Earlier this month the University of Sydney launched an investigation into allegations miniature spy cameras were used to record and distribute exam content online.

At the same time, the UK’s national examinations regulator warned smart glasses, smartwatches and concealed earpieces are emerging threats for unis.

Chief regulator of qualifications Sir Ian Bauckham noted technology was “changing fast”:

There are smartwatches that we are increasingly seeing on young people and they are fully internet connected […] And I understand that in the pipeline there are even things like smart glasses […]

There is a renewed emphasis on having in-person exams in response to AI. University administrators have traditionally regarded in-person, invigilated exams as the most reliable way of ensuring students don’t cheat.

But the rise of these new wearable technologies could undermine this approach.

So what can Australian universities do in response?

A new generation of tech

Cheating in examinations is of course not new. Students have long relied on handwritten notes, information hidden on clothing, or materials accessed during bathroom breaks.

In 2022, a Spanish law student even gained media attention after engraving tiny notes onto plastic pens for an exam years earlier.

However, new types of wearable technology are changing how students can cheat.

Among the most significant developments are AI-enabled smart glasses with built-in microphones and cameras.

These can display AI-generated text, process spoken language and analyse written materials. They can be hard to distinguish from everyday glasses.

Research suggests even when images captured by smart glasses were blurry and warped, AI could still extract enough information to answer some exam questions correctly.

Alongside covert recording devices, micro earpieces are also available, allowing answers to be relayed to candidates.

Screen-enabled pens can also display and generate text, allowing users to access notes while appearing to use a normal pen.

Meanwhile, smartwatches remain a cheating risk. They can store notes, display text discreetly, and in some cases connect to other devices, the internet and AI chat functions.

As a 2026 paper by Australian researchers noted, transparent wearable AI – particularly AI-enabled smart glasses – are difficult for exam invigilators to detect.

How widespread is the issue?

We do not yet have robust data on Australian usage of smart devices for cheating.

But in the United Kingdom, the exam regulator reported 2,225 cases involving mobile phones and smart devices for tertiary and senior school exams in 2025. This accounted for 44.3% of all cheating cases.

China is also grappling with the issue. This month, its Ministry of Education warned bringing smart devices to exams, including smart glasses, counts as cheating.

Numerous Chinese provinces also introduced tighter exam security measures at the same time, including mandatory inspections of candidates’ glasses, manual checks and a wider rollout of smart security gates. These are electronic screening checkpoints that detect banned devices.

In Japan, covert recordings in 2024 prompted universities to take stricter security measures for exams.

What can we do?

In Australia, some universities have banned smart devices in supervised exams.

However, smart devices cannot be addressed through traditional invigilation alone.

Universities need to update policies to explicitly address smart glasses, AI earbuds and other wearable technologies. Invigilators require training to recognise devices. For example, thick-framed smart glasses, active indicator lights, concealed earpieces and screen-enabled pens.

Universities may also need to consider having exam rooms monitored by device screening technology, and secure storage procedures for prohibited items. While such systems involve upfront costs, they are already being used in China. This suggests the technology is commercially available and operationally feasible in universities.

Other changes are needed

Assessment design also needs to evolve. Exams that focus primarily on memorisation are more vulnerable to cheating than those requiring critical thinking, problem-solving and application of knowledge.

Universities should also improve systems to collect data on technology-enabled cheating. This will allow policies to be guided by evidence.

At the same time, institutions must avoid creating inequitable surveillance practices. Intensive scrutiny of glasses and hearing aids and what students are wearing may discriminate against students with disabilities, chronic health conditions and religious dress requirements. So universities face the challenge of balancing academic integrity with inclusion and accessibility.

Undermining academic integrity

If students are cheating on exams and unis don’t realise, the consequences extend beyond individual cases of misconduct.

Public trust in university qualifications may be weakened. As the UK regulator noted,

you end up with grades for qualifications which are no longer reliable, no longer trustworthy.

The challenge for higher education is not simply preventing cheating. It is ensuring assessment remains valid, credible and equitable in a world where AI and other technology is increasingly embedded into everyday devices and learning.

Meena Jha, Associate Professor, College of Information & Communication Technology, CQUniversity Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Federal Education Minister Jason Clare introduced a bill to parliament on Thursday that will see universities face new caps on domestic student numbers.

At the same time, the government will fund additional student places. It says this will add up to 230,000 new commencing students over the next decade. This is to help attract more students from poorer families and regional and country areas.

How the tension between caps and growth plays out in practice will determine the success of Clare’s policy agenda.

How does domestic student funding work?

The bill’s biggest change modifies how universities are funded for “Commonwealth supported students”. This describes how the federal government subsidises the costs of a student’s study.

Almost all domestic undergraduates and a large proportion of postgraduates are Commonwealth supported students.

The bill does not change the underlying per student funding rates. These remain a combination of a Commonwealth contribution paid by the government and a student contribution (commonly paid through a HECS-HELP loan).

And the high Job-ready Graduates fees for arts, business and law students will remain in place.

But the way universities receive this funding will change.

What is changing?

Under the current system, each public university receives a maximum basic grant amount that covers Commonwealth contributions in higher education courses. For 2026, these add up to A$7.75 billion.

From 2027, universities will receive a maximum allocation of student places rather than a maximum dollar amount. This allocation will be made by the new Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC), within a total number determined by the minister.

Additional uni places

The education minister will also decide each year the total number of Commonwealth supported places for the next year. He must do this by June 30 each year for the following year.

Clare says he will add 16,000 places in each of the next three years. This represents 2.6% of all the Commonwealth supported places in 2024 (the last year for which we have official figures).

The new tertiary education commission will then decide how to allocate these places between universities.

What are ‘over-enrolments’?

Under the current system, the federal govenrment’s funding for university places is capped but the number of places is uncapped. This means if universities choose to accept student-contribution-only funding, they can take additional students. These extra students are known as “over-enrolments”.

The proposed system will cap over-enrolments for each university at either 5% above its original allocation of places or 750 places, whichever is lower. If universities exceed their over-enrolment cap they will lose the student contribution revenue for those extra students.

No official figures show the scale of over-enrolment. But documents released under a Freedom of Information request show that in 2024 nine universities delivered student places worth 5% or more above their maximum funding.

Over-enrolment risks

Over-enrolment policy is the most controversial change in the funding bill.

Clare says he wants to end what he calls a “hunger games” system, under which popular universities take students he believes should attend other institutions.

But over-enrolment provides flexibility in the current system. It lets universities make offers to prospective students without worrying too much about the funding consequences. In most cases, putting additional students in existing courses does not cost a lot of money. The student contribution can cover it.

Under the proposed new system, universities will be more cautious about making enrolment offers. Nervousness about over-enrolments will likely drive student numbers down below what they could have been.

Over-enrolment and university missions

In a new paper I coauthored, my colleague and I interviewed university leaders about over-enrolment.

The vice-chancellor of a regional university told us their university was the only one available for local students preferring on-campus study. With their mission to serve their community, they tried to accommodate demand even when it led to over-enrolment. Another deputy vice-chancellor from a university with a strong focus on disadvantaged students similarly said they over-enrol rather than reject applicants with a good chance of success.

Under the new system, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission will try to forecast demand, including from equity students, and reflect this in its allocation of places to universities. The commission can go back to the education minister and ask for more equity student places if it underestimates demand.

But this process is bureaucratic. The minister’s June 30 deadline to allocate places for the next year comes before we know the number of applications for that year. This is the first major demand indicator. Many other variables will remain only rough estimates in June. This includes how many current students will re-enrol and how many applicants with offers will accept them. This last figure won’t be known until the summer offer rounds are over in the following year.

The bill allows for late revisions, but the minister may not enjoy his summer holidays being interrupted by bureaucrats who realise they have miscalculated demand.

Funding for Indigenous students

The new funding bill preserves demand-driven funding for Indigenous students in bachelor degrees or medical courses. This means that if an Indigenous student qualifies for a university place they can have one and it will be supported by the federal government.

This operates outside the caps on student places. The bill also gives the minister a new power to make additional courses demand driven. Explanatory documents issued with the bill suggest nursing and teaching could be possible examples.

Keeping expectations modest

With this bill, the government is talking big about future enrolments and how they will “open those doors of opportunity wider”.

But on their own figures, the number of new places in the next few years will only be small increments.

The government’s restrictions on over-enrolments will limit growth across the whole sector, but especially at currently over-enrolled universities.

Policies introducing both greater bureaucratic control and enrolment growth seem to be at least partially contradictory. Total enrolments probably will increase, but not by as much as would have been possible with a more flexible system.

Andrew Norton, Professor of Higher Education Policy, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The latest inflation figures released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics look, at first glance, like good news. The headline rate for May rose 4.0% over the past year, down from 4.2% in April.

After a long run of high inflation numbers and interest rate hikes, mortgage holders could be forgiven for hoping rate relief is on the way.

But don’t hold your breath. Look under the bonnet and the picture is far less comforting. The fall was largely driven by one thing — petrol — and the part of inflation the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) actually cares about hasn’t budged.

Why inflation matters

Inflation is measured by the consumer price index (CPI), which tracks the price of a typical basket of things Australian households buy.

The RBA has one main job here: keep inflation low and steady at around 2.5% on an annual basis. Its main tool is the cash rate, the official interest rate that flows through to your mortgage and your savings account. When inflation runs hot, the bank lifts that rate to cool spending down.

Fuel is the great troublemaker in these figures. Back in March, petrol prices jumped almost 33% in a single month after the Iran war squeezed global oil supplies.

Since then, two things have pushed oil prices down sharply: a tentative peace deal has let global oil prices fall, and the federal government’s decision to halve the fuel excise — the tax charged on every litre — is still keeping prices at the pump down.

Cutting through the noise

Cheaper petrol drags the headline number down; headline CPI actually fell 0.1% in the month. But it doesn’t tell us anything about whether the broader economy is cooling. It just tells us oil got cheaper.

Because petrol prices swing wildly, economists watch a steadier measure called underlying inflation, or the “trimmed mean”. This cuts out the biggest price rises and falls and shows what is left in the middle. Think of it as ignoring the loudest person in the room so you can hear what everyone else is saying.

And once you ignore the petrol, the room is still too noisy. Underlying inflation came in at 3.6% in May, up from 3.4% last month and still far above the RBA’s target.

Two kinds of price pressures

Economists often divide inflation into two types.

The first is “tradeables”: goods bought and sold around the world, like petrol, phones, televisions and cars. Their prices are largely set overseas. There’s not much the RBA can do about the global oil price, up or down.

The second is “non-tradeables”: things produced and used right here, like rent, a restaurant meal, a plumber’s call-out, a dentist’s appointment or school fees. Their prices depend on local demand and local wages.

The cheaper petrol that improved this month’s headline sits in the first bucket. The inflation that refuses to fade sits in the second. Rents (up 3.6%), insurance (up 5.5%), health (up 3.8%), education (up 4.8%) and eating out (up 4.0%) are still rising strongly.

That pressure is not being imported. It is homegrown, and it is being driven by Australians who are still willing and able to spend.

When inflation falls because of a global price move — cheaper oil, say — the RBA usually looks straight through it.

But when inflation stays high because of strong local demand, that is exactly the problem interest rates are built to fix. Higher rates leave households with less to spend, so demand cools and price pressures ease. A domestic inflation problem has a domestic solution — and a temporary discount on petrol does nothing to solve it.

This homegrown, services-driven inflation is also the kind the RBA watches most closely, even when it doesn’t say so out loud.

So a lower headline like today’s is not the green light for rate cuts that some will read it as. If anything, strong underlying inflation keeps another rate rise on the table.

Homegrown inflation is the concern

There is a sting in the tail. The petrol relief is temporary on both fronts. Global oil prices can turn again in a week. And the fuel excise cut was always meant to be short-lived — and it is now being wound back. This will push prices at the pump back up over the next month or two.

When that happens, the headline figure will bounce straight back up. The “good news” in today’s number will evaporate.

The only measure that will have told a consistent story throughout is the underlying one — and it has been flashing the same warning all along.

Last week, the RBA held the cash rate at 4.35%, after lifting it three times already this year. But it warned it stood ready to move again if inflation stayed high.

Soft headline inflation driven by cheap petrol is not the kind of sustained progress the RBA is looking for. My own cash rate tracker shows financial markets are not betting on relief any time soon.

Because when inflation is being made at home, a cheaper tank of imported petrol doesn’t change the cure.

Isaac Gross, Lecturer in Economics, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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During her widely reported appearance at the National Press Club last week, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson was asked (at 58:06) about her views on Australian foreign aid spending in the context of bipartisan efforts by both Labor and the Coalition governments over the last decade to deploy aid to push back on China’s growing presence in the Pacific. The question and her response were as follows:

Phil Coorey (journalist): Over the past decade or so, as we’ve seen the sort of rise of China in the region and governments here of both persuasions, Coalition and Labor, have increasingly relied on aid as a form of soft diplomacy, especially in the Pacific, to push back at the incursion, if you like, of China. Have you changed your views on foreign aid? Do you see a value in it from a geostrategic position? Or are you still, you know, largely opposed? Are you still of the same views you held for a long time?

Pauline Hanson: Phil, as long as it’s spent well. When I hear — and I just heard recently — from the foreign aid that’s going to Papua New Guinea and I’ve heard this for years and years and years, decades, the corruption that goes on there and the amount that is actually wasted. I’ve got Australians as I said, 130,000 Australians living in poverty who can’t get a roof over their head and we’re giving foreign aid to countries that don’t respect it and corruption that’s happening there, that needs to change. You talk about the Chinese, the amount of money that we’ve helped with our Pacific partners and we’ve given them foreign aid, only still allowed to the Chinese to come in there, their Belt and Road projects, supports that they’re building, it’s like they’ve said to us, up you, we’re going to just take the Chinese and have them here. If you want Australians’ hard-earned taxpayer dollars, well, there has to be, you work with us. And China is a real big concern to me, where we’re headed with that. Foreign aid in the right places, but, Phil, I also believe clean up our own backyard first, and when I can look … Put a roof over the people’s heads, put food on the table for our Australian people and not see the starvation that’s happening with children and people, then we might be able to increase and help others.

Another journalist asked a clarifying question about Chinese aid:

Tom Connell: Are you saying essentially if a country accepts foreign aid from China, we wouldn’t give it as well? That would be a deal-breaker for us?

Hanson: My concern is they are still accepting from China. If China is our biggest concern, I think that we need to really look at the relationship they have with China and how it’s going to impact on us. If we’ve been propping up these countries for many years, Tom, you know, we have to realise the threat. We cannot disregard China. We have to realise the threat that it could be in our vicinity.

