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Websites sometimes hide how widely they share our personal information, and can go to great lengths to pull the wool over our eyes. This deception is intended to prevent full disclosure to consumers, thus preventing informed choice and affecting privacy rights.

Governments are responding to consumer concerns about privacy with legislation. These include the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). The impact of this legislation is visible as websites request permission to track online user activity.

However, many users remain unaware of the impact of these choices, or how the extent of sharing is deceptively hidden.

Websites and privacy

As Canadian policymakers grapple with updates to online privacy regulations, our research looks at when and why companies actively hide — and how widely they share — our personal data. We found that the obfuscation, or disguise, of information sharing is a strategy commonly used by websites to mislead users and raise the cost of monitoring.

Our research team has been studying website privacy issues for a number of years, specifically with respect to the sharing of consumer data with third parties as a way to monetize web traffic.

Our research has established that websites with privacy-sensitive content, such as medical and banking websites, are naturally constrained by the market in terms of their third-party sharing. These websites are also more privacy-sensitive, and so are less likely to obscure the extent of information-sharing.

We also examined the privacy abuses that occurred as people’s use of online services increased in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted research that allowed us to predict website trustworthiness by observing how they employed third parties. We discussed how opt-in privacy legislation can increase third-party sharing.

Read more:
To protect user privacy online, governments need to reconsider their use of opt-in policies

Gathering and sharing of data

We examined third-party data collection by websites, highlighting the extensive tracking mechanisms deployed by platforms and advertisers to capture consumer information. This pervasive surveillance raises significant concerns about privacy infringement and the commodification of personal data.

Within the first three seconds of opening a web page, over 80 third parties on average have accessed your information. Some of these third parties provide services to improve a website’s functionality and performance.

Other third parties are engaged in advertising and targeted advertising, which includes scooping up and selling your most personal information. Some third parties are extremely predatory in their privacy abuses.

Our research reveals circumstances where websites actively hide how widely our data is shared. As content sensitivity increases — for example, websites dealing with sensitive personal medical information — websites reduce the level of deception compared to websites with less sensitive content.

We also found that websites that are more popular are more likely to hide their data-sharing practices than websites with smaller audiences.

Websites modify how widely they share user information and hide how much they share because it can sometimes help increase profits by taking advantage of unknowing consumers. This means that visitors are unable to make fully informed decisions regarding their data privacy.

Similar to ambiguous website privacy policies, requesting consent to collect and share information does not necessarily resolve the information asymmetry between websites and users. A common strategy is to overwhelm users with an overly extensive list of third parties that do not necessarily reflect their particular interaction.

Asking for consent to gather information is a gesture that can hide a website’s actions.
(Shutterstock)

Pervasive surveillance

Websites use a variety of techniques to keep users from understanding the true level of information sharing and its privacy implications. One deception is the use of dark patterns, defined as “user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions.” These dark patterns trick users into giving away their privacy.

Another deception technique relates to the lack of transparency surrounding third-party sharing. Who websites share information with depends upon a myriad of variables — the consumer never knows how or why their information is shared. Third parties can differ depending on where a user is located: third-party sharing across the largest 100,000 websites is on average higher for customers clicking from California compared to New York, for example.

Obfuscated customization occurs when the website actively tries to hide their abusive third party sharing. For example, consumers can use a Do Not Track (DNT) request: however, websites can make it difficult for users to understand the website’s response to the request, and it is very difficult to figure out what happens after the request is made.

Sometimes, websites actually track users more in response to a DNT request. In an unpublished experiment that we performed, 40 per cent of the top 100 largest news websites in the world shared your data with more third parties if you made a DNT request. Even if a website engages fewer third parties, the changes in response to a DNT request may still be abusive because they may now share data with more intrusive third parties.

Consumer responses

Consumers may use various tools to protect themselves, including virtual private networks (VPNs), behavioural obfuscation and lying about their personal information.

Simply disclosing the presence of third parties and requesting user consent is insufficient because the consumer, for all practical purposes, is unaware of the extent of third-party sharing and tracking. Because of this information asymmetry, it is impossible to know when or to what extent personal information has been shared.

The EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA contain opt-in and opt-out regulations, such as those currently under consideration in Canada. But one thing is clear: these regulations are not enough to stop websites from manipulating and profiting from user data. Läs mer…

Those advocating for a green transition have, in recent years, had to contend with not just economic or political resistance, but ideological push back as well — specifically, from those adhering to the “ideology of fossil fuels.”

The ideology of fossil fuels is characterized by an inability to imagine life, or progress, without petroleum products. In politics, this ideology influences the positions of left and right alike. It even encourages those on the centre-left to support oil and gas while also endorsing green energy.

In Alberta, we saw this when former Premier Rachel Notley enthusiastically supported the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and increased renewable electricity production.

On the right, conservatives see in this ideology the vindication of their love of business and fossil fuel producers above all else. Project 2025, proposed by the Heritage Foundation, a leading American conservative think tank, reflects this mentality. The United Conservative Party government in petroleum-rich Alberta also sings from this hymn book.

Growing green in Alberta

For decades, Alberta has been one of North America’s most important oil producers. Today, only Texas pumps more oil than Alberta.

However, Alberta’s oil producing stature has camouflaged the province’s emergence as a green energy leader.

One Alberta energy regulator observed that renewable electricity production was growing “by leaps and bounds.” The Canadian Renewable Energy Association reported that 75 per cent of the country’s new renewable electricity generation came from Alberta in 2022.

Rystad Energy, the international energy consultancy, predicted Alberta would be Canada’s largest wind and solar electricity producer by 2025.

Alberta could be Canada’s largest wind and solar electricity producer by 2025.
(Shutterstock)

The biggest contributors to Alberta’s revolutionary potential? A mixture of industry-wide technical changes and a market where generators are paid only for the power they generate. These changes in the solar sector drove down solar costs by more than 80 per cent between 2009 and 2023 and electricity sector greenhouse gas emissions fell by 51 per cent from 2015 to 2021.

