MIL-OSI Export

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lachlan Hart, Lecturer, School of Education, UNSW Sydney

The Kimberley region in the north-west corner of Western Australia is full of rugged ranges and gorges, and long stretches of red soil and rocky ground. The dry seasons are long, and the wet seasons often flood the Martuwarra Fitzroy River – an artery to the Indian Ocean – in the region’s south.

But if you were to travel back to the Early Triassic period, 250 million years ago, you would see a very different landscape. Back then, the land was covered in brackish water and was more like a mudflat, on the shore of a shallow bay.

Inhabiting this area were creatures a far stretch from the dingoes, rock wallabies and livestock that populate the region today. Strange amphibians, called temnospondyls, which looked like a cross between a salamander and a crocodile, dominated this era, feeding on fish and other small animals.

A new study colleagues and I have just published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology sheds new light on these animals. It shows for the first time how they were able to become an evolutionary success story.

Lost – then found

Palaeontologists uncovered fossils of these weird animals in rocks (known as the Blina shale) on Noonkanbah station, roughly 250 kilometres inland of Broome, during field expeditions in the 1960s.

Temnospondyls are an incredibly long and diverse lineage of vertebrates. Their fossil record extends some 210 million years, from the Carboniferous period through to the Cretaceous. They include prehistoric animals such as Eryops and Koolasuchus. Their story is one of great survival – one of the few vertebrate groups that persisted through the two mass extinctions at the end of the Permian and Triassic periods.

The temnospondyl discovered on Noonkanbah station was called Erythrobatrachus noonkanbahensis. It was named in 1972 by Cosgriff and Garbutt based on three fossil skull pieces that were retrieved on those field expeditions in the 1960s.

The specimens were sent to several museum collections in Australia and the United States. And some time in the following 50 years or so, they were lost.

Luckily, the Western Australian Museum retained a high quality plaster cast of one of the pieces. But our team was determined to find out more about these enigmatic fossils. We were completely blown away when one of the lost pieces turned up in a museum collection at Berkeley, in the US.

One species becomes two

Once we could look at these two pieces of Erythrobatrachus, we could see that they actually belonged to two different species of temnospondyl.

One of the original fossils was definitely unique enough to maintain the Erythrobatrachus name. The other one was more like a previously described, and well-known temnospondyl called Aphaneramma.

While both animals would have been roughly the same size (with skulls of about 40 centimetres long when complete), the shape of their skulls indicated different diets and hunting strategies.

Erythrobatrachus had a broader, more robust head and would have been a top predator in its environment.

Aphaneramma, on the other hand, had a long, thin snout probably adapted for catching small fish. They both lived in the same habitat, coexisting by hunting different prey.

A global spread

Modern amphibians are extremely sensitive to salt levels in water. This is why marine environments which have high salinity are generally not a place where amphibians like to live.

Temnospondyls of the family Trematosauria, to which both Erythrobatrachus and Aphaneramma belong, were apparently unbothered by salt water, as trematosaurid fossils are found in marine deposits around the world.

In fact, fossils of Aphaneramma have been found in localities of similar age to the Blina Shale – in Svalbard, Russia, Pakistan and Madagascar.

Trematosaurs are particularly notable as their fossils are found in rocks which date less than 1 million years after the mass extinction event at the end of the Permian period, also known as the Great Dying. This was the most catastrophic mass extinction in Earth’s history.

Confirmation that Aphaneramma’s range also included Australia shows these animals were dispersing worldwide during the earliest parts of the Mesozoic era.

Our research adds an exclamation point to just how adaptable temnospondyls were. They had an amazing ability to utilise a plethora of ecological niches to survive, even in the face of extreme global change – proving they were definitely one of evolution’s success stories.

– ref. 250 million-year-old amphibian fossils from Australia reveal global spread of ‘sea-salamanders’ – https://theconversation.com/250-million-year-old-amphibian-fossils-from-australia-reveal-global-spread-of-sea-salamanders-276162

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/23/250-million-year-old-amphibian-fossils-from-australia-reveal-global-spread-of-sea-salamanders-276162/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Meehan, Director, NZ Policy Research Institute, Auckland University of Technology

Pay equity is back in the spotlight in New Zealand, with an unofficial “people’s select committee” about to report on last year’s legislative changes that overhauled the process and cancelled existing claims.

