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A growing number of women’s groups, regulators and corporate performance governance experts are raising flags after the release of a recent S&P Global report signalling an “alarming turning point” for women’s leadership parity in American companies.

Women accounted for 11.8 per cent of C-suite roles in 2023, according to the report, down from 12.2 per cent the previous year. This number is significant, considering women’s representation in leadership positions had been on the incline over the years.

This sudden drop marks a reversal in progress toward a decades-old goal to ensure more women gain executive positions in North American corporations.

The Canadian situation looks equally disappointing. According to Statistics Canada, only five per cent of Toronto Stock Exchange issuers retained a female CEO in 2022 — a number that remains static since the first year of data collection. In Canada, there are more CEOs named Michael than women.

Women have been striving to land a C-suite (such as CEO) corner office while gaining a seat at the corporate table for decades. For those women who do, many have become increasingly disaffected by the patriarchal hierarchy and biases that await them.

In response, women have been seeking alternate leadership models: a C-hub rather than a C-suite, where “C” represents collaboration based on clarity of purpose and coordinated channels of communication, rather than “chief” in charge.

One step forward, two back

As women inch toward the goal of achieving 30 per cent of leadership positions — the target designed to break the proverbial “glass ceiling” — the gap to equity has been widening in some places.

This predictable equity regression, studied for decades, is known as the “glass cliff.” It involves women being intentionally put into precarious leadership positions that often result in their failure. Studies have shown that only when an organization is in crisis are women more likely than men to be placed in leadership roles.

Phenomena like the glass cliff reflect the corporate two-step pattern of gender equity — any gains that are made are quickly followed by losses. Nancy Coldham, one of the co-authors of this article, is currently conducting her doctoral studies on the topic.

Women have been striving to enter the C-suite and gain a seat at the corporate table for decades.
(Shutterstock)

Gender parity makes good business sense

Improving gender diversity on boards and in organizations results in improved financial performance. Organizations experience the greatest benefits of diversity when they have between 40 and 60 per cent female representation.

However, the Globe and Mail’s 2023 Report on Business study noted that “at the rate we’re going, we won’t reach parity for another four decades.”

As Ivey Business School professor Alison Konrad states: “I’ve uncovered over 100 large, longitudinal peer-reviewed panel studies of the relationship between board gender diversity and firm performance, and the beneficial findings are strong and clear.”

Read more:
Gender diversity on corporate boards can improve organizational performance

Research from the non-profit Catalyst, the Boston Consulting Group, Gartner research firm and Harvard University all point to the significant corporate performance benefits of gender parity.

According to the World Economic Forum, the cost to the global economy of failure to achieve gender parity is a staggering $12 trillion. That’s a bottom-line impact that cannot be ignored.

According to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, women’s leadership at executive levels matters to all. Yet decades of struggling for leadership equity remains elusive.

Skirting the equity impact

Boards that are gender diverse have improved decision-making and corporate governance. Women in leadership foster more engaged and productive corporate management teams. Yet corporations here in Canada and globally continue to skirt the proof of diversity impact.

Research from Rotman’s Institute for Gender and the Economy and a recent Bloomberg Report found a reversal is underway; retaining women’s corporate leadership has failed.

The sudden loss of representation in the C-suite is “particularly disappointing,” to Sarah Cottle, head of data and insights at S&P Global Market Intelligence. She notes it’s “not just a loss in momentum but a loss in seats.”

Deloitte drops the gauntlet in its most recent Women in the Boardroom report: “With women still underrepresented on company boards globally, why aren’t organizations and investors doing more to realize the benefits that diverse boards bring?”

Invisible biases and barriers

Indra Nooyi, former chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, speaks after being inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame on Sept. 24, 2022, in Geneva, N.Y.
(AP Photo/Lauren Petracca)

The corporate landscape is littered with women CEOs who accepted precarious leadership positions: Indra Nooyi at Pepsi, Mary Barra at General Motors, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, Ellen Pao at Reddit, Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard and many more.

The departure of HSBC Canada CEO Linda Seymour marked the end of a brief period in history where women led large Canadian banks.

These women fit the description of what is known as Tall Poppy Syndrome, where individuals are undermined or penalized for their success by those around them. Women are more likely to be victims of Tall Poppy Syndrome than men are.

Men are more likely to gain promotions over women, impinging on their advancements before they even begin. Multiple invisible biases and barriers impede women in the workplace before they attempt to lead; the negative outcomes only serve to confirm the more overt biases. Biases must be intentionally revealed and excised for real change to occur.

Achieving gender parity

Perhaps the best solution to the decline in the C-suite, is women declining the C-suite. Women are rejecting patriarchal norms of rigidity, burnout, harassment, limited opportunity and unfair pay in what has been termed the “Great Breakup.”

Women are more likely than men to leave their corporate jobs when their needs are not being met at work. In rejecting the C-suite model, women are calling for more power-balanced, equitable models of leadership that involve collaboration rather than domination — a model in which, as
Gloria Steinem famously states, “we are linked, not ranked.”

Likewise, in co-author Jennifer Walinga’s research on women entrepreneurs, women shared how leaving their corporate jobs to be an entrepreneur fulfilled their desires for a new universe where post-heroic, non-hierarchical leadership models can be enacted.

RBC may have unveiled another possible solution to failed leadership parity that they call the “great wealth transfer” — a “seismic change” that is seeing wealth ownership transfer from men to women. In fact, it is estimated that, by 2028, women in Canada will control $4 trillion in assets — almost double the $2.2 trillion they control today.

With women projected to wield significantly more economic influence in the coming years, there is a potential for them to reshape leadership dynamics and drive positive change.

In confronting failed leadership parity targets, and the failure to benefit from diversity, solutions may be found in women’s vision for more sustainable leadership models, growing wealth and economic clout in the future, and surging political impact as voters at the ballot box. Läs mer…

A two-week standoff between Columbia University administration and student protesters who advocated for the school to divest from companies that work in or support Israel culminated on April 30, 2024, one day after a group of students occupied a campus building, Hamilton Hall.

New York police arrested 109 demonstrators at Columbia and 173 other demonstrators at City College, in uptown Manhattan, on April 30.

The Conversation U.S. politics and society editor Amy Lieberman spoke with John J. Sloan III, a scholar of crime and police on college campuses at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to better understand the different roles that police play on university and college campuses.

NYPD officers on April 30, 2024, enter a building at Columbia University, where pro-Palestinian students barricaded themselves and set up an encampment.
Kena Betancur/AFP via Getty Images

How do universities differ in working with police?

The first documented appearance of a sworn police officer patrolling a college campus was in 1894 at Yale University.