The data seems clear, renewables have a secure, and growing, position in Alberta’s electric grid.

Inquiries

Last summer Premier Danielle Smith fired the first shot in her campaign against renewables. In early August, Smith imposed a seven-month moratorium on all new renewable generation project approvals.

The moratorium came despite the significant investment and employment benefits Alberta’s renewables sector had started to deliver. Between 2019 and 2023, $3.75 billion was invested in Albertan utility-scale wind and solar projects; 4,500 workers were hired.

Key government rationales for the moratorium lacked evidence. The government said Alberta needed a moratorium plus a public inquiry into the land use impact of renewables. Why? Because of unspecified concerns that renewables posed significant threats to Alberta’s best agricultural lands and to “Alberta’s pristine viewscapes.” The province instructed the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) to conduct this inquiry.

The inquiry didn’t find any support for this government rationale. Several participants in the inquiry (myself included) offered research showing that renewables have made, and likely will continue to make, a marginal contribution to converting Alberta’s best agricultural lands to renewable electricity production.

The 31,125 hectares of land needed to achieve net-zero for the province of Alberta is just 61 per cent as big as Waterton Lakes National Park.
(Wikimedia), CC BY

The commissioners listened. They observed that renewables weren’t primarily responsible for any historical loss of these lands. Furthermore, they endorsed the findings of a renewables “worst case scenario” for prime agricultural lands. This scenario imagined locating all the renewables needed to reach net-zero in electricity by 2035 on the best farming land. This would remove less than one per cent of these lands.

Approximately 0.4 to 0.6 per cent of today’s best lands would need to be converted if solar alone was the vehicle to reach net-zero. The 31,125 hectares needed to realize the solar-only net-zero scenario is just 61 per cent as big as Waterton Lakes National Park in the southwest corner of the province.

The government dismissed these observations and adopted an “agricultural first” policy. The policy prohibits renewable projects from locating on prime agricultural land unless projects can share the land with agriculture. While the AUC saw promise in sharing the land (a process known as agrivoltaics), they told the government this option “would benefit from further study.”

Ideological drivers

What links the Alberta government’s agriculture first policy to a fossil fuel ideology? It’s refusal to impose any similar land use restrictions on exploiting oil and gas. The commission observed that pipelines and non-renewable industry are responsible for the greatest loss of agricultural land recently. Those activities, not renewables, would be more appropriate targets.

Protecting “pristine landscapes” also revealed the fossil fuel ideology’s importance. The commission noted how difficult it was to agree on what the government’s phrase meant. It was simply impossible to agree on what a pristine landscape actually looked like. Faced with this impossibility, the AUC left it to government to decide what, if any, viewscape qualified as pristine.

But the commission suggested that protecting viewscapes should be “industry agnostic.” Viewscape prohibitions should “apply equally to all forms of development within the restricted zone, not just electricity generation.”

The protection of ‘pristine landscapes’ is a common tactic used by the UCP to block renewables development.
(Shutterstock)

The government did not follow this suggestion. Its minimum 35 kilometre “pristine viewscape” buffer prohibits all new wind projects. Solar projects also may need to pass a visual impact assessment as part of the approval process.

These viewscape restrictions do not apply to new oil and gas projects.

Beyond these issues, a fossil fuel ideology also animates other provincial policies designed to expand petroleum production. Billions in subsidies for carbon capture projects and intense opposition to a proposed federal cap on oil and gas emissions demonstrate this.

Similar opposition to federal draft clean electricity regulations and a new annual registration fee for electric vehicles also confirm the prominence of an ideology of fossil fuels in contemporary Alberta conservatism.

While the UCP in Alberta may, at the moment, be the primary culprit in this assault on green development, it is important to remember that a fossil fuel ideology is not inherently driven by party politics. Understanding this can help us all to more effectively keep both conservative, as well as future left-leaning, governments to account. Läs mer…

Set aside the apple and the snake. Set aside the unforgiving God. The loss of Eden is a story about the consequences of monumental folly and needless greed. Having soiled paradise, we live now in a harsher, bleaker world.

In The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown, the South African author and naturalist Adam Welz shows we are repeating those errors, sowing and reaping our despoilation. His book is a thoughtful, perceptive, empathetic and sorrowful account of the consequences of our increasing subversion of the natural world that gives us life.

Review: The End of Eden: Wild Nature in the Age of Climate Breakdown – Adam Welz (Bloomsbury Sigma)

By now, we are all aware of the devastating losses brought by increasingly frequent environmental catastrophes: the Black Summer bushfires, the floods, the coral bleaching, the droughts, the mass fish kills, the retreat of glaciers, the loss of polar ice, the days of unbearable heat.

Kangaroo Island following the Black Summer wildfires. Such catastrophic events have devastating consequences, but there are many subtle and gradual effects.
John Woinarski

Most people recognise that, as the creators of climate change, we are the responsible agents; we have put ourselves on a pathway that is rushing us towards destruction. Many of us have been directly affected; all of us will be indirectly affected.

In End of Eden, Welz describes some of the myriad losses of nature caused by such disasters. One of his examples is the impact of Hurricane Maria on the Puerto Rican parrots known as Iguacas. Following a long history of clearing of its habitat, its remaining wild population became restricted to a single national park in highland rainforest. By 2017, following decades of care by conservation agencies, this remnant population was at last seemingly secure, and the population had built to about 650 birds.

In vivid prose, Wenz describes what then happened when the hurricane tore through and destroyed this forest. Through radio-tracking, scientists were able to establish that maybe only one bird survived the onslaught. But after a few days lost in the devastated landscape, that single bird succumbed too.

In this case, happily, not all was lost for the Iguacas. Although the entire wild population was wiped out, some individuals in a captive breeding facility survived, providing a tenuous thread for the ongoing existence of the species.

It is a story with many lessons, but preparedness for inevitable disaster is an important message.