The first notable aspect of Hanson’s response is the apparent softening of her position on aid spending. Whereas One Nation’s current party platform calls for a $3 billion (60%) reduction of the annual aid budget, Hanson’s remarks suggest this spending should be judged by “whether it’s spent well” rather than arbitrarily cut. She even opened the door to a possible increase. Aid advocates may well have taken some solace from these comments. However, given Hanson’s subsequent appearance (just a day later) at an event at which Australian mining magnate and One Nation donor and fundraiser Gina Rinehart publicly encouraged her to emulate Elon Musk — the man who oversaw the demolition of USAID — and “take a bulldozer” to federal government regulation and spending, this solace was probably short-lived.

Two other aspects of Hanson’s remarks are worth interrogating. The first is the suggestion that Australia’s aid to the Pacific should be conditional on whether countries are also accepting assistance from China. Here Hanson’s remarks unwittingly illuminate one of the unstated dynamics of what Foreign Minister Penny Wong has called the “permanent contest” in the Pacific — that is, that Pacific governments and elites, rather than just Australia or China, are among the primary players in and beneficiaries of this contest. Alan Tidwell from Georgetown University has recently labelled this dynamic as a form of “strategic arbitrage” wherein “a small state profits from the gap between what two rivals will pay for the same alignment … The gap is the asset, and the leader’s task is to keep both rivals paying”. From the Pacific leaders’ viewpoint therefore, “Asking who is winning the great game is the wrong question. Instead, the question that matters is whether arbitrage itself can last.”

Whether it is accessing funding for state-of-the-art policing equipment, high-profile infrastructure projects or elite sporting franchises, Pacific governments have a direct interest in keeping the contest going as its ending — either in the form of one rival withdrawing or both rivals reaching an agreement to cease competition — would crash the price of alignment. Globally, we have seen this play out with the massive funding cuts to America’s development assistance programs under President Donald Trump, of whom Hanson is an avowed supporter. Beijing has not “filled the gap” in response, as many geopolitics pundits predicted. Instead, China has simply sought to purchase developing countries’ alignment much more cheaply and, in the process, has been able to portray America as fickle and untrustworthy. Of course, none of this has been good for global development and, as a result, we have seen a massive increase in levels of need in areas including the humanitarian and health sectors. Given Australia’s position as the largest regional donor by far, and the very high levels of aid dependence in many Pacific countries, an equally dismal foreign policy and development outcome would result if Australia were to withdraw its funding to the region on the grounds that Hanson suggests.

Hanson’s remarks also included a reflection on the relationship between corruption and aid, suggesting that Australian development assistance is helping fuel corruption in countries like PNG. This is not a new narrative and one in which populist critics of aid, both here and internationally, have often indulged. While it is certainly an issue in the Pacific, there is very little evidence of Australian aid being implicated in corruption. However, the focus on competing with China for Pacific elites’ support has meant that we talk about corruption — and the importance of combatting corruption as part of the promotion of economic development — much less than we used to. In the mid-2000s, the Australian aid program published a stand-alone anti-corruption strategy as part of a wider focus on governance, and anti-corruption featured in both the Coalition government’s 2006 Aid White Paper and the Labor government’s 2011 aid policy.

Today, while Australia’s governance spending remains high, there is very little talk about corruption in the Pacific, its effects and how we might best work with partners to combat it. Corruption gets scant attention in the government’s 2023 International Development Policy. This is not a viable answer to the Hanson critique. Acknowledging the problem, and discussing evidence-based solutions, must be part of the response. Of course, in doing so Australia should be humble and willing to learn given both its own imperfect record on government integrity and the alleged role of some of our non-aid spending in high-profile corruption scandals in countries such as Nauru.

It remains to be seen whether One Nation can sustain its rapid rise in the opinion polls until the next federal election and whether Hanson really has had a change of heart on foreign aid. If there is one point upon which a more constructive consensus might be built between aid advocates, One Nation’s constituencies and those of the major parties, perhaps it should be her initial observation that we should judge the success or otherwise of Australia’s aid by its effectiveness.

This article appeared first on Devpolicy Blog (devpolicy.org), from the Development Policy Centre at The Australian National University.

Disclosure: This research was undertaken with the support of the Gates Foundation. Any views expressed are those of the author only.

Contributing Author: Cameron Hill is Senior Research Officer at the Development Policy Centre. He has previously worked with DFAT, the Parliamentary Library and ACFID.

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The post Pauline Hanson has raised an uncomfortable question about Australia’s foreign aid. Here’s why it matters first appeared on The Australia Today.

July 1 ushers in a new financial year – and a raft of changes that will affect both workers and businesses.

From changes in superannuation payments and parental leave to an above-inflation increase in the minimum wage, here’s what you need to know.

Modest tax cuts are coming

From July 1, the current lowest income tax rate, which applies to income from A$18,201 to $45,000, will be reduced from 16% to 15%.

So a person earning $45,000 or more will save $268 a year.

New ‘instant’ $1,000 tax deduction

If you’re someone who hates keeping track of receipts, there’s good news.

While it still has to pass parliament, the federal government has proposed an “instant” $1,000 work-related tax deduction to start this financial year. That’s higher than the little-known $300 limit on receipt-free work deductions available already.

It’s forecast to leave about 6.2 million Australians better off than now.

But be warned: if you’re among the majority of Australians who claim more than $1,000 in work expenses, you’ll be better off still collecting those receipts and claiming the way you have before.

National minimum wage increase

Around 2.8 million of Australia’s lowest-paid workers will get a 4.75% pay rise from July 1. The very lowest-paid workers – about 100,000 people on entry-level and minimum pay – get a bigger 5.97% pay bump.

The national minimum wage will rise from $24.95 an hour to $26.44, or up from $948 a week to $1,004.90 per week.

Yet even after the new rises, Australia’s lowest-paid employees will still have less buying power at the shops than they did five years ago.

Payday super

From July 1, all Australian businesses need to pay their employees’ superannuation on the same day as they pay salaries. It’s expected to leave ordinary workers thousands of dollars better off in the long term, while guarding against a persistent problem of super being underpaid.

If you’re an employer worried about meeting the July 1 deadline, you can find more resources here.

Parental leave pay changes

The length of paid parental leave is increasing slightly, by ten days, to a total of 26 weeks from July 1, and the payment will increase to $1,004.70 per week.

The government says this will provide families with more financial support and parents will still need to meet an income test and work test.

There’s more information for employers on how the scheme works here.

Instant asset write-off extended

For small businesses, an instant writeoff for assets costing less than A$20,000 will be extended permanently from July 1. This applies to small businesses with annual turnover of less than $10 million.

SMS register to fight scams

For years, scammers have used a simple trick to lure people into clicking links they shouldn’t.

You get a message from “AusGov” and assume it’s from the Australian government. In fact, that’s a fake “sender ID” – the identity of who’s sending a text – close enough to the real “myGov” that it has fooled people.

From July 1, those scam text messages should show up on your phone under a single, “unverified” message thread.

While it’s a welcome move, it is expected to catch some businesses and community groups off-guard. If they haven’t registered their legitimate sender ID by July 1, their messages risk ending up in that “unverified” scam thread too.

Supermarket price-gouging law

From July 1, it will be harder for our two largest supermarkets – Coles and Woolworths – to charge “excessive prices”. A new law has been brought in to increase scrutiny on their pricing practices, following similar rules in the European Union.

Penalties will apply for any breach, although “excessive pricing” may be difficult to prove.

Anti-money laundering rules widened

Updated laws covering anti-money laundering and counterterrorism financing (known as “AML/CTF”) will apply to more businesses from July 1.

The rules will now apply to real estate professionals, lawyers, accountants and conveyancers and some other businesses. These services will need to register with the regulator, AUSTRAC, and meet certain requirements, such as checking the identity of customers and reporting certain transactions.

What’s not changing from July 1

• Changes proposed in the May federal budget to negative gearing and the 50% capital gains tax discount are not yet law. They are currently being debated in parliament and are due to begin on July 1 2027.

• A new minimum tax on discretionary trusts, also flagged in the budget, is not due to start till July 1 2028. These types of trusts are typically used for income splitting, so a high income earner pays a lower rate of tax.
• The Working Australians Tax Offset announced in the May budget provides an additional tax offset of $250 each year. But this only starts from July 2027.

For more changes coming in from July 1, 2026 – including on business and company fees – check the federal government’s Business website.

Liz Minchin, Executive Editor + Business Editor, The Conversation and Victoria Thieberger, Business and Economics Editor, The Conversation

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Australia’s new law on supermarket “price gouging” (also known as excessive pricing) starts on July 1 2026.

It prohibits any very large supermarket with revenue exceeding A$30 billion – currently only Coles and Woolworths – from charging a price for a grocery product that is significantly excessive compared to the cost of supply, plus a reasonable margin.

The law is an addition to the existing mandatory Food and Grocery Code. It will be enforced by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). Significant financial penalties apply for any breach.

The law comes into effect at a time when the major supermarkets are under scrutiny for their pricing practices.

Recently Coles was found to have misled consumers under its “Down Down” promotion, where it advertised prices as reduced, even though the prices were higher than originally advertised. Significant penalties are expected. A similar action by the ACCC against Woolworths is awaiting judgment.

Why was the new law introduced?

The new law fulfils the Labor government’s pre-election promise to ban supermarket price gouging as part of its commitment to address cost of living pressures.

The law was introduced following evidence of rising grocery prices.

Last year, the ACCC’s supermarkets inquiry found Coles and Woolworths have significant market share – more than two thirds of Australian grocery sales. They are also among the most profitable supermarket businesses globally and face little competition.

Although the ACCC did not recommend an excessive pricing law, it anticipated that greater competition would reduce profit margins in the sector.

Other inquiries into supermarket pricing, including by the Australian Council of Trade Unions and the Senate Select Committee into supermarket prices, recommended an excessive pricing law. Separate parliamentary inquiries in Queensland and South Australia also pointed to the need for tighter regulation of the sector.

Australia’s law goes further than other countries

Australia’s law is unique. Countries that have introduced a dedicated price gouging law have done so primarily for a limited time in cases of emergency, like the COVID pandemic, when products (such as face masks) are scarce and the risk of price gouging is high.

The European Union uses its competition law to prohibit large companies from abusing their dominance to harm competition, including by charging excessive prices.

However, excessive pricing is not expressly part of Australia’s competition law.

Instead, Australia chose to include excessive pricing in the Grocery Code. This approach confines excessive pricing only to large supermarkets, rather than to other sectors of the economy.

Even so, it is expected Australia will rely on competition cases from the EU and the United Kingdom in applying the new law. However, even in the EU and UK, the cases are not extensive and the principles around what constitutes an excessive price are not fully settled.

How will the law apply in practice?

The new law does not define when prices are significantly excessive (or provide examples), nor does it specify what is a reasonable profit margin.

In the EU, the overarching test of whether a price is excessive is if the price is significantly above what would be charged in a competitive market.

However, the test will be difficult to apply because the nature of a supermarket business involves costs that are spread across a huge portfolio of products. So it is hard to allocate costs and profits to a single product. Supermarkets also deal with hundreds of suppliers, with prices and costs changing frequently.

Therefore, courts and regulators look to other means for determining whether a price is excessive. This could be the price charged by other companies for a similar product, or the price charged for the product in different places or at different times.

The new law places an emphasis on whether a supermarket is making a “reasonable” profit margin. However, determining the profit margin of a business is notoriously difficult and what is “reasonable” is open to debate and proof.

All this means the new law will be difficult to apply, as noted in Treasury’s consultation paper.

What can consumers expect from the new law?

In practice, the new law is likely to be used only infrequently, given the difficulties of proof. Large supermarkets will also have an incentive to defend any excessive pricing claim brought by the ACCC.

The law is not a silver bullet for achieving fair grocery prices or for addressing cost of living pressures. Consumers need to manage their expectations of what it can realistically achieve on its own.

It was always intended that the excessive pricing law would be part of a broader armoury of consumer measures. This includes:

• the new merger law, which requires major supermarkets to notify the ACCC of certain acquisitions
• funding the consumer group CHOICE to provide greater transparency on consumer prices, and
• funding for the ACCC to address misleading conduct by supermarkets, including increased funding in the recent May budget.

The new law does put Coles and Woolworths on notice that their pricing practices are being watched.

Will these July 1 changes transform the market dominance of Woolworths and Coles? It’s unlikely. But having new commercial incentives for large supermarkets to review their pricing practices can only be positive for consumers.

Ray Steinwall, Adjunct Professor, UNSW Law, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Within days of debate over Hanson’s call for Australia to be “multiracial” but “monocultural”, the One Nation leader appeared at the Sikh Temple Perth complex in Canning Vale, wearing a head covering, meeting Sikh community members and taking part respectfully in one of Australia’s most visible multicultural spaces.

For many of her critics, the visit may appear contradictory.

How can a politician who questions multiculturalism walk into a gurdwara, honour Sikh customs and stand beside a community whose faith, language, dress and traditions are proudly distinct?

But there is another way to read the moment.

Perhaps this is exactly what Hanson means when she says Australia should have one culture: not one religion, not one language, not one food, not one ethnicity, but one shared civic culture built on respect, law, equality, service and national belonging.

The video supplied to The Australia Today shows Hanson at Western Australia’s Canning Vale gurdwara, where she is seen with community members outside the temple and later inside the premises wearing a blue head covering.

Inside the gurdwara, she appears in the prayer hall area and later among community members in the langar hall, where Sikh volunteers serve free vegetarian meals to all visitors regardless of faith, background, wealth or political views.

That image is powerful.

A Queensland senator known for her hardline views on immigration and national identity walks into a Sikh gurdwara in Western Australia and follows the rules of the house. She covers her head. She shows respect. She engages with elders. She stands in a place where faith and service are central to community life.

That is not exclusion.

That is participation.

For Hanson’s supporters, the visit may be seen as proof that her argument is not against people of different races or faiths, but against division, separatism and the idea that Australia should become a collection of disconnected cultural enclaves.

The gurdwara visit challenges the simplistic claim that wanting one national culture automatically means rejecting migrant communities.

In fact, the Indian community offers one of the clearest examples of how cultural identity and Australian belonging can sit together.

Indian Australians have built businesses, served in public life, joined the defence forces, worked in transport, health, farming, education and small business, and contributed deeply to local communities across the country.

Their temples are not isolated spaces. They are centres of prayer, charity, education and service. Langar is not just a religious meal; it is a public act of equality. Anyone can sit. Anyone can eat. No one is turned away.

