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The Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme (PALM) has been lauded by both sides of politics as a “win win” for the islanders who come here and the Australians who use their services.

Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs has even labelled it a “triple win”, for the workers, their hosts and for their home nations who receive remittances.

But beneath the surface serious questions are being asked about the safety of workers denied the right to leave their employers.

A report by the NSW Anti-slavery Commissioner entitled Be Our Guests has identified signs of debt bondage, deceptive recruiting, forced labour and, in extreme cases, servitude, sexual servitude and human trafficking.

The NSW parliament has launched its own inquiry into the risks faced by migrant workers in response and is seeking submissions.

Employment Minister Murray Watt this month signalled changes, saying there had been “far too many abuses of the PALM scheme”.

PALM allows rural and regional employers to hire workers from nine Pacific nations and Timor-Leste when there are not enough local workers available.

Unplanned pregnancies, sleeping rough

The workers hired do not have the right to change employers while in Australia, even for contracts of up to four years, except via a request from their original employer or a direction from the Department of Employment.

This means workers who abandon their employers for reasons including underpayment of wages, excessive deductions and overcharging for accommodation become absconders and lose their rights.

The NSW Modern Slavery Commissioner says there are several thousand absconded PALM workers in Australia, without access to health insurance and formal income. Among them are women with unplanned pregnancies denied antenatal care due to ineligibility for Medicare.

The Commissioner says crisis accommodation services in the NSW Riverina report having exhausted all available resources, including tents, for PALM workers who have left their employers and are sleeping rough.

Australia had 30,805 PALM workers at the end of August, one-third of them (11,420) in Queensland. Most work in farming (52%) and 39% in meat processing. The accommodation and care industries between them account for 6%.

For many of these workers, the income is life-changing. An I-Kiribati worker I interviewed recently told me she makes more money cleaning hotel rooms in Queensland than is paid to the president of her country.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says between July 2018 to October 2022 PALM workers sent home a total of A$184 million, but their employers made profits of $289 million and charged them a further $74 million in rent.

Unable to switch employers, their bargaining power is weak.

An estimated 45 workers on the PALM scheme died between June 2022 and June 2023. Nineteen deaths remain under investigation.

After a Fijian abattoir worker died of a brain tumour in June, Fiji raised with Australia claims of racism, bullying, excessive workloads, unfair termination and unsafe working conditions under the program.

Minimum pay, but no right to move

Reforms introduced last year guaranteed workers a minimum of 30 hours per week and a minimum weekly take-home pay (after deductions) of $200.

But until PALM workers are able to move freely between approved employers they will remain at risk of what the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions Michele O’Neil calls modern-day slavery.

O’Neil wants the government to blacklist bad employers and identify ethical ones in consultation with unions and civil society organisations. But she says until PALM workers can move, they risk being treated as disposable labour.

Many employers treat their PALM workers well, but the current design of the scheme leaves that outcome to chance, and leaves badly-treated workers trapped.

It’s time to give them the same sort of right to move between employers as the rest of us. Läs mer…

On the surface, most of Canada’s lakes and rivers look pristine. But below the surface, many are facing essential challenges to their health. Why? To better understand the health of Canadian lakes and rivers, we must look beyond the site itself to the whole watershed.

Canada’s freshwater streams, rivers and lakes are inherently connected ecosystems. Driven by precipitation and gravity, the flow of water changes across seasons and location. Connected waterflows form watersheds. A watershed is the combined area drained by a body of water, including groundwater aquifers.

All human activity within a watershed that affects the quality of flowing water — including rain, snow, irrigation or groundwater — will have an impact upon all the water bodies in the system. Because of this, it is essential to monitor and regulate human activities in a lake’s watershed if its health and biodiversity are to be preserved.

Disturbances can influence aquatic ecosystems even if they occur far away from the water’s edge, especially where large quantities of water flow rapidly. Simply put, what happens upstream, and on land, is as important to what is happening in the lake itself. What’s more, poor freshwater health can affect the health of the land within the watershed as well.

Our lakes: their secrets and challenges, is a series produced by La Conversation/The Conversation.

This article is part of our series Our lakes: their secrets and challenges. The Conversation and La Conversation invite you to take a fascinating dip in our lakes. With magnifying glasses, microscopes and diving goggles, our scientists scrutinize the biodiversity of our lakes and the processes that unfold in them, and tell us about the challenges they face. Don’t miss our articles on these incredibly rich bodies of water!

In my research, I work to better understand lake, stream and river ecosystem functioning, biodiversity and health. This is of increasing importance as aquatic environments are affected by climate change. What is clear, is that to fully understand what is going on in a lake ecosystem, you need to look beyond its shoreline.

Truly understanding how water flows within a watershed can empower us to act more responsibly and design more just and effective policies.

Inconsistent boundaries

Watershed boundaries, which are defined by landscape topography, often do not overlap nicely with political boundaries — with the Nile Basin being perhaps the most obvious example.

Moreover, humans have long been manipulating water flows through dams and irrigation. Where we place our cities, agriculture, mines and forestry also often overlaps with more than one watershed or can overwhelm another.

Recent work, as part of the Lake Pulse Network, has sampled over 650 lakes across Canada. This research demonstrated that only a four per cent to 12 per cent urbanization level within a watershed is enough to harm biodiversity and ecosystem functioning.

Urbanization is one of the most impactful ways in which humans affect watersheds. The reasons for this are likely down to hard infrastructure blocking the flow of water along with forestry and agriculture land conversions changing how water flows.

A windsurfer cuts through the waves along Lake Ontario overlooking the City of Toronto skyline on a warm winter day in February 2024. Lakes are hugely influenced by the levels of urbanization along their shores.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan Denette

The inescapable truth is that the health and function of a specific aquatic ecosystem is shaped by what happens on the land within that watershed as a whole. These system-wide influences are known as as “allochthonous” — as opposed to “autochthonous” (internal) interactions solely within a single waterbody.

External influences (runoff) from the land can overwhelm a water body’s internal processes and, in some case, can even have negative impacts upon both fish health and the wider local food web.

Climate change is also playing an increasingly outsized role in the lives of Canadian lakes. The most noticeable impacts of a warming world in Canada are forest fires of increasing severity and duration and ever more intense storms.

These extreme events will cause more runoff into our lakes, potentially overwhelming them through nutrient overloading, salinization and other chemical shifts in the water quality.

Read more:
Sediment runoff from the land is killing NZ’s seas – it’s time to take action

Managing water flows

The connectivity between waterbodies within a watershed is also critical to consider in biodiversity conservation.

First, these aquatic connections serve as migratory corridors for mammals and birds, but also aquatic species of fish and invertebrates like insects and crayfish. With climate change and warming waters across Canada, aquatic organisms will increasingly need such corridors within watersheds to move northwards to cooler waters.

Just as migratory pathways enable the dispersal of native species, they can also aid the spread of invasive species. Invasive species management must also take a watershed perspective, and not focus on a single invaded lake or river.