Puerto Rican Parrot.
USDAgov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Read more:
The Great Barrier Reef’s latest bout of bleaching is the fifth in eight summers – the corals now have almost no reprieve

Subtle entangling impacts

End of Eden does much more than count the environmental toll of individual catastrophes. The effects of climate change are more subtle, more pervasive. Much of its effect is nuanced and gradational, and hence less obvious but more insidious.

Welz’s approach is to paint intricate portraits of plant and animal species, and of places. He gives us insights into how flora and fauna are woven into their ecological setting, then describes how that weave is unravelling.

Some of these accounts are heartbreaking. Millions of years of finely tuned evolution has perfectly adapted the biology of species to their environments. These adaptations are being rendered fragile and increasingly incapable of dealing with the rapid and unremitting changes we have wrought upon the world.

The cheetah is one such case. Exquisitely designed for speed, and hence so successful at hunting in the open plains, its habitat is being crowded out by increasing tree cover, a consequence of rising concentrations of greenhouse gases.

The cheetah’s specialised adaptation is now a failing, and the species is rapidly heading for extinction.

There are many comparable examples. Welz gives accounts of decline and loss of plants and animals, of the gathering emptiness. In some cases, we can decipher the cause, as scientists have – painstakingly, lovingly – learned to see the world from the perspective of a plant or animal, understand its weak points and define the chain of causality.

The Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill of the Kalahari is part of the fabric of that place, but populations are dwindling. Climate change is the root cause, as rising temperatures now often exceed the physiological tolerance of the males, leaving them unable to gather enough food to deliver to their dependent young and brooding females. They starve, and nesting now fails, year after year.

Southern Yellow-billed Hornbill, Makgadikgadi Pans National Park, Botswana.
Diego Delso, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Even more intricately layered is the case of the Red Knot. For one subspecies of this shorebird, the mudflats of northwestern Africa are a key staging point along their migratory route, because within the mud there is a rich resource of small clams. In the 1980s, more than half a million birds congregated there.

But the population has now fallen by at least 80%. The problem lies thousands of kilometres away in the breeding grounds of northern Siberia, where warmer temperatures mean the snow covering melts earlier each year. The Red Knots now arrive too late to coincide their breeding with the pulse of insects that follows the melting snow.

Their young are now malnourished; breeding success has collapsed. Food limitation in infancy has also resulted in shrinkage of their bills. These increasingly shorter-billed birds cannot so readily access the clams hidden below the mud in their non-breeding area. Their bodies, formerly tuned to remarkable migrations, are failing them. Further decline seems inexorable.

There are many other examples of such losses in this book. Each plays out in a different area, at varying pace or magnitude. In each case, a species has its existence cruelled by one or more of the many manifestations of climate change.

These natural history narratives – of species struggling with new regimes of heat or fire or the chemical composition of their environments – illustrate the pervasiveness and multiplicity of climate change’s effects. Individually, they are saddening; collectively, they are devastating.

Read more:
Friday essay: ’mourning cannot be an endpoint’ – James Bradley on living in an Age of Emergency

Change, chaos and causality

Welz writes that “climate change” is too gentle a phrase. He suggests “climate breakdown” is more apt, as it better conveys the likelihood there may be no recovery from this transformation and the multiple, complex and interactive processes that follow from our greenhouse gas emissions.

A characteristic and strength of this book is the counterpointing of its wildlife narratives with explanations of the workings of these causal factors. There are mechanistic descriptions of the processes of fire, thermoregulation, migration, wind, vision and evolution. Through Wenz’s accounts, we see the receding wildlife, but also understand the factors that have subverted their lives.

Much of the collapse of nature – the extinctions, the population crashes of previously abundant species, the losses which we barely perceive – can be attributed to our ongoing destruction of natural habitats, our resource use, the effects of invasive species, and other factors. Climate change is not the only concern.

But climate change compounds these effects. It pervades all natural systems. It has rapidly become the primary driver of much of this decline. And of course the causal factors are, ultimately, due to us.

The End of Eden is a harrowing, necessary book: it shows that we are now witnessing, and causing, the destruction of Eden. We are sentencing our descendants to a less bounteous, less wonderful world. Much of nature has been lost; much more will disappear.

Welz’s concluding chapter does, however, offer a little hope, a frail pathway to recovery. There are no new or startling solutions proposed. Indeed, the final section is cursory. Wenz’s argument is essentially that as we increasingly come to recognise what we are losing – the kinds of losses he documents so well in this book – our society, all of us, will eventually recognise the need to take the actions required to save our future.

We have a limited opportunity to prevent the fall. Läs mer…

In the early 20th century, canaries were used as early warning systems in coal mines to alert miners to rising levels of carbon monoxide.

A small unremarkable fish may fill a similar role in coastal ecosystems around Aotearoa New Zealand.

Triplefins, or kokopara, are common in a range of shallow coastal habitats across the country. They are a diverse group of fishes, with 26 endemic species living on our shores, and they make excellent “canaries” for the coastal marine environment, helping us to understand and possibly address pollution.

Research using triplefins has already shown increased consumption of microplastics by fish living closer to urban areas. Studies have also identified molecular responses to multiple chemical pollutants and described cognitive damage caused by loss of habitat complexity.

Noise pollution from small boats also has negative effects on coastal fish. And now, new research is investigating the surprising impact of light pollution on coastal ecosystems.

We are finding what is called “skyglow” affects triplefin growth patterns, with consequences for their ability to forage.

An underwater ‘canary’

Human activity around coastal waters is intense, about triple the rate of other areas, and it affects ecosystems such as beaches and wetlands.

Coastal urbanisation introduces a range of challenges for near-shore ecosystems, including pollutants, plastics, sound and light.

Light pollution is often recognised for the limitations it imposes on astronomers and stargazers, but a growing body of research has begun to document effects on the health of animals and ecosystems.

Triplefins have already shown that fish living closer to urban areas are more exposed to microplastics and noise pollution.
Wikimedia Commons/Ian Skipworth, CC BY-SA

Scientists have found coastal fishes in tropical and temperate environments, including the common triplefin, reproduce and grow in a cyclical pattern which follows the monthly lunar cycle.

