Two Extinction Rebellion activists joined the speakers today at an Auckland protest over Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza and occupied Palestine, condemning the “apocalyptic” assault on both people and their living environment.
Caril Cowan, a de facto coordinator of Extinction Rebellion Tāmaki Makaurau, spoke of the climate crisis this month in Aotearoa New Zealand to provide an insight into the Gaza emergency.
“One of our climate scientists, says this is normal – get used to it. We are going to have killing storms over, and over, and over …
“As we are saying, ‘We are all Palestine’, I just think of the people of South America, I think of the people of Africa, I think of Europe, where people are dying now because of the climate.
“They are dying of heat exhaustion, they are dying from floods, they are dying from landslides, like we have been having, not just a few. It’s happening. It is here now.”
After the rally, the protesters marched around the corner from Te Komititanga Square to the US Consulate in Auckland for a “Blood on your hands “ protest over the US role in funding and enabling Israel’s atrocities in Gaza.
Cowan was among those protesters who symbolically raised blood on their hands over the “shameful” US role under President Donald Trump and previous presidents.
Extension Rebellion speaker Caril Cowan . . . “people are dying now because of the climate crisis.” Image: APR
US pays part UN dues This week in Washington, a UN spokesperson said the United States had paid about US$160 million (NZ$268 million) of the more than US$4 billion it owes to the UN, just as Trump hosted the first meeting of his so-called “Board of Peace” initiative over Gaza that critics say could undermine the United Nations.
The US is the biggest contributor to the UN budget, but under the Trump administration it has refused to make mandatory payments to regular and peacekeeping budgets, and slashed voluntary funding to UN agencies with their own budgets.
Washington has also withdrawn from dozens of UN agencies.
Another speaker at today’s rally, Adam Jordan, from both Extinction Rebellion and the Palestinian movement, talked about the “connection” between the Gaza genocide and anthropogenic climate breakdown.
“As is so often the case with colonialism, and the capitalist system more generally, ecological destruction has always been inherent to the Zionist, settler-colonial project,” Jordan said.
Extension Rebellion’s Adam Jordan . . . the destruction in Gaza has reached such “apocalyptic proportions that the damage is visible from space”. Image: APR
“From contaminated soil and groundwater to decimated farmland and burning down centuries old olive groves that had been lovingly tended by countless generations of Palestinians.
“Rather than ‘making the desert bloom’ as they often claim, the colonisers are engaged in a process of ‘desertification’ — transforming once fertile and active farmland into an area devoid of both vegetation and biodiversity.”
Damage visible from space Jordan said that destruction of both people and the land itself in Gaza had reached such “apocalyptic proportions that the damage is visible from space”.
“The people who have not yet been killed by the bunker buster bombs, the forced starvation, disease, sniper fire and autonomous killer drones live in a wasteland of undrinkable water, unexploded munitions, overflowing landfills, contaminated soil and toxic debris, with orchards and fields reduced to dust in which life itself is being rendered impossible for the long term,” he said.
[embedded content] Gaza pollution environmental threats Video: Al Jazeera
“Ecocide here fuses with genocide in a manner never seen before.”
But where was the real connection between Palestine and the climate crisis?
“Despite all the rhetoric from governments and corporations about how they’re taking climate change seriously, the 2020s have so far seen an accelerated expansion of fossil fuel production, just when it had to be reined in and inverted into a sustained dismantling — for the world to avoid a warming of more than 2°C, and ideally no more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial baseline.
“Currently we’re at 1.6°C above that baseline, and this is already proving to be absolutely catastrophic. In fact it’s proving again and again to be deadly,” Jordan said.
“The destruction of Gaza is of course executed by tanks and fighter jets, sending their projectiles that turn everything into rubble — but only after the explosive force of fossil fuel combustion has put them on the right path.
“All these military vehicles run on oil. As do the supply flights from the US, UK and Germany.’
A young protester with a Palestinian flag at the Auckland rally today. Image: APR
Emissions burden One study had estimated that from October 2023 to January 2025 the emission burden of the Gaza genocide by Israel and the West to be 32 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
“That’s more than the annual emissions of many countries,” Jordan said.
“It has generated more than 36 million metric tonnes of debris from buildings being either severely damaged or completely destroyed. It would take as long as four decades to remove and process all of this debris.”
Jordan said what was happening in Gaza was not just a transnational effort, but “a stain on the so called ‘international law’ that cannot be washed clean”.
“For over two years now we have watched as the corrupt corporate media has dehumanised the victims and attempted to humanise those committing this genocide,” he said.
“We have watched as academic institutions, politicians and governments all over the world have denied or justified the unspeakable horrors taking place in Gaza, just as they deny the severity and the consequences of the climate crisis and justify the continuation of business as usual, no matter how destructive it is to our environmental life support systems.
“But this is just business, this is just how the capitalist system works. Both people and the environment are seen as expendable, here only for the purposes of wealth extraction by the ultra wealthy ruling class — or as I prefer to call them, ‘The Epstein class’.”
New flotilla plans Among other speakers, Rana Hamida spoke about the new Global Sumud Flotilla plans to break the military siege of Gaza in April.
The flotilla has announced plans to send more than 100 boats carrying up 1000 activists, including medics and war crimes investigators, to the besieged enclave.
Hamida appealed for more volunteers from New Zealand to join the fleet.
Not just climate change – but a “system change” call for action. Image: APR
The global human rights landscape has witnessed a significant diplomatic milestone.
Indonesia, for the first time since the body’s establishment in 2006, has officially taken the presidency of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC).
Indonesia’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro, is currently guiding the procedural and diplomatic course of the world’s foremost human rights forum for the coming year.
Indonesian Human Rights Minister Natalius Pigai . . . seeking to ensure the revised law is “more progressive and advanced”. Image: Antara
This appointment, backed by consensus within the Asia-Pacific regional group and subsequently endorsed by the full council, is far more than a routine procedural rotation.
It is a mirror reflecting diplomatic success, yet also a fragile piñata — ready to spill forth either in praise or sharp criticism depending on the blows dealt by reality and unfolding dynamics.
This moment is not the end of a journey, but the opening of a new chapter rife with interpretation — a complex test of Indonesia’s credibility, capacity, and consistency on the stage of global issues.
The test begins not only in the halls of Geneva but simultaneously in the halls of power in Jakarta, where the government is pushing for the ratification of a revised Human Rights Law by this year.
This legislative endeavour has now become inextricably linked to the credibility of its international leadership.
Foundations and mandate To understand the seriousness of this position, one must look to its foundational pillars.
The UN Charter, as the supreme constitution of global governance, clearly places the promotion and respect for human rights as a central pillar for maintaining international peace and security.
This charter provides an undeniable moral and political mandate. Indonesia’s presidency, within this framework, is an operational instrument to realise the charter’s noble aims — a collective trust bestowed by the community of nations.
The Human Rights Council itself is a product of the post-Cold War collective consciousness and the failures of its predecessor, the Commission on Human Rights. Established by General Assembly Resolution 60/251, it was designed as a more legitimate intergovernmental body with a mandate to strengthen the promotion and protection of human rights globally.
It is a space of often-tense dialogue, a tireless advocacy arena for civil society, and a stage where mechanisms like the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) and Special Procedures strive to illuminate dark corners of violations.
Within this complexity, the council president is not merely a passive moderator but a pacesetter, agenda-shaper, balance-keeper, and often a mediator in intricate political deadlocks. This position holds the key that can either unlock discussions on neglected issues or bury them in procedure.
The normative compass for the council is the International Bill of Human Rights — comprising the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
These standards are the shared measure, the common language, and the basis for demands.
Indonesia’s leadership will be judged on its ability to advance the language and spirit of these covenants, not only within the halls of Geneva but also through their resonance and enactment at the national level. It is here that the ongoing revision of Indonesia’s own Human Rights Law (Law Number 30 of 1999) transforms from a domestic legislative process into a litmus test for its international posture.
Two sides of the coin Globally, this presidency represents the pinnacle of Indonesia’s soft power diplomacy. It affirms the image of a consequential developing nation deemed capable of leading even the most sensitive conversations.
It is an invaluable platform to voice Global South perspectives, emphasise the interdependence of civil-political and socio-economic rights, and champion dialogue over confrontation.
Indonesia has the opportunity to act as a bridge-builder, spanning the divides between West and East, North and South, in an increasingly polarised human rights discourse.
Yet, behind the stage lights, the shadows are long and critical. Organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have consistently warned that leadership on the council must align with tangible commitment.
They are watching closely: Will Indonesia use its influence to push for access by special mandate-holders to global conflict zones, or will it cloak inaction in the rhetoric of state sovereignty?
Will its voice be loud in highlighting violations in one region while falling silent on another due to geopolitical and geostrategic considerations?
Herein lies the ultimate credibility test. The United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) criticises Indonesia’s presidency, arguing it could swiftly become “hollow prestige” if seen merely as a product of regional rotation, not a recognition of substantive capability.
The ULMWP asserts that Indonesia is unfit for the role, pointing to allegations of a 60-year conflict in Papua, historical casualties, and comparing the situation to past international controversies.
They challenge Indonesia’s moral standing, citing unresolved historical allegations, internal displacement, and the long-standing refusal to grant access to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
This opposition underscores the profound domestic scrutiny the presidency faces: every action on the global stage will be measured against conditions in Papua, where critics describe ongoing tensions and demand immediate access for journalists and a UN visit.
The most profound implications may, in fact, unfold domestically. This presidency is a mirror forcibly held up to the nation itself. It creates unique political and moral pressure to address longstanding homework.
Issues such as freedom of expression, protection of minorities and vulnerable groups, law enforcement in cases of alleged violations, and the state of labour and environmental rights will come under a brighter international spotlight. Image: Laurens Ikinia/APR
Issues such as freedom of expression, protection of minorities and vulnerable groups, law enforcement in cases of alleged violations, and the state of labour and environmental rights will come under a brighter international spotlight.
In this context, the government’s move to revise the Human Rights Law is a direct response to this pressure.
Human Rights Minister Natalius Pigai, in a meeting with Commission III of the House of Representatives (DPR) on February 2, 2026, emphasised that the drafting process involves prominent national human rights figures — including Professor Jimly Asshiddiqie, Makarim Wibisono, Haris Azhar, Rocky Gerung, Ifdhal Kasim, and Roichatul Aswidah — to ensure the revised law is “more progressive and advanced”.
The government is targeting ratification in 2026, aiming to synchronise domestic legal progress with its international leadership year.
The government thus faces a stark choice: leverage this historic moment as a catalyst for deeper legal and institutional human rights reforms, open wider dialogue with civil society, and demonstrate tangible progress anchored in a stronger law; or, wield the position merely as a diplomatic shield to deflect criticism, content with symbolism over substance, even if that symbolism includes a newly passed but weakly implemented law.
The latter would be a damaging boomerang, deepening a crisis of trust both in the eyes of its own citizens and the global community.
Indonesian civil society, conversely, holds a golden opportunity. They now have a wider door to elevate domestic issues to the global forum, using their own nation’s presidential position as an accountability tool. The involvement of activists in the law revision process is a start, but the presidency must be seen not as the sole property of the government, but as a national asset to be filled with diverse and critical voices, both sweet and bitter, to ensure the promised progress is real.
Navigating the terrain A clear-eyed SWOT analysis is indispensable for Indonesia to strategically navigate its historic presidency of the UN Human Rights Council. This framework illuminates the internal and external factors that will define its tenure, balancing inherent advantages against palpable risks, all while the domestic reform clock ticks.
Strengths: Indonesia enters this role with a formidable diplomatic toolkit. Its long-standing tradition of “free and active” foreign policy has cultivated a wide non-aligned network and substantial credibility as an independent voice in the Global South.
As the world’s third-largest democracy, it offers a practical case study in balancing governance, diversity, and development. Furthermore, its soft power assets — embodied in the national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity) and its narrative of moderate Islam — provide unique cultural and religious leverage to mediate polarised debates on sensitive issues like religious freedom.
Operationally, the presidency itself confers significant agenda-setting power, allowing Indonesia to prioritise thematic issues such as the right to development, climate justice, and interfaith tolerance, while influencing the appointment of key human rights investigators.
The concurrent push for a progressive Human Rights Law revision can be framed as a strength, showcasing a commitment to aligning domestic norms with international aspirations.