Generally, there have been two approaches to police on university or college campuses. Initially, university administrators asked local police to respond to issues with antiwar demonstrators during the Vietnam War and with women’s rights protests in the 1960s. When many of those encounters did not go very well for anyone, campus police departments were created. Today, about two-thirds of universities and colleges – mainly public ones, like University of California, Los Angeles – have their own campus police departments. There is no difference between these campus police officers and their municipal counterparts, in terms of training or legal authority.

Another one-third of colleges and universities ultimately chose to instead hire their own private security guards – not police officers. Columbia and other Ivy League schools, as well as other private institutions like Johns Hopkins University, are in this group. Increasingly, many of these guards are armed.

One reason different options were taken was because the legalities of creating a police department at a private school are more complex than are those for creating police departments at public universities. Aside from these logistics, there have also been image concerns about whether schools really wanted to have armed, uniformed police on their campuses.

Does this difference in police or private security matter, practically?

Colleges and universities that have their own police departments frequently have a memorandum of understanding or mutual aid agreement that formalizes the relationship between campus and municipal police. Often, both groups will train together to better coordinate their response to, say, a mass shooting on campus. It’s likely that in the post-George Floyd era, mutual training included responding to campus protests.

For schools without campus police, security personnel may lack extensive training in how to deal with demonstrations. As a result, things can spiral very quickly. I would imagine that Columbia’s president made the most recent call to bring in the NYPD because of a combination of factors – including that private security personnel may not have been fully trained and equipped to address the situation, plus the perceived urgency of the situation of students taking over a university building.

What else is notable about how different schools have responded to these protests?

There appears to be a wide range in both university and police responses to the protests. On the one end is the Columbia situation, where you literally had NYPD officers using drones and other types of military tactics to take the building back that the students first occupied on April 29.

At the University of Wisconsin, Madison – which has its own campus police department – the university president also made the decision to call in the Madison police, perhaps for different reasons. This gets to the question of how university administrators want to deal with these protests. Do they want to wait out the protesters? And if they don’t want to wait them out, then how quickly do they want the campus cleared?

I certainly understand there is a need to ensure that the campus is secure. But when you invite local or state police to campus to address protests, you are turning over control of the situation to them and you are relying on them having the necessary training and preparation to come in and not create more problems. What I have seen so far, at least, is those who have called in outside law enforcement are going to have to answer questions about the use of force that was used against protesters.

California Highway Patrol officers walk near a protester at a pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA on May 1, 2024, in Los Angeles.
Mario Tama/Getty Images

What is important to know about the police’s tactical response to the protests?

New York Mayor Eric Adams spoke at a press conference and explained the NYPD’s approach to entering and clearing the Columbia campus and it reminded me of military tactics. He talked about how the NYPD had drones flying around to pinpoint better access points into the building and where the students were. He discussed encrypting the police’s radio frequency, so no one could listen to them. The garb that the police were wearing and the visuals of so many officers marching down the street reminded me of an army.

Adams said that no one was hurt at Columbia, but there are reports that show three students were hurt, as well as potentially some police officers. There have also been reports of police officers being injured at University of Wisconsin, Madison.

In other places, like UCLA, there has been a heavy outside police presence on campus, as well as reports of police officers using pepper spray and tear gas on protesters there and in other places like Florida. And at the University of Texas, Austin, officials called in state troopers to arrest protesters this week. Police using pepper spray and other aggressive tactics were reported there as well.

Part of this phenomenon involves the extent the police, nationwide, are becoming more and more militarized as a standard operating procedure. The Ohio State University purchased a surplus military armored personnel carrier for its police team in 2013, for example.

In the post-9/11 era, initial law enforcement concerns were with terrorism; now, the concern is mass shooters. In response, many police departments, including those at colleges and universities, are now routinely using military-grade surveillance, communications, equipment and training as part of their operations, such that it can look like you have the military on your campus. Läs mer…

Though a second Trump presidency is not a foregone conclusion, Nato members are gearing up to Trump-proof the organisation and reviewing their defence strategies.

Nato’s concerns about Trump’s re-election were heightened by his flippant comment in February that he would encourage Russia to do whatever it wanted, if certain countries didn’t pay up, defying Nato’s principle that an attack on one constituted an attack on all.

Trump’s comments represent a seismic departure for US foreign policy. No US president has made these types of threats before about its commitment to Nato, and this has forced Europe to prepare to deal with Russian aggression without US support.

Ahead of Nato’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington DC in July, this has become so concerning that one of the major parties in the European parliament, the European People’s Party has called on Europe to build its own nuclear umbrella without the US.

Of course, this is all coming to a head at a time when the west is facing the biggest threat to its security since the second world war, making the discussions about Nato’s nuclear shield more salient.

Although Russia is unlikely to use nuclear weapons in this conflict in Ukraine, some experts are warning that assuming that Nato’s current nuclear deterrence is sufficient is foolhardy.

A Russian nuclear weapon on display as part of a military parade in Moscow, Russia.
Ivanov Arkady/Alamy

Putin has made it clear that Russia is prepared and willing to use nuclear weapons, if necessary. Putin may believe that a limited use of nuclear weapons would not escalate the war enough to involve the US, making it more likely that Russia could dip into its nuclear arsenal in its next conflict to gain a huge advantage (or possibly at a later stage in the current one).

Read more:
Ukraine war: why many Nato countries are thinking of introducing conscription and the issues that involves

Nuclear decisions

The logic of nuclear deterrence assumes that all actors are rational, have full information and can use that information to predict what others will do.

Putin has shown that he is a risk taker with poor military intelligence, leading to massive miscalculations, particularly if Nato remains complacent.

Putin may also assume that the US under Trump would be mostly preoccupied with domestic political opponents, giving Russia the chance to push ahead and do whatever it wants. Recently leaked documents from Russian military files have shown that its threshold for using nuclear weapons is surprisingly low, particularly if conventional methods aren’t working.

With two of the biggest superpowers being led by wildcards Putin, and potentially Trump, Nato members are rethinking their nuclear strategy. Both the UK and France have nuclear capabilities, and this provides an independent nuclear deterrence.

However, Nato’s deterrence relies mostly on US nuclear weapons deployed in Europe – of which there are about 100 non-strategic warheads (down from 7,500 in the 1980s) deployed in five Nato countries – Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey. By comparison, Russia has around 6,000 nuclear weapons – which constitutes the world’s largest arsenal – and can launch these weapons from land, sea and air.

Russian nuclear weapons are deployed across dozens of military bases in Russia, with some tactical nuclear weapons recently moved to Belarus.

Most concerning may be Russia’s confirmation in 2018 that it has nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad – the Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania.

Even though Russia’s nuclear modernisation drive has not been a huge success, the Kremlin has used the threat of nuclear weapons to temper the west’s response to Russian aggression.

Can Europe survive without the US?