Patterns in nocturnal illumination (known as artificial light at night, or ALAN) of surface waters have a surprisingly large impact on these fish. The prevalence of light pollution from cities (in this case New Zealand’s capital Wellington) can potentially interfere with their breeding cycles.

Read more:
Night skies are getting 9.6% brighter every year as light pollution erases stars for everyone

Long-term trends in skyglow over the Wellington region have revealed elevated levels of nighttime illumination up to 60 kilometres from the city centre.

Analysis of triplefin samples from nearby waters has identified altered growth patterns, manifesting in different body shapes. The health consequences include decreased swimming and foraging ability and make life harder for fish developing in brighter waters.

A network of street lights illuminates the Wellington region at night.
Shutterstock/Hairem

Bright city lights

It may not seem that the effects of light on a tiny fish are a big deal, but triplefins are a clear indicator of what could be happening in other fish.

In marine ecosystems, small changes have a way of propagating further up the food chain. In the light pollution example, theory suggests small-scale, relatively short-term fluctuations in small prey species like the common triplefin are likely to appear later as long-term fluctuations in larger species at a greater spatial scale, with genuine implications for pelagic fisheries.

In an instance such as this, the triplefin is indeed acting as a canary for potential changes affecting the entire marine food web.

Read more:
Under the moonlight: a little light and shade helps larval fish to grow at night

We know what affects one fish species may not affect others. But equally, we can’t carry out experiments on every species. What the humble triplefin can tell us is that coastal ecosystems are in trouble, not just from water quality and pollution, but from the lights and sounds of our big cities.

Like the miners, we need to pay attention to the animals we use as indicators. The triplefins are asking us to embrace the dark and there are many ways in which our cities can do this.

Communities can choose LED lightbulbs and shaded fixtures for street lights, so they only point down. Sensible use of dimmers and timers will help turn off unnecessary lights. In fact, Aotearoa New Zealand hosts two of the world’s few dark sky reserves, in Aoraki-McKenzie and, more recently, in the Wairarapa, as well as two dark sky sanctuaries (Aotea/Great Barrier Island and Rakiura/Stewart Island).

New Zealand could be on track to become the second dark sky nation in the world (after Niue). Läs mer…

Do you find yourself endlessly scrolling through streaming channels, wondering what to watch among the hundreds (or thousands) of options? Do you worry about spending more money on yet another subscription just to watch the latest show everyone is talking about? Do you miss the days when we had just five channels to choose from – and someone else was making the choices about what was playing? Do you ever just wish you could watch Home and Away, 24 hours a day, every day?

Well, there is a channel for that.

On “FAST TV” – or, free ad-supported streaming TV – in Australia you can watch a channel entirely dedicated to Home and Away, or another that plays Border Security non-stop. You can watch Mythbusters on a loop, or hours and hours of Baywatch.

You can watch channels curated by genre, like “Cooking & Culture” or “Property Dreams”, or by sporting code. Some channels recreate those you might remember from your Foxtel days, like MTV Reality and Nick Toons, or The Movie Hub and “Throwback TV”.

FAST channels (or “FASTs”) resemble traditional broadcast or cable channels. They run on a linear schedule, interspersed with blocks of ads. But they are entirely free and delivered over the internet – and our recent audit of the market found there are more than 640 available in Australia.

Read more:
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Where can I find them?

FASTs are offered on most smart TVs, as well as on some local broadcasters’ video-on-demand services.

They first became available in Australia in 2020 when Samsung launched Samsung TV Plus. LG Channels, TCL Channels and VIDAAtv (on Hisense TVs) have since entered the market.

Do you want to watch Mythbusters all day, every day? There’s an app for that.
AP Photo/Noah Berger

If you have one of these smart TVs, you might have access to FAST channels. These are normally displayed in the app-launcher row on the smart TV home screen and in the electronic program guide.

7Plus and 10Play offer more than 50 FAST channels each, and 9Now and SBS On Demand recently each added a couple of FAST channels. Plex, a free media player and video app you can download onto your smart TV, offers more than 200 FAST channels.

So why do they exist?

For TV manufacturers like Samsung and LG, FASTs add value to a customer’s initial purchase and manufacturers make money from advertising and the data they collect from users.

For Australian television stations, FASTs help their streaming catalogues look bigger and allow them to use the content they’ve licensed in a different way.

Arguably, the audience for shows like Home and Away and Border Security are used to linear TV (and the advertising that comes along with it), and they might enjoy a lean-back experience where they can binge these shows.

Manufacturers like Samsung have their own FAST channels.
M-SUR/Shutterstock

FAST channels are being promoted to audiences as the solution to streaming frustrations such as subscription fatigue, choice paralysis and increasing costs. With these channels you don’t have to choose what to watch next; instead, you can sit in front of whatever is on. A study by Samsung found ads within FAST environments are perceived as shorter and less disruptive than broadcast TV. And, of course, FASTs are free.

FASTs also provide content audiences might not be able to find anywhere else. They exist across several key niches (in our research, we found channels for gaming, yoga, poker, wrestling, fashion, cooking, spirituality and finance) and serve particular diasporic communities in Australia. For example, LG Channels offers a suite of South Korean channels.

Some of the 1,500 FAST channels in the United States have started making exclusive new content, but at the moment the FAST channels in Australia only offer existing content.

Read more:
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There are issues to iron out

The FAST channels of Australian television stations offer recognisable, high-quality titles, mostly exclusive to one platform.

But we found that the FAST channels offered by smart TV manufacturers in Australia have a long way to go to catch up with the quality of those from the broadcasters.

Manufacturers have opted for quantity over quality. As a result, their FAST channels can be quite obscure and erratic. We observed poor video quality and channels that are slow to load, glitchy or prone to malfunction. Programming is regularly labelled incorrectly or confusingly in the electronic program guide.

We also found a surprisingly high proportion of empty ad slots, even on the more premium manufacturer FAST channels. This means that you might be left sitting through a repetitive holding screen during designated “ad” breaks.

