We’ve heard a lot about the artificial intelligence (AI) boom and how enormous amounts of money are being poured into companies building ever more powerful technologies.

That boom is now taking a new turn as major AI players edge closer to becoming publicly-traded companies.

According to reports, OpenAI is preparing to file confidentially for a public listing that could value the ChatGPT maker at hundreds of billions of dollars. Rivals including Anthropic (Claude) and Elon Musk’s SpaceX – which just absorbed xAI (Grok) – are also moving toward the stock market.

What many people may not realise, however, is that, through retirement funds, pensions and other managed investments, they could end up owning shares in these giants – whether they choose to or not.

And while people might have moral concerns with the AI companies they’re tied to, the greater issue at play is about money, risk and who ends up holding it.

Where AI’s billions go

Building a cutting-edge AI system requires vast numbers of specialised computer chips, running nonstop in data centres that consume enough electricity to power a small city.

OpenAI plans to spend around US$50 billion on computing power in 2026 alone. In 2017, that same company spent roughly US$30 million, a 1,600-fold increase in less than a decade. OpenAI is targeting roughly US$600 billion in compute spending – or that in areas such as processing power, data storage and cloud infrastructure – through to 2030.

It’s not just OpenAI. The big technology companies are collectively expected to invest around US$650 billion in AI infrastructure in 2026. That’s roughly one-third of Australia’s annual GDP – or two-and-a-half times New Zealand’s – being committed to one technology bet in a single year.

All these expenses must be covered before the companies earn consistent profits. This is why they keep raising money – and why the question of where that money will eventually come from is enormously important.

In 2025, total investment in AI companies reached US$217 billion. Then, in just the first three months of 2026, private AI companies raised a further US$226 billion, surpassing the entire 2025 total in a single quarter.

Much of this was concentrated in three transactions: US$122 billion for OpenAI, US$30 billion for Anthropic and US$7.5 billion for xAI.

Together, these three deals alone accounted for 71% of all AI funding that quarter. Mega-rounds above US$100 million now make up 94% of all AI investment by value.

The funding has mostly come from large institutions: venture capital firms, sovereign wealth funds, and technology giants that can afford to take the risk. The gains and the losses stay within a small, specialist group.

When the AI sector goes public

Once a company is publicly listed, anyone can buy its shares.

More importantly, large index-tracking funds – widely used in Australia’s Super system and New Zealand’s KiwiSaver funds – automatically gain exposure to companies once they become large enough to enter the indices those funds follow.

In other words, they don’t get to decide whether it looks like a good investment; the index simply decides for them.

That matters for ethical investors, too. The thought of AI raises concerns about privacy, labour, misinformation and security. But unlike tobacco or gambling, it may prove difficult to exclude because it is being increasingly woven into the world’s largest listed companies.

There is, therefore, a case for asking whether these companies should trigger an opt-out mechanism for fund managers and regulators before the listings arrive.

Neither OpenAI, Anthropic, nor xAI has formally announced a stock market listing, and timelines remain uncertain. When that shift comes, the risk also shifts. The investors who funded the early stages of this race knew what they were getting into.

The people who will end up holding the shares through their pension funds or index trackers may not.

Index providers are rewriting the rules

Here is where the picture becomes more complex. Major index providers are changing their rules so newly listed mega-cap AI companies can enter key benchmarks much faster.

Nasdaq has already adopted a fast-track rule that allows a newly listed mega-cap company to join the Nasdaq-100 after just 15 trading days. S&P Dow Jones Indices is consulting on similar changes that would reduce the waiting period and waive profitability requirements for mega-caps.

These changes are reshaping the index system to funnel passive money into AI giants almost as soon as they list – and before most investors have had time to decide whether they belong in their portfolios at all.

So, what can ordinary investors do?

As they likely won’t be making the call themselves on whether to invest in an AI stock market float, they can put questions to the fund managers doing so on their behalf.

Those might be questions about whether the company is becoming more efficient, what their customer retention looks like, or how their leadership holds up under pressure.

OpenAI’s 2023 board crisis showed how unusual governance structures can create sudden instability.

There is no doubt the AI revolution is real and is changing economies in the same way it is changing our everyday lives.

But whether the AI boom will create lasting value for ordinary investors – or mainly provide an exit for early-stage insiders – is a question fund managers and regulators cannot afford to leave unanswered.

Before the listings arrive, they need to decide: should ordinary investors be automatically swept into the AI gamble, or should they have a choice?

Sara Ali 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.

Our novel artificial intelligence model can predict extreme storm surges with high accuracy, including under future climate conditions. Because the AI model runs much faster, it can help researchers and practitioners better assess coastal flood risk for adaptation planning.

Sea levels are rising, and with them, the risks posed by extreme coastal events, such as storm surges – temporary rises in sea level caused mainly by storms, which are among the primary drivers of coastal flooding. For the more than 10% of the global population living in low-lying coastal regions, the combination of gradual mean sea level rise and increasingly intense extreme events represents a growing threat.

For coastal planners and policymakers, the key issue is not just the expected rise in mean sea level, but the changes in the likelihood and severity of extreme events. Infrastructure design, urban planning and disaster preparedness depend on estimates of extreme event scenarios.

However, projecting extreme sea level events remains a major scientific challenge, as they are driven by complex, nonlinear interactions between tides, atmospheric forcings, ocean dynamics and local coastal features. This means that uncertainty in extreme projections remains highly unquantified. Small differences in model assumptions can lead to large differences in predicted outcomes, especially for extremes. This uncertainty means a lot for planners, civil protection and, ultimately, the protection of human lives and assets.

The efficiency of AI models opens up new possibilities. Because AI models can generate predictions much faster than physics-based models, they enable the exploration of large ensembles of future scenarios, which would be prohibitively expensive using traditional models alone. This is particularly important for risk assessment, where understanding the probability of rare but catastrophic outcomes is essential.

A combined AI and physics-based approach for a changing risk

Traditional physics-based models, which use physical laws to represent how coastal waters move, can simulate these processes in detail, but they are computationally expensive, making it difficult to explore a wide range of future scenarios and uncertainties.

At the same time, artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being used in climate science, as it offers new opportunities to overcome these challenges. However, its reliability remains uncertain in this context, particularly due to two key challenges: the limited representation of rare but high-impact extremes in training data, and the need to generalise findings – in a robust fashion – to future climate conditions that may differ substantially from those observed historically.