Though the conflict in Ukraine has made the issue of nuclear deterrence more urgent, this is not the first time European powers have voiced concerns about their own vulnerabilities. In 2020, French president Emmanuel Macron raised the alarm about the US’s commitment to Nato and offered to make France’s nuclear deterrence the centre of European defence strategy.

At the time, Nato secretary-general Jens Soltenberg dismissed this suggestion, claiming that it made more strategic sense to rely on the US’s nuclear umbrella.

France and the UK are far behind Russia. France has around 290 nuclear warheads, which can be deployed at short notice, from both air and sea.

The UK decided in 2021 to increase the number of nuclear weapons to 225, with the goal of reaching 260 warheads by 2025.

Unlike Europe, the US does have a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, just below Russia’s – at 5,244, and this includes nuclear-armed submarines, long-range bombers and inter-continental missiles. It has also been flying B-52 strategic bombers close to the Russian border in the Gulf of Finland, as a show of force to the Russians.

But a Trump presidency may give Putin the impression that he is unlikely to face any consequences for his actions from the US, which has been at the heart of Nato’s current nuclear deterrence plan. This would put more pressure on Europe to demonstrate its resolve.

Poland, for one, has made clear that it is ready and able to host nuclear weapons, while the Baltic states have upped their own military spending. Close to Kaliningrad, the Baltics have important energy and telecommunications infrastructure, making the area particularly vulnerable.

While some experts argue to increase Nato’s nuclear capabilities and sharing programmes, others claim that Nato’s most significant source of deterrence comes from political unity and its advanced conventional forces.

Increasing nuclear weapons capabilities may make Russia feel more threatened, and more likely to take risks. A related view is that the war in Ukraine has proven that there is no effective nuclear deterrent. The existence of tactical nuclear weapons (of which Russia has 2,000), which are smaller and more precise, increases the likelihood that they will be used by virtue of being smaller.

Whatever course of action carries enormous risks and potential devastation. And it’s important to highlight that the nuclear weapon launched in Hiroshima in 1945 was a “small” nuclear weapon — and it still had the power to kill 140,000 people with generations later still suffering from diseases.

Modern nuclear weapons are 3,000 times more powerful. This makes it all the most critical to come up with a coherent and effective nuclear strategy that can prevent them from being used at all. Läs mer…

Children and young people may be seeing news headlines about men murdering women or footage of people rallying to call for action. Perhaps they or their friends have even gone to the protests.

As Australia confronts the shocking numbers of men murdering women, children and young people may have questions or want to talk about violence against women and children.

If you are a parent you may also be wondering how you can help your child develop the attitudes and skills they need to have healthy and respectful relationships throughout their lives.

While there has been consistent messaging that “we all have a role to play” when it comes to stopping violence against women, actual guidance on what parents should do can be difficult to find.

Talking to your kids about recent events

If current headlines are leading your child to ask questions, it is certainly OK to answer them. In fact, this is an excellent opportunity to talk about these issues.

Be guided by the questions your child asks and keep your response simple. Young people will typically ignore anything that exceeds their current needs. But don’t be afraid to ask your child about their thoughts first. It can be a useful way to know what they understand.

If your child is showing distress, reassure them the media attention is a positive thing. As a nation we are much more aware these issues are occurring, we are talking about it more openly, and we want to keep an eye on our friends and family.

Governments are funding various programs and Australians are holding them accountable. These issues will not be resolved quickly, but we are moving in the right direction.

Ask your child if they have any followup questions and remind them they can check back with you at any stage.

If you feel they are overly anxious about these events, it could be a good idea to seek professional advice from someone like a school counsellor or GP.

Recent rallies provide an excellent opportunity to talk to your children about violence against women and children.
Darren England/AAP

How to approach gender and relationships

There are many things parents and carers can do to help the children and young people in their lives develop healthy ideas about gender and relationships. Here are seven ideas:

1. Model respect

One of the most important things adults can do is to model respect for others, both offline and online.

This includes respecting other people’s boundaries. For example, you might seek permission before hugging someone, or ask people if it’s OK to share a picture of them on social media.

Showing respect means genuinely and politely communicating with others. This should include how you speak about people, or a group of people, when they are not present.

This is particularly important as research shows young people want less fear-based messaging from adults and more practical guidance on how to have good partnerships.

2. Point out and talk about stereotypes

Television shows, movies, popular music and online influencers can provide young people with unrealistic or harmful messages about gender roles, relationships, dating, sexual activity and our bodies.

Take advantage of these opportunities to instil more accurate messages. You can tell your child most relationships don’t play out like a romantic comedy film or “reality” dating show. Falling in love might be easy, but staying in love often takes work and communication.

The bodies and sexual acts we might see on screens have also been heavily curated and most people don’t look or act like that. Sexual activity shouldn’t be violent or aggressive and both partners should enjoy the process equally.

Discuss how gender norms and stereotypes are problematic for everyone, no matter our gender. They create unhelpful expectations about how we are supposed to look, feel and act and can pressure us to conform to certain ideals. For example, boys can and should express their emotions. They don’t have to love football or want a six pack.

Encourage your child to dress, play, study and engage in activities that bring them joy with less concern for what society might “expect” them to do.

Encourage children and young people to dress and play the way that feels right for them.
Cottonbro/Pexels, CC BY

3. Teach your child to stick up for themselves and others

Talk to your children about how to respond to sexist or inappropriate behaviour that might happen to them or to others.

There are various ways to approach this. You might encourage them to speak up and challenge the behaviour, to use their body language to show they don’t approve of what is happening, or at least redirect everyone’s focus onto something else.

They might also be able to ask a third party to get involved and help intervene.

Sometimes, there isn’t much you can do in the moment, or it might not be safe to directly involve yourself. The best thing to do in these moments is to at least check in afterwards with the person who has been harassed to make sure they’re OK.

4. Don’t have different messages for boys and girls

Try not to have different messages for boys or girls. Partly, this is because many young people today see themselves as something other than male or female, but more importantly we want everyone to receive the same key information and to develop the same skills.

5. Avoid lectures and look for everyday opportunities to chat

Your conversations don’t need to be lengthy sermons. Drip feed your thoughts and little bits of information throughout your everyday activities.

For example, you could share your thoughts about a news report, a movie scene you’re watching together, or a song on the radio.

6. Provide other information

Not all young people are big talkers, so it can be helpful to provide your child with other materials from books and websites.

If, for whatever reason, a child won’t listen to their parents, ensure they have a support network of other trusted adults they can rely on. This could be people like another family member, a close family friend, a school teacher or a sports coach.

7. Think about your own upbringing

Parents may need to reflect upon their own backgrounds before having some of these conversations. Perhaps there was a lack of correct information, positive attitudes, or modelling of appropriate behaviours when you were growing up.

Attitudes and understanding about gender-based violence and gender relations have changed a lot in recent years.