FASTs are a great way for Australians to supplement paid subscriptions with a range of free channels. There will no doubt be more investment in this market in the years ahead.

But our research suggests, so far, FASTs have largely flown under the radar of Australian audiences and it remains to be seen whether they can provide a satisfying substitute to streaming in practice.

A 24-hour Home and Away channel might not be a threat to Netflix just yet – but a channel dedicated to a new and exclusive show? That might be a different story. Läs mer…

So weighed down have Americans become by student debt, and so potent a political issue has it become in the US, that President Biden plans to waive interest or write off money owing by 30 million of them.

He is doing it bit by bit, in the face of resistance from the US Supreme Court. He has already axed or wound back 4.3 million debts, and on Friday cancelled 277,000 more.

The benefits, as he keeps telling anyone who will listen in the lead up to the November election, are likely to be increased consumer spending, better mental health and credit scores for borrowers, and increased home ownership.

In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is under pressure to do something – anything – for Australians under the same sort of pressure.

Every June, the amount owed jumps

Every June the amount that someone who has borrowed under the Higher Education Loan Program (HELP) jumps. Because the jump is linked to inflation, and because inflation has been low for decades, in most Junes the jump has been small, until last June.

On June 1 2023, Australians who had made no payments over the previous year faced a jump of 7.1%. Someone who had owned $25,000, suddenly owed $26,770, and so on.

A quarter of a million Australians have signed a petition asking for change.

The good news is there’s likely to be some change, and we are likely to hear about it soon, in the lead-up to the May budget.

The bad news for borrowers is it won’t be debt relief of the kind Biden is offering.

It’s worse in the US

While in both Australia and the US it’s the government that lends to pay student fees rather than private lenders (who don’t like the risks) in the US the loans are really onerous, requiring fixed monthly repayments over a set period of time,
regardless of the borrower’s circumstances.

In Australia and the United Kingdom and New Zealand and some other countries that have copied Australia’s system, the loans are income contingent, meaning they only need to be repaid when the borrower’s income rises to a certain level.

Biden is planning Australian-style student loans.
Bonnie Cash/AAP

At the moment Australia’s repayment threshold is A$51,550 per year, meaning anyone who earns less than that doesn’t need to repay a cent, perhaps forever if their income never climbs that high.

Where payments are required, they are taken out in the same way as income tax is, each fortnight for pay-as-you-earn employees.

Buried within Biden’s announcement is a decision to move towards an Australian-style plan he has called SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education.

If it becomes law, single Americans won’t have to repay until they earn US$32,800. For an American supporting a family of four the threshold will be US$67,500. It will be an Australian-style system.

Easy wins for Albo

While Australia’s system is much better than the one in the US and has been copied around the world, it is far from perfect.

A simple change, identified by the report of the Australian Universities Accord delivered to Education Minister Jason Clare, in February is to increase the amount owing each year by either the rate of increase in prices or the rate of increase in wages, whichever is lower.

Usually, prices increase by less than wages, which is why the system was set up in 1988 to index amounts owed to prices.

But last year, unusually, prices increased faster than wages. In those years it would be simple to lift the amount owed only in line with wages, as the report recommends.

The amount owed needs to increase in line with something, because otherwise its value would shrink rapidly as prices rose. The government doesn’t charge interest (which would hurt) so instead it lifts the amount owed in line with prices to ensure that compared to other things it remains little changed.

Make repayments more like tax

Although we repay student loans through the income tax system, we don’t do it like income tax.

Here’s how it works for tax: on our first $18,200 of income we pay nothing, then we pay 19 cents in the dollar for each extra dollar we earn up to the next threshold, and so on. The key words here are “for each extra dollar”. We continue to pay nothing on the first $18,200 we earn.

Higher education loans work differently. For them, we repay nothing until we earn $51,550, and then at that point, even if we earn just one dollar more, we pay one per cent of all our annaul income, the entire $51,550 (which amounts to $515).

It’s a repayment cliff that sends us backwards. It means earning an extra dollar costs us more than $500 in that year. It can mean an effective marginal tax rate of 500%.

The cliff matters. Each year, there’s an impressive cluster of taxpayers who happen to be earning just under the threshold. More likely to be women than men, they might be deciding not to work in order to keep their incomes below the threshold.

Make it easier to get home loans

Britain and other nations that copied Australia’s system don’t impose large repayments in one hit, and the economist who designed Australia’s system now says that part of the system was “an error, a mistake”.

That economist, Bruce Chapman, has suggested a redesign that would require collections only on extra rather than total incomes, a proposal the report to the government endorses.

And there’s something else Albanese can do. Right now Australia’s banking regulator requires banks to count student loans as debt for the purpose of determining who can get a housing loan, knocking some former students out.

Chapman says it would make more sense to treat the compulsory payments as tax, which is how they function. All they do is reduce after-tax income, and for low earners, they don’t even do that. It’d get more people into housing.

Now it’s over to Albo.

Read more:
How do we protect students from ballooning HELP debts? A fixed maximum indexation rate would help Läs mer…

Many Australians with disability feel on the edge of a precipice right now. Recommendations from the disability royal commission and the NDIS review were released late last year. Now a draft NDIS reform bill has been tabled. In this series, experts examine what new proposals could mean for people with disability.

One of the main proposals of the review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is the mandatory registration of all service providers. It is also one of the most controversial. A taskforce investigating the idea, announced by NDIS Minister Bill Shorten, will report by the end of June.

At present, registration is voluntary, except for a few high-risk services such as those that use restrictive practices or provide specialist disability accommodation. About 16,000 providers are registered, but more than 150,000 are unregistered.

Many people in the disability community are distressed by the plan. They say it will reduce their ability to choose people they know and trust as their service providers if those providers remain unregistered.

Extending provider registration (including in shared accommodation) makes sense, but not in the way proposed.

The NDIS review wants to make people in the scheme safer, get them higher-quality services, and collect data to better track the market – including monitoring abusive providers and workers. But instead of lurching to mandatory registration for all, the government could take a more nuanced approach to balance safety with the “dignity of risk”.

