Mark Wilson’s novel version of Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie at the Melbourne Theatre Company doesn’t cooperate with historical readings of the play – but is exactly the kind of theatre we should be championing.

Wilson takes a much-loved classic that recollects family anxieties and subverts it, pushing into its dreamlike strangeness and nudging its audience to interrogate how memories are constructed.

This new version of Menagerie might well mark a defining shift for Melbourne theatre aesthetics, inviting real experimentation back into the main stage conversation.

An agonising subtext

The Glass Menagerie (1944) explores a haunted family in mid-depression era St Louis. It is Williams’ most autobiographical work.

A mother and her adult son and daughter – whose husband and father has deserted them – share a claustrophobic apartment and emotionally suffocating relationships, inhabiting the stifling space within their own distinct dreams about what their lives should be.

Tom (Tim Draxl in this production), the son, yearns for freedom, adventure, poetry. He disappears every night into dancehalls.

His mother, Amanda (Alison Whyte), is emotionally neglected, holds Tom responsible for their futures, and is desperate for control in a life in which she has almost none.

The daughter, Laura (Millie Donaldson), is disabled, displayed as a deficit; she is habituated to low self-esteem. But Laura’s second act encounter with gentleman caller Jim (Harry McGee) is a revelation – she is finally seen in a different light.

This play is a dream play. Tom tells us at its beginning we are about to see his memory; we understand this memory tortures him. Tom has been running from his family, like his father before him, but will never escape.

To echo a dream, Wilson has played with the theatrical form. The tone keeps subtly shifting. Sometimes we identify with the realism of Amanda and Tom’s visceral arguments; sometimes gestures are heightened in bizarre ways that ask us to intellectualise interiority.

He employs a heightened and surreal physical vocabulary, making manifest the characters’ internal tensions. We see Tom’s hand shape a gun while arguing with his mother. When the actors eat a meal or smoke cigarettes, they mime – as in a dream, they ingest no actual food and inhale no real smoke.

Within this dream-vortex, Tom’s memory distorts. This is what memories do – they garble and highlight unevenly; they are strange and unsolvable.

A distant cackle of laughter arising from a moment of tenderness helps make this production awkward and uncooperative, but isn’t that the truth of our lives? We are not resolved, and our familial relationships are often not straightforward.

Critics of Wilson’s production have questioned Wilson’s use of “buffoonery”, but this vastly misses the point. Wilson’s production inserts heightened, ridiculous moments we least expect precisely because it aims to subvert.

The play has been synonymous with melancholy when melancholy is but a tiny fraction of its possibilities. Wilson’s bold experiment holds value in asking audiences to consider Williams’ ideas anew: relationships are complicated, people are inconsistent, lives are strange.

This production gets the discomfort right in a way I haven’t seen before.

A house of the oppressive

Kat Chan’s set is appropriately oppressive. The apartment is drab and far too small for the players, filled with too much furniture – and, at one point, Amanda’s ridiculous pink dress (Matilda Woodroofe’s canny costumes) – in a way that forces the characters to inelegantly navigate each other’s bodies.

The enormous tenement fire escape is used mostly to compose stunning shadows in collaboration with Paul Lim’s remarkable lighting. Marco Cher’s composition and sound design evocatively underscore haunted inner lives.

These theatrical experiments make for a confronting production, which in turn gives audiences much to debate – and debate is critical if we want to continue to flex Melbourne’s cultural muscle.

Unlike productions that focus on melancholic realism, the production takes an intellectual approach to emotional truth, which makes it less emotionally absorbing.

But by disrupting our expectations of a single emotional tone, Wilson offers its contemporary audience an opportunity to think critically about how contradictory and strange we all are, and about theatre’s powerful ability to provoke these ideas.

A changing theatre landscape

Melbourne’s main stages are undergoing a curious shift in identity.

Melbourne Theatre Company’s artistic director Anne-Louise Sarks came up through experimentation. Mark Wilson had a long and lauded career on the experimental theatre scene before hitting the main stages.

Bringing him into the MTC fold speaks to a respect for pushing audiences gently forward.

Meanwhile over at Malthouse Theatre, Dean Bryant is new to the helm. Malthouse has a history of being the more formally inventive of Melbourne’s two main stage companies and while we are yet to see Bryant’s first season fully roll out, he comes from a decidedly more commercial and traditional background, at the forefront of Australian music theatre.