AI and physics-based modelling are complementary tools: physics-based models remain essential for representing the underlying processes and for generating the high-quality data needed to train and validate AI models, and ultimately to build trust in their AI counterpart.

By combining the physical realism of traditional models with the efficiency and flexibility of AI, researchers are developing a new generation of tools for coastal risk assessment. These tools will be critical for informing adaptation strategies, helping societies better prepare for a future where extreme sea level events might become more frequent and more severe.

Our findings suggest that AI can be reliably used for projecting rare but high-impact extreme sea level events. In addition, AI models, by enabling rapid scenario generation and sensitivity testing, provide a new tool to better characterise these uncertainties.

A new AI emulator for extreme storm surge prediction

In our recent study published in Earth’s Future, we investigated whether AI-based models can accurately predict extreme sea level events, when trained to emulate the outputs of physics-based simulations and projections. In other words, our AI models aim to learn to reproduce the results of these more complex models, but much faster.

Our results show that AI emulators can successfully learn the complex dynamics behind storm surge events and reproduce extremes with high accuracy, including under future scenarios, compared to available projections up to the mid-21st century.

To demonstrate this, we developed a framework to improve the ability of AI models to represent extreme storm surge events and to test whether their predictions remain reliable under future scenarios.

We focused on the New York City coastal area as a case study, because it is highly exposed to coastal flooding, presenting a dense population, critical infrastructure and major economic assets – and because it has experienced devastating storm surges in recent history, such as during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which caused many fatalities and over $60 billion in economic damage.

Our AI emulator relies on openly available physics-based simulations from the Global Tide and Surge Model (GTSM), not only for training, but also for assessing its reliability under different climate conditions, including future scenarios.

Current limitations and next steps

The next step is to test the robustness of such AI tools further across a wider range of climate scenarios and integrate them into operational risk assessment frameworks and global climate data services providing hydro-climatic and coastal information to decision-makers, such as the Aqueduct Flood Risk Analyzer and the Copernicus Climate Data Store.

More broadly, AI models have the potential to address several critical needs in coastal risk analysis, but important gaps remain. These include improving and rigorously quantifying their transferability across a wide range of future scenarios, better representing uncertainties associated with physics-based parameters embedded in the training data, and assessing how well these models generalise across different geographic locations.

Clarifying the limits of their extrapolation capabilities will be essential for building confidence in their use for decision-making, particularly under conditions not seen before, due to climate change and non-stationarities (that is, changes in climate regimes and more intense extremes than what was observed before), and that are therefore outside the range covered by past observations or physics-based simulations used to train the AI models.

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The AXA science philanthropy is now part of the AXA Foundation for Human Progress, which brings together the commitments of AXA Group and Mutuelles d’Assurances in the fields of Science, Nature, Solidarity, and Culture. Before 2025, the global science philanthropy was held by the AXA Research Fund, which has supported over 750 projects around the world since its inception back in 2007. To learn more, visit Axa Foundation for Human Progress.

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A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!

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Andrea Ficchì received funding from AXA Research Fund, through the Ocean Decade Joint Call for Fellows on Coastal Livelihoods, for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship project conducted at Politecnico di Milano, endorsed by UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission as UN Ocean Decade Action.

Emiliano Longo is a member of the CMCC Foundation (Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change). He has received funding from Politecnico di Milano.

If you or someone you’re caring for has a medical emergency, visit your nearest emergency department or call 000.

But what if it’s not an emergency, or you’re not sure? Sometimes you can’t wait wait until 9am or Monday morning to see a doctor or access health care.

You might have a fever that’s not subsiding, a sprain that could be a break, a painful urinary tract infection, or a distressing situation that demands immediate mental health support.

Here are your options for accessing timely health care, in-person and virtually – including some that are free.

Medicare Urgent Care Clinics

Medicare Urgent Care Clinics provide bulk-billed care by a general practitioner (GP) for non-life-threatening illnesses and injuries.

Patients can walk in without an appointment or referral, and can access other services such as blood tests and X-rays. There are no out-of-pocket costs.

You can find your local clinic here.

Search engines to find a GP appointment – in person or online

Health service search engines such as Healthengine and HotDoc can help you find GPs and book appointments.

You can filter search results by types of services and telehealth availability, including the “GP telehealth on-demand option within 15 minutes” on Hotdoc.

Many will come with out-of-pocket costs.

Home visits

In-person home doctor visits for urgent, episodic illness or injury can also be arranged through options such as 13SICK National Home Doctor Service, DoctorDoctor, Hello Home Doctor Service, Sydmed, 13 CURE and OnCallDrs.

These are often bulk billed.

A call with a nurse or doctor

The new 1800MEDICARE helpline is a free 24/7 service where you can speak to a registered nurse about any health concern.

They will listen to your concerns, assess your symptoms and provide advice on next steps. This might mean looking after yourself at home, getting help from a GP, or attending an Urgent Care Clinic, pharmacy or emergency department.

If the 1800MEDICARE nurse advises you to see a GP within 24 hours, you may be offered a telephone or video call back from a 1800MEDICARE GP. These GPs can provide prescriptions via SMS.

Virtual emergency departments for non-life-threatening emergencies

Virtual emergency departments are free, online emergency departments that treat non-life-threatening emergencies such as pain, sprains, infections, respiratory illnesses, gastroenteritis, high blood pressure, pain, infections, minor burns and rashes.

Examples include:

• the Victorian Virtual Emergency Department
• the South Australia Child and Adolescent Virtual Urgent Care Service
• Queensland Virtual Emergency Care Service.

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Read more: What is a virtual emergency department? And when should you ‘visit’ one?

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Another similar option is My Emergency Doctor, which offers patients access to specialist emergency doctors via video call or telephone 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, this service costs $150.

Medicines and pharmacists

Some pharmacies operate on extended business hours, including 24 hours. You can find a pharmacy near you at this link, with the option to filter by “extended hours”.

In some circumstances, pharmacies can issue a small amount of a medicine if you’ve run out.

In some states and territories, pharmacists can provide medicines such as antibiotics for simple urinary tract infections without a prescription.

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Read more: It’s now easier to get antibiotics for UTIs. But here’s what to do if your symptoms don’t go away

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For people living in remote Australia, the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) runs a Medical Chests program. Medical chests contain a range of pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical items, including prescription-only medicines, which RFDS doctors may prescribe after a phone consultation.

Pregnancy, birth and children

Pregnancy, Birth and Baby is a free national service that provides support to expecting parents, and parents of children from birth to five years of age.