Weaknesses: Indonesia’s most significant vulnerability remains the perceived gap between its international advocacy and its domestic human rights landscape. Longstanding, contentious issues — including restrictions on civil liberties, protections for minorities, and unresolved past alleged violations — provide immediate fodder for critics and undermine its moral authority.
This credibility deficit is a strategic weakness that adversaries will exploit. The revision of the Human Rights Law, if perceived as a rushed or cosmetic exercise to coincide with the presidency, could exacerbate this weakness rather than alleviate it.
Additionally, the technical and political capacity of its permanent mission in Geneva will be under immense strain, tested by the need to master complex procedural rules while managing intensely politicised negotiations among competing global blocs in real-time.
Opportunities: This presidency is an unparalleled platform for strategic nation-branding, casting Indonesia as a consensus-driven, responsible global leader. Domestically, it creates a powerful political catalyst to accelerate and deepen stalled legislative reforms.
The targeted 2026 ratification of the Human Rights Law is the prime opportunity; it must be used to revitalise national human rights institutions like the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM) and pass long-delayed bills like the Domestic Workers Protection Bill.
Internationally, it offers the chance to operationalise its bridge-builder identity, mediating in protracted conflicts or humanitarian crises where dialogue has stalled, thereby translating diplomatic principle into tangible impact.
Successfully shepherding a meaningful domestic reform would give Indonesia undeniable moral currency in these international efforts.
Threats: The external environment is fraught with challenges. The council is often an arena for great power politicisation, where human rights issues are weaponised for geopolitical ends. Indonesia risks being ensnared in these zero-sum games, which could drain diplomatic capital and compromise its neutral stance.
Simultaneously, it faces relentless scrutiny from a vigilant transnational civil society and global media, ensuring that any perceived stagnation or regression at home — such as a watered-down Human Rights Law or continued restrictions in Papua — will trigger amplified criticism internationally.
The paramount threat, however, is the boomerang effect: that the heightened visibility of the presidency exponentially raises expectations, and the subsequent failure to demonstrate concrete progress — both in Geneva through effective leadership and in Jakarta through substantive reform—could severely damage Indonesia’s hard-won diplomatic reputation, leaving it weaker than before it assumed the chair.
Thus, Indonesia’s tenure will be a constant balancing act: leveraging its strengths to seize opportunities, while meticulously managing its weaknesses to mitigate existential threats.
The presidency is not merely a position of honour, but a high-stakes test of strategic foresight and authentic commitment, where domestic legislative action is now part of the international exam.
From symbol to substance: The path forward Indonesia’s election as the 2026 President of the UNHRC is an acknowledgment of its role and potential on the global stage. However, this acknowledgment comes as a loan of trust with very high interest: increased accountability and consistency.
The government’s own timeline, aiming to ratify a revised Human Rights Law within this same year, has voluntarily raised the stakes, tying its legacy directly to tangible domestic output.
This year of leadership is not a celebratory party, but a laboratory for authentic leadership. Its success will not be measured by the smoothness of procedural sessions or the number of meetings chaired.
It will be measured by the extent to which Indonesia can articulate and champion a vision of inclusive and just human rights globally, and — just as crucially — by the degree to which this office leaves a positive legacy for the advancement of human rights at home.
The revised Human Rights Law is poised to be the most visible component of that domestic legacy. Minister Pigai’s confidence in its progressiveness, bolstered by the involvement of respected figures, must translate into a law that meaningfully addresses past shortcomings and empowers institutions.
Indonesia stands at a crossroads. One path leads to transformative leadership, using this position to strengthen global norms while cleansing the domestic mirror through courageous reform and open engagement. The other leads to transactional leadership, leveraging prestige and a new but potentially inert law to impress without touching the core of the issues.
Indonesia’s choice will determine whether history records 2026 as the year Indonesia truly led the world on human rights by exemplifying the change it advocates, or merely performed a protocol duty on a stage where the lights are slowly fading on its credibility.
A historic mandate and its dual imperative This strategic position is a historic achievement, cementing the country’s role while presenting a real-time test of its global credibility. As a body of 47 member states, the UNHRC holds vital authority in investigating violations, conducting periodic reviews, and shaping international human rights norms. The Council President controls the agenda, guides dialogue, and, most importantly, builds consensus from diverse interests.
Indonesia is no newcomer, currently serving its sixth membership term and often as a Vice-President. Securing the top seat opens the chance to shift from “player” to “game-setter,” potentially shaping a more inclusive global human rights discourse.
This achievement is built on active diplomacy: vigorous economic and peace diplomacy (including Indonesia’s peacemaker initiatives), strengthened regional diplomacy emphasising ASEAN centrality and Global South solidarity, and a consistent multilateral commitment as a strong UN system supporter.
The Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has affirmed its commitment to lead the council objectively, inclusively, and in a balanced manner. Potential agenda paths include advocating for contextualising human rights principles to be more sensitive to the historical, developmental, and socio-cultural contexts of developing nations; expanding the discourse to seriously discuss issues like corruption, environmental degradation, and electoral governance in the Council; and testing its bridge-builder capacity in acute conflicts, such as the Palestinian issue, by leading constructive diplomatic initiatives.
Ultimately, history will record not just the prestigious title of “UNHRC President,” but the substance and impact of the leadership. This position is a mirror: Is Indonesia ready to lead with consistency and firm moral principle, or will it become trapped in the contradiction between rhetoric in Geneva and reality at home?
The parallel process to revise the Human Rights Law is now part of that reflection. Its quality, its process, and its final enactment will be scrutinised as evidence of Indonesia’s sincerity.
True leadership will be measured by the courage to build bridges amid global divisions and the ability to connect words with concrete action and accountability domestically. The year 2026 will determine whether this moment is remembered as a renaissance of moral diplomacy, backed by genuine legal evolution at home, or merely a display window of symbolism where even new laws ring hollow.
The final word rests not on the title itself, but on the government’s collective actions in both the international arena and the national legislature. Success in this dual mission would add a brilliant and coherent achievement to the international record of the administration of President Prabowo Subianto and Vice-President Gibran Rakabuming Raka.
The choice — and the test — is in Indonesia’s hands.
Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan lecturer and researcher at the Institute of Pacific Studies, Indonesian Christian University, Jakarta. He is also an honorary member of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) in Aotearoa New Zealand.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on February 21, 2026.
Palau court denies Senate bid to stop US deportee deal RNZ Pacific Palau’s Supreme Court has denied an application by the Senate for a stay order on the government’s plan to take third country nationals deported from the United States. President Surangel Whipps’ has agreed for Palau to take up to 75 people, with the US to give Palau US$7.5 million in development funds. However,
Moana Maniapoto: The day we met Jesse Jackson – and why his words still matter COMMENTARY: By Moana Maniapoto Known globally as one of America’s most prominent and inspiring civil rights leaders, Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr twice ran for US president. He has died at 84. Throughout his lifetime, he fought to promote social justice, economic equality and political empowerment for marginalised communities — and worked hard to encourage voter
Why has Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor been arrested, and what legal protections does the royal family have? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Francesca Jackson, PhD candidate, Lancaster Law School, Lancaster University Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest comes after the US government released files that appeared to indicate he had shared official information with financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey
Papuan activist Wenda accuses Jakarta of ‘lying’ over shot down plane Asia Pacific Report A West Papuan leader has accused the Indonesian government of lying over its operations and “masking” the military role of some civilian aircraft. Disputing an Indonesian government statement about reported that TPNPB fired upon an aircraft in Boven Digoel, killing both the pilot and copilot, United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP)
Could Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest bring down the British monarchy? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Coghlan, Associate Professor, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, University of New England When a royal faces scrutiny, it can feel like a rupture with tradition. Yet across the ages, British royals have repeatedly fallen under suspicion. What makes the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor so striking is
Wuthering Heights looks lush – but it’s a bad film and a worse adaptation Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin D. Muir, Casual Academic, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago, yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her. This is how one Letterbox’d user described writer-director Emerald Fennell’s film
A love letter to Country: grief, motherhood and loss in Jada Alberts’ Black Light Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Swain, Associate Lecturer in Theatre, The University of Melbourne This story oscillates and swells around a glass outdoor table, on the porch of a family home on Larrakia land. A table almost identical to the one on my porch back home. I point this out to
Is AI really ‘intelligent’? This philosopher says yes Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Goodall, Emeritus Professor, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University Anyone who engages in serious dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM) may get the impression they are interacting with an intelligence. But many experts in the field argue the impression is just that. In
Australia’s masculine policing culture is failing women and children Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Simpson, Associate Professor in Criminology, Macquarie University Australian policing has been in the spotlight in the past few weeks. There were concerning scenes in New South Wales during protests against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit, while Queensland Police’s commitment to curtailing domestic and family violence was
Andrew’s arrest: will anything like this now happen in the US? Why hasn’t it so far? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University The stunning arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor by UK police on suspicion of misconduct in public office must have chilled many powerful American men to the bone. They may now wonder: could something like
Known globally as one of America’s most prominent and inspiring civil rights leaders, Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr twice ran for US president. He has died at 84.
Throughout his lifetime, he fought to promote social justice, economic equality and political empowerment for marginalised communities — and worked hard to encourage voter uptake from the disillusioned and excluded.
Little wonder he was outspoken against the South African apartheid regime and on Palestine. His six children described their father as a “servant leader”.
When I think of Jesse Jackson, I recall the iconic image of him standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968, moments before his mentor Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated.
I visited the site over a year ago. Now transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum, it documents the Jim Crow era both men were born into; where segregation and racism was formally normalised.
The interactive display was both moving and disturbing. It was also hopeful; a reminder of people-power movements led by those shaped by a Baptist church culture that grew the most compelling orators.
I have a personal memory of meeting Jesse Jackson one special afternoon many years ago in New York, while travelling with Deirdre Nehua and Syd Jackson.
Fearless treaty activist Syd, one of our most fearless unionists and treaty activists, passed away in 2007. Both men were intelligent, witty and passionately Kaupapa-driven; powerful speakers who used their gifts and life experience to build movements at home and beyond.
They marched and organised sit-ins. They spoke out when it wasn’t popular, put their hands up when others hesitated. They got off the fence and made a difference.
We were introduced by a mutual friend as “Māori activists from New Zealand”. A puzzled Jesse gazed at Uncle Syd.
“Where did you get that slave name from, my brother?”
Deirdre and I glanced at each other. Uncle Syd responded with a deft explanation that referred to his Welsh whakapapa and included the words both “rugby” and “colonisation”.
Afterwards, the three of us bounced around New York beaming. We’d met an inspirational leader and he now knew “Māori brothers and sisters at the bottom of the South Pacific” were in the same waka; fighting the good fight.
In the many tributes to Jesse Jackson, I noted the odd commentator described him as a “populist”. It’s a term that conjures up those who frame themselves as saviours by fomenting division and exploiting fear.
Inclusive and reformist Yet Jesse was inclusive and a reformist. Their point was about how he built coalitions that brought African Americans, Latinos, unions, rainbow communities, poor whites and working class together to fight for basic human rights inside the existing system. It’s said he frequently used his platforms to highlight Native American and Indigenous-led causes.
This week The Washington Post noted how colleges in the US are dismantling affirmative action stategies designed to overcome restrictions on participation due to race or income. Back here, calls have been made for a referendum on electorates set up to specifically provide a voice for signatories to Te Tiriti, in a system not designed by or for them.
Next week, a champion who railed against inequality will be laid to rest in his beloved Chicago. For us in Aotearoa, it’s an opportunity to reflect on his coalition-building record in this era of division and truly look around; to understand who and what the real threat to our sense of nationhood truly is.
A man of faith and hope, Jesse Jackson’s words are as relevant now as they ever were. Words matter. So does his call to action.
“It’s time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.”
Moe mai ra e te Rangatira.
Moana Maniapoto MNZM is an Aotearoa New Zealand singer, songwriter and documentary maker, and presenter of Te Ao With Moana. This article was first published on the Te Ao FB page and is republished with permission.
Palau’s Supreme Court has denied an application by the Senate for a stay order on the government’s plan to take third country nationals deported from the United States.
President Surangel Whipps’ has agreed for Palau to take up to 75 people, with the US to give Palau US$7.5 million in development funds.
However, the Senate — the upper house of the Palau National Congress (Olbiil era Kelulau) — and a citizens group went to court arguing the deal is unlawful and not in Palau’s interests, but their motion has been denied.
While the Senate earlier tried to block the deal through legislation, the House of Delegates did not approve.
The President has said Palau will decide on a case by case basis which deported people are accepted.
