standing-up-for-the-people-of-iran-and-palestine-lebanon-venezuela-cuba/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Twomey, Professor Emerita in Constitutional Law, University of Sydney

The High Court has taken an axe to the Victorian Electoral Act, chopping out the entirety of Part 12.

It deals with election spending, caps on political donations, three different types of public funding (for election campaigns, party administration and policy development), along with the disclosure regime for donations.

The Victorian parliament will be scrambling to reconstruct and reenact it in a constitutionally valid manner in the lead up to the Victorian election in November this year.

What was the problem with the law?

Part 12 was struck down due to the constitutional invalidity of a seemingly obscure provision setting differential rules for “nominated entities”. But it was really about the constitutional validity of a law allowing the three main political parties to spend more on election campaigns than anyone else.

The High Court had previously held that legislative limits on political donations and electoral expenditure can reduce the amount of money a political party or candidate can spend on political communications during an election campaign.

This means such a law can breach the constitutionally implied freedom of political communication – unless the law is made for a legitimate purpose, such as reducing the risk of corruption and undue influence, and the law is reasonably appropriate and adapted to achieving that purpose.

In Victoria, the parliament passed amendments in 2018 that put a very low cap on political donations. A person could only make donations to a political party or any of its candidates or elected members, up to a cumulative maximum of A$4,000 (since raised to $4,970) over the entire four-year period between elections.

The law did not, however, place any cap on electoral spending, as long as the spending came out of a special campaign account. In effect, the limit on spending depended on what was paid into that campaign account. All donations and electoral public funding had to be paid into that account.

But what else could be deposited in it?

This is where “nominated entities” first appeared. The main political parties each had a separate body, which held major income-producing capital assets. It would transfer funds to the party. The new law allowed the party to register the body as a “nominated entity”. It could then make uncapped transfers into the party’s campaign account. But an independent candidate could not establish a nominated entity, so the candidate had no chance of competing with the spending of a political party, funded by its nominated entity.

The Labor, Liberal and National parties each registered a nominated entity prior to July 1 2020. After that date, this funding route was effectively cut off for small or new parties. Greater restrictions were imposed on the control and operation of any nominated entity subsequently established. They could not build up a capital fund because a nominated entity was restricted to receiving only capped donations over the four year parliamentary term. It was also an offence to deposit money into a fund held by a body and then later register it as a nominated entity, if the amount deposited would otherwise have breached the donation caps.

The upshot was that three parties – Labor, Liberal and National – could use nominated entities to make uncapped donations into their campaign accounts. This meant they could spend vastly greater amounts on campaigns than an independent or a candidate from any other political party.

The challenge

The validity of this law was challenged by two former candidates, Paul Hopper and Melissa Lowe, who ran as independents at the 2022 state election and lost. They argued the law concerning nominated entities was unfair and undemocratic, and there should be a level playing field for elections. Hopper said the donation laws were rigged and unfairly biased to the major parties.

The ground of the challenge was that the law about nominated entities breached the implied freedom because it unfairly disadvantaged independents and small or new political parties in their ability to spend on political communications. Conversely, it advantaged the three main parties.

The High Court accepted the law capping donations burdened the implied freedom of political communication. It also found the law about nominated entities affected independents and smaller parties differently from the major parties.

It noted three kinds of differential operation. First, the law gave advantages to political parties but not to others, such as independents.

Second, it treated nominated entities differently depending on whether they were registered before or after July 1 2020.

Third, it favoured the major political parties by allowing the bodies holding their existing capital funds to become nominated entities when the law commenced, but prevented new funds from being built up by other parties by restricting them to the receipt of capped donations.

The court didn’t need to decide if each of these three differential applications resulted in the constitutional invalidity of the relevant section or the whole part. This was because the Victorian solicitor-general conceded there could be no constitutional justification for the second differential treatment, based on the July 1 2020 date.

Victoria was hoping the court would strike down that minor distinction, keeping the rest of the provisions alive. But the court concluded the invalid provision that imposed the differential treatment was too dependent on a web of other provisions in Part 12. This meant it could not be disentangled without the court effectively redrafting the law. So the entire part was struck down.

What are the ramifications for Victoria?

Victoria now has a massive hole in its electoral act. It has no valid system for disclosing political donations, or requiring parties and candidates to make annual reports on donations and expenditure, or even for banning overseas and anonymous donations.