If the core of Australian culture is fairness, service, dignity, respect for the law and helping your neighbour, then Indian Australians are not outside that culture. They are living it.

That is why Hanson’s Canning Vale visit matters.

It shows that the monoculture debate does not have to be reduced to fear or hostility. It can also open a more serious question: what is the common Australian culture that holds people together?

A common culture does not require everyone to pray the same way, dress the same way or eat the same food. Australia is not stronger when people are forced to erase their heritage. It is stronger when different communities are united by shared values.

The gurdwara itself is a perfect example.

Everyone entering follows the same basic rules. Cover your head. Remove your shoes. Show respect. Sit together. Eat together. Serve others. No one is asked to abandon who they are, but everyone is expected to honour the shared code of the place.

That is a form of common culture.

And it is not weak. It is disciplined, respectful and inclusive.

This is where the national debate often becomes dishonest. Too many people pretend there are only two choices: either unlimited multiculturalism with no common identity, or forced assimilation where migrants must hide their heritage.

Most Australians live somewhere in between.

They want migrants to contribute, respect the law, embrace democratic values, speak to their neighbours and feel part of the country. But they also understand that someone can be fully Australian while still being Sikh, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or of no faith at all.

They understand that a turban, a temple, a language, a festival or a community kitchen does not make someone less Australian.

The question is not whether people look or worship the same. The question is whether they share a commitment to the country they call home.

Seen through that lens, Hanson’s visit to the Canning Vale gurdwara becomes more than a political photo opportunity. It becomes a test case for her own argument.

If her monoculture means one race, one religion or one old version of Australia, then it will fail in a modern country built by many communities.

But if her monoculture means one national loyalty, one rule of law, one democratic standard, one expectation of mutual respect and one commitment to Australia’s future, then the gurdwara visit shows that people of all backgrounds can be included in it.

That is the version of the debate Australians deserve.

Because the Sikh community did not need to stop being Sikh to welcome Pauline Hanson.

And Pauline Hanson did not need to stop being Pauline Hanson to respectfully enter a Sikh gurdwara.

Both things happened at once.

That may be uncomfortable for critics on both sides, but it also says something important about Australia.

The country is at its best when communities are confident enough to share their traditions and strong enough to unite around common values.

If that is what Hanson means by monoculture, then the Canning Vale gurdwara visit may be one of the clearest examples yet that the idea does not have to exclude everyone.

It can include everyone willing to respect Australia, contribute to Australia and belong to Australia.

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The leaders of the United States and Iran have signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding to end the war between their countries, as well as Israel’s military assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

From the US point of view, the deal leaves a lot to be desired. Washington is giving up a lot for very little in return. President Donald Trump’s claims of success make this feel like an “emperor has no clothes” moment.

There is nothing positive for the US in the agreement that didn’t already exist before the war – including Iran’s very minimal nuclear concessions.

The US is also abandoning a number of partners – most prominently the Persian Gulf countries – but also Israel’s interests and obviously the Iranian people.

With this deal, the US is making promises it has no way of fulfilling, especially when it comes to sanctions relief and unfreezing Iranian assets.

Here is a point-by-point breakdown of some of the promises in the deal and the biggest problems I see with them.

Point 1: Israel’s bombing of Lebanon

The United States and Iran and their allies […] declare the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon.

A big problem here is the deal does not mention Israel or Hezbollah, who are the two parties to that conflict and clearly have not been consulted on this point.

Does “termination of military operations” mean Israel’s military withdrawal from southern Lebanon? This is not likely to happen. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not be able to withdraw Israeli troops for domestic political reasons – a large proportion of Israelis want to keep fighting Hezbollah and, at a minimum, stay in southern Lebanon.

I can see both sides respecting a ceasefire of sorts, but this conflict will definitely flare up again.

Point 5: An open Strait of Hormuz

Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Oman.

This point is really striking – it basically concedes to the Iranian regime that if it just waits 60 days, it can essentially start charging a service fee for traffic going in and out of the strait.

This deal puts Persian Gulf countries and Oman in a really challenging position. They have been under direct attack from Iran, and this agreement does not have any mechanism to guarantee their security going forward.

So, the Gulf countries may well decide it’s worth it to pay Iran a service fee in exchange for their security. For them, it’s better if their oil, gas and fertiliser shipments can get out, even if they are more expensive.

Point 6: A redevelopment plan for Iran

The United States undertakes with regional partners to develop a definitive, mutually agreed plan with at least US$300 billion for the reconstruction and economic development of Iran.

The US itself is unlikely to put money into this fund. But this will be another leverage point for the Iranian regime vis-a-vis Gulf countries (who have been committed here as the “regional partners”). Iran will essentially say to them, “You need to fund our reconstruction as per this agreement, otherwise we will block the Strait of Hormuz and attack you again.”

The Gulf countries will come out of this war thinking first and foremost of their own territorial security and economic survival. They are likely to decide that the $300 billion reconstruction fund is a better prospect than the continued economic damage Iran can impart by threatening their security again.

The expectations on Gulf countries in this deal put them in a tricky position regarding the US.

On one hand, they need US military protection, so they are not going to overtly distance themselves from the US. But they are likely to try to diversify their partnerships and get closer to China, in particular.

Point 7 and 11: Lifting sanctions and releasing frozen assets

The United States undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral US sanctions…

The United States undertakes to make fully available for use the frozen or restricted funds and assets of Iran upon the implementation of this MOU.

The first problematic thing here is Washington can only unilaterally terminate US sanctions. In addition, it can only release frozen assets that are held in the US, which is a very small proportion of Iran’s overall frozen assets.

The US has no mechanism to deliver on the rest of the promises here, such as cancelling UN Security Council and IAEA sanctions resolutions.

The same goes for frozen assets. The only way for the US to deliver on this would be to pressure its allies through either coercive threats or incentives – and it does not seem there has been any consultation with them before signing this deal.

Point 8: The nuclear question

Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States and Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled, enriched material […] with the minimum methodology to be down-blending on site under the supervision of the IAEA. The two parties also agreed to discuss the issue of enrichment and other mutually agreed matters related to Iran’s nuclear needs.

What is important here is that pursuing uranium enrichment is not specifically prohibited in this agreement. This implies it was a red line for the Iranian regime – it was not going to give up uranium enrichment for civilian purposes. As a result, the US has not included it in this agreement.

Iran’s broad commitment not to develop a nuclear weapon is something that already existed before the war.

Basically, the only detailed point in this part of the agreement is that it requires the Iranian regime to dilute its existing enriched uranium to secure sanctions relief.

This is not an incredible deal for the US. The US wanted the Iranian regime to give up enriching uranium completely. The deal stipulates the two sides will merely “discuss the issue of enrichment”. And yet, the US is giving up a huge amount in sanctions relief in return.

It’s unlikely more specific details on the nuclear issue will be agreed in the next 60 days. If we ever do get to an agreement, which is by no means assured, it would take months at a minimum and is not likely before the end of this year.

Jessica Genauer, Academic Director, Public Policy Institute, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The post What’s in the US‑Iran peace deal? A lot of concessions and empty promises from Trump, in return for little first appeared on The Australia Today.

Angus Taylor, the Liberal leader who should know better, recently accused One Nation of wanting to “judge people based on the colour of their skin” — a characterisation so detached from what Hanson actually said at her press conference that it crosses from misrepresentation into something closer to deliberate fabrication.

Hanson had just argued, on the record, that Australians should be treated equally “regardless of race, colour, creed, or where you are from.”

You may disagree with her politics. You may find her tone abrasive. But the political class’s instinct to caricature rather than confront tells you more about their intellectual bankruptcy than about her.

That said, Hanson’s own position and One Nation’s social media amplification of it suffers from a different kind of failure: a divisive cultural nationalism that undermines the very case it wants to make.

Let us start with what is simply correct. The English language is not a colonial relic to be apologised for. It is the operative language of Australian civic life, of courts, parliaments, hospitals, workplaces and schools.

One Nation has recently cited the 2021 Census figure of 872,000 people as evidence of a language crisis. The number is real, but the framing requires precision.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 872,206 people who spoke a language other than English at home self-reported that they spoke English not well or not at all. It is a self-assessed measure, not a tested or verified one, and it applies specifically to those already using a non-English language at home — not to the general population.

That caveat does not diminish the concern; it sharpens it.

On the ABS’s own figures, 3.4 per cent of the total Australian population fell into the not-well-or-not-at-all category in 2021. On a population of 25.5 million, the arithmetic produces roughly that 872,000 figure. And the claim that 23 per cent of households do not use English at home is similarly grounded — the ABS recorded 22.3 per cent of the population using a language other than English at home, which rounds to the figure One Nation has cited.

The numbers, properly qualified, are accurate. They represent a policy failure of the first order, not a data point to be explained away by progressive commentators as merely a sign of diversity.

No serious immigration programme can function if large cohorts of settlers arrive or remain without the language capacity to participate in the society that receives them.

This is not nativism. It is logistics. Hanson is right to press on this, even if she presses on it with a bluntness that invites easy mockery and alienates the very moderate opinion she needs to persuade.

The exchange with the SBS journalist at Hanson’s press conference crystallised the confusion at the heart of this debate. The journalist defended SBS’s broadcasting in more than sixty languages as a tool of integration. It was, charitably, a confused argument — and one that SBS’s own institutional history quietly refutes.

SBS did not begin as the multilingual colossus it is today. It launched on 9 June 1975 as Radio Ethnic Australia with just seven languages, with Greek the first to go to air, broadcasting in Sydney and Melbourne. The expansion to its current 63 languages across radio, podcasting, online and social media has been driven by quinquennial reviews tied directly to Census data, which is itself an institutional acknowledgment that language services are a function of demographic need, not a permanent cultural entitlement.

More telling still is what SBS has been willing to cut. After its 2016 Census review, twelve language services were discontinued or placed in recess — among them Fijian, Cook Island Maori, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Tongan — because the communities in question had either shrunk, integrated, or no longer required in-language services to navigate Australian civic life. After the 2021 review, Albanian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian were similarly decommissioned, while newer migrant languages from South Asia were added in their place.

The selection criteria SBS applies require a minimum population threshold and a demonstrable need linked to English language proficiency levels in the community. In other words, SBS itself operates on an integration logic: when a community no longer needs a linguistic bridge, the bridge is withdrawn. The journalist’s argument that multilingual broadcasting aids integration is thus contradicted by SBS’s own institutional practice. SBS does not broadcast in 63 languages because it believes permanent linguistic separation is healthy. It does so as a transitional service — and it removes languages when the transition is judged complete.

So, if SBS can decide that a language community no longer needs broadcasting support, it has already conceded Hanson’s central premise. It just lacks the courage to say so plainly.

This makes the case not for abolishing SBS — Hanson’s blunt instrument — but for something more structurally intelligent. Australia is one of the few countries in the world that funds two full public broadcasters. The combined annual taxpayer outlay on the ABC and SBS runs to approximately 1.3 billion dollars. Rather than defunding the ABC, as some on the right demand, or treating the present duplication as sacrosanct, as the left instinctively does, a merger that preserves SBS’s multicultural remit within a unified public broadcaster, with shared back-end infrastructure, combined streaming platforms, and clear editorial firewalls protecting the language and cultural programming, would serve both taxpayers and audiences better than the current arrangement.

The Australia Institute has already recommended consolidating the two broadcasters’ online news and streaming services, noting that sharing content, translation and publishing systems presents genuine efficiency gains without gutting the public interest mission of either.

The ABC’s own trajectory is instructive: in 2009, Radio Australia broadcast in eight languages, including Khmer, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Mandarin, French and Burmese. By 2018, following budget cuts in 2014 and 2016, it could be heard only in English and Tok Pisin. The ABC has, in fact, been moving away from in-language domestic services, not towards duplicating SBS. A merged entity would rationalise what is already a fragmented and sometimes redundant public broadcasting landscape, and produce a genuinely wholesome broadcaster with the best of both institutions — without the ideological overcorrection of abolition.

But the deeper problem with Hanson’s framing is not the data; it is the conclusion drawn from it.

The proposition that Australia needs “one strong Australian culture” that is cohesive and defined against a corrupted multiculturalism is not a policy framework — it is an emotional slogan.

What does “one Australian culture” mean, exactly? The culture of the gold rush? Of the White Australia Policy? Of the bush ballad or the inner-city café?

Australian culture, like every living culture, is not a fixed quantity to be defended. It is a negotiated, evolving set of civic norms built around what people actually share — and what they genuinely need to share is not the same thing as cultural uniformity. The distinction between monoculture and civic integration is crucial, and One Nation collapses it.

For example, an Indian-Australian woman who speaks fluent English, pays her taxes, knows her legal rights, votes, and raises children who think of themselves as Australian — she has integrated. That she also celebrates Diwali and cooks butter chicken is not a threat to social cohesion. It is colour in what would otherwise be a beige civic landscape. Demanding that she surrender this is not integration policy; it is cultural imperialism dressed in the language of belonging.

What Australia actually needs is not the fantasised monoculture, nor the performative multiculturalism of progressive elites who treat the 872,000 figure as a diversity statistic rather than a governance problem.

It needs a firm, unapologetic civic integration framework: English language proficiency as a verified prerequisite, not merely a self-declared one, for permanent residency; a migration intake calibrated to absorptive capacity rather than ideological targets; and a willingness to name the failure when communities of any origin develop parallel institutional lives that corrode shared norms.

The appeasement instinct that has overtaken Australian mainstream politics, and indeed much of the Western political class, is the real rot. Politicians on all sides have spent two decades treating ethnic communities as electoral blocs to be soothed rather than citizens to be engaged.

The consequence is that legitimate questions about language, integration and civic expectation have been ceded to Hanson by default, precisely because the centre lacks the courage to say things that might complicate a preference vote.

Hanson fills a vacuum created by elite neglect, and then the elite attacks her for filling it.

Taylor’s performance, attacking Hanson for racism on the very day she explicitly disavowed racial categorisation, is a symptom of this neglect turned aggressive. It is easier to throw a slur than to develop a policy. The Liberals, who presided over their own extended failures on immigration and integration policy, have no standing to lecture anyone on this ground.

Hanson is not always wrong. She is often inflammatory and strategically limited in her capacity to build the broad coalitions that lasting policy change requires. But the monoculture she reaches for and the civic integration she actually needs are not the same thing, and her rhetoric too often obscures this.

The English language argument is worth making with precision and dignity. The SBS argument is worth making with an understanding of what SBS actually does and how it actually works. And the broadcasting reform argument is worth making as a fiscal and structural proposition, not a cultural war.