A source within the government said it was likely that the first group of deported people to arrive in Palau would number about 10.
Whipps’ office said the Senate and traditional leaders have declined attempts to meet for discussions about the issue.
The Senate is pushing for a referendum on the issue, as indicated in a vote on the issue last month.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest comes after the US government released files that appeared to indicate he had shared official information with financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a trade envoy for the UK. But the police have not given details of exactly what they are investigating.
It is important to be clear that the arrest is not related to accusations of sexual assault or misconduct. In 2022, Mountbatten-Windsor reached a settlement with the late Virginia Giuffre for an undisclosed sum that did not include an admission of liability.
Being named in the Epstein files is not an indication of misconduct. Mountbatten-Windsor has previously denied any wrongdoing in his association with Epstein and and has previously rejected any suggestion he used his time as trade envoy to further his own interests.
What was Mountbatten-Windsor’s official role and why did he lose it?
In 2001, Tony Blair’s government made the then-prince the UK’s special representative for trade and investment. According to the government at the time, his remit was to “promote UK business internationally, market the UK to potential inward investors, and build relationships in support of UK business interests”. He did not receive a salary, but he did go on hundreds of trips to promote British businesses.
Members of the royal family are often deployed by the government on international missions to promote trade. When negotiating with other countries, particularly those which are also monarchies, sending a prominent figure like a royal may help seal the deal. Indeed, the then-government claimed that the former Duke of York’s “unique position gives him unrivalled access to members of royal families, heads of state, government ministers and chief executives of companies”.
It is not unusual for members of the royal family to be deployed by the government for diplomatic missions. Royals often host incoming state visits and lead similar visits abroad, and can be deployed to lead delegations on more specific missions.
However, Mountbatten-Windsor had an official role as trade envoy. He stepped down from this role in 2011 following reports about his friendship with Epstein, who was convicted of sex offences in 2011.
The monarch is protected by sovereign immunity, a wide-ranging constitutional principle exempting him from all criminal and civil liability. According to the leading 19th century constitutionalist Alfred Dicey, the monarch could not even be prosecuted for “shooting the Prime Minister through the head”. The Prince of Wales also enjoys immunity as Duke of Cornwall, which protects him from punishment for breaking a range of laws.
The State Immunity Act 1978, which confers immunity on the head of state, also extends to “members of the family forming part of the household”. However, this phrase has been interpreted narrowly to apply to a very tight circle of people and does not appear to apply to the monarch’s children in general. For example, in 2002 Princess Anne was prosecuted (though not arrested) for failing to control her dogs in Windsor Great Park after they bit two children.
Nevertheless, there has often been a perception that members of the royal family are held to a different standard when it comes to the law. In 2016 Thames Valley Police were criticised by anti-monarchy groups for not prosecuting the then-prince after newspaper reports alleged he had driven his car through the gates of Windsor Great Park. In 2019 the Crown Prosecution Service declined to prosecute Prince Philip for causing a car crash which injured two people.
The monarch also cannot be compelled to give evidence in court. For example, prosecutors were unable to summon the late queen to give evidence in the trial of Princess Diana’s former butler, who was accused of stealing her jewellery.
In response to Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, the king said: “What now follows is the full, fair and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and co-operation. Let me state clearly: the law must take its course.”
When was the last time a royal was arrested?
You have to go back quite a long way to find the last time that a member of the British royal family was arrested. This was during the English civil war, when Charles I was taken prisoner for treason before being found guilty and ultimately executed in 1649.
A number of royals, including Princess Anne, have committed driving-related offences, including speeding. But this arrest makes Mountbatten-Windsor the first member of the royal family to be arrested in modern times, though it should be noted that he is no longer a royal – he was stripped of all his official titles in October 2025 as his friendship with Epstein came under even more scrutiny.
What limits do police have on investigating royal estates?
Sovereign immunity also prevents police from entering private royal estates to investigate alleged crimes without permission. This can, theoretically, protect members of the royal family from arrest and prosecution. The Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Act 2017 also bans police from searching royal estates for stolen or looted artefacts.
In 2007, two hen harriers were illegally shot at Sandringham estate. However, Norfolk Police first needed to ask Sandringham officials for permission to enter the estate, by which time the dead birds’ bodies had been removed. Police questioned Prince Harry, but did not bring charges.
Other incidents have allegedly led to Sandringham being accused of becoming a wildlife crime hotspot, with at least 18 reported cases of suspected wildlife offences taking place between 2003-23 – yet only one resulting in prosecution.
Another longstanding legal precedent is that no one may be arrested in the presence of the monarch or within the precincts of a royal palace. It was thought that this rule could protect other members of the royal family and royal employees. However, Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest at Sandringham suggests that this antiquated principle may no longer hold true today.
A West Papuan leader has accused the Indonesian government of lying over its operations and “masking” the military role of some civilian aircraft.
Disputing an Indonesian government statement about reported that TPNPB fired upon an aircraft in Boven Digoel, killing both the pilot and copilot, United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) interim president Benny said the aircraft was “not civilian”.
Benny Wenda said the Indonesian government was “tricking the world” about its military operations in West Papua.
“The Cessna plane the TPNPB [West Papua National Liberation Army] fired upon in Boven Digoel was not a civilian plane, as the police spokesman misleadingly stated, but part of a security operation,” Wenda said.
“Indonesia is again disguising their military activity as [civilian] activity. They are also willfully breaching the no-fly zones established by the TPNPB.”
The occupied conflict areas in which the Indonesian military TNI were “not permitted to fly” had been “clearly marked out by the TPNPB”.
“This is the same pattern Indonesia used in 1977, when Indonesia used a disguised civilian plane to bomb villages across the highlands and massacre thousands, including many members of my own family,” Wenda said.
Clear strategy He added there was a clear strategy behind this — “Indonesia wants to avoid the attention that would be drawn by a large scale military buildup, so they mask their introduction of weapons and other military equipment and personnel”.
Wenda said they were effectively “using their own people as human shields”.
Indonesian soldiers and equipment next to a civilian aircraft. Image: ULMWP
Indonesian troops boarding a civilian aircraft in the West Papua Highlands. Image: ULMWP video screenshot APR
The TPNPB attacks took place on February 11, with the plane being downed and the pilot and co-pilot being killed.
A second attack took place in Mimika, near the Grasberg gold and copper mine, which has been the cause of so much West Papuan deaths over the past 40 years.
“Indonesia then immediately began operating their propaganda machine, claiming that the planes were simply engaged in civilian and medical supply distribution,” Wenda said.
“The truth is that these aircraft were involved in intelligence and security operations.
Media blackout “Indonesia is only able to spread these lies and mislead the international community because of their six-decades long media blackout in West Papua.
“No journalists or NGOs are allowed to operate in our land. West Papua is a closed society, just like North Korea. I thank God we have civilian journalists to document their lies.”
By breaching these rules the military were inviting further attacks, Wenda said.
“We must always remember that the Indonesian military uses any armed action by West Papuans for their own gain, as a pretext for more militarisation, more displacement, and more deforestation and ecocide.”
Wenda said their aim was always to escalate the situation as a way of ethnically cleansing Papuans, forcing them to become refugees in their own land, and strengthening their colonial hold over West Papua.
“It isn’t a coincidence that in the week since this incident we have seen an escalation in Yahukimo, an Indonesia-occupied community health centre, and transformed it into a military post, displacing and traumatising local residents.”
Using hospitals and other health infrastructure for military means was a clear breach of international humanitarian law, Wenda said.
Normal for military In West Papua such behaviour was normal for the military.
“In the same week in Puncak regency, Indonesian military personnel seized a school, preventing students from learning and putting ordinary people at risk of harm. Soldiers are posted in classrooms with guns.”
Wenda called on the Indonesian government to withdraw their troops from occupied West Papua, allow civilians to return home, cease using civilian vehicles as a cover for military action, and immediately facilitate a UN Human Rights visit to West Papua — as has been demanded by more than 110 UN Member states.
“Ultimately, Indonesia must come to the table to discuss a referendum,” Wenda said. “This is the only path to a peaceful solution in West Papua.”
When a royal faces scrutiny, it can feel like a rupture with tradition. Yet across the ages, British royals have repeatedly fallen under suspicion. What makes the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor so striking is that we have to reach back to the 17th century to find anything comparable.
The royals are by no means strangers to scandal, but allegations of law-breaking are another matter entirely. Mountbatten-Windsor’s fall from grace will have huge repercussions for the British royals, and it also gives us an insight into how the handling of the royals has changed since Queen Elizabeth’s death.
When the crown fell
This is not the first time the British royals have crossed paths with the law. In 1483, Richard III became associated with the disappearance of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. The two princes were legitimate heirs and therefore direct threats to Richard’s claim to the throne. He was never tried in court, and historians still debate the evidence.
The most dramatic confrontation between monarchy and law came with Charles I. He was accused of treason during the English Civil War. He was arrested in 1649, tried and publicly executed. This act stunned Europe and shattered the belief royals were above the law.
As a consequence, England abolished the monarchy and became a republic under Oliver Cromwell. So the last time a member of the royal family was arrested and tried, the crown itself fell.
That precedent matters because it underscores how rare royal arrests are. For more than three centuries the monarchy has avoided that spectacle. The fact Andrew’s arrest forces comparison with Charles I reveals how rare the moment is.
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Reputation as royal strategy
By the 19th century, the monarchy survived less through force and more through reputation. Under Queen Victoria (1837-1901), the crown cultivated domestic virtue and moral seriousness as a shield against instability. Respectability became a strategic defence against scandal.
However, fame and power inevitably lead to very high public interest, and scandals made their way into print culture and later mass media. Prince Albert Victor, the grandson of Queen Victoria, was accused of being Jack the Ripper. It’s a claim historians have largely rejected as conspiracy theory, yet it persists because it speaks to fears about royal cover-ups.
James II was removed from the throne in 1688 during the Glorious Revolution amid claims he undermined Protestantism laws and promoted Catholic officials. His perceived abuse of power, rather than a single prosecutable crime, cost him the throne.
In the 20th century, Edward VIII generated a different kind of unease. After his abdication in 1936, evidence emerged of his sympathy toward Nazi Germany followed by his 1937 meeting with Adolf Hitler in Germany. While there was no prosecution, it did cause serious damage to Edward’s standing and public trust.
The collapse of deference
For much of the 20th century, the monarchy operated within a culture of deference. The press refrained from reporting royals’ private lives and indiscretions were quietly managed. The arrangement insulated the royal family from sustained exposure. However, this began to change after a series of scandals in the 1990s. This eventually led Elizabeth II to call 1992 her annus horribilis.
The rise of tabloid journalism eroded old boundaries, and digital media dissolved them entirely. Silence now intensifies suspicion rather than calming it, as was the case with royal silence about the Princess of Wales’ health in early 2024, forcing them to go public with her cancer battle.
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Influence, access and optics
Even before Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, the optics were damaging.
His arrest lands in this transformed landscape. During his tenure as the United Kingdom’s Special Representative for International Trade and Investment, he cultivated relationships with political leaders and wealthy business figures across the Middle East and Central Asia. Critics questioned whether he blurred the line between official trade promotion and private networking.
The 2010 “cash for access” episode involving Mountbatten-Windsor’s wife Sarah Ferguson deepened that perception. She was filmed offering introductions to Andrew in exchange for substantial payment. Although she apologised and Andrew denied involvement, the imagery of monetised proximity to the crown was corrosive.
In 2021, an undercover investigation suggested the queen’s cousin Prince Michael of Kent was prepared to use his royal status to assist a fictitious company in exchange for payment. He denied wrongdoing, but the harm was done.
A brand without insulation
Under Elizabeth II, longevity conferred authority and steadiness that often softened scandal. Under Charles II, the institution appears more exposed. Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest disrupts and exposes the royal family to reputational damage. While he was later released, the scandal still has a long way to play out.
Charles is a constitutional monarch. He can’t interfere in police investigations or prosecutorial decisions without provoking a constitutional crisis. His authority is symbolic rather than executive.
But he can excise Andrew’s inner circle, including his daughters, further from public life. He has already stripped his brother of his royal titles and told him to leave his home, Royal Lodge.
Yet even that has limits. Charles’s power now rests less on control than on credibility. In a permanently watchful society, judgement is delivered not in private but in full view.
The precedent that lingers
The last time a reigning monarch was arrested, England abolished the monarchy and became a republic. The historical echo is impossible to ignore. It reminds us that when the crown becomes entangled with criminal process, the consequences resonate beyond the individual.
Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest underscores how fragile that trust can be and how decisively it is shaped by the court that really matters, that of public opinion. While Andrew is not the king, the scandal may have been softened if his brother Charles acted more decisevly and sooner to remove him from the inner circles of the monarchy.
Royal scandals chip away at the sense of mystery that has long protected the crown. The monarchy survives not because it holds real political power, but because it represents stability, dignity and something slightly removed from everyday life.
When royals are caught up in scandal, that sense of distance collapses, and the institution can begin to feel more fragile than untouchable.
Good adaptations take advantage of the affordances the cinematic medium provides, so some changes are permissible. Fennell goes well beyond this, altering essential characters, relationships and themes to the point that the film feels like erotic fan-fiction with a Hollywood budget.
To synopsise, Brontë’s story is a tragedy of intergenerational trauma. It follows Heathcliff, an abused serial abuser, and Catherine, an intergenerational manipulator. The pair’s toxic relationship – and mutual revenge on everyone they knew (beyond the grave in Catherine’s case) – wreaks havoc.
Visually loud, emotionally mute
Given its tagline “the greatest love story ever told”, Fennell’s film was destined to make some changes.
The frame narrative of the novel is missing. The novel is told through housekeeper Nelly Dean, who is recounting it to Heathcliff’s tenant, Lockwood. The film, meanwhile, starts in Catherine’s childhood and ends at her death.
This also means Fennell stops short of the final act of the novel. In doing so, she omits an entire generation of important characters on whom the original Catherine and Heathcliff – two traumatised, irredeemable wrecking balls – foist their damage.
The interpersonal dynamics that underpin Brontë’s story are warped into a vacuous caricature, missing the point with virtuosic flair. And make no mistake: there is flair. The visual design is bombastic, pointedly anachronistic, and utterly at odds with the novel’s gloomy Gothic countenance.
The opulent, richly saturated sets veer sharply from Brontë’s bleak, wind-swept moors.Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
Brontë’s perpetually grey and haunted moors are swapped for technicolour highlights, elaborate outfits and, at times, saturated tangerine sunsets. It watches like Sofia Coppola attempting Edgar Allan Poe – or a Charli XCX clip (guess who wrote the original soundtrack). This is an odd liberty for a film named after the story’s original setting – the stormy Wuthering Heights estate.
As pioneering Gothic theorists Sanda Gilbert and Susan Gubar write, the Heights in the novel are blanketed by “a general air of sour hatred” that manifests as “continual, aimless violence”.
In the Gothic, setting functions as a haunted presence that reflects the characters’ aberrant psychological states. The past haunts, even when there are no ghosts.
Fennell’s version retains the melodrama, but not the foreboding, hate and malice. And despite the explicit sexuality (none of which appears in the novel beyond euphemism), her take on the story feels oddly toothless. Neutered, even. It trades Gothic for vaudeville.
The erasure of Hindley and Heathcliff
To say the film lacks the novel’s social commentary is an understatement.
From the opening scene, the changes to the source material are clear. We see a young Catherine witnessing a hanged man with an erection – and this tone remains for the entire runtime.
Hindley – Catherine’s brother who forces Heathcliff into servitude, and is arguably the lynchpin of Heathcliff’s revenge – is also entirely absent from the film.
Literary critic Terry Eagleton notes how it is Hindley’s inherited status that enables his abuse of Heathcliff. It is Heathcliff’s lack of wealth, status and property that sees Catherine wed the wealthy Edgar Linton; and, as theorist Arnold Kettle argues, it is Heathcliff’s weaponisation of wealth and inheritance that finally serves as his vehicle for revenge.
To remove these factors is to remove the novel’s entire moral framework.
In the film, Heathcliff’s grievances shrink to Catherine choosing to marry Edgar Linton. This is as close as the film comes to the novel’s treatment of classism, racism and intergenerational trauma.
Likewise, ending on Catherine’s death erases the consequences of the deuteragonists’ manipulations – namely the suffering of their respective children and servants.
The casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has its own controversy. In the novel, Heathcliff’s ambiguous racial identity, within the context of Georgian England, shapes almost every interaction he has.
Even though it’s not clear what his racial identity is (some scholars point to hints that suggest he may have escaped from slavery), his character is defined by “othering”. This is something Elordi’s Heathcliff is at no risk of believably experiencing.
The film flattens the novel’s broader account of how trauma replicates across generations, and how systemic marginalisation can both attract and beget abuse.
Jacob Elordi’s casting sidesteps the racialised marginalisation central to Heathcliff’s character.Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
On abuse – perhaps Fennell’s strangest departure from the source material is reframing Heathcliff’s treatment of Isabella (Edgar Linton’s sister and later Heathcliff’s wife) as a consensual BDSM dynamic.
Brontë’s Heathcliff terrorises Isabella physically and emotionally, and implicitly sexually, until she flees with their son.
The switch from repressed, complex desire in the novel to explicit sex scenes (absent from the book), and the rewriting of abuse as kink, seems to cater to audiences raised on post-50 Shades Of Grey erotica rather than Victorian Gothic.
Literary classics for a Tiktok generation
Like 2020’s colourful Austen adaptation, Emma (well received as a film, but criticised as an adaptation), Fennell’s Wuthering Heights signals a trend towards the “tiktokification” of literary adaptations.
Hollywood has long taken liberties with books, but this recent wave feels engineered for clips, reels and virality, rather than the necessary sacrifices of adaptation.
We know it’s possible to have adaptations with both flair and substance. Consider Baz Luhrmann. The Oscar-nominated Romeo + Juliet (1996) is just as visually bombastic, yet the extent of verbatim Shakespeare retains a dedication to the source that Fennell’s film lacks.
So what does it have to offer? Virality. Even this article contributes to the internet firestorm that will ensure Wuthering Heights’ commercial success. It will ragebait critics far longer than such a limp effort deserves – and we are all its victims.
This story oscillates and swells around a glass outdoor table, on the porch of a family home on Larrakia land. A table almost identical to the one on my porch back home. I point this out to my sis as the bubbling opening night crowd pours into the Merlyn Theatre, in the Malthouse on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation.
I am a proud Dabee Wiradjuri person and theatre maker. My family’s table is held by cold Ngarigo Country, in the alpine plains where I grew up. A far cry from the salty humid air of Larrakia land where this table and this story are set. I do not know Larrakia Country well, only faint memories of glowing sky, crocs and giant mystical trees from when I visited family as a child.
But this table, I do know.
I wonder who else in this auditorium knows this table? Or what is their version of this table? Where do they and their people gather?
Aunty and Bub confront their deeply rooted fears, pain and wisdom on Country.Pia Johnson/Malthouse Theatre
My table back home has held more cups of tea with my family than I can possibly count, summer storm watching, rain bird listening, laughter, tears and silence. If my understanding of this table is even somewhat similar to that of Larrakia mother, writer, director Jada Alberts, then my heart is in for a ride.
Around the Black Light table, we are met by four inimitable First Nations women and actors: Trisha Morton-Thomas (Nan), Rachael Maza (Aunty), Lisa Maza (Mum) and Tahlee Fereday (Bub).
Each of these women is holding the strength of the people and places that have come before and after them. The audience is also there with a lineage that has led us all to this very moment. I wonder how many people will go home and think of all the people and places that have come together in them?
Love and magic
Four women across three generations come together in the wake of an unnamed national crisis. There are allusions to climate disaster with regular power outages, unrest in the city and storms scoring the play. There are resonances of lockdowns from a not-so-distant past, or the possibility this is a crisis in a not-so-distant future.
Following a relationship breakdown, Bub has returned home from the bustle of the city with their children in tow. Nan’s memory is declining; Mum is always working; Aunty, Nan’s main carer, is lonely.
This is the first time in a long time they have all been together – and possibly the first time they have been forced to speak the unspeakable.
Trisha Morton-Thomas as Nan brings equal parts joy and tenderness to the stage.Pia Johnson/Malthouse Theatre
Morton-Thomas as Nan has us in the palm of her hand. When she giggles, we giggle. When she cries, we weep. She so beautifully carries us between worlds, dipping in and out of lucidity, the liminal, the here, the past and into a dreamscape of a beyond. We follow her as our guide through both the surreal and domestic non-linear form this play traversed.
“This is magic and magic is love,” Nan says. Tonight, there is a whole lot of love and undeniable magic.
On the topic of magic, the Maza sisters are a force to be reckoned with. Returning to the stage together for the first time in 17 years, the synergy of these real-life sisters playing fictional sisters is truly palpable. As they began to bicker for the first time, you can feel an energy spill across the audience: a collective strapping in.
The head-to-head, sarcastic side eyes from Aunty and deathly glares from Mum have the audience cackling. The comedy lulls us into a false sense of security, momentarily forgetting the ecological and familial crisis on the horizon.
Tahlee Fereday’s Bub embodies the state of being on the precipice of crisis. Bub is lost and needs to find their way back home. Nan repeats, “Just reach out bub” – Country is waiting.
I have the immense privilege of calling Tahlee a friend and colleague. In the real world, she is a laugh a minute. Here as Bub, Tahlee is grounded, authentic and captivating. Her delivery of the final monologue flaws me in its vulnerability.
Melbourne-based actor Tahlee Fereday plays Bub, teetering on the precipice of crisis, with compassion, depth and humour.Pia Johnson/Malthouse Theatre
Country speaks loudly
I cried before, during and after the show.
Before, reading Albert’s writer and director’s note honouring their grandmothers and generously inviting us to listen to Nan’s words:
I hope her words remind you of your own humanity, your interconnectedness, to every living thing and the Country that holds you.
During, between the laughs, as I experienced the brave truth telling and poetic reclamation of grief, trauma, love, loss and survival in the colonial project. Country speaks loudly: no words, but we heard her.
After, remembering – just like Albert’s – my own grandmother turns 90 this year. The staunch matriarch and pillar of my family. So much of her is in me, her love, her magic (which Nan says is the same thing).
I can’t wait to call my grandma and tell her all about this play.
This will be one of those plays that stays with us another 17 years from now.Pia Johnson/Malthouse Theatre
As I write this now, I still feel as though my heart is on the outside of my body – “good ways”.
Thank you Jada, for sharing the story of your motherhood and the mothers who came before you. Thank you Malthouse for programming this work to open the 2026 season.
I know this will be one of those plays that stays with us another 17 years from now.
Black Light is at Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne, until March 7.
Anyone who engages in serious dialogue with a Large Language Model (LLM) may get the impression they are interacting with an intelligence. But many experts in the field argue the impression is just that. In philosopher Daniel Dennett’s words, such systems display “competence without comprehension”.
The hype about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) from big corporations and their celebrity spokespersons has prompted a backlash, in which scepticism turns to cynicism, often tinged with paranoia about how “stochastic parrots” may start to control our lives.
“Intelligence” itself has become an overheated topic, one that calls for less assertiveness, more cool thinking, and refreshed attempts at a starting point.
Review: What is Intelligence: Lessons from AI about Evolution, Computing, and Minds – Blaise Agüera y Arcus (MIT Press)
What Is Intelligence? by Google luminary Blaise Agüera y Arcus is the first book in a new series from MIT in collaboration with Antikythera, a think tank focused on “planetary-scale computation as a philosophical, technological, and geopolitical force”. A foreword from series editor Benjamin Bratton makes the bold claim that “computation is a technology to think with” and that the building blocks of our reality are themselves computational.
Research on intelligence has a chequered history, tainted by eugenics, statistical manipulation and a banal obsession with metrics. Agüera y Arcas counters this by opening up the topic as wide as it can go. A physics graduate with a background in computational neuroscience, he is something of a polymath. He draws explanatory frameworks from microbiology, philosophy, linguistics, cybernetics, neuroscience and industrial history.
His book presents almost as a sequence of foundation lectures in these areas. Its release has been accompanied by dozens of online talks and interviews, in which Agüera y Arcas presents the case that we are up for a seismic shift in how we think about intelligence – biological and artificial.
“Few mainstream authors claim that AI is ‘real’ intelligence,” he writes. “I do.”
Could the nerds be right?
The fundamental case against the “I” in AI is that intelligence is organic, derived from sensory interaction with a physical environment. Agüera y Arcas turns the tables with the premise that computation is the substrate for intelligence in all life forms.
The claim builds on an apparently crude proposition: prediction is the fundamental principle behind intelligence and “may be the whole story”.