If an exotic species has arrived in your watershed then you are likely to soon see that species in a lake or river near you.

Train cars are seen on the tracks in an aerial view at Canadian National Rail’s Thornton Yard on the Fraser River, in Surrey, B.C., in August 2024. The health of connecting flows of water within watersheds is of vital importance to the overall ecosystem.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck

Contaminants — such as pesticides, other toxins, microplastics and nutrients — also require a watershed-wide approach to effectively manage. Like an invasive species, contaminants can flow downstream across a watershed. Though, the presence of healthy wetlands within a watershed can help filter these out and improve water quality.

Dams, bridges and culverts provide a clear physical barrier to connectivity within a watershed. Though not without utility, these human constructs greatly affect the watershed ecosystem.

For example, many fish species will not pass through a culvert or under a low bridge. These human structures can greatly disrupt fish population dynamics, movement pathways and abilities to adapt to changing conditions.

Unfortunately, the challenges facing fish populations can have significant impacts for biodiversity health, and ecosystem services, across the watershed.

Endlessly interconnected

The interconnected nature of watershed ecosystems necessitates collaborative forms of governance.

Integrated watershed management is an approach to water governance that involves many different agencies, communities and levels of government. Several provinces use this approach, including the most populated provinces of Ontario and Québec. This model must become the norm across Canada.

Read more:
How the invasive spiny water flea spread across Canada, and what we can do about it

More fundamentally, biodiversity protection in a watershed must be handled in an integrated manner. Ideally this would be done using natural watershed boundaries, and not political ones, especially with respect to managing issues related to connectivity. However, this may not always be possible, in which case water governance systems must transcend political boundaries as needed.

Enabling watershed governance across political boundaries is an area where the new federal Canada Water Agency could play a leading role.

Regardless of specific arrangement, it is imperative that all who care about the health of Canada’s freshwater consider its lakes and rivers within their larger watersheds. Only by focusing on watershed health can we preserve Canada’s freshwater. Läs mer…

When Apple’s version of AI, branded as Apple Intelligence, rolls out in October to folks with the company’s latest hardware, the response is likely to be a mix of delight and disappointment.

The AI capabilities on their way to Apple’s walled-garden will bring helpful new features, such as textual summaries in email, Messages and Safari; image creation; and a more context-aware version of Siri.

But as Apple Intelligence’s beta testing has already made clear, the power of these features falls well below what is on offer from major players like OpenAI, Google and Meta. Apple AI won’t come close to the quality of document summary, image or audio generation easily accessed from any of the frontier models.

But Apple Intelligence will do something none of the flagship offerings can do: change perceptions of AI and its role in ordinary life for a large portion of users around the world.

The real impact of Apple AI won’t be practical but moral. It will normalize AI, make it seem less foreign or complex. It will de-associate AI from the idea of cheating or cutting corners. It will help a critical mass of users cross a threshold of doubt or mystification about AI to forge a level of comfort and acceptance of it, even a degree of reliance.

Overcoming early doubts

Generative AI has faced two problems since ChatGPT was unveiled in 2022. Many have wondered what it’s really for or whether it’s truly useful, given hallucinations and other issues that are rooted in training data. Others have doubted the ethics of using AI, seeing it as a form of cheating or copyright infringement.

But as we have learned in recent months, language models are most effective when they work on our own documents and data, as with platforms like NotebookLM or GPT4o, which can now handle upwards of 50 to 100 books’ worth of material we upload.

Customers at the Apple Store on 5th Ave. in New York on Sept. 20, 2024.
(AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

The output of the prompts we run — in the form of article or lecture summaries, reports, slide decks and even podcasts — is much more accurate and useful than what came out of earlier chatbots. Apple Intelligence capitalizes on this insight by pointing most of its AI functionality at user data, rather than data on the web.

Domesticating AI

With Apple Intelligence working mainly on our own data, much of its output will likely mirror the higher quality of output we’re seeing with tools like NotebookLM — compared to AI that works mainly on large bodies of anonymous training data, like ChatGPT in its early days.

Having AI work mostly on user data — and doing it frequently — will forge a new association in people’s minds between generative AI and personal information, rather than miscellaneous training data. It will likely cause us to see AI as something integral to our personal routines, like reading email or the morning news.

This, in turn, will make using more powerful tools like GPT4o or Claude more socially and ethically acceptable. Once we’re in the habit of using AI to summarize or edit our email, condense articles on the web into pithy summaries or edit images in Photos, we’ll think less about the propriety of using NotebookLM to prepare a first draft of a memo or report, or using Dall-E to create images.

‘AI for the rest of us’

Apple has a long history of making complex technologies more accessible to everyday users, and that is their goal for AI.

When word processors first appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was similar uncertainty about the propriety of using them to help us write things — a belief that something authentic or human about writing by hand would be lost.

Read more:
Think tech killed penmanship? Messy handwriting was a problem centuries before smartphones

For many, computers themselves were too daunting to embrace. But Apple’s Macintosh personal computer helped domesticate and normalize using computers to write with its graphic user interface and WYSIWYG feature (“what you see is what you get”). Eventually, writing would become so closely associated with word processing that we find it hard to imagine the one without the other.

Former Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs, left and President John Sculley presenting the new Macintosh Desktop Computer in January 1984 at a shareholder meeting in Cupertino, Calif.
(AP Photo)

Apple Intelligence could do for generative AI what the Mac or graphic user interface did for personal computers: help tame it, and make it seem ordinary and acceptable. Apple’s marketing team hints at this in their tagline for Apple Intelligence, “AI for the rest of us.”

If history is any guide, Apple will play a key role in changing how we think about AI. Doing many of our basic tasks without it may soon seem unthinkable. Läs mer…

The Ian Potter Centre at Melbourne’s Federation Square is located on the banks of the lower stretches of Birrarung, the Yarra River. For Reimagining Birrarung Design Concepts for 2070, on until 2 February 2025, the river flows into the gallery through ideas, images, objects and stories.

In this bold and unusual exhibition, we listen to traditional owners and get inside the imaginations of eight of Australia’s most innovative landscape architecture studios. By looking at “possible” and “preferred” futures, this exhibition frames the river as a complex, diverse, interconnected ecosystem that nurtures our health and is essential to human and non-human communities.

Urban rivers are being rethought internationally. In Australian cities, where big city rivers are often estuaries, the problems of waterways and wetlands are inseparable from colonisation and urbanisation. The fate of these cities as the climate heats up is tied to their rivers.

Melbourne was established in 1835 at the lower stretches of Birrarung where salt water from Port Phillip Bay travels about 10 kilometres upstream. Now metropolitan Melbourne dominates and influences the landscape of its lower reaches.