You can speak to maternal and child health nurses via phone, by calling 1800 882 436, or video call about you or your baby, between 7am and midnight, seven days a week.

CubCare is another virtual urgent care option which provides access to paediatric emergency doctors, for a fee.

Dental care

The Australian Dental Foundation runs a free 24/7 Emergency Dental Hotline which can help you work out the urgency of your issue and your next steps.

National Emergency Dentist is a private health service which connects patients to emergency dentists offering same-day and after-hours appointments, for a fee.

Mental health phone support

Mental health support will depend on your individual needs and background. You can access mental health support after hours through these call services (some also have online chats):

• Lifeline: 24/7 crisis support

• Beyond Blue: counselling via phone online chat

• Kids Helpline: 24/7 online and phone counselling for young people aged five to 25 years

• Suicide Call Back Service: 24/7 service providing phone and online counselling to anyone affected by suicide

• 1800 RESPECT: 24/7 support for people affected by domestic, family, or sexual violence

• Gambling Help Online: phone and online support for anyone affected by gambling

• National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline: 24/7 service for all states and territories, except South Australia which operates 8.30am–10pm

• the Butterfly Foundation for free and confidential support about eating disorders and body image.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander services

• 13 YARN: 24/7 crisis support phone line operated by and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples

• Yarning Safe'N'Strong: 24/7 support available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who need to have a yarn with someone about their wellbeing

• Brother to Brother: 24/7 crisis line providing phone support for Aboriginal men, staffed by Aboriginal men, including Elders.

LGBTQIA+ services

• QLife: phone and webchat that operates during afternoons and evenings seven days a week to support LGBTQIA+ people.

Communication assistance

The National Translating and Interpreting Service offers support to non-English speaking people for their consultations. This service is typically free, covers 150 languages and can be accessed after-hours. Register here.

The National Relay Service provides assistance to people with hearing or speech difficulties during their medical consultations.

Mahima Kalla received previous funding from the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre to help build a patient consultation summary application within Healthdirect's video telehealth platform.

Feby Savira Feby received a Priority Primary Care Centre Fellowship (2023-2025) supported by the Western Victoria Primary Health Network and was involved in the evaluation of Priority Primary Care Centres in the Western Victoria region.

Kara Burns receives funding from the Australian General Practice Foundation to research the scaling of digital maternity care in remote general practice. 

Sathana Dushyanthen 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.

Many parents have heard the warning: Don’t use baby talk with babies and toddlers. Instead, caregivers are often encouraged to speak properly and use adultlike language, out of concern that simplified speech could confuse children or delay language development.

But my research, which I highlighted in in my new book, “Beyond Words,” suggests the opposite is true. The sing-song voice many adults instinctively use with infants, sometimes called “baby talk” but more accurately known as “parentese” or infant-directed speech, actually helps children learn language.

Far from confusing babies, exaggerating phrases like “Loooook at the doggie!” capture their attention, help them detect patterns in speech and strengthen social bonding.

And the funny mistakes children make along the way, such as saying “goed,” instead of “went,” or “mouses” instead of “mice,” are not signs that children are learning language incorrectly. They are evidence that children are actively working out the rules of language for themselves.

What parentese really is

When many people think of baby talk, they imagine nonsense phrases like “goo goo ga ga” or made-up words like “num nums.” But that’s not what linguists and developmental psychologists mean by parentese.

Parentese uses real words and grammatically correct sentences, but with exaggerated intonation, a higher pitch, stretched-out vowels and a slower rhythm. Think of the way a caregiver might naturally say: “Hi, baaaaby! Are you huuungry?”

There is little evidence that occasional playful nonsense words harm children’s language development. But studies suggest that parentese in particular helps babies pay attention to speech, recognize patterns and engage socially.

Adults across cultures tend to speak this way to infants instinctively. Even people who swear they never use baby talk often slip into it around babies.

Researchers have found that infants actually prefer listening to parentese over regular adult speech. The exaggerated sounds and slower pacing make language easier to process. Babies are better able to pick out individual sounds, notice word boundaries and recognize patterns. In other words, parentese helps tune babies into language.

It also strengthens emotional connection. Language learning does not happen in isolation. Babies learn through warm, responsive interaction with caregivers during feeding, play, bath time and everyday routines.

Interestingly, humans are not the only ones who respond to this style of communication. Studies have even shown that cats react more positively when people use a baby-talk voice with them.

Babies are not passive learners

Children do not learn language simply by copying adults word for word. They actively test hypotheses about how language works. That is why toddlers make predictable and surprisingly logical mistakes.

One common example is overgeneralization. A child learns that people form the past tense of many verbs by adding “-ed,” so they produce forms like “goed,” “eated” or “comed.”

These are not random errors. In fact, they show that the child has understood a grammatical rule and is trying to apply it consistently. The problem is simply that English is full of irregular exceptions. The same thing happens with plurals. Children may say “foots” instead of “feet” or “mouses” instead of “mice.” Again, the logic behind these errors is sound.

Linguists sometimes say that children are little scientists, constantly testing patterns and revising their understanding as they receive more input from the world around them.

Why toddlers call everything a ‘dog’

Young children also make predictable mistakes with meaning.

A toddler might learn the word “dog” and then use it for every four-legged animal they encounter. Linguists call this overextension. On the flip side, some children use words too narrowly. A child may use “dog” only for the family pet and not recognize that other dogs belong in the same category. Linguists call this tendency underextension.

These mistakes reveal how children organize and categorize the world around them. They are gradually mapping words onto objects, people and experiences.

Pronouns are another tricky area. Small children often confuse “me” and “you” because these words constantly shift depending on who is speaking. If a parent says, “I’ll pick you up,” the child hears themselves called “you.” But when they try to repeat the sentence, they may not yet understand that the labels switch from speaker to speaker.

This is why toddlers sometimes say things that sound unintentionally cute or confusing. But beneath the confusion is a sophisticated learning process.

Even the Cookie Monster gets it wrong

Children’s speech errors are so recognizable that they often appear in popular culture. Sesame Street’s character Cookie Monster famously says things like “Me want cookie,” while Elmo often refers to himself in the third person: “Elmo wants this.” These speech patterns mirror real stages of child language development. Young children commonly confuse pronouns or refer to themselves by name before mastering forms like “I,” “me” and “mine.”

Despite occasional complaints from adults, there is no evidence that hearing this kind of speech harms children’s language development. If anything, it reflects the natural experimentation children go through.