“One Australian culture” is a slogan that forecloses the very conversation it claims to open.

Australia is not a monoculture. It never was. What it can be, what it must be, is a country with non-negotiable civic common ground: a shared language, a shared legal framework, and a shared expectation that those who make their home here contribute to rather than shelter from the society that receives them.

That argument is available to any thoughtful person across the political spectrum. It is a pity that it keeps being made, and kept being answered, in the worst possible terms by almost everyone involved.

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And it is precisely this everyday multicultural reality that Minister for Multicultural Affairs Anne Aly says is under threat from Pauline Hanson’s renewed push for a “monocultural” Australia, a push the Minister called out as one that “almost exists in the imagination of people who perhaps want to go back to a White Australia.”

Speaking on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, Aly drew on the full breadth of Australia’s multicultural story to make her case, from First Nations peoples who spoke dozens of languages long before European arrival, to every wave of migration that has since reshaped the nation’s character.

“Diversity is etched in our landscapes — from our snowy mountain tops to our pristine beaches, our red earth in the centre to our rainforests. It is etched in our history. It is who we are.”

A ‘monoculture’ — but whose?

Hanson’s position distinguishes race and culture, arguing that Australia can be multiracial while insisting on a single shared culture. But Aly cut to the heart of why that argument is hollow for the millions of Australians who live across cultural identities every single day.

“Who gets to dictate what that monoculture is?” she asked. For a Greek Australian family who speaks Greek at home and English at work, for a Vietnamese Australian whose children celebrate Tết and Australia Day in the same month, for a Sudanese Australian community maintaining language and music across generations, the demand for cultural uniformity is not a neutral policy. It is an erasure.

Aly was unambiguous:

“To denigrate, deny or try and destroy our diversity is really denigrating, denying and destroying who we are as a nation today — a modern, multicultural and diverse nation.”

Aly explains what Hanson would take away

In the interview’s most resonant moment, Aly named the grandmothers of multicultural Australia, the tetas of Lebanese families, the nonnas of Italian households, the yiayas of Greek communities, to put a human face on what Hanson’s agenda would actually mean.

Add to that list the dadi’s and nani’s of Indian Subcontinent families, the lolas of Filipino communities, the nainais of Chinese Australian households, every grandmother in every language who has ever whispered a bedtime story, sung a lullaby, or passed on a recipe in a tongue that is not English.

“She wants to take away the ability of the tetas and the nonnas and the yiayas to speak their language to their grandchildren,” Aly said.

She also listed the abolition of SBS, the broadcaster that serves dozens of language communities across Australia, among Hanson’s targets, alongside cuts to the ABC, minimum wage rises, tax cuts and paid parental leave.

What Hanson has pledged to cut — and who bears the cost:

SBS — the only national broadcaster serving Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi, Greek, Italian, Vietnamese and dozens of other language communities

Community languages — the right of families to pass on Greek, Italian, Cantonese, Arabic, Hindi, Vietnamese and more to the next generation

Paid parental leave — heavily relied upon by newer migrant families still building financial stability in Australia

Minimum wage rises — essential for multicultural workers concentrated in hospitality, aged care, construction and retail

Celebrating together: Holi, Diwali, Eid, Easter — all of it Australian

Central to Aly’s argument is that cultural celebrations are not imports grafted onto an otherwise uniform nation. They are Australia. When Holi is celebrated in Federation Square, when Lunar New Year lights up Chinatowns from Sydney to Melbourne, when Eid prayers fill out suburban parks, when Diwali fireworks go off in Parramatta, this is the country expressing itself.

The Minister said, presenting diversity is not a concession to newcomers but a collective inheritance belonging to everyone.

“Whether that’s Holi or Diwali or Eid, or Christmas or Easter — all of that beautiful, different cultural and religious celebration is what we share as Australians,”

Multicultural workers power the economy — and small businesses know it

Wearing her Small Business Minister hat, Aly also pushed back on claims that Labor’s workplace laws make it too hard to dismiss underperforming workers, a line advanced by both Hanson and sections of the Opposition. The Minister said the real conversation she hears from business owners is very different.

“They’re not saying ‘I can’t sack someone,'” she said.

“They’re saying, ‘I need more workers, I need access to skilled workers.'”

Multicultural Australians — through skilled migration, free TAFE pathways and community networks — are central to meeting that need.

New figures released this week show net overseas migration has fallen to 301,000 for the year to December 2025. While that remains above the government’s preferred level, Aly said the system is being carefully recalibrated — not dismantled — to ensure it serves the interests of all Australians, including the communities that have made skilled migration part of their story.

What the government is doing — and what still needs to be done

Aly pointed to a suite of actions the Albanese Government has already taken to protect multicultural communities from racism and discrimination, strengthening hate speech laws, commissioning both an Islamophobia review and an Antisemitism Report, and working across communities to build a framework that protects everyone.

A formal response to the Islamophobia Envoy’s report is imminent, though the Minister declined to commit to a specific date. The broader message, however, was clear: this government sees multicultural Australia not as a problem to be managed, but as a strength to be protected.

• Government actions protecting multicultural communities
• Existing hate speech laws strengthened to better protect all communities
• Islamophobia Envoy review completed; government response imminent
• Antisemitism Report commissioned and under active response
• Free TAFE expanding pathways for multicultural Australians and skilled migrants

For the millions of Australians who live between cultures, who celebrate two new years, who code-switch at the dinner table, who carry the languages and traditions of somewhere else into the fabric of here, Aly’s message was simple: this country is yours. It always has been.

“Diversity is a strength for Australia,” she said. “Always has been.”

Disclaimer: The Australia Today covers stories that matter to multicultural and diverse communities across Australia. This article is based on Minister Anne Aly’s interview on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing.

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A university place is often described as a “pathway to opportunity”. But for many students, getting in is only part of the challenge.

The other challenge is affording to stay. This is becoming more difficult as uni fees and costs-of-living increase.

In a new report, we look at the financial pressures facing Australian university students and what can be done to better support them.

We found one in three students surveyed reported they were struggling or severely struggling with their financial situation. This was more common among international students, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, students living with disability, and students living alone.

Our research

To understand what supports are available and what challenges today’s students face, we analysed 41 Australian universities’ policies on financial support for students. We then surveyed nearly 900 students and interviewed around 50 students and university staff. Students were recruited through university networks, student unions and social media.

Students reported growing pressure across core living costs. For example, 51% experienced food insecurity and 64% struggled with housing affordability. Almost 45% said financial stress had negatively affected their studies.

This mirrors other surveys showing students have been skipping meals to cope with costs of living.

Other recent surveys suggest financial pressure is shaping study decisions before students even arrive at university. Some young people are delaying study, planning to study part-time, or expecting to live at home to reduce costs.

What are students doing to cope?

The most common strategy among those we surveyed is paid work. In our survey, 74% of students said they relied on paid employment to cover living expenses. About 36% worked more than 20 hours per week.

While paid work can support independence and employability, working long hours can compete with study time, class attendance, assessments, placements and rest. One student described needing to “skip lectures or skip tutorials” because of work.

Students also reported borrowing money from family and friends, taking out loans, delaying medical or dental care, reducing their study load, dropping classes or delaying graduation.

One student told us:

Every day I think about money […] I find it hard to sleep.

What help is available?

Government payments such as Youth Allowance, Austudy and ABSTUDY provide important support for eligible students.

But these do not cover all costs of living and study or all students. For example, Youth Allowance for students is about A$339 a week, if you are over 18 and do not live with your parents. In 2025, the poverty line for a single adult was about $584 a week. This leaves a gap of about $245 a week even before extra study costs such as textbooks or placements. In 2026, Anglicare also found there were no affordable rental listings in Australia for a person receiving Youth Allowance.

Welfare advocates also argue too many potential recipients are excluded. International students are generally ineligible and many domestic students are also ineligible due to age, if they live with their parents, or due to parental income.

HELP loans – including recent debt-reduction measures – address tuition costs for many students. But they do not assist with day‑to‑day living expenses.

What do unis provide?

Our analysis found most universities offer some form of financial or cost-of-living support.

This includes scholarships, bursaries, emergency grants, hardship loans, financial counselling, food programs (such as food pantries, grocery vouchers and subsidised meals), textbook support and referrals to external services such as community legal centres, housing services, food relief providers and financial counselling services.

But the main issue is not simply whether support exists. It is whether students know about it and can receive it before the pressure becomes a crisis.

Only 22% of surveyed students were aware of financial support available at their university. Of those who were aware, almost half said the application process was difficult or unclear. Some schemes also require students to pay for costs up-front, and then apply for reimbursement, which they cannot afford.

Students and staff described hard-to-navigate webpages, complex eligibility rules, extensive documentation, delays, uncertainty about who qualified, and stigma around asking for help.

How can the system support students better?

Financial literacy programs can help in some cases. But many students are not struggling because they cannot budget. The issue is their income does not meet the cost of studying and living.

Government payments need to better reflect the real cost of studying and living. If students are expected to study full time and complete placements, income support needs to be assessed against actual costs such as rent, food, transport, health care and course requirements.

While the government has introduced some payments for pracs, placement support needs to be equitable across disciplines and not limited to students who already receive government support. Additional support such as travel and parking subsidies are needed. More flexible placements, including part-time schedules could allow students to keep some paid work while meeting course requirements.

Universities also need clearer ways to support students to find, understand and use the available supports. Support should be easy to find, written in plain language, and available through a central pathway. There needs to be simpler application processes for students and the staff supporting them.

If Australia wants a skilled, diverse university-qualified workforce, we need to do a better job supporting students through their studies. It should not be a private problem for students to manage alone.

Katherine Kent, Senior Lecturer in Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Wollongong and Kelly Lambert, Associate Professor Nutrition and Dietetics, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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As the UK prepares to introduce an “Australia plus” ban on social media for under 16s, many lessons can be learned from Australia’s experiment. Many people may think Australia’s ban is a success, with nearly 5 million social media accounts deactivated, removed or restricted. But the reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Australian legislation only requires social media platforms – such as Instagram, TikTok and Facebook – to take “reasonable steps” to prevent under 16s from holding social media accounts. This means children can continue to view social media content – on YouTube, for example – on a web browser, without having an account.

This legislation applies to all platforms whose “sole or significant purpose” is to enable “online social interaction”, allowing people to link to or interact with others, and to post material on the platform. However, the legislation excludes gaming platforms, messaging apps and platforms whose “sole or primary purpose” is educational or health related. The government provides a self-assessment guide for platforms to identify whether they must restrict access.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner did provide an “initial list” of ten platforms considered “likely” to fall under the legislation. These included Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, X, and Twitch. Reddit was also included and immediately launched a legal challenge, which has yet to be resolved.

The eSafety Commissioner also named ten platforms “unlikely” to fall under the legislation (such as Roblox, YouTube Kids and Discord). Yet such exclusions continue to raise concerns around potential harm. In February, the eSafety Commissioner put Roblox “on notice” following several international reports of grooming, including a man who was jailed for this offence in the UK.

Was the launch of the ban successful?

Since its launch on 10 December 2025, Australian media has been filled with stories of children remaining on social media platforms. There was a major spike in downloads of non-mainstream platforms, like Rednote, Yope, and Lemon8.

Children reported exploiting the legislation’s known “loophole” by shifting their conversations to gaming and messaging apps, or by using VPNs to access existing accounts. Many under 16s who were initially locked out of their accounts also reported being able to reactivate or create new accounts immediately.

There were also many reports of under 16s (and their parents) being surprised they were not asked to assure their age, at all. As some companies use behaviour-based age assurance technologies, with age estimation based on the accounts people follow, or they content they like, a young person interacting with mature content could mistakenly be estimated to be 16 or older.

Of those who were asked to assure their age by providing images of themselves, many children reporting fooling the system with masks or by having older siblings (and even parents) sit in front of the camera. All these workarounds were known, and widely reported, months ahead of the December launch.

What does the evidence show?

In March 2026, Australia’s eSafety Commission released its first detailed compliance report. It showed social media companies had taken “some steps” to restrict access to accounts. But the report also provided data from parents showing 70% of children retained active social media accounts.

The report highlighted four key compliance issues. It found that messaging to under-16s on some platforms encouraged children to attempt age assurance, even where they declared themselves to be underage. Some platforms enabled under-16s to repeatedly attempt the same age-assurance method to ultimately pass age checks. Pathways for reporting age-restricted accounts have generally not been accessible and effective, particularly for parents. Finally, some platforms appear not to have done enough to prevent under-16s having accounts.

The report explained Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube were being investigated for “potential non-compliance”. While the results of these investigations are not yet known, enforcement decisions are expected by midyear. In the meantime, parents continue to be frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the legislation.

A recent study provides further insights into the flaws and limitations of Australia’s social media restrictions. The study found 61% of under 16s reported “no or little change” in their social media use. Only 26% reported they had been “significantly affected” by the ban. However, of those who were restricted, 51% reported a significant drop in access to news coverage. These results raise significant concerns for young people’s future civic engagement.

What can the UK learn from Australia’s experiment?

The UK government will implement stricter measures than Australia, by banning under 18s from accessing romantic or sexual AI chatbots and including gaming sites in the restrictions. However, Australia has already introduced similar measures.

The Australian government announced a new legislative rule so its definition of social media includes platforms with “addictive or otherwise harmful design features”. It also introduced new restrictions on search engines, AI tools, gaming platforms and other technologies to limit children’s access to pornography, extreme violent content and self-harm content. The success of these measures is not yet known.

Australia will also introduce digital duty of care legislation later this year, which will place additional expectations on technology companies for preventing digital harms.

With the UK’s claim that it will introduce a “sweeping ban” of all children under 16 on social media, a critical question to ask is how that will be achieved. Australia’s experience and several global studies show significant limitations in age assurance technologies, which have error rates of one to three years when attempting to estimate people’s ages.

The UK could require technology companies to use age verification for all social media users – where everyone 16 and older would need to provided government-issued ID or other evidence to prove their age. But this approach brings significant privacy concerns. The UK’s experience with age verification for pornography sites saw a significant increase in the use of VPNs, which could also be used to circumvent social media restrictions.

Digital spaces should be safe for people of all ages. But I don’t believe bans are the answer. Technology companies need to be held to account and required to block harmful content and build safety into their designs.

Lisa M. Given, Professor of Information Sciences & Director, Social Change Enabling Impact Platform, RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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You’re browsing a major online marketplace for a warm winter jacket, when a sponsored listing catches your eye: a black, fleece-lined jacket, prominently priced for sale from A$18.99 each. It’s just what you want. So you click through, ready to grab a bargain.