So it can be a good idea to challenge or discount anything that is unhelpful, or impacts our ability to model or speak openly about respectful relationships.

Look for everyday moments to talk to your child about gender, rather than planning a lecture.
Ketut Subiyanto/ Pexels, CC BY

More resources

Here are some websites and podcasts with information and advice for parents on how to talk to their children about gender, sexuality, violence against women and respect.

Talk Soon. Talk Often is a free West Australian government resource to help parents talk to children (from infancy to 18) about sex.
Yarning Quiet Ways is a free WA government resource for Aboriginal parents and carers to talk about safe and healthy relationships with their kids.
The Conversation Guide is a free federal government resource for parents to talk to their children about respect for women and gender inequality.
Project Ari is a free podcast by the federal government’s Stop it at the Start Campaign and NOVA Entertainment. It follows the story of 10-year-old Ari, “the world’s first artificial intelligence prototype, as he tries to wrap his ‘data brain’ around the human experience”. It is designed to be a funny series to teach kids about respectful behaviour.
Sex Ed Rescue has free and paid resources for parents about sex education and pornogrpahy, split into topics and ages. The site is run by sex educator Cath Hakanson.
Talking the Talk is the website of sexual health educator Vanessa Hamilton, with free tips, scripts for talking to your children and book recommendations.
Doing “IT” is a free podcast by Sexual Health Victoria. Every episode contains different relationships and sexuality advice for parents and carers. Topics vary from gender pronouns, to pornography and taking care of your body. Läs mer…

For more than a decade now, the Stella Prize, an award celebrating Australian women’s writing, has been changing Australia’s literary landscape. It has taken a monkey wrench to the way literary esteem is bestowed in this country. Its annual whack has shifted the calibration of what kinds of books are valued.

This year’s shortlist is, as we have come to expect, a celebration of unruliness, activism and vivid writing. Reading these books back to back, my overwhelming impression was one of emotional intensity. They are full of pain, shock, desire, anger, grief, horror and joy.

They are also marked by different forms of literary experimentation, particularly in their use of personal experience – whether in fiction, memoir, autofiction or lyric essay. It is not surprising that such experimentation is found in a shortlist published almost entirely by smaller and independent publishers, whose role in Australia’s literary industry has long been to support works that push the boundaries.

This year’s shortlist draws attention to works of literature that don’t offer much in the way of consolation, but might shake up how you see the world and your place in it.

The Swift Dark Tide – Katia Ariel

Gazebo Books

The Swift Dark Tide is a lyrical memoir about love and desire, family and inheritance. It is a multi-directional love-letter addressed to the author’s parents and grandparents, her children, her husband, and her new lover, referred to in the book as “you”.

This is a coming-out story: a tender and vulnerable celebration of the realisation of queer desire in midlife. At the heart of the book is a grand and complicated love affair taking place across two established relationships. Ariel is in a loving marriage with a man when she falls for her new lover. They enter into an open relationship, with all of its complexities.

In the familiar narrative of all-consuming love, everything is swept up in its wake. Here we see love situated in a daily context of parenting and logistics across two families, but also in transnational and intergenerational contexts.

As Ariel tells the story of her love affair, she unravels the histories of family members who migrated to Australia from Odessa. Their characters are portrayed in loving detail in a memoir that does not hold back from self-disclosure.

Body Friend – Katherine Brabon

Ultimo Press

Katherine Brabon’s Body Friend is a hypnotic, uncomfortable novel about chronic pain and female friendship. The reader meets its protagonist, who lives with an autoimmune condition, as she is about to undergo surgery. The book follows her period of convalescence and pays careful attention to the details of embodied experience. What emerges is a many-sided picture of how pain shapes relationships and selfhood.

The story is based around two friendships that develop in the wake of the protagonist’s surgery. The intensity of these relationships and the forms of identification they allow feel at once surreal and lifelike.

The novel explores the deep pleasure of a friendship with someone who understands your experience and gives you permission to withdraw from the world. But it also looks at the power of friendship to open the door to new ways of being and push you to do more than you thought you could.

In addition to exploring different modes of responding to chronic pain, the relationships at the heart of Body Friend present friendship as sustaining and challenging, marked by the play of identification, attachment and jealousy.

Reading this novel was claustrophobic and compelling. Body Friend explores the difficulty of fitting pain or illness – especially that experienced by women – into available narrative frameworks. It dispenses with the notion of a satisfying plot of recovery. Its structure is cyclical and the pacing is slow, but it is gripping nonetheless.

Feast – Emily O’Grady

Allen & Unwin

You know when people say in praise of a novel, “I couldn’t put it down”? There were a few times when reading Emily O’Grady’s Feast that I had to put it down because I was so shocked by what it had revealed about its characters.

O’Grady is in full force here. She is doing something quite new with the established genre of the domestic gothic. The novel opens with the scene of a rabbit caught in a trap and goes on to plumb the question: what enables people to wield and abuse power over others?

Feast takes place in an old house in the Scottish countryside, owned by retired actress Alison and her partner, a famous musician. The house is the setting for a birthday party at which multiple pasts are revealed.

The story is triangulated through the perspectives of Alison, her stepdaughter Neve, and Neve’s mother Shannon. These women are differently implicated in a devastating story of cruelty and control. Among the many things that impressed me about Feast is its creation of characters who feel as odd and confusing, appealing and awful, as people are in real life.

Praiseworthy – Alexis Wright

Giramondo

Praiseworthy is a novel that invites – perhaps requires – its readers to rethink their approach to reading fiction. Character, plot, setting, tone: all are called into question.

Allegory is at work – a central character is named “Aboriginal Sovereignty” – but as Mykaela Saunders has written, the literal and the metaphorical are not easily distinguished in the world of the novel.

The remote town of Praiseworthy is covered in an ancestral haze that carries a slippery metaphorical meaning. A kind of hero, Cause Man Steel, is driving the town (and his wife) crazy with his plan to ensure the survival of his people through a scheme to harness the transport energy of the country’s millions of feral donkeys, anticipating a time when the petrol runs out.

Through the madcap antics of Cause and his donkeys, a sharp thread of grief and rage is evident. This focuses on questions of climate emergency and assimilation, and the novel works in complex ways to provide a sense of what it feels like to be living at the pointy end of both. The latter is given unforgettable weight through the perspective of Cause Man Steel’s youngest son, whose inhalation of media hysteria about Indigenous communities has tragic consequences.

Wright does not make it easy to know what to think of all this: the Ancestors are at work, but they might have bigger fish to fry. Written in a register that is expansive and surprising, Alexis Wright’s prose is like nothing you will encounter elsewhere.

Hospital – Sanya Rushdi

Giramondo

In Sanya Rushdi’s Hospital, the narrator – and thus the reader – is never clear about what is real. This is a work of autofiction, in which the protagonist shares a name and some biographical details with the author.