‘Pasketti’ and ‘wabbit’

Pronunciation develops gradually too. Young children often simplify difficult sounds and groups of consonants. “Spaghetti” becomes “pasketti,” “rabbit” becomes “wabbit” and “yellow” may come out as “lellow.”

Speech-language specialists call these simplifications phonological processes. They are a normal part of development because some sounds are physically harder to produce than others. Sounds such as r, th, sh and ch tend to develop later because they require more precise control of the tongue and mouth.

Most children naturally outgrow these pronunciation patterns as their speech matures. However, persistent difficulties can sometimes signal a speech or language disorder, which may require professional support.

Mistakes are part of learning

Parents are often under enormous pressure to do everything right, including helping their children learn to speak a language. But children do not learn language by avoiding mistakes. They learn through interaction, experimentation and repetition.

Parentese helps babies focus on speech and engage socially. The funny mistakes toddlers make reveal that they are actively piecing together the complex system of language and are often signs of normal development. Language acquisition is messy, creative and remarkably sophisticated.

Speaking in an exaggerated sing-song voice to a baby is not something parents and caregivers need to feel embarrassed about.

Far from harming language acquisition, it may help lay the foundation for it.

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

“Digital authoritarianism” refers to governments using technology for surveillance and censorship to repress dissent.

China remains the master practitioner. There, sweeping surveillance and censorship at home is combined with cyber-espionage and disinformation, censorship and influence campaigns abroad.

But this problem is no longer confined to Moscow or Beijing. Democracies, too, are beginning to repress their citizens with the same tools, and export them abroad.

Two countries in particular – India and Israel – reveal how democracies are drifting toward the very digital authoritarianism they once opposed.

Israel: exporting spyware

Israel, a democracy, permits private firms to export spyware under a state-regulated system.

Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, is marketed as a tool licensed to government agencies for counterterrorism and serious crime investigations.

However, investigations have linked it to the surveillance of journalists, activists, lawyers and political opponents.

Pegasus spyware can infiltrate smartphones without the user clicking on a link. It can grant access to messages, calls, microphones and cameras.

It has been linked to the surveillance of journalists in Mexico, opposition politicians in India and civil society groups in Hungary.

Israel tightened export rules in 2021, insisting sales go only to trusted governments for legitimate purposes. Yet the problem has not disappeared.

In early 2025, it was revealed Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware firm cofounded by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, developed a powerful surveillance tool capable of potentially compromising encrypted communications.

WhatsApp said last year nearly 100 journalists and members of civil society had been targeted using Paragon spyware.

Reporters at Citizen Lab later identified the spyware as a Paragon product, Graphite, and confirmed it had been used against journalists. It remains unclear who exactly the perpetrators were.

Through its export control system for offensive cyber tools, Israel is still allowing Israeli firms such as NSO Group and Paragon Solutions to sell spyware abroad, including Pegasus and Graphite.

This has contributed to concerns about the normalisation of commercial spyware.

India: Pegasus turned inward

In India, Amnesty International’s Security Lab reported forensic evidence of Pegasus being used on the phones of high-profile journalists.

Earlier reporting alleged Indian journalists, activists, lawyers and opposition figures appeared among potential targets. Following a petition, the Supreme Court will soon decide whether there should be an investigation into “India’s alleged use of Pegasus spyware on journalists, activists and public officials”.

The perpetrator has not been conclusively identified in those forensic reports, but NSO Group says Pegasus is licensed only to law enforcement and the intelligence agencies of sovereign states and government agencies.

The Indian government has denied wrongdoing, with IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw saying such surveillance was not possible under Indian law. The government later declined to file a detailed affidavit before the Supreme Court, citing national security.

These allegations sit within a wider pattern of democratic erosion in India. Critics have linked the Pegasus controversy to broader state practices, including:

• frequent internet shutdowns and online censorship
• legal pressure on journalists and activists
• online harassment of journalists, activists and members of marginalised groups
• and the stifling of dissent.

In 2023, Apple warned at least 20 Indian opposition politicians and journalists that their iPhones may have been targeted by “state-sponsored attackers”, reviving allegations the Indian government was using electronic surveillance against domestic critics. The Indian government has rejected the implication, but has announced an investigation.

Social media platforms have also been pressured by Indian government agencies and regulators to remove posts critical of the government. And supporters of the ruling party are known to organise online harassment campaigns of government critics.

A global problem

Other democracies – from Hungary to Turkey to Mexico – have experimented with spyware and aggressive online controls.

Technologies once hailed as enabling protest, connecting citizens and amplifying marginalised voices are now being redeployed for surveillance and control.

In 2024, global internet freedom declined for the 14th consecutive year. This was driven by censorship, surveillance, disinformation, platform restrictions and controls on internet access.

Governments of all types are blocking platforms, expanding monitoring, and deploying trolls and bots to tilt online debate.

For instance, Russia’s state-linked online influence operations have used coordinated troll farms to manipulate political discussions at home and abroad. Turkey’s pro-government “AKtroll” networks have also been accused of amplifying official narratives and harassing opposition voices online.

Gradual erosion of freedoms

Digital authoritarianism does not arrive overnight. It advances through normalisation: spyware licensed as “security”, platforms nudged into silencing dissent, internet shutdowns excused as “temporary”.

These measures, taken alone, may appear minor. Together, they gradually erode freedoms until democratic life itself is hollowed out.

Reversing this requires democracies to commit to strict controls on spyware exports. These controls must be backed by transparency, accountability and robust oversight.

Surveillance powers and online restrictions must be publicly justified and subject to independent review.

Equally vital is the protection of civil society. Journalists, activists and opposition groups need guarantees they can operate freely.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have 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.

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

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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.

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Read more: What does One Nation actually believe in?

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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.

Humans are the only species known to use fully symbolic language: a system capable of expressing abstract ideas, imaginary worlds and endless combinations of meaning. But how did we get there?

The origins of language have fascinated philosophers, scientists and storytellers for thousands of years. Despite all our advances in linguistics, archaeology and cognitive science, we still don’t know exactly how language began.

That uncertainty hasn’t stopped people from trying to solve the mystery. In fact, some of the earliest theories of language’s origins are among the strangest and most entertaining ideas in the history of science.

Bow wow, ding-dong

In the 19th century, scholars proposed a flurry of curious theories to explain how speech first emerged. Many of these theories were given playful nicknames by the German philologist Max Müller, who intended them partly as satire. Yet the theories were genuine attempts to tackle one of humanity’s biggest questions.

