The Victorian election is still months away, yet voters are already being shown events which never happened. A machete attack at a petrol station, a woman giving birth on the roadside, floodwater pouring down the steps of parliament: all “deepfakes” generated by artificial intelligence (AI), and all reportedly appearing as paid advertising ahead of voters going to the polls.

Previously described as a potential “sleeper issue” for Australian politics, deepfake political content is rapidly becoming a very real electoral challenge.

We have been studying political deepfakes – and how people respond to them – in the lead up to the Victorian state election. Our preliminary results provide important insights into people’s ability to detect deepfakes and will help voters navigate the increasingly fraught information ecosystem as electoral campaigning ramps up.

What impact might this have?

Deepfakes once required specialist technical expertise and software to convincingly produce. Today, they can be produced by anyone using commercial and open-source AI tools. And they’re getting harder and harder to spot.

We conducted a meta-analysis that brought together findings from previous published studies from 2018 to 2026 to understand political deepfakes more and what this could mean for upcoming elections.

Across 19 studies and more than 24,000 people, the results (which are yet to be published) identified deepfakes can appear just as persuasive as other political content, including authentic footage and conventional misinformation.

We also found that deepfakes are associated with lower trust in news and democratic institutions, potentially making people question not only what is fake, but what is real – ultimately damaging trust in democracy itself.

At a broader level, this uncertainty can contribute to the “liar’s dividend”. This is where individuals dismiss genuine content as inauthentic.

Rejection of the real

In an experiment we did with 411 Australians, participants viewed an authentic political video, a low-quality deepfake, or a high-quality deepfake. Our preliminary findings are cause for concern.

People who consumed more news were better at detecting low-quality deepfakes, but not sophisticated ones. More strikingly, as news consumption increased, people became less accurate at identifying authentic content.

We found that roughly 75% of our sample could correctly identify deepfakes, regardless of whether they were high or low quality. However, this still leaves around one in four people who are unable to correctly identify a deepfake or are unsure about its authenticity.

Of even greater concern, almost 29% incorrectly labelled the real video as fake, while a further 18% were unsure.

Put another way, almost half of participants could not confidently and correctly identify genuine political content as real.

The danger, then, is not only that voters may believe content that is fake, but that they may also be becoming too ready to disbelieve content that is real.

Who is better at spotting a deepfake? It’s complicated

Some people are likely to be more susceptible to deepfakes than others.

Previous research suggests political deepfake detection declines with age, which may be particularly relevant in Australia, given the substantial proportion of older voters.

Political orientation may matter too.

Research from the United States suggests left-leaning individuals can be more accurate at detecting political deepfakes.

Our preliminary experimental findings add an important nuance: differences emerged only when the deepfake depicted a political actor aligned with the viewer’s own political orientation.

For example, if you are a Labor supporter you’re more likely to be able to tell a video of the current Prime Minister is a deepfake. This suggests susceptibility may depend not simply on a person’s politics, but on who is being depicted and their political alignment with the viewer.

Feeling confident doesn’t mean you’re right

Research provides a mixed picture regarding the role of confidence in detecting deepfakes.

Some studies suggest greater confidence can help people identify deepfakes, while others find confidence has little relationship with correct identification.

Our latest findings add another layer.

Among moderate and higher news consumers, confidence became increasingly disconnected from accuracy. These participants may have felt well equipped to judge political content, but that confidence did not necessarily translate into getting it right.

Therefore, feeling confident that something is AI-generated is not evidence that it actually is. Confidence may even become a vulnerability.

This matters beyond whether one video is correctly classified. If voters become increasingly suspicious of authentic evidence simply because it could have been generated by AI, deepfakes can potentially undermine trust even in their absence.

How can you spot a political deepfake?

There is no foolproof way to spot a deepfake. As AI improves, voters should rely less on whether something “looks fake” and more on verifying its source and supporting evidence.

First, don’t rely on appearance. Visual or audio flaws can reveal poorer deepfakes, but these cues are becoming less reliable.

Second, trace the source. Find where the content originated and consider whether the source is credible.

Third, check other evidence. Look for independent reporting or official sources confirming the content.

Fourth, question your confidence. Feeling certain something is fake does not mean you are right.

Finally, don’t amplify it. Avoid sharing suspicious content to ask if it is real. Verify it first.

As political deepfakes become more sophisticated, spotting visual imperfections will become increasingly difficult. The challenge for voters is therefore changing. We need to become better at questioning what we see, without automatically disbelieving it.

In an age of increasingly convincing AI, healthy scepticism matters. But so does knowing when that scepticism has gone too far.

Rory Mulcahy, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of the Sunshine Coast; Aimee Riedel, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, Griffith University; Asha Worsteling, PhD Student, The University of Queensland; Griffith University; Lucas Whittaker, Lecturer in Marketing, Swinburne University of Technology, and Renee Barnes, Associate Professor of Journalism, University of the Sunshine Coast

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

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The federal government is aiming for 80% of Australian adults to have a vocational or university qualification by 2050, up from the current rate of 60%.

It seems fair to question this goal, when almost half of Australian workers say they are overeducated, according to new survey results.

The latest Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, released on Thursday, shows 49.5% of workers aged 18 to 64 were “overeducated” in 2024. This means they had a higher educational level than they believed they needed to successfully do their job.

On top of this, 25.7% of workers said they were overskilled, meaning they reported they do not use many of their skills and abilities in their job.

But before rushing to judgement, it is worth considering reasons why almost all countries worldwide are educating more tertiary graduates than a generation ago.

Reporting on overeducation

HILDA is an annual survey that tracks around 17,000 Australians. Each year, it asks respondents for their highest educational qualification.

Every four years since 2012, the survey also asks respondents for the minimum level of education necessary to satisfactorily complete their job. The information on the actual and the required minimum level of education is compared to measure rates of overeducation.

As we can see from the chart below, occupations with the highest levels of overeducation were labourers, sales, machine operators and personal and community care workers.

Australians complete more formal education than they once did

In the last several decades, wealthy countries around the world have had an increasing proportion of adults completing higher education. Many developing economies are following the same trajectory.

Going back to the period after the second world war, most countries have sought to widen participation in higher education to up-skill work forces in the hope it will drive economic growth.

Australia is no different. For example, the proportion of people aged 15 to 74 with a bachelor’s degree or above has increased in recent years from about 26% in 2016 to almost 34% in 2025.

The uses and purposes of education

There are many reasons people choose to study, including being able to get a job and the likelihood of earning more money and more employment opportunities. These are not the only reasons.

People also choose to study because they are interested in the subject or want to explore the possibilities it might hold.

When selecting a course, recent research suggests people seem to preference their interests over the cost of the course or their potential earnings.

While people may feel there is not a great match between employment and their job today (particularly in a poor economic climate), they may not feel the same way at a different point in their working lives. A bachelor’s degree can support a career over a lifetime, not just a single job.

Education and the economy

There are also different economic theories about what education is for.

Economist Gary Becker was famously concerned about “human capital”, or people having the necessary skills and experiences required for a specific job.

This suggests a qualification is about providing a discrete skill set that matches a job.

But other economic research argues having a qualification can have a different function. For example, it can act as a signal to employers they are considering a “good” candidate, such as one that can meet deadlines, work on projects long term and under pressure.

Here, having a degree is not about having certain skills but developing and demonstrating broader capabilities.

What can these figures tell us?

As Australia seeks to reshape post-secondary education through reforms to university funding and more support for vocational education and TAFE, the HILDA figures suggest many people see some mismatch between their study and their job.

Given the many reasons people study (and how they value this may change over time), the latest findings suggest we should be open to a post-secondary education system that has a lot of different choices.

For example, do we need the option for shorter higher education degrees, which are common in the United States? Or more opportunities for micro credentials? Do we need different combinations of vocational degrees and certificates, such as short courses?

The needs of labour markets are continually evolving, so some skills mismatches will be an unavoidable price.

Deciding on what education we should offer, however, requires a full consideration of all the reasons we continue to choose to study.

Gwilym Croucher, Associate Professor, Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne

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

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Two of Melbourne’s west’s most recognisable Indian-Australian political figures have spent the better part of a decade circling the same prize: a seat in the Victorian Parliament representing Tarneit.

Neither will get it in 2026.

Labor powerbroker Jasvinder Sidhu and former Wyndham councillor Intaj Khan have travelled very different political paths. Still, their ambitions have repeatedly converged on Tarneit, one of Australia’s fastest-growing and most multicultural political battlegrounds.

This November, however, the contest will go ahead without either man.

Labor is going to the election with sitting MP Dylan Wight, while the Liberal Party has endorsed Venkat Ram Upparlapalle. Both parties have already publicly listed both men as their Tarneit candidates by June and September respectively.

For Sidhu and Khan, it is the latest chapter in political stories stretching back almost a decade.

In 2017, remarkably, both men were attempting to secure Labor preselection for Tarneit.

Sidhu came extraordinarily close. He won 54 per cent of the local Labor membership vote against Sarah Connolly, but ultimately failed to secure the state leadership’s endorsement. At the time, he was already confronting allegations of branch stacking and questions surrounding his charity Let’s Feed — allegations he emphatically denied, describing them as a smear campaign.

Khan, then a Wyndham councillor, also wanted the Labor nomination. His attempt became embroiled in a bitter internal fight after federal Labor MP Joanne Ryan called for him to be expelled from the party amid charges concerning the disclosure of property and commercial interests. Some of those charges were subsequently dropped. Khan threatened defamation proceedings against Ryan and denied wrongdoing. Ryan’s motion to expel Khan was defeated with an overwhelming majority.

Nearly a decade later, the names may have changed on the ballot paper, but the political prize has not.

Sources familiar with the latest Labor deliberations have told The Australia Today that Sidhu again wanted a pathway to Tarneit but was ultimately not given the seat.

His potential comeback was far from fanciful.

In 2025, Labor’s national executive controversially lifted a seven-year ban preventing Sidhu from seeking preselection two years before it was due to expire. At the time, senior Labor sources were openly discussing a factional scenario under which Wight could move to the Legislative Council, and Sidhu could take Tarneit.

The ban followed a Labor investigation that alleged Sidhu had engaged in branch stacking and inflamed ethnic tensions.

In 2020, Sidhu faced fierce criticism over recorded comments concerning Turkish and Lebanese Muslims. Muslim and Turkish community organisations condemned the remarks, while Sidhu apologised for the offence caused amid the controversy.

Sidhu has consistently rejected the allegations, maintaining the evidence against him was concocted and that he was the victim of a factional attack.

Sidhu nevertheless remained an influential figure inside Victorian Labor during the ban.

His political organisation in Melbourne’s west and links across Labor’s membership have long made him a consequential internal figure, even when he was unable to contest parliamentary preselection.

But his past has also followed him.

Labor sources speaking to The Australia Today say those events were among the matters raised during discussions surrounding his political future.

The sources also told The Australia Today that senior Labor figures were concerned about reopening community divisions in an electorate where Labor is increasingly conscious of the challenge posed by One Nation and the Greens, whose Tarneit candidate is long associated with local Mosques and Islamic leadership.

It means political disputes involving religion, migration and multiculturalism can carry particular weight in the electorate.

The broader political environment, however, has changed dramatically.

A RedBridge/Accent Research poll conducted between September 1 and 14 among 2,371 Victorian voters put One Nation on 25 per cent of the statewide primary vote, compared with 29 per cent for the Coalition and 24 per cent for Labor. The poll’s estimated margin of error for the full sample was ±2.2 percentage points. It was a statewide poll, not a Tarneit poll, so it cannot establish One Nation’s support in the electorate itself.

Labor’s concern about Melbourne’s west is nevertheless increasingly public. ABC reporting this week noted that Labor’s campaign against One Nation is particularly focused on western Melbourne, where frustration over infrastructure, population growth and government services is putting pressure on the party’s traditional support base.

Tarneit is especially important because few Victorian electorates look like it.

According to the 2021 Census, 22.6 per cent of Tarneit residents were born in India, and 21.8 per cent reported Indian ancestry. Punjabi/Sikh ancestry alone accounted for another 5.4 per cent, although Census ancestry categories can overlap because respondents can nominate two ancestries.

The sensitivity surrounding Tarneit is understandable given the electorate’s extraordinary demographic profile.

Hindus accounted for 17.1 per cent of residents, Muslims 14.6 per cent and Sikhs 9.6 per cent. Together those three faiths represented 41.3 per cent of the electorate’s population at the Census — although population figures should not be confused with the enrolled voting population.

That makes community relations more than a peripheral issue in Tarneit politics.

For Khan, meanwhile, the road from Labor aspirant to Liberal aspirant has been almost as complicated.

After his Labor ambitions collapsed, Khan eventually joined the Liberal Party and sought Tarneit preselection ahead of the 2022 election.

His bid failed again.

At that time Khan had only recently joined the Liberals and required an exemption from the party’s membership-duration rules. The Liberal Administrative Committee unanimously rejected his exemption application, The Australia Today reported at the time.

Khan has remained politically connected and visible in Melbourne’s west since then.

Sources have now told The Australia Today that Khan again explored Liberal candidacy for Tarneit ahead of the 2026 election, but withdrew after it became clear his application would not receive leadership support.

Those sources say concerns about controversies accumulated during his years in local politics and business were raised as obstacles to his candidacy.

What can be established is that Khan is not the Liberal candidate. The party has instead endorsed Venkat Ram Upparlapalle for Tarneit.

There is a remarkable historical symmetry to all of this.

In 2017, Sidhu and Khan were effectively competing against each other for a pathway into Parliament through Labor.

Khan later crossed the political divide and attempted to contest the same electorate for the Liberals.

Sidhu remained inside Labor, survived years of factional warfare and eventually regained his eligibility to seek preselection, again prompting speculation that Tarneit could finally become his route into Spring Street.

Yet as Victoria heads towards the 2026 election, both remain outside the contest.