Hospital explores how Sanya, a student of psychology, navigates experiences of psychosis, medication and forced institutionalisation. She is living with and being treated for psychosis. The experience is one in which time slips, motivations are unclear, and personal agency is obstructed at every turn.

Family members call the Crisis Assessment and Treatment Team to visit Sanya at home, and their perceived role shifts from caring interlocutors to enforcers of a medication regime she actively resists. She is taken, in turn, to a group home and then to a hospital psychiatric ward, where she finds her analysis of her own situation undermined and ignored.

Translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha, Hospital is written in an understated tone that does not sensationalise the experiences it portrays. The use of first person is important in keeping the focus on Sanya’s thoughts and feelings, not on how she is diagnosed by others.

Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead – Hayley Singer

Upswell

Abandon Every Hope is a collection of lyrical essays that laments the violence meted out by humans against farmed animals. This violence is presented in brutal, shocking detail. The writing is always aware of the entanglement of human and animal lives.

Perhaps the most stunning, and shocking, essay in the collection is Inferno: an account of the effect of COVID on the interface between humans and farm animals in the United States, where restaurant closures and infections in processing plants led to the “inelastic agricultural supply chain” grinding to a halt.

But this is an industry that cannot just “stop” its work of breeding and slaughtering animals. New techniques were developed to euthanise millions of pigs and chickens. Poorly protected workers were infected in high numbers.

Like many of the essays in the collection, Inferno reveals how the farming of animals relies on a disregard for the rights of animals, and the humans who are employed to kill and “process” them.

Singer’s grief and her experiences during COVID are at the forefront of many of these essays. They are not easy reading. They take the reader directly into the slaughterhouse, and they are difficult to forget. Läs mer…

“Bluey mania” shows no sign of abating. Bluey’s season finale, The Sign, was the most viewed ABC program of all time on iView.

A “hidden” follow-up episode, aptly named The Surprise, created a storm of headlines around the world, many of which have a decidedly adult tone.

As highlighted in social media fan communities and articles, the show has struck a chord with adults, many of whom aren’t parents. What do they get from a show that is ostensibly “for kids”?

Parents love Bluey (sometimes more than kids)

Our research with children aged 7-9 and their parents provides evidence of how enraptured adults are by Bluey. Our findings also suggest it’s the parents who often drive household Bluey obsessions.

As one mum told us:

If we could tell the Australian TV gods something that we’d like to have on Australian TV, it would be more Bluey, don’t get rid of Bluey. […] Bluey is loved by mums a lot.

Another explained how the show provided learning for parents:

It’s the gentle parenting, kindness, empathy for the children, the humour […] And helping kids [and] families work through real life situations with kindness and compassion.

When one eight-year-old and his mum told us about their favourite shows, the following exchange took place:

Mum:: What about Bluey? Son: I sometimes [watch it]… Mum: You don’t want to say. He doesn’t want to say he watches Bluey. Bluey’s fantastic. Son: I sometimes- Mum: He wants to be a big boy. […] Everyone in this room probably loves Bluey. It’s not just for kids. Son: Enough about that.

Beyond families, Bluey has also attracted teen and adult fans without kids – in part thanks to a vibrant TikTok community (aka #blueytok). While some commentary suggests this adult fandom is “weird”, Bluey is only the latest in a long line of “children’s” shows with a passionate adult fanbase.

Shifting barriers in television

The distinction between “children’s” and “adult” television has long been crucial to our cultural understandings of what separates a child from an adult.

In the 1950s, academics were concerned children were watching TV content that was too mature for them, turning them into “adultised children”, and that adults watching kids’ shows were becoming “infantile adults”.

The industry took note. In 1957, a reduction in children’s TV production in the United States made space for so-called “kidult” shows designed for both age groups.

Since then, the boundaries between children’s and adult television have continually shifted. In television’s early days, science fiction was associated with child audiences (which is why many initially assumed Star Trek was a kids’ show).

These boundaries were also influenced by television scheduling. Warner Bros’ early animation shorts were initially all-ages theatrical releases, but in 1960 were packaged into the Bugs Bunny Show – pitched for kids and aired on Saturday mornings. As a result, by 1967 animation was considered kids’ fare.

The boundaries shifted again in the 1980s as adult Japanese anime such as Akira (1988) became popular in the West.

In 1989, The Simpsons debuted on TV. Our research reveals even today there is confusion regarding the show’s suitability for young children. Some of our seven-to-nine-year-old participants described secretly watching it without their parents’ knowledge.

Childhood healing

Bluey’s adult appeal is credited to the show’s playful yet emotionally complex content. One reason adults tune into today’s kids’ TV is because it’s far more diverse than the shows they could access growing up.

For many adults Bluey is a better experience of kids’ TV than what they grew up with.
ABC

Take 19-year-old Bluey fan Darby Rose, who points to an episode in which a Jack Russell terrier has ADHD. “As a neurodivergent person myself, this representation makes me ecstatic,” Rose says. This is also true of many teen programs, with the queer-friendly high-school romance Heartstopper attracting a large adult following.

It’s not just childhood nostalgia that drives adults to kids’ shows (although this is one aspect). Watching kids’ shows can be self-affirming for adults who missed out on seeing their identity onscreen growing up. Some adult fans even say Bluey has helped them heal childhood wounds.

Children’s television meets adult fan cultures

Watching “adult” television enables kids to feel more grown-up. Conversely, adults can watch children’s television to embrace aspects of their personality they feel social pressure to repress.

The latter is often the case for “Bronies” (a portmanteau for “bro” and “pony”): adult male fans of the animated kids’ show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (2010-20). The community has attracted much controversy. But research has found the reasons behind being a Brony aren’t suspicious or bizarre, but are empowering in unexpected ways.

As Bronies themselves have explained, the fandom allows them to rethink what masculinity means to them, with the support of other fans online and at events such as BronyCon.

Why can’t “manliness” include watching a cute show about ponies with friendship at its heart?

The 2012 BronyCon event in New Jersey attracted about 4,000 My Little Pony fans.
Mel Evans/AP

The changing nature of children’s television

The rise of streaming has led to yet another shift. On-demand viewing means freedom from the constraints of TV scheduling, which historically set the terms for “child” and “adult” viewing.

As our book details, Netflix has invested in the expansion of cultural expectations around what makes “child-appropriate” television.

Netflix’s mega hit Stranger Things deliberately pushes at these boundaries to attract a wide audience, from children and teens, to families, to adults without kids. As co-creator Matt Duffer explains, the aim was to get children hooked on the show, and then later in the season “scare the shit out of them. Then the parents can get mad.”