Will we see a shift in aesthetics between these two companies? And is experimentation being ushered back into the zeitgeist?

Wilson’s provocative, peculiar and beautiful Menagerie allows its audience to grapple with complex ideas about what theatre can do. It might not cooperate with our previous expectations of the play – but this is what is important.

The Glass Menagerie is at Melbourne Theatre Company until June 5.

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

After four women and nine children associated with Islamic State returned to Australia from Syria last week, the Australian Federal Police indicated some would be referred to community reintegration and countering violent extremism programs.

Australia is not starting from scratch. Thirty-one Australian women and children have previously returned from Syria, all but six of them with government assistance. None has been linked to criminal acts since coming home.

The pressing question, then, is not whether Australia has the institutional capacity to support these returns, but what makes reintegration succeed or fail.

This is where Australia can learn from the lessons of dozens of other countries that have repatriated women and children linked to ISIS.

I’ve conducted research on these repatriations across 69 countries, conducting interviews with ISIS returnees, practitioners and policymakers. And I’ve identified a consistent pattern. States that invest in well-designed rehabilitation programs can achieve better long-term outcomes for both communities and returnees.

What the research shows

First, most rehabilitation programs globally are designed for men. They neglect women’s experiences and reinforce stereotypes about women’s lack of agency or assumed victimisation.

For instance, in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Kosovo and parts of Southeast Asia, these programs provide vocational training for women based on gender-stereotypical roles, such as sewing classes. Such choices are not inherently problematic, but applying the same template globally reflects gendered assumptions rather than a tailored response to the local economy and individual needs.

Second, women often face a “double stigma”. They are penalised for their association with a violent extremist group, and for transgressing conventional gender norms by joining the group.

Women and children from ethnic and religious minority groups face the greatest stigma.

The public understanding of ISIS returnees in non-Muslim majority countries, in particular, has been shaped by Islamophobia. Returning to a society that discriminates against women for wearing a hijab, for instance, can undermine the sense of belonging that reintegration requires.

This matters because the way a country talks about its returning citizens directly influences how successful they are in finding a place in society again.

A holistic approach

Several countries, such as France and the United Kingdom, have faced criticism for their hardline approach to repatriations.

One country that has done a better job – and has received far less attention – is Kosovo.

When Kosovo repatriated more than 100 of its citizens from Syria in 2019, it became the first country in the world to establish a government department dedicated to rehabilitating its returning citizens. The justice minister declared the government would not stop until every citizen had been brought home.

This department within the Interior Ministry provides medical and psychiatric support, counselling, housing, social services, vocational training and free legal advice to returnees. It also includes female religious leaders from the Islamic Council of Kosovo, who play a central role in working with women and their communities.

What stands out about the Kosovar example is the deliberate work to reduce stigma that returnees face.

The government’s official narrative was that Kosovo had a responsibility to care for its citizens and reintegration was the best approach to public safety.

And before Kosovar citizens returned, civil society organisations and authorities engaged extensively with communities to address people’s concerns and reassure them that safety was a priority. Religious and community leaders were also involved to counter stigma directly.

Kosovo’s approach was not without challenges. Some of the rhetoric framing the women who returned, for instance, seemed to underplay their culpability.

What this means for Australia

The situation in Australia is different, with three of the four women who returned last week having been charged with serious crimes against humanity. This includes alleged enslavement of a Yazidi woman.

However, the underlying lesson stands, especially for the children who may now be separated from their mothers.

A holistic approach that includes gender-responsive community engagement makes successful reintegration possible. Relying solely on securitisation and “othering” the returnees makes it more difficult. Two lessons follow from this.

First, programs built for men do not automatically work for women. Victoria’s rehabilitation program is a strong community-led model – it’s run by the Board of Imams Victoria, in cooperation with authorities.

The Kosovo experience suggests that engaging female religious leaders alongside organisations like the Board of Imams Victoria can be particularly effective for women returnees. They can offer women guidance grounded in shared experience and provide gender-sensitive religious teachings.

Second, programs achieve better outcomes when communities are engaged as carefully as the returnees themselves and address stigma directly.

Special attention must be paid to how communities engage with the girls and boys returning from the camps. These children are Australian citizens who had no choice in their parents’ decisions and have spent their formative years in detention camps. Trauma-informed care is vital for their successful reintegration.