As we await its findings, it’s a timely moment to ask what problem pay equity settlements are actually meant to solve.

Over the past 50 years, women in Aotearoa have changed where they work in big ways. They have moved in significant numbers into occupations once dominated by men, including law, medicine and management.

In many professions that were overwhelmingly male a generation ago, women are now well represented. But the change has been largely one-way. Men have not moved in comparable numbers into jobs traditionally done by women.

These occupations, such as teaching, nursing, and care and support roles, remain heavily female dominated. That enduring imbalance is important, because it raises the question at the heart of pay equity: have roles historically performed by women been systematically undervalued?

Our research, drawing on five decades of Census data, tracks occupational segregation patterns in New Zealand over time.

While the overall picture has shifted, the persistence of female-dominated occupations tells us why pay equity – and robust settlement processes – still matter.

Progress, but mostly in one direction

Overall, New Zealand’s labour market is less segregated by gender than it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Women now work across a much wider range of occupations, and many barriers that once limited their choices have fallen.

This represents real progress. Across the economy, much of this change reflects women moving into jobs once dominated by men. Health provides a clear illustration.

The share of female doctors has risen sharply, from just 12% of GPs in 1976 to 57% in 2023. The reverse shift has been far weaker: men have moved into nursing only marginally and the occupation remains overwhelmingly female, with 89% of registered nurses women in 2023.

This imbalance helps explain why pay equity exists at all – and why it is often misunderstood. Pay equity is often confused with equal pay, but they address different problems.

Equal pay is about paying people the same for doing the same job. By contrast, pay equity, is about equal pay for work of equal value. It is a fundamental human right. It addresses whether different jobs – often in different industries – are being paid fairly relative to each other, given the skill, responsibility, effort and conditions involved.

When women are concentrated in undervalued occupations, equal pay within these jobs does not close the overall gender pay gap across the economy. If an entire occupation is underpaid relative to comparable work, equal pay within it simply preserves that imbalance.

Addressing this requires pay equity processes that allow comparisons across occupations, both within and outside the industry, so that female-dominated roles can be properly assessed against comparable work elsewhere in the labour market.

A problem of structure, not just productivity

Last year, changes to New Zealand’s pay equity legislation were passed under urgency, raising the bar for bringing and progressing claims and making it harder for workers in female-dominated occupations to have potential inequities assessed.

The subsequent “people’s select committee” inquiry, launched by ten former women MPs to allow for public submissions and closer scrutiny of those changes, has created an opportunity to revisit how pay equity operates and what it is meant to achieve.

Our research helps explain why these processes exist at all. Even after decades of change, the gendered structure of work remains.

There is often an assumption that wages simply reflect productivity – that workers are paid according to their “marginal product”, or what an extra worker adds to output. In practice, pay is shaped by more than productivity alone.

Bargaining power, pay-setting institutions and long-standing norms all matter, especially in occupations where output is difficult to measure or price. This is particularly true in care, teaching and support roles, where the value of work is real but not easily captured in market prices.

Pay equity is designed to deal with that reality. It recognises that if wages reflect institutional history as well as productivity, then undervaluation can persist even in a well-functioning labour market.

Over five decades, progress toward gender equality at work has been real – but uneven. Women have moved into many new roles. Men have not followed in the same way.

That imbalance continues to shape pay outcomes across the economy, and pay equity settlement processes were designed in response to that structural reality. As debates about pay equity continue, it is worth keeping that original purpose in view.

Pay equity is not about special treatment. It is about ensuring that work is valued fairly in a labour market where the division of jobs by gender has narrowed, but not disappeared.

– ref. The work women do has changed. The case for pay equity in NZ hasn’t – https://theconversation.com/the-work-women-do-has-changed-the-case-for-pay-equity-in-nz-hasnt-274962

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/23/the-work-women-do-has-changed-the-case-for-pay-equity-in-nz-hasnt-274962/

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vaughan Cruickshank, Senior Lecturer in Health and Physical Education, University of Tasmania

Milan Cortina 2026 was Australia’s most successful Winter Olympics.

From 1936-2022, Australia won 19 medals, including six golds.

This year, Australia has added another six medals, including three golds.

How has this happened and what may this success mean for the future of winter sports in Australia?