The recommendations

The premise of registration reforms is that the riskier the service provided, the more stringent the registration process should be. The review calls this a “graduated risk-proportionate regulatory model”. For example, a local laundry service would need to “enrol” with the National Disability Insurance Agency (the NDIA, which administers the scheme). This would involve an online application, ABN, Digital ID, bank account and contact details. The online application would also enable NDIA payments.

Then there would be three tiers of registration: basic, general, and advanced. Basic registration would involve self-assessment and stated commitment to NDIS Practice Standards. General and advanced registration would involve an audit that providers arrange and pay for themselves. For many small businesses and contractors, this could prove onerous and expensive.

The review proposes using one dimension to determine risk: the kind of service being provided. But this does not give NDIS participants – the people receiving services – the ability to take on some of the risk of screening workers themselves if they so choose.

People with disability want the right to choose who comes into their homes.
Shutterstock

Read more:
Draft NDIS bill is the first step to reform – but some details have disability advocates worried

Some people with disability want more options, even if it involves risk

When the NDIS was designed more than a decade ago, it purposely enabled the use of unregistered providers by legislating different plan management options. This deliberate policy choice was to encourage competition and innovation.

Nearly a third of NDIS participants are self-managing. This means they manage their plan budget and can choose to screen their own workers and hire their own staff.

All providers, whether they register or not, have responsibilities to participants. All providers can have complaints raised against them through the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission and are held to the NDIS Code of Conduct. And who is allowed to self-manage is already subject to a risk assessment undertaken by the NDIA.

Deciding who supports them matters to people with disability, especially when support workers are in their homes and helping them with the most personal of care, such as getting in and out of bed, dressing or showering.

Trusted networks of workers may have been built up over many years. Yet, by categorising this kind of care as “high risk”, the proposal for mandatory registration means directly hired staff could have to undergo and pay for an audit and do extra training. Such requirements could make many established support arrangements unviable.

Australia doesn’t have to go this way. In England, under a comparable scheme, more than 69,000 people with disability directly employ more than 130,000 “personal assistants”. Direct employers are encouraged to invest in training for their staff, but it is not mandated through formal registration.

Read more:
States agreed to share foundational support costs. So why the backlash against NDIS reforms now?

Thin markets

Some people in the NDIS use unregistered providers not by choice, but by necessity. In areas where there are very few providers, termed “thin markets”, working with unregistered providers can be the difference between getting a service and receiving no services at all.

Unregistered providers tend to provide more short-term or one-off services, meaning the costs of registration might outweigh the benefits for some providers. For example, some providers who mainly work with non-disabled clients might choose to stop providing NDIS services rather than register, which would be a problem in markets with few or one provider.

Read more:
Unregistered NDIS providers are in the firing line – but lots of participants have good reasons for using them

A new payment system will help

A lot of the data the government needs to track down and strike off dodgy providers or workers will come through the enrolment process into the scheme’s new payment system once established. This will record providers’ business name, ABN or Digital ID, bank account details, location and contact details.

This information means authorities stand a much better chance of tracking spending and taking enforcement action when needed. It should help the government keep participants safer while cracking down on fraud – without necessarily requiring mandatory provider registration.

Where to from here

We need to see less heat and more light around the purpose of regulatory reform.

The focus on mandatory registration comes at the expense of deeper thinking about the problems good regulatory design needs to solve, like the shocking abuse Lee-Anne Mackey suffered from carers in her group home.

People with disability deserve a more nuanced approach to regulating disability services – one that retains choice while enhancing regulatory and other protections in the settings where it is most needed. Läs mer…

There is growing concern about people’s unwillingness to get to know their neighbours. This concern is significant enough to have spurred research into what has been termed the “emerging asocial society” — one of the challenge areas of an initiative called Imagining Canada’s Future.

To contribute to this challenge, our research examines what we do and do not know about neighbours in densifying Canadian cities.

Over the past three years, we have partnered with community housing providers seeking to improve resident quality of life in challenging conditions of change. Understanding whether residents are willing to get to know their neighbours is an important initial step.

The more willing people are to make ties, the better the prospects are for building social interactions into mutual feelings of trust, welcome and belonging in urban neighbourhoods. These feelings are linked to a number of positive impacts, including physical and mental health, voluntarism and participation, cost-effectiveness of urban planning and safety.

We specifically used the question “would you like to get to know your neighbours better?” to assess neighbour willingness. Comparing our results over the past three years suggests that concerns about the decline of neighbouring are not unfounded: growing numbers of people are not seeking to deepen their neighbourly ties.

Participant responses to the research question: Would you like to get to know your neighbours better? (2021 N=284; 2022 N=395; 2023 N=617)
(Ahad Kamranzadeh)

Rather than sound the alarm about anti-social communities, we argue that the situation is more complex. Before we draw conclusions about the implications of social isolation, we should check our expectations of how, when and why neighbouring does or does not happen.

Many of the classical assumptions of neighbouring may not apply today. By the same token, we can’t expect old fashioned emblems of what neighbourly communities look like — think of the Neighbourhood Watch or Block Parent programs — to fit today’s picture.

Rapidly changing demographics

Federally, provincially, and within many regional and municipal governments, efforts to increase the supply of homes in Canada are at an all-time high. A growing share of these homes are in high-density buildings.

At the same time, the demographic composition of fast-growing neighbourhoods is changing. Canada set immigration records in 2022 and 2023, leading to changes in both the population and living environments of our cities.

When we scanned the research literature to understand what these changes might mean for the social dynamics of urban communities, and how to support neighbouring in this new context, we found very limited research about the kind of neighbours that high density and high social mix make, in Canada. Our research aims to fill this gap.

Our research focuses on the social aspects of urban life for residents of community housing, an umbrella term for non-market and non-profit housing that is home to many of those classified as vulnerable by the National Housing Strategy.