Rivers are Country

Entering the gallery, we are invited to listen to Birrarung. The river’s voice is spoken by Uncle Dave Wandin, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Elder and Birrarung Council member. Originally commissioned by the 23rd Biennale of Sydney,
the video portrait provides an important transition from the bustle of Melbourne, into the contemplative space of the exhibition.

Many will know the river as the Yarra, or Yarra Yarra – but this was a mistranslation by a surveyor in the 1830s of another Aboriginal word Yarro Yarro, “it flows”.

The misnamed river has suffered from disconnection from its traditional owners and severe environmental degradation.

In 2017, the Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act was passed by the Parliament of Victoria, to protect the river for future generations and to recognise the river and its lands as a single living and integrated entity. Uncle Dave Wandin is a member of the Birrarung Council, appointed to work with Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Elders and communities, to provide independent advice to the government on the implementation of the Act.

Barracco and Wright’s contribution to the exhibition builds on the impact of this legislation. Speculative Policies displayed as an historic document from the future in a 2035 cabinet.

Installation view of McGregor Coxall’s design for reimagining Birrarung.
NGV Australia/Photo: Sean Fennessy

Colonial histories

Thinking about legislation in future worlds helps remind us the challenges of urban rivers – pollution, storm water management, and flooding – have colonial histories.

Waterways have long been treated as dumping grounds for Australia’s industrial progress.

In their work Aqua Nullius, not-for-profit multidisciplinary design and research practice OFFICE points to viticulture (winegrowing) and golf courses as culprits of water extraction in the Birrarung catchment.

The problems arise not only where water is redirected as a resource for elites, but also where the connections between waterways and wetlands are disrupted by roads, estates and colonial land use. Billabongs are cut off from their sources and creeks are converted to drains. Wildlife such as turtles, platypus and birds lose their habitat corridors.

Terra Nullius is well known as the concept that shaped colonists approach to Australia. Aqua Nullius, OFFICE argue, is just as significant. Rivers are country – and need to be respected, cared for and healed.

Designers from OFFICE assert the Terra Nullius concept applies to water too.
NGV Australia/OFFICE

Seeing like a landscape architect

By combining ecological knowledge with architectural forms, landscape architects are often leading these goals alongside Aboriginal people. While many of Melbourne’s residents and visitors enjoy the outcomes of their designs in city parks and green infrastructure, landscape architects are rarely the focus of exhibitions in major art galleries. This exhibition shows how design projects can invite us to imagine urban rivers differently using a range of tools that bring life to possible futures.

In this exhibition we see images, maps, models, flags, plans, animations, timelines, and even a uniform design for a future “bio-zone guide”.

The Birrarung Catchment by McGregor Coxall projects an animated map at waist height. It shows us the past, present and potential future of the catchment, highlighting the evolution of Birrarung’s lands, health, waterways, and its relationship to people.

Presented as a map that shifts over time, the table top animation shares a rhythm with two screens on the wall, one with a population counter and one with the changes of flow within the catchment. These three elements link the growth of urban population to the disruption of the rivers flow. Dealing with Melbourne’s anticipated population growth, the projection looks forward in time proposing ways to care for the river by establishing the Great Birrarung Parkland.

What’s good for Birrarung …

Not all rivers are created equal. Melbourne is a river city, planned, designed, built and managed around Birrarung.

A short walk from the gallery, rowers launch into the river and lovers hold hands on its banks. Melbourne is Birrarung and we can see it as we move around the city. But all cities have waterways and wetlands, many less visible.

Place-based approaches to caring for urban water is needed everywhere. And this can have flow-on effects. If we start to care for minor creeks and estuaries that are built over and forgotten, we understand connections between people, nature, water and Country. This exhibition shows those visions for the future require research, vision and political will.

Reimagining Birrarung: Design Concepts for 2070 is on until 2 February 2025 at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. Free admission. Läs mer…

While Hasib Hourani’s Rock Flight and Samah Sabawi’s Cactus Pear for My Beloved are both books by Australian writers that speak of the Palestinian experience, they could not be more different.

This is not simply because one is a book-length poem, the other a novelised biography. Hourani’s Rock Flight is minimalist, almost brutalist in its aesthetics. Cactus Pear for My Love, by contrast, is written with the detail and warmth of a storyteller who wants to commemorate a much-loved subject.

Review: Cactus Pear for My Beloved: A Family Story from Gaza – Samah Sawabi (Penguin) & Rock Flight – Hasib Hourani (Giramondo)

Sabawi tells the story of her father, Abdul Karim Sabawi, who died at the age of 82, shortly after the publication of her book. A renowned poet and novelist, Karim published more than ten novels and books of poetry in Arabic. His poetry was recently translated into English in a collection titled Blood for Freedom.

Sabawi recounts her father’s birth, his education and marriage, his work as a teacher and journalist, and his exile from Gaza after the Six-Day War of 1967 for his part in the Palestinian resistance.

She does this by fusing storytelling techniques with extensive ethnographic and historical research. Episodic in structure, Cactus Pear for My Beloved eschews explanations and psychologising. Rather, it relies on the vibrancy of its characters and the material details of their world to bring memorable moments to life.

Samah Sabawi.
Nahedh Elrayes, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Sabawi shares photos and artefacts, such as an image of her grandfather’s licence to run a small school from his home. Issued by The Government of Palestine, Department of Education, Jerusalem, it is dated 1935. At that time, Palestine was classed as a “Mandate A” territory and flagged by the League of Nations for independent nationhood.

Throughout Cactus Pear for My Beloved, Sabawi deftly connects personal stories to wider historical and political contexts. She also uses a number of novelistic techniques, such as fictional characters and dramatised scenes, to recreate the past and represent a collective Palestinian experience. These scenes alternate with historical accounts. The novelistic and biographical work together, producing a rich and often buoyant story.

Sabawi also records the importance of poets and the poetic tradition, both in her father’s schooling, and also in voicing the Palestinian experience under occupation. As a poet, Abdul Karim Sabawi’s life intersects with significant literary events, such as the 1964 Arab Poetry Festival in Gaza, and the conference of the Union of Palestinian Writers, where renowned writers such Ghassan Kanafani and Muin Bseiso were present.

Abdul Karim Sabawi receiving a poetry prize from Munir Al-Rayes, mayor of Gaza, September 1959.
Courtesy Penguin Random House

Displacement and exile

Sabawi stops her father’s story in 1967, when her father was exiled. To stay would have risked arrest or death. Exile, in the words of her father, is not a journey, because “exile refuses to take me anywhere but exile itself”.

Though Cactus Pear for My Beloved takes place in the Tuffah quarter of Gaza City between 1918 and 1967, it is framed by a prologue and epilogue set in 2018 in a Queensland shopping mall, where Sabawi takes her now elderly father. This framing serves a number of purposes. It allows Sabawi to dramatise the spoken contract between father and daughter: he grants her permission to embark upon the project of telling her family’s history.