A medal rush in Italy

Jakara Anthony became our first two-time Winter Olympic gold medallist in the women’s dual moguls.

Cooper Woods (men’s individual moguls) and Josie Blaff (women’s snowboard cross) also won gold.

Scotty James became the first Australian to win three Winter Olympic medals with a silver in the men’s half-pipe, and Matt Graham added to his 2018 medal with a bronze in the men’s dual moguls.

Danielle Scott also won silver in the women’s aerials.

Other young members of the 53-strong team such as Valentino Guseli (snowboard half-pipe), Tess Coady (snowboard big air), Jackson Harvey (moguls) and Indra Brown (freeski half-pipe) also made finals and recorded top-ten results, indicating Australia should continue to be competitive in the future.

What are the reasons for this success?

Increased investment from the federal government has certainly helped.

In July 2024, the federal government announced A$489 million of funding for elite Olympic and Paralympic athletes, coaches and support staff for 2025-2026. This was 50% more than the previous government’s 2021- 2022 high performance funding.

This funding is focused on better support for training, wellbeing, event preparation and access to high-level international competitions.

In 2023 the federal government announced a specific winter sport funding boost of $1.1 million, while in November 2024, a $385 million package was announced for winter and summer sports, with the aim of ensuring Australians have world class pathways and support at all levels.

Investment in facilities has also been critical.

The Olympic Winter Institute of Australia was formed in 1998 to support the development of elite winter athletes.

It contributed to a world class moguls course at Perisher in New South Wales, where three of Australia’s 2026 medallists have trained.

Aerials and moguls skiers can now practise their jumps on the southern hemisphere’s first year-round ski jumping facility near Brisbane: the Geoff Henke Olympic Winter Training Centre which was completed in 2020.

It greatly reduces the need for these athletes to travel overseas to train.

Four of our 2026 medallists have trained here.

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Read more: How do Winter Olympians train compared to summer games athletes?

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The National Snowsport Training Centre in Jindabyne, NSW, is also world class.

Winter athletes have benefited from Australia’s European Training Centre in northern Italy. This “home away from home” for Australian athletes greatly reduces the travel required to compete in many elite events.

So what happens now?

Australia’s success at these Olympics has pushed winter sport into the mainstream. The big question is what happens next – will more people try them, and will more funding follow?

Possibly – we have seen a similar pattern in Australia before.

After the 2003 Rugby World Cup, there was a spike in junior registrations.

Similarly, women’s and girls’ soccer registrations significantly increased following the Matildas’ performance in the 2023 Women’s World Cup.

However, this is not always the case.

For example, the 2000 Sydney Olympics did not significantly increase physical activity levels in Australia, despite our successful games.

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Read more: Does sports participation boom during (or before, or after) the Olympics?

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Additionally, winter sport has tougher barriers than rugby and soccer because many are expensive, seasonal and coaches and facilities are often located far from where people live.

The Australian ski season doesn’t begin until June, meaning any surge in enthusiasm from the Winter Olympics must persist for months before people can access domestic snow fields.

The Australian Sports Commission estimates about 184,500 Australians (aged 15+) skied or snowboarded at least once in 2024.

So, there is real interest but those numbers are small compared to other popular sports.

Continued funding for athletes and facilities will help ensure greater opportunities for Australians to engage in snow sports.

Currently, non-elite athletes in Australia have limited access to year-round facilities, although some developments are being proposed in major cities.

While recent funding has contributed to our success in Milan Cortina, there are concerns about this funding continuing.

There are calls for further investment in winter sports, while Australian’s chef de mission Alisa Camplin-Warner hopes the winter games won’t be forgotten as Australia increases its focus on the Summer Olympics in Brisbane in 2032.

Australia’s success at the Winter Olympics could inspire other Australians to pursue snow sports. But if Australia wants a “Matildas effect” for winter sports, they must become easier to access for the general population.

This can happen through continued facility development, cheaper learn-to-ski/ride programs, more school links and more pathways through Snow Australia.

– ref. After the Milan Cortina medals, what comes next for Australian winter sports? – https://theconversation.com/after-the-milan-cortina-medals-what-comes-next-for-australian-winter-sports-276060

Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/23/after-the-milan-cortina-medals-what-comes-next-for-australian-winter-sports-276060/