Meanwhile, Tarneit itself is becoming harder for either major party to take for granted.

Labor has held the district at every election since it was created in 2002. Wight won it in 2022 with 46.6 per cent of the primary vote and 62.3 per cent after preferences against the Liberal candidate, a 5.6 percentage-point two-party-preferred swing against Labor.

The political environment heading into November is markedly different from four years ago. One Nation’s statewide polling surge, voter frustration across Melbourne’s rapidly growing west and Tarneit’s extraordinary demographic transformation mean the electorate is becoming an important test of how Victoria’s major parties speak to multicultural suburban voters.

And behind the official contest sits another political story — of two Indian-Australian figures who have spent almost 10 years trying to turn influence, organisation and community connections into a seat in Parliament.

For Jasvinder Sidhu and Intaj Khan, Tarneit has repeatedly appeared within reach.

For almost 10 years, two ambitious political figures have pursued the same parliamentary destination from different sides of politics.

In 2026, Tarneit will again go to an election without either man’s name on the ballot.

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The post After a decade chasing Tarneit, Labor’s Jasvinder Sidhu and Liberal’s Intaj Khan again left outside race for Parliament first appeared on The Australia Today.

The US reportedly turned down a direct Saudi request to strike Houthi positions last week, a sharp reversal from the “major military punishment” Trump had threatened in July, and consistent with the ceasefire arrangement his administration had already reached with the group months earlier. Trump has left everyone guessing whether he will come to Mohammed bin Salman’s rescue or not.

It fits a pattern, not a one-off. Trump has spent this term treating close allies as adversaries, tariff fights with Canada, public friction with the UK and Japan, pressure on South Korea, a running feud with Macron, a public rupture with Meloni serious enough that Italy’s foreign minister cancelled a Washington visit, and repeated jabs at NATO. Henry Kissinger’s old line that it can be dangerous to be America’s enemy but fatal to be its friend reads less like a quip and more like a warning label for Riyadh right now. Washington’s underlying power looks diminished, not just its willingness to use it.

Saudi Arabia’s own alternative alliance offers even less. The Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, linking Riyadh with Pakistan and Turkey, was a non-starter to begin with. Pakistan is a de facto failed state, contending with domestic insurgencies and an economy on its 24th IMF bailout. It was also handed a crushing military defeat by India last year: India struck nine terror sites inside Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Jammu and Kashmir on May 7, then on May 10 hit roughly a dozen Pakistani military airbases; satellite imagery and geolocated video showed runway craters and destroyed hangars at several bases including Nur Khan and Bholari — forcing Islamabad to beg for a ceasefire within four days. A state that couldn’t secure its own skies was never going to extend a credible security umbrella over the Arabian Peninsula. Turkey brings its own problems, inflation is still above 30 per cent, on top of a long-standing rivalry with Saudi Arabia for leadership within the Muslim world that makes deep military solidarity unlikely no matter what the treaty says.

China is not a workable substitute either — despite being Saudi Arabia’s biggest trading partner, it remains closely aligned with Iran. It’s also worth noting that, much as happened in Pakistan last year, the Chinese-made air defense systems Iran fielded failed when the US and Israel struck. A patron whose own hardware can’t protect its client has nothing to offer Riyadh on restraining the Houthis.

That leaves India as the only superpower with real standing to get Saudi Arabia out of this quagmire. India is Saudi Arabia’s second-largest trading partner, has good relations with both Riyadh and Tehran, maintains a substantial defense relationship with Israel — now allegedly assisting the Saudis — and, unlike Washington or Beijing, doesn’t take sides in the Gulf’s traditional rivalries. It was able to bring Iran and the UAE to the table on the sidelines of this month’s BRICS summit in New Delhi. Since then, there have been no strikes by Iran or its proxies on the UAE.

No other power commands respect across Tehran, Abu Dhabi, Jerusalem and Riyadh at once — which is why Modi might be Salman’s best shot at getting this situation under control before it spirals into something much bigger.

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In an interview with The Australia Today Editor Pallavi Jain, Ganatra, author of Mahabharata Unravelled, Ramayana Unravelled and other books, said her own journey into the epics began with curiosity about what it means to be Hindu and, more fundamentally, what “dharma” means. Her professional experience as a consultant, she said, also helped her approach the epics through the lens of storytelling and different audiences.

For Ganatra, understanding these traditions is particularly important for younger generations and the Indian diaspora, where questions of identity can become more pronounced. She argued that knowing the cultural ideas that shape one’s worldview can help people understand their own responses to the world without becoming either defensive about their identity or feeling compelled to abandon it.

She also stressed that studying the tradition does not mean accepting everything associated with it unquestioningly. Ganatra said societies inevitably carry contradictions, struggles and practices that may no longer serve their purpose. The concept of dharma, she explained, provides a way to assess what enables society to thrive as circumstances, technology and values change. “A lot of what we think as tradition today was innovation once upon a time,” she said.

Ganatra believes this approach can also help distinguish the core ideas of Sanatana Dharma from practices or baggage accumulated over time. She pointed to yoga, Ayurveda, pranayama and mindfulness as examples of Indic ideas that have been studied and adapted in contemporary contexts, arguing that there is value in approaching the shastras (scriptures) with an open and questioning mind.

Her message to young people who may see the epics as belonging to the past is simple: know before you accept or reject. The Mahabharata and Ramayana, she said, continue to speak to human beings because the underlying dilemmas have not fundamentally changed — people still grapple with desire, insecurity, anger, competing priorities and difficult choices. “It’s your life, it’s your karma,” Ganatra said, urging people to use their buddhi (intelligence) before deciding what to accept or reject.

Ganatra also sees an opportunity for India to contribute its civilisational ideas to contemporary global conversations. Discussing technology and geopolitics, she pointed to approaches that emphasise wider human welfare, ethical frameworks and dialogue, saying India’s growing confidence has helped create greater space for discussions around the Indic worldview on the global stage.

Ganatra is touring Australia for a series of talks and sessions titled “AI: Ancient India — The Timeless Frontier” across five cities — Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane — from 25 September to 11 October 2026. Her tour is being hosted by OpticsAustralia.

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The post Dharma is not religion, egalitarianism and wellbeing of all humankind central to Hindu worldview: Ami Ganatra first appeared on The Australia Today.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke announced the government’s long-awaited migration policy yesterday. It’s been a week dominated by the topic, with One Nation unveiling its policy on Monday, too.

The government’s proposed settings appear to be knee-jerk reactions to reducing net overseas migration (often referred to as NOM), rather than being based on careful modelling of labour demand and migration impacts on infrastructure.

Falling short of expectations

There was a strong expectation Burke would set out a concerted approach to lowering the 400,000-odd people on bridging visas, especially those awaiting the outcome of an appeal to the Administrative Review Tribunal following rejection of an application for a student or asylum visa.

Their chances of success on appeal to the tribunal are minimal but, because of the huge numbers, it takes a long time for cases to be heard. During that wait time, the person is issued a bridging visa, which enables them to work.

It was also expected the government would propose restricting the capacity of these people to work, and to examine ways to limit their capacity to appeal, thus encouraging them to leave.

This wouldn’t have been controversial because it has been an issue for a decade. All political parties are in favour of doing this.

But apparently this did not happen because Burke had not reached agreement with the Coalition on migration policy changes.

Instead, he’s proposed a return to 2015, when people whose options had run out went into detention centres and dutifully left the country in a few weeks.

Today, however, the numbers involved are vastly greater, far exceeding any capacity for detention centres to house them or the department’s capacity to find them.

Withdrawing work rights is the obvious policy direction. But this would have to be matched by severe penalties on Australian employers if they hire a person without work rights illegally.

The 2015 approach will do little. This is important because the data show that the low number of departures, not a high number of arrivals, is why the net overseas migration rate hasn’t fallen more quickly.

Punishing partners

The failure of people who don’t leave the country when they should also undermines the integrity of the migration system. But instead of addressing the pressing issue of departures, Burke focused on even more measures to reduce arrivals.

The unseemliest of these measures is to prevent partners and children of Australian citizens from coming to Australia on a visitor visa and then applying for permanent residence. Instead, partners will only be allowed to have short visits with their spouses before leaving again.

The net outcome of this arrangement is that the Australian citizen will eventually leave Australia so they can live in a full-time relationship with the person they love from another country – not one of occasional visits.

By contrast, for new permanent skilled migrants coming to Australia from overseas, their spouses can join them immediately.

It is also not clear what will happen if a relationship is formed in Australia. Will the partner be required to leave?

Changes, but with how much impact?

A second measure geared towards limiting arrivals is to not allow students to bring “secondary applicants” with them, that is, their spouses and children.

According to Department of Home Affairs statistics in 2025–26, 39,400 grants were made to secondary applicants on student visas (excluding those studying for a PhD). About a quarter of those were for children aged under 15 and most of the rest were partners.

Interestingly, 58% of secondary applicants were men. The primary student visa holder was a woman in the majority of cases. Nearly half (46%) were from South Asian countries, while just 4% of grantees were Chinese.

At the 2021 census, 57% of adults in the secondary student category had a university degree and 78% were employed

The impact of this restriction on net overseas migration will be limited in the short term as, in 2025–26, 54% of the grantees were already in Australia. In 2025, net overseas migration for people in this category was only 12,400.

It seems the restriction on secondary applicants will also apply to those on graduate visas. This will probably reduce applications for this type of visa, as grantees would be facing many years of being without their partners.

The government has also proposed a ballot for second- and third-year grants of working holiday visas.

This could have a powerful effect because a backpacker facing three months of farm or mining work in a regional area just to qualify for the ballot may decide the risk is too great. Farmers are already concerned about the loss of backpackers from work in the horticultural industry. This may add to their anxiety.

Still no plan

It seems the government has prioritised shrinking net overseas migration at the expense of the comprehensive planning that experts, including myself, have long been calling for.

Many of the people in the affected categories are now working in jobs that are important to the economy and society.

For example, as the demand for aged care has expanded sharply since COVID, many migrants have become carers. They were available and willing to do this work.

The demand for aged care workers is about to explode as the baby boomer generation turns 80. Withdrawing workers from the sector will be problematic.

Certain skilled trades in the construction industry could also be affected. The government’s proposed juggling of permanent skilled visa grants will only touch the surface of this demand.

It also misses the central issue for Australian migration policy: the management of the temporary population.

Other countries face similar challenges. Canada has recently accepted that temporary migrants will make up 5% of the total population of the country. In other words, it has accepted the inevitability of an ongoing, mainly growing, temporary population, and is planning accordingly.

Planning for temporary migrants (numbers, labour force involvement, infrastructure implications, rights and responsibilities) did not feature in Burke’s speech at all. This doesn’t bode well for managing migration in the future.

Peter McDonald, Honorary Professor of Demography, Centre for Health Policy, The University of Melbourne

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

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The Australian government has announced visa changes making it harder for international students to bring their families with them while they study. There are also new rules designed to stop students from cycling through courses just to prolong their stay in Australia.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has framed these changes as part of a broader, “orderly” and “fair” approach to lowering net overseas migration. But they also continue a years-long push by the federal government to lower international student numbers.

What has been announced? And what is happening with international student numbers more broadly?

What did Tony Burke say?

On Thursday, Burke told the National Press Club most international students will have to come alone to Australia. There will be some exceptions, including for people from Pacific and ASEAN countries and PhD students.

Last year, more than 45,000 visas were granted to family members of an international student.

Burke also flagged the government would clamp down on “visa hopping” by international students. Students will need to prove they are progressing to a course at a higher level to prolong their student visa.

As Burke explained:

One of the classic areas of visa hopping is people finish a course, hop to the next course, hop to the next.

These changes are part of the federal government’s wider bid to bring down net overseas migration from about 290,000 to 225,000 in 2027-28.

The peak body, Universities Australia, described the latest move by the government as “worrying”. Chief executive Luke Sheehy explained students often bring family members to Australia if they are doing research degrees “because they can be here for up to three or four years while they do that”.

What has been happening?

Over the past three years, the government has been trying to lower the number of international students in Australia.

Legislation to give the government greater powers to do this was blocked before the last election, so the government has had to use a series of “workarounds”. These include increases to student visa application fees and slower visa processing times.

After the pandemic, international students returned to Australia more quickly than expected. In 2022, the Australian government suggested it might take four years to reach pre-pandemic levels of students. It took one year.

This surge created an increase that continues to work its way through the system. After completing a course, many international students can apply for a graduate visa. This means they can extend their stay for a further 18 months or more.

The number of students on graduate visas has more than doubled from 70,000 in June 2019 to 199,000 in June 2026 as students who finish their courses transition to these visas.

Further increasing the total number of current and former students are “secondary” visaholders. These are normally immediate family members, such as partners and children who come with students to Australia. The total number of student and graduate secondary visaholders has increased from about 92,000 in June 2019 to about 142,000 in the most recent available data.

Other moves to reduce international students

To reduce net overseas migration, the number of residents leaving the country must be higher than the number of residents entering the country.

Many of the measures announced on Thursday give the government more ways to ensure student visaholders leave. In the meantime, there has been a reduction in the intake of new international students.

Our analysis of immigration data (shown in the chart below) shows the visa refusal rate for international students has increased significantly over the past six months. Student visa refusal rates are currently the highest they have ever been.

The government has said this is because it is more strictly applying a financial capacity test. These are the funds an international student must demonstrate when applying for a visa – to prove they can support themselves while in Australia.

How does Labor’s plan compare to other proposals?

The complicated nature of migration means it can be difficult to make direct comparisons between different proposals.

However, this week, One Nation announced a much harsher plan. Its target of 350,000 international students would come close to halving the number in Australia, as part of its proposal to reduce the overall number of temporary migrants by 750,000.

Such a cut would have a huge impact on the university sector and beyond. The Australia Bureau of Statistics says international education is worth A$54.7 billion per year, of which $24.3 billion is from student fees.