Parents certainly aren’t mad about their children getting hooked on Bluey. They may even be the secret to its global success: to keep the children watching, get the adults hooked. Läs mer…

What’s been described as the largest underpayment class action in Australian legal history has just been settled. Who was allegedly underpaid? Thousands of junior doctors who, subject to court approval, are set to share back-pay of more than a quarter of a million dollars.

Amireh Fakhouri, who brought the claim on behalf of junior doctors in New South Wales, alleged that when they worked in the state’s public health system from December 2014 to December 2020, NSW Health had failed to pay the overtime and weekend meal break entitlements she and her colleagues were owed.

More than 20,000 claimants are now set to be eligible for a share in the nearly A$230 million settlement.

But repayment was never the main goal of the class action. Fakhouri, who is now training as a GP in Victoria, said she hoped instead it would change the work culture in medicine.

A rite of passage?

Our health-care system has routinely relied on the labour of junior doctors. These include interns (those who have completed their university medical training and are in their first year of being practising doctors), residents (who have completed their internship and hold a general registration) and registrars (specialists in training).

Junior doctors often provide much of the staffing for night and weekend shifts and complete burdensome administrative tasks for consultants (senior doctors).

Overworking junior doctors has been normalised for decades. We see this depicted in books (such as The House of God and This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor) and TV shows (such as House and Scrubs).

The TV series This is Going to Hurt is based on the book by former UK junior doctor Adam Kay.

This is a safety issue. Doctor fatigue has considerable effects on patient safety through potential medical errors, poor quality patient care, longer patient recovery, reduced physician empathy and impacts on the doctor-patient relationship.

A 2020 study found that when doctors reported even moderate tiredness their chance of making a medical error rose by 53%.

Put simply, stretched, demoralised and tired doctors will do harm. Eventually, that will affect you.

It’s not just long hours

The expectation of working long hours is only part of the culture of medicine.

Our research and global evidence shows “teaching by humiliation” and other forms of verbal mistreatment have also been normalised.

A 2018 study of NSW interns and residents found more than 50% experienced bullying. Some 16-19% (mostly female) experienced sexual harassment.

Some of the junior doctors who are victims of mistreatment later become the perpetrators, perpetuating this harmful culture.

Junior doctors are suffering

The impact of long hours on junior doctors and of the abuse they are subjected to is vividly evident through research, including ours. Junior doctors have significantly high levels of depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide.

As we’ve been saying for almost a decade, there is a desperate need for better work-life balance for junior doctors and deep culture change in our health-care system.

But there is often little sympathy for junior doctors. In 2022, one hospital threatened to remove comfortable lounges to prevent juniors napping on quiet night shifts. Just last week, we heard of a similar case involving junior doctors at another hospital, who were told “sleeping is not part of your job description”.

A culture of silence

This class action was needed because on a day-to-day basis, junior doctors mostly do not complain.

They internalise distress as failure (not being tough enough) and fear that a diagnosis of depression or anxiety will result in patients and colleagues avoiding them.

They don’t report mistreatment or reject overwork as, often, their
senior doctors control their career progression.

This is important, because contrary to perceptions of doctors as wealthy elites, our research shows junior doctors often find it hard to progress, get a job in their city of choice, or find full-time roles. The pressure on junior doctors to “make it” in an increasingly competitive environment grows stronger. Such professional problems reinforce the culture of not complaining for fear of blow-back.

Most of those who do take action, report ineffective or personally harmful outcomes when reporting to senior colleagues. This fulfils a vicious cycle of silence as junior doctors become ill but do not seek help.

We wanted to lift the silence

We used theatre to lift the culture of silence about health-care worker distress due to workplace pressure.

We conducted interviews with junior and senior doctors about their experiences and used their verbatim stories to craft the script of the play Grace Under Pressure.

The aim is for this “verbatim theatre” to facilitate conversations and actions that promote positive culture change.

What needs to be done?

It often takes brave public legal action such as this lawsuit to catalyse culture change – to nudge hospitals to prevent junior doctors from working back-to-back shifts, to protect time off for a personal life, ensure meal breaks, and provide means to hold powerful senior doctors to account.

Culture change is hard, slow and requires multi-pronged strategies. We need a safe way for junior doctors to report their concerns, and training so they know their options for responding to mistreatment. We need senior doctors and hospital managers to be trained in how to encourage and respond constructively to complaints.

Our research shows that when this happens, culture change is possible. Läs mer…

You go to the gym, eat healthy and walk as much as possible. You wash your hands and get vaccinated. You control your health. This is a common story we tell ourselves. Unfortunately, it’s not quite true.

Factors outside our control have huge influence – especially products which can sicken or kill us, made by companies and sold routinely.

For instance, you and your family have been exposed for decades to dangerous forever chemicals, some of which are linked to kidney and testicular cancers. You’re almost certainly carrying these chemicals, known as PFAS or forever chemicals, in your body right now.

And that’s just the start. We now know exposure to just four classes of product – tobacco, alcohol, ultra-processed foods and fossil fuels – are linked to one out of every three deaths worldwide. That is, they’re implicated in 19 of the world’s 56 million deaths each year (as of 2019). Pollution – largely from fossil fuels – is now the single largest environmental cause of premature death. Communities of colour and low-income communities experience disproportionate impacts; For example, over 90% of pollution related deaths occur in low middle income countries.

This means the leading risk factor for disease and death worldwide is corporations who make, market and sell these unhealthy products. Worse, even when these corporations become aware of the harms their products cause, they have often systematically hidden these harms to boost profits at the expense of our health. Major tobacco, oil, food, pharmaceutical and chemical corporations have all applied similar techniques, privatising the profits and spreading the harms.

Tobacco companies long questioned the link between smoking and cancer.
Nopphon_1987/Shutterstock

Profit and loss statements

When companies act to conceal the harm their products do, they prevent us from protecting ourselves and our children. We now have many well-documented cases of corporate wrongdoing, such as asbestos, fossil fuels, pesticides, herbicides) sugar, silica, and of course tobacco. In these instances, corporations intentionally manufactured doubt or hid the harms of their products to delay or prevent regulation and maintain profits.

Decades of empirical evidence shows these effective tactics have actually been shared and strategically passed from one industry or company to the next.

For instance, when large tobacco companies Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds bought food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco in the 1980s, tobacco executives brought across marketing strategies, flavouring and colourings to expand product lines and engineered fatty, sweet and salty hyperpalatable foods such as cookies, cereals and frozen foods linked to obesity and diet-related diseases. These foods activate our reward circuits and encourage us to consume more.

Or consider how ‘forever chemicals’ became so widespread. A team of scientists (including this article’s co-author) investigated previously secret internal industry documents from 3M and DuPont, the largest makers of forever chemicals PFOA and PFOS.

The documents showed both 3M and DuPont used tactics from the tobacco industry’s playbook, such as suppressing unfavourable research and distorting public debate. Like Big Tobacco, 3M and DuPont had a financial interest in suppressing scientific evidence of the harms of their products, while publicly declaring in-demand products such as Teflon were safe.