But when you land on the page, then select a jacket from the drop down menu, the price instantly jumps to $39.99.

It turns out the $18.99 was actually for a different product – a waterproof storage bag – which was inexplicably listed along with three variants of the jacket.

This is a common strategy used by online sellers. The platform’s search algorithm displays the headline image of the jacket, but pairs it with a more attractive price of a different product.

Frustrated? You’re not alone. Across online forums such as Reddit, or deal-hunting sites such as OzBargain, shoppers have long warned others about this type of “multi-variation listing” on popular shopping websites and apps.

It’s not just wasting your time: it can be illegal.

This kind of visual bait-and-switch trick could potentially be misleading conduct under Australian Consumer Law. It may also breach the prohibition on “bait advertising”, applying to ads that promote “sale” prices on products that aren’t available, or available only in very limited quantities.

And a proposed prohibition on unfair trading practices, now before parliament, could soon give Australians even more power to complain.

Why visual tricks like these work

Academic research helps explain why this kind of design is so effective, and also such a problem.

When a price claim and a product image are presented in close proximity, consumers naturally assume that the price applies to the pictured product.

It is a “visual superiority effect” in advertising. Research has shown that visual superiority effect means consumers process images faster and more automatically than text.

When visual and textual elements conflict, consumers rely more heavily on the visual content in forming their judgements, and form less critical thoughts when it comes to the text, such as a product description.

Consumer watchdogs have warned this kind of design tactic is a type of “dark pattern”: tactics used to nudge, manipulate or trick you into spending more money than you’d planned, or provide personal data that’s not needed.

Research has shown nearly all consumers are susceptible to these manipulative tricks under the right conditions.

Is this actually misleading under Australian law?

Let’s go back to the example of the black winter jacket you clicked on thinking it was available from $18.99, only to discover that price was for a different product.

Is this visual bait-and-switch – where a lower price has been paired with a product image it does not apply to – misleading under Australian consumer law?

Yes, it probably is.

Retailers should be warned. The national consumer watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), can prosecute for misleading people with eye-catching headline claims, if those are not true once you look more closely at the detail.

For instance, just over a decade ago the ACCC pursued TPG Internet in court over misleading ads, which led to a $2 million penalty. The ads had prominent headlines about attractive internet prices – with much less prominent terms qualifying the offer.

It went all the way to the High Court, which ruled that if consumers were drawn into what the judges called “the marketing web” by a misleading “dominant message”, it could be enough to be misleading under the Trade Practices Act.

Not all seemingly deceptive ads will necessarily fall within the category of misleading conduct. It can be harder to prove if the qualification to the images or pricing is revealed before the consumer adds the product to their basket.

But Australia’s laws look set to become a bit clearer on this front.

New legislation currently before federal parliament would introduce a prohibition on unfair trading practices that manipulate consumers, or “unreasonably distort” the environment in which a decision is being made to the detriment of the consumer.

That new prohibition is intended to capture “dark pattern” tactics that are “nudging or pressuring consumers into unintended actions”.

How consumer backlash and complaints can help

Research shows that when shoppers feel they have been intentionally misled, the damage to the brand’s reputation can be severe and immediate.

Price confusion doesn’t just cause frustration; it triggers a deep sense of unfairness. That unfairness can translate into action: consumers abandoning their carts, switching to competitors, and complaining to family and friends.

If you come across shopping platforms where there are consistent, manipulative bait-and-switch tactics like this being used, it may be worth asking: is it time to shop somewhere else?

Or, if you’re annoyed enough to take action, take a screenshot and contact the business.

If they don’t stop bait-and-switch sales listings, anyone can make a report to the ACCC about a false or misleading claim. Reports from customers help inform the ACCC’s education, compliance and enforcement work.

The ACCC has named misleading and manipulative pricing practices among its enforcement priorities for this financial year. Anyone selling to Australian customers should be on notice.

Jessica Pallant, Lecturer in Marketing, RMIT University; Adrian R. Camilleri, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Technology Sydney, and Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law (consumer protections and credit law), The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Instead, I heard something Victorian Labor should find far more unsettling.

Four ordinary Victorians, from four very different backgrounds, told me with surprising passion that they were now looking at One Nation.

Not whispering it. Not half-embarrassed. Not as a protest joke.

They meant it.

One was a 46-year-old Australian-born man. Two were Asian-born women. Another was an Australia-born Indian Australian. These were not the stereotype that inner-city commentators lazily attach to One Nation voters. They were not angry caricatures from a regional pub. They were suburban, working, taxpaying, multicultural Victorians sitting in the middle of Melbourne, explaining why they felt abandoned by Labor.

That is the story the Allan Government does not want to hear.

The 46-year-old man, a Preston resident, told me bluntly that his area was changing politically.

“People think Preston is automatically Labor or Greens,” he said.

“That’s old thinking.

People are angry.

They don’t say it loudly at work, but they say it at the pub, at home, with friends. One Nation is coming through because people feel nobody else is listening.”

I pushed back. Preston has long been treated as a progressive stronghold. Labor and the Greens dominate the political conversation there.
Just to draw the perspective, I googled after coming home. Preston has been with the Labor Party since 1945.

He laughed.

“That’s exactly why they’ll miss it,” he said.

“They think because a seat has cafes, migrants and renters, people won’t vote One Nation. They don’t understand how fed up people are.”

That sentence should terrify Labor strategists.

For years, Victorian Labor has governed as if multicultural suburbs were safely locked away. It assumed migrant communities would remain loyal because the alternative could always be painted as hostile. It was assumed that younger renters would stay with the left because the Liberals felt too distant. It assumed working families would keep voting Labor because they always had.

But the compact is breaking.

The Asian-born women I spoke with were not talking about abstract ideology. They were talking about safety.

One said she no longer felt comfortable letting family members move around at night.

“I came here because Australia felt safe,” she told me.

“Now I worry about shopping centres, train stations, streets. I don’t want speeches. I want my family to feel safe.”

The other nodded and added,

“Every time something happens, the government says it is doing more. But people don’t feel safer. If you don’t feel safe, nothing else matters.”

This is where Labor’s political problem becomes deeper than polling. Safety is emotional. Once voters believe a government has lost control, announcements rarely fix it. A press conference cannot undo the feeling of looking over your shoulder at a shopping centre or railway station.

Then came the Indian Australian man, born here, raised here, deeply invested in Victoria’s future, and furious about what he sees as the state’s decline.

“There is no growth here anymore,” he said.

“People work hard, pay taxes, run businesses, study, try to build something, and what do we get? Debt, red tape, crime, high costs and no confidence.

Victoria used to feel like a place of opportunity. Now it feels like a place people want to escape.”

He said his frustration was not about race or religion. It was about economic confidence.

“My parents believed Victoria was the best place to build a life,” he said.

“My generation is asking whether we should build somewhere else.”

That is devastating for a Labor Government that once sold itself as the builder of modern Victoria.

Daniel Andrews dominated Victorian politics with force, discipline and an ability to define his opponents before they could define themselves. But his legacy is now being judged by voters who are living with the bill: debt, infrastructure blowouts, a strained health system, housing pressure, crime anxiety and a political culture many see as arrogant.

Jacinta Allan inherited that legacy but has not escaped it. To many voters, she does not look like a fresh start. She looks like continuity without the command.

Recent polling suggests this anger is no longer anecdotal. A Freshwater Strategy poll reported by the Herald Sun had Labor on just 23 per cent primary vote in Victoria, behind the Coalition on 27 per cent and One Nation on 25 per cent. It also found 62 per cent of voters believed Labor should change leader before the November election.

That is not a wobble. That is a warning siren.

Roy Morgan polling earlier this year also showed One Nation competing strongly in Victoria, even moving ahead of Labor in one February survey and sitting within striking distance again in April.

Labor’s comforting theory is that One Nation’s vote is mostly regional, older and conservative. That may have been true once. But it is no longer enough. The new One Nation voter can be a migrant mother worried about safety. A suburban tradie crushed by costs. A small business owner sick of regulations. A young worker who cannot see a future. An Indian Australian angry that Victoria feels stagnant. An Asian Australian who came here for security and now feels the state is slipping.

That does not mean all these voters will end up voting One Nation. But it does mean they are willing to listen. And for Labor, that is the dangerous part.

For too long, the Victorian Government has treated voter anger as a communications problem. It is not. It is a lived experience problem.

People are not angry because they misunderstood the government’s message. They are angry because they understand their own lives.

They see bills rising. They see crime stories spreading. They see housing as out of reach. They see debt climbing. They see small businesses struggling. They see political leaders lecturing them about values while failing to deliver basic competence.

One Nation’s pitch is simple: the system is broken, and the major parties are not listening.

Labor’s response has been to call it dangerous. But moral panic is not a strategy. If anything, it confirms the voter’s suspicion that the political class is more interested in silencing frustration than understanding it.

What I heard on Lygon Street was not a formal poll, but it was politically revealing. When multicultural, suburban, working Victorians are openly talking about One Nation in the heart of Melbourne, something has shifted.

Labor can dismiss it as a protest. It can blame misinformation. It can attack Hanson. It can tell itself that Preston, Melbourne’s north, the migrant suburbs and the working-class belt will come home on election day.

Or it can finally accept the uncomfortable truth.

Victorians are not flirting with One Nation because they have suddenly changed who they are. They are doing it because they believe Labor has changed what Victoria is.

And unless Jacinta Allan understands that, the next election may not just be a contest between Labor and the Coalition.

It may become a referendum on whether the party that once owned Victoria has stopped listening to it.

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There is a passage in Frantz Fanon that every post-colonial state eventually confronts: the moment when the liberated nation must decide whether independence was an arrival or merely a change of address.

For nearly seven decades after 1947, the Indian state largely chose comfort — the inherited address of Nehruvian modernism, which tacitly accepted that civilisational legitimacy must be earned through Westphalian categories: secular rationalism, linear progress, text-based scholarship. Heritage was admirable, but it was safely archival, managed by the Ministry of Culture with the quiet diligence of a good librarian.

The twelve years since 2014 represent something qualitatively different. Not simply a change of government, nor even a change of cultural policy, but a structural reordering of the question India asks of itself: not what shall we preserve? But what shall we project?

The Parliament as Philosophical Statement

The New Indian Parliament Building is the most legible symbol of this reordering, and its legibility is precisely the point. When Edwin Lutyens designed the old Sansad Bhavan, he built a monument to the idea that India could be made governable through imported Greco-Roman rationalism softened by a few Mughal chhatris — tolerance as decoration, indigeneity as accent. The new building inverts this hierarchy entirely.

The Samudra Manthan mural is not decorative; it is constitutional. In placing the cosmic churning of the ocean — that great Puranic metaphor for the productive conflict between order and chaos, creation emerging from collective effort — at the heart of the legislative complex, the state has made a philosophical argument: Indian democracy does not derive its moral authority from Westminster or Montesquieu. It draws from the ancient Sabhas of the Vedic era, the village republics of Uttaramerur, and the dharma-danda traditions that predate Magna Carta by millennia. The installation of the Sengol — the sacred sceptre from the Chola tradition symbolising righteous, accountable rule — adjacent to the Speaker’s chair is an equally deliberate act of historical correction. It is an acknowledgment that India’s democratic ethos is not borrowed; it was merely interrupted.

If the Parliament building was a domestic statement, the G20 Presidency of 2023 was its international translation. The decision to decentralise the summit across sixty cities was administratively complex and deliberately so. It forced the world’s most powerful economies to encounter India not as a single, manageable Delhi abstraction, but as a vast, hyper-diverse civilisation whose sophistication resides equally in the weavers of Varanasi and the bronze-casters of Thanjavur.

The placement of a twenty-eight-foot Chola Nataraja at Bharat Mandapam was the signature gesture of this approach. The Nataraja is not merely aesthetic grandeur; it is a compressed philosophical system — Shiva’s cosmic dance encoding simultaneously creation, preservation, destruction, concealment, and liberation within a single bronze form. To conduct global economic negotiations beneath this image is to insist that India’s worldview operates at a different register of temporal and philosophical depth than the quarterly-earnings horizon of contemporary geopolitics.

The mainstreaming of millets — rebranded as Shree Anna — and the institutionalisation of International Yoga Day extend this logic into the domain of global problem-solving. The argument is subtle but significant: when the world faces crises of nutritional security, metabolic disease, and existential anxiety, India offers not merely agricultural commodities or wellness tourism, but a 5,000-year-old knowledge tradition that anticipated these crises.

The Epistemological Frontier: Shruti Against the Archive

Perhaps the least visible but most consequential dimension of this civilisational reassertion is its epistemological ambition. Western academic methodology is fundamentally text-centric — history begins with the document, and the manuscript validates knowledge. India is, at its core, a civilisation of Shruti and Smriti: the heard and the remembered. The Vedas were not primarily written; they were breathed, chanted, and transmitted with extraordinary fidelity across generations through sonic memory.

For decades, Indian institutions attempted to earn Western scholarly legitimacy by playing on Western terms — digitising manuscripts, cataloguing physical archives, translating Sanskrit texts. These are necessary and valuable projects. But they concede the epistemological premise: that the written record is the real record, and the living oral tradition is merely its imperfect backup.

The shift of the past decade has involved a more ambitious challenge to this premise: treating the living carriers of oral knowledge — the Vedic chanters whose pronunciation preserves Sanskritic phonology unchanged over millennia, the folk bards who encode local ecology and cosmology in song, the tribal knowledge-keepers who maintain botanical and astronomical systems outside the text — not as quaint performers of dying traditions, but as active, rigorous epistemic authorities. Codifying their knowledge with academic methodology rather than reducing it to ethnographic curiosity is a genuinely revolutionary curatorial move.

Media and the Democratisation of Deep Culture

Civilisational narratives, however sophisticated, remain inert without a distribution infrastructure. The institutional partnership that produces research-driven documentaries on lesser-known monuments, vanishing art forms, and indigenous knowledge systems addresses this directly. By deploying cinematic language, high-definition production values, and narrative compression to make archaeological and cultural scholarship accessible to millions of ordinary households, this initiative bypasses the traditional gatekeeping of elite cultural institutions. It democratises depth.

The arc of these twelve years, viewed dispassionately, reveals a single governing insight: India’s greatest contemporary strategic asset is its temporal depth. Most nation-states argue from the present; India can argue from five thousand years. The liberation achieved is not merely political but psychological — the shedding of what might be called the post-colonial permission-seeking reflex, the habit of validating Indian civilisation only once it received Western scholarly approval.