International students also take a huge range of courses at different types of institutions, such as vocational colleges, private providers or English-language schools.

Universities can be the face of international students, but they only account for about half of the international student enrolments in Australia.

An international student could be your baker or your carer

Our analysis of tax data (shown in the chart below) shows international students play a significant role in certain occupations. These include jobs as hospitality workers and food trades workers (such as bakers and cooks).

About 10% of carer and aides jobs, such as child carers and aged care workers, were held by current and graduate international students.

Other countries are doing similar things, but …

Australia is following a global trend to tighten settings for international students.

Canada has also wound back its international student program. Rather than having an open-ended number of visas, there are planned ceilings. The United Kingdom also announced a restriction on family members applying for student visas in 2024.

What is missing from these announcements is a clearer picture of how international education fits within the wider migration program.

The debate has focused on reducing numbers, but the bigger question is what Australia wants international education to achieve. That means deciding which skills to prioritise and how education, migration and workforce planning can work together.

Peter Hurley, Professor and Director, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University and Melinda Hildebrandt, Policy Fellow, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

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

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The post Life just got tougher for international students under new visa rules. Why is this group being targeted? first appeared on The Australia Today.

Labor is no doubt dreading the likelihood of further interest rate rises, despite Treasurer Jim Chalmers talking up the economy.

When One Nation outpolled Labor’s primary vote for the first time back in June, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese responded: “It’s the economy, stupid”.

He argued voters were struggling economically despite working hard. Consequently, “many people feel that the system isn’t working for them”.

Albanese’s over-reliance on an economic explanation risks underestimating other factors such as race, ethnicity and gender.

Nonetheless, election studies and opinion polls have indeed shown economic concerns are a major factor driving the increased vote for One Nation.

Two in three One Nation voters say their household finances have worsened over the past few years, while 77% believe a Hanson government would successfully manage the cost-of-living crisis.

With voters in a world of economic pain, what might it mean politically?

The economic pain is real

The economic pain voters are feeling is real. Successive interest rate increases have seen many voters paying tens of thousands of dollars extra in mortgage repayments since Labor was first elected in 2022.

The economy might be growing slowly, but living standards are not. Profits are rising but real wages are dropping due to inflation.

The government is being punished as a result. The Coalition is blaming Labor for Australia’s economic woes. One Nation is blaming both major parties.

However, the economy is also being impacted by forces outside any Australian government’s control. For example, Albanese argues “every country is facing” economic problems and inflation as a result of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. It should be noted, though, that Australia’s inflation and interest rates are particularly high.

The relatively small growth in the Australian economy that may result in the Reserve Bank increasing interest rates yet again has been driven significantly by private consumers purchasing electric cars in response to the petrol crisis caused by the Middle East war. It has also been driven by private business purchasing equipment for data centres as AI reshapes the international economy.

Any Reserve Bank decision to raise interest rates further to contain inflation based on current economic growth figures is therefore contentious. Ordinary Australians are already constraining their normal spending due to the cost-of-living crisis and lower real wages. Higher interest rates will simply hurt them even more.

Perceptions matter too

Voters therefore have very real economic concerns. Nonetheless, perceptions also play a role. It’s not just that voters who are hurting can blame governments for some economic factors beyond their control. Voter perceptions of whether the government is listening and trying to address their economic difficulties are important too.

Albanese argues the government is hearing voters’ pain. He cites multiple efforts the government has made to address the cost-of-living crisis. These include wage rises, tax cuts and greater subsidies for health and childcare costs. There are also the controversial tax measures designed to address the housing affordability crisis.

However, such efforts are continually being undercut by inflation and interest rate rises. Furthermore, the government is constrained by the fear the Reserve Bank will raise interest rates even more if funding additional cost-of-living measures increases government debt.

Chalmers has ruled out abandoning the decades-long convention of Reserve Bank independence and using a residual government power to override its interest rate decisions.

Meanwhile, both the Liberals and One Nation have criticised current government debt levels, arguing they have fuelled inflation and therefore high interest rates.

One Nation has also constructed the domestic issue of immigration as an economic one that is contributing to the housing affordability crisis and depressing wages. Similarly, the government’s energy policies, designed to address climate change, are being criticised for increasing power bills.

However, the housing crisis long predates Labor, and climate change critics overlook that increasing power bills are partly driven by fossil fuel industries as well as by the war in Ukraine.

Yet there is also little comfort in all this for the Coalition. Their declining primary vote and electoral losses to One Nation indicate many voters don’t see them as offering a solution either. The anger in sections of the electorate who feel abandoned by the major parties is palpable, along with a transgressive joy in punishing the establishment.

To some extent, the Coalition may be suffering from a problem of their own making. After decades of flirting with a neoliberal populism that criticised Labor by arguing big government was the problem, not the solution, and that politically correct elites were abandoning mainstream Australians, they have now come to be seen as just another self-serving “uniparty” elite themselves.

However, Labor faces a particular perception problem that can undermine its efforts to tackle cost-of-living issues.

One Nation is depicting itself as the champion of the workers and Labor’s attempts at discounting that claim are not cutting through. A key reason is that populist arguments by both the Coalition and One Nation have long mimicked class politics.

They have suggested “woke” elites are exploiting workers by ripping off taxpayer funds to support minority groups and issues such as climate change, rather than workers’ exploitation occurring in the labour market.

It is cleverly designed to appeal to workers, reframing debates away from workers versus bosses to workers versus so-called elites. This is also why older-style class-based Labor arguments emphasising wage issues or associating Hanson with wealthy supporters such as Gina Rinehart may not be sufficient.

If Labor is to win back less socially conservative working-class voters it has lost to One Nation, it needs to be more successful at arguing that its equality agendas for groups from women to Indigenous people are not supporting woke elites but disadvantaged Australians who are often members of the diverse working class themselves.

Labor needs to emphasise that its policies are based on equal opportunity and a fair go, given One Nation suggests they discriminate against mainstream groups such as white men.

Similarly, Labor needs to become better at convincing voters that climate change is not a woke elite issue either. After all, workers’ homes in at-risk areas won’t be miraculously immune from increased bushfires. Blue-collar workers and tradies are at risk from work-related heat stroke due to rising temperatures.

The framing of voter perceptions on economic-related issues is therefore crucial. The economy may not be the only explanation for the growth of right-wing populism, but it is an essential part of the perceptual glue that holds various populist narratives together.

For all the above reasons, economic perceptions matter alongside real economic issues. However, so far neither Labor nor the Coalition is cutting through sufficiently to win back the swathes of voters who have abandoned them on economic grounds.

Carol Johnson, Emerita Professor of Politics, Adelaide University

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

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The post Yes, it’s the economy, stupid. But One Nation is outflanking the government on messaging, too first appeared on The Australia Today.

Results from the latest international test of 15-year-olds have prompted another round of headlines suggesting there are serious problems with Australia’s academic results.

Some outlets reported Australian reading and maths results in the PISA tests have taken a “plunge” and sunk to an “all-time low”.

At the same time, headlines have lamented “Australia’s classroom disruption [is] among worst in world”.

As someone who has researched PISA for 25 years from three different countries (Norway, England and Australia), what do the results tell us, beyond the punchy headlines?

What is PISA?

PISA stands for the Programme for International Student Assessment. It’s an international survey comparing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students across 91 OECD countries.

It also involves a survey of students about their classroom experiences.

PISA is conducted every three years and aims to assess how effectively students can transfer the lessons learnt in school into the real world. The tasks in PISA are less about memory and more focused on students’ ability to analyse and problem-solve.

PISA tests students in three main domains: mathematics, science and reading literacy. In 2025 it also added a new area: learning in the digital world, which tested digital skills.

In the latest round, conducted in 2025, 91 countries and 760,000 students participated. This makes PISA the largest education survey in the world.

In Australia, 766 schools from all states and territories and 14,658 students participated.

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Australian students perform above average

Despite the alarmist headlines, in 2025 Australian students maintained above OECD-average scores in reading, science and mathematics.

The report ranked Australia in 11th place for reading and science, and 17th in maths.

In reading, Australian 15-year-olds scored an average of 491 points, compared with the OECD average of 461. In maths, Australian students recorded an average score of 478, compared with the OECD average of 463.

Australian students’ science scores were strong. Their mean score of 509 remained stable and was considerably higher than the OECD average of 482.

It would be helpful to know more about what Australian teachers are doing well – and how can we make sure this knowledge is shared across the country.

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For the first time, the 2025 survey also tested students’ ability to problem-solve using technology. Australian students performed strongly in this area, scoring 532 – well above the OECD average of 500.

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Lower scores in reading and maths

While the average science score has remained consistent over the past ten years, the mean scores for Australian students in reading and maths were lower in 2025 than 2022.

These declines in reading and maths follow a long-term trend – Australia’s scores have been dropping since 2003.

It’s important to note maths, reading and science scores have been declining globally, especially across OECD countries. Here, 20% of all 15-year-olds are now considered low performers in these three learning domains.

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Why are we seeing a drop?

The PISA survey doesn’t report on the reasons for these trends.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare says too much screen time in schools is behind a decline in academic results.

The OECD has also suggested digital devices could have made an impact on global reading skills, but this is only a suggestion at this point, and more research is needed.

We simply do not yet know enough about the quality of students’ technology use, the impact on learning, when to use digital devices and when not to.

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Are Australian classrooms too noisy?

As part of the survey, students were asked to report on how disruptive their science lessons were.

In Australia, 41% of students reported science classes as being disrupted by noise and disorder compared with the OECD average of 31%.

About 34% of Australian students said their peers didn’t listen to the teacher during science lessons.

The results about Australian classrooms being particularly disruptive are similar to previous rounds of PISA reporting, in 2019 and 2022.

These perspectives are based on self-reports, which research has shown are often biased. They can also simply depend on personal preferences. What some students report as disturbances might be productive discussions for other students.

To better understand these results, we need further evidence-based research of how classes are run. This includes reports from teachers and other observations of classrooms.

This is a complex report, with many stories

There was also positive news in the latest PISA data about school cultures.

The results show the majority of Australian students find their teachers caring and supportive.

About 79% reported their teacher showed an interest in all students’ learning in most science lessons, compared with the OECD average of 69%. The report also found 80% of students believe their teacher offers extra help to students when they need it.

What now?

Australia’s PISA results are worth reflecting on as we support the next generation to succeed in an increasingly complex world.

But the numbers are a starting point only, not the full story. We also need time for further research and analysis.

That includes discussing the results with students and teachers to agree on what is going well, and working with them on what is needed to improve their learning and teaching.

Therese N. Hopfenbeck, Professor in Educational Assessment, Faculty of Education, The University of Melbourne

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

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The post Australia’s reading and maths results are at an ‘all‑time low’ – but there’s more to the story first appeared on The Australia Today.

Anthony Albanese spent the same day in Suva signing a defence treaty with Fiji. Narendra Modi landed in Melbourne the following morning, and by the end of that week had signed a joint declaration on defence and security cooperation in Australia and elevated the relationship with New Zealand to a strategic partnership.

In February 2025, a People’s Liberation Army Navy task group — the cruiser Zunyi, frigate Hengyang and replenishment vessel Weishanhu — sailed through the Torres Strait, down Australia’s east coast, and conducted live-firing exercises in the Tasman Sea on 21 and 22 February before circumnavigating the Australian continent. The exercises were conducted without prior official notice.

New Zealand’s Defence Minister called the deployment unprecedented in those waters. New Zealand’s response was concrete: a Defence Capability Plan in April 2025 committing NZ$12 billion over four years, raising defence spending above 2 per cent of GDP for the first time in over three decades. Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy reflects the same fundamental reassessment.

India brings a different kind of experience to this conversation. Chinese naval deployments have been a persistent presence in the Indian Ocean for years. What registered as a shock in the Tasman in 2025, Indian naval planners have been accounting for routinely. That shared experience — at different stages of familiarity — is part of what is pulling these three navies closer together.

Against this backdrop, will India’s Chief of Naval Staff, Admiral Krishna Swaminathan’s visit to Australia on 10 September 2026 amount to much? Australians have been told for the better part of two decades that India is on the verge of mattering.

Uranium, the Quad, the trade agreement, the recurring language about natural partners: each cycle arrived with a summit and receded without altering a great deal at sea. According to the 2026 Lowy Institute Poll, half of Australians say they trust India to act responsibly in the world, four points fewer than last year. Set against the same poll’s numbers for the United States- 31 per cent, and China – 28, that result describes something other than affection. It describes a public that has become wary of almost everyone, and within which India occupies a middle position — neither trusted as Japan is, at 89 per cent, nor entirely written off.

Some of the reasons for the wariness are specific and will not dissolve with a single visit of a navy chief. India buys Russian oil and Russian weapons, and has declined to vote on Ukraine the way Canberra would prefer — a divergence officials on both sides have learned to work around. The same Lowy Poll found support for cultural diversity in Australia falling from ninety per cent to seventy-three in two years. Just under half of respondents described migration as too high. Indian-Australians are the fastest-growing part of that migration, which means the people-to-people warmth invoked in every ministerial speech, it appears, is carrying more weight than it can safely be asked to bear.

None of that settles the narrower and more tractable question raised by this week’s visit, which is whether the two navies can produce something operationally useful together. On the evidence, they already are. AUSINDEX began in 2015 and now incorporates even anti-submarine warfare, which is about as technically intimate as naval cooperation gets. India joined Exercise Kakadu this year and will be at Talisman Sabre in 2027. Australian ships sailed to MILAN at Visakhapatnam in February. The two navies held their seventeenth staff talks in Sydney last month. July added a defence industry roundtable, uranium supply under IAEA safeguards, and work towards an arrangement covering defence articles and services.

Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy calls India its most important defence partner in the northeast Indian Ocean, and the phrase is meant seriously. India operates the P-8I; Australia operates the P-8A; New Zealand operates four of the same aircraft. Maritime patrol aircraft are how all three countries locate submarines and follow shipping traffic across large oceanic distances.