How Australia responds to the reintegration of these women and children will be a litmus test for social cohesion. These returns could lead to increased Islamophobia. Failing to confront that risks compounding the marginalisation that both Islamist and far-right extremists can exploit.

Getting this right matters not just for the women and children who returned last week, but for the Australians that remain in the Syrian camps. Australia has the resources to bring them home and give the children a path to recovery they cannot have in Syria.

This research was supported by the Australian government through the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (Project number CE230100004).

Frozen shoulder can make simple tasks – such as lifting your arm, sleeping on your side, getting out of bed, putting on a bra, driving or playing with your kids – painful and challenging.

This condition usually starts with pain suddenly developing in the shoulder and stiffness. Over time, the pain and stiffness get worse. It can drag on for months or even years.

So, what causes frozen shoulder? And can it be treated?

What is frozen shoulder?

This shoulder condition, also known as “adhesive capsulitis”, affects around 8% of men and 10% of women aged 25–64. But it’s more common over 40, especially for people in their 60s.

We don’t fully understand what causes frozen shoulder.

The tissues around the joint become tight, swollen and stiff. But we don’t know exactly why these changes occur and lead to pain and limited movement.

There are usually three stages:

• freezing – pain gradually gets worse and the shoulder becomes stiff, limiting the range of movement

• frozen – stiffness and pain usually peak, but may begin to ease

• thawing – pain and stiffness slowly improve, and movement begins to return.

While health professionals commonly accept it, this staged description suggests frozen shoulder will follow a predictable pattern and always get better on its own. But research suggests this is not always the case.

For example, the “freezing” stage is usually expected to last at least ten weeks. But some people will start to notice improved movement sooner.

Recovery stages will vary from person to person and can take months to years. Some people may not fully recover, even with treatment.

One 2020 study followed up with 215 patients with frozen shoulder. While over 70% of participants said they were happy with improvements in their symptoms, around 40% still had some movement restriction two years after their symptoms began.

Another study from 2008 found over a third of people they surveyed (41%) had ongoing symptoms two to seven years later, including pain and difficulty sleeping.

Who is most at risk?

Certain groups are more likely to develop frozen shoulder:

• women, especially during menopause
• people with diabetes
• older adults
• those with high cholesterol or thyroid problems.

There is some evidence genetics also plays a role, as a family history increases your risk.

But we need more high-quality research to understand what’s behind these risk factors.

For example, people with diabetes are around five times more likely to develop frozen shoulder than those without diabetes – and also have worse pain. This may be linked to diabetes-related changes in the body, such as reduced blood flow to tissues and chemical changes from high blood sugar. But the exact mechanisms are unclear, and research is yet to determine whether controlling blood sugar better could help prevent or slow frozen shoulder.

Similarly, women are 40% more likely to develop frozen shoulder than men, with one theory suggesting hormone fluctuations during menopause are responsible. But there is no clear evidence yet to support this.

How is frozen shoulder treated?

There is mixed evidence about which treatments are effective, including whether over-the-counter pain medication such as Voltaren helps.

Oral steroids

A review of the evidence suggests oral steroids, such as prednisolone, can provide some short-term pain relief and improve shoulder movement, compared to doing nothing or a placebo. But these benefits don’t seem to last beyond six weeks, and the evidence comes from a few small studies. These require a prescription.

Injections

High-quality evidence shows corticosteroid injections can provide short-term relief, compared to doing nothing.

There is also some limited evidence that corticosteroid injections and platelet rich plasma injections can provide better short-term pain relief, compared with over-the-counter pain relief and physiotherapy. However, the studies are small or poorly designed and the effects are small, so the evidence needs to be interpreted with caution.

Physiotherapy

Moderate-quality evidence suggests physiotherapy can help improve shoulder movement. Benefits of physio are greater when combined with a steroid injection, and followed up by doing the exercises at home. More research is needed to understand how well these treatments work in the long term.

What about surgery?

There are two main procedures for frozen shoulder, both done while the patient is unconscious under anaesthetic.

1. Manipulation under anaesthetic

This is a less invasive procedure where the surgeon stretches the shoulder, without cutting into the joint, to help loosen tight tissue that may be causing stiffness.