Vikas bhi, Virasat bhi — development and heritage together — is not merely a political slogan. It is a philosophical proposition: that a society need not Westernise in order to modernise, that the ancient and the contemporary are not in tension but in dialogue. Whether this proposition is fully realised in practice remains, as with all civilisational projects, an open and evolving question. But the terms of the question have irrevocably changed. Bharat no longer waits to be discovered. It has stepped forward, offered its own vocabulary, and asked the world to keep up.

Author: Dr Sachchidanand Joshi is the Member Secretary of IGNCA and vice chancellor of the Institute of Heritage

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At the end of each school year, we see the same ritual play out. Year 12 results are released and newspapers publish league tables, ranking schools by their exam results.

What you almost never see on the front page is a student who finished a vocational program and walked straight into skilled work.

This doesn’t make sense. There is constant commentary from governments and employers that the country needs more skilled workers in construction, nursing, aged care, early childhood, teaching and trades.

Yet we still treat the pathways that produce these workers as the option you take when the “real” one doesn’t work out.

Why is this? And how can we fix it?

What is a vocational pathway?

A vocational pathway means developing workplace-specific skills and qualifications for a particular occupation or industry. Students can begin vocational learning while still at school, including as part of a senior secondary certificate or through a school-based apprenticeship or traineeship. After school, they might continue through TAFE, another registered training provider, an apprenticeship, a traineeship or a private registered college.

This is different from a “higher education”, where the focus is on giving you thinking tools to perform in a role (although unis can also focus on practical skills).

You might do vocational training to be a hairdresser, chef, electrician or dental hygienist, for example.

Vocational pathways can start before students leave school. In 2024, more than 266,000 Australian school students undertook vocational training as part of their senior secondary certificate. This was about 26% of Year 12 completers.

You can also start your vocational training – with no prior experience – after school.

A paradox decades in the making

For at least 40 years, governments of every stripe have warned about skills shortages. As of 2025, 29% of occupations are in shortage. This involves almost 50% of trade roles and about 40% of professional occupations. But when it comes to life after Year 12, the focus keeps flowing toward universities and the ATAR.

Students can absorb the message early. From the first years of high school, the academic route is presented as the aspiration and vocational study as the fallback.

This is despite the strong opportunities many vocational pathways can provide. In 2024, 95.4% of trade apprentices were employed after completing their apprenticeship or traineeship. Some trade occupations also pay above the all-occupation median. For example, electricians have median full-time earnings of about A$2,191 a week, well above median weekly full-time earnings of about $1,852.

A current Victorian parliamentary inquiry has heard evidence from students of the “stigma” around taking a vocational pathway in the senior years of school, noting it’s not seen as the “smart way”.

A 2024 federal parliamentary inquiry similarly found many students still see vocational pathways as a “last resort” for those who do not get the marks for university.

It also heard many schools are institutionally structured to channel students toward university. This can include limited provision of vocational options, inadequate information about non-university career pathways, and a lack of trained career counsellors and educators with industry knowledge.

It also noted how high ATAR scores are used to rank schools, while schools are “rarely if ever” ranked by the number of students who succeed through VET pathways.

Vocational learning seen as ‘residual’ by school leaders

This doesn’t mean students lack interest in vocational learning. It means they are often making choices in a system where university entrance, ATAR results and academic achievement remain the most visible signs of “school success”. Meanwhile, vocational achievement is less publicly recognised.

In our research on vocational and applied learning (which includes workplace learning, projects and community activities), we found school systems often make vocational learning less visible and less secure.

In a project with school leaders across 23 Victorian high schools, applied learning was repeatedly described as “additional”, “extra” or “residual” work. Leaders pointed to timetabling pressures, staffing instability and school systems that still privilege academic performance.

When vocational learning is treated as peripheral inside schools, students are more likely to view their pathway is also peripheral.

The teachers no one talks about

Students aren’t the only ones affected.

Teachers in applied and vocational settings do some of the most demanding work in schools. They connect classroom learning to what’s happening in industry, build partnerships with employers, and teach some of the most diverse groups of students.

That work takes real expertise. Yet our research also found it is routinely treated as a “lesser” role in the profession. This judgement shows up in concrete ways in timetabling, funding, and in who gets resourced and recognised.

Why marketing won’t fix it

Three structural changes can help this situation.

1. Change how we measure and report success. If a school’s public worth is summarised by its top ATARs, everything else is invisible. Recognising and reporting achievement in vocational pathways would begin to shift what counts.

2. Stop treating vocational and academic pathways as separate worlds. Schooling, vocational education and higher education are still too often governed, funded, and discussed through different systems. This reinforces the idea that they are different kinds of learning – with different levels of importance – rather than connected parts of a broader education and training system.

3. Build more useful evidence. Government-funded bodies such as the Australian Education Research Organisation give schools research-based advice. Applied and vocational pathways need the same attention, so schools are not left to build programs on goodwill alone. They need clearer evidence about what works, how to implement it, and how to recognise successful outcomes beyond ATAR results.

Signs of change

It isn’t all bleak. For example, in Victoria, students can now do a vocational major as part of the Victorian Certificate of Education. This means there is a clear place within the schooling system and recognition of distinct contributions they make to schools.

Educators and young people already know the value of this learning, they live it. The shift still to come is among policymakers, the media and the public.

The next time the ATAR league tables appear, it is worth asking who they leave out, and what we would have to change to put them back in.

Kellie McGlynn, Senior Lecturer in Education, Deakin University and Shaun Rawolle, Senior Lecturer in Education, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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As the United Kingdom and other countries make moves to follow Australia’s lead in restricting access to social media for under 16s, there is still much we don’t know about how the technology impacts young people’s mental health over time.

For example, does using social media for a certain amount of hours each day lead to increased harm? Are younger adolescents more vulnerable than older ones? Is there any difference between boys and girls?

Our new study, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, provides some important answers to these questions. It found clear risks from heavier social media use on young people’s mental health.

Alongside this, we also undertook a recent poll of Australian parents about efforts to restrict access to social media for young people. The findings suggests the law is changing parents’ views and practices around their children’s social media use.

A debate over age

When Australia restricted access to social media for young people under 16 last December, there was considerable debate about whether 16 was the appropriate age threshold.

There were a number of longitudinal studies that examined associations between adolescent social media use and mental health. But very few had systematically investigated whether risks of social media use differed across age during adolescence.

One large 2022 study from the UK found that increases in adolescents’ social media use over time were associated with lower life satisfaction during specific age periods – 11 to 13 years of age for girls and 14 to 15 years of age for boys. It focused on life satisfaction and did not assess symptoms of mental health.

Interactive: the 5 simple tweaks to make social media less addictive

Digging deeper

Our new study aimed to dig deeper into these trends.

We used data from 1,195 students in Melbourne whom researchers have followed annually from 12 to 18 years of age.

We examined whether their social media use was related to later mental health problems, and statistically accounted for a range of individual and family factors that are known to influence both social media use and mental health. Therefore, we were able to reduce alternative explanations and strengthen confidence in our findings – even though we couldn’t prove causation.

We found that adolescents who spent more than two hours per day on social media had a higher risk of developing mental health problems one year later, compared with those using social media for less than one hour per day. The mental health problems included elevated symptoms of depression and poor wellbeing.

Importantly, the risks of social media use were not evenly experienced across adolescence.

The strongest effects consistently emerged in adolescents aged 12 to 13 for both girls and boys. The estimated risk for symptoms of depression and anxiety, as well as poor wellbeing and self-harm, was roughly twice as large compared with adolescents aged 14 to 16 and those aged 17 to 18.

Overall, the estimated size of effects was modest. But in girls aged 12 to 13, more than two hours of daily social media use was associated with around 11 additional cases of high depressive symptoms per 100 adolescents.

Even small effects can become meaningful at a population level when large numbers of young people are spending more than two hours a day on social media.

Age-based restrictions alone aren’t enough

Our study cannot determine a precise age at which social media becomes “safe”. Nor should a single study inform national legislation on age-based restrictions.

However, combined with other research, our study suggests that younger adolescents are particularly vulnerable to the potential harms of social media, with the strongest effects emerging during early adolescence.

As a result, we expect that Australia’s social media law will have the greatest impact on the mental health of younger adolescents. But further research is needed to confirm this.

However, age-based restrictions alone are unlikely to eliminate all risks associated with adolescent social media use. We found evidence that some risks for mental health problems – namely elevated symptoms of depression – persisted for young people up to 18 years of age.

This highlights the need for continued supports for older adolescents.

This includes holding social media platforms accountable for algorithms and features that promote compulsive engagement and exposure to harmful content. One way to achieve this is through Australia’s proposed digital duty of care reform.

It also involves improving education on digital literacy and safety at schools and supporting parents to help young people develop healthier online habits.

Changing the norm

We also recently undertook a poll of more than 2,000 parents of 0- to 17-year-olds about the law restricting access to social media in Australia.

The survey found that 59% of parents felt the law supported them to set rules around social media use. Also, 39% of parents reported that the law has changed their view on when children should first have their social media accounts, with 16 years being the most commonly endorsed age (38%).

These findings, which are yet to be published, demonstrate that public health policies can influence what is considered appropriate or expected behaviour.

While evidence on the impacts of Australia’s social media law is still emerging, it has already influenced global discussions on adolescent social media use.

Debates about age-based social media restrictions are now occurring in many countries. And the conversation is increasingly shifting from whether social media affects young people’s mental health to when young people may be most vulnerable and how we as a society should respond.

Nandi Vijayakumar, Research Fellow, School of Psychology, Deakin University; Susan M. Sawyer, Professor of Adolescent Health The University of Melbourne; Director, Royal Children’s Hospital Centre for Adolescent Health; and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, The University of Melbourne, and Sylvia C. Lin, Postdoctoral research fellow, Deakin University; Murdoch Children’s Research Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The United States has launched new airstrikes across Iran this week as President Donald Trump, losing patience over the protracted negotiations to end the war, has leaned into violence to ratchet up the pressure on the Iranian leadership.

The US secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, made clear the airstrikes would likely continue if the peace deal continued to stall, saying:

If we need to negotiate with bombs, we’ll negotiate with bombs.

This came after Iran and Israel fired missiles at one another in recent days and Iran shot down a US helicopter.

Up to this point, both the US and the Iranian regime had respected the precarious ceasefire that had halted the war in early April. Both sides seemed to want it to continue. And Trump is still insisting a peace deal is imminent.

Why, then, are both sides firing on each other now, and where does this leave the negotiations? There are a few plausible explanations.

Escalate to deescalate

In conflicts, states often escalate to deescalate. This is when a country ramps up military action with the aim of intimidating the other side into submission.

Both the US and Iran want to show force to pressure the other side into accepting an agreement that meets their own core interests.

However, the two sides remain at an impasse because their most critical interests are at odds with one another.

The US wants Iran to capitulate on its nuclear program and reopen the Strait of Hormuz to commercial traffic, with no constraints. Iran wants its frozen assets released and a lasting ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Both sides remain far apart on the nuclear issue, with Iran unlikely to fully agree to US demands that it dismantle its nuclear infrastructure and cease uranium enrichment altogether.

Given the stalemate, both sides want to show they are willing to escalate through military action. Yet, neither wants the ceasefire to break completely.

Trump wants to move on from the war and shift the political agenda domestically in an election year. Fewer than one in six Americans think the US is winning the war. The Iranian regime remains standing, but it cannot ignore the mounting economic pressures of a full-scale war for much longer.

The problem is that escalating in hopes of intimidating an adversary into a deal only works if the other side is not pursuing the same tactic at the same time. Otherwise, both sides end up in an escalation trap, each ramping up the severity of attacks and unable to back down.

Accidental escalation

An alternate explanation is that these escalations are the unintended but inevitable consequence of a tense ceasefire that includes a live military blockade in the Strait of Hormuz.

It remains unclear if the Iranian drone that downed the US helicopter this week, precipitating the retaliatory airstrikes, was intentional or an accident.

An existential regional conflict

Making things more complex is the fact this isn’t just a fight between two protagonists – Israel is simultaneously launching military strikes on an Iranian ally, Hezbollah, in Lebanon.

Israel’s military operation deep into southern Lebanon has fundamentally shifted the regional geopolitics. And it may undermine the tenuous ceasefire between the US and Iran, despite Trump’s efforts to maintain regional calm.

What the Trump administration does not seem to have fully grasped is that in the eyes of the Israelis and Iranians, this conflict runs much deeper and has been going on far longer than the current war. For both sides, it is existential. The Islamic regime in Iran has long opposed Israel’s place in the region, and Israel has long viewed a nuclear-armed Iran as the chief threat to its survival.

As such, Iran will not abandon Hezbollah, which it has long funded and armed, and respect a ceasefire with the US, while Israel wages war in Lebanon. The reason: the regime see itself and Hezbollah as one front fighting the same battle.

And on the Israeli side, the October 7 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel fundamentally shifted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to the region. Since then, his far-right government has adopted an offensive military strategy of capturing territory in Israel’s neighbours – Syria, Lebanon and Gaza – and establishing security buffer zones. Netanyahu has also vowed to eliminate any threat coming from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.

However, the non-state actors of Hamas, Hezbollah, and even the Houthis in Yemen cannot be eliminated with conventional military force. Militant groups like these can blend into civilian populations and reemerge, sometimes months or years later.

So, despite Israel’s significant use of military force and the widescale destruction of Gaza and now southern Lebanon, Israel will not succeed in eliminating Hamas or Hezbollah, and will keep fighting.

Trump’s approach to regional diplomacy has ignored these complexities. Trump leans heavily on bilateral and personal relationships to achieve his objectives. He has shown little interest or patience in addressing the underlying drivers motivating the multiple actors involved in the conflict.

Will the ceasefire hold?

The most important thing to understand here is how Trump views a “ceasefire”. In a news conference this week, he said in the Middle East, a ceasefire means “shooting in a more moderate manner”.

But we do know he doesn’t want to return to a full-scale war, which is why he demanded Israel and Iran stop striking one another earlier this week.

So, we could see more strikes between the three sides as they continue negotiating. And we may see a memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran in the coming days or weeks. However, this would likely be an agreement for both sides to continue talking. It is unlikely it will resolve the core issues.

Nor is Israel likely to withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon or halt its asymmetric war with Hezbollah.

As I’ve argued before, this has the making of a “frozen conflict”, or an unresolved war that continues at a low level, below the threshold of full-scale combat.

If the deeper roots of the conflict are not resolved, a “ceasefire” between the US, Israel and Iran can only ever be temporary.

Jessica Genauer, Academic Director, Public Policy Institute, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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This, according to the BBC, was “India’s new political superstar.” According to the ABC, it was the moment that “India’s largest online youth movement” spilled onto the streets. According to the Telegraph’s award-winning foreign correspondent, it was a “viral cockroach party” that “threatens to bring down Modi.”

