Many parts of the federal government’s budget have been hotly debated in recent weeks.

But budgets are dense documents. There are always important measures that receive very little attention. One of these is planned changes to Australia’s child support system. The government has allocated $182 million over the next four years to make the system “safer and more effective”.

Almost one million children nationally are registered to receive child support every year. The amendments would change the way many parents experience the system and provide for their families.

What are the proposed changes?

The proposed changes would encourage child support to be collected directly from wages more often. About half of child support payment arrangements are made privately, which can be hard to enforce.

The government is also planning to release an online tool to help parents select the most suitable collection method.

The proposed laws would also be more flexible, allowing either parent to switch from private to government collection to recover child support debts.

There’s also funding to crack down on people who repeatedly don’t lodge tax returns to reduce the amount of child support they owe.

A primary aim of these reforms is to address unfair outcomes linked to Family Tax Benefit Part A, a government payment that helps mainly lower-income families (including many single parents) with the cost of raising children.

When child support is unpaid, delayed, or underpaid, payees (mostly mothers) can lose access to higher government payments or face unexpected debts because government payments are linked to expected child support. Single mothers with young children almost always carry the greatest financial burden of non-payment because they are less likely to be employed than other mothers.

Tackling financial abuse

Under the changes, late or unpaid child support is increasingly being framed as financial abuse. According to a government media release:

some parents deliberately choose to weaponise the scheme, including by deliberately minimising or under-reporting income to minimise their child support obligations or by underpaying, not paying or threatening to stop paying their child support.

The government’s budget statement draws on the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s 2025 report The Weaponisation of Child Support. The ombudsman’s media release refers to “widespread manipulation and weaponisation” of child support.

The ombudsman’s report relies heavily on complaints and evidence based on samples recruited through advocacy networks. Given the lack of representative data, claims that the weaponisation of child support is widespread remain difficult to substantiate.

That’s not to say that economic abuse isn’t a serious problem. It certainly is, and it demands urgent action. Women should never be abused or controlled through child support payments.

However, abuse is just one of many problems plaguing the child support system, and one of many reasons why men fail to meet their financial obligations. Framing it all as deliberate abuse risks oversimplifying a complex problem.

Why don’t people pay up?

“Can’t pay” is different from “won’t pay”. It’s not always easy to tell which is going on.

For some separated fathers, rising housing and living costs can make it harder to meet child support obligations consistently.

Of course, these broader financial pressures affect many Australian families, especially single-mother families and children.

Although reliable Australian evidence on the reasons for non-compliance is currently lacking, evidence from the United States shows key reasons for non-payment stem from payers having difficulty finding work or insufficient income despite employment.

These are not reasons for people to avoid paying what they owe, but they do explain that there isn’t always ill intent.

What else needs attention?

There are more fundamental structural challenges facing the child support system that are missed with a narrow focus on financial abuse.

The formula for how child support is calculated is complex, and difficult for many parents to understand. Parental disputes often arise over reported income and parenting arrangements where one extra night of care can significantly change payments.

Child support debt nationally continues to rise. It was $1.6 billion in 2021 but has now reached $2 billion.

Rising debt does not automatically mean rising non-compliance. Old debts can linger for years, and can arise for many reasons besides deliberate non-payment. The Australian National Audit Office is investigating Services Australia’s use of its powers to recover child support debt. Stronger enforcement might follow.

Evidence also shows separated parents often see the child support system as difficult to navigate, administratively heavy and unfair.

While tackling non-compliance and family violence is important, attention is also needed on updating the actual costs of raising children, ensuring the formula remains fair and income support payments are adequate, recognising that many young adults need financial support beyond age 18 and the need for better data to monitor the system.

The current framing of the child support reforms risks alienating fathers, which won’t help compliance. What will help is confronting the identified structural problems facing the child support system and acknowledging the broader economic challenges facing families.

Until these fundamental issues are addressed, and emotionally charged terms such as “weaponisation” don’t dominate the debate, the child support system’s ability to support children and earn public trust remains limited.

Bruce M Smyth receives funding from La Trobe University, and the University of Canberra as an external Chair of its Human Research Ethics Committee. He has received funding from the Australian Government Department of Social Services, and was a member of the Expert Panel on Child Support (2024-2025). The views expressed here are the author's own.

The weekend exchange of strikes between Iran and Israel has put US President Donald Trump under even more domestic and international pressure to end the unpopular war he launched with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more than three months ago.

The Israeli leader favours the continuation of the war until Iran is reduced to a feeble state. This would enable him to win the Israeli general elections later this year and further his goal of expanding Israel’s borders and regional domination in pursuit of a so-called “Greater Israel”.

Netanyahu is against any US–Iran deal that doesn’t meet his objectives. Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon to repel the Iran-backed Hezbollah group is part of his strategy, which has been boldly countered by Iran.

Tehran, meanwhile, has shown a steely resilience to ensure the war is settled in its favour as a formidable regional actor.

As a result of all this, Trump faces the difficult task of reaching an acceptable deal with Iran and restraining an unruly Netanyahu.

Why the standoff has gone on so long

At this point in the war, what would constitute a “victory” for Trump?

He wants an outcome that can vindicate his decision for starting the war, which has proved to be very costly, generating a worldwide energy crisis and a great deal of economic pain. The war could cause Trump political problems in the midterm elections later this year, too.

He also wants an agreement on Iran’s nuclear program that he could claim is better than the 2015 deal Tehran struck with the Obama administration and its international partners, called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Trump withdrew the US from the deal in 2018.

But Iran’s Islamic government has so far not been willing to bend to Trump’s demands.

Relying on a mix of ideological devotion to Shia Islam, a strong sense of historical nationalism, and an effective military capability, the regime has not only survived, but made strategic gains.

It has destroyed or damaged many US bases in the Persian Gulf, hit Israel hard with missile and drone strikes, and above all gained control of the Strait of Hormuz. The strait – a critical oil and fertiliser chokepoint – has now become Iran’s most potent lever of resistance and punishment.

The conflict has also given renewed life to the Islamic government and its instruments of power. Many citizens who were opposed to the regime have rallied around the flag in the face of the external threats and for the love of their country.