What he means by prediction here is something much more radical than what we see with autocorrect. He explains it in biological terms as a process of pattern development. Single cells like bacteria predict sequences of events that may influence their capacity for survival. The synaptic learning rules in single neurons give rise to local sequence prediction.
Agüera y Arcas recounts how his journey into the enigmatic terrain of AI reached a turning point with his counterintuitive recognition that “the nerds were right”: in computation, bigger really was better and might actually be the key to moving from Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – the kind that can play chess – to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which can participate in a philosophical discussion.
Setting aside his contempt for the apparently simplistic dedication to scaling up, Agüera y Arcas returned to the biology lab for a reassessment of what was observable in living systems. If every form of life is an aggregation of cooperative parts, he reasoned, the evolution of cells into organs and organisms may be a matter of predictive modelling.
A central tenet of What is Intelligence? is that every form of life is an aggregation of cooperative parts. Links proliferate through patterns that enable increasingly complex functions. When Agüera y Arcas says the brain is computational, it’s not a metaphor: it is not that brains are like computers, they are computers.
Correlations between biological and mechanical forms of intelligence are his deep and abiding interest. What is Intelligence? follows What is Life?, a shorter book in which Agüera y Arcas lays the groundwork for this larger, more ambitious publication.
These are the originators of modern thinking about artificial intelligence, and the quest for origins runs through all Agüera y Arcas’ lines of enquiry.
It is worth noting that Antikythera, the publishing series launched with this book, is named after an ancient device found in a shipwreck off the coast of Greece, which has been called the original analog computer.
Computation was discovered as much as it was invented, Bratton says in his foreword. This might apply to the Antikythera. If it is indeed the first computer, it was literally discovered at the bottom of an ocean.
But it corroborates Bratton’s statement in another sense. As a device for tracking astronomical phenomena, the Antikythera testifies to computation as an aspect of how the universe works.
Getting specific about origins
Agüera y Arcas wants to get more specific about origins. How does pattern emerge from randomness? How does code emerge from an unorganised soup of molecules?
In approaching these questions, he takes his cue from Turing and von Neumann, whose experiments anticipated the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953. The 1936 Turing machine established a minimalist prototype for computational function with the simple components of a coded tape and a read/write head. Von Neumann brought in a focus on embodied computation, where the components of the machine or body are part of what is written.
This is where Agüera y Arcas situates his work. His breakthrough came from adopting a programming language, devised in 1993, called “Brainfuck”. With just eight command symbols, Brainfuck set the parameters for a controlled experiment, in which Agüera y Arcas and his team used 64 byte tapes coded with “junk” drawn from a soup of code and data.
In the experiment, two tapes are selected at random, joined end to end, and run to test for interaction patterns. Then it’s rinse and repeat. The tapes are returned to the soup, and two more are run.
At first, nothing much shows up amidst the randomness. But after a million or so repeats (not massive in computing terms) the magic starts to happen. Loops appear. Patterns emerge. At around the five million mark, the non-functional code or “Turing gas” transforms itself into a “computorium” of replicating code.
In lectures, Agüera y Arcas shows a screenshot of this on his laptop: a vertical line down the centre of the field of data marks the “phase transition”. The image is reproduced on the cover of his book, as an emblem of the paradigm shift he is tracking.
If the transition to replicating code is indeed an expression of what is happening in the development of life forms, the theory of natural selection may lose its claim to primacy as the explanatory model for evolution. Richard Dawkins enthusiasts, hang on to your hats.
Agüera y Arcas does not engage in a polemical critique of Dawkins, but his book brings Margulis, an early adversary of Dawkins, into the centre of the arena. The pair faced off in a public debate in Oxford in 2009, where Dawkins’ popularised concept of the “selfish gene” came under pressure from Margulis’ theory of symbiogenesis, literally genesis through combination or fusion.
The Dawkins account is based on a Darwinian view of natural selection through competitive advantage; Margulis was drawing on research into the formation of microorganisms through combinations of mitochondria and chloroplasts, once independent life forms.
It was survival of the fittest versus a vision of biological complexity generated through endosymbiosis, a relationship in which one organism lives inside another, potentially resulting in a new life form – or, as Agüera y Arcas sees it, an impetus towards “fit” understood as pattern completion, rather than “fitness” understood as advantage.
Microbiologist Lynn Margulis was an early adversary of Richard Dawkins’ theory of the ‘selfish gene’.Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Prediction and function
Agüera y Arcas’ central concepts are prediction and function, which work together to explain intelligence as the development of functional complexity through predictive pattern completion.
He is erasing a familiar conceptual boundary here: intelligence does not prompt function, it is function.
Intelligence, he argues, is a property of systems rather than beings, and function is its primary indicator. A rock does not function, but a kidney does. This is demonstrated simply by cutting them in half. The rock becomes two rocks, but the kidney is no longer a kidney.
So does a kidney have intelligence? Or an amoeba? Or a leaf? These questions are opened up, along with the question of whether Large Language Models have intelligence, which may a better way to frame it than asking whether they are intelligent.
Agüera y Arcas is not alone in taking an affirmative position. Influential biologist Michael Levin runs a research laboratory at Tufts University, where he and his team study the functional correlations between natural organisms and synthetic or chimeric life forms in search of “intelligence behaviour in unfamiliar guises”.
Their declared goal is to develop modes of communication with truly diverse intelligences, including cells, tissues, organs, synthetic living constructs, robots and software-based AIs.
Such an approach steers a course between the stochastic parrots view and biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance,” which proposes that organic form is a manifestation of memory, resonating through generations as genetic heritage. Agüera y Arcas avoids both Sheldrake’s intuitive and telepathic orientations, and the hard-headed constraints of mechanistic determinism.
The thesis presented in What is Intelligence? is unfamiliar rather than intrinsically difficult. Much of the explanation is easy enough for the general reader to follow, though Agüera y Arcas has a tendency to veer into more the technical and abstract terrain of programming, as if addressing an insider audience. The extensive glossary does not include standard programming terms, such as logic gates, gradients, weights and backpropagation.
At over 600 pages, What is Intelligence? is a marathon read and it is encumbered by tangential excursions. I’m not sure why Agüera y Arcas needs to go into the history of industrialisation, or anthropological studies of the Pirahā people of the Amazon. This is a book for dipping into rather than swallowing whole.
But its ideas are important. They may well be part of a major transformation in our thinking about where human intelligence sits in the rapidly evolving environment of AI.
These issues might appear to be separate, but they both highlight a masculinity problem within Australian policing.
It may be time for an Australian version of the United Kingdom’s 2023 Baroness Casey Review, which exposed worrying behaviour and cultural issues inside the UK’s Metropolitan Police Service.
Violence and a lack of support
In Sydney, the policing of protesters against the visit of Herzog led to serious questions about the use of force.
Protesters were pepper sprayed and forcibly penned in by police, leaving a 69-year-old woman with four broken vertebrae.
Meanwhile in Queensland, a tribunal revealed this month that the Queensland Police Service (QPS) had refused to discipline an officer accused of serious domestic violence against his heavily pregnant partner, citing “no tangible benefit” to doing so.
This comes at a time when domestic and family violence incidents reported to police in Queensland increased by more than 220% between 2012 and 2024, with many victims left waiting hours or days for help.
Each of these events is of significant concern in its own right.
But put together, they present a far more troubling picture and raise the question of whether Australian policing has a problem with gender.
Not simply in how it responds to violence against women but in how an increasingly masculine institutional culture shapes what policing looks like, what it prioritises and ultimately who is protected.
Worrying cultures
Following the 2020 murder of Hannah Clarke and her three children by her former partner, and the 2021 Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce’s “Hear Her Voice” report, the Queensland government established a Commission of Inquiry into policing responses to domestic and family violence.
Its report found a culture of “sexism, misogyny and racism” across the service, with “negative attitudes towards women” that “inhibits the policing of domestic and family violence”.
In NSW, a 2023 Law Enforcement Conduct Commission review of police responses to domestic and family violence found such incidents account for 40% of all police work. That is around 500 incidents every day.
Yet, the review found basic failures in recording, training and victim support. It also found 60 officers were involved in domestic and family violence incidents. Some were investigated more than once.
In more than three quarters of cases, those officers were investigated by colleagues from their own command. In most, there was no record of whether their firearms had been removed.
In Victoria, 683 Victoria Police staff were investigated for alleged sex crimes and family violence offences between 2019 and 2024 – the majority of whom were uniformed officers. Chief Commissioner Shane Patton called the figure “alarming”.
This follows the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission’s 2015 Independent Review which found an “entrenched culture of everyday sexism” and a “high tolerance for sexual harassment” across the force.
These reports all identify cultures of misogyny, sexism and basic operational failures in responding to violence against women.
But what none of them quite names is what sits behind all of it: men, and a deeply entrenched culture of masculinity.
As Amanda Keddie – a Deakin University professor who has researched gender equality in police forces – argues, the hierarchical and masculinised cultures within policing have been “taken for granted and unquestioned”.
They remain unnamed in report after report, even as they shape every failing those reports describe.
Commissioned after the 2021 abduction, rape and murder of Sarah Everard by a serving Metropolitan Police officer, Casey found a rampant “boys’ club culture” that privileged white male officers while sidelining women, Black and gay colleagues.
At the same time, services for violence against women and girls were hollowed out, with rape kits stored in broken freezers held shut with bungee cords.
gender inequality will not be addressed without transforming the hierarchical and masculinised cultures of policing organisations.
The Casey Review offers a blueprint: specialist units for violence against women, independent oversight of police-perpetrated abuse and mandatory standards on vetting and misconduct.
In Australia, this means working to systemically change police cultures that were built by, and for, a narrow demographic which does not reflect the diversity of the communities they are meant to serve.
It means resourcing specialist domestic violence commands rather than dismantling them, holding officers who perpetrate violence to account, and recruiting and promoting in ways that genuinely reshape who polices and how.
ER Report: Here is a summary of significant articles published on EveningReport.nz on February 20, 2026.