More importantly, all the money paid in public funding to political parties, whether for campaign funding or slush funds for “administrative” and “policy development” purposes, was unlawful, and has been since 2018. One can imagine some legislation validating that funding with retrospective effect will be introduced pretty quickly.

The writing was on the wall that Victoria was going to lose this case. The solicitor-general’s concession showed the government was trying to salvage what it could.

The Victorian government even introduced legislation to make the nominated entity provisions fairer, but it dropped the provisions about nominated entities before the bill was passed in March this year. The excuse was it was awaiting the High Court’s judgment. It will now have to engage in far more extensive amendments than it had envisaged.

What are the ramifications for the Commonwealth?

The Commonwealth parliament also enacted legislation about political donations in February last year, which is to come into force on July 1 2026. It includes provisions about nominated entities, which have been alleged to tip the playing field unfairly in favour of the main political parties, to the disadvantage of new parties and independents. A challenge to it has been commenced by former senator, Rex Patrick, and former MP, Zoe Daniel.

The Victorian case will not directly affect the Commonwealth challenge. This is because the Commonwealth law does not contain an equivalent provision that treats nominated entities differently by reference to the date they were registered. But it does raise other concerns about differential treatment that were also noted by the High Court in the Victorian case.

While the Victorian law was by far the worse of the two, the Commonwealth law remains vulnerable. In both cases, major parties tried to manipulate the electoral campaign funding laws to their advantage, and the High Court has a history of not taking kindly to such action. Political apparatchiks in Canberra will be feeling more nervous tonight.

– ref. High Court takes an axe to Victoria’s political donations laws – and it will make federal MPs nervous – https://theconversation.com/high-court-takes-an-axe-to-victorias-political-donations-laws-and-it-will-make-federal-mps-nervous-280713

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/15/high-court-takes-an-axe-to-victorias-political-donations-laws-and-it-will-make-federal-mps-nervous-280713/

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

Without understanding the astonishing network of power exercised by the United Arab Emirates you would have no idea why the UAE was hit particularly hard by Iran in recent weeks.

Nor would you know what fuels chaos from Libya to Sudan to Somalia to Yemen.

If you understand the UAE’s business-geostrategic model and how it mobilises warlords, gold, oil, regional logistics and finance — you get much closer to seeing the pattern in the seeming madness.

Tiny UAE, 1.4 million citizens, wields so much power that Saudi Arabia sees it as a serious threat. In December, Saudi Arabia bombed UAE surrogates in Yemen and told the emirates to exit the country. They didn’t. If the US and Israel hadn’t attacked Iran, more fireworks were in the offing.

Israel is the UAE’s close ally. They collaborate not just on the War on Iran but in many of these various “civil wars” that are both money-making ventures and a series of heartless state-destruction campaigns that give them greater geopolitical weight in the region.

Israel is UAE’s close ally.            Image: Google Earth map

We first need to understand what UAE (United Arab Emirates) really is. Comprising seven emirates — Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ajman, Umm Al-Quwain, Ras Al-Khaimah, and Fujairah — it is now the hub of an empire that both Iran and Saudi Arabia would like to knee-cap.

The powerhouse is actually Abu Dhabi, the oil giant which is the effective boss of the rest, including Dubai.

Family business with six sons
Abu Dhabi is a family business, run by The Bani Fatima, the sons of Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Al Ketbi who is the most influential of the wives of the late Sheikh. Today, ultimate power resides with MBZ (Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan) the eldest of her six sons.

MBZ was a long-time buddy of MBS (Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman) but those days are well behind us. In the words of a senior Saudi figure, Ahmed Altuwaijri, Abu Dhabi is Israel’s Trojan horse in the region.

Along with Bahrain, UAE is a signatory to the Abraham Accords which is a US vehicle to bring Israel in from the cold. The other Gulf States oppose this “Israel First” policy and are clear that a resolution of the rights of the Palestinians must come first, although they do little about it.

The Bani Fatimid system works like this: identify a country that is experiencing instability, pick a side (preferably anti-political Islam) and offer not only to finance that militia or warlord of choice but provide the immense logistical support the UAE has, including air freighting weapons, supplies and soldiers, and the complex systems needed to convert, for example, stolen gold into arms or other assets.

Time and again this has resulted in the creation of shadow economies that end up controlling significant resources (gold, oil, agriculture, ports) and creating parallel states. Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen have all been played in this way. It is textbook divide and rule: weakening a state from within to then exert ongoing influence and resource extraction.