Further, the war has propelled the government’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is designated by the US and many of its allies as a terrorist organisation, to new heights. It has been able to prove its worth as the key actor defending Iran and its Islamic system.

Meanwhile, Tehran is not as isolated as the Trump administration believes, either. It has the support of both Russia and China. And Iran’s geographical location has worked to its advantage, enabling it to access markets by road through its neighbours and via the Caspian Sea to the north.

The US and Israel still have the advantage when it comes to military power and they can inflict heavy damage on Iran. But Tehran’s strategic gains have placed it in a stronger bargaining position in the peacemaking process.

No matter the level of US military and economic pressure, Tehran is unlikely to succumb to US and Israeli demands to dismantle its nuclear program or relinquish control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The regime was designed to be resilient. It has built a system based on defiance, resistance and pragmatic decision making when faced with serious threats from both inside and outside Iran.

As such, it has the patience and endurance to outlast Trump – and for that matter, Netanyahu.

Echoes of 1979

The regime also has a history of outlasting the United States.

For instance, there are some parallels that can be drawn between the way the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, dealt with the hostage crisis of 1979–81 – when a militant group of his supporters ransacked the US embassy and took 66 Americans hostage – and the manner in which his successors are now managing negotiations with the US.

Khomeini let that episode drag on for 444 days to both consolidate his power and humiliate the US for having backed the pro-Western monarchy of his predecessor, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

His approach played a key role in then-President Jimmy Carter’s defeat to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 US presidential election. The regime released the remaining 52 hostages just minutes after Reagan was inaugurated in January 1981.

The current standoff with Iran is only 100 days old, and it appears the regime is now prepared to use a similar strategy to punish Trump and Netanyahu for attacking Iran.

Iran’s leaders are seemingly determined to turn the tables on their adversaries and humiliate them. Whether they succeed will depend on what Trump does next – and what he’s willing to compromise on to bring Iran to the table for a lasting, mutually acceptable agreement.

Amin Saikal does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

There has been a lot of speculation lately, not least from Pauline Hanson, about the possibility of the One Nation leader riding her surging polling figures into the Lodge at the next election.

So what are the rules around who can be prime minister? What would need to happen first? Is it likely Hanson will ever hold the position, or is this just hype?

What are the rules?

While the prime minister has historically come from the House of Representatives and not the Senate, where Hanson is, this is not actually stipulated in the Constitution.

This means many of our rules are mostly conventions inherited from the Westminster traditions of the United Kingdom, rather than legal requirements.

By these conventions, the prime minister has historically been the leader of the party or parties that can maintain the confidence of the House of Representatives. To be eligible, section 64 of the Constitution requires only that all government ministers have a seat either in the Senate or House within three months of being appointed to the role.

So, given Hanson holds a seat in the Senate, she’s eligible to be a government minister and will remain so unless she loses her seat and can’t get it back.

By convention, prime ministers have traditionally been drawn from the House of Representatives. This convention is so strong that when Senator John Gorton was voted by the Liberals to become their leader in 1968, he resigned and moved to the lower house almost immediately.

Having the prime minister in the lower house means they are directly accountable to the people of an individual electorate, can face more scrutiny during question time, and helps to show they’re better in control of their own ministers and backbenchers. It also means they share in the three-year electoral cycle with the majority of MPs, rather than six-year terms of senators.

Read more: The new leader of the Greens sits in the Senate. Why is that so unusual in Australian politics?

What would need to happen?

First, One Nation would need to get a large enough share of seats in the lower house to ensure Hanson could survive a vote of no confidence. This would need to be either a majority (76 of the 150 seats up for grabs) or a large enough share to persuade other parties to join a coalition or at least guarantee her confidence.

An example of this in practice occurred after the 2010 election, when Prime Minister Julia Gillard needed to negotiate with independents and Greens to form government.

It is likely Hanson would want to move from the Senate (where she’s very safe) to a lower house seat, either by resigning and running herself in 2028 or persuading another member to vacate the seat. In the latter scenario, she would still need to win a byelection in that seat. If her party or coalition could obtain the right numbers, either by election or defection from other parties, she could then make a case to the governor-general for appointment to the top job.

What is likely to happen?

The reason we are asking these questions is because One Nation for the first time in its history has been polling better than the Liberal-National Coalition federally (and with a higher primary than Labor in two recent polls).

This comes as the conservative parties, after several leadership changes and election defeats, are at one of their lowest ebbs. It is also reflective of an environment in which none of the major parties is attracting as enthusiastic support as in the past. Similarly, Albanese and Labor are at a point in the electoral cycle where incumbents are generally in decline.

History may prove me wrong, but I think Hanson’s ambitions are unlikely to be achieved for three reasons.

First, although the Liberal and National parties are struggling at the moment, they may bounce back in the coming years. Polling outside of an election period is also different from when an election is looming – and the next federal election is not due until 2028.

Low satisfaction with Albanese in 2024 didn’t translate to a win for his opponent Peter Dutton in 2025. The polls reversed just before the election when people were paying more attention, and Albanese was elected with a large majority.

Voters closer to an election may put more scrutiny on One Nation’s policies around economic management, or their positions on vaccines, abortion and gun control. With migration falling, the importance of their core issue area may have lessened as well, although much will depend on how people are feeling about the state of the economy, and how much they connect migration with other pressing issues such as housing.

Read more: What does One Nation actually believe in?

Second, despite some recent polling suggesting as many as 18 Labor seats were potentially under threat from One Nation, the main contest – at least for now – will be between One Nation and the Coalition for rural and regional seats.

Unless Hanson’s appeal can spread much further than it has in the past into the seats where most people live in cities with a more multicultural electorate, it’s unlikely One Nation would win more seats than Labor. The centrist independents who are doing well in these areas where Labor struggles would be unlikely to team up with her.

Finally, Hanson has historically been both the party’s greatest strength, and its greatest weakness. Her initial win in Oxley in 1996 was as a disendorsed Liberal candidate. By 1998 she was voted out again. When she was out of politics (and contemplating a move to the UK), the party struggled, despite an initial surge of enthusiasm at the 1998 Queensland state election (winning 11 seats from around 22% of the primary vote). By the next election, none of those elected were still with the party.