The shopping mall setting also underlines the distance and the differences between Karim’s old life in Palestine and his new life in Australia. It allows Sabawi to show her father’s humour and swagger in the face of old age. He prefers the shopping trolley to his walker, which makes him look old. The opening scene has him setting the terms. The finished manuscript must have his approval. He insists that his story be presented as “part of a tapestry of stories. If you pull it out of that tapestry it will unravel and will lose its meaning.”

True to her father’s instructions, Sabawi begins the story of her father, with the story of her grandfather Sheikh Hussein and his widowed mother Moftiya. An early scene takes place in the Sheikh’s house in 1918, the year the British occupied Palestine, and the year after the Balfour Declaration, which declared British “sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations”.

At the time, the area was 90% Arab and 10% Jewish. The Sheikh draws parallels between Palestine and India, telling the story of Gandhi’s resistance to British colonial forces to a room of men who can’t conceive of standing up against British military might.

The Sheikh is frustrated; his ability to access newspapers and keep up with the political situation makes him important, but it also isolates him. Only a train driver, who regularly travels outside of Tuffah, is able to conceive of the danger.

Thirty years later, the Sheikh will be fleeing his home with his family for the refugee camps during the Nakba of 1948, which displaced 750,000 Palestinians.

Sabawi uses dialogue to give voice to Palestinian experiences of the moment Britain left Palestine and the State of Israel was declared. The Sheikh, dumbfounded at the headlines in newspapers, cannot believe that the British handed over Palestine to European Jews:

They gave them everything. They gave them the official government buildings, the airports, the seaports, the military equipment and the training. Everything! And they gave us checkpoints, prison cells, torture chambers and targeted assassinations for any one of us who tries to resist.

Ultimately, the Sheikh is hopeful that times can’t be darker than they were under the Ottomans and the English. “You cannot empty a country of its people and claim it just like that. The world will soon see this”.

Israeli soldier and Palestinian prisoners in Ramla, 1948.
David Eldan/GPO, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The family return home to Tuffah and the precarity of being native without being citizens. The Sheikh, who has been a teacher and leader of his community, is unable to flee when Israeli forces come to his home. In one powerful scene, he must declare himself crippled to avoid being shot. The humiliation is intensified by being witnessed by his son, who at the age of 14 must decide whether to intercede.

The book’s title is taken from the act of peeling cactus pears, which is the sensuous image of the love Sabawi’s father’s feels for her mother, Souhailah. The skin of the cactus pear is rife with thistles, so fine as to be invisible to the naked eye, yet lastingly painful to the hand they lodge in. But the fruit itself is wildly colourful, and much loved by Souhailah.

The gesture of peeling a cactus pear is intimate and devotional, rooted in Palestine and carried across continents to Australia. It spans Karim and Souhailah’s lifelong marriage, from their youthful courting to their old age.

Indeed, lust and love and a pragmatic attitude to sex play important roles in the book. Sabawi shows different forms of love to be organising forces in the lives of her characters: familial love, erotic love, love of friends, love of home, love of poetry and education, love of Gaza Beach, love of Palestine.

Sabawi describes the process of writing Cactus Pear for My Beloved as “bittersweet”. She recreates a past of “family, love and homeland”, while negotiating the “horrific trauma of dispossession and loss”. She depicts the experiences of people she loves and speaks of those experiences in a way that can be shared and remembered, viscerally, in the body and the heart.

Palestinian refugee children, Nablus, West Bank, 1948.
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

How to make a rock

Rock Flight is first book of poetry by Lebanese-Palestinian writer Hasib Hourani. Though it can be read as a single book-length poem, its structure is fragmented. Intense lyrics are interspersed with records of torture techniques, footnotes and bureaucratic formatting, including redaction and multi-level lists.

Hourani, who was born in Bahrain and now lives in Sydney, demonstrates the visceral consequences of being Palestinian in a world that refuses to recognise the experience of occupation. He lays bare the violence of bureaucracy. By co-opting the typography of bureaucracy and scholarship, incorporating it into his poetry, he destabilises and challenges the markers of legitimacy and draws attention to structural violence.

Part of what makes Rock Flight so intense is that Hourani chooses a limited number of tropes – rocks, paper, suffocation, migratory birds – but overburdens them, so that there is an accumulative density to his poetry.

A close reading of the title demonstrates the density. Rocks are static until they are acted upon, so there is a tension in the coupling of “rock” with “flight”. But there is also the sonic and metrical aspect of the pairing: the sharp plosives (“f” and “t”) combining with the dead beat of a spondee. Then there are the contradictory connotations of “flight”. It sometimes suggests a motion that is graceful and soaring; sometimes it suggests fleeing. And it has an obvious rhyme: “fright”.

The title recalls that in the Israel-Palestine conflict, it has often been Palestinian rocks against Israeli tanks. It evokes the rubble of buildings hit by bombs. Yet rocks are also the pieces of a homeland that can be taken when one leaves. They represent the distinctive mythical and geological features of the territory.

In a deceptively simple section, How to Make a Rock, Hourani instructs the reader to crumple a piece of paper and throw it. A gesture of futility and frustration, paper is the symbol of the bureaucracy, but equally of the poem itself.

Hasib Hourani.
Leah Jing McIntosh/Giramondo

Poetics of the political

This kind of close attention is important, because Hourani’s poetics are indissolubly bound with the political, though not in the sense that he sacrifices poetry for a political message. He maintains a commitment to the way poetry works through image, form and sound. Poetry and politics fuse into a distinctive and significant aesthetic.

Poems deal directly with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel. They detail the surveillance technology used to police Palestinians. They document torture techniques used by Israeli forces against Palestinian prisoners. All without losing the artistry and vision of the poet.

Rock Flight also deploys a poetics of motion and displacement. Its first gesture of is to root a family to a territory and a people to the land. The family name Hourani derives from the volcanic landscape of Houran, a region between Syria and Jordan. The title alludes to the connection to place and the migratory condition of so many Palestinians dispossessed or expelled.

Whether at a residency, or a return trip to Palestine, or in the midst of an exodus, the feeling of being in motion, uprooted, is captured through attention to the body. It is often conveyed through the experience of illness, from travel nausea to tonsillitis.

For instance, the book opens with the Hourani family in flight. The bile of travel sickness makes the poet’s throat “blister, then crunch, swallow, crunch”. The poem links this “suffocating state” to “the reason that I am elsewhere”.

The connection between swallowing and speech, stomach and sight, illness and the abject makes for visceral poetry. Even the birds are often abject or tragic. There are references to pelicans coated in an oil slick and the symbolic “pfeilstorch”, a migratory bird that flies across continents impaled by a spear.

Pfeilstorch.
Zoologische Sammlung der Universität Rostock, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Perhaps the most powerful refusal of Hourani’s poetry is the refusal to imagine a world beyond the complex of “it” – where “it” is not only Israel and Zionism, but surveillance technology, mainstream western media and the nations that directly and indirectly support the occupation of Palestine.