New Canadians raise their right hands as Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marc Miller administers the Oath of Citizenship during a citizenship ceremony in Ottawa on Feb. 28, 2024.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

Through resident surveys and other methods like focus groups and photovoice, we seek the perceptions and experiences of neighbouring within contexts of rapid change that often involve poverty, immigration, social exclusion, resident turnover and eviction, and bias related to age, race, Indigeneity and other factors.

Our research demonstrates there are valid reasons for the ambivalence many people feel about their neighbours. Community housing residents may be prone to higher risks of conflict with higher stakes for their housing security and mental and physical health.

When people’s housing is unstable, inadequate, unaffordable and doesn’t provide access to the amenities and resources they need, they may be less likely to have the sense of welcome, belonging and trust to engage in neighbouring behaviour. This can result in less interest and less capability to be a good neighbour, classically understood.

At the same time, neighbouring remains possible and important in community housing. Our research shows the important role neighbouring plays in neighbourhood quality of life.

Neighbouring is a spectrum

In our focus group research conducted in Vancouver, we discovered that it makes more sense to consider neighbouring not as good versus bad but as a spectrum of different behaviours in challenging contexts.

Efforts to increase the supply of homes in Canada are at an all-time high and a growing share of them are in high-density buildings.
(Ghazaleh Akbarnejad), CC BY

Residents of community housing experience neighbouring in ways that run the gamut from pro-social to anti-social, with a significant middle zone of asocial activities and relationships. Rather than associating certain behaviours with bad or good neighbours, different contexts and dimensions of vulnerability can determine where a behaviour falls on the neighbour spectrum.

Our focus group participants defined good neighbours as residents who understood the importance of social recognition, respect for difference and need for privacy, offering help, and opportunities for shared social activities.

In the middle zone, we found asocial neighbouring activities that defied categorization. Depending on the circumstances, these activities could be the source of conflict or a path to generate a more pro-social sense of neighbouring. Activities included mutual aid; sharing food; noise and odours; responding to illness and loss of life; observing rules; response to emergencies; attitudes about privacy; and organized social activities.

People who may appear disillusioned with their neighbours often still had the capacity to be good neighbours — but they struggled to be good neighbours under the weight of poverty, inequality, and the structures and regulations in place at home.

The more the participants discussed with one another and with us, the more willingness they demonstrated to improve the functional neighbourliness of their buildings. This willingness proves the potential for new programs, rules and spaces to support neighbouring within community housing. However, it also provides a warning.

New realities of neighbouring

Social connections are not a natural, synergistic outcome of living in close quarters with other people. New understandings of the spectrum of neighbouring may open up more meaningful neighbour behaviours for those facing social isolation who are most at risk from anti-social behaviours.

At the same time, making better neighbours is not always the place to start to improve quality of life in high density neighbourhoods undergoing rapid change. Neighbouring can be politically and emotionally charged. Pro-social neighbouring work should be treated with cultural and situational awareness in mind.

In the context of refugee settlement in particular, there is a need for both restraint and understanding of specific conditions and cultures before advancing social connections.

As urban and neighbourhood planning gears up to meet the demands of changing Canadian cities, we also need to consider neighbour dynamics.

We are in need of community development strategies that reflect new realities of neighbouring across a spectrum of structural and social expectations, risks and rewards. For rapidly changing neighbourhoods, with high levels of diversity and vulnerability, neighbouring carries risks and constraints, but still matters. Läs mer…

It’s not at all clear that disinformation has, to date, swung an election that would otherwise have gone another way. But there is a strong sense that it has had a significant impact, nonetheless.

With AI now being used to create highly believable fake videos and to spread disinformation more efficiently, we are right to be concerned that fake news could change the course of an election in the not-too-distant future.

To assess the threat, and to respond appropriately, we need a better sense of how damaging the problem could be. In physical or biological sciences, we would test a hypothesis of this nature by repeating an experiment many times.

But this is much harder in social sciences because it’s often not possible to repeat experiments. If you want to know the impact of a certain strategy on, say, an upcoming election, you cannot re-run the election a million times to compare what happens when the strategy is implemented and when it is not implemented.

You could call this a one-history problem: there is only one history to follow. You cannot unwind the clock to study the effects of counterfactual scenarios.

To overcome this difficulty, a generative model becomes handy because it can create many histories. A generative model is a mathematical model for the root cause of an observed event, along with a guiding principle that tells you in which way the cause (input) turns into an observed event (output).

By modelling the cause and applying the principle, it can generate many histories, and hence statistics needed to study different scenarios. This, in turn, can be used to assess the effects of disinformation in elections.

In the case of an election campaign, the primary cause is the information accessible to voters (input), which is transformed into movements of opinion polls showing changes of voter intention (observed output). The guiding principle concerns how people process information, which is to minimise uncertainties.

So, by modelling how voters get information, we can simulate subsequent developments on a computer. In other words, we can create a “possible history” of how opinion polls change from now to the election day on a computer. From one history alone we learn virtually nothing, but now we can run the simulation (the virtual election) a million times.

A generative model does not predict any future event, because of the noisy nature of information. But it does provide the statistics of different events, which is what we need.

Modelling disinformation

I first came up with the idea of using a generative model to study the impact of disinformation about a decade ago, without any anticipation that the concept would, sadly, become so relevant to the safety of democratic processes. My initial models were designed to study the impact of disinformation in financial markets, but as fake news started to become more of a problem, my colleague and I extended the model to study its impact on elections.

Generative models can tell us the probability of a given candidate winning a future election, subject to today’s data and the specification of how information on issues relevant to the election is communicated to voters. This can be used to analyse how the winning probability will be affected if candidates or political parties change their policy positions or communication strategies.

We can include disinformation in the model to study how that will alter the outcome statistics. Here, disinformation is defined as a hidden component of information that generates a bias.

By including disinformation into the model and running a simulation, the result tells us very little about how it changed opinion polls. But running the simulation many times, we can use the statistics to determine the percentage change in the likelihood of a candidate winning a future election if disinformation of a given magnitude and frequency is present. In other words, we can now measure the impact of fake news using computer simulations.