She has famously fallen out with other MPs in the past, including former Labor leader Mark Latham, who led the party in New South Wales, and the longstanding member for Mirani in Queensland, Stephen Andrews. One Nation has reportedly been aiming to create a more stable and traditional party branch structure recently. However, the party has often been run from the top down while lacking the organisational discipline of other parties.

Until the Farrer byelection last month, they had never won a federal lower house seat under their own label. It remains to be seen whether recent success in South Australia and the inclusion of high-profile but divisive figures such as Barnaby Joyce and Cory Bernardi will make the party more or less stable in the long term.

Pandanus Petter is employed with funding received from The Australian Research Council.

News on AI and audiobooks is coming thick and fast. Australia-based audiobook producer Bolinda recently announced it will create a “bespoke” AI clone of romance bestseller Barbara Cartland’s voice, in partnership with her estate. (She died in 2000.)

Two days later, Spotify announced a tool (created by synthetic voice company ElevenLabs) that will allow self-published authors to create audiobooks voiced by AI on its platform, and publish them anywhere.

Meanwhile, a recent New York Times exposé revealed AI-enabled audiobook piracy on a massive scale on YouTube, with versions appearing of everything from literary fiction to Harry Potter, business bestsellers to John Grisham. A pirated version of his latest legal thriller, The Widow, accompanied by an “AI slop” video, has over 80,000 views. Listeners called the voice “boring” and “awful”.

“If you look up any best seller, you find a free audiobook on YouTube,” said the chief executive of the United States Authors Guild. A 2025 survey found that 35% of audiobook consumers had listened to a YouTube audiobook – and that AI-narrated audiobooks now account for 23% of new releases.

Around 17% of Australian audiobook listeners have (knowingly) listened to an AI audiobook, according to my own recent survey of over 500 Australian audiobook listeners. This rate is higher among listeners with vision impairments and other disabilities, who have long used AI for accessibility reasons – and should be centred in these discussions.

How have AI voices in audiobook listening evolved? And where is it heading?

The evolution of AI voices

The large language models behind ChatGPT and Claude map the relationship between words across billions of pieces of text. Similar models map sound patterns across recorded speech to produce contemporary “AI voices”.

AI voices were originally used for accessibility. The first automated text-to-speech system was created in 1968 by a Japanese research laboratory. The first screen reader technology was developed by IBM in the early 1980s. In 1986, it introduced its first screen reader for general use on personal computers.

This text-to-speech technology was originally for vision-impaired readers, who were the first to embrace it.

But as AI voices became more convincing, concern about their impact on human-narrated audiobooks grew. In 2009, the US Authors Guild blocked implementation of the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech function, claiming it infringed their audiobook rights.

Many high profile authors argued against the decision and its impact on accessibility. “The day that artificial intelligence gives us perfect Kindle readings, we’ll have bigger fish to fry than audiobook rights,” science fiction and tech author Cory Doctorow wrote in the Guardian. He called the idea that computer narration might ever seriously rival human narration “nonsensical”.

Voice clones and pirates

Swedish Storytel, the largest streaming platform in Nordic markets, reported in 2024 that nine out of ten listeners “could not tell which narration was human” when it tested the AI-generated voices in its Voice Switcher program.

Like Spotify, Storytel uses ElevenLabs AI technology. With Voice Switcher, listeners can choose between the original human narrator, three different AI-generated voices, or an AI version of popular Swedish actor and narrator Stefan Sauk, who has licensed his voice to Storytel.

Only a handful of Barbara Cartland’s 723 novels were available as audiobooks before her estate signed an exclusive agreement with Bolinda, the leading producer of Australian audiobooks. Bolinda started by distributing accessibility materials, such as large print and talking books, in 1986, and moved to audiobooks in 1995.

Cartland’s voice clone will be used to frame the beginning and end of her audiobooks, while human narrators will continue to narrate the books themselves. Even for this limited use, Cartland fans have described the announcement as “creepy”, “haunting”, “gross” and “disappointing” on social media.

Voice clones are being put to worrying uses. Along with other “deepfakes”, this led to the UN publishing a “wake-up call” to organised fraud in March. Audiobook publishing is not immune to these deepfakes, or artificially generated imitations of real people.

Recordings of Stephen Fry reading the Harry Potter series were used to generate an illegal clone of his voice in 2023. And this year, author Shaun Rein discovered deepfakes of himself on YouTube, reading chapters of his book. “The voice clone was probably created from the author’s publicly available interviews,” wrote publishing commentator Jane Friedman.

Piracy is a problem for digital content in general – including audiobooks. YouTube addresses piracy by automatically scanning uploads to see if they match with material in their massive database of copyright content. Pirates alter or add bracketing material to try to circumvent it. Publishers told the New York Times that the program, built for music, is “less effective” with audiobooks, where “even slight changes – like shifts in speed, pitch or voice, or added background noise or music – can prevent a match”.

Audible, Spotify and Project Gutenberg

Audible, owned by Amazon, began implementing AI-voiced audiobooks in late 2023. A year later, it added a service that lets select narrators create and monetise replicas of their own voices.

The other major global player in audiobooks, Spotify, first offered AI-narrated audiobooks in 2023, the year it launched its audiobook business.

Last year, it began accepting audiobooks narrated using ElevenLabs’ AI voice technology, which lets self-publishers create an audiobook with a voice from a catalogue, or create their own voice clone. The catalogue includes trademarked clones of actors like Michael Caine. And now, self-publishers can create AI-voiced audiobooks on Spotify itself.

Commercial and pirate audiobooks sit alongside projects like public domain repository Project Gutenberg’s free catalogue of 5,000 AI-narrated audiobooks of out-of-copyright books, created by Microsoft and MIT. It was named one of the best inventions of 2023 by TIME magazine.

The future of audiobooks

Voice actors are concerned about the erosion of skilled jobs and the use of cloning technologies to infringe on their vocal rights. Unions and advocacy groups are actively campaigning for tighter regulatory controls. And authors and publishers want action on YouTube piracy.

These issues are intensified by the important ethical and environmental questions raised by AI use. Legislators, technology companies and major commercial players have a responsibility to ensure AI narration technologies are made and used transparently and ethically.