The poet may find himself elsewhere, but the complex is with him everywhere. The effect is claustrophobic. Politics, economics and body are enmeshed, experienced by and filtered through the politicised body of the poet.

The Palestinian people, whether those still living in occupied territories, or those who are refugees or migrants or children of the diaspora, are at the heart of Rock Flight, as they are in Sabawi’s Cactus Pear for My Beloved. Hourani and Sabawi are grouped together in a single review because the nation is such a powerful organising lens through which to interpret literature.

For many people, the national paradigm is a record of sites of invasion and occupation, lines drawn by colonial powers to legitimate claims over territories and resources, for the benefit of the powerful. Yet national identities are also the source of fierce loyalties and resistances that have allowed people to fight for independence or defend their homeland, to give their individual stories the weight and scale of a national story.

The number of Palestinian casualties since the present conflict began on October 7 2023 is conservatively estimated to be around 148,000. The number of people displaced from Gaza alone is nearly two million, or the population of Perth. What logic, what scale of values justifies this? How many Palestinian stories does it take for this to become wrong. Läs mer…

As investment in generative AI continues to grow globally, New Zealand’s government has been implementing its use across the public sector and encouraging businesses to embrace the technology’s potential.

But the environmental, social and governance risks and costs of AI remain under-investigated.

In particular, the energy-hungry computations generative AI requires mean an ever-expanding carbon footprint for this technology at a time when countries are expected to make more ambitious commitments to cut emissions at the upcoming United Nations climate summit (COP29) next month.

We argue that questions around AI’s environmental and social impact need to be part of the conversation about the role it should play in New Zealand society.

Societal costs and risks of AI

Currently, the global use of AI gobbles up as much energy as a small country. This rate is expected to double by 2026. Increasingly sophisticated AI is also projected to double the number of data centres in the next four years.

This ever-expanding reliance on data centres brings sustainability worries. The average data centre already uses about 40% of its power for cooling, often relying on local water supplies.

AI also brings social risks to employees and users. Its capabilities may result in job displacement and the wellbeing of staff who train AI could be affected if they are repeatedly exposed to harmful content.

Governance pitfalls include concerns about data privacy, breaches of copyright laws and AI hallucinations. The latter refers to outputs that sound right but are incorrect or irrelevant, but nevertheless affect decision making.

Why this matters for New Zealand

Like other countries, Aotearoa is rapidly adopting generative AI, from business to the courts, education and the work of government itself.

A recently announced collaboration between Microsoft and Spark Business Group means New Zealand will enter the hyperscale data centre trend. Hyperscale data centres allow for vast data processing and storage needs.

Once completed, a new hyperscale cloud region promises to enable New Zealand businesses to scale up locally, all powered by 100% carbon-free energy provided through an agreement with Ecotricity.

Data centres already use about 40% of their power for cooling.
Getty Images

For the moment, many of the environmental and social costs of New Zealand’s growing use are being borne elsewhere. The issue for New Zealand right now is one of global entanglement. Asking ChatGPT a question in New Zealand means relying on overseas data centres, using a lot of electricity from their municipal grid and likely their water for cooling.

Data centres are scattered across the world and many are located in developing countries. Even where data centres use renewable electricity sources, this diverts supply from other priorities, such as the electrification of public transport.

This is ethically problematic because other (often poorer) countries are shouldering the burden of New Zealand’s AI use. It may also be legally problematic. As a developed country and party to the Paris Agreement, New Zealand is committed to taking a lead in addressing climate change. This means setting progressively more ambitious emissions reduction targets (known as nationally determined contributions).

Last year’s United Nations global stocktake on climate action confirmed that countries’ total efforts are insufficient to limit temperature rise to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels. New Zealand’s contribution is also falling short.

The tension between increasing use of generative AI and meeting climate goals is one that climate change minister Simon Watts and his team will be wrestling with as they prepare for next month’s climate summit in Azerbaijan.

Lower and smarter use of technology

To press on with New Zealand’s commitment to address climate change, we need to focus on entangled solutions to deal with the growing environmental, social and governance costs of generative AI.

“Digital sobriety” is a concept that encourages reduced technology use. It is one approach to thinking about the tensions between AI use and its escalating impacts.

This is similar to our approaches to reducing water consumption and waste. It also involves asking ourselves whether we really need the latest smart device or bigger data plans.

Another potential remedy is to scale down slightly and make use of small language models instead of data-hungrier large language models. These smaller versions use less computational power and are suitable for smaller devices.

Integrating sustainability into AI guardrails would also help to balance some of the environmental impacts of generative AI. Guardrails are filters or rules that sit between inputs and outputs of the AI to reduce the likelihood of errors or bias. Currently, these safeguards are mainly focused on fairness, transparency, accountability and safety.

As the Paris Agreement acknowledges, adopting sustainable patterns of consumption plays an important role in addressing climate change. Careful thinking now about how we adopt hyperscale generative AI in New Zealand in sustainable ways could help steer the country towards a more responsible relationship with this powerful and swiftly developing technology. Läs mer…

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken centre stage in basic science. The five winners of the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Chemistry and Physics shared a common thread: AI.

Indeed, many scientists – including the Nobel committees – are celebrating AI as a force for transforming science.

As one of the laureates put it, AI’s potential for accelerating scientific discovery makes it “one of the most transformative technologies in human history”. But what will this transformation really mean for science?

AI promises to help scientists do more, faster, with less money. But it brings a host of new concerns, too – and if scientists rush ahead with AI adoption they risk transforming science into something that escapes public understanding and trust, and fails to meet the needs of society.

The illusions of understanding

Experts have already identified at least three illusions that can ensnare researchers using AI.

The first is the “illusion of explanatory depth”. Just because an AI model excels at predicting a phenomenon — like AlphaFold, which won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for its predictions of protein structures — that doesn’t mean it can accurately explain it. Research in neuroscience has already shown that AI models designed for optimised prediction can lead to misleading conclusions about the underlying neurobiological mechanisms.

Second is the “illusion of exploratory breadth”. Scientists might think they are investigating all testable hypotheses in their exploratory research, when in fact they are only looking at a limited set of hypotheses that can be tested using AI.

Finally, the “illusion of objectivity”. Scientists may believe AI models are free from bias, or that they can account for all possible human biases. In reality, however, all AI models inevitably reflect the biases present in their training data and the intentions of their developers.

Cheaper and faster science

One of the main reasons for AI’s increasing appeal in science is its potential to produce more results, faster, and at a much lower cost.

An extreme example of this push is the “AI Scientist” machine recently developed by Sakana AI Labs. The company’s vision is to develop a “fully AI-driven system for automated scientific discovery”, where each idea can be turned into a full research paper for just US$15 – though critics said the system produced “endless scientific slop”.

Do we really want a future where research papers can be produced with just a few clicks, simply to “accelerate” the production of science? This risks inundating the scientific ecosystem with papers with no meaning and value, further straining an already overburdened peer-review system.