The July missile launch reminded us that the problem in these waters is rarely a shortage of law and usually a shortage of domain awareness. Compatible procedures, shared sensor practice and an agreed picture across the eastern Indian Ocean would constitute a real capability, and would require no new platform, no new money and no treaty. June’s Defence Ministers’ Dialogue identified this as a priority. Admiral Swaminathan and Vice Admiral Matt Buckley are the two officers positioned to convert it into a coordinated information-sharing protocol.

Aircraft are the easier half of the problem. The human side of this relationship is underleveraged. The professional military education exchange currently moves two Australian officers to India and three Indian officers to Australia each year, which, against the scale of what July envisages, is a token. The summit promised an Australian instructor posted to an Indian institution in 2028–29, a welcome commitment that is nonetheless three years away.

Combined exercises do not solve this, because the difficulty in a crisis is never the equipment. It is that officers who have never worked a problem together have no shared experiences and reflexes to fall back on. War games on disaster relief and maritime law enforcement, building towards combined operations, would cost very little too. The New Zealand leg may attract less attention than it warrants. Three arrangements signed in Auckland in July — on maritime cooperation, on hydrography and nautical cartography, and on mutual logistics support, including reciprocal access— give the Indian Navy its first formal standing in the South Pacific.

The Pacific is not, however, a space for Canberra and New Delhi to apportion between themselves. India’s value in the region will be judged by whether it contributes to priorities Pacific states have already set, and whether it does so consistently rather than episodically.

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The post The Pacific is changing fast: India and Australia face a new reality at sea, and China is driving it first appeared on The Australia Today.

Some people seem naturally tidy. Their keys are always in the same place, clothes make it into the wardrobe, and their kitchen bench remains mysteriously visible.

Others can clean the house on Sunday and wonder by Wednesday how everything became messy again.

It’s tempting to explain this as personality: “I’m just a messy person.” And there is some truth to that. But personality isn’t destiny. Our surroundings and the small things we repeatedly do within them matter too.

In fact, changing those patterns may eventually change something about the kind of person we are.

Are some people just naturally tidier?

Psychologists describe personality in terms of relatively enduring patterns in how people tend to think, feel and behave.

One of the “Big Five” personality traits is conscientiousness. It includes tendencies towards being industrious, self-controlled and orderly. So, someone higher in conscientiousness – particularly its orderliness aspects – may find keeping things organised easier.

But “relatively enduring” doesn’t mean personality is fixed.

Large studies following people over time show personality is both stable and changeable. For example, people tend to become more conscientious during different stages of adulthood, such as when they have children or new responsibilities.

So, saying “I’m a messy person” may describe a tendency. It doesn’t condemn you to a lifetime of losing your keys.

Messiness is something you repeatedly do

A messy room isn’t usually created by one great act of mess-making. It results from hundreds of tiny behaviours: leaving the cup on the desk, putting clothes on the chair, dropping the keys wherever is convenient, or deciding you’ll deal with the mail later.

Repeat those actions and they begin to look like a characteristic of the person doing them.

They can also become habits.

Habits develop when we repeatedly perform a behaviour in a recurring context. With repetition, features of that context can begin to prompt the behaviour automatically.

This helps explain why simply deciding to “be tidier” can fail. You return home with the same intentions, but also to the same environment that prompts the same old behaviours.

Change the environment, not just your intentions

Suppose you routinely arrive home and drop your keys on the nearest surface. You could keep reminding yourself to be more organised.

Or you could put a small bowl beside the door.

The bowl doesn’t just store your keys. It can prompt the behaviour you want. Repeatedly putting the keys there when you arrive home helps strengthen the association between the situation and that response.

The same principle applies elsewhere. Put the laundry basket where clothes actually come off. Give frequently used objects an obvious home. Put things you want to remember where you’ll encounter them at the moment you need to act.

In other words, don’t rely solely on motivation or memory. Arrange the environment to prompt the behaviour you want and make it easy to perform.

So if you act like a tidy person, do you become one?

This raises a more interesting question. What do we actually mean when we say someone is a tidy or messy person?

We usually imagine personality causes behaviour: a conscientious person behaves conscientiously.

But the relationship may also run in the other direction. Researchers have proposed that changing the behaviours through which a personality trait is expressed may, over time, contribute to changing the trait itself.

This doesn’t mean you can decide on Monday to have a different personality by Friday. Personality change is generally gradual. But it challenges the idea that we must first become an organised person before we can behave like one.

Perhaps consistently behaving in a more organised way is part of how we become more organised.

So, how do you become tidier?

Start by observing rather than judging. “I’m messy” doesn’t tell you what to change. Notice a recurring problem and the behaviour that produces it.

Then decide what you want to do instead. Make it specific: “When I take off my clothes, I’ll put them in the basket.”

Next, arrange your surroundings to prompt the new behaviour and make it easy. Put the basket where you actually get changed, or the key bowl beside the door.

It can also help to link the new behaviour to an existing routine: “When I make my morning coffee, I’ll deal with yesterday’s mail” or “When I turn on the television after dinner, I’ll spend five minutes putting things away before I sit down”.

Try the new routine, then review it. If it isn’t working, don’t conclude “I’m just a messy person”. Ask what got in the way and adjust the plan.

With repetition, the new behaviour may require less conscious effort and become part of your routine.

But do you actually need to become tidier?

Tidiness isn’t a measure of character, and perfection doesn’t need to be the goal. The more useful question is whether your environment is helping or hindering the life you want to lead.

If you routinely can’t find important things, miss bills, argue with people you live with, can’t use parts of your home, or find the clutter stressful, changing some habits may make life easier.

And if difficulties with organisation are causing significant distress or interfering with everyday life, it may be worth seeking professional help.

If clutter becomes so severe that rooms can’t be used for their intended purpose, or getting rid of possessions causes intense distress, that’s different from ordinary messiness. Hoarding disorder is a recognised mental health condition, and professional help is available.

Otherwise, you don’t need a personality transplant.

You may always be less naturally orderly than someone else. But arrange your environment to prompt the behaviours you want, establish routines that support them, and repeat them often enough, and those behaviours can become habits.

Trevor Mazzucchelli, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, Curtin University

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

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The post Can a messy person become a tidy person? Or are we doomed? first appeared on The Australia Today.

Last year, Australia took world-leading action by banning children under the age of 16 from having social media accounts.

It was one of the biggest social and cultural changes our country has ever faced, and it
was led by Australian parents protecting children.

When we proposed and introduced the ban, there were sceptics, there still are.

We didn’t lead the world for the sake of it.

We took action because the community said enough was enough and we would no longer let Australian kids be treated as commodities instead of children.

Our action is working. More than five million accounts have been removed or deactivated in Australia, and we have started a global movement, with more than 20 countries taking similar action to get kids off social media.

Despite our success, we know there is more to do. Our government will not back down.

This week in Canberra, we will seek to pass new legislation to double down on our efforts to protect Australian children from the harms of social media.

This legislation will give the eSafety Commissioner new powers to crack down on platforms that refuse to follow Australian laws to ensure the ban is effective.

The legislation does two things. It gives the government regulator the powers it needs to collect critical evidence, and it doubles the penalty that big tech faces for breaking Australian law.

When we passed our world-leading laws, we had bipartisan support. We said at the time we knew these laws wouldn’t be perfect and that it would take time to see the full impact.

Now, the parliament has the opportunity to come together again to strengthen bipartisan laws and to hold some of the richest organisations in the world to account for choosing company profits over child safety.

While we are strengthening the ban, we are taking the next steps to make interactions with the internet safer for all Australians – through our Digital Duty of Care.

This landmark reform will put the onus on services providers to take reasonable steps to create a safe online environment for all Australians.

We are also looking at what action we can take on harmful algorithms.

The evidence is overwhelming.

Algorithms are pushing people further and further to the extremes.

They are driving users – often young people – down rabbit holes of harmful content.

We also know harmful algorithms can be devastating for young people and body-image issues.

For young men, those paths far too often lead to misogynistic voices detached from the values and expectations of our societies.

The government is under no illusions. The connection between what is being fed to people on feeds and the terrible consequences of sexual violence that we see far too often in our communities is clear.

Every woman and every girl have the right to feel safe and must be safe at all times – in our workplaces, in our schools, in our sporting clubs, in our homes and online.

This is not about giving government control. It’s about giving people control.

People should have control of what they consume, and tech companies have a responsibility for what they platform on their services.

Advocates such as Chanel Contos and Teach Us Consent have highlighted the dangers of systems that push content on to users they may not be looking for – and which may harm them.

The Digital Duty of Care will place the responsibility on platforms to provide a safe online environment for all Australians.

We want to give users more choice of their digital platforms, rather than platforms having control over people.

Contributing Author: PM Anthony Albanese

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The Australia Today is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information in this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts, or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of The Australia Today, and The Australia Today News does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same. This Op-ed has been provided by PM&C.

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Australia has passed a grim milestone. Gross government debt has surged past $1 trillion for the first time in our history.

For many in the Indian Australian diaspora who came to this country to build a better future — through small businesses, trades, healthcare, IT and professional work — this isn’t an abstract number. 

It’s a bill that lands on every taxpayer, including the thousands of Indian Australian- families running small businesses, working double shifts, and trying to get ahead in one of the most expensive cost-of-living environments in a generation. 

Interest repayments on this debt are now the fastest-growing single item in the federal budget. This financial year they will around $30 billion — roughly the entire annual bill for Medicare.  

That works out to about $2,300 a year in interest for every taxpayer. Money that isn’t going to hospitals, roads, schools or small business support. It’s going straight to servicing debt. And it’s only getting worse. Government debt is projected to keep growing under this government, reaching $1.25 trillion within three years. Worse still, interest rates on this debt are far higher than they used to be — around 5% today, compared to less than 2% a few years ago.

Recently in Parliament, I asked what the government’s strategy was to get this debt under control. The answer? There isn’t one.

This government talks constantly about “intergenerational fairness.” But there is nothing fair about saddling our children — many of whom are the next generation growing up in migrant families across this country — with a mountain of debt and a crushing interest burden they had no say in creating.

For the Indian Australian community who have built their lives on the values of hard work, saving, and building something for future generations, this should matter deeply.

Labor is steering Australia toward a high debt, low-growth economy. An economy restricted by heavy government spending, high taxes, excessive regulation, and a small business sector under real pressure.

Many of our community’s small business owners — in retail, hospitality, transport, IT services and beyond — are already telling me how hard it has become to stay afloat. 

That is why the next election matters so much. It will be our chance to change course before this economic mismanagement becomes irreversible, and before the bill gets handed to a generation that never agreed to it.

Contributing Author: Dave Sharma is Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, Shadow Assistant Minister for International Development and the Indo-Pacific, and Senator for New South Wales

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The post $1 trillion in debt and counting: Who will pay the bill? first appeared on The Australia Today.

The anniversary falls on Australian National Flag Day, observed each year on 3 September. On this day in 1901, the new flag was raised above the dome of Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building, just months after the six Australian colonies joined to form the Commonwealth of Australia.

The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet said the 125th anniversary was an opportunity to reflect on Australia’s history and the nation’s achievements since Federation.

“While our flag does not tell the full story of our nation, it remains an enduring symbol of unity and our shared achievements since Federation,” the department said.

The milestone is particularly closely linked with Melbourne. The Royal Exhibition Building, where the flag was first raised, had hosted the opening of Australia’s first Commonwealth Parliament on 9 May 1901.

A commemorative event at the historic building on Thursday was organised to include Speaker of the House of Representatives Milton Dick, federal MPs and Museums Victoria, with a ceremonial unfurling of an Australian Parliament House flag.

The story of the flag began almost immediately after Federation on 1 January 1901, when Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, backed an international competition to find a flag for the newly created Commonwealth. Entrants were asked to develop designs suitable for official use as well as merchant shipping.

The response was extraordinary for a nation whose population was then only about 3.5 million. A total of 32,823 designs were submitted from Australia and overseas by people from different backgrounds and age groups. Some were tiny enough to be disqualified, while others used enormous quantities of bunting. Designs featuring kangaroos, native animals and the Southern Cross were among those submitted.

Judges spent six days examining the entries at Melbourne’s Exhibition Building. They considered historical relevance, heraldic conventions, originality, practical use and manufacturing cost, while also seeking a design acceptable to the British Admiralty.

In the end, there was no single designer.

Five entrants had independently submitted designs that were judged to be almost identical, and all five were declared joint winners. They were Annie Dorrington, an artist from Perth; Ivor Evans, a 14-year-old Melbourne schoolboy; Leslie Hawkins, a teenage apprentice optician from Sydney; Egbert Nuttall, a Melbourne architect; and William Stevens, a ship’s officer with the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand. The £200 prize was divided between them.

On 3 September 1901, Barton announced the winners and a huge flag measuring about 5.5 metres by 11 metres was raised above the Exhibition Building while the submitted designs were on display below. The flag was initially known as the Commonwealth Blue Ensign.

The 1901 design was recognisably Australian but was not identical to the flag flown today.

It featured the Union Jack in the upper-left corner, a six-pointed Commonwealth Star below it representing the six states, and the five stars of the Southern Cross. The individual Southern Cross stars originally had different numbers of points, ranging from nine to five, intended to indicate their relative brightness.

The design was subsequently standardised. An official drawing published in 1903 showed four of the Southern Cross stars with seven points and the smaller Epsilon Crucis with five. In 1908, a seventh point was added to the Commonwealth Star to recognise Australia’s territories, producing the basic design still used today.

The modern flag has three principal elements. The Union Jack acknowledges the history of British settlement in Australia; the seven-pointed Commonwealth or Federation Star represents the six states and the territories; and the Southern Cross reflects Australia’s location in the Southern Hemisphere.

For decades after Federation, however, there remained confusion about which flag Australians should use. The blue ensign was originally associated particularly with government use, while a red version served as the merchant ensign, and the Union Jack also continued to be widely flown.