2. Arthroscopic capsular release

In this type of keyhole surgery, the surgeon cuts tight tissues inside the shoulder joint to try to free up shoulder movement.

Improvements from these procedures are typically small, and evidence suggests the results are not better than non-surgical treatments. For example, one study showed that after one year, patients who’d had surgery had similar improvements to those who’d had physiotherapy and a steroid injection, but no surgery.

These procedures also have several downsides. It’s more expensive than other treatments, carries additional risks, and typically requires weeks (and up to three months) of rehabilitation.

The bottom line

Being physically active and doing exercises can help if you’re experiencing pain and limited movement. But you don’t have to work this out alone. It’s a good idea to get advice on managing pain and how to stay active.

If you suspect you have frozen shoulder, it’s important to see a doctor or physiotherapist so they can rule out other conditions, such as fracture and arthritis.

A health professional can also discuss management – the potential benefits, harms, costs, and how easy it is to access each treatment option.

Joshua Zadro receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF).

Peter Malliaras receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF).

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

The rise of One Nation may seem sudden. In the 2025 Australian federal election, Pauline Hanson’s party received only 6.4% of the national vote. A year later, One Nation has surpassed the Liberal Party in the polls, received more votes than the Liberals in the South Australian election, and won their first seat in the House of Representatives in the Farrer by-election.

Similarly, the movement of independent candidates seemed to emerge rapidly. At the 2019 federal election, independent candidates won just three seats. By 2022, this had multiplied to 10 independents winning seats in the House of Representatives, six of which were previously safe Liberal seats.

While these major shifts in voter behaviour seem to have appeared suddenly, the conditions underlying the rise of minor parties and independents have been building gradually over decades.

How did we end up here?

Our new podcast (Apple | Spotify) traces the unlikely story of Australia’s most controversial minor party.

For thirty years, it’s honed its tactics and now its upending politics as we know it.

The Australian Election Study, a major survey of Australian voters that has been fielded after every federal election since 1987, tracks long-term shifts in Australian political attitudes and behaviour. These surveys show the gradual transformation of Australian voters and their preferences, which has created opportunities for smaller parties and independents.

The first major shift is what is known as “partisan dealignment” – growing voter detachment from political parties. This means there are fewer voters “rusted on” to the major parties than there used to be.

Back in 1987, 84% of Australians reported feeling close to one of the two major political parties. By 2025, this had declined to just 55%. For the first time on record, the proportion of non-partisans in the electorate, surpassed the number of Liberal partisans (Figure 1).

Other indicators similarly reflect this growing disaffection with the major parties. The popularity of both Labor and the Liberals has declined, reaching a record low for Labor in 2013, following the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years. The Liberals hit a record low in 2025, following their historic election defeat.

The second shift, related to this detachment from political parties, is growing voter volatility. In the 1960s, over 70% of voters would vote for the same party in every election. This has gradually declined over time, with just 34% of voters reporting that they always voted the same way in 2025 (Figure 2).

This growing electoral volatility is reflected in a range of indicators. These include more voters considering changing their vote during election campaigns and more voters deciding their own vote preference order rather than following a how-to-vote card (Figure 3).

Taken together, these results show Australian voters have become detached from major political parties. They are also increasingly likely to change their vote from election to election. This weakens the influence of long-term factors driving the vote, such as social position and party attachments. It increases the importance of short-term factors such as election issues, the campaign, and the party leaders.

Partisan dealignment on its own is not enough for a minor party or independent to win a seat. But it does create an opportunity for alternative actors to mount competitive campaigns that tap into voters’ frustrations with the major parties. In many recent cases, these campaigns have been successful.

Australia’s unique electoral system creates both challenges and opportunities for non-major party actors. On the one hand, single-seat electorates in the House of Representatives have typically made it hard for minor parties or independents to compete with the dominance of the two major parties. On the other, preferential voting can encourage voting for minor parties and independents as voters can do so without the risk of a lost vote. Compulsory voting further mobilises non-partisans, who might be less likely to participate if voting were voluntary.

The recent electoral success of independents and One Nation in Australian politics may appear to be a new phenomenon, but the changes within the electorate underlying this shift have gradually emerged over decades.

Sarah Cameron receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Ian McAllister receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Juliet Pietsch receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

We’re less than a month away from the southern hemisphere winter. But you’d be forgiven for thinking summer was only last week.