All of this, for fewer attendees than a mid-tier college festival.

The CJP playbook is not original — and that is precisely the point. Since Bangladesh’s so-called “Gen Z revolution” of 2024, which brought down Sheikh Hasina’s government and opened the door to Islamist consolidation under Prof. Muhammad Yunus, and Nepal’s opposition-driven street politics of recent years, a template has emerged: brand a protest movement in the language of youthful irreverence, flood social media with memes and follower counts, and wait for the Western press to do the amplification work for free.

In Bangladesh, this resulted in the dismantling of a secular, if imperfect, government — and the rapid rise of Jamaat-e-Islami and its affiliates in the resulting vacuum. In Nepal, street pressure has been a reliable instrument of political destabilisation regardless of which faction wields it. Now the Nepali youth want rapper-turned-politician Prime Minister Balen Shah to resign too.

The lesson that India’s fractured, desperate opposition drew from both cases was seductively simple: virality can substitute for legitimacy.

The CJP has followed this formula with almost textbook precision. Begin with a grievance that is real — NEET examination irregularities are a genuine problem, and Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan is a legitimate target of criticism. Then wrap that grievance in a satirical identity (the “cockroach” branding, originating from a Supreme Court hearing remark) designed for maximum shareability. Recruit someone who on surface looks like an independent figure, Sonam Wangchuk, to lend credibility. Claim astronomical online numbers. And then, crucially, let foreign media manufacture the aura of inevitability.

22 million claimed followers. 8 lakh petition signatures. 1,000 bodies at the protest 9including media, social media influencers hungry for content, and selfie hunters). At some point, even the most credulous foreign correspondent must ask: where did everyone go?

One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to notice that the CJP’s political positioning maps almost perfectly onto the Aam Aadmi Party’s talking points and that of the broader INDIA alliance. The demand for Pradhan’s resignation, the framing of the government as running a “politics of fear,” the conspicuous absence of any critique directed at opposition-governed states with their own examination scandals — all of this follows a script that serves India’s dysfunctional opposition more than it serves any student.

Dipke’s remarks at Jantar Mantar were revealing: “Stop religious politics, stop Hindu-Muslim politics.” This is legitimate as far as it goes. But it is also, notably, a campaign slogan — and one borrowed wholesale from opposition rhetoric. A genuinely independent student movement would direct its fire at the system, not at a single minister, and certainly would not arrive led by a figure flying in from the United States with pre-drafted ultimatums and media escorts.

India’s opposition, having failed to build a credible electoral alternative, has repeatedly turned to street theatre as a substitute for policy. The CJP is the latest, most social-media-optimised iteration of that strategy.

What makes this episode genuinely worrying, however, is not the protest itself — which was peaceful, modest in scale, and entirely within the norms of democratic expression. What is worrying is the complete abandon with which major Western outlets fabricated a narrative of revolutionary momentum from almost no evidence.

ABC (Australia): “India’s viral ‘cockroach’ political movement spills onto Delhi’s roads… India’s largest online youth movement has just had its first go at taking things out of reels and into real life.”

BBC: “India has a new political superstar — a cockroach.”

The Telegraph: “Viral cockroach party threatens to bring down Modi.”

AFR: “Viral ‘cockroach party’ crawls under Modi’s skin.”

None of these headlines were written after the protest. None of them reflected the reality of 1,000 people in paper cockroach masks at a venue that has seen millions. They were written in advance of the event — fed by the same social media metrics that the CJP itself was manufacturing — and they served audiences outside India who have no mechanism to verify that “22 million followers” does not translate to 22 million people willing to take to the streets of Delhi.

This is not merely sloppy journalism. It is a structural failure of legacy media institutions whose India coverage is increasingly shaped by diaspora correspondents, social media feeds, and a reflexive appetite for any narrative that frames Modi’s India as teetering on the edge of youth-driven collapse. The BBC’s audiences in Birmingham or ABC’s in Brisbane did not learn that the protest drew 1,000 people. They learned that India had a new political superstar. These are not the same story.

It bears saying clearly: the NEET paper leak scandal is a genuine outrage. But legitimate grievances do not automatically produce legitimate movements. The CJP’s petition with 800,000 signatures, its 22 million claimed followers, its promises that “lakhs of students will join us in a day or two” — none of this materialised on Saturday. What materialised was a small and ultimately inconsequential gathering that has been inflated, by foreign media that should know better, into something it is not.

The danger here is not that CJP will bring down the government. It will not. The danger is that this template — manufacture virality, import a foreign media narrative, launder opposition politics through a supposedly apolitical youth brand — will be refined and repeated. It was tested in Dhaka, adapted in Kathmandu, and is now being piloted in Delhi. Each iteration learns from the last.

Western public broadcasters like the ABC and BBC have, whether intentionally or through sheer analytical laziness, become the most important infrastructure that these manufactured movements depend on. They provide the international legitimacy that domestic social media cannot. They tell the story before it happens and ignore to update on the reality after it fails.

India’s democracy is robust enough to survive cockroaches. It is less certain that the international audience’s understanding of India will survive another decade of coverage like this.

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Victoria has recently been labelled Australia’s “car theft capital”.

According to the Insurance Council of Australia, more than A$243 million was paid out in Victoria last year in 12,500 claims involving stolen vehicles and thefts from motor vehicles.

Between 2024 and 2025, the state recorded a 25% increase in motor vehicle theft claims. There was also a 37% increase in associated costs.

As vehicle theft claims fall in several other states, Victoria is heading in the opposite direction.

The question is, why?

Why Victoria is becoming an outlier

Insurance Statistics Australia data suggest Victoria is increasingly an outlier when it comes to vehicle theft. But it provides limited insight into what is driving the increase.

To understand why Victoria is experiencing rising vehicle theft while other states are declining, we need to look at a broader range of factors.

According to Victoria Police, a key factor is the increasing use of electronic devices to steal cars.

Victoria Police say more than 10,000 vehicles are stolen using electronic theft methods each year. This is around 30 vehicles every day. In fact, Victoria Police has linked the growing use of these technologies to the highest levels of vehicle theft recorded since 2001.

Cars with keyless entry are a particular target, with theft techniques becoming more sophisticated.

Old fashioned techniques such as forced entry and hot-wiring have been replaced with key cloning, key mimicking, or key reprogramming devices. These can access a vehicle’s electronic systems, override security features, program new keys, and start the car without the original key being present.

This technology is available in all states and territories but it seems Victoria is being hit hardest in Australia. This may indicate policing or policy issues.

Organised crime may be part of the picture. In March this year, the Victoria Police Vehicle Crime Squad uncovered an alleged international syndicate accused of stealing more than 150 vehicles worth more than $20 million and exporting them overseas for profit.

Youth offending patterns also need consideration. In a state where youth crime remains a regular feature of public and political debate, young people continue to be over-represented in carjackings and aggravated burglaries, offences that are often linked to vehicle theft.

Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Robert Hill has argued some young people involved in vehicle theft are being recruited by organised crime groups. He has described them as “minions” used to carry out offending on behalf of older criminals.

While organised crime and youth crime are both Australia-wide issues, Victoria’s Youth Gang Strategy notes the significant overlap between youth and serious organised crime networks in the state.

So it’s likely Victoria’s vehicle theft problem is not driven by a single factor.

What other states and territories are doing

Queensland provides an interesting comparison. There, motor vehicle thefts went down 12% between 2024 and 2025, the largest decrease on record for the state.

In February 2026, Queensland Police launched Operation Yankee Forge, a six-month operation targeting burglary, robbery and vehicle theft. More than 2,000 offenders were charged with over 5,000 offences in the first six weeks.

In 2025, Queensland introduced its “adult crime, adult time” youth justice reforms, a year before Victoria’s recent bail and sentencing changes. Although it is too early to assess their precise effect of these two initiatives, the highly visible nature of these reforms may have played a role in shaping offender perceptions and behaviour.

Queensland’s approach highlights the potential value of sustained, highly visible, and state-wide enforcement activity focused specifically on vehicle theft.

Western Australia and South Australia have also recorded a reduction in vehicle theft claims. SA has invested in prevention initiatives such as the award-winning Stop Car Theft Program, a partnership between South Australia Police and the Royal Automobile Association of South Australia that combines enforcement, public education and crime prevention activities.

The WA government has made it compulsory to fit a government-approved immobiliser – which greatly reduce the chance of having your car stolen – when a vehicle is registered or transferred.

Tips to keep your car safer

While there is no single solution to vehicle theft, some of the most effective prevention measures remain the simplest.

Removing valuables from your vehicle, using a steering wheel lock, parking in well lit locations, and installing sensor lighting and CCTV around driveways and parking areas can increase the effort and risk involved in offending.

These measures work by making vehicles less attractive targets and increasing the likelihood offenders will be seen, challenged, or interrupted. They can reduce opportunities for offending and make vehicles less appealing to potential offenders.

Joel Robert McGregor, Senior Lecturer, Criminology, Swinburne University of Technology and Xanthe Weston, Criminologist, CQUniversity Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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More than half of Australia’s universities dropped in global rankings this week.

Individual results always bounce around. But this drop, via the Centre for World University Rankings, suggests the decline of Australia’s standing in many global rankings systems is more than a blip.

Centre for World University Rankings president Nadim Mahassen [warned]:

Australian universities are struggling to deliver high-quality education, attract and retain talent, and produce quality research at scale.

Mahassen explained this is “not just an academic problem” but one that undermines Australia’s “long-term future”.

The rankings also follow a high-profile opinion piece by academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who wrote last week how she had told her teenage stepdaughter to think twice about going to uni:

right now kids are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt to have a terrible campus experience while being graded on who can write the best AI prompts.

What’s going on?

What are rankings and what did they show?

Global university rankings aim to evaluate all universities in the world through a single framework. Each ranking system has a slightly different focus and methodology.

The Centre for World University Rankings measured more than 20,000 universities globally on four factors: education, employability of graduates, number of faculty members who have received top academic distinctions, and research output.

Of the 39 Australian universities included in the exercise, 14 improved their rank compared with last year, four stayed the same and 21 dropped.

Four Australian institutions made it into the top 100. While this number is the same as last year, the Australian National University and University of Sydney fell a few places, to numbers 93 and 100 respectively. The University of New South Wales and the University of Melbourne held the top spots for Australian universities at 52 and 64 respectively, with no change from last year.

June is the start of global “rankings season”, so we will soon see whether these trends continue to hold.

Other high-profile global rankings include those by QS Quacquarelli Symonds, Shanghai Ranking and the Times Higher Education.

A drop but not a shock

Last year, we saw some similar downward trends in Australia’s rankings, which university commentators described as a “wake-up call” for the sector.

So this year’s decline will not be a shock to anyone who works at an Australian university. Administrators also know the rankings can move around from year to year.

However, it is harder to brush off this year’s results. As media reports noted, universities have “tumbled” in rankings after a “scandal-plagued year”. It also follows an increased propensity to label the Australian higher education sector as being in “crisis”.

This label is tied to criticisms that unis are being run like profit-focused businesses, instead of places of education and aspiration, research and development, and civic engagement for the good of the community.

Indeed, as the rankings were released, Mahassen also cautioned Australia’s poor result reflected years of inadequate funding and the “devaluation of science and education as public goods”.

Amid criticisms of universities operating like corporate entities it is important to note federal funding to the sector (not including for HECS/HELP) has declined in recent decades, from 0.9% of GDP in 1995 to 0.6% of GDP in 2021.

Constant concerns

Universities have certainly been making headlines for the wrong reasons in recent years.

Concerns about university executives’ behaviour and pay have become regular stories.

On top of this, we have had a year-long Senate inquiry into university governance, which revealed a lack of transparency about spending on services such as consultancies. Labor senator Tony Sheldon criticised universities for

[taking money] out of the pocket of taxpayers and not going into better services for our students.

These issues have been exacerbated by both threatened and actual cuts to operations and jobs at many universities. This comes amid underpayment cases and precarious work conditions for many academics.

As the late professor Graeme Turner argued in his 2025 book, the Australian university system is “broken and urgently needs fixing”.

What are students paying for?

Some Australian undergraduates are taking on huge levels of debt to go to university.

The Job-ready Graduates scheme restructured university fees in 2021 under the Morrison government. It lowered fees in some areas, such as teaching and nursing, while massively increasing the cost of degrees in humanities fields. Despite widespread criticism of the scheme, the Labor government has not scrapped it. Arts degrees now cost more than A$50,000.

These huge costs comes amid moves to reduce in-person lectures and tutorials at some universities.

It also comes as universities – in Australia and around the world – grapple with the rise of AI and what this means for assessments, cheating and the quality of student learning.

No wonder some are questioning whether an expensive uni education is worth it.

The international student factor

But it is not just domestic undergraduate fees and poor executive management that are mixed up in the issues facing our universities.

Rankings are particularly important tools for international student recruitment. Prospective students look closely at the rankings and research and teaching reputations of various unis. A drop in rankings could mean students look to other countries in the competitive global market for the international student dollar.

That dollar is important to Australia. International students have become a crucial funding source for programs and research in our universities. For example, in 2024, Western Sydney University used 24 cents from every dollar an international student pays to subsidise domestic students, research and student services.

Overall, higher education expenditure on research and development reached $16.4 billion in 2024. More than half, around $8.6 billion, came primarily from $13 billion in international education earnings.

As the Group of Eight (which represents the country’s prestigious research universities) notes – inadequate research funding from other sources has led to their reliance on international student fee revenue to cross-subsidise research.

Any loss of income caused by a drop in international student enrolments also impacts Australia’s economy more broadly. International students are now Australia’s largest services export market. The sector was worth $53.6 billion in 2024–25.

What now?

Despite the turmoil around universities, surveys show Australians continue to have higher confidence in universities than in many other institutions, including the federal government.

They have also shown their support for unis facing cuts – such as public opposition to the proposed cuts to the ANU School of Music last year.

This suggests there is some community goodwill towards universities – but we can’t take it for granted. Nor can we take universities themselves for granted.

As Mahassen said, this is not just an academic problem. If our universities are not functioning well, it spills out into the rest of our society, economy and beyond.

Kylie Message, Professor of Public Humanities and Director of the ANU Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The first phase of One Nation’s rise was obvious. It took votes from the Liberals and Nationals in regional Australia, among older, conservative, financially stressed voters who no longer believed the Coalition spoke for them. That part of the story is well understood.