But there is no one way to read a book. Only a fraction of books published will ever be available as human-narrated audiobooks, due to the significant time and expense of making them. And for many readers – those with vision impairments or some forms of neurodivergence, for instance – audiobooks are an essential resource.

Human performance offers a gold standard listening experience: expressive, immersive and authentic. But AI narration has a growing role in the audiobook’s future.

Millicent Weber received funding for this research from Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award DE240100466, 'Audiobooks and Digital Book Culture'.

Public hearings are underway this week to highlight the impacts of the government’s new National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) bill to tighten eligibility and save costs.

Over the past two days, the Senate inquiry heard that if the bill passes in its current form, it risks entrenching gender inequities in the NDIS and further excluding women and girls.

We have long known the NDIS has a gender problem.

Women and girls only make up 38% of the scheme. Men outnumber women in every age category (except for 55 and over) and dominate nearly every disability type within the scheme.

From the age of 15, access requests from men are also approved at a higher rate than access requests for women.

Tighter eligibility

From January 1 2028, the bill will require scheme applicants to access all “appropriate” treatments (meaning known, evidence-based and available in Australia) likely to “materially” (meaning noticeably) improve or alleviate the impact of the impairment, before NDIS access is granted.

Applicants have always been asked to demonstrate they’ve tried other treatments before applying for the NDIS. But this new rule is likely to place an even higher burden on people with impairments that are difficult to diagnose and medically complex to treat.

Under the new permanency rules, people may have to try lots of potentially marginal treatments that might slightly improve functioning, even if their conditions are not understood, or the treatment is expensive or difficult to access.

Women are more likely than men to have medically unexplained or chronic conditions, such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, which causes chronic pain.

These “pay to prove” dynamics also disproportionately affect those with fewer financial resources. Women with disability are more likely than men with disability to live on lower incomes. They also have higher expenses and lower earning capacity due to greater caring responsibilities.

Tightening access to the scheme in this way – without first addressing costly and difficult-to-access treatment pathways – risks excluding these women and girls from key supports.

Support can only be provided for approved conditions

If the bill passes, the NDIS will only fund supports for needs that directly relate to NDIS-recognised impairments.

This reverses changes to NDIS legislation introduced two years ago, which better recognised the complex way people actually experience impairments.

We have spoken to people in our current study about chronic pain who have explained that pain from one condition (for example, a connective tissue disorder) can affect the functional impacts of another impairment (for example, autism or a psychosocial disability, for which they receive NDIS support). For them, it’s impossible to distinguish between support needs “arising directly” from their NDIS-recognised impairment and support needs that are indirectly related to that impairment.

Women are also more likely than men to experience multiple chronic health conditions and disabilities, especially in age groups under the NDIS cut-off of 65.

Narrowing the lens of assessment and restricting access in this way also has gendered consequences.

Cuts to social participation funding

The bill gives the minister power to make cuts to entire categories of supports in the future, without introducing legislation or consultation.

We got a taste of what this could look when the government announced it would cut participants’ social and community participation budgets.

The 50% across-the-board cuts will shift these responsibilities back onto informal carers – largely women.

There are more than twice as many female primary carers as male primary carers. Of those providing primary care to children with disability, the overwhelming majority (84.7%) are women.

Some 43.8% of primary carers also have disability themselves. This means that when it comes to carers, we are often talking about women with disability who are the primary carers for children with disability.

These cuts will increase unpaid caring responsibilities. The bill’s explanatory memorandum acknowledges this:

Due to the gendered nature of caring, women are more likely to be impacted by changes to the supports available […].

These changes may lead carers to cut back on paid employment, deepening women’s socioeconomic exclusion.

Cuts to social and community participation funding are also likely to increase social isolation and reduce natural safeguards of community connection for people with disability.

Women with disability are disproportionately likely to experience violence, so cutting them off from vital community participation supports poses an unacceptable risk.

What needs to be done?

The bill’s explanatory memorandum says:

opportunities to increase gender equality will be considered as part of the design and evaluation of future market reforms to delivering social and community participation and capacity building activities.

However, no timeframes, benchmarks or accountability mechanisms are provided for when or how this work will occur.

The Australian government’s approach to gender-responsive budgeting requires new policy proposals to include gender analysis proportionate to the scale, scope and likely impact of the reform.

Given the scale and implications of the proposed NDIS reforms, we need a comprehensive and publicly available gender impact analysis before this bill is passed.

We also need more certainty on what can be done for those outside the scheme who need foundational supports. The Australian government has announced the Thriving Kids initiative. However, there is limited detail on planned foundational supports for other participant groups.

Researchers and advocates have been calling for an NDIS gender strategy for years. The National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) began work on this in early 2025, but by 2026 this work had been paused to prioritise broader scheme reforms. Advocates, such as Women with Disabilities Australia, continue to draw attention to the gendered issues of these reforms.

The likely consequences of these reforms show a gender strategy is needed more than ever.

Sophie Yates receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Molly Saunders does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Trees take carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into wood, storing it for decades. This is why Australian authorities have made forest regeneration eligible for carbon credits.

The largest carbon farming scheme is known as human-induced regeneration. Here, land owners and managers support forests to return on once-forested land. Every tonne of carbon dioxide soaked up by regrowing trees is worth one Australian carbon credit, about A$37.50.

The scheme has around 42 million hectares of land on its books. But only a third of this area is eligible for carbon credits, as the land has to be assessed as likely to regenerate into forest under changed management.

In recent years, some projects have come under fire. Researchers have suggested there’s not enough regeneration or that regeneration would have happened anyway. But independent assessment of these claims suggest these concerns are overblown.

As someone responsible for formally reviewing almost 100 of these projects since 2023, I have visited many sites and verified the data. Overall, I found these projects were being managed well – and forests are regrowing.

How does carbon farming work?

Under the rules, the area can’t have been forested for at least a decade before the project starts. It must have a high likelihood of becoming forested and richer in carbon through regeneration.

If left alone, trees will naturally regrow unless something stops them. Grazing by livestock, feral animals and sometimes native animals is the biggest barrier.

Many regeneration projects are in semi-arid areas with limited water. If water is made freely available for livestock, it can lead to surging numbers of kangaroos, wallabies and other native animals that eat regenerating saplings. This is why one method of limiting grazing is removing artificial watering points.