The most famous is probably the Bow-Wow Theory. This suggested language began through imitation of natural sounds. Early humans, according to this theory, copied the noises around them: animal cries, splashing water, thunderclaps and birdsong. Words such as “buzz”, “hiss”, “bang” and “splash” seem to support the idea because they sound like what they describe.

But there is a problem. Different languages hear the same sounds differently. English dogs go “woof” or “bow-wow”, but in Turkish they go “hev-hev”, while Indonesian dogs go “guk-guk”. Even animal noises, it turns out, are filtered through culture and language.

And onomatopoeic words (words that imitate sounds) make up only a tiny fraction of our vocabularies. Most words sound nothing like their meanings. For instance, there is nothing inherently tree-like about the word “tree”.

That brings us to the Ding-Dong Theory, which argued that sounds and meanings are naturally connected in some deeper, almost mystical way.

Some words do seem to fit their meanings uncannily well. “Mini”, “teeny” and “itsy-bitsy” feel small and delicate. “Lump”, “rump” and “plump” sound heavier and rounder.

Modern linguists call this sound symbolism. One famous experiment asked participants to match two nonsense words, “bouba” and “kiki”, to two shapes: one rounded and one jagged. Most people matched “bouba” with the soft shape and “kiki” with the sharp one.

The effect is real, but it is limited. Most language still appears to be arbitrary, which means there is no natural reason why a particular sound should mean a particular thing.

Pooh-pooh, la-la, ye-he-ho

Other theories focused less on imitation and more on emotion and social interaction.

The Pooh-Pooh Theory proposed that speech began with instinctive emotional cries such as “ouch”, “oh” or perhaps less publishable exclamations uttered after stubbing a toe. According to this idea, language evolved from spontaneous vocal reactions to pain, surprise, fear or joy.

Again, though, there are complications. Interjections vary widely across languages. English speakers say “ouch”. Greeks say “aou”. Czechs might exclaim “ach”. Emotional sounds are not nearly as universal as they seem.

Then there is the wonderfully named Yo-He-Ho Theory, which suggested language emerged from rhythmic chants used during collective labour, like sailors chanting “yo-heave-ho” while hauling ropes, or workers singing together to coordinate physical effort.

The theory may sound quaint, but modern researchers do think rhythm, cooperation and social bonding played important roles in human evolution. Language is, after all, deeply social.

Another proposal, the La-La Theory, linked language to music. Charles Darwin entertained the possibility that speech evolved from musical calls used in courtship and emotional expression. Before humans spoke, perhaps we sang?

Some modern theories echo this idea. One hypothesis suggests that, as early humans began walking upright, parents increasingly needed to soothe babies from a distance. Sing-song vocalisations, cooing and proto “baby talk” may have helped strengthen emotional bonds and eventually paved the way for speech.

Gestures, symbols and brains

Today, most scientists think no single theory fully explains language origins. Instead, language probably emerged gradually through a combination of gestures, vocalisations, facial expressions, social cooperation and increasing cognitive complexity.

Some researchers argue that language began with gestures before shifting to speech. Others believe language evolved as a tool for social bonding, allowing larger groups of humans to cooperate and share information. Still others see language as tied to the evolution of symbolic thought itself: our ability to imagine, plan, remember and communicate abstract ideas.

Biology is also a factor. Humans have developed unusually precise control over the tongue, lips and vocal tract. We have evolved specialised brain regions linked to language processing.

But anatomy alone cannot explain language. Parrots can mimic speech sounds. Many animals communicate. None, however, appear to possess grammar and symbolism on the human scale. And, frustratingly, early language leaves no evidence behind. Spoken words don’t fossilise.

That lack of evidence is one reason the topic became so controversial that, in 1866, the Société de Linguistique de Paris banned discussions about language origins altogether, dismissing the field as hopelessly speculative.

Of course, theories about language origins also appear in religion and mythology. In Greek mythology, the messenger god Hermes was associated with language and communication. In the Hindu tradition, the goddess of knowledge and speech Saraswati bestowed Sanskrit upon humanity. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, language was a gift from God, who enabled Adam to name the animals in the Garden of Eden.

These stories reflect something deeply human: our urge to explain where language came from, because language itself feels almost magical. Every theory of language origins captures a small piece of the puzzle. Imitation, emotion, rhythm, music, gesture, cooperation and symbolic thought probably all played some role.

But none can provide a complete answer. The truth is that language evolved so long ago, and likely so gradually, that we will never pinpoint a single moment when it began, unless someone invents a time machine.

The birth of language will probably remain one of humanity’s greatest unsolved mysteries. Still, the theories themselves tell us something important. Humans are always trying to explain what makes us human. And language may be the most human thing of all.

Karen Stollznow 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.

Mining billionaire Gina Rinehart is bankrolling the acquisition of a 9.5% stake in Southern Cross Media by Bruce McWilliam, who worked for Murdoch’s News Corp for nine years and is also a former Seven Network executive.

This venture is costing Rinehart $26 million. It does not buy her a direct stake in Southern Cross, but if McWilliam cannot uphold his side of a security deed he has signed with her, she could take control of it.

Southern Cross is one of Australia’s biggest media organisations. It owns the Seven Network, 7news.com.au, the Triple M and Hit radio brands, a raft of regional radio stations, and West Australian Newspapers.

The Rinehart-McWilliam-Murdoch axis is a formidable force, part of a new combination of media, political and mining interests, reminiscent of that which formed the Liberal Party in the 1940s. The other key figures are News Corp chair Lachlan Murdoch, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and Liberal Party director Tony Abbott.

This is the lens through which it is instructive to assess the media’s coverage of One Nation’s rise since the Farrer byelection on May 9.

To see the parallels with the 1940s, we need to join a few dots.

Rinehart is a benefactor to Hanson. She recently bought her a light aircraft worth $1 million.

She is also a benefactor to Lachlan Murdoch. Her company Hancock Prospecting is sponsoring Sky News, owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation, to the extent of a little over $1 million for a Sky event in Dubbo called the Bush Summit.

Lachlan Murdoch is chairman of News Corporation. In 2023, he appointed Tony Abbott to the board of the News subsidiary, Fox Corporation, a day after Rupert Murdoch announced his retirement. In May this year, Abbott was elected unopposed as federal president of the Liberal Party.

Lessons from the 1940s

The parallels with the 1940s can be seen in volume two of Sally Young’s magisterial two-volume history of the Australia media, Media Monsters, where she describes the machinations that led to the formation of the Liberal Party.