Dr Andreas Krieg of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London told The Thinking Muslim channel recently that UAE is far more advanced than Saudi Arabia in establishing powerful, agile networks across a wide zone of influence.

“It’s not about size. Size doesn’t matter in the networked global order that we’re operating in today. It’s about connectivity and who you can mobilise on your behalf — whether it’s in the information environment or armed non-state actors, such as the STC (in Yemen).

“But it’s also the commodity traders, the financiers, the banks, the insurance companies, the other trading corporations, that you can mobilise to generate what strategy is all about: influence and power,” Krieg says.

Libya’s terrible 15-year civil war has been immensely worsened by outside states, including UAE which turned general Khalifa Belqasim Haftar from a YouTube revolutionary into the head of the massively resourced LNA militia that now controls about a third of the country.

With UAE commanding the centre of a hub-and-spoke system, it can move fighters around the region at will, for example from Libya to Yemen where it sent thousands of LNA fighters to support local client militias. By backing the Southern Transition Council (STC) in Yemen, UAE got control over the vital Port of Aden. Similarly, by partnering with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan, tons of stolen gold flows into Dubai. You get the picture.

Gold is the prime currency of the Bani Fatima empire (MBZ and his brothers). Dubai is known in the region as The City of Gold, the place where the bulk of Africa’s yellow metal, much of it smuggled, finds its way.

Imagine this: at the very time tens of millions of Sudanese are suffering famine or near-famine conditions, the UAE is facilitating the export to Dubai of tons of gold to fuel the war. This represents billions of dollars that should be held for the benefit of the people but instead is being used for empire building.

In Somalia the UAE has switched sides when economic or strategic advantage could be made. Along with Israel, UAE is backing militias who have declared a break-away state “Somaliland” that borders the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

The UAE has military bases in “Somaliland” and has poured millions of dollars into the port of Berbera. With hundreds of kilometres of coastline adjacent to vital Red Sea shipping lanes, UAE and Israel will be important players in a contest with Yemen, Saudi Arabia and other powers.

In December last year Israel became the first to recognise Somaliland as a state. UAE is understood to be working on the Trump administration to do the same – further trashing the idea of territorial integrity for the sake of advantage. As an aside: Israel hopes to ethnically cleanse Palestinians to Somaliland one day.

All this dovetails with Israel’s strategy of smashing states to control them. For them, an alternative to regime change in Iran is Balkanisation to create several weak statelets thereby enhancing Israeli security and influence.

For those reasons and more, I hope the sovereign state of Iran survives the onslaught. I hope UAE and Israel’s genuinely evil business of fragmenting state after state is defeated. I hope the Western countries look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves: what kind of moral monsters would be allies of Israel and the UAE?

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region.

Eugene Doyle is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. He has written extensively on the Middle East, as well as peace and security issues in the Asia Pacific region, and contributes to Asia Pacific Report. He hosts solidarity.co.nz

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/15/divide-and-rule-how-uae-is-israels-trojan-horse-in-the-gulf/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clive Williams, Visiting professor, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney

In the lead-up to the release of the National Defence Strategy (NDS) this week, the Albanese government has announced it will spend an additional A$2–5 billion on drones and counter-drone systems.

This will bring total spending on uncrewed and autonomous systems to A$12–15 billion over the decade to 2035–36.

With this announcement, the government is apparently learning from the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East how best to prepare for the future of warfare.

What is emerging is not simply a technological shift in military capabilities, but a structural one: recognising the growing importance of cost, scale and domestic industrial capacity in determining military effectiveness.

The rapid evolution of drone warfare

The origins of this dynamic lie in Iran’s development of mass-produced offensive drones, which cost US$20,000–$50,000 (A$28,000–70,000) each, depending on the model.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Iran has supplied it with both Shahed drones (known locally as Geran) and production expertise, enabling Moscow to swarm the skies over Ukraine.

This has forced both sides into a rapid process of adaptation, focused less on maximising performance and more on reducing cost and increasing production volume.

Ukraine has quickly become a world leader in drone technology. Last year, it announced it would produce around four million drones, about double its production of the previous year. It has also developed a layered defence system capable of defending against swarms of Russian drones.

While both Russia and Ukraine initially focused on developing small quadcopters, they are now investing heavily in fixed-wing drones optimised for range, endurance and adaptability.