Fencing is another method. Australian and international researchers have found trees and vegetation on degraded land usually regenerate better when behind fences, though not always.

Does it work?

Australian authorities define a forest as an area dominated by trees over two metres tall, with existing or potential taller trees covering 20% or more of the area.

Participants have to prove forests of local tree species exist in the surrounding area, show the land can support forest and that there are sources of seeds. They also have to show evidence the area could be considered forest 20 years or so after the project begins.

Before carbon farmers can earn credits, the evidence they supply is audited and reviewed by teams of independent experts.

As one of these experts, I have reviewed a great deal of evidence and been on site when data was collected by independent ecologists to confirm how accurate tree cover estimates are. They’re not perfect. But they are very good.

If regeneration is too slow or fails, the area can be removed from the scheme. To date, about 6% of the land considered likely to regenerate has been taken off the scheme. Put another way, that means forests are actually regrowing on 94% of the land considered likely to regenerate.

Is criticism warranted?

Prominent critics have questioned the link between stopping grazing and regenerating forest. If this critique was accurate, it would mean there was no permanent boost to forests by ending grazing.

They argue instead in favour of only giving carbon credits to projects where trees are actively planted on previously cleared land.

The problem is, planting is relatively expensive and can be limited in scope. Planting also requires great care in tree species selection and genetics.

By contrast, removing pressure and allowing forests to naturally regenerate avoids these issues. Natural regeneration can also work in areas where planting and tree management would be expensive.

The critics used national-scale maps of woody vegetation to argue tree cover on some projects was falling short.

But as other experts have pointed out, these criticisms don’t stack up. The maps and models they rely on underestimate tree cover, compared to local and precise data gathered by aircraft with high-resolution scanning lasers.

When regeneration areas are independently assessed using similar gold standard methods, almost all show clear signs of regenerating forest.

Where does this leave us?

Worldwide, there are very real and well documented problems with carbon credit schemes intended to protect or restore forests.

This is why it’s important to scrutinise Australia’s human-induced regeneration scheme and others like it. But not all criticisms are valid.

The good news is, gold standard data gathered by participants cross-checked with regular on the ground audits and reviews show the scheme is largely working.

Regeneration can be slow, even after livestock have been removed. Some heavily degraded areas may not regenerate at all. But overall, it is leading to more forests and more carbon stored.

Under Australia’s carbon credit rules, all methods of producing credits expire after ten years. As a result, the human-induced regeneration scheme closed to new participants in 2023. Policymakers are working on new nature-based solutions to store carbon and boost wildlife on privately managed land.

But for the foreseeable future, forests will quietly regrow on huge tracts of land – and their successes and failures will be tracked and measured to make sure Australia has more trees than it would have otherwise.

Cris Brack subcontracts to ANU Enterprise to deliver regular independent reviews of the Human Induced Regeneration program. He has no current research grants but previously received income to help develop Australia’s National Carbon Accounting System (NCAS) and advise industry and government about sustainable natural resource management.

The “world first museum of AI arts” is scheduled to open next month in a 35,000 square feet purpose-built facility in downtown Los Angeles.

Dataland is the brainchild of Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkiliç, artists known for using artificial intelligence and vast datasets to create large-scale immersive art projects.

The “living museum” will present a continuously evolving immersive, audiovisual experience based on millions of images, sounds and scents from nature. As an indication of what it will be like, Dataland’s website presents phantasmagorical images of ecological wonder and awe.

Anadol says he wants Dataland to

develop a new paradigm of what a museum can be, by fusing human imagination with machine intelligence and the most advanced technologies available.

But behind its futuristic facade and the fleeting cultural landscapes hosted inside, the museum has much deeper historical roots.

The birth of the museum

A clear connection exists between the aspirations and dreams of Dataland’s founders and the 19th century fascination with emerging technologies. Large-scale exhibitions promised new forms of public spectacle and commercialised entertainment.

The Crystal Palace exhibition was held in London in 1851. Its purpose-built glass and iron building was considered a technological marvel.

Visited by over six million people, it was designed to promote Britain as an industrial power.

It showcased more than 100,000 objects from around the globe. These included locomotives, hydraulic presses, agricultural products and musical instruments. Its most famous item was the world’s largest-known diamond, acquired from India two years earlier for Queen Victoria.

The “midway” at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair was famous for its exhilarating amusements and living exhibits.

Premier attractions were the world’s first Ferris wheel and the world’s first commercial movie theatre. It also featured human display villages, or “human zoos”, that reinforced racist colonial hierarchies.

This era kicked off the modern public museum movement in Europe and the United States. Early museums were rooted in Enlightenment ideals of industrial and technological progress, civic education and national identity.

Museums including the South Kensington Museum (1857) and the Smithsonian’s Graphic Arts Department (1897) extended visitor fascination with new technologies such as cinema and railway travel, and sold mass-produced souvenirs of exotic and intriguing cultures.

Just as we today express conflicted views about AI-generated art, 19th-century audiences needed to learn how to respond to new cultural forms. Entertainment was key.

They quickly learnt viewing motion pictures was a social and public activity, improved if they suspended disbelief and expressed individual reactions.

The most well-known (albeit exaggerated) account describes an 1895 screening of a Lumière Brothers film. As the moving image of a train seemingly hurtled toward the audience, viewers are said to have screamed and ducked under seats.

Global exploitation

There is a darker side to the 19th-century precursors of Dataland.

The project’s dataset is a large nature model (LNM) – an open-source model trained on half a billion images sourced “ethically” from partner institutions including the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and London’s Natural History Museum.

These images are complemented by data gathered by Anadol’s team from 16 rainforests “from Chile to Indonesia to Australia”.

Dataland’s website does not provide provenance information about partner institution’s source collections. But we know they would likely include 19th century specimens.

Natural history collecting was a lucrative industry in the 19th century. The increasing ease with which people and commodities were able to travel the world expanded supply chains and the global industry of specimen transfer.

Museum collecting was deeply entangled with the violent, systemic processes of European imperialism, colonial expansion and scientific exploitation.

Dataland promotes its “permission-based” approach to using data from institutions. It cites contemporary collaboration with the Yawanawá people of the Amazon as “radically responsible”.