We might find ourselves in a world where science, as we once knew it, is buried under the noise of AI-generated content.

A lack of context

The rise of AI in science comes at a time when public trust in science and scientists is still fairly high , but we can’t take it for granted. Trust is complex and fragile.

As we learned during the COVID pandemic, calls to “trust the science” can fall short because scientific evidence and computational models are often contested, incomplete, or open to various interpretations.

However, the world faces any number of problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality, that require public policies crafted with expert judgement. This judgement must also be sensitive to specific situations, gathering input from various disciplines and lived experiences that must be interpreted through the lens of local culture and values.

As an International Science Council report published last year argued, science must recognise nuance and context to rebuild public trust. Letting AI shape the future of science may undermine hard-won progress in this area.

If we allow AI to take the lead in scientific inquiry, we risk creating a monoculture of knowledge that prioritises the kinds of questions, methods, perspectives and experts best suited for AI.

This can move us away from the transdisciplinary approach essential for responsible AI, as well as the nuanced public reasoning and dialogue needed to tackle our social and environmental challenges.

A new social contract for science

As the 21st century began, some argued scientists had a renewed social contract in which scientists focus their talents on the most pressing issues of our time in exchange for public funding. The goal is to help society move toward a more sustainable biosphere – one that is ecologically sound, economically viable and socially just.

The rise of AI presents scientists with an opportunity not just to fulfil their responsibilities but to revitalise the contract itself. However, scientific communities will need to address some important questions about the use of AI first.

For example, is using AI in science a kind of “outsourcing” that could compromise the integrity of publicly funded work? How should this be handled?

What about the growing environmental footprint of AI? And how can researchers remain aligned with society’s expectations while integrating AI into the research pipeline?

The idea of transforming science with AI without first establishing this social contract risks putting the cart before the horse.

Letting AI shape our research priorities without input from diverse voices and disciplines can lead to a mismatch with what society actually needs and result in poorly allocated resources.

Science should benefit society as a whole. Scientists need to engage in real conversations about the future of AI within their community of practice and with research stakeholders. These discussions should address the dimensions of this renewed social contract, reflecting shared goals and values.

It’s time to actively explore the various futures that AI for science enables or blocks – and establish the necessary standards and guidelines to harness its potential responsibly. Läs mer…

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has often been accused of copying former US President Donald Trump’s tactics. Some analysts even refer to Dutton, like Trump, as a “populist” who seeks political gain by pitting ordinary citizens against corrupt “elites”.

There is evidence of this populism in the willingness of Trump, Dutton and other figures in their parties to attack “big business”.

This is unusual for the conservative parties, and it has alarmed business-aligned outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the Australian Financial Review.

Republicans and Liberals have always preferred to identify with small business rather than big business. Their relationship with corporate interests has not always been smooth.

But they do not believe there is a natural conflict between business and workers, or between different sections of the economy. And they usually align with big business on the critical issues of taxation and government regulation.

So Dutton’s declaration earlier this year that the Liberal Party is “not the party of big business” but “the friend of the worker” marks a notable rhetorical shift, even if there is reason to doubt the substance behind it.

It mirrors a similar shift to pro-worker rhetoric among leading Republicans. Florida Senator Marco Rubio said in 2020, for instance, the future of the Republican Party is based on “a multiethnic, multiracial, working-class coalition”.

Expanding their share of the working-class vote may be necessary for both parties, given their losses of tertiary-educated, middle-class voters and seats in recent elections. Economic populism may be one path to do it.

But how economically populist can conservative parties get in either country?

Donald Trump at a campaign rally at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Thomas Slusser/The Tribune-Democrat/AP

Why attack big business?

A lot of Republican and Liberal attacks on big business are fundamentally cultural rather than economic.

Publicly-owned corporations have embraced diversity, equity and inclusion policies. They declare commitments to “sustainability”. And plenty of them have backed causes like marriage equality, Black Lives Matter and the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

However cosmetic these gestures are, many conservatives see major corporations as culturally hostile to them. More importantly, they no longer see big business and finance as reliable political backers.

Peter Dutton addresses a summit of small business owners in Sydney in April.
Biance de Marchi/AAP

And they don’t need them like they once did. Dynastic wealth in both countries has seen the ascendancy of private companies owned by super-rich individuals and families. These, not corporate donors, are now the most consistent sources of financial and political support for conservative parties.

These changing conditions have given Republicans and Liberals a free hand to make big business – never a popular entity – into a target of populist campaigns.

Many of their attacks are about “wokeness”. But not all. Consumer protection has also become an opportune theme, given the cost of living crisis in both the United States and Australia.

Trump, for instance, has floated capping credit card interest rates at 10%. Dutton has proposed using the government’s divestiture powers to break up supermarket and hardware chains that are accused of using their monopoly power to exploit consumers and suppliers.

They can propose these ideas because voters usually trust the Republican and Liberal parties more than their opponents on economic issues. Most Democratic and Labor politicians would be unwilling to take populist measures that far because of their perennial fears of being seen as economically irresponsible.

But when it comes to actually siding with workers over business, a different picture emerges.

The Republican romance with ‘union workers’

As president, Trump had a notably anti-union record. His appointees to the National Labor Relations Board, which enforces labour law, consistently ruled against unions.

In Trump’s current campaign to re-enter the White House, unions have criticised him for holding a rally appealing to “union workers” at a non-union shop, and for praising tech billionaire Elon Musk because he sacked workers who threatened to strike.

Trump also said recently that as a business owner he hated paying overtime. He has also previously said he preferred to use non-union workforces.

Despite all this, the Trump campaign is making a serious play for the votes of unionised workers, who could be critical in Midwestern battleground states.

Although unions as organisations usually support Democrats, the number of voters in union households who support Republicans is sometimes more than 40%.

Democratic President Joe Biden joins striking United Auto Workers on the picket line in Michigan in 2023.
Evan Vucci/AP

This year, Trump sought the endorsement of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the North American truck drivers’ union with 1.3 million members. The Teamsters have supported Democratic candidates in every presidential election since 2000, but prior to that, the organisation had also backed Republican candidates like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.

This year, the Teamsters did not join most other unions in quickly endorsing Democratic incumbent Joe Biden before he stepped aside for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, almost got into a fight with a Republican senator in a committee hearing in 2023 after calling him a “greedy CEO who acts like he’s self-made”. Nonetheless, he got an invitation to speak at this year’s Republican National Convention. He praised Trump as a “tough SOB”, but then blasted various businesses and business organisations for being anti-union, to the discomfort of the audience.

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien addressing the Republican National Convention.

The Teamsters ultimately endorsed neither candidate. However, they released polling showing nearly 60% of their members supported Trump compared to a third for Harris.