Russia’s Molniya (and newer Molniya-2 version) is a cheap, expendable, fixed-wing loitering munition, built from lightweight plywood and foam. These drones have extended Russia’s strike range into Ukraine’s rear areas and can operate as “motherships” for smaller drones. They can also relay messages from one drone to another.

These Russian platforms are increasingly being deployed in conjunction with first-person-view (FPV) quadcopters. They often incorporate satellite communications (such as Starlink terminals) and specialised payloads. These can include smaller attack drones or reconnaissance sensors.

Ukraine, in turn, is developing its own fixed-wing interceptors and strike systems, including the Blyskavka, which is also constructed from plywood and foam or plastic. These systems emphasise speed (up to 140 kilometres per hour), autonomy and resistance to electronic warfare.

The goal on both sides is the same: keep it super cheap. The Blyskavka reportedly costs around US$800 (A$1,120) per unit. It is simple to build in garages or small workshops, but can carry a payload of up to eight kilograms.

Ukraine is also partnering with a Japanese firm to develop a low-cost, stealthy, high-speed interceptor drone called the Terra A1.

The Terra A1, with a top speed of 300 kph, is designed specifically to counter piston-engined Shahed-type drones with a top speed of 185 kph. The Terra A1 system combines relatively simple features — electric propulsion, autonomous targeting and short endurance — with the ability to be deployed in large numbers.

Its exact materials have not been publicly disclosed. However, it likely uses lightweight composites, 3D-printed parts or other cheap materials to achieve its low unit price of US$2,500–3,000 (A$3,500–4,200).

Why this matters for Australia

As Australia unveils its next defence strategy, it must focus on how to defend large areas with finite resources.

Australia’s current drone capability emphasises high-end, ISTAR systems (meaning intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance), including the Shadow and Triton drones. Australia is also increasingly adopting low-cost tactical drones.

Compared to Ukraine, though, Australia lacks large-scale domestic drone production and does not have a standalone unmanned systems branch.

Australia is different from Ukraine in many ways, but both countries share similar underlying constraints. Because Australia needs to defend extensive maritime approaches, northern military bases and critical infrastructure, this raises many critical questions Ukraine has had to face, such as how to deal with:

• saturation threats, where large numbers of relatively simple systems overwhelm defences

• cost-imposition strategies, in which adversaries exploit cheaper technologies to generate financial strain

• the capacity to produce and replenish defence systems over time.

While more traditional, high-end air defence systems remain essential, particularly against cruise and ballistic missile threats, the Ukraine and Middle East wars have shown that Australia can’t rely on these alone.

This means the key issue is not the replacement of advanced systems, but the integration of very low-cost alternatives.

For Australia, this implies a need for a more layered approach combining:

• high-capability systems for complex and high-speed threats

• low-cost, disposable systems capable of countering large volumes of simple drone platforms.

A shift in the economics of warfare

Land wars of the recent past were shaped primarily by the industrial-scale production of tanks and artillery. Increasingly, wars are now being determined by the capacity to produce and deploy large numbers of unmanned systems at relatively low cost.

Iran demonstrated how affordability could be used to great effect. Ukraine, working with international partners, has applied similar principles in defence.

The war in Ukraine is, therefore, not only a contest over territory. It is also a contest over the cost of warfare itself.

Australia’s latest defence strategy must fully reflect this shift. Because cost is becoming a defining feature of modern conflict, the ability to generate capability at scale — and cheaply — may prove as important as technological sophistication.

– ref. What Australia must learn from Ukraine about drone technology and the future of warfare – https://theconversation.com/what-australia-must-learn-from-ukraine-about-drone-technology-and-the-future-of-warfare-280466

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/15/what-australia-must-learn-from-ukraine-about-drone-technology-and-the-future-of-warfare-280466/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annette Greenhow, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Bond University

A recent move from a leading insurance provider has made it more difficult for AFL and AFLW players to access brain injury insurance.

In March, Zurich Australia announced concussion and head trauma exclusions for professional players who held total and permanent disablement (TPD) insurance as part of the AFL Players Association superannuation fund, the trustee for which is AMP.

This means no TPD benefit will be payable for football-related brain injury including concussion and chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

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Read more: I’ve seen the brain damage contact sports can cause – we all need to take concussion and CTE more seriously

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The change comes into effect on May 1.

So why did Zurich make this move and how may the decision impact sports leagues and athletes?