King George VI endorsed the Australian government’s recommendation to use the Commonwealth Blue Ensign as the national flag in 1951. Parliament subsequently passed the Flags Act 1953, formally declaring the blue design to be the Australian National Flag and the red design the Australian Red Ensign for merchant shipping. Queen Elizabeth II gave royal assent during her first Australian royal tour in 1954.

The flag received another layer of legal protection in 1998, when the Flags Act was amended so the existing Australian National Flag could not simply be replaced without the Australian people having a say. If alternative designs were put before voters, the existing flag would also have to be included among the options.

Australian National Flag Day itself is considerably younger than the flag. Governor-General Sir William Deane formally proclaimed 3 September as Australian National Flag Day on 28 August 1996, declaring that the anniversary should be observed throughout Australia and its external territories.

For the 125th anniversary, Commonwealth departments and agencies have been asked to fly or display the Australian National Flag throughout Thursday, while schools, businesses, community organisations and members of the public are also being encouraged to display it.

The anniversary comes during a broader year of Federation commemorations. The Commonwealth has noted that 2026 marks 125 years since Federation, the adoption of the Constitution, the first sitting of the Commonwealth Parliament and the first official flying of the national flag.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in a National Flag Day message published for the anniversary, described the flag as an emblem of “unity, identity and pride”, saying it had accompanied Australians through war, peace, celebration, mourning and enormous social and political change over 125 years.

The flag has long had particular importance for the Australian Defence Force. Chief of the Defence Force Admiral Mark Hammond said the anniversary was a chance to remember Australians who had served and sacrificed under it, describing the flag as a reminder of the ADF’s duty to the country and the people it protects.

Today the Australian National Flag flies permanently above Parliament House in Canberra. Inside Parliament, it is displayed alongside the Australian Aboriginal Flag and the Torres Strait Islander Flag, reflecting the range of symbols now used to represent Australia and its people.

The 125th anniversary also coincides with Merchant Navy Day. Australian merchant mariners historically sailed under the Australian Red Ensign, sometimes known as the “Red Duster”, and government guidance allows it to be flown on 3 September in recognition of their wartime service and sacrifice. When displayed together, the Australian National Flag takes the position of honour.

From a public competition involving nearly 33,000 entries to a flag flown above Parliament House, military deployments, citizenship ceremonies, schools, sporting grounds and Australian missions around the world, the design first raised in Melbourne in 1901 has remained through dramatic changes in Australian society.

One hundred and twenty-five years later, Australian National Flag Day provides an opportunity not only to remember how the flag came into being, but to reflect on the history, identity and shared values Australians have placed beneath it — and on the changing nation it continues to represent.

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The sentiment, surprising for a senior diplomat, is rooted in a flawed reading of history and deserves correction. Taxila was a prominent city of ancient India, home to one of the world’s oldest known centres of higher learning. Before the concept of the nation-state was codified in the Westphalian settlement, places were understood as parts of civilisations, not states. The city of Troy, immortalised in Homer’s epics, now lies within modern Turkey — but that does not make the Iliad and the Odyssey Turkish literature.

Pakistan is a state carved out of India less than 80 years ago, founded on the ideology that Hindus and Muslims could not live together as one nation. India, by contrast, is the world’s oldest continuous living civilisation and its largest secular democracy. To ascribe any part of ancient Indian civilisation to the modern state of Pakistan does a disservice to history itself.

Taxila predates Pakistan by at least two and a half thousand years, and predates Islam’s arrival in the region by at least a millennium. It is traditionally associated with Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, one of the ancient world’s great teachers of politics and economics, credited with helping Chandragupta Maurya found the Mauryan Empire, one of antiquity’s largest. Taxila’s university was a centre of learning encompassing several strands of Indian academic and philosophical pursuits. Much of this heritage was destroyed in successive waves of attacks by Islamic invaders.

To call this “Pakistan’s history,” then, is effectively to credit an ideology that sought to erase the very civilisation that built Taxila. Curiously, some quarters within Pakistan — a nation whose founding claim was that Islam alone constitutes nationhood — now appear to be reaching further back: past the Mughals, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Arab conquest of Sindh in 711 CE, to Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, cities that were planned and thriving when much of the ancient world was still emerging. For those who have long held that the Indian subcontinent is, at its deepest level, a single civilisational entity bound together by the profound wisdom and metaphysics of Hindu philosophy, expressed across extraordinary diversity, for, at the very least, over five thousand years — this shift, if genuine, would carry real meaning. But only if it is genuine.

The Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation (also known as the Indus Valley Civilisation) is among the oldest known civilisations of humankind, alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia, and by some estimates the most extensive of the Bronze Age world by geographical reach — spanning roughly 1 to 1.5 million square kilometres. According to current understanding, it stretched from what is now the Iranian border and northern Afghanistan across to Jammu, western Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and northern Maharashtra in India. Some of its cities are estimated to have held populations of 40,000 or more, remarkable against a typical ancient city of roughly 10,000.

One of the defining features of Indian civilisation is its cultural continuity across millennia. The Pashupati seal from Mohenjo-daro, depicting a figure in a yogic posture, and the swastika motifs recurring throughout Indus Valley artefacts, are threads that run unbroken into symbols still used across the Indian subcontinent today.

There are indications that some in Pakistan feel the Indus narrative offers an identity anchor the Islamic-state framework has failed to provide — *Maryam Nawaz’s revival of *Basant, the kite-flying festival being one example. But without acknowledging that this civilisation is part of India’s story, rooted in Hindu philosophy, and without shedding the exclusionary baggage of Islamist denial, any attempt at Pakistani self-recovery through this route is unlikely to succeed.

There is a harder argument here too, about the cost of political Islam as an organising principle for a state. Pakistan faces what analysts call a polycrisis: an economy dependent on repeated IMF bailouts, institutions hollowed out by a military establishment that consumes the largest share of the budget, and chronic instability. In 2024 it held elections widely regarded as manipulated and jailed its most popular political leader, Imran Khan. It continues to face a freedom movement in occupied Balochistan and civil unrest in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. More recently it also saw protests in Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir which were met with a brutal crackdown, with many killed by security forces. A nation defined entirely by what it opposes — Hindus, India, the “infidel” — has no positive civilisational content left once that opposition is exhausted. Pakistan’s founders believed Islam alone could supply the national glue; instead the country produced the Taliban, sheltered Al-Qaeda’s leadership, and in 2025 found itself exchanging cross-border strikes with the very Taliban it had nurtured for decades.

If Pakistan is genuinely turning toward the Indus, metaphorically speaking, it would be good news for the Pakistani public that deserves an identity built on truth rather than religious bigotry, and good news for the world too that has for long borne the costs of terrorism exported from Pakistan.

*Maryam Nawaz – Current Chief Minister of Pakistan’s Punjab province, daughter of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, niece of current PM Shehbaz Sharif.

*Basant – Basant is a spring festival associated with the Hindu month of Magha, marking the onset of spring and celebrated in parts of the Indian subcontinent with kite-flying festivities; its date varies by regional tradition.

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Zhao is hardly an insignificant casualty. When the PLA was reorganised into five theatre commands in 2016, Xi Jinping personally handed Zhao the military flag as commander of the newly created Western Theatre Command. The command oversees China’s military operations along its western strategic frontier, including the border with India. His removal therefore carries considerable symbolism as Galwan represented the largest Chinese military loss in a single border conflict since the 1969 Sino-Soviet clashes.

The bloody nose China got in Galwan was the first serious pushback to China against its ‘salami slicing’ tactics against its neighbours. In June 2020, Chinese and Indian troops fought a brutal hand-to-hand battle in the Himalayas. India lost 20 soldiers — a toll New Delhi acknowledged within days. China remained silent about its losses before eventually admitting, eight months later, that four PLA soldiers had died even as Indian and Western intelligence estimates put the Chinese death toll considerably higher at around 40 or more.

His removal comes as Xi’s military purge reaches extraordinary proportions. A Center for Strategic and International Studies assessment identified 101 senior PLA officers who had been officially purged or potentially purged or missing since 2022. CSIS found that 41 of 47 PLA leaders who were generals in 2022 or were promoted to three-star positions afterwards had been purged or potentially purged — an extraordinary 87 per cent.

And the purge is not confined to men who were Xi’s adversaries. Many were elevated by Xi himself. CSIS found that 32 of the 35 three-star generals Xi promoted from 2020 onwards appeared to have been investigated, with 29 subsequently confirmed or potentially purged. The purge has also reached Zhang Youxia, a vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and one of China’s most senior generals, and CMC member Liu Zhenli. Their removal from the state CMC last week left only two active members of the seven-member body, including Xi himself. Beijing’s official line points to corruption investigations, but the pattern speaks for itself: a purge this deep, this fast, and reaching this close to Xi’s own inner circle is not hard to read.

It fits a much broader pattern under Xi. Former president Hu Jintao’s dramatic removal from the Communist Party Congress in 2022 became an enduring symbol of the end of China’s old model of collective leadership. And the spectacular fall of billionaire Jack Ma after he publicly criticised China’s financial regulators — followed by the suspension of Ant Group’s record-breaking $37 billion IPO — demonstrated the limits of even enormous private wealth when it appears to collide with Xi’s ego.

The economic backdrop makes the spectacle even more striking. China remains a formidable economic and military power, but its property crisis, weak domestic demand and slowing growth have exposed significant vulnerabilities. And when power becomes so concentrated that generals, ministers and businessmen know the consequences of crossing the leader, who is left to tell him when he is wrong?

Zhao Zongqi’s removal is therefore about more than one retired general. It is another window into Xi Jinping’s China — a country attempting to project strength to the outside world while its leader is conducting an extraordinary purge within its own ruling and military establishment, the hallmark of a weak and insecure ruler.

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A flash flood can transform a river within minutes. This is what communities near the Nepal-Tibet border witnessed on Wednesday.

A massive flash flood ripped through villages along the Bhote Koshi–Trishuli river system carrying mud, debris and fast-flowing water. It has claimed the lives of at least 469 people and left hundreds more missing, including 39 Australians. Preliminary investigations suggest the flood was caused by a major collapse of ice and rock high in the Himalayas.

During such disasters, every extra minute is valuable time to reach higher ground. So how can we ensure communities are prepared in the face of such rapidly developing hazards?

Our research suggests early warning systems may help.

How do early warning systems work?

Early warning systems use various tools, data and communication channels to detect natural disasters before they strike.

These systems do much more than send a text message after a flood or fire has started. They are designed to identify a potential hazard early, track it as it develops, and forecast where it may go. The most effective early warning systems communicate this information quickly, enabling the public and emergency responders to act.

These systems have saved lives. In the Swiss village of Blatten, monitoring enabled authorities to evacuate residents before a massive rock-ice avalanche swept through the region in 2025. In Iceland, monitoring and established emergency procedures allowed more than 800 people to escape sudden glacial floods during the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption.

Tracking where a disaster travels and how it develops is crucial. In the case of floods, river-monitoring stations at strategic intervals can measure water level and discharge. Cameras and other sensors can provide information about flow velocity and debris. Combined with real-time flood modelling, these observations can indicate when a flood may reach downstream communities, how severe it could be, and which areas may be inundated.

This information also helps emergency responders. If authorities know one settlement may have 20 minutes before a flood arrives while another has 50 minutes, they can prioritise evacuations, position rescue teams, and identify roads and bridges that may soon become inaccessible.

When warnings aren’t enough

In Nepal, emergency warnings were sent out but were not enough to save local villages.

The cascading disaster was triggered by the collapse of a massive glacier in Nepal’s Langtang national park at about 8:40am. Nepal’s Flood Forecasting Division soon received information that a major flood had entered the Bhote Koshi river system from Tibet.

Within minutes, more than 600,000 mobile warning messages were sent to the public. By then, the Syabrubesi monitoring station in northern Nepal had already stopped transmitting. As the flood moved downstream, authorities continued to track it and issue warnings.

Nepalese authorities have known about the risk of such a disaster occurring for years. A 2020 assessment by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development and the United Nations Development Programme identified 47 potentially dangerous glacial lakes across the region’s main river basins. This was based on data from satellite images and other remote-sensing technologies used to monitor glacier activity. High-risk areas can then be monitored using cameras, lake-level gauges, weather stations, and sensors measuring ground or ice movement.

The Nepali government has rolled out similar technology at Imja Lake, a fast-growing glacial lake in the Himalayas. Authorities installed sensors and automated sirens in 2016, but these have since fallen into disrepair.

Not foolproof

The catastrophic Nepal flood reveals the limitations of early warning systems.

For communities close to the source, flood warnings simply came too late. This is why warning systems should be automated wherever possible. When sensors detect dangerous conditions, information should immediately reach forecasting and emergency authorities. Location-based mobile alerts must then be sent to people in threatened areas.

But mobile networks and electricity can fail, so phones cannot be the only solution. Sirens, radio and trained local task forces provide essential backup and ensure people know where to go and which evacuation routes to follow.

The monitoring network itself must be resilient. In Nepal, several weather stations stopped transmitting or were swept away during the recent floods. Monitoring infrastructure must be designed to keep functioning even if some instruments fail. This may involve establishing more strategically spaced weather stations, communication pathways, and backup power systems.

More work needed

Early warning systems cannot prevent natural disasters or fully protect vulnerable communities. They must be used alongside hazard mapping, which identifies areas that are more vulnerable to a particular disaster. Resilient infrastructure and established evacuation routes are also vital to prepare for natural disasters.

Research must focus on what interventions are most effective and in what regions. In the wake of the recent Nepal floods, several important questions remain, including how closely river-monitoring stations should be spaced, and how much warning time different communities need to evacuate safely.

Communities may have only minutes before a disaster strikes. An effective early warning system is about making every one of those minutes count.

You can support the Nepal Flood Disaster Appeal through the Emergency Action Alliance website or by calling 1300 939 000.