Friday essay: ‘red flags’ and ‘performative reading’ – what do our reading choices say about us? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology What do our reading choices say about us? When teaching creative writing and literature classes, I always ask my students about their favourite genres and current reading in the first week. It is
SA Newspoll shows Liberal wipeout likely; Victorian Morgan poll puts One Nation first on primaries Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne A South Australian Newspoll has given the Liberals just 14% of the primary vote, four weeks before the state election. And in a Victoria Morgan poll, One
Humanoid home robots are on the market – but do we really want them? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eduardo B. Sandoval, Scientia Researcher, Social Robotics, UNSW Sydney Last year, Norwegian-US tech company 1X announced a strange new product: “the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home”. Standing 168 centimetres tall and weighing in at 30 kilograms, the US$20,000 Neo bot promises
Is couples counselling right for me and will the therapist take sides? An expert explains Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Priscilla Dunk-West, Professor of Social Work, Victoria University Should we do couples counselling? Are we happy? Are we both pulling in the same direction? How can we get our spark back? These kinds of questions are normal in a society that places such importance on coupledom, despite
Not just sport and car crashes: debunking 5 myths about traumatic brain injury in NZ Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kelly Jones, Associate Professor of Pediatric Neuropsychology, Auckland University of Technology Touching the lives of an average 110 people each day in Aotearoa, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is much more common than any of us would like it to be. Yet it is often misunderstood, underestimated and
Diversity programs have become a tick-the-box exercise. They need to become more political, not less Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Celina McEwen, Senior Researcher in Sociology of Work, University of Technology Sydney Diversity programs are a favourite target of right-wing populists who claim they represent a radical left agenda that is politicising workplaces. Our research shows something quite different. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) isn’t failing because
SpaceX rocket left behind a plume of chemical pollution as it burnt up in the atmosphere Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn Schofield, Professor and Associate Dean (Environment and Sustainability in Faculty of Science), The University of Melbourne Space junk returning to the Earth is introducing metal pollution to the pristine upper atmosphere as it burns up on re-entry, a new study has found. Published today in the
Almost half of antibiotic prescribing for surgery is inappropriate, new report shows Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Allen Cheng, Professor of Infectious Diseases, Monash University Inappropriate antibiotic prescribing around the time of surgery and long-term prescribing in aged care are among a mixed bag of findings of a recent report into antibiotic use and resistance in Australia. The report shows while fewer antibiotics are
Dramatic changes in upper atmosphere are responsible for recent droughts and bushfires: new research Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milton Speer, Visiting Fellow, School of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, University of Technology Sydney Over the past decade, southern Australia has suffered numerous extreme weather and climate events, such as record-breaking heatwaves, bushfires, two major droughts and even flash flooding. While Australia has always had these disasters,
More women are professors, but gender gaps continue to plague NZ universities Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kim Hebert-Losier, Associate Professor in Sports Biomechanics, University of Waikato Universities play a crucial role in achieving gender equality, but persistent disparities in leadership, pay and research opportunities continue to shape women’s careers in academia. Globally, only 36% of senior academics are women. In Aotearoa New Zealand,
Why has Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor been arrested, and what legal protections do the royal family have? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Francesca Jackson, PhD candidate, Lancaster Law School, Lancaster University Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest comes after the US government released files that appeared to indicate he had shared official information with financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey
The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy and Director, Applied Ethics Center, UMass Boston Public debate about artificial intelligence in higher education has largely orbited a familiar worry: cheating. Will students use chatbots to write essays? Can instructors tell? Should universities ban the tech? Embrace it? These concerns are
Why Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ endures Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Virginia Raguin, Distinguished Professor of Humanities Emerita, College of the Holy Cross Michelangelo’s fresco of “The Last Judgment,” covering the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City, is being restored. The work, which started on Feb. 1, 2026, is expected to continue for
Why the ‘Streets of Minneapolis’ have echoed with public support – unlike the campus of Kent State in 1970 Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory P. Magarian, Thomas and Karole Green Professor of Law, Washington University in St. Louis The president announces an aggressive, controversial policy. Large groups of protesters take to the streets. Government agents open fire and kill protesters. All of these events, familiar from Minneapolis in 2026, also
Streetlights in Lagos can boost safety and grow the economy. Why not everyone benefits Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adewumi Badiora, Senior Lecturer, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Olabisi Onabanjo University Nigeria is urbanising at a remarkable speed. Some of the world’s fastest growing cities are in the west African country. With the current rate of urbanisation, Kano, Ibadan, Abuja and Port Harcourt will surpass
Former Fiji prime minister and ex-police commissioner on bail in inciting mutiny case By Margot Staunton, RNZ Pacific senior journalist Fiji’s former Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama and ex-police commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho are out on bail after appearing in court, charged with inciting mutiny. The pair appeared for a first call before the Suva Magistrates Court yesterday and were granted bail under strict conditions. Magistrate Yogesh Prasad also issued
‘Antisemitism training’ at universities. Labor’s march to authoritarianism From curbing protests to controlling what can be said in Australia, state and Federal Labor governments are becoming authoritarian. Next in line is the thought police entering campus. Nick Riemer reports for Michael West Media. ANALYSIS: By Nick Riemer In December, the NSW Labor government gave itself the power to ban street marches for an
Grattan on Friday: Can Angus Taylor get beyond slogans to craft a sound immigration policy? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra This week we pressed the rewind button on the Pauline tape, back to Hanson maxing out with inflammatory statements about Muslims, attracting a blaze of publicity and widespread outrage. Or, given One Nation’s surging polls, have we pushed the fast
Why one of Australia’s most successful TV production companies is being shut down Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phoebe Hart, Associate Professor, Film Screen & Animation, Queensland University of Technology Members of the Australian screen industry have been shocked to learn one of the nation’s most successful and prolific production companies, Matchbox Pictures – and its subsidiary Tony Ayres Productions – will shut their doors
With more restrictive laws across the country, how can we protect the right to protest? Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Law, Member of Deakin Cyber and the Centre for Law as Protection, Deakin University, Deakin University In the wake of the Bondi terror attack, multiple state governments have passed laws to restrict mass protests. Most notably, the New South Wales government introduced
The stunning arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor by UK police on suspicion of misconduct in public office must have chilled many powerful American men to the bone. They may now wonder: could something like this now happen in the US?
The former prince’s arrest is related to his association with dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and allegations he shared confidential material. Andrew has consistently denied wrongdoing and has been released under investigation.
To see UK police making arrests over allegations relating to Epstein contrasts strongly with the US where, so far, little has happened to further investigate those linked to the disgraced financier.
So, will we now see stronger Epstein-related investigative efforts and possibly even arrests in the US? And why haven’t we seen anything like that, so far?
Will this actually prompt stronger action in the US now?
It’s possible. The whole situation is fairly unpredictable, and there has been mounting pressure on people named in the Epstein files to resign or step aside, particularly in higher education.
In Congress, US lawmakers are pushing hard for accountability.
It’s important to remember the collapse of the rule of law in the US is far from inevitable.
The Epstein story still has a long way to play out yet, if only because of the weight of the documentary evidence that needs to be sorted through.
It’s also possible the arrest and potential prosecution of Mountbatten-Windsor (and others outside the UK) may end up revealing more from the Epstein story than has come out of the Department of Justice (DOJ) releases, which have been selective.
If the Mountbatten-Windsor case goes to trial – which is still far from certain – and as the scandal reverberates across Europe, that may end up circumventing efforts we have seen so far from the DOJ to slow-walk the release of Epstein-related documents and information.
Why haven’t big arrests like this happened in the US so far?
The most obvious reason is the stranglehold the Trump administration has on the DOJ.
To have the attorney-general – instead of being accountable and answering legitimate questions about the Epstein files – waxing lyrical about US President Donald Trump being the greatest president in American history tells you a lot about the political capture of that department.
Another extremely unsubtle sign of that capture is the large banner featuring Trump’s face that has just been slung across the Justice Department building.
Members of the National Guard walk past a banner with President Donald Trump hanging on the Department of Justice.AP Photo/Allison Robbert
All this tells you the DOJ is not an independent government department anymore. It has been captured and weaponised by the Trump administration.
It’s the same story at the FBI; instead of taking strong action over revelations appearing the Epstein files, the agency appears to be focused on investigating Trump’s claims about 2020 election “fraud” in Georgia.
That shouldn’t exactly be a surprise, given FBI Director Kash Patel wrote a series of children’s books depicting Trump as an unjustly wronged “king”.
The unfortunate truth is there’s no satisfactory answer as to why no significant arrests have been made in the US in relation to the Epstein files.
It’s partly the Trump administration’s capture of these agencies and departments.
But it’s also that the Epstein scandal implicates so many of the powerful in the US. These are enormous networks that span political divides, including some of the richest people in the world. And, of course, they’re very good at protecting themselves.
It’s also a marker of Trump’s capture of his political base. Viewed from the outside, it defies logic. You’d think a movement that coalesced around conspiracy theories there was a powerful cabal of paedophiles at work in the US would be loudly calling for arrests after the Epstein revelations.
The fact they’re not shows how ingrained their loyalty is, and the depth of the personality cult that has developed around Trump.
This base is far from a majority of the American people, but it is one that has – for now at least – largely captured the major levers of power in the US.
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So following Andrew’s arrest, will anything happen in the US? It’s possible, but don’t hold your breath.
The other major news is it now looks increasingly likely Trump is about to start a war in Iran.
It’s common for people to say he does things like that to distract from the Epstein story.
But I see his efforts in Iran (and Venezuela, and elsewhere) as part of a concerted effort to radically reshape American society and the United States’ role in the world. It’s about the reassertion of American power – which Trump understands to mean his own power.
The president unilaterally declaring a war on Iran without the ascent of Congress would defy the law. This is all part of a broader pattern of the Trump administration’s attacks on rule of law and the institutions charged with implementing it.
Overall, Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest throws into stark relief the state of the US compared to other democracies like the UK.
What’s happened in the UK shows the collapse of the rule of law is not inevitable. Institutions can hold, even if they they are slow and deeply flawed.
Perhaps we will one day see institutions in the US working as they are supposed to, too.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
A South Australian Newspoll has given the Liberals just 14% of the primary vote, four weeks before the state election.
And in a Victoria Morgan poll, One Nation has topped both Labor and the Coalition on primary votes, with 26.5%, compared to 25.5% for Labor and 21.5% for the Coalition. Labor leads both One Nation and the Coalition after preferences in the poll.
A separate Victoria Resolve poll has One Nation at only 11%.
South Australian election polls
The SA state election is on March 21. A Newspoll, conducted February 11–17 from a sample of 1,057 people, gave Labor 44% of the primary vote, One Nation 24%, the Liberals just 14%, the Greens 12% and all others 6%.
With One Nation second on primary votes, no Labor vs Liberal two-party estimate was provided.
After the previous SA Fox & Hedgehog poll that had primary votes of 40% Labor, 20% One Nation and 19% Liberals, I said there was some chance of the Liberals winning zero of 47 lower house seats.
If the Newspoll figures are correct, it’s likely the Liberals will be wiped out of the SA lower house at the election, with One Nation winning the very few conservative seats.
Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas had a +40 net approval rating, with 67% of respondents satisfied with his job performance and 27% dissatisfied. Liberal leader Ashton Hurn was at +4 net approval (39% satisfied, 35% dissatisfied). Malinauskas led Hurn as better premier by 67–19%.
A SA YouGov poll for The Advertiser, conducted February 6–17 from a sample of 1,217 people, gave Labor 37% of the primary vote, One Nation 22%, the Liberals 20%, the Greens 13% and all others 8%.
On respondent preferences, Labor led One Nation by 60–40% and the Liberals by 59–41%.
Malinauskas’ net approval was +36 (64% satisfied, 28% dissatisfied). Hurn’s net approval was +7 (40% satisfied, 33% dissatisfied). Malinauskas led Hurn as better premier by 64–20%.
And 52% of respondents thought the Malinauskas government deserved to be re-elected, compared to 24% who didn’t.
Victorian Morgan poll: One Nation first on primary votes
The Victorian election is in late November. A Morgan SMS poll, conducted February 13–16 from a sample of 2,462 people, gave One Nation 26.5% of the primary vote, Labor 25.5%, the Coalition 21.5%, the Greens 13.5% and all others 13%.
On a “three-party preferred”, which distributes respondent preferences from Greens and Others between Labor, One Nation and the Coalition, Labor had 44.5%, One Nation 29.5% and the Coalition 26%. Labor led the Coalition by 52–48 and One Nation by 52.5–47.5 in two-party head to head matchups.
Even though One Nation is first on primary votes in this poll, Labor leads both right-wing parties after preferences. If the election reflected the overall votes and preferences in this poll, Labor would probably be returned to government. But there’s still over nine months until the election.
SMS polls may be prone to attracting too many motivated voters. Other methods of polling are not so prone to this. Many people just don’t care about politics.
An early February DemosAU poll had the Coalition leading Labor by 53–47 from primary votes of 29% Coalition, 23% Labor, 21% One Nation and 15% Greens. However, the Resolve poll below gave One Nation just 11%, although this poll was taken in two waves (January and February).
Labor Premier Jacinta Allan’s net approval in the Morgan poll was -37, with 67.5% disapproving and 30.5% approving. Liberal leader Jess Wilson’s net approval was +10.5. Wilson led Allan as preferred premier by 51–42.5.
Victorian Resolve poll far worse for One Nation
A Victorian state Resolve poll for The Age, conducted with the federal January and February Resolve polls from a sample of 1,100, gave the Coalition 30% of the primary vote (down nine since the December Resolve poll), Labor 28% (steady), the Greens 12% (steady), One Nation 11% (not asked for previously), independents 7% (down two) and others 11% (steady).
No two-party estimate was reported, but The Poll Bludger estimated a 51–49 Labor lead over the Coalition. This poll is much worse for One Nation than the Morgan or DemosAU polls,
Despite relatively good voting intentions for Labor, Allan’s net likeability slumped 20 points to -37, only four points higher than Donald Trump’s net likeability in Australia. Wilson’s net likeability was steady at +14. Wilson led Allan as preferred premier by 39–20 (41–24 previously).
All three recent Victorian polls agree that Allan’s ratings are dismal. As voters focus on state issues in the lead-up to the election, Allan’s unpopularity is likely to drag Labor’s vote down.
Queensland Resolve poll: One Nation up and Labor down
A Queensland state Resolve poll for The Brisbane Times, conducted with the federal January and February Resolve polls from a sample of 868, gave the Liberal National Party (LNP) 34% of the primary vote (up one since December), Labor 26% (down four), One Nation 16% (up seven), the Greens 10% (down one), independents 9% (up one) and others 5% (down five).
After the LNP won the October 2024 election, Labor had been competitive in this poll from August until December 2025. However, the LNP has regained a big lead, with analyst Kevin Bonham estimating a 54.6–45.4 LNP lead over Labor after preferences.
LNP Premier David Crisafulli’s net likeability surged five points to a new high of +21, while Labor leader Steven Miles was down eight points to -3. Crisafulli led Miles as preferred premier by 44–23 (35–34 previously).