It also insists it manages the environmental impact of the museum’s consumption of natural resources.

But Dataland does not appear to apply its own ethical standards for producing collections from rainforests to the vast historical resources it sources from its partner museums.

It is silent on the obligations it may have to contemporary descendants of communities from which specimens and knowledge were extracted. It provides no guardrails about appropriate cultural protocols or safeguards for anyone wanting to access or learn more about any of its collections.

This approach is out of step with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The declaration enshrines the rights of Indigenous peoples to self-determination over their data. This includes traditional knowledge and ownership over natural resources.

Many of the kinds of institutions Dataland has partnered with are now seeking to repair the loss of Indigenous knowledge, cultural heritage and authority caused by colonial collecting.

The Natural Sciences Collections Association UK explains this reparative work is

proactive in telling hidden truths however difficult, about how we got our collections – [we must] acknowledge we have them, but at what cost?

The lack of transparency and self-awareness regarding the large nature model’s use of historical collection materials is a significant oversight. It echoes criticism that AI art does not adequately seek human consent or offer credit or compensation for contemporary art.

Dataland is a museum of the future. But it cannot outrun the historical and very human legacies of the form it has chosen to align itself with – the museum.

Kylie Message does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

When you think of outer space, you’re likely picturing stars, planets and moons. But much of space is filled with clouds of gas, plasma and stardust – known as interstellar clouds.

In the local parts of our galaxy alone there’s a complex of roughly 15 individual interstellar clouds. The Solar System is currently traversing one of them, aptly named the Local Interstellar Cloud. The origin and history of these clouds are believed to be tightly connected to the birth and death of stars. But we can see their imprints right here on Earth, in a place you might not expect – Antarctic ice.

My colleagues and I have been studying stardust trapped in old Antarctic snow and ice to trace the history of our solar neighbourhood, including the Solar System itself.

In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, we found a subtle clue that reveals our Solar System’s movement through the local interstellar environment over the past 80,000 years.

Looking down to see the sky

Astronomy usually looks outward. Telescopes collect light from distant stars and galaxies, allowing us to observe events across vast stretches of space and time. From these observations, we infer how stars live and die, how elements are formed, and how the universe evolves.

Our approach turns that idea on its head.

Instead of observing the light coming to us, we study the debris of exploding stars right here on Earth. As cosmic furnaces, stars forge many elements in their cores, from carbon and oxygen to calcium and iron. This includes rare isotopes (variants of chemical elements) such as iron-60.

When massive stars explode into supernovae at the end of their life, these elements are ejected into space and become interstellar dust.

Tiny grains of this dust then drift through the galaxy and occasionally find their way to Earth’s surface. Radioactive iron-60, a fingerprint of stellar explosions, is embedded within these grains. By searching for these atoms in geological archives on Earth, we can probe astrophysical events like supernovae long after their light has faded.

This is why Antarctica is so valuable. Its snow accumulates slowly and remains largely undisturbed, forming a layered record that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Each layer captures a snapshot of the material that was present in our cosmic neighbourhood at the time.

Finding stardust in Antarctic ice

When we studied 500kg of recent snow in Antarctica, we unexpectedly found this rare radioactive isotope. Where did it come from? There was no recent near-Earth supernova.

But our solar neighbourhood is filled with 15 clouds, with the Solar System currently traversing at least one of them. Is the stardust waiting in the clouds to be picked up by Earth? If yes, then the amount of stardust Earth collects should be related to their structure: the denser the clouds, the more iron-60 they contain. This was our educated guess in 2019.

Soon, other explanations were brought forward. Millions of years ago Earth received large showers of iron-60 from massive supernovae. Is the iron-60 in Antarctic snow the last remnant or an echo of this signal? A rain that became a drizzle?

To find out, we analysed a 300kg section of Antarctic ice, dating from 40,000 to 80,000 years ago. The process is painstaking. The ice needs to be melted and chemically treated to isolate tiny amounts of iron, including the iron-60 from the stardust.

Then, using the sensitive atom counting technique of accelerator mass spectrometry at the Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility at Australian National University, we counted individual atoms of iron-60.

The expectation was straightforward: based on previous measurements from surface snow of Antarctica and several thousand-year-old ocean sediments, we anticipated a certain steady level of iron-60 deposition.

Instead, we found less. Not zero, but noticeably lower than expected.

This result suggests that less interstellar dust was reaching Earth during that period. This is a remarkable change on a comparatively short astrophysical timescale and does not fit the long timescales of the iron-60 deposits that landed here millions of years ago. Instead, we needed to look for a smaller, more local source for the isotope.

A fitting story

Naturally, astronomers are also quite interested in the clouds around the Solar System. Last year, a study reconstructing the history of the clouds arrived at the conclusion that they most likely originated in a stellar explosion. Furthermore, they found the Solar System has been traversing the Local Interstellar Cloud from sometime between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.

If that’s correct, we would expect that the amount of iron-60 collected on Earth should have changed sometime in the same time period – between 40,000 and 124,000 years ago.

This is exactly what our results showed in Antarctica.

The story doesn’t fit perfectly, though. If these clouds did originate directly from an exploding star, we would expect way more iron-60 than we actually see in Antarctic ice.

Nevertheless, these clouds are imprinted in Earth’s geological record. If we look deeper and analyse even older ice, we might soon unravel the mystery of these local interstellar clouds, revealing their full history and uncertain origins.

Dominik Koll receives funding from the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE).

Back in 2005, US economist Fred Bergsten coined the term “Group of 2” or “G2”, proposing a stronger partnership between what are now the world’s two largest economies – the United States and China.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis a few years later, economic cooperation between these two countries briefly seemed to attest to the success of efforts at integrating China into a liberal rules-based order.

To be sure, the ostensible G2 was not meant to replace the larger, formalised G20 group of major economies, so much as strengthen it. Underpinning the broader G20’s response to the global financial crisis, the US enacted an initial US$787 billion fiscal stimulus, while China provided its own US$586 billion stimulus. This helped avert a much larger global economic catastrophe.

This week’s summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping heralds a different sort of G2. On Friday, Trump claimed the countries had struck some “fantastic trade deals”. But anyone hoping for details of such deals – on tariffs, rare earths or Iran – was left disappointed on Friday afternoon.