Prashidha Khatiwada, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Engineering, Swinburne University of Technology

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

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More than 150 people are dead and hundreds more missing after an enormous wave of water, ice, mud and rock cascaded more than 170 kilometres down the Bhote Koshi River valley in Nepal. The valley is the main link between Kathmandu in Nepal and Lhasa in Tibet. At least 34 Australians are missing. There was little warning.

Footage of the debris-laden flash flood is shocking. It is, unfortunately, not surprising.

As an expert in glaciers, I have tracked their accelerating retreat around the world as they melt – and the disasters that can follow. Early analysis suggests the abrupt collapse of a glacier triggered the disaster.

As climate change intensifies, glaciers worldwide are melting – even in high regions such as the Himalayas. The Himalayas are especially vulnerable, because the steep slopes of many of these very tall mountains are made of permafrost – rock and soil frozen for centuries. As temperatures rise, these slopes are beginning to melt or destabilise. If an earthquake or slope failure occurs, it can trigger a sudden and devastating debris flow.

It’s too early to say this was the exact cause. But we know that the great ice stores of the Himalayas – known as the world’s “third pole” because it contains the largest amount of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctic – are no longer safe.

What do we know about this disaster?

What happened in Nepal is likely due to an enormous ice-and-rock landslide sweeping down a mountain pass and gathering up ice, water, rock, trees and dirt.

The landslide was so large it was originally thought to be an earthquake, as the seismic energy registered as a 4.4 magnitude quake on seismographs.

By the time it reached Gyirong Port – a China-Nepal border crossing – the wall of debris resembled a tsunami of dirt. Early estimates suggest the wave may have been 30 metres high.

What are the likely causes?

Sometimes, disasters like these can be caused when glacial meltwater trapped in a lake by a landslide breaks free. One of these events – known as a glacial lake outburst flood – hit Nepal in 2024.

But early analysis suggests this isn’t the case here. Satellite imagery suggests the landslide may have carved away large parts of a glacier, triggering its collapse.

We don’t know yet what caused the glacier to collapse. But glaciers worldwide are broadly in retreat – and flood and debris flow disasters can follow.

A smaller flood hit the same district in Nepal last year, killing nine people. Also last year, a melting glacier in Switzerland triggered a huge debris flow that destroyed the village of Blatten. In 2023, a landslide and subsequent flood in my home country of Georgia killed 33 people at a mountain resort.

But this disaster is one of the largest so far.

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/lsjYC

Permafrost is vulnerable

The high-elevation glaciers of the Himalayas can respond differently to climate change than glaciers at lower elevations or in relatively warmer regions. Thawing and degrading permafrost can also contribute by making steep Himalayan slopes less stable.

Permafrost is ground containing rock, soil and ice that has remained at or below 0°C for many years. As the climate warms, the ground can thaw, weakening the ice that helps bind rock and soil together.

On steep mountain slopes, this loss of frozen ground can make slopes less stable and make rockfalls, landslides and other forms of ground movement more likely. An earthquake, rockfall or other disturbance can then trigger a rapid downslope movement of rock, soil and debris.

Can these disasters be prevented?

No one died when the Swiss glacier collapsed. That’s because early warning systems were in place. Authorities evacuated residents before it fell.

As temperatures rise and climate-related disasters become more frequent or severe in some regions, early warning systems will become increasingly important for villages and towns located near glaciers or thawing permafrost.

These systems can monitor rapidly rising river levels, intense rainfall and seismic waves to alert authorities before disaster strikes.

However, installing and maintaining effective early warning systems can require significant investment. That’s a challenge for lower-income and developing countries. In good news, the Green Climate Fund last year announced funding for better monitoring systems in Nepal.

There’s another problem, too. Meltwater from Himalayan glaciers feeds rivers that are vital to billions of people across Nepal, Pakistan, India and China.

As the climate warms, increased glacier melt can temporarily increase river flows and, in some places, contribute to flood risk. But as glaciers continue to shrink, their contribution may eventually decline and lead to less water availability – particularly during the dry season.

Rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, investment in early warning systems and better monitoring of vulnerable mountain regions can help communities prepare. These measures cannot prevent every disaster, but they can save lives and give people a better chance to adapt to a changing climate.

Levan Tielidze, Research Fellow in Glacial Geomorphology, Monash University

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

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It’s a cold winter afternoon and you’ve just brought the washing in. Suddenly, you pause. Are these clothes a bit damp?

In the laundry basket, your hand can clearly distinguish the textures of silky shirts, woollen jumpers, cotton bed sheets. So why is it so hard to tell whether the washing is cold and damp, or just cold?

A sensible guess might be that our hands are numb from the cold, making it harder to detect wetness. The less intuitive reality is that we humans completely lack any specialised sensors that respond to “wetness” in the first place.

That’s right – your skin alone can’t actually detect if something is damp.

How do we tell if something is wet?

Our ability to sense information about our external environment starts at nerve cell endings in our skin.

There are specialised molecules on the surface of these nerve cells called sensory receptors. They convert environmental information into a biological signal, which is amplified into an electrical impulse and transmitted along nerve cells to the brain.

There are numerous different sensory receptors in nerve cells that are activated by cold, warmth or damaging heat. There are also sensory receptors that respond to very precise tactile information such as vibration, friction or stretch.

When you put your hand in that laundry basket, all the information about temperature and texture comes from the relevant sensory receptors in your hand.

The electrical signals triggered by these multiple inputs can also be integrated together in the central nervous system, or the brain. In this way, we can infer an extraordinarily nuanced sense of our environment.

Our experience of wetness arises in this way. It comes from the combined input of cold and friction receptors, refined by association with previous experience.

This means our brain can detect wetness without needing a specific sensory receptor activated by moisture. All we need is a set of related sensory inputs that, taken together, are consistent with our concept of wetness.

This integration of information even extends to include our other senses (the look, smell and sound of the material), and draws on related context (such as “is it currently raining?”) to inform our subconscious assessment of whether something is wet.

It’s not a perfect system

Sensory integration is only as good as the quality of input it receives. It can be hard to feel if clothes are damp in wintry conditions, because both cold and wet things activate our cold receptors.

Likewise, in hot weather it’s much easier to tell when our skin or clothes are damp, as evaporation leads to both local cooling and a slight change in pressure on the skin.

However, we can experience similar challenges in sensing wetness in a warm environment: try closing your eyes in a warm bath and lying still. Without evaporation or cooling from the contact of water against your submerged skin, it can become difficult to consciously perceive that those parts are wet – at least until you lift your arm out of the water and the skin cools as water evaporates.

Our lack of specific wet receptors doesn’t mean our perception of wetness is an illusion generated by our brain. Sensory integration allows us to sense a consistent and tangible quality of objects.

While this sense may sometimes be unreliable, our perception of wetness is not totally untrustworthy. On the contrary, the precision with which we navigate our environment by combining information from different sensory receptors is, frankly, awe-inspiring.

There’s a way to help your brain

Next time you’re trying to figure out whether your washing is damp or just cold, you can try and use some of these insights.

Help your brain out by adding additional context to the signals you’re receiving from the nerve endings in your hand. Squeezing or rubbing the clothes to generate more friction can enhance the mechanical information that influences our ability to detect wetness.

You can also try using visual information, such as variations in colour across the fabric when lightly stretched, to add fresh sensory context.

Or, shifting from cold and damp to warm and damp by heating a small part of material with a hairdryer (or your own breath) will make it much easier to tell if the clothes are dry, or … if you need to hang them all out again.

Kate Poole, Associate Professor in Physiology, UNSW and Felix Aplin, Lecturer, Department of Physiology and Translational Neuroscience Facility, School of Biomedical Sciences, UNSW

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

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This speech was delivered at the launch of the Australian Council for International Development’s (ACFID) State of the Sector Report 2026 on 6 August 2026.

I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we meet, and pay my respects to Elders past and present. I extend that respect to all First Nations people here today.

On the cover of this report are Kilu and Oneidah from Boboe Island in Solomon Islands, harvesting sea grapes.

Sea grapes are a traditional food and an important source of livelihood. In Western Province, four communities have launched a women-led enterprise producing body lotion and soap from sustainably harvested sea grapes. The work draws on traditional practices and helps conserve a food source under pressure from a changing climate. It also creates new sources of income.

The project is supported through Climate Resilient by Nature, an Australian Government initiative delivered in partnership with WWF-Australia.

That cover image captures much of what good development looks like. Local knowledge shapes the work. A trusted partnership supplies support. Environmental care and economic opportunity advance together.

The photograph shows people at work. The pages that follow give us the evidence behind that work.

Good sector data helps organisations see changes and lets funders test assumptions. It also gives the public a clearer view of how the sector uses trust and expertise. This report performs each of those functions.

I am delighted to launch the ACFID State of the Sector Report 2026.

Thank you to ACFID and Monash University, and to Karinda Flavell, Raewyn Lans, Aditri Saikia, Emily Moreton, Samanthi Gunawardana and Sara Niner, with support from Terence Wood. Thank you also to the organisations that contributed data and case studies. A report of this scale depends on a sector willing to examine itself closely and share what it finds.

This is the second State of the Sector report, following the first in 2018. Across 36 indicators and 10 characteristics, it provides the most comprehensive comparable picture of Australian development non-government organisations in nearly a decade.

The pressures are plain. Inflation has increased costs. Real public donations are around 20% lower than in 2015. The share of Australian adults donating to ACFID members fell from 8.3% in 2016 to 5.7% in 2023. Across a comparable group of organisations, staffing fell by around one-third between 2017 and 2022.

These figures affect organisational resilience and the capacity to plan for the long term. They also shape how many communities organisations can reach.

Alongside that strain, the report records strong performance across many areas.

ACFID members continue to set a high standard for transparency and accountability. Audited financial reporting is universal. Compliance with ethical standards for emergency appeals is consistently high. Participation in learning remains strong, with 25 active communities of practice and more than three-quarters of members involved in at least one.

The sector is also becoming more representative in important respects. Around 70% of staff are women, and women’s representation among chief executives and board directors has risen since 2016. The report identifies scope for stronger data on broader forms of diversity. Better measurement will help organisations understand who holds influence and where fresh perspectives can be brought in.

There is encouraging progress on climate integration. In 2023, 458 projects included an element of climate action, with most focused on building resilience.

This October, that work will have a global platform in the Pacific. In partnership with Australia, Fiji and Tuvalu will host the official Pacific Pre-COP events from 5 to 8 October 2026. Fiji will host the preparatory meeting, while Tuvalu will host a leaders’ event. The gatherings will bring global leaders to the Pacific to see climate impacts and Pacific-led solutions first-hand. They will also help shape priorities ahead of COP31.

The report’s new baseline for locally led development is another important contribution.

Forty-three per cent of responding members had an internal commitment or policy on locally led action or partnerships. Almost all organisations reported dedicating staff time to partner-led capacity building and institutional strengthening. Among organisations undertaking advocacy, local partners usually had some influence over that work.

These measures give the sector a basis for tracking change over time.

Locally led development means listening early and sharing decisions. It means backing local institutions and recognising where knowledge sits. That approach builds capability close to the people affected and supports solutions grounded in local priorities.

This approach sits at the heart of the Australian Government’s development program. We support solutions shaped by communities themselves across climate adaptation and health, as well as education and governance. Local organisations bring knowledge and legitimacy. Australian organisations contribute expertise and long-term relationships.

Australian non-government organisations are invaluable partners to government. You can mobilise quickly and work in fragile or hard-to-reach places. You reach people who can be overlooked by large systems, and you sustain relationships across political and funding cycles.

Your experience also improves policy. You help government understand regional challenges and shape responses. Through deep people-to-people links, you connect Australians with our region and give local partners a stronger voice in Canberra.

In 2026-27, the Albanese Government will invest $5.2 billion in official development assistance, an increase of $112 million on the previous year. More than three-quarters of that investment will benefit our region, including $2.2 billion for the Pacific and $1.4 billion for Southeast Asia.

At a time when aid budgets are shrinking elsewhere, Australia remains a reliable and responsive partner. Our development program helps shape a region that is more peaceful and prosperous. It strengthens relationships founded on mutual respect for sovereignty.

It supports human rights and social inclusion. That includes gender equality and disability equity, along with LGBTIQ+ rights.

It is also an investment in Australia’s future. Helping a community withstand a cyclone or contain an infectious disease contributes to a safer region. Supporting children to learn and protecting humanitarian workers strengthens the resilience on which shared prosperity depends.

Government works with a range of partners because different organisations bring different strengths. We choose delivery partners according to capability and context. The proportion of funding delivered through contractors varies from year to year.

Funding delivered through non-government organisations has remained broadly stable at around 10 to 11% of official development assistance over the past decade. Non-government organisations can also compete for departmental procurements.

The distinctive contribution of this sector deserves clear recognition within that mix. Non-government organisations bring public trust and specialist expertise. They also bring local partnerships and the patience required for work whose results unfold over years.

The report’s findings on public engagement deserve close attention. In 2023-24, ACFID members raised $750 million from more than 793,000 Australians. That is a formidable constituency for international development. The decline in donor participation also shows the work ahead.

The strongest case for aid often begins with a truthful account of what cooperation achieves.

It is harvesting sea grapes from a better-managed reef. It is a health worker reaching a remote community. It is a local organisation leading through the next emergency. It is an Australian donor seeing how a modest contribution becomes a larger act of solidarity.

The sector has an opportunity to tell more of these stories while keeping the rigour that this report exemplifies. Evidence gives stories weight. Stories give evidence reach. Together, they can build durable public support.

The operating environment will remain demanding. Humanitarian need is rising and climate pressure is intensifying. Civic space is narrowing in many places, while resources remain tight.

This report shows a sector learning how to work in that changed world.

Its strengths are substantial: professional standards and deep partnerships, alongside a culture of reflection and a broad community of Australian supporters. Its challenges are stated with candour, which gives the sector a solid base for action.