The right was in disarray. Robert Menzies’ comically ill-named United Australia Party had been trounced by Labor at the 1943 election. In the aftermath, Menzies was re-elected leader but made it a condition that he had the right to form a new party.

He was backed by an entity called Collins House. This was a collection of companies connected by networks of powerful business figures who dominated mining and manufacturing. An influential figure was Lachlan Murdoch’s grandfather, Keith Murdoch. As managing director of the all-powerful Herald and Weekly Times (HWT) newspaper group, he provided a vital connection between the Collins House group and the most senior level of politics.

The HWT and other major media proprietors of the day anointed Menzies and his proposal for the new Liberal Party, at a dinner of Collins House magnates in Melbourne in 1944.

The difference between the political circumstances of the 1940s and those of today is that today there are two right-wing political parties contending for supremacy: the Liberal Party and One Nation.

Rinehart seems to be having a million quid each way on which will prevail. By contrast, if the recent coverage of One Nation by The Australian is any guide, Lachlan Murdoch has already cast his vote decisively for the Liberal Party.

The media sober up

For a fortnight after One Nation’s historic win in Farrer, the media, including News Corp media, were intoxicated by the attendant excitement and controversy: the shredding of Liberal Party support; Hanson’s ambition to be prime minister; the possibility of a Liberal-One Nation coalition.

Then, led by The Australian, the media began to sober up. On May 23, its editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, wrote that the Nationals, Liberals and One Nation were locked in a bitter competition with “life or death” consequences.

From that point on, The Australian applied the blowtorch of journalistic scrutiny to One Nation, and The Age and Sydney Morning Herald swiftly followed.

With its customary disregard for journalistic ethics, The Australian made a point of reporting that One Nation’s South Australian parliamentary team was looking like a “rainbow coalition”, one of its MPs having come out as gay with a partner who was an Indonesian Muslim.

But then it got into some serious public-interest journalism. For two days it pursued the party over its handling of rape allegations against an adviser, Sean Black.

It accused Hanson of shirking her parliamentary duties by being absent from 88% of Senate estimates hearings over the past decade. It also drew attention to the fact One Nation had failed to lodge audited financial records for three years in Queensland, and disparaged its policy proposal for citizen-initiated referendums.

On June 3 it drew on all this to publish a thundering editorial. One Nation was drifting further out to the fringes. It would be divisive and disruptive. It had appeared to lurch into blind confusion. Hanson was “not fit in any sense” for the role of prime minister.

On June 6, it led page one with a full-frontal attack, carrying the self-revealing headline: “Hanson hit”. It said Hanson had been caught out misleading voters, raising further questions about her capacity to be prime minister.

The Age and SMH were by then taking up the theme.

Suddenly Hanson was reportedly not sure if she would pitch for the prime ministership. She had admitted having had to close down party branches that had been “infiltrated by extremists”. She had insisted she would not be influenced by Rinehart despite having adopted one of Rinehart’s key policies. In other words, she was all over the place.

On June 6, the papers’ political and international editor, Peter Hartcher, described her as a firebrand provocateur who specialises in grievances without solutions and turns to scapegoats instead – Asians, First Nations people, Muslims. He pointed out that Hanson had answered “no” when asked by another journalist whether she could think of any error that Donald Trump might have made since taking power.

The same day another Age/SMH commentator, Paul Sakkal, wrote about what he called the collection of right-wing forces barracking for Hanson: openly white supremacists, people who rallied alongside neo-Nazis, supporters of the so-called sovereign citizen Dezi Freeman, who had killed two policemen. “A serious governing party cannot retain these relationships.”

A right mess

The big question after all this is how the forces brought together through the new media-politics-mining combination will resolve the obvious tensions involved in creating an effective force on the right of Australian politics.

Murdoch, through The Australian, has clearly signalled his contempt for One Nation, and already has Abbott on his team through Fox Corporation.

Rinehart, with her substantial holdings via McWilliam in Southern Cross Media, could go either way: backing Hanson or the Liberals. And her record indicates she would use her power to influence editorial decision-making to support her choice.

In 2012 she became the largest shareholder in the Fairfax company, with 14.99%. However, she refused to sign the company’s charter of editorial independence, and as a result was refused a seat on the board. She sold out in 2015.

Her history in refusing to sign the Fairfax charter is a strong indicator she would want the option of using her position on any media board to influence editorial decisions.

The old Fairfax newspapers, The Age, the SMH and the Australian Financial Review, are now owned by the Nine Entertainment Company, and stand outside the new cabal. A crucial question is whether they might prove to be a countervailing force.

One Nation set off this earthquake in Australian politics, but how the media play into the aftershocks will be a significant factor in the shaping of the new landscape.

Correction: this article originally referred to Gina Rinehart as “billionaire heiress to the Lang Hancock mining empire”. This has been amended to “mining billionaire”.

Denis Muller 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.

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.

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

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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.

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

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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.

The 2026 Africa-France summit in Nairobi on May 11-12 is the first to be held in an African country that is not a former French colony. It is also the first to be held since the dramatic collapse of relations between France and a number of west African countries – notably Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

The 2026 summit can be understood as the latest example of President Emmanuel Macron’s new Africa doctrine, which he laid out in Burkina Faso in 2017. The doctrine’s three notable messages were:

• an apology for colonial wrongs

• a neoliberal small-business approach to assistance programmes

• the French resolve to develop new alliances outside French Africa.

In keeping with the new doctrine, the French president hesitantly apologised in 2021 for some aspects of French colonial policy in Algeria. These include the torture and assassination of the Algerian nationalist hero Ali Boumendjel.

But mostly, Macron has looked to strengthen the position of Paris as old alliances were becoming weaker.

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Read more: France in Africa: why Macron’s policies increased distrust and anger

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He has consciously invested time and effort beyond French west Africa. The official visit to Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, is a case in point.

Right after his election in 2017, France’s development aid agency (AFD) and the Tony Elumelu Foundation signed an agreement in Nigeria to empower a new generation of business leaders. Tony Elumelu Foundation is a Lagos-based non-profit that promotes youth entrepreneurship across Africa.

Macron then promoted entrepreneurship during the New France-Africa Summit in 2021. He sought to inspire the youth of Africa to innovate and set up businesses.

This year’s conference is held under the banner: “Africa Forward: Partnerships between Africa and France for innovation and growth”. The business start-up vibe is no coincidence.