April was unseasonably warm and dry across Australia. Temperatures were above average or very much above average for most of the country.

New South Wales had its second-driest April on record, while Bairnsdale in Victoria’s typically wet Gippsland region only recorded 5.4mm in rainfall in April, the lowest since since 1943.

So why has the weather been so unseasonally warm? And what will winter look like?

Under pressure

The dry April came as a stark contrast to a very wet February and March. In late February, a low pressure system from the tropics stalled over central Australia, causing widespread heavy rainfall. Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre began to fill for the second time in two years and the desert turned green.

But during April, persistent high pressure systems sat over large areas of eastern Australia. Air descends within high pressure systems, stopping clouds forming. When high pressure systems are above us, we tend to experience warm sunny days and no rain.

At night, the lack of clouds means more of the day’s heat absorbed by land and water radiates back out to space. This leads to colder mornings, which is why we saw lower minimum temperatures over eastern Australia in April and a few foggy mornings.

These persistent high pressure systems over eastern Australia acted like boulders in a stream, diverting the flowing atmosphere around them.

When cold fronts came across from the west, they hit the “boulder” and veered south near the Great Australian Bight, missing the eastern states.

Climate heating

Of course, high pressure systems aren’t the only reason autumn has been so warm.

Every one of the past 13 autumns in Australia have had hotter daily maximum temperatures than the 1961–90 baseline average.

Climate change has already made air temperatures in Australia 1.51°C hotter than in 1910, when records began. The extra heat is inextricably linked with increased emissions of greenhouse gases caused by the burning of oil, gas and coal.

As global warming intensifies, it’s expected to strengthen the subtropical ridge – a semi-permanent band of high pressure that circles the planet, deflecting cold fronts away from Australia in summer and autumn. The ridge runs across Australia at about 30°S latitude, above Perth and Sydney. Scientists believe a stronger ridge will lead to reduced autumn and winter rainfall over southern Australia, though the exact impact is still being investigated.

What about El Niño?

Many media reports have suggested a giant El Niño climate event is likely this year. But these reports are premature. We aren’t actually in an El Niño yet, so we can’t say the autumn heat is linked.

During an El Niño, sea surface temperatures in the central Pacific are warmer than usual, while the east-to-west Pacific trade winds weaken or even reverse.

On average, El Niño conditions make eastern Australia hotter and drier during winter and spring, as fewer rain-bearing weather systems arrive. Some of Australia’s biggest droughts have hit during El Niño years.

Officially, the Pacific is in a neutral condition (neither El Niño nor the opposite, La Niña). But warmer ocean water is brewing beneath the surface and forecasts suggest an El Niño is likely to develop by late winter. The strength and duration of the likely El Niño are still uncertain.

What should we expect for winter?

During winter, the subtropical ridge migrates north, triggering the dry season in the tropics. With the ridge absent, more cold fronts can reach southern Australia, which is why most rain tends to fall during these months in the southern half of the continent. But if an El Niño forms, there may not be as much of the anticipated rain. So what type of winter will Australians have in the south?

The Bureau of Meteorology’s long-range forecast accounts for all major drivers of Australia’s weather, from the winds pushing cold fronts to southern regions, to El Niño, to the Indian Ocean Dipole, El Niño’s cousin over west.

What this shows is that Australia is likely to be warmer than average this winter. May rainfall is tipped to be below average almost everywhere in Australia, other than normal rainfall in southern Victoria, southwest Tasmania and central Western Australia. Queensland’s northern tip may see above-normal rainfall.

Between June and August, the bureau predicts drier than normal weather in the southwest and southeast. There’s a higher chance of wetter than normal conditions in northern Queensland, the Northern Territory’s northeast and central WA.

Long-term rainfall forecasts become less reliable once we look further than a month ahead. For farmers, fire managers and anyone else dependent on rain, it’s worth checking for rainfall forecast updates more regularly.

Kimberley Reid receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

As of May 8 end-to-end encryption is no longer available on direct messages on Instagram.

Meta, in announcing the policy reversal, said it had done so because few people used the feature. But this has raised questions about its impact on user privacy and whether it will improve child safety on the platform.

Instagram has long been a focal point for discussion about online safety – whether in relation to body image concerns, cyberbullying or sexual extortion. This policy change by Meta directly affects how safety and moderation are implemented in private messages.