The task now is to use this evidence. Strengthen organisations before strain becomes fragility. Widen the circle of Australians who see themselves as participants in development. Move from local consultation towards local authority. Keep testing which partnerships produce lasting benefit.

The cover returns us to the heart of the work. Kilu and Oneidah are drawing on knowledge rooted in their community and place. Their hands are harvesting food and supporting livelihoods. Their work also cares for an ecosystem that will sustain future generations.

Good development gives people greater power to shape their own future, supported by partners who respect their knowledge and back their ambition.

Congratulations to ACFID, Monash University and everyone who contributed.

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

Contributing Author: Dr Andrew Leigh is Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury, and Federal Member for Fenner (ACT). He was formerly an economics professor at the Australian National University. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from Harvard and is the author of numerous books on economics and public policy.

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Universities are increasingly turning to oral exams to stop students using artificial intelligence (AI) to cheat.

Some unis say it allows teachers to more accurately test students’ knowledge.

Meanwhile, some NSW schools are also using oral exams to prevent cheating.

Oral exams – or “viva voces” – are one of the oldest assessment methods. But they are not a foolproof solution as universities and schools struggle to ensure academic integrity. Here’s why.

A brief history

Oral exams date back to ancient Greece. Teachers would ask students questions, which needed to be responded to on the spot to show their knowledge of a subject.

They became less common over time as written exams were easier to administer across growing numbers of students. But oral assessment never disappeared and has remained in many schools and unis.

Aside from testing a student’s knowledge, oral exams allow examiners to ask a student immediate questions and prompt them to clarify points further. An oral exam can also help students develop their public speaking and communication skills.

Not fair for all students

Despite these benefits, oral exams can create barriers for some students.

Research suggests they can increase students’ social anxiety. A German study found uni students experienced more anxiety in oral exams than written ones. If students are overly anxious, they may not be able to show examiners what they actually know.

Oral exams may also unfairly disadvantage students when they are required to speak in their non-native language. These students might have a strong understanding of the subject but might need more time to express that understanding.

Consistency can be a problem

Research suggests it is also difficult to ensure oral exams are consistent.

For example, a study of oral exams in Norwegian secondary schools found initial student presentations ranged from five to 16 minutes. At the same time, follow-up discussions ranged from seven to 23 minutes. This gave students unequal opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge. A follow-up study found with the same examiners, some students received fewer than ten questions while others received nearly 50.

These variations may not always be intentional, but they can have real impacts for students.

Can they really stop cheating?

As a measure against cheating, oral assessments are not perfect.

A student could use AI to rehearse and remember convincing answers. Another student who wrote every word may freeze under pressure.

If we are just using oral exams as an “AI lie detector”, it can turn assessment into a test of confidence, rather than learning or effort.

Making assessments fairer

My research shows effective forms of school assessment must:

• produce trusted and reliable results
• treat all students fairly
• allow appropriate flexibility for students’ different needs
• measure the intended learning. For example, a science oral should assess scientific reasoning, not speaking confidence, while an English oral would be a more appropriate place to assess speaking skills.

For oral exams, this might involve assessors telling students ahead of time the purpose of the assessment, its marking criteria and the types of questions they may be asked by examiners.

Students should also have regular opportunities to practise speaking, enough thinking time to answer questions and any appropriate adjustments made to help them feel more comfortable, for example, choosing the time of their exam, and whether they’d prefer sitting down or standing up to speak.

Examiners should use agreed, consistent prompts for follow-up questions so students have comparable opportunities to demonstrate their learning.

Along with a shared marking template, other teachers checking a sample of marks can also provide oversight without creating an unmanageable workload.

Assessments in the age of AI

Research suggests oral exams are most useful when used alongside written or practical assessments, rather than replacing them.

For example, rather than replacing a history essay with an oral exam, students could submit an annotated essay draft and reference list, followed by a five-minute conversation with the teacher. In this discussion, the student might explain their decision to include a specific reference, one notable revision they made and how any AI assistance shaped their thinking.

A well-designed oral exam can show how students have engaged with a topic, and support a meaningful conversation between teacher and student. This can strengthen assessment and trust.

Used as a form of interrogation, it may simply replace an integrity problem with a fairness problem – as well as a lot more work for examiners.

Nicole Brownlie, Lecturer in Education, University of Southern Queensland

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

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From defence and critical supply chains to the Quad, sports diplomacy and space cooperation, the scope for collaboration between the two countries is expanding rapidly. India’s growing economic and military weight is also reshaping its role in the Indo-Pacific, while Australia is looking to build greater strategic resilience in an increasingly contested region.

In this exclusive interview with The Australia Today, Dhruva Jaishankar, Executive Director of the Observer Research Foundation America and the inaugural recipient of the Lowy Institute’s Dr Ram Sethi Fellowship for 2026 speaks with Pallavi Jain about the opportunities and challenges ahead.

Jaishankar examines what is holding back deeper economic engagement and how Australia can better understand India’s strategic and defence capabilities.

He also discusses the future of the Quad, the largely untapped potential of sports diplomacy, and the possibilities for a much deeper Australia–India partnership in the rapidly expanding space sector.

Exclusive Interview

Pallavi Jain: Australia and India often describe each other as “natural partners,” yet bilateral trade remains at around A$55 billion, compared with Australia’s trade with China of over A$325 billion. What are the biggest structural barriers holding the relationship back, and what practical steps should governments and businesses take over the next decade to accelerate growth?

Dhruva Jaishankar: I would actually look at the rapid growth of bilateral trade – especially since the conclusion of the Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA) – as a positive development. China is not a useful comparison, given the history with Australia and scale of resource exports, but India is already Australia’s fifth largest goods trade partner and is likely to surpass Japan and South Korea in the coming years to be a distant third behind China and the United States. That said, there are lots of opportunities to increase the business-to-business partnership beyond commodities, education, and low-cost services. For example, Australia should look to Indian manufacturers to diversify its supply chains, whether for pharmaceuticals, vehicles, refined petroleum, electronics, or machinery and more ambitiously for defense, drones, and semiconductors. There are also exciting new investment opportunities but little public awareness in Australia: indeed, compared to North America and Europe, India is relatively untapped from the point of view of Australian institutional investors.

Pallavi Jain: There remains a perception gap in Australia when it comes to India. Much of the conversation still revolves around migration, education and trade, while there seems to be less awareness of India’s strategic capabilities—including the fact that it has the world’s fourth most powerful military and a rapidly expanding defence-industrial base. How can Australia develop a more complete understanding of India’s hard power, rather than simply viewing it as a fast-growing economy with a large consumer market or a partner in forums such as the Quad?

Dhruva Jaishankar: My sense is that the opportunity is well understood in the Australian government, but less among investors or the Australian business community writ large, particularly those who had some familiarity with the Indian economy in decades past. On defense, there’s been a rapid expansion of cooperation on maritime domain awareness, military-to-military engagements, and training. Indian aircraft now fly to Darwin, just as Royal Australian Navy vessels more regularly dock at Indian ports. The two countries perform a variety of sensitive tasks together, from submarine rescue and air-to-air refueling to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief. The opportunities do now need to be seized in terms of defense industrial cooperation and I believe agreements to accelerate that are in the works between the Australian Department of Defense and Indian Ministry of Defense. Questions of export controls, including those involving the United States, will need to be navigated in some cases.

Pallavi Jain: For decades, Australia’s security outlook has been anchored in the United States-led alliance system. As questions emerge about the long-term reliability and capacity of American security guarantees, what role could India play over the next two decades in contributing to greater strategic balance and resilience for Australia?

Dhruva Jaishankar: India should not be seen as a substitute for the United States as a regional security guarantor for Australia, but it can play a few important roles. One is in terms of helping secure critical sea lines of communication, on which Australia is dependent as a trading nation. Secondly, providing capacity in the form of equipment and training to smaller countries in the region, including in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. India is already doing some of that, but can coordinate more with countries like Australia, just as Australia is doing more to support India in the Indian Ocean littoral.

Pallavi Jain: The Quad has become a central pillar of Indo-Pacific cooperation, yet questions persist about the consistency of US foreign policy across administrations. How resilient do you believe the Quad is to political changes in Washington, and what must India, Australia and Japan do to ensure it remains an effective strategic partnership regardless of who occupies the White House?

Dhruva Jaishankar: Some aspects of the Quad – including Summits and ministerial meetings – are more political. But many other aspects involving the militaries and bureaucracies have proved more steady. These include combined efforts on maritime domain awareness, humanitarian assistance, and military logistics, as well as joint projects in the South Pacific. Naturally politics can alter the tenor and pace of cooperation, but so far the Quad has withstood two U.S. presidential transitions and change of government in Australia.

Pallavi Jain: Australia is arguably one of the world’s great sporting nations, while India is investing in sport, with ambitions stretching well beyond cricket. Do you see sports diplomacy as an underutilised pillar of the Australia–India relationship? Could deeper collaboration in elite sport, sports science and major events create a new form of soft power between the two democracies?

Dhruva Jaishankar: Absolutely! We think of Australia as a sporting powerhouse now, but a lot of its strengths grew in the aftermath of the 1976 Summer Olympics, when its underperformance led to investments in the Australian Institute of Sport and other centers of excellence. With India hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2030 and bidding for the Olympics, the possibility of tapping Australia’s world class training and coaching programs in a variety of sports is there. Sports featured prominently both in Prime Minister Modi’s agenda in Australia and in his speech on Independence Day. Foundational sports such as athletics, swimming, and gymnastics will be more important to India than those in which it has already invested significant resources, such as badminton, hockey, shooting, and wrestling. There is also past precedence for this, such as Dennis Lillee’s involvement in the MRF Pace Foundation, and its major contributions to India developing high-quality fast bowlers in cricket.

Pallavi Jain: India has established itself as a global space power, with a proven track record of delivering world-class missions at a fraction of the cost of many Western agencies. While India and Australia already collaborate on international projects such as the Square Kilometre Array, do you see scope for a much deeper bilateral partnership in the space sector?

Dhruva Jaishankar: Space is a really exciting sector in India, with the privatization push leading to hundreds of small start-ups involved in almost every aspect of the space industry, from launch and observation to de-orbiting. Australia benefits from its geography and integration with other advanced markets, so there are natural complementarities. It would be nice to see a greater Indian presence at venues such as the Australian Space Forum in Adelaide.

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The photograph circulating online is said to be of a house in Tarneit. Painted across its garage door is a large portrait of the late Punjabi singer Sidhu Moose Wala.

That detail fundamentally changes the debate around the image.

This is not simply a generic portrait of a Sikh man or an innocent representation of Indian-Australian culture.

Moose Wala, whose real name was Shubhdeep Singh Sidhu, was one of the biggest stars of Punjabi music before he was shot dead in Punjab in 2022. He was also a political figure, joining India’s Congress party and unsuccessfully contesting the 2022 Punjab election from Mansa.

His legacy, however, is complicated.

Moose Wala became admired by millions of young Punjabis around the world as a symbol of Punjabi pride, resistance and defiance. He supported India’s farmers’ protests and used his music to speak about political and social issues affecting Punjab.

But some of his work also attracted controversy over references to ‘Khalistan’ and militant figures.

The Indian Express reported that his 2020 song Punjab glorified Khalistani terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, opening with material from Khalistan supporter Bharpur Singh Balbir and containing lyrics praising Bhindranwale. Moose Wala himself, however, later clarified in an interview that his invocations of “Khalistan” referred to the rule of *Maharaja Ranjit Singh, not a demand for a separate country. His posthumously released song SYL stirred further controversy for imagery tied to Bhindranwale and Balwinder Singh Jattana, a *Babbar Khalsa-linked militant accused of killing two engineers on the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal project.

But none of this means every Moose Wala fan supports ‘Khalistan‘.

That distinction is critical.

For millions, he remains primarily a musician — a murdered young artist whose songs articulated Punjabi pride, frustration and aspiration. His enormous following cannot reasonably be categorised under a single political ideology.

But it is equally misleading to pretend the political symbolism surrounding him does not exist.

Parts of the pro-Khalistan movement have embraced Moose Wala’s image and music as symbols of Punjabi defiance. His death further enlarged his status among sections of Sikh youth and the diaspora.

That context explains why the Tarneit mural has caused discomfort among a large section of the Indian-Australian community.

For those Australians, particularly Indians who strongly oppose the Khalistan separatist movement, the question is straightforward: is a suburban Melbourne garage the appropriate place for an enormous public-facing image of a figure whose work has become intertwined with highly contentious separatist politics?

They argue that Australia should be careful about importing unresolved political conflicts from the Indian subcontinent into Australian neighbourhoods.

That concern deserves to be heard rather than automatically dismissed as anti-Sikh sentiment.

Australian Sikhs should never be conflated with Khalistan supporters. Sikhism, Punjabi identity, admiration for Punjabi music and support for Khalistan are four different things.

Indeed, collapsing them together does a profound disservice to Australia’s Sikh community.

But the opposite mistake is also possible: pretending that symbols carrying political meaning overseas suddenly become culturally neutral when displayed in Australia.

If Australians are expected to understand the political symbolism attached to far-right European imagery, Middle Eastern political movements or other international conflicts, Indian Australians are entitled to discuss the political associations surrounding imagery imported from South Asia.

Yet the reaction from the other side of Australian politics has introduced another troubling dimension.

Some anti-immigration voices responding to the image online have suggested that somebody should go to the property overnight and replace the Moose Wala portrait with Pauline Hanson or One Nation imagery.

Even if intended as a joke or provocation, that suggestion crosses an important line.

Criticising a mural is legitimate.

Calling for its removal through lawful processes is legitimate.

Painting Pauline Hanson’s portrait on your own garage door is legitimate.

But encouraging strangers to go onto somebody else’s property at night and alter their artwork without permission is not legitimate political expression. It would potentially amount to property damage or trespass, depending on what was done.