Read here: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EPWMLSvHG

But the second phase is more politically dangerous. One Nation is now positioned to eat into the vote of long-relied-upon Labor communities: trade-qualified workers, union households, outer-suburban mortgage belts and middle-class families who once saw Labor as the party of secure work, affordable living and practical government.

These voters are not at all racist. Many are not driven by the culture war. They are worried about the future. They are worried about rent, mortgages, power bills, hospital queues, crime, congestion, school pressure and whether their children will ever be able to buy a home.

And increasingly, they are starting to blame Labor.

That is the part missing from the neat demographic story. It is too easy to say Labor holds up in “younger, educated and multicultural” urban seats, while One Nation dominates “older, less diverse” regions. That framing ignores what is happening in the suburbs, where economic stress cuts across ethnicity, age and class.

A truck driver in Melton, a nurse in Cranbourne, a tradie in Ipswich, a factory worker in Werribee, a small business owner in Tarneit or a mortgage-stretched family in Camden may not have the same background. But they can share the same frustration: life is getting harder, services are not keeping up, and governments keep asking them to accept more pressure.

Migration is central to this debate, not because every voter concerned about migration is anti-migrant, but because people can see population growth running ahead of housing, roads, hospitals and schools. In outer suburbs, this is not an abstract national conversation. It is lived daily through traffic jams, rental queues, crowded classrooms, GP shortages and longer waits for basic services.

Labor’s danger is that it mistakes multicultural suburbs for automatic Labor suburbs.

Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Greek, Vietnamese, Lebanese, Nepalese and other migrant communities are not immune from cost-of-living anger. They are also homeowners, renters, workers, parents, small business operators and commuters. They also get frustrated when crime rises, when hospitals are overloaded, when roads are clogged and when government feels more interested in symbolism than service delivery.

For years, Labor could rely on a broad coalition of union workers, public sector workers, migrants, renters, young voters and progressive professionals. But those groups no longer always want the same thing.

The inner-city progressive voter may see the migration debate mainly through identity and inclusion. The outer-suburban worker may see it through housing supply, wage pressure, infrastructure failure and competition for services. That does not make them racist. It makes them economically anxious.

This is where One Nation sees an opening.

Its message does not need to win majority support across multicultural Australia. It only needs to peel away enough disillusioned Labor voters in the right suburban and regional seats to shatter Labor’s margins. In a multi-party system, small shifts matter. A few thousand voters moving from Labor to One Nation, or exhausting their preferences, can change the entire map.

The Coalition has a serious problem, but Labor’s problem is more subtle. The Liberal vote may be visibly bleeding. Labor’s vote may be quietly hollowing out.

The old union member who once voted Labor because Labor stood for wages, jobs and the working class is now asking why their bills keep rising. The suburban parent who voted Labor because it promised fairness is now asking why fairness does not seem to include their family budget. The migrant small business owner who once saw Labor as welcoming is now asking why government regulation, taxes and costs are making survival harder.

This is not just a right-wing revolt. It is a trust revolt.

Labor’s mistake would be to believe that as long as the Coalition alienates diverse communities, Labor will inherit them by default. That may have been true once. It is less true now. Diverse Australia is not one voting bloc, and working-class Australia is not permanently loyal to any party.

One Nation’s next growth area may not be the wealthy Liberal suburbs or the deepest rural heartland. It may be the suburbs where Labor assumed economic hardship would keep people loyal, even as those same voters feel ignored.

The real warning for Labor is simple: when people feel poorer, less safe and less heard, they do not always move neatly from Labor to Liberal. In 2026, they may move to One Nation, independents, minor parties or no one at all.

That is why reading this purely as a Coalition crisis misses the point. One Nation may have started by raiding the Liberal base. But its next target is Labor’s working-class and outer-suburban base.

And if Labor keeps treating those concerns as prejudice rather than pressure, it may only accelerate the shift.

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The latest data on Australian schooling shows about 81.5% of Year 10 students go on to Year 12.

This is a modest rise of 1.6 percentage points on the previous year, but figures have been largely stable since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There has been decades of research on how to help students finish school.

Each student is of course different and will have different needs. But there are many things schools can do from Year 7 to support students to stay until Year 12.

Here are three of the most important ones.

Why it’s important to finish school

Completing Year 12 is associated with a range of positive longer-term outcomes.

These include better employment prospects, higher lifetime earnings, and stronger health and wellbeing.

It also keeps the widest range of post-school options open, from vocational training and apprenticeships to further study and direct entry into work.

Why do students leave?

The reasons students leave before Year 12 are varied and often complex.

For example, some students might be managing health challenges, navigating difficult life circumstances, or pursuing opportunities like an apprenticeship that fit their goals well.

For others, however, leaving early is shaped by experiences at school itself.

Somewhere along the way, they became disengaged, fell behind, or lost their connection to school. These are the experiences schools are best placed to influence.

Research shows there are three key areas schools can better develop now to help increase the retention numbers in the years ahead.

1. How teachers teach

It may sound obvious but one main way schools can keep students is through teaching approaches that help students learn effectively. This is because students need to feel they can succeed at school — and see themselves making progress — in order to stay engaged and connected to it.

When learning is consistently out of reach, students disengage. In contrast, when they can see themselves getting better at things, school feels worth their effort.

Our research shows effective teaching in Year 7 is connected all the way through to whether a student completes school six years later.

This type of teaching is also linked with students putting in greater effort at school and higher achievement.

What kind of teaching practices are we talking about?

One well-evidenced approach is explicit instruction where teachers clearly model new concepts and skills, guide students through examples, and gradually shift responsibility to students as they gain mastery.

As part of this, two strategies stand out.

First, reducing difficulty during initial learning. When a concept is new, break it into manageable steps and match the challenge to what students already know.

Second, give students well-organised opportunities to practise, paired with specific guidance on how to improve.

2. How the classroom works

Orderly, predictable and positive classrooms free up students to focus on learning rather than navigating disruption.

This is why classroom management is important. This is how teachers structure the classroom environment and the interactions within it so learning can happen.

In a recent study, we found students whose teachers provided strong classroom management were up to six times more likely to have high motivation, engagement, and resilience at school than students whose teachers did not.

Two strategies are particularly effective for classroom management.

First, establishing and consistently maintaining clear rules and routines is important, so students know what to expect.

Second, recognising and building on what students do well rather than only focusing on what goes wrong.

3. Student-teacher relationships

Research also tells us it’s important for teachers to build warm, respectful relationships with students.

It is not only important for retention in its own right — it also underpins the other two areas above. Strong teaching and good classroom management both depend on positive teacher-student relationships.

When students feel known and supported by their teachers, they are more willing to engage and stay connected to school.

Our research shows each relationship a student has with a teacher matters. The more positive relationships students have with their teachers — relative to negative ones — the greater their academic engagement.

Academic engagement in turn, is a key driver of school retention.

Research tells us every teacher can make a difference, and the relationships teachers build with their students could be what helps that student stay on and complete school. This is because the relationships add up — and for some students, the bond they build with one teacher in particular can be what tips the balance toward staying engaged with school.

So it is important to create conditions where every student has the chance to build genuine, positive connections with teachers. This means teachers getting to know students as individuals, showing interest in their lives beyond the classroom, and teaching in ways that feel personal and engaging.

Rebecca J. Collie, Professor of Learning Sciences, Monash University and Andrew J. Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology, UNSW Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Sex Discrimination Act is currently in the news following the outcome of a high-profile court case reaffirming transgender rights in Australia.

The controversy concerns the meaning of “sex” in the act and its interaction with gender identity discrimination. The Coalition wants to amend the act to include a definition of biological sex, arguing “the law does not properly protect single sex spaces for women and girls”.

But what’s missing from the conversation is how the Sex Discrimination Act works and what it was designed to achieve.

What is the Sex Discrimination Act?

The Sex Discrimination Act is a federal law. It originally became law in 1984 and protected people from sex, pregnancy and marital status discrimination.

Currently, the act protects people from discrimination based on a wider range of attributes, called “protected attributes”. These include their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, marital or relationship status, pregnancy or potential pregnancy status, breastfeeding or family responsibilities.

Discrimination is prohibited in employment, the provision of goods, services and facilities, education, accommodation, land, clubs, and federal programs and laws. A purpose of the act is to eliminate “so far as possible” discrimination based on the protected attributes.

Unlawful discrimination is either “direct” or “indirect”. Direct discrimination occurs when a person with an attribute is treated less favourably than a person without that attribute in the same situation. Classic examples of direct sex discrimination are where a woman is paid less than a man while completing the same work.

Indirect discrimination addresses more subtle forms of inequality. For example, a rule may seem to treat everyone equally, but, in practice, it disadvantages one group that shares an attribute.

Let’s say a firm requires all partners to work a 60-hour week. People with family responsibilities could be less able to comply with this rule.

Rules that cause disadvantage based on an attribute can be legal if they are reasonable, but direct discrimination cannot be defended on the basis it is reasonable.

What are the exceptions?

There are limits to protection against discrimination under the Sex Discrimination Act.

The act contains many exceptions allowing conduct that would otherwise be discriminatory. For example, there are general exceptions for services where they can only be provided to members of one sex.

Exceptions also apply to staff and students in religious educational institutions.

There are exceptions for participation in sports where strength, stamina or physique is relevant.

It is also not discrimination to provide affirmative action or equal opportunity measures. But these exceptions, called “special measures”, cannot discriminate on the basis of other protected attributes.

Very few court tests

Despite the act being in force for more than 40 years, it has received little attention from higher courts.

The recent decision of Giggle For Girls v Tickle was the first case of gender identity discrimination heard by the Federal Court. The full bench found a transgender woman had been directly discriminated against on the basis of gender by being refused access to a women-only social media app.

The High Court of Australia has considered only three sex discrimination claims in its history. None of these was made under the Sex Discrimination Act. Two of those were decided in the 1980s, and one was considered in 2006. That means the High Court has not heard a sex discrimination claim in 20 years.

It has never considered the act and its prohibitions on discrimination. This means there is little higher court authority on how its provisions operate.

The 2013 changes

Until 2013, federal law did not protect people from discrimination because of gender identity, sexual orientation or intersex status. While there were protections in state and territory acts for these attributes, they varied greatly. This led to inconsistent protection from discrimination across Australia.

In 2013, the federal Sex Discrimination Act was amended to include the attributes of gender identity, sexual orientation, intersex status and relationship status.

This made it unlawful to discriminate, directly or indirectly, against people based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status or relationship status. This protection from discrimination applies in all areas of life captured by the act.

The amendments created definitions of these newly protected attributes. The definition of gender identity was designed to achieve “maximum protection” for gender-diverse people.

It was also designed to recognise that “gender” and “sex” are distinct concepts. The definition indicates both are changeable.

Further, the definition of “intersex status” was designed to recognise that sex is not binary.

The definitions of “man” and “woman” were also removed and are instead understood by their “normal meaning”. This means the words aren’t narrowly interpreted to exclude transgender people. Women and men (of all ages) would also continue to be protected from discrimination based on their sex.

In 2013, the amendments made to the Sex Discrimination Act were not particularly controversial. As then-Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus noted in respect of a Senate Committee Report on human rights and discrimination legislation:

all parties agree on one issue – the pressing need for protection from discrimination for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex community at the federal level.

It was recognised that there was substantial evidence of discrimination due to sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status. This discrimination was harmful and created barriers in how people could live their lives.

While controversies have sprung up since, the 2013 changes to the Sex Discrimination Act remain a milestone. For many Australians, the changes marked the first time that federal law protected their right to live free from discrimination.

Alice Taylor, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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New Liberal federal president Tony Abbott has sought to rally the party at “this time of existential crisis”, labelling it “the patriot party” and declaring it must boost its membership.

While not directly mentioning the threat from Pauline Hanson, One Nation’s surge was clearly in Abbott’s mind when he addressed the Liberal federal council in Melbourne after being elected president unopposed on Friday.

“My fellow Liberals, our challenge is to persuade the sceptical public that we remain the most credible alternative party of government in this country,” he said.

Abbott said he owed the Liberal party “big time”. “That’s why I regard it as my duty to serve the party in this time of existential crisis.”

The council meeting comes as the party has been encouraged by the backlash against the budget, with the government having a fight on its hands over its capital gains tax changes, and being forced to look to some carve outs.

But more generally, the Liberals are fearful of the dramatic rise in One Nation support and the plunge in Coalition numbers, with a recent poll suggesting it would be nearly wiped from parliament in an election held now.

Among Liberals there are mixed feelings about the Abbott presidency, with some saying he will bring enormous energy to the job and others worried he will overshadow opposition leader Angus Taylor.

Abbott said that as the last successful Liberal federal leader of the opposition “I do believe I have the ability to help Angus Taylor to be the next successful federal leader of the opposition and to become our 32nd prime minister”.

He praised Taylor for policy leadership but said he had to be backed by a strong organisation.

That meant, “first and foremost”, increasing party membership. Even on the most optimistic figures, Abbott said, the party only had 50,000 members – the same as 30-40 years ago when the population was scarcely half its present number.

The Conservative party in Canada had 400,000 members. “On a per capita basis we would have at least 250,000 members.”

“And that’s what we need to do, to mobilise the good people of Australia in a good cause – the cause of better government based on our values.

“We are the freedom party, the tradition party, but above all else we are the patriot party, which is why, at our best, we should be absolutely unbeatable.”

The Guardian reported on Friday that Abbott was stepping down from his advisory role to the right wing advocacy group Advance, on becoming Liberal president.

Former foreign minister Alexander Downer won one of the vice-president positions.

Taylor, addressing the council on Saturday, will heavily target the integrity of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in a personal attack.

He will denounce Albanese as the prime minister whose “word is never his bond”, turning the PM’s own word-is-my-bond description of himself back on him.

In his address, released ahead of delivery, Taylor describes Albanese’s pre-election ruling out of changes to negative gearing and capital gains tax as “the mother of all lies”.

“No Australian can trust another word that comes out of this bloke’s mouth,” Taylor says.

He says Albanese doesn’t want to “empower people” but wants “power over people, often saying he wants Labor to be “the natural party of government”.

“That statement is as entitled as it is illiberal. For Anthony Albanese, political life has always been about entrenching Labor rule. His main interest is to consolidate and centralise power.”

Taylor also labels Albanese “unashamedly socialist”. “We must fight and defeat Labor’s socialist vision if we’re going to restore our standard of living and protect our way of life,” he says

Many Australians “feel like second class citizens under Labor,” he says.

“Many of these Australians – who have never been political – are speaking up for the first time.

“We will never have a better opportunity than this. To rally people to our cause To encourage Australians to join us in the fight against Labor by joining the Liberal Party.”

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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