Kenya has also stressed the groundbreaking nature of the meeting for its focus on Africa as a major partner for Europe. Europe is looking for new allies in the midst of a war in Ukraine; and the US is unreliable, with Donald Trump imposing tariffs and questioning the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

As a historian of global north-global south relations, I see the meeting less as groundbreaking, and more as a continuation of an older, mutually beneficial relationship between Kenya and France.

Kenya hopes its relationship with France will elevate its influence across Africa, allowing it to rival the diplomatic weight of South Africa, which hosted the G20 summit in November 2025.

By transcending the classic divide between French and British Africa, Nairobi can present itself as a continental leader and as a diplomacy city.

History of the relationship between France and Kenya

The economic and diplomatic relationship goes back to the 1960s and 1970s. Back in September 1970 France sent a little-known legal expert called Jaques Mollet to advise the Kenyan Ministry of Industry and Commerce on the newly-formed East African Community.

France also sought cooperation with institutions of the East African Community such as the East African Development Bank. By becoming a close partner of a newly established regional economic bloc in Africa, in which Nairobi played a pivotal role, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs sought to weaken the British influence of Africa while strengthening its own position within the European Economic Community, now the EU.

Paris somewhat cynically justified its meddling as a way to strengthen continental unity since a French and a British sphere of influence in Africa would lead to unnecessary internal competition between the Commonwealth countries in Africa and Françafrique.

Kenya sought to strengthen its trade relations with France and the EEC in the 1960s. This was partly an attempt to become more independent of the Commonwealth. When negotiating with the EEC in 1963, an east African delegation that included Kenya’s Minister of Labour Tom Mboya stressed that maintaining the East African Common Market was key – not the Commonwealth.

Ruto and Macron’s shared understanding

The similarities between Kenya’s President William Ruto and Macron further strengthen this historical bond between Kenya and France. They share the same diplomatic goals. They are both focusing on climate change funding and security, and they share a preference for neoliberal privatisation as a mode for governance at home and abroad.

Ruto’s election campaign in 2022 touted the “hustler nation” – a focus on enabling small businesses. Macron has acted as a businessman-diplomat abroad, pushing small businesses as a solution for underdevelopment.

It’s no accident therefore that the 2026 summit will host a business forum and talks will focus on the potential benefits of artificial intelligence. AI, climate initiatives and weapons manufacturing, as well as the small-business ventures that have emerged through these priorities, are areas of cooperation and investment between African countries and the former colonial powers. Politicians like to flaunt this.

Part of the reason is that these are yet unproven ventures with no long history of unequal exchange between the two sides. They are natural common ground for two sides seeking a renewed relationship that is less burdened by the dark history of colonial oppression.

Yet France and Kenya’s agreement about the need to address security, climate change and artificial intelligence obscures the fact that both countries often find themselves on opposing sides of these issues.

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has shown, African and European leaders do not necessarily share the same analysis of the global security situation. European countries assumed they would get complete support from African countries but only 28 out of 54 African countries voted in favour of a United Nations resolution that condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kenya abstained.

On issues like climate change and artificial intelligence, France and Kenya again agree on the broad principle that these issues require urgent action, but disagree on the form the action should take.

For instance, climate change has hit Kenya hard. Extended droughts require genuine climate action. At the same time, France and the EU have been talking about loosening climate regulations to address the energy crisis caused by the US war on Iran. This includes easing emission regulations for cars.

The same problem presents itself in relation to the AI economy, which is being championed by France. It is cheap labourers in Kenya that have been doing much of the legwork to keep AI applications going. Large language models and other applications need to be trained and monitored by humans and they are often trained in Kenya’s so-called “AI sweat shops”. Kenyans are doing much of the data labelling and content moderation AI work.

Long term relationship?

In essence, the summit illustrates how climate finance, security and AI are being used to bolster commercial interests in both Africa and France, a strategic attempt to redefine a relationship long shadowed by colonialism.

However, the future of this entrepreneur-led approach remains uncertain. Its success hinges on whether France and Kenya can ensure that the wealth generated by these emerging sectors is distributed broadly, or if it will merely enrich a small circle of tech elites.

Frank Gerits 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.

Egisto Ott is no James Bond. But the stories the 63-year-old Austrian told a Viennese jury recently would make good plotlines. Ott worked as an intelligence officer in Austria’s now-defunct Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counterterrorism. He was also moonlighting for the Russians.

Prosecutors say Ott, who was sentenced to four years in prison on May 20, handed over information to fellow Austrian Jan Marsalek, the fugitive former executive of the collapsed payments firm Wirecard. Marsalek ran a cell of Bulgarians who were convicted in London in 2025 of spying for Russia. They called themselves the “minions”.

In 2023, the London Metropolitan police in cooperation with MI5 secured chat messages between Marsalek and the minions, which led to Ott. It turned out Ott had provided sensitive data on dissidents, investigative journalists and a Russian intelligence defector. The trial also revealed that Ott had obtained the infamous “canoe-trip-mobiles”.

In 2017, high-ranking Austrian civil servants went on a canoe trip in a tributary of the Danube River. They managed to fall into the water and had their phones sent in for repairs. Their mobile data was copied by Ott and subsequently ended up in Moscow, along with Marsalek’s favourite Viennese chocolate cake, a Sachertorte. According to the chat messages, the minions had a stressful time finding the correct one (there are rival Sachertorte recipes).

What sounds like a comic opera has a sinister backstory. Since the 1950s, Austria has hosted several international organisations that are regularly targeted by intelligence services. These include Opec (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

However, Austria’s reputation as a spying hub dates back even longer. The Austrian capital, Vienna, was known for espionage before and after the second world war. Arnold Deutsch, the recruiter of the Cambridge Five spy ring that passed information to the Soviet Union, hailed from Vienna. Its leading light, Kim Philby, was also talent-spotted by Soviet intelligence in the city in 1933.

But Vienna was never just a playground for Soviet intelligence. After the war, when the city was divided into four sectors for allied occupation, the UK’s foreign intelligence service, MI6, started its most creative cold war operations. Peter Lunn, head of MI6’s Vienna station, built listening stations in the city to tap Soviet phone lines.

He hid his listening tunnels underneath ordinary shops in the British zone. The first tunnel was built beneath a police station. Later, MI6 built another tunnel under a jewellery shop and then installed intelligence officers posing as a young, rich couple in a Viennese villa. While they were partying upstairs, their colleagues listened in to Russian military traffic downstairs.