Whatever may have transpired, US–China cooperation no longer automatically implies positive spillover effects for the rest of the world. Instead, in 2026, the G2 appears, at best, to be a private bargain between two great powers, imposing hidden costs on those outside, looking in.

The Trump administration has ushered in a noticeable shift in how the US views its economic interests: no longer premised on shared liberal values, but on spheres of influence among great powers. The key question, therefore, is not whether the US and China can cooperate. It is what kind of order their cooperation will produce.

Read more: Trump-Xi summit: 3 ways the US and China can compete without going to war

West and East

An older economic contrast is useful here.

In the wake of the second world war, the Western bloc (led across the US, the United Kingdom, and Western European states) was united by a shared commitment to a Keynesian global order (under the Bretton Woods system) that sought freer trade in goods while preserving national economic autonomy.

In contrast, the Eastern bloc (led by the Soviet Union) organised trade through what was called the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon), trading many goods between countries through planned barter arrangements, instead of for cash.

The irony for the present day is that the Trump–Xi agenda looks more like the old Eastern bloc’s approach.

In this light, the clearest sign that a G2 may be working outside the G20 or larger rules-based order is not that Washington and Beijing are talking. It is the range of issues that may be managed, tying together such concerns as tariff relief, airplane orders, rare-earths access, chip restrictions, Taiwan and Iran.

In each of these cases, it’s reasonable the two countries would want to coordinate their policies. But together, they point to a new global order where two superpowers increasingly call the shots in their own interests.

Chips and rare earths

Rare earths and advanced chips are the clearest example. Beijing wants access to the advanced semiconductors necessary to dominate the artificial intelligence race.

Washington wants rare earths and critical minerals whose importance has become more acute as the conflict with Iran has strained US stocks of missiles, drones, air-defence systems and other high-end military technologies.

If these are traded against one another, the summit is not about economic liberalisation. It is about whether strategic technologies remain national-security constraints or become bargaining chips in a bilateral deal.

An entourage of executives

The business delegations that have accompanied Trump on this trip point in the same direction.

The presence of executives such as Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Apple’s Tim Cook, Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk (not to mention others from Qualcomm, Citigroup and Boeing) gave the summit the appearance of a commercial negotiation.

Reported agreements on aircraft orders, agricultural purchases, investment forums and corporate access may all be presented as signs of economic normalisation.

But the question is not only whether US firms gain market access. It is whether commercial wins help stabilise a great-power bargain whose geopolitical costs are borne elsewhere.

Any deal the countries eventually reach on tariffs will likely have the biggest market impacts. But the deal itself could matter less than the optics, allowing Trump to claim a business victory.

This might calm markets in the short term, but it highlights the potential for a retreat from rules-based multilateral liberalisation in the longer term.

A warning on Taiwan, near silence on Iran

The question of Taiwan loomed large over this week’s summit. On Thursday, Xi gave an unusually direct warning to Trump, saying if the issue was not handled properly, the two countries could see “clashes and even conflicts”.

In a larger sense, the danger is not necessarily a formal US concession on Taiwan. It is that Taiwan and other regional actors bear the external costs of a private bargain.

If Taiwan becomes one variable in a wider negotiation, the costs of US–China cooperation may fall on those not in the room.

Iran and oil broaden the same logic. If Trump has pressed Xi to use China’s influence over Tehran, he is not simply asking for diplomatic help. He is treating Beijing as a co-hegemon in a great-power bargain based on order for some – the US and China – and exclusion for others.

This kind of G2 can undermine the global public good. It will also test whether middle powers like Australia, Canada and European countries can keep their seat at the table where decisions are made or, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it, risk being “on the menu”.

Wesley Widmaier receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

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

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

Centre for World University Rankings president Nadim Mahassen warned

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

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

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

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

What’s going on?

What are rankings and what did they show?

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

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

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

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

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

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

A drop but not a shock

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constant concerns

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more: There is declining trust in Australian unis. Federal government policy is a big part of the problem

What are students paying for?

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

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

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

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

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

The international student factor

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

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

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

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

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

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

What now?

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

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

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

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

Kylie Message works for the Australian National University, which dropped in the rankings discussed in this piece.

Birth rates have been declining worldwide since the peak of the post-second world war baby boom. Birth rates have now reached below replacement in most of the world, including Australia. Put simply, populations on average aren’t replacing themselves.

Everyone from Elon Musk to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, to the pope have opinions on declining total fertility (or birth) rates – the average number of births per woman.

Overpopulation has dominated popular discourse since the 1960s. While fears of overpopulation remain, especially tied to immigration, concerns have shifted to depopulation and the related economic and national security issues.

Overpopulation fears to depopulation woes

In his 1968 book The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich warned the 1970s would bring “people, people, people, people” and an overpopulation “cancer” resulting in famine and war. Human extinction was imminent, we were warned.

Overpopulation-associated human extinction has not come to be.

The global total fertility rate has more than halved since 1950. Average birth rates for OECD countries now sit at 1.46 births per woman, well below the 2.1 required for generational replacement.

World population decline is projected by the mid-2080s. China is now in its fourth year of population decline. South Korea has been declining since 2019 with its near-global record low birth rates. Germany has seen deaths outnumber births since 1972. Japan, Greece, Italy, Cuba and Thailand are also among those in the depopulation club.

Without immigration, the United Kingdom would also see population decline, with deaths outnumbering births. Australia is about a generation away from the same fate. Immigration controls have seen depopulation in Canada.

Birth rates a solution to the ageing ‘problem’

Enormous advancements since the 1950s, mostly in health and medical technologies like immunisation, mean humans are living longer. We’re also having fewer children, and as a result populations are ageing.

An ageing population is a mark of success and human ingenuity, but economic systems tend to view ageing societies as problematic.

Workers and working-aged people are essential to maintain a healthy economy. Individual income taxpayers are the top source of federal government revenue in Australia. Too few people of working age replacing those retiring can seriously undermine economic wellbeing, forcing governments to do more service provision with less financial resources.

Below-replacement fertility and its implications for government bottom lines have resulted in Australian politicians calling on Australians to have more babies. “Have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country”, treasurer Peter Costello famously said in 2004.