This is important considering research has found that perpetrators first contacted roughly 23% of Australian sexual extortion victims on Instagram, the second most frequent method of contact, behind Snapchat (at 50%).

What is end-to-end encryption?

End-to-end encryption is a way of scrambling a message so only the sender’s and recipient’s devices can read it. The platform carrying the message, in this case Instagram, can’t access it.

This same technology is present by default on WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, and (since late 2023) Facebook Messenger.

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg first promised to bring end-to-end encryption across Meta’s messaging products back in 2019, under the slogan “the future is private”.

Instagram tested encrypted direct messages in 2021. It rolled them out as an opt-in feature in 2023.

End-to-end encrypted direct messages never became the default, and the low adoption rate of opting in to use the feature is Meta’s justification for removing it. As a spokesperson told The Guardian:

Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram.

There is a circular logic to this: Meta has killed off a feature it buried so deep that most users never knew it existed, then cited low usage as the reason for its removal.

What does this mean for Instagram users?

In practical terms, every message you send on Instagram now travels in a form Meta can read.

Meta’s privacy policy lists the content of messages users send and receive among the data it collects. In principle, this enables the company to use this data to personalise features, train artificial intelligence (AI) models, and deliver targeted advertising.

While Meta has publicly committed not to train its AI models on private messages unless users actively share them with Meta AI, it has made no equivalent public commitment about advertising.

That leaves open the possibility that Meta could use unencrypted Instagram direct messages for ad targeting. And without encryption, Meta’s AI commitment is now backed by policy alone, not by the technology itself.

A clear reversal

This reads as a clear reversal of Meta’s privacy-first posture which Zuckerberg announced seven years ago.

Meta has been under sustained pressure from law enforcement, regulators and child protection organisations who argue end-to-end encryption creates spaces where platforms can’t detect child sexual exploitation and grooming. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has been clear that the deployment of end-to-end encryption “does not absolve services of responsibility for hosting or facilitating online abuse or the sharing of illegal content”.

This argument deserves to be taken seriously. The harms are real and disproportionately fall on young people.

However, sexual extortion research shows perpetrators don’t tend to stay on the platform where they make first contact, with more than 50% of sexual extortion victims saying perpetrators asked them to switch platforms.

Meta still uses end-to-end encryption on its other platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and it needs to apply a consistent approach to child safety. Predators routinely ask victims to switch platforms, so the company’s safety approach needs to work for Instagram and their end-to-end encrypted services.

A false choice

Meta and privacy advocates often frame this as a choice between end-to-end encryption or child safety. But that’s a false choice. It’s not an “either-or” situation, even if they make it sound like one.

The technology already exists to detect harmful content while keeping messages encrypted in transit. It just has to run in the right place: on the user’s device, before the device encrypts and sends the message, or after it receives and decrypts it.

On-device approaches have a contested history, and any deployment must be genuinely privacy-preserving by design. But technology companies must weigh the objection against the harms that continue to occur. A safety by design approach is needed.

On-device safety measures have been demonstrated at scale with Apple’s on-device nudity detection for images sent or received via Messages, AirDrop and FaceTime. A 2025 study demonstrated high-accuracy grooming detection using Meta’s AI model designed specifically for on-device deployment on mobile phones.

Recently, both Apple and Google have started to take measures towards app store–based age verification in some jurisdictions.

The highest-profile real-world deployment of these is Apple enabling device-level privacy-preserving age verification in the UK.

Social media and private messaging companies, along with operating system vendors (Microsoft, Apple, and Google), all have a role to play in ensuring harmful content is detected, whether or not end-to-end encryption is used. Progress has been slow. But we, as a community, need to demand more from these companies.

Joel Scanlan is the academic co-lead of the CSAM Deterrence Centre, which is a partnership between the University of Tasmania and Jesuit Social Services, who operate Stop It Now (Australia), a therapeutic service providing support to people who are concerned with their own, or someone else's, feelings towards children. He has received funding from the Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Criminology, the eSafety Commissioner, Lucy Faithfull Foundation and the Internet Watch Foundation.

Unemployment in Australia is currently at 4.3% – below average for the past century. But last week, the Reserve Bank forecast unemployment will slowly climb from next year on, rising to 4.7% by mid-2028 – and possibly higher if the Middle East war drags on.