Small-sample post-spill federal Morgan poll
A national Morgan poll, conducted February 13–16 (in the days following the federal Liberal leadership spill) from a sample of just 526, gave Labor 32% of the primary vote (up 1.5 since the February 9–13 pre-spill Morgan poll), the Coalition 23.5% (up 3.5), One Nation 21.5% (down 3.5), the Greens 12.5% (down 0.5) and all Others 10.5% (down one).
Labor led the Coalition by 55–45 on respondent preferences, a 3.5-point gain for the Coalition from an unusually strong flow to Labor in the pre-spill poll. By 2025 election flows, Labor would have led by about 54.5–45.5, a 0.5-point gain for the Coalition.
Asked about ways to fund the tax cuts, by 66–8 respondents agreed with reducing spending, by 58–12 increasing taxation on banks, by 57–13 increasing taxation on mining companies, by 46–17 reducing negative gearing tax concessions, by 40–17 reducing capital gains tax concessions and by 36–24 reducing superannuation tax concessions. The one unpopular proposal was increasing the GST (54–18 disagreed).
Asked to pick up to three areas for spending cuts, 53% said foreign aid should be targeted, followed by 29% for renewable energy projects and 21% unemployment benefits. Foreign aid makes up just 0.5% of the total budget, renewable energy 0.6% and unemployment benefits 2.2%.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Novitz, Senior Lecturer, Writing, Department of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology
What do our reading choices say about us? When teaching creative writing and literature classes, I always ask my students about their favourite genres and current reading in the first week. It is a good way to get a sense of their interests, gauge how they will respond to set texts, and get them thinking about the kinds of projects they want to work on.
There are always a few students who will sheepishly admit to not reading any fiction at all, and I’ll happily talk to them about comic books, television shows and video games. This exercise often leads to some interesting conversations across the class, where students start to connect over their favourite authors and share recommendations.
Very occasionally, however, someone will mention a book or an author that will give me pause. I still remember a moment from my second year of teaching when a student causally mentioned that they were reading The Turner Diaries, an infamous work of white nationalist speculative fiction (recently referenced in the 2024 film The Order), because they were “just curious” about it.
I didn’t press them further and the student never expressed any extremist views in class or in their writing. In fact, they were unfailingly thoughtful and respectful. I couldn’t see any evidence that this uncomfortable reading choice reflected anything about them as a person, and there are valid reasons to be curious about a book like the Turner Diaries and the warped viewpoint it presents. But it still made me feel a little cautious, in a way that I couldn’t entirely shake.
Reading as a public activity
The idea that reading – and reading fiction in particular – has a formative effect on character is generally well accepted. The books we choose to read are assumed to shape our outlook and identity, or at least reflect our values in some way. Many of us have probably slid over to a host’s bookshelves at a party and attempted to discern something about their personality and interests from the titles.
But what was once a deeply personal activity has stated to feel a lot more public. Online subcultures like Bookstagram and Booktok encourage readers to circulate and share their preferences and opinions. Platforms like Goodreads and The Storygraph allow us to follow the reading goals and experiences of friends and strangers. The once unremarkable habit of pulling out a book in a café or on public transport has now been dubbed “performative reading”, leading to a host of call-out and parody videos.
What and where we individually choose to read now seems subject to greater scrutiny. As reading becomes an increasing public act and reading identities are more extensively and visibly “performed”, we may become reasonably concerned about what our reading expresses about ourselves.
Are there books that we are proud to display and identify with? Or books that we dread being caught with in public?
Lists of supposedly “red flag” books, have been circulating for a while now, the idea being that someone’s bookshelf may reflect something problematic in their personality. These might range from very obvious red flags (e.g. Mein Kampf or the aforementioned Turner Diaries) to works that might indicate incompatible values or outlooks (most often particular genres of self-help, finance, religious or diet books, or contentious authors like Jordan Peterson and Ayn Rand). Some familiar classics and contemporary literary titles can also be taken as a warning of a particularly “toxic” reader.
Charles Bukowski.Ulf Andersen/Getty Images
This last category is invariably the most interesting. It is usually associated with male readers, in particular, and certain titles and authors get frequent mentions. Audiences are jokingly (and not so jokingly) advised to block, ghost or run from men with too many Ernest Hemingway or Charles Bukowski titles on their shelves, which may be an indicator of a particularly noxious brand of hypermasculinity. An interest in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita often shows up as a red flag (though this tends to assume that a reader will be sympathetic to the perspective of the narrator Humbert Humbert, rather than horrified by it).
Fans of Fyodor Dostoevsky often get stereotyped as humourless and self-serious, which, while possibly true, unfairly overlooks just how funny Dostoevsky can be. Anyone who lists David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as their favourite novel may be dull or pretentious, or just unlikely to ever shut up about having read Infinite Jest.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, warnings about “red flag” books come up frequently in discussions around dating and relationship advice. Dating and social media profiles are common spaces where stated reading interests are used to convey or project one’s personality or values. Just having read or had a passing interest in particular book or author might not in itself be problematic. But the kinds of books that are listed as favourites, or even presented as a component of one’s identity, may be worth scrutinising.
Book blogger Ashley Holstrom cautions against what she characterises as “dude-bro and hippie-chick” books, such as The Bro Code by Barney Stinson or Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Holstrom is also suspicious of classic and popular philosophy (“I’m not saying an interest in philosophy sucks or is a major red flag, but listing one of these boring-ass books as your all-time fave is”) and anyone whose personality revolves around their fandom for a massively popular series, such as Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight novels or Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thrones and Roses.
In all these cases, there is a suggestion that the content of these books may appeal to uninteresting, difficult or problematic people; the red flag suggests it is reader who should be avoided. But what about situations where the author’s actions or behaviour may create a red flag around reading their work?
Renouncing fandom
Just as our reading habits have become more public, authors are, in some respects, much less remote than they were previously. Rather than only expressing themselves through published books or articles, they are now encouraged to maintain a strong social media presence, with a regular stream of content.
While this certainly has its benefits, it does mean that authors – in all their virtues and flaws – are now more accessible as people than they have been in the past. Their histories and biographies are readily traceable. This may make it much harder to avoiding conflating problematic authors with their fiction.
In recent years, due to either private behaviour or public statements, a range of authors have been arguably tagged as “red flags” – in ways that may make reading or enjoying their work feel dubious or questionable. My feeds have been full of friends and acquaintances renouncing their fandom of J.K. Rowling and Neil Gaiman, among others (though the sexual assault charges against Gaiman have now been dropped, his documented behaviour remains problematic for many former readers).
As a result, there has been some extensive discussion of how we read and relate to authors whose personal views or actions we find objectionable. We may reasonably decline to support them financially through book sales, or enhance their visibility by discussing or promoting their work.
But what about public or private reading and enjoyment? One commentator suggests the best response is to sequester books by red flag author in a “corner of shame” if we are unable to discard them. Continuing to read and enjoy them is acceptable privately, but should be avoided in public. Other commentators have discussed their inability to separate the author from their work at all and have banished certain red flag authors from their shelves.
Insisting on a kind of cultural or political purity may result in overly cautious or antiseptic art. Closing ourselves off from authors or writers we disagree with may limit our perspective and frame of reference. I find David Mamet’s politics deeply disagreeable, but he remains an unmistakably great playwright and screenwriter.
At another level, continuing to read an author while aware of reprehensible actions or behaviour can be challenging. I would now find it impossible to read or recommend childhood favourite fantasy authors David and Leigh Eddings, knowing that they were tried and convicted for child abuse in the 1970s. Returning to the works of Marion Zimmer Bradley and Alice Munro, or the films of Woody Allen, now feels similarly impossible, in the light of the allegations against them.
But the cultural artefacts they created still have value, and may have meaning and resonance for new audiences who discover them.
Authors behaving badly
Our awareness of an author’s actions and biography may feel entirely at odds with the values that are expressed in their best work. It can become harder, for example, to accept Pablo Neruda as one of history’s greatest love poets after reading about his callous abandonment of his first wife and their disabled daughter.
How we understand and appreciate particular books may also shift when we learn more about the circumstances surrounding their creation. Recently, Saul Bellow’s biographers have given more attention to the collapse of his second marriage, which he loosely fictionalised in his novel Herzog.
Herzog focuses on the protagonist’s discussion of his suffering and humiliation in a series of unsent letters to public figures and dead philosophers. The letters are written after he discovers his wife has been having an affair with a close friend and wants a divorce.
Highly acclaimed at the time of its publication, Herzog cemented Bellow’s reputation as the preeminent American literary novelist of his generation. He would subsequently be awarded the Nobel Prize. But, as Louis Menand observes, Herzog is unmistakably a revenge novel. It aims to settle scores by slandering Bellow’s ex-wife Sondra, who is recognisable as Herzog’s cruel and unfaithful wife Madeleline. The protracted and repeated physical abuse that Bellow inflicted upon Sondra throughout their marriage is not mentioned.
Herzog is justly understood as Bellow’s masterwork. But an awareness of the motivations behind it, and the real stories that have manipulated or omitted through its composition, may complicate how it is read and received in 2026.
Saul Bellow’s masterwork Herzog is unmistakably a revenge novel.Louis Monier/Getty Images
How we respond to these questions and choices is extremely personal. Authors are often as complex, human and multifaceted as their characters. It is reasonable to at least try to separate their fiction from the aspects of their personal lives and beliefs we may find unpalatable. But we may, individually, find lines we cannot cross, fictional worlds that we can never visit or return to.
It is important to emphasise that the question of what we choose to read is not the same as what we choose to buy. There may be authors and creators that we rightly feel that we can never support by purchasing their work. Consistently unimpeachable behaviour may be too high of a demand, but it is always possible to find an equally great writer who has not done awful things. Maybe buy their book instead.
But I am not comfortable with discarding red flag books and authors entirely, or confining them to some hidden “corner of shame”. The idea that our reading lists should be carefully curated to avoid projecting a particular persona also seems limiting.
Everyone reads and understands books differently, at different times in their lives. It can be fine – or even brave – to be a little curious about terrible people and unconscionable worldviews. We can have unique or different takes on particular red flags. Our knowledge of what is problematic about particular texts and authors may enhance our reading and make new understandings possible. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we should not close ourselves off to the possibility that a fun, charismatic David Foster Wallace fan may theoretically exist, somewhere in the world.
Reading is ultimately a social as well as a solitary activity. The publishing industry depends on crucial “word of mouth” discussions and personal recommendations. Sharing our reading interests, impressions and experiences – no matter how problematic or “performative” they may be – is important in keeping literacy alive. Our reading is a part of us, but it does not simply define us. We can all probably afford and accept a few “red flags” on our bookshelves.
Should we do couples counselling? Are we happy? Are we both pulling in the same direction? How can we get our spark back?
These kinds of questions are normal in a society that places such importance on coupledom, despite there being no handbook or one-size-fits all approach.
Many people seek out couples counselling when going through a rough patch, or wondering how to improve their relationship. And no doubt the hit show Couples Therapy has boosted public interest in this type of counselling.
So, how do you decide if it’s right for you – and what should you expect?
Should we get couples counselling?
Relationship satisfaction changes over time. Research shows even knowing this can help couples navigate the usual ups and downs of life together.
Some research also shows couples therapy can help lower relationship distress (which might include things such as frequent arguments or feeling dissatisfied in your relationship).
It may be suitable for some couples who want to work through infidelity or stressors such as caregiving responsibilities.
Others may seek out preventative couples counselling, which is focused on finding ways to improve communications before your relationship reaches crisis point.
Does it work? Well, some research has found certain types of counselling did help cut the divorce rate among newlyweds – but so too did getting couples to simply watch romance movies together and discuss the themes with their partner.
Overall, much depends on your motivation for seeking counselling and the mindset you’re bringing to it. Ask yourself: what do I want to work on, and what do I hope to achieve?
If your goal is to get someone to “take your side”, counselling may not help. A good couples counsellor should remain neutral, and they’re not there to take sides.
Many who seek couples counselling do so because they’re arguing and disagreeing a lot with their partner. If that’s you, it might help to let go of notions about who is “right” and move beyond anger. Instead, the focus in counselling may be on finding new conflict resolution skills.
Counselling may help with:
improving communication skills
making better connections with each other
exploring the couples’ hopes for the future
identifying what’s blocking them from achieving these goals.