For decades, forever chemicals PFOA and PFOS have been used to make Teflon pans, Scotchgard, firefighting foam and other non-stick materials. By the early 2000s, one of these, PFOS, ended up in our blood at 20 times the level its manufacturer, 3M, considered safe.

As early as 1961, the chief toxicologist at DuPont’s Teflon subsidiary reported the company’s wonder-material had “the ability to increase the size of the liver of rats at low doses”, and recommended the chemicals be handled “with extreme care”. According to a 1970 internal memo, the DuPont-funded Haskell Laboratory found the chemical class C8 (now known as PFOA/PFOS) was “highly toxic when inhaled and moderately toxic when ingested”.

Teflon was hailed as a wonder material, making non-stick pans possible. But the original chemicals used to make Teflon were dangerous.
Minko Dima/Shutterstock

Both 3M and DuPont did extensive internal research on the risks their products posed to humans, but they shared little of it. The risks of PFOA including pregnancy-induced hypertension, kidney and testicular cancers, and ulcerative colitis was not publicly established until 2011.

Now, 60 years after DuPont first learned of the harms these products could cause, many countries are facing the human and environmental consequences and a very expensive cleanup.

Even though the production of PFOA and PFOS is being phased out, forever chemicals are easily stored in the body and take decades to break down. Worse, PFOA and PFOS are just two of over 15,000 different PFAS chemicals, most of which are still in use.

How can we prevent corporate injury to our health?

My co-author and I work in the field known as commercial determinants of health, which is to say, the damage corporations can do to us.

Corporate wrongdoing can directly injure or even kill us.

One of the key ways companies have been able to avoid regulation and lawsuits is by hiding the evidence. Internal studies showing harm can be easily hidden. External studies can be influenced, either by corporate funding, business-friendly scientists, legal action or lobbying policymakers to avoid regulation.

Here are three ways to prevent this happening again:

1) Require corporations to adhere to the same standards of data sharing and open science as independent scientists do.

If a corporation wants to bring a new product to market, they should have to register and publicly release every study they plan to conduct on its harms so the public can see the results of the study.

2) Sever the financial links between industry and researchers or policymakers.

Many large corporations will spend money on public studies to try to get favourable outcomes for their own interests. To cut these financial ties means boosting public health research, either through government funding or alternatives such as a tax on corporate marketing. It would also mean capping corporate political donations and bringing lobbying under control by restricting corporate access and spending to policymakers and increasing transparency. And it would mean stopping the revolving door where government employees or policymakers work for the industry they used to regulate once they leave office.

3) Mandate public transparency of corporate funding to researchers and policymakers.

In 2010, the United States introduced laws to enforce transparency on how much medical and pharmaceutical companies were spending to influence the products doctors chose to use. Research using the data unearthed by these laws has shown the problem is pervasive. We need this model for other industries so we can clearly see where corporate money is going. Registries should be detailed, permanent and easy to search.

These steps would not be easy. But the status quo means corporations can keep selling dangerous or lethal products for much longer than they should.

In doing so, they have become one of the largest influences on our health and will continue to harm generations to come – in ways hard to counter with yoga and willpower. And your health is more important than corporate profits.

Read more:
Chemicals, forever: how do you fix a problem like PFAS? Läs mer…

Imagine working during a heat wave, standing over a boiling hot stove in a busy restaurant with no air conditioning, limited ventilation and no access to a break until you’ve worked five consecutive hours.

To cope, you drape a damp hand towel over your shoulders and stand in the walk-in freezer for a brief moment to cool down. While beads of sweat drip down your forehead, your employer pulls you aside and says he cannot risk having customers see you sweat. It appears unhygienic. This experience is typical for many food service workers during extreme heat.

From fields to fryers, a warming planet is intensifying occupational health and safety threats to low-wage workers across the food chain. Of particular note are migrant agricultural workers and restaurant workers in Canada who share many similar conditions.

Read more:
States are weakening their child labor restrictions nearly 8 decades after the US government took kids out of the workforce

Workers in both farms and restaurants face daunting barriers to unionization, experience hazards like sexual harassment and fear employer retaliation and job loss. Extreme heat, flooding and wildfires are exacerbating this precarity, and labour laws are failing to protect workers.

In a warming world it is essential that labour protections and climate justice go hand in hand.

On the front lines of extreme heat

Alvita is a 37-year-old mother from Jamaica who has worked in Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) since 2014. She described what it was like to live in an overcrowded bunkhouse in British Columbia during the deadly 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome:

I’m telling you, if it is summer, you are going to die because you can’t sleep in it… all of that heat piercing in from the sun… It is so hot. Like naturally, just walking in the heat makes you feel dizzy. It’s like you’re in a furnace. And there is no fan, there is nothing. No windows you can open up, no nothing.

Alvita’s experience with grossly inadequate cooling and ventilation is a common story we heard in our interviews in Ontario and B.C. In both provinces the employers of migrant agricultural workers provided substandard housing which often undermined their physical and mental health.

Workers felt pressured not to complain because their work permits were precarious, and they feared repatriation.

Globally, heat stress and dehydration among agricultural workers has been associated with kidney disease. When farm workers have access to air conditioning, their sleep quality improves, with an array of potential benefits for their health.

Seasonal workers routinely face a range of health concerns as a result of poor working conditions.
(Michael Tseng), Author provided (no reuse)

Indoor workers also face hazards during extreme heat.

During the heat dome, one-third of calls to WorkSafeBC were related to high temperatures in restaurants.

A report, prepared by the Worker Solidarity Network, surveyed and interviewed restaurant workers across B.C. and found that 77 per cent of restaurant workers reported adverse physical health effects, and a lack of protective measures, during high temperatures. Some described these conditions as “abusive,” “dehumanizing” and “absolute hell.”

It is also worth remembering that these conditions are occurring in a restaurant industry which is notoriously gendered, racialized and difficult to unionize.

One restaurant cook from B.C.’s interior reflected:

I have this very specific story of this one day where it was just so hot — I couldn’t rationalize why I was still at work…so much was going around like the forest fires and the heat itself… While I was working, all I could think of was climbing over the counter and pushing my way out of the restaurant and getting the hell out of there. But I couldn’t because it’s like, how am I going to pay rent?

This sentiment captures the reality of precarious work: having to choose between persevering through poor working conditions or risking a paycheck. These stories point to other labour issues like the complexity of refusing unsafe work and the balancing of multiple jobs to make ends meet amid rising prices and unaffordable housing.

A panel discussion on climate change and labour produced by the Global Labour Research Centre at York University.

Protections for workers on a warming planet

When it comes to updating labour laws to protect workers from climate change, governments in Canada are woefully behind the curve.