Trump-era Republicans frequently praise “union workers” rather than actual unions. When Senators JD Vance (now Trump’s running mate) and Josh Hawley supported the striking United Auto Workers last year, they criticised the union’s leadership. But they are happy to be seen as being on the side of unionised workers against big businesses who send manufacturing jobs overseas, a trend Trump promises to reverse.

The term “union workers” prompts conservative nostalgia, especially for a group like the Teamsters with their mostly male membership and reputation for toughness. It evokes the anti-communist, blue-collar workers of the 1960s and ‘70s who supported Nixon and brawled in the streets with college-educated anti-Vietnam War protesters.

That is not the only nostalgic element. Through heavily protectionist measures, Trump is promising to restore millions of manufacturing jobs to the United States – the kinds of jobs that used to be largely unionised. He also promises to roll back environmental regulations to expand mining, drilling and fracking on federal land. Again, these are the kinds of jobs often associated with “union workers”.

When Trump and others praise “union workers”, they are not really talking about unions, but a certain type of blue-collar job they are promising to create and protect. “Union” in this context has the positive connotation of well-paid, stable work.

But Trump claims it is his policies that will guarantee these jobs, making unions themselves virtually irrelevant.

Where Liberals won’t follow

Dutton may praise workers, but he is unlikely to add the prefix “union” anytime soon. It is hard to imagine any Liberal leader courting the support of a union because Australia’s party system effectively enshrines the country’s adversarial industrial relations system in its politics.

The Australian Labor Party began as the parliamentary wing of the union movement, and to this day affiliated unions are entitled to 50% of delegates at party conferences. American unions are not linked to the Democratic Party in the same way.

This does not mean the votes of union members are off-limits to other parties. In 2006, then-economist (now Labor MP) Andrew Leigh estimated about a third of union members voted for the Coalition on a two party-preferred basis from 1966 to 2004. But Liberals will not appeal to these voters as “union workers” in the same way Republicans do.

Trump’s dream of restoring American manufacturing dominance would involve a resurgence of long-term employment in large and medium-sized firms. He is promising the stability once associated with unions, not the “flexibility” that Australia’s Liberals want in workplaces.

For the most part, Liberals still prefer to talk about blue-collar workers as independent tradespeople or aspiring business owners rather than employees.

Dutton says the modern Liberal Party is the friend of “small business owners and employees in that business”. This conjures images of family-like operations where staff loyally put in unpaid overtime – instead of larger, impersonal workplaces (where unpaid overtime is also the norm).

Peter Dutton (centre) at a visit to the A.H.Beard bedding manufacturer in outer Sydney in 2023.
Nikki Short/AAP

And unlike Trump Republicans, the Liberal and National parties still believe in free trade. After a long bipartisan opposition to protectionism, Labor has recently embraced a major new industrial policy. The Coalition is not on board.

Some doubt whether Trump is a genuine populist. But he has a wider scope for genuinely populist rhetoric than Dutton, at least for now.

Even though he’s a symbol of capitalist excess, part of Trump’s message is that capitalism has taken a wrong turn. Not just into excessive wokeness, but into globalisation and financialisation, where investment and speculation are more profitable than production.

There are limits to how much any Liberal leader, even Dutton, can tap into anger with capitalism itself. Läs mer…

Inhaling smoke is bad for you. Smoke from any kind of fire, from bonfire to burn-off to uncontrolled wildfire, can have serious consequences.

Even low levels of smoke can make many heart and lung diseases worse, sometimes triggering a rapid deterioration in health. When we are repeatedly exposed over months and years, air pollution, including smoke, makes us more likely to develop heart, lung and other chronic diseases.

Now, new international research has linked the warming climate to some of the deaths from exposure to fire smoke in large parts of the world, including Australia.

In 2012, I led the first team to estimate the number of landscape fire smoke-related deaths globally each year. Our estimate of 339,000 deaths did not attempt to pull out the influence of climate change. But we noticed much higher impacts during hotter and drier El Niño periods.

The researchers behind the new study took this a step further, estimating how much of the historical burden of fire smoke-related deaths might be attributable to climate change. They found a considerably increasing proportion, from 1.2% in the 1960s to 12.8% in the 2010s.

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke

A wall of flames is way more deadly than a bit of smoke in the air – isn’t it? It’s not so simple. When you look back at a fire disaster, the smoke-related death toll in the aftermath can be surprisingly high.

During the extreme Australian bushfire season of 2019–20, there were 33 deaths directly related to fire. But my team found the number of smoke-related deaths was 429, more than ten times higher.

Smoke travels vast distances and can affect very large populations. Millions of people in Australia and New Zealand breathed smoke from the 2019-20 Australian fires. The sheer scale of the air quality impacts means the associated public health burden can be very large.

Smoke harms our health in two ways. In the short term, it makes existing diseases worse. As soon as the body detects smoke, it initiates immune and stress responses that affect, among other things, blood pressure, blood glucose and the risk of forming blood clots.

For some people with serious chronic illness such as heart and blood vessel disease, these subtle changes can trigger deadly complications including heart attacks or strokes.

When smoke reaches our eyes, throats and lungs, it acts as an irritant. This can be enough to make people living with asthma or other lung conditions seriously unwell.

Over the longer term, air pollution is a known risk factor for developing heart disease, lung disease, asthma, diabetes and stroke, and landscape fire smoke is increasingly contributing to the load.

How did the researchers find this out?

Most research on the health impact from air pollution focuses on the damage done by fine particles called PM2.5. These particles are defined as those less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter, meaning they are small enough to get into the lungs and bloodstream.

In the new paper, the authors used computer models to estimate how global changes in fire-related PM2.5 emissions between 1960 and 2019 had been influenced by the warming climate. To do this, they evaluated climate factors known to promote fire activity, such as higher air temperatures and lower humidity. Then, they used modelling to estimate how these changes would have influenced fire activity, smoke exposure and smoke related deaths globally.

Using this approach, the authors attributed 669 (1.2%) of the wildfire-induced smoke-related deaths in the 1960s to climate change. But that rose to 12,566 (12.8%) in the 2010s. They found the influence of climate change was higher in some regions, including Australia.

Climate change is making fires worse

These reported numbers seem to be surprisingly low when put in context with previous global and regional estimates of deaths due to air pollution from landscape fires.

But estimating how many deaths can be attributed to landscape fire smoke is a challenging task, requiring assumptions about the size and strength of the links between meteorology, fire activity, smoke production and dispersal, population vulnerability and health outcomes in the huge diversity of landscapes, climates and cultures across the world.

Importantly, the estimates in this recent study were driven by changes in climate. But the modelling approach can less easily account for fluctuations and trends in another incredibly important driver of fire activity on Earth, human activity.

For example, huge volumes of smoke globally are created by setting fires to burn and clear tropical forests for agriculture. Corporate activity and government policies drive these fires more than climate change, and are harder to capture in a modelling study.

Nevertheless, these new results clearly support empirical studies showing increases in extreme fire activity attributable to climate change, and illustrates the relative impacts when other influences are held constant. Importantly, it points to parts of the world – including the north and southeast of Australia – where we can expect harmful population smoke impacts to get worse.