In 2020, former prime minister Tony Abbott suggested the wrong kind of women were having children, calling on “middle class” women to have more. Talking the budget, treasurer Jim Chalmers in 2024 said it would be “better if birth rates were higher”.

Human catastrophe of low birth rates

People are increasingly saying the choice to have children is constrained by external factors. Worldwide, around one-in-five surveyed by the United Nations said fears about the future would or has resulted in them having fewer children than they wanted.

Housing affordability, economic stability, gender inequality and climate change present insurmountable barriers for having a much-wanted family.

The lack of choice to have children in below-replacement regions, I’d argue is indeed a human catastrophe. How is it that we’ve allowed society to become so hostile that children are out of the question for so many who want them?

The intergenerational bargain is well and truly corrupted.

We are confronted with the tough question of who will care for us with the children gone.

Can a human catastrophe be avoided?

The burden of having a family falls on working-aged people, especially women.

A baby bonus or one-off payment is unlikely to change people’s minds and increase the total fertility rate; such payments merely change timing. Instead, increasing total fertility rates requires a comprehensive suite of measures from a policy perspective.

Tackling the big four big domains of housing, the economy, gender and climate encompass issues such as

• secure, affordable and appropriate housing
• employment and income security
• accessible childcare
• social and workplace gender equality
• climate change action.

People of childbearing age aren’t being hedonistic when making family and fertility decisions. They’re not thinking about themselves, they’re actually thinking about the future world and weighing what that might look like for prospective children.

Loss of hope among people of childbearing age, including fears of being left behind, contribute to overall concerns about an insecure future.

Not only is the human catastrophe of low births rates reflecting more widespread concerns, such as insecurity, it could also be undermining social cohesion.

Rather than an exploding bomb of overpopulation, the world faces an economic and social implosion due to lacking substantive supports necessary to help raise much-wanted children.

Surely it’s beyond time we ask people what they actually need – and give it to them.

Liz Allen receives funding from the Australian Research Council for a Discovery Project on the history of grandparenting in Australia (DP250100728).

Doing a load of laundry involves lots of decisions – from which cycle to choose to what detergent to use.

These choices may seem like simple personal preferences. But in communities where skin and other infections are common, doing laundry is often part of medical advice.

Washing clothes and bedding is widely recommended to help control skin and other infections. However, we haven’t known which wash settings are needed to kill or remove pathogens found on fabrics.

How hot? For how long? And with what detergent?

Our new research aims to answer these questions.

Why washing matters

Washing clothes and bedding may be one way to support skin health.

Rural and remote First Nations communities experience a particularly high burden of skin infections. These infections are driven by the consequences of colonisation, socioeconomic marginalisation and housing inequity, which disproportionately affect First Nations people.

Skin infections can have serious consequences. For example, skin infections caused by the toxin-producing bacteria, Corynebacterium diphtheriae, are driving the current diphtheria outbreak that has already claimed one person’s life.

Strep A skin infections can lead to acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease, conditions that can cause inflammation throughout the body and permanent damage to the heart. This has a big impact on the lives of children and families. Severe cases may lead to serious disability or death.

Improving access to effective washing may be one way to support wellbeing and curb the spread of skin disease. But we need to get our wash settings right.

Read more: Deep-rooted inequalities are driving the latest diphtheria outbreak. But we can fix them

What we studied

In our new study, we conducted a systematic review that analysed all the available research about fabric contamination and the effect of washing practices on skin pathogens.

Our results show temperature is the most important factor in preventing the spread of skin infections. This was true across all the pathogens and parasites we reviewed.

We found it is most effective to launder clothes at a minimum temperature of 60°C for at least 15 minutes to effectively kill off any bugs or pathogens. This can be in a washing machine set to hot, or in a conventional dryer.

However, reaching these high temperatures is not always possible. Under current regulations, hot tap water can only reach a maximum of 50°C to prevent scalds. And only some washing machines have internal water heaters, so even a “hot” wash might not be hot enough. Heating water and running dryers is also energy intensive and expensive.

Detergents containing activated oxygen bleach can effectively kill some skin pathogens at lower temperatures. But we need more research to know whether detergents and disinfectants can make cold water washing more effective.

Washing in First Nations communities

However, it’s often not possible to wash laundry in a way that effectively kills pathogens. This is especially true in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Many households struggle to purchase a reliable washing machine that is large enough to suit the needs of families. Washing machines can be twice as expensive in remote communities than urban areas, and the cost of electricity is exorbitant. Environmental factors such as dust, wet seasons and hard water – meaning water with higher concentrations of certain minerals – can damage machines and shorten their lifespan.

In some areas, as many as 70% of First Nations households go without a functional washing machine. Even fewer households have access to a dryer.

Community laundries may be one way to improve access to washing facilities. Our research shows that in the past decade, more than 50 communal laundry facilities have been set up in at least 38 rural and remote First Nations communities. These facilities give people free access to industrial washing machines, machine dryers, hot water and detergent.

Last November, the federal government committed A$11.4 million in funding for new or upgraded laundries.

Read more: How we partnered with local communities to halve skin sores among Aboriginal children in remote WA

Where to from here

Washing facilities are tied to the human rights to water, sanitation and dignity. They also have clear benefits for wellbeing.

But more work is needed to understand how effective washing could help reduce skin infection rates, particularly in remote First Nations communities.

One reason is funding for these laundry facilities is often tied to potential health benefits. The Remote Community Laundries Project, for example, aims to prevent serious conditions that can arise from skin infections. However, we don’t have enough evidence for looking at the health impacts of having more laundry facilities, or how we can maximise them.

Another reason is we don’t currently have guidance to support communities and laundry providers delivering these services. Our research highlights that the Australian Standard for Laundry Practice, for instance, has no specific recommendations about how community laundry facilities should be established or run.

Everyone has the right to wash and dry their clothes and bedding. But more work is needed to ensure washing facilities and practices meet the needs, preferences and priorities of First Nations communities.

Rosemary Wyber is supported by an NHMRC Fellowship and receives funding from The Kids Research Institute Australia and Yardhura Walani at Australin National University.

Rachel Burgess receives funding from The Kids Research Institute Australia.

Kate Summer does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.