A rapidly escalating risk landscape

Zurich has stated it is the only insurer offering this type of coverage to AFL and AFLW players, reflecting a reduced appetite from insurers and underwriters to cover these types of injuries.

Media reports suggest Zurich is worried by a higher-than-expected volume of claims paid since it commenced coverage in 2020, with several seven-figure payouts to athletes.

Another reason given was the high levels of uncertainty associated with brain injuries and attempts to limit liability for high-contact sports.

Unlike their AFL counterparts, NRL players don’t appear to have access to a single default insurance arrangement. Instead, the league and its players association have two funds: a “past player medical support fund” and the “player hardship fund”.

There is limited publicly available information about the nature and scope of these funds.

Limited options for athletes

Millions of Australian workers are covered by state-based workers compensation schemes such as WorkCover. These provide no-fault insurance that pays medical costs and replaces part of a worker’s income when they are injured because of their job.

Most professional athletes are excluded. This exclusion was a focus of a 2023 Senate inquiry into concussions and repeated head trauma in contact sports.

From May 1, unless an AFL or AFLW player has their own private TPD insurance, they will need to look to the league and its players association for support.

The AFL, via its players association, does offer a “severe injury benefit” which provides financial support up to $600,000 to eligible AFL and AFLW players who suffer cognitive impairment caused by their playing career. This includes the impacts of traumatic brain injuries.

But this capped payment is not comparable to the financial security previously offered by Zurich.

There are also concerns about the discretionary nature of these private schemes and whether the level of funding available is sufficient to cover the number and amount of claims.

For now, privately funded arrangements such as the AFL’s act as a stopgap.

More sustainable solutions are needed.

One sport, differing approaches

How countries organise responsibility for the long-term impact of head injury risk varies significantly.

A useful comparison can be found in the three rugby heartlands of the southern hemisphere: Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

In Australia, registered rugby players at all levels are covered by a national risk management and insurance program. Injury cover is basic and capped.

This insurance does not cover long-term head injury risk.

Instead, the future costs of concussion tend to fall across a mix of private insurance, public health systems and increasingly for professional players, the courts. Litigation related to concussion and head trauma is rising and is widely viewed by insurers as an accelerating legal risk.

Insurers have responded by withdrawing or excluding head injury cover from their TPD insurance. In effect, concussion risk is being treated as uninsurable, rather than governable.

New Zealand takes a fundamentally different approach.

Through its no-fault Accident Compensation Corporation, head injuries are treated as a publicly pooled social risk – coverage is automatic and universal.

The compensation corporation works alongside sport through SportSmart, a national injury prevention program developed by academics, clinicians and sporting organisations.

In this system, litigation is largely replaced with guaranteed medical care, rehabilitation and income support, while prevention becomes a direct tool for protecting the sustainability of the insurance pool.

South Africa sits somewhere between these models.

While the system does not rely on a public insurer, it operates in partnership with a private insurer and incorporates BokSmart, a national safety program which mandates education, enforces evidence based laws and applies strict return-to-play protocols across all levels.

Litigation is possible in South Africa but remains uncommon.

Rather than adopting an initiative such as SportSmart or BokSmart, Australia’s concussion governance is largely decentralised. Individual codes have responsibility for concussion protocols within their competitions and pathways.

Stronger partnerships are needed

While a lack of TPD insurance does not directly threaten the viability of sports, Zurich’s decision does require alternative solutions to protect athletes.

Better partnerships between sporting organisations, insurers and governments should create an opportunity to improve how head injury risk is understood.

By pooling more injury surveillance data, stakeholders could gain a clearer picture of long-term exposure and emerging trends. This would support better decisions about preventing harm, designing policy, and managing risks.

This approach will likely be most effective if it extends down to community and junior sport.

Concussion and head injuries often first occur in youth participation, and early mismanagement can increase the risk of long-term health consequences.

A serious concern

The Zurich decision only impacts the specific TPD cover of elite AFL and AFLW players. However, any decision to reduce or exclude sport-related concussion cover could lead other insurers to review their coverage, including community or junior sport insurances.

This will be a serious concern, because as the Insurance Council of Australia cautioned in its 2023 submission to the Senate inquiry: “no insurance means no sport”.

– ref. When insurers walk away from concussion risk, who protects athletes? – https://theconversation.com/when-insurers-walk-away-from-concussion-risk-who-protects-athletes-279740

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/04/15/when-insurers-walk-away-from-concussion-risk-who-protects-athletes-279740/