The likely geographic impacts can be put together with information about the location of more vulnerable population groups, or higher population densities, to focus on responses where they are most needed. But in Australia that means pretty much everywhere, including the tropical north.

What we can do about it?

To adapt to a smokier world, we will need comprehensive education about escalating air quality hazards and ways to reduce the harm for both the general public and health professionals.

These include keeping on top of long-term health conditions that could be made worse by air pollution, knowing how to keep track of air quality, and when to use strategies such as face masks, air filtration and managing the ventilation of homes and buildings to reduce individual smoke exposure.

Adaptive responses alone do not get around the urgent need to act on climate change. Watching fire seasons around the world get steadily worse year on year really frightens me. We are getting into a vicious cycle where the hotter climate is driving more and more fire. These fires are increasingly venting long-stored carbon and contributing to further climate change.

As well as ending the massive combustion of fossil fuels, we must halt the burning of tropical rainforests and agricultural crop residues globally. These actions will also dramatically improve air quality and health globally and support ongoing capture and storage of atmospheric carbon. Läs mer…

Universities are supposed to be places where all students can learn, free from discrimination.

A key part of this ideal is academics welcoming all students to study and research, regardless of their racial background.

But as our new research shows, Australian academics responded differently to potential PhD students, depending on whether they were called “Melissa” or “Rahul”.

Racism on campus

Many overseas and Australian studies have shown racism is both a historical and ongoing problem for universities.

A 2020 Australian study showed universities tend to be run by older, white men. A 2021 UK study showed academics from different cultural backgrounds face racism at work.

But there has been less specific attention paid to those trying to become academics.

The main way people start an academic career is via a doctoral degree. In the Australian system, before a student is accepted they usually require an established academic to agree to supervise them. So a student’s initial communication with a potential supervisor is very important.

To start a PhD, students usually need to have a supervisor lined up.
Jacob Lund/Shutterstock

How we set up our research

To investigate whether racism is playing a role at the entrance point to PhD study, in 2017 we sent about 7,000 emails from fictitious students to academics based at the main campuses of Australia’s Group of Eight universities (billed as Australia’s top research universities).

These are the Australian National University, Monash University, University of Adelaide, University of New South Wales, University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, University of Western Australia and University of Queensland.

We emailed staff ranked senior lecturer or above, as these are the levels most likely to be supervising PhD students. Academics were identified by university websites, and we sent emails to everyone who fit our rank criteria across all disciplines.

In this process, we found 70% of relevant academics were male and 84% were white. This did not improve in the more senior ranks – more than 68% of professors were white men.

What did the email say?

The emails asked for an meeting to talk about potential PhD supervision.

They were identical apart from the senders’ names. These names were tested to be associated with male and female and with white-European, Indigenous, South Asian, Chinese and Arab identities. Recipients were randomly allocated to different name groups.

The emails indicated the sender was an Australia-based student with fluent English. It conveyed an interest in the recipient’s research and urgency in meeting because the sender was only on campus for several days. It also noted “I have recently finished my honours degree” (a common path into a PhD in Australia) and was sent from a University of Sydney email address.

We emailed about 7,000 senior academics as part of our study.
Tipa Patt/Shutterstock

What did we find?

Responses agreeing to a meeting or requesting further information were categorised as “positive”. Those who declined a meeting were “non-positive”. Automated replies and those who did not reply were “non-responses”.

Of 6,928 emails sent, 2,986 (43.1%) received a reply within 24 hours and 2,469 (35.6%) received a positive reply. There were 3,942 (56.9%) non-responses and 517 (7.5%) non-positive responses (declining a meeting).

We initially planned to give academics a week to respond, but after IT at one university noticed several staff had received emails with identical text, we ended the experiment after 24 hours.

From here, the results were stark: emails from names associated with non-white racial groups received significantly fewer responses and positive replies than those from names typically associated with white individuals.

An email from “Melissa Smith” was far more likely to get a positive response than an identical email from “Grace Chen Jinyan” (six percentage points lower) or “Omar al-Haddad” (nine percentage points lower).

The most dramatic gap was in the positive response rates to Melissa Smith, compared with “Rahul Kumar”. The rate of positive responses to Melissa was 12 percentage points higher than for Rahul.

Overall, our statistical analysis showed the white-sounding names averaged a 7% higher reply rate and a 9% higher positive response rate than the non-white sounding names. Both these findings were highly statistically significant, meaning we can be very confident the results were not due to chance.

Of course, some faculty members may simply have been unable to meet with the student, or may have missed the email. However, given the randomisation used, it is reasonable to assume bias explains the gap in responses to students with different names.

This is alarming because it suggests racial bias is quietly influencing who gets a foot in the door of academia even before formal admissions processes begin.

Silver linings

One seemingly positive finding was academics at the more junior end of our study group appeared to show less bias towards students of different backgrounds.

For academics at senior lecturer or associate professor levels, Melissa was 10.5% more likely to receive a positive response than Rahul, while the corresponding figure for full professors was 14.7%.

However, junior academics often have little institutional power or much of a say on hiring. More research is needed to explore whether generational change is achievable (albeit painfully slow).

We also found that, unlike similar US studies, there was no significant bias against female students. In fact, there was some evidence of positive bias, or preference, for female students.

Our study found academics did not discriminate against potential candidates based on gender.
Matej Kastelic/ Shutterstock

Backlash to our study

We based our study on a peer-reviewed study carried out in the United States, and followed a research ethics protocol approved by our university.

However, minutes after academics received our follow-up email telling them they had been part of a research study (part of our ethics protocol), the backlash began.

The University of Sydney, our home institution at the time, received more than 500 inquiries about the study. While some were curious or supportive, the majority were complaints. These were primarily about our use of deception (a well-researched and supported method of studying bias). Megan MacKenzie, the more junior author (at the time a senior lecturer), received calls threatening her with consequences for her career.

Although unpleasant, the reaction was revealing. It reinforces other research on how defensive racial majorities can be when they believe they are suspected of bias. It also complements work showing internal resistance to diversity efforts in higher education.

What can we do?

Universities pride themselves on being meritocracies, where the best ideas and brightest minds rise to the top. But our study suggests racial bias is undermining this principle by influencing who is even considered for an academic career.

There is growing acknowledgement racism is a significant problem on Australian university campuses (as well as in broader society). In May, the federal government asked the Australian Human Rights Commission to study the prevalence and impact of racism at Australian universities.

But this study is not due to deliver its final report until June 2025, and any ensuing action will be further away still.

What can be done now to tackle this issue?

First, universities need to acknowledge academia remains overwhelmingly white and male, in spite of efforts to increase diversity.

Second, universities also need to acknowledge the existence of racial bias, the need for ongoing research into how it operates in higher education and the most effective strategies to tackle it. Läs mer…