I should emphasise that measuring the impact of fake news is different from making predictions about election outcomes. These models are not designed to make predictions. Rather, they provide the statistics that are sufficient to estimate the impact of disinformation.

Does disinformation have an impact?

One model for disinformation that we considered is a type that is released at some random moment, grows in strength for a short period but then it is damped down (for example owing to fact checking). We found that a single release of such disinformation, well ahead of election day, will have little impact on the election outcome.

However, if the release of such disinformation is repeated persistently, then it will have an impact. Disinformation that is biased towards a given candidate will shift the poll slightly in favour of that candidate each time it is released. Of all the election simulations for which that candidate has lost, we can identify how many of them have the result turned around, based on a given frequency and magnitude of disinformation.

Fake news in favour of a candidate, except in rare circumstances, will not guarantee a victory for that candidate. Its impacts can, however, be measured in terms of probabilities and statistics. How much has fake news changed the winning probability? What is the likelihood of flipping an election outcome? And so on.

One result that came as a surprise is that even if electorates are unaware whether a given piece of information is true or false, if they know the frequency and bias of disinformation, then this suffices to eliminate most of the impact of disinformation. The mere knowledge of the possibility of fake news is already a powerful antidote to its effects.

Alerting people to the presence of disinformation is part of the process of protecting them.
Shutterstock/eamesBot

Generative models by themselves do not provide counter measures to disinformation. They merely give us an idea of the magnitude of impacts. Fact checking can help but it is not hugely effective (the genie is already out of the bottle). But what if the two are combined?

Because the impact of disinformation can be largely averted by informing people that it is happening, it would be useful if fact checkers offered information on the statistics of disinformation that they have identified – for example, “X% of negative claims against candidate A were false”. An electorate equipped with this information will be less affected by disinformation. Läs mer…

When Amy Winehouse died at the age of 27 in 2011, many felt the world had been robbed of one its greatest stars who had barely shown us the extent of her talent. The new biopic Back to Black – directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and named after Winehouse’s seminal second album – attempts to make sense of her tumultuous life and musical output.

The film follows Winehouse – played by Marisa Abela – from the early days of her career in early-2000s London, through to global stardom. In the process, it reveals the ways in which female celebrities are objectified in contemporary media and celebrity culture, even after their death.

At the height of Winehouse’s fame, gossip tabloids still ruled the media. They created what became known as “trainwreck celebrities” – predominantly female stars who were portrayed as publicly promiscuous and frequently intoxicated. The most famous from this period include Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Lily Allen. These female celebrities were regularly shamed in the tabloid and gossip press on both sides of the Atlantic.

Winehouse shot to fame with her first album, Frank, in 2003, and was quickly considered one of these “trainwrecks” for being outspoken, performing intoxicated, and stumbling out of north London bars with her on-off lover and future husband, Blake Fielder-Civil.

Throughout her life, Winehouse tried to resist this form of control and commodification. She was seen fighting with paparazzi and resisting rehab when her record company tried to get her help (she even wrote a song about it).

Abela’s ability to imitate Winehouse’s voice and mannerisms is often impressive. However, while in the early stages Back to Black tries to counteract Winehouse’s tabloid image, it ultimately fails to shift this widely accepted narrative surrounding her chaotic lifestyle.

Amy’s distinct style

The beginning of the film centres on Winehouse’s songwriting talent and musical performance, which is swiftly followed by the offer of a record contract.

Abela’s Winehouse doesn’t tire of reminding her family and the viewer that she’s not in this for the fame or money. Indeed, the film both begins and ends with her telling us that all she wants is to make music that helps people forget their troubles, and only wants to be remembered for being a singer and for being herself.

Winehouse’s distinctive personal style is central to the visual storytelling of the film. The singer became known for her trademark beehive and eyeliner, as well as a signature Fred Perry polo and skinny jeans combination. She was also known for wearing pink satin ballet flats, which gained notoriety in paparazzi photos that showed them bloodied in the public aftermath of a fight with her husband in August 2007.

The film uses Winehouse’s distinctive style to communicate changes in her health. Instead of showing the unglamorous and often visually disturbing realities of bulimia and drug abuse, the progressively more torn clothes and dishevelled hair come to signify Winehouse’s physical and mental decline.

Many of these style moments used in the film were not inspired by looks she wore in her performances, but instead were captured through paparazzi footage. While the use of these visuals amid the dramatised scenes serve as a reminder of the relentless media chase Winehouse had to endure, the film ultimately reinforces this sense of media exploitation.

Rather than offering a complex visual portrayal that goes beyond the “trainwreck” images the viewer may be familiar with, Back to Black almost banks on how recognisable they are. It relies on the tabloid media’s damaging visual narrative instead of venturing to create its own.

Victim narratives

As a biopic, the film attempts to reclaim Winehouse from the victimhood often ascribed to her. However, the story it tells reduces Winehouse’s complex character and her life to a series of episodes of suffering.

Take a scene set in the wake of her beloved grandmother’s illness and death. Winehouse’s husband is presented as the villain who exploits her trauma as a moment of weakness, to introduce her to the same hard drugs she rejected early on in the film. This sets Back to Black’s story on a familiar trajectory.

In the film, her bulimia happens in the background, with scenes briefly showing Winehouse in front of the toilet. The only somewhat explicit discussion of it appears when her flatmate complains about the flushing noises that wake her up.

These brief moments serve as markers of unhappiness, but offer no exploration of where this unhappiness may come from. They eschew the complexity of Winehouse and her mental health, and don’t offer more than the shallow broken artist shaped by tragedy and the love of a bad man – a narrative we already know.

When Back to Black does look for causes of unhappiness, it settles on odd territory. At one point, it seems to suggest that her suffering stems from an unfulfilled desire to be a mother – a take that has garnered deserved criticism.

Ultimately, Back to Black is unable to capture what made Winehouse so special: the grain of her voice, and her ability to craft stories of female experience that reject simplistic narratives of suffering.

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