The only surviving witness of a listening station today is Sir Rodric Braithwaite, whom I first interviewed in 2024. As a 19-year-old conscript, Braithwaite worked with British Army Field Security in the Aspang listening station, next to the Aspang Bahnhof (a train station on the outskirts of Vienna).

It wasn’t an uplifting experience. He sat there for long shifts with earphones on, handling old equipment and pressing recording buttons. But his memories of the tunnel are valuable because to this day MI6 has not released any photos, let alone recordings, that were made during these operations.

The Third Man

They have also not revealed the details of another highly creative intelligence operation. In 1948, a British team arrived in Vienna to film The Third Man, a thriller set in the city. They were eager to shoot scenes in the Soviet sector.

Four key people involved in the making of the film were working for British intelligence: novelist Graham Greene, director Carol Reed, “Austria advisor” Elizabeth Montagu and, most importantly, producer Sir Alexander Korda. Korda’s film production company had been providing covers for British intelligence officers in Europe since the 1930s.

Whether the filming of The Third Man was connected to Lunn’s tapping operations, or whether MI6 had to smuggle something out of the Soviet sector, is a matter of conjecture. But “odd people” appeared on the set.

The film’s sound engineer, Jack Davies, remembered a British technician who turned up out of the blue. After filming, the technician vanished completely and Davies never came across him again – something rather unusual in the small world of British film technicians.

The script girl, Angela Allen, who I first interviewed for my book Das Haus am Gordon Place (Vienna ‘48) in 2024, also realised that something odd was going on. She noticed that Carol Reed was under enormous stress in Vienna and kept himself awake with Benzedrine. He stopped taking the drug once they were back in England, filming in London studios.

Allen, who is 97 now, wasn’t surprised to find out years later that Korda was working for the British intelligence services. She told me: “He had enormous charm. He could make his people do everything for him.”

Perhaps that is one reason why Ott and Marsalek failed. To succeed as a spy in Vienna, you need to be a great illusionist like Alexander Korda.

Karina Urbach’s book about spies in Vienna, Das Haus am Gordon Place (Vienna ’48), won the German crime award. Her interviews with Angela Allen and Sir Rodric Braithwaite can be watched here: https://vimeo.com/1086100608

Cerebral palsy is the most common disability that starts in childhood, affecting about 50 million people worldwide.

Cerebral palsy can impact a person’s ability to move their body. This can result in mobility problems, muscle stiffness or weakness, and abnormal movements. There are often other neurological issues as well, such as epilepsy or visual impairment.

Physiotherapy can help people with cerebral palsy across the lifespan. It uses a range of interventions to improve mobility and function. Conventional physiotherapy includes treadmill training, strength training and task-specific training (such as practising getting in and out of a car).

But there’s another therapy tool that’s been showing promise – exoskeletons. These wearable devices support a person’s body from the outside, helping their posture and movements.

For two decades, lower limb robotic exoskeletons have been a major focus in neurological rehab for adults. The majority of research has been about people with stroke and spinal cord injury.

Can they help with cerebral palsy too? Published in Disability and Rehabilitation Journal, our new systematic review of robotic exoskeletons for cerebral palsy reports promising findings – and more questions to tackle.

From the lab to everyday life

The first exoskeletons to help people walk were developed in the 1960s. These were clunky, complex devices, and took several decades to leave the lab.

Over the past 60 years, exoskeletons have become much more streamlined. In Australia, several have been approved by the Therapeutic Goods Administration in recent years.

There are three main categories of medical exoskeleton. Two of them are essentially stuck in place – these are devices paired with treadmills, such as the Lokomat, and “end-effectors” (static devices similar to an elliptical machine), such as the Innowalk.

The third category are devices which can be used overground, such as the Atlas 2030. With overground devices, users can have more choice in where they move, and interact with their environment more.

They even show promise as longer term assistive devices – something the person might wear in everyday life.

What does the evidence say?

An advisory committee for Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is currently reviewing various supports for people with disability, including robot-assisted gait training.

The results will advise Australia’s peak disability funding body on whether and how to fund therapy with this technology. So, it’s timely to look at the evidence. That’s exactly what our systematic review did.

We asked: what are the effects of wearable overground exoskeleton-assisted therapy on physical, functional, quality of life and participatory domains for people with cerebral palsy? “Participation” refers to being truly involved, rather than just present, in chosen activities.

We included 21 studies representing 241 people with cerebral palsy, with an average age of nine. Then, we extracted and analysed data for all clinical outcomes. This included walking speed, endurance, balance, high-level mobility (running and jumping), strength, goal attainment and more.

Robotic rehabilitation outperformed conventional therapies for four outcomes:

• walking speed
• walking endurance
• balance
• high-level mobility.

This means using exoskeletons could provide meaningful benefits in these areas for people with cerebral palsy.

For other outcomes, there was not enough data to make recommendations, or results were inconsistent. Skin irritation was reported in some studies, but never prevented ongoing use of the exoskeleton. Where mentioned, user experiences were generally positive, although most studies didn’t evaluate them.

More to discover

Despite our review showing some encouraging benefits of exoskeleton therapy for people with cerebral palsy, there’s much we still don’t know. Very few of the included studies reevaluated outcomes after the person stopped the therapy. So we can’t say whether benefits are sustained.

We also couldn’t categorise results by type or severity of cerebral palsy, or by age. And with only seven adult participants represented in this systematic review, results can be confidently applied to children, but not adults.

There’s some evidence this technology is beneficial, compared to conventional therapy. However, no studies explicitly compared the use of the exoskeleton with the next most equivalent, and more readily available intervention – bodyweight supported treadmill training.

Exciting is not enough

Recently, therapy with overground exoskeletons is becoming more available in Australia. Costs for these sessions with trained and experienced clinicians can be supported through NDIS funding. However, currently no scheme in Australia will fund a person to have an exoskeleton of their own.

It’s very common for families to want to “try it all”, particularly new and exciting therapy options. Exoskeletons are definitely exciting and attract significant interest.

However, it’s important that families don’t waste money and time on inappropriate therapies.

Our systematic review supports the use of overground exoskeletons for walking speed, walking endurance, balance and high-level mobility for people with cerebral palsy.

It’s crucial for clinicians to provide appropriate and evidence-based advice on the best treatment options. If someone with cerebral palsy wants to try robotic exoskeleton therapy, the clinician should set clear goals for what results to expect, and step forward with caution.

Nicola Postol 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.