And politically, it would achieve precisely the opposite of what critics claim to want.

If the argument is that Australians should respect Australian values and Australian law, vandalising someone’s home because you dislike the ethnicity or politics represented by their artwork is hardly an advertisement for either.

The temptation to transform this controversy into “Indians versus Pauline Hanson” should also be resisted.

The disagreement is much more complicated.

Some Indian Australians oppose the mural because of what they believe Moose Wala represents politically.

Some Sikh Australians may see him simply as a cultural icon and musical hero.

Some Australians concerned about migration may see the mural as another symbol of rapid demographic and cultural change in Melbourne’s west.

Others may simply think that what somebody paints on their garage is none of their business.

All four positions can exist simultaneously.

That complexity matters because Australia is entering an increasingly heated argument about immigration, multiculturalism and national identity.

There are legitimate questions about whether migration has been too high.

Australians can reasonably ask whether population growth has outpaced housing, roads, hospitals and schools.

They can argue for dramatically lower immigration.

They can vote for One Nation.

They can criticise multicultural policy.

Indian Australians themselves can hold exactly the same views.

But opposition to immigration cannot become a licence to intimidate migrants already living here.

An Indian family living in Tarneit did not determine Australia’s migration intake. A Sikh truck driver did not create Victoria’s housing shortage. An international student does not set Commonwealth immigration policy.

Governments do.

Direct the political argument towards the people making those decisions.

There is an equally important responsibility on migrant communities.

Multiculturalism cannot mean importing every historical grievance from the countries Australians or their parents left behind and then expecting the wider community to remain silent about it.

Australia has welcomed people from societies carrying complicated religious, territorial and political disputes. And communities have every right to remember their histories and express their political views.

But Australia should not become another theatre in which overseas conflicts are endlessly replayed.

That principle must apply consistently.

If an image carries genuine political associations, Australians should be able to question it without immediately being accused of racism.

If an Indian Australian objects to Khalistan symbolism, that person should not automatically be described as anti-Sikh.

Likewise, someone admiring Sidhu Moose Wala should not automatically be labelled a Khalistan supporter.

And someone arguing for lower immigration should not automatically be called racist.

The line should instead be drawn at intimidation, hatred, collective blame, vandalism and threats.

That brings us back to the garage door.

Should the Moose Wala portrait be there?

People are entitled to say no.

Others are entitled to say yes.

But assuming the artwork complies with applicable laws and local regulations, the final decision belongs primarily to the property owner — not social media activists, not Indian nationalists, not Khalistan supporters and certainly not strangers arriving with paint in the middle of the night.

If somebody wants Pauline Hanson painted across a garage door, there is a simple solution.

Paint her on your own.

That is democracy.

The more uncomfortable question raised by Tarneit’s now-famous garage is what happens when Australia’s extraordinary multicultural diversity collides with political baggage carried from overseas and an increasingly angry domestic debate over migration.

The answer cannot be censorship.

It cannot be vandalism either.

It has to be the harder option: allowing difficult arguments while drawing clear boundaries around intimidation and collective hatred.

Sidhu Moose Wala can be a musical hero to one Australian, a symbol of political defiance to another and an inappropriate figure to a third.

Pauline Hanson can similarly represent political courage to one Australian and divisive politics to another.

A mature democracy has enough room for those disagreements.

What it cannot afford is for disagreement over a painting to become another excuse for Australians to start treating their neighbours as enemies.

The Tarneit garage door may belong to one household.

The debate it has exposed belongs to all of us.

*Maharaja Ranjit Singh was an Indian Sikh ruler and the founder of the Sikh Empire, which at its height stretched across much of present-day north-western India and Pakistan, reaching Peshawar and the Khyber Pass in present-day Afghanistan, with Lahore, now in Pakistan, as its capital.

*Babbar Khalsa International (BKI) is a pro-Khalistan terrorist organisation.

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The post When overseas politics comes to Australia: ‘Khalistan’, migration and One Nation collide over controversial Tarneit garage mural first appeared on The Australia Today.

By James C. Murphy, Emily Foley, Phoebe Hayman, and Tenzin Liddy-Corlett

A new poll of Victorians shows almost half of respondents who voted Labor in the 2022 state election intend to vote differently this November, with more than 13% moving their vote to One Nation and a further 11% intending to vote for the Coalition.

The survey, conducted by Accent Research as part of an in-depth study of the Victorian state election funded by the University of Melbourne, also found the cost of living was easily the most pressing issue for voters, with more than 68% listing it in their top three concerns.

Worryingly for the Carroll Labor government, just 18.8% of voters thought Labor was the party best able to deal with cost-of-living issues, behind the Coalition (23.9%) and just ahead of One Nation (15.7%).

While much of the campaigning efforts against the Labor government have been directed at issues of corruption, voters say household financial pressures will be the key issue in November.

The key issues

Our poll, made up of a representative sample of 1,002 Victorians, asked voters to nominate their biggest issues this election.

Two thirds of our sample — 68% — nominated cost of living as one of their “top three” issues when presented with a list of a dozen policy areas to choose from. 56% put crime in their top three, and 38% did so for health. Other issues — corruption, public debt, schools, the environment — were lower down in voter priorities.

Cost of living is not a surprise issue: it has rated high across Australia for some time, with inflation a persistent pressure and a series of interest rate rises biting, though perhaps slightly less in Victoria than other states.

Crime has also been a significant political issue in Victoria for several years. Both the media and the state opposition have claimed Victoria is in a “crime crisis”, though the latest statistics suggest crime rates are declining.

The appearance of health in the top three is more surprising. It is of course a perennial issue, but hospitals have not been a major feature of the political debate in Victoria — certainly not in the way they were at the last election. However, recent strikes by healthcare workers might be a sign the issue will grow in salience.

When asked which parties they trusted most to handle those issues, more respondents (24%) said the Coalition was the best party to address cost of living than said Labor (19%) or One Nation (16%).

This is somewhat surprising, in that federally the Labor Party was normally rated as better at addressing cost-of-living pressures in national polls.

The Coalition won on crime, too: a quarter of our sample said Liberals or Nationals were best at dealing with this, though One Nation was close behind, with 22% preferring them. Only 16% of respondents rated Labor as best on crime.

On health, Labor remains the preferred party, as it often is in such polls, at state and federal level. But its lead could be stronger: 26% said Labor was best to deal with health, with 21% opting for the Coalition and 13% nominating One Nation.

Labor ‘defectors’ and ‘remainers’

About 35% of respondents said they voted for Labor in the 2022 state election — the post-COVID “Danslide” that saw Labor take 56 seats in the 88-seat Legislative Assembly.

Labor appears to be losing a big chunk of those voters. Just 57% of people who voted Labor at the last state election say they will stick with them this year. 11% of this group said they intended to vote instead for the Coalition in November, while even more — 13.4% — intended to shift to One Nation. 8.5% were moving to Greens and 6.8% were undecided.

This much tracks to the broad picture in other polls: Labor is recording much less support than four years ago. But what do these Labor “defectors” care about?

Our poll found the top issues for this group were the same as the full sample: cost of living, crime and health. 77% of this group ranked cost of living in their top three issues and nearly half (47%) ranked this as their number one — easily the biggest issue, and something Labor has spent big to try to ease — but perhaps not enough.

Crime was in the top three for about half of Labor defectors. This might suggest Coalition attacks against Labor, accompanied by high-profile campaign promises on recruiting more police and restricting bail, have cut through.

Labor has matched the Coalition on some of these policies, including controversial “adult time for adult crime” laws, but this appears not to be enough to convince voters of its tough-on-crime bonafides.

Health was top three for 43% of Labor defectors — an interesting finding, suggesting Labor’s ownership of the issue is relatively soft, and opinions divided.

Also interesting is what is not in this list. Missing are two big issues the Coalition and media critics are focused on: “corruption”, ranked in the top three of issues for just 15% of Labor defectors; and government debt, which was in the top three for 12%.

Complicating this picture is the fact that Labor “remainers” had the same set of top three issues as “defectors”: cost of living, healthcare and hospitals, and crime and public safety. This is perhaps an indication voters are thinking about the same set of issues — they are not siloed off in echo-chambers, thinking about radically different issues — but are divided over how well Labor is addressing them.

One Nation wins converts

The most unusual aspect of this state election is the rapid rise of One Nation in the polls. Our poll found only 16% of respondents planning to support One Nation this November supported them in the 2025 federal election and the 2022 Victorian election. The vast majority of our sample intending to support the party – 70% – did not vote for them in 2022.

These One Nation “converts” were strongly united in their concern about crime (79% put it in their top three) and cost of living (62%), with government finances and debt (29%) and corruption (28%) trailing further back.

This sky-high concern about crime with One Nation converts is interesting: more rated it in their top three issues than did Coalition converts (only 54% of this cohort put crime in their top three).

And of the respondents saying they were Coalition-to-One-Nation converts — not a large group, only 8% of our sample — a whopping 86% rated crime in their top three.

This complicates our understanding of how crime concern is playing politically. It might be that all the Coalition’s crime campaigning is sending some voters over to One Nation instead of themselves — indeed, even sending away some who were previously in their camp.

Cost of living, crime and health will be a focus in November

This is just one poll, one snapshot in time. The intent is not to try to project the election outcome with any precision. Rather, the goal is to gain insights into which issues voters really care about, and from there, to see how parties go about responding to that, and with what success.

In particular, this poll helps us better understand the degree to which ‘issue salience’ and ‘issue ownership’ moves or is fixed. The academic literature is divided on this.

These early results suggest Labor ownership of health and cost of living has slipped, and Coalition ownership of crime is being contested by One Nation. This could have government-changing implications in November.

James C. Murphy, Lecturer & Tutor (Teaching Intensive) in Politics and Public Policy, The University of Melbourne; Emily Foley, Postdoctoral research fellow, Flinders University; University of Canberra; Phoebe Hayman, PhD Candidate and Casual Academic in Politics, La Trobe University, and Tenzin Liddy-Corlett, PhD candidate in Politics, La Trobe University

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

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The post Exclusive poll shows nearly half of respondents defecting from Victorian Labor. What do these voters care about? first appeared on The Australia Today.

Delegates attending the Pacific HIV Symposium in Fiji next week will be confronting one of the region’s most urgent health challenges: the fastest growing HIV outbreak in the world.

HIV prevalence among adults in Fiji is now 1.6%. This means about one in 60 adults lives with the virus.

This is likely the tip of the iceberg: just one-third of people living with HIV in Fiji know their status, and only a quarter are receiving treatment.

Experts project yearly infections will triple by 2030. Sadly, the equivalent of one child every week is born with HIV in Fiji, while one dies of AIDS-related complications every month.

This is a public health emergency whose causes and consequences extend well beyond Fiji’s islands. In a region connected by travel, work, study and family ties, the challenge demands attention, support and informed engagement from its neighbours.

An outbreak with many causes

The crisis is already gaining international attention, with Fiji in the spotlight at the AIDS2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro in July. The head of Fiji’s national HIV outbreak cluster response task force, Jason Mitchell, told delegates:

It’s important to talk about what’s happening in Fiji, as it can happen anywhere in the world.

No single factor explains the outbreak.

Health authorities and experts point to a combination of rising methamphetamine use and needle sharing, disruptions to funding for prevention and treatment services, health system pressures and a culture of silence and stigma surrounding HIV.

Since declaring the outbreak in January 2025, Fiji has established a dedicated HIV response task force and expanded testing and treatment. There is increasing emphasis on prevention tools.

PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), a highly effective medicine taken to prevent HIV, is now available. Fiji is now also in the queue for the long-acting HIV prevention drug Lenacapavir, as the Global Fund – a worldwide partnership to defeat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria – expands access.

Fiji is also working with international partners to strengthen its response. Australia recently announced a contribution of more than US$10 million to support Fiji’s HIV response. UNAIDS, the World Health Organization and many other international agencies are providing financial, technical and on-the-ground support.

Why this matters beyond Fiji

Despite this progress, Fiji’s outbreak represents a significant health security risk to the region. Many New Zealanders and Australians have close connections to Fiji through tourism, seasonal employment, education and family networks.

Fiji is also a major regional hub, connecting communities across the wider Pacific. This does not mean travellers should be alarmed. HIV is not transmitted through casual contact or everyday social interactions.

Just as importantly, it is no longer the death sentence it was once perceived to be. With early diagnosis and effective treatment, it is managed as a chronic health condition, and people living with HIV can expect to live long, healthy lives.

Understanding the situation in Fiji is not about avoiding travel. It is about encouraging informed and responsible behaviour (including condom use), access to HIV prevention tools and regular testing for those who may have been exposed to risk.

Such precautions are relevant whether someone is travelling to Fiji, Auckland, Sydney or anywhere else. HIV is a global health issue, not a uniquely Fijian one.

But one of the greatest challenges facing the response is social stigma, which research shows discourages people from testing, delays treatment and undermines public health efforts.

A regional response is vital

Concerns about confidentiality, shame and discrimination can make it difficult for people to seek support, particularly in smaller and more closely connected communities.

Similar barriers can affect Fijian health professionals diagnosed with HIV, as well as Pacific peoples living in New Zealand and Australia.

This is why culturally safe services that recognise the realities of Pacific communities and reflect Pacific values are so important for supporting confidentiality and trust.

Similarly, health authorities in New Zealand and Australia prioritise their own domestic preparedness and security in an outbreak so close to home. But these measures also need to avoid creating further stigma.

Public health challenges in the Pacific – be they caused by HIV, other infectious diseases or climate change – are increasingly regional in nature. Fiji cannot do this alone and is still calling for support, funding and technical and capacity-building assistance.

It is hoped this week’s Pacific HIV Symposium can build on what has already been offered and help the country’s health workers, community leaders and people living with HIV to confront this urgent challenge.

Sharon McLennan, Senior Research and Teaching Fellow, School of Health, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

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

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