Provinces like B.C. should look to places like California for examples of effective regulations to protect both indoor and outdoor workers. Washington State has also recently implemented a permanent heat rule for outdoor workers requiring bosses to, amongst other things, offer shade and cool water when the mercury rises above 27 C.

In Canada, we recommend three policy interventions that would go a long way toward protecting workers in the food industry and beyond:

1. Maximum temperature policy:

Despite the devastating lessons learned from the heat dome, there is no maximum temperature policy in B.C.

Current heat exposure regulations note that workers should be protected from thermal stress in environments where their core body temperature may exceed 38 C. This measure has not been updated since 2005 and does not proactively limit workers’ exposure to heat-related illness. We encourage the government to update this regulation or establish a distinct and comprehensive “too hot to work” policy that does not merely use core body temperature as a marker to refuse unsafe work.

Canada urgently requires updated climate health and safety regulations.
(Michael Tseng), Author provided (no reuse)

2. Better access to union protections:

Unions give workers a democratic voice in the workplace, such as collectively bargaining for wage and job protection during environmental disasters. Unions may also play an important social movement role in pushing governments to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate pollution.

Agricultural workers in provinces like Ontario should have the option of joining a union, and Canadian provinces should consider broader-based and sectoral bargaining. This could make unions more accessible to precarious workers in private sector jobs with high turnover like fast food.

Read more:
It is industry, not government, that is getting in the way of a ’just transition’ for oil and gas workers

3. Stronger enforcement of health and safety regulations:

Even the best labour protections for workers are useless unless they are enforced in practice.

Advocates note that when workers in B.C. file formal complaints about unfair working standards, they can face extremely long wait times — from six months to three years in some instances.

Workers in low-wage sectors need random, proactive health and safety inspections. They also need better oversight on the enforcement of personal protective equipment, heat stress assessments and worker training on exposure plans. The federal government should also co-ordinate strong, enforceable national housing standards for migrant agricultural workers that include thermal comfort.

An ongoing effort

This May Day, everyone across Canada should take a moment to reflect on past labour injustices and the growing challenges facing exploited workers. History has shown that workers can have a seat at the table and while the conditions today may be different, the solutions are nothing new.

Individual Canadians, and unions, across the country must maintain constant pressure on governments and industry to give teeth to climate change-related occupational safety standards so that everyone — and especially working people — can be healthy, safe and work with dignity on a planet changing beyond all recognition. Läs mer…

Christopher Luxon’s sacking of two struggling cabinet ministers last week was praised by pundits as a sign of decisive – even “brutal” and “ruthless” – leadership. But this week’s 1News-Verian poll suggests the public is far less convinced of his leadership performance.

Based on those poll numbers, the National-led coalition would be out of office if an election were held now. And Luxon’s “preferred prime minister” rating fell further to 23%.

Politics is often a brutalising business. Machiavelli famously argued it is safer for leaders wanting to keep their job to be feared rather than loved. Countering perceptions of weak leadership may have been the motivation for Luxon’s decision to demote two ministers this early in his government’s term.

But those perceptions have been fuelled by the manner in which the prime minister’s coalition partners have tested, if not undermined, his authority and credibility.

We can trace this back to November last year, with the press conference announcing the coalition agreement, the ministerial swearing-in ceremony and the first cabinet meeting. NZ First leader and deputy prime minister Winston Peters repeatedly stole the limelight with a series of provocative, headline-grabbing statements.

Peters is a highly experienced politician, so would have known he was taking centre stage from the prime minister. But the mere fact he could do this was an early indicator of Luxon’s tenuous grip on power.

Coalition collisions

ACT Party leader David Seymour has also more than once undermined Luxon’s authority and credibility.

When the prime minister finally confirmed National would not support ACT’s contentious Treaty Principles Bill beyond its first reading, Seymour’s response was to openly state he didn’t believe Luxon’s commitment to that position.

Luxon brushed off the incident. But more recently he sought to publicly reprimand both Seymour and NZ First minister Shane Jones for critical comments each had made about the Waitangi Tribunal, which could have breached the cabinet manual.

Seymour’s response this time was to say it was Luxon who had erred by publicly stating those concerns.

Some of this can be put down to the policy tensions and competing political ambitions inherent in a three-party coalition. It’s the first such arrangement since New Zealand adopted the MMP proportional system.

But does Luxon’s leadership style make him unusually vulnerable to these kinds of tactics from his putative parliamentary allies?

David Seymour: openly challenging Luxon’s authority and credibility.
AAP

Leadership and power

Power is a fundamental aspect of both politics and leadership. Complex, dynamic and multifaceted, it is neither a zero-sum game nor solely rooted in laws or formal authority.

Leaders can enhance their power, in the sense of securing more respect and influence, through personal characteristics that garner admiration and support. They can demonstrate expert knowledge and skills, and use reason, logic and evidence to persuade others.

They can gain power through rewarding supporters. But least effective in most circumstances is the power to punish others, which risks turning erstwhile supporters into enemies.

In theory, Luxon has access to all these bases of power. But so far he has struggled to mobilise them in ways that command the respect of his coalition partners.

According to this week’s 1News-Verian poll, this is also increasingly evident to the public: only 51% said Luxon is the decision-maker in the coalition government.

Luxon’s relative lack of political experience (compared to Peters, in particular) may be a contributing factor. But his continued low poll rating as preferred prime minister also likely weakens his sway over cabinet – possibly even his own caucus.

Live by the sword …

Should that lack of popularity continue, it imperils National’s chances of success at the next election. Regardless of the formal reality that he has the lawful mandate to be prime minister, Luxon needs to convince the public he deserves their support.

The signs so far aren’t promising. His party did not see a post-election bump in the polls and hasn’t enjoyed a traditional honeymoon effect.

Lack of judgment over his “entitlement” to an accommodation allowance preceded Luxon’s drop in “net favourability” (favourable minus unfavourable results) in the March Taxpayers Union-Curia poll – to below Labour leader Chis Hipkins, who recently led his party to a historic defeat in the election.

In a subsequent poll from Talbot Mills (one of whose clients is the Labour Party), Luxon’s net favourability was –7%. By contrast, former National prime minister John Key scored around +58% at a similar time in his tenure.

In that same survey, the words people associated with Luxon’s character are indicative of the problem. While “business” and “leader” likely hold reasonably positive connotations, “greedy”, “unsure” and “arrogant” clearly do not.

Luxon claimed his sacking of the cabinet ministers demonstrated an ability to “adapt very quickly and dynamically to changing circumstances and situations”. He will need those qualities if he is to turn around public opinion about his character and his government’s performance.

Unless his personal standing with the voting public becomes a key source of his political power, such that his colleagues feel he can carry them to re-election, Luxon may learn the hard way what “live by the sword, die by the sword” means in politics. Läs mer…