Couples counselling isn’t always about staying together. Some use it to explore how to separate in a way that centres the needs of children.
Others may have specific issues with intimacy or sex. In that case, a sexual health counsellor or sex therapist may be more suitable than a standard couples counsellor. You can find one via professionalorganisations.
With a sex therapist, you and your partner might talk about things such as:
mismatched libidos
bodily changes, for example, to do with ageing
expectations around sex
communication around sex
making adjustments to the way you interact to resolve these issues.
The problems or harms in some relationships will not be resolved through talking therapy. The most obvious is where violence and/or coercive control is used: safety planning, not couples counselling, is more appropriate.
And it’s important to remember the problems that lead people to conflict or counselling sometimes have structural causes that can’t be “fixed” by a few therapy sessions. For instance, perhaps your relationship is suffering because you’re experiencing stress at work, financial pressures, or you’re supporting a partner with depression. These are complex structural issues.
It’s also unclear how long the benefits of couples counselling last. One study noted “many distressed couples benefit during relationship education courses but that these benefits decline when the program ends.”
Couples in contented relationships do things daily for each other, such as making a coffee for your partner.Ketut Subiyanto/Pexels
How do people choose a counsellor?
There’s a wide range of therapeutic techniques.
One famous approach is called the Gottman method, where couples focus on things such as creating “love maps” recording what you know about your partner, nurturing fondness, turning toward each other instead of away and solving problems. Famously, the Gottman approach also identifies the “four horsemen” of a relationship apocalypse: criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling.
Other couples counsellors will take more of a psychological or psychoanalytical approach, informed by techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy.
At the end of the day what matters most is that you and your couples counsellor “click”; if you don’t gel with yours, it’s OK to find a new one.
Love is about doing
It can be helpful to use American author bell hooks’ idea of love as a practice of “doing” rather than a passive “being”. In other words, love is about doing things (for each other, together, or for yourself to fuel your relationship) rather than just about “being in love”.
Couples in long-term, contented relationships engage in day-to-day love practices, such as making a coffee for your partner, or watching a show together.
So, consider snuggling up on the couch with your partner to watch something together. Perhaps even Couples Therapy can provide a healthy prompt to reflect on and appreciate one another in a new light.
Last year, Norwegian-US tech company 1X announced a strange new product: “the world’s first consumer-ready humanoid robot designed to transform life at home”.
Standing 168 centimetres tall and weighing in at 30 kilograms, the US$20,000 Neo bot promises to automate common household chores such as folding laundry and loading the dishwasher.
Neo has a built-in artificial intelligence (AI) system, but for tricky tasks it requires a 1X employee wearing a virtual reality helmet to remotely take over the robot. The operator can see whatever the bot does inside your house, and the process is recorded for future learning.
Other household androids are expected to hit the market this year. But Neo shows the issues at play, which will be familiar to anyone who has watched the AI boom of the past few years: products launched with great fanfare and limited capabilities, concealed privacy risks, and invisible remote workers behind the scenes.
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The dream of human-like robots
Machines made in the human likeness have figured in mythology and history for millennia.
Why now? The past few years have seen improvements in hardware such as batteries, motors and sensors – many thanks to the burgeoning electric vehicle industry. At the same time, the AI systems to control the hardware have also become far more capable.
Hurdles remain
Despite huge technical progress, these robots are still clumsy at handling everyday tasks in homes or hospitals or other uncontrolled environments. While specialised bots such as vacuum cleaners have become a familiar sight, the fact remains that human homes aren’t designed for robots.
And for many fiddly tasks, such as folding laundry, more specialised machines do a better job.
To improve performance, the robots will need a lot of real-world data. The best way to gather that data is by putting these mechanical servants to work in actual homes. And the data in question will include a lot of intimate detail about the lives of specific people – which raises big questions about privacy.
And behind the scenes, at least for now, will be humans. Remote online labour in the tech industry is a growing phenomenon that can increase socioeconomic inequality and have a negative impact on people in developing countries working long hours for low pay, often exposed to disturbing scenes and content.
Other uses for humanoid bots
According to the International Federation of Robotics, useful and widely accepted home androids may still be 20 years away.
But there are other reasons we might want to make artificial humanoids. Japanese researcher Hiroshi Ishiguro has been making human-like “geminoids” for decades with quite different motivations.
My motivation for making humanoid robots stems from an interest in understanding what makes us human, and what it means to be human.
From this perspective, humanoid robots can serve the philosophical exploration of human identity, rather than making life more convenient or generating profits.
What’s ahead
Autonomous humanoid robots will undoubtedly improve as products with the integration of large language models and other generative AI systems.
In the long term, dexterity, navigation, learning and autonomy will get better – but that will require years of research and investment. Humanoid robots will not be immediately available as convincing and useful commercial products.
Concerns around remote work may fade, too. Just last week, 1X announced a software update for its robots that it says will mean less human involvement behind the scenes.
Privacy concerns seem an inherent risk of the technology. An incredibly sophisticated robot in your home will inevitably collect intimate data about your life, opening a new frontier for data exploitation and potential breaches.
Despite these issues, humanoid robots will keep inspiring scientists, engineers and designers. By all means let them inspire us – but we should think twice before letting them stack our dishwashers.
Touching the lives of an average 110 people each day in Aotearoa, traumatic brain injury (TBI) is much more common than any of us would like it to be.
Yet it is often misunderstood, underestimated and too easily dismissed as someone else’s problem.
We know these injuries – sustained when the brain is damaged by a force such as a fall or a knock – can cause effects ranging from mild, short-term symptoms to serious, long-term disability.
But there is still much to learn about who is being injured, where it happens and what is causing it.
To answer these questions, we examined traumatic brain injury cases recorded in the Waikato population in 2021–22, then compared the results with a similar study we ran a decade earlier.
Our newly published findings help to debunk some common and enduring myths about a health risk that is neither inevitable nor beyond our control.
Myth #1: Most traumatic brain injuries are severe
While these injuries can often be devastating for those affected, our study found that most cases (93%) were mild in severity, such as concussion.
At the same time, the number of traumatic brain injuries adds up to a far bigger problem than many realise. We found that for every 100,000 people, 852 experienced a traumatic brain injury – meaning at least 40,000 New Zealanders are affected each year.
Myth #2: It’s a sports and car crash problem
We often associate traumatic brain injury with head blows sustained in car crashes, on the sports field or during fights or assaults. While media coverage of concussion in sport has done much to raise awareness of the issue and its impacts, the more ordinary reality is that most cases are caused by falls.
Data from both our studies showed this leading cause – whether from someone tripping or falling off something – accounted for nearly half of all traumatic brain injuries, with a similar proportion of all cases occurring in the home.
Myth #3: Only young people are vulnerable
Young people are commonly considered most vulnerable to traumatic brain injury; our data did indeed show children aged 0–4 among the groups more likely to experience it.
Yet our most recent study found the largest share of these injuries occurred in adults aged 65 and over, mostly due to falls (39%). This is a worrying trend, especially given New Zealand’s population is on track to include around one million people aged 65 and over by 2029.
Myth #4: Risk looks the same for everyone
We also found higher rates among males and Māori. Among Māori in particular, this elevated risk likely reflects persistent disadvantages such as lower incomes, poorer housing, barriers to education and healthcare and ongoing impacts of colonisation.
Some patterns appear to reflect the period in which the study was conducted. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we observed more traumatic brain injuries among females aged 15–64 due to assault.
This increase coincides with pandemic-related pressures on jobs, mental health, and family and social life, and aligns with wider evidence of increased violence against women during that period. Brain injury linked to intimate partner violence remains an important area of concern in New Zealand.
We also recorded fewer injuries among children (aged 0–15) and people living in rural areas. But this may say less about true risk and more about COVID-19 restrictions, difficulties accessing healthcare and evidence that some parents avoided doctors and hospitals because of fears about infection.
Myth #5: Traumatic brain injuries are unavoidable
Much as we might like to think of brain injuries as an unfortunate fact of life, they are not inevitable. Many are preventable.
Our data suggest there is still more to be done – especially for younger and older people and in Māori communities – even though a wide range of prevention efforts already exist.
There are government-funded fall prevention programmes. ACC’s Community Strength and Balance classes aim to keep older people strong, steady and safe from falls. Safekids Aotearoa delivers home safety programmes and free safety devices to help prevent serious injuries, such as falls, in young children.
Kaupapa Māori-based (Māori-led) fall-prevention programmes – such as Taurite Tū, a strength and balance wellness programme – have been designed by Māori for Māori aged 50 and over and their whānau.
Public health messaging also plays an important role in encouraging people to take responsibility for keeping themselves and their communities safe – for instance, through ACC’s “Have a hmmm” campaign.
Prevention has also attracted growing interest from the private sector, with major investment in new technologies designed to lessen the risk of falls and head injuries, including smart-home devices and wearable technology.
But what matters most is careful evaluation. We need to be confident that these investments really make a difference and that efforts are focused on those with the greatest need.
That will require working with younger and older people, their families and carers, and Māori communities to design, deliver and assess prevention efforts.
The author acknowledges the contributions of study collaborators Nicola Starkey, Shanthi Ameratunga, Alice Theadom, Braden Te Ao, Laura Wilkinson-Meyers, Irene Zeng and Valery Feigin.
Our research shows something quite different. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) isn’t failing because it’s too political. It’s failing because it refuses to be political at all.
In a study just published in the academic journal Work, Employment and Society, we examined DEI practices in three organisations: a national sports organisation with around 100 staff, a technology services company with more than 500 employees, and a community liaison agency with 70 staff and DEI as its core mission.
They were selected because of their commitment to equality, being known and awarded for their best practice in DEI, and being presented as an inspiration to other organisations for how to do DEI well.
Across these very different workplaces, we found the same pattern. DEI programs created the appearance of progress, while leaving deeper inequalities untouched. As one participant put it:
We have the window dressing […] but behind the scenes, I can tell you, it’s nothing like that.
DEI programs commonly focus on single labels. Diverse employees are categorised as, for example, “woman”, “Indigenous”, “LGBTQ+”, or “people with disability”. This oversimplifies people’s lived experiences and typically ignores class altogether.
In practice, identities overlap and affect each other in different ways for different people. But we found that managers tend to rely on superficial and apolitical understandings of diversity, leading them to avoid confronting the real experiences that shape people’s lives at work.
The result is that DEI can reinforce stereotypes rather than challenge them.
As the only Indigenous person in a leadership position at one organisation told us:
most of [my male peers] are smug arseholes who look down at me […] I don’t get treated with the same respect as my peers by some of them and partly it’s obviously I’m Black, partly it’s I’m a woman.
Problem 2: DEI has become a corporate product
DEI has become commodified. Organisations buy standardised training packages, hire consultants, and tick boxes to show they are doing the right thing. But these programs rarely change how power operates inside the organisation.
In our study, workers labelled as “diverse” reported feeling pressure to present themselves in ways that were acceptable to the dominant culture. As one participant explained, women were accepted in senior positions provided they acted like “one of the boys”.
DEI becomes something to be managed and reported, not a pathway to justice and equality.
Problem 3: DEI avoids talking about power
Our research confirmed that inequality is built into the everyday structures of workplaces. It shapes who gets promoted, whose voice is valued, and who is assumed can be a “leader”. Meanwhile, we found that organisations present themselves as tolerant while also limiting how much minority voices can challenge the status quo.
Diversity initiatives need to challenge the status quo.Adrian C/Pexels
DEI can celebrate diversity while suppressing political demands to achieve real equality. When confronting the fact that all the senior women in her organisation were white, one person explained:
There’s been a lot of these things where I’ve spoken up [… but…] we’re seen as troublemakers.
But when DEI avoids talking about power, it creates a false sense of progress. This can be reinforced by management believing equality is improving simply because DEI activities exist.
What would a political version of DEI look like?
Right‑wing populists often claim DEI threatens traditional values or gives unfair advantages to minorities. But our research shows DEI rarely challenges anything. Instead, it protects existing hierarchies by avoiding the political questions equality requires.
Real equality demands confronting who holds power, who benefits from the current system, and who is excluded. DEI programs avoid these questions because they risk upsetting people in leadership. And those leaders are people who rarely come from marginalised backgrounds.
DEI fails when it offers the comfort of visible action while preventing the structural transformation genuine equality demands. If we want workplaces that are fair, we need DEI that can challenge the status quo, redistribute power and confront injustice head-on.
The real question isn’t whether DEI is too “woke”, but whether organisations are brave enough to pursue real change.
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