That forecast came after a long-running survey of 3,600 Australians – taken in the early weeks of the US-Israel war on Iran – found people thought their chances of losing their job had risen to 26.8%. Job insecurity fears haven’t been this high since 2020’s COVID-19 lockdowns, when unemployment hit 6.4%.

If worrying about keeping your job has been keeping you up at night, you’re far from alone.

But there are evidence-based things we can do – at an individual, organisational and government level – to manage job insecurity better in uncertain times.

How job stress hits our health and even our personality

Job insecurity can take a heavy toll on your mental and physical health.

There’s strong evidence from meta analyses – research where all the studies in that area are pulled together – that people are significantly more dissatisfied with work when experiencing job insecurity. The same study found job insecurity can also affect workers’ commitment to their organisation and undermine their job performance.

There’s also some evidence job insecurity can increase workplace bullying. When people feel really insecure, they’re more likely to lash out at others. The same study showed workers who’ve been bullied tend to feel more insecure in their work.

Our 2020 study, tracking 1,046 Australians over nearly a decade, suggested a prolonged period of job insecurity could even change people’s personalities: making them less emotionally stable, less agreeable and less conscientious.

5 ways to turn fear into action

It’s easy to fall into the trap of unhealthy coping strategies when you’re stressed about work. These can include drinking too much alcohol or “ruminating”: allowing worries to go around and around in your brain.

While these can feel hard to resist, they usually leave you feeling worse.

There are healthier coping strategies, backed by research evidence.

Actively planning your career: This sounds obvious, but it can make a big difference. In a study my colleagues and I did of more than 200 Europeans on short-term contracts, we found that insecurity increased the closer people got to the end of their contracts – unless people took proactive steps. Workers who took the initiative to engage in career planning and talk to supervisors and others about how to boost their skills did not experience job insecurity, even as their short-term contracts got close to ending.

Seeking social support: reaching out to other people – family, friends, colleagues or your boss – is a well-established way to help with work stressors, such as job insecurity. For instance, a meta analysis of three decades of data from 39 countries found social support can reduce feelings of job insecurity.

Building a network with informal mentors: You don’t need a formal mentor program to do this. In fact, past evidence has shown informal mentoring (usually someone you’ve approached yourself) can be more powerful than formal mentoring. And seek out more than one mentor: one person might help on digital skills, another might have advice on career planning.

Working on in-demand skills: If you know you have gaps in your skills, such as if you’re worker with no experience with artificial intelligence (AI), start taking small steps to fill those gaps. There are a wide range of free online courses you can do from places such as EdX and Coursera, through to relatively affordable “micro credential” courses from universities around the world.

Building a life beyond work: Research shows job insecurity is more harmful to people for whom work is highly central to their identity. A 2025 Australian study confirmed what decades of research has shown: engaging in other social roles beyond work – like being a parent, friend, or volunteer – can boost your self-esteem and wellbeing.

Employers and government should do more too

It’s unfair to expect individuals to handle job insecurity on their own. Employers and governments have important roles to play too. Here are just two examples.

Better workplace training: Australians are worried about losing work to AI. Federal government research last year found more Australians are secretly using artificial intelligence, often in the absence of clear workplace rules. If organisations want to retain good staff, it’s in their interests to invest in employee training, including in AI – and have clearer policies on its use.

Read more: Employment data shows the early signs of AI job disruption are already here

Government investment in training and welfare: A 2022 study comparing 17 European nations found workers experienced less job insecurity in nations such as Denmark and Sweden, because they invest more in helping people get work, such as plentiful opportunities for re-skilling, training, and career counselling. Generous employment benefits also improve people’s wellbeing through fostering financial security.

In Australia, JobSeeker payments to 900,000 unemployed, working-age people still fall well below the poverty line, despite repeated recommendations to lift them higher.

Read more: Increasing JobSeeker is long overdue. Here’s how we could do it, without breaking the budget

There are few jobs for life anymore. But amid so much change, there’s more we can do more to help ourselves, our colleagues, employees and those who are already unemployed feel less job insecurity than Australians currently do.

Sharon Kaye Parker receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Who am I? Where do I come from? These became defining questions in the late 20th century for a generation whose parents and grandparents had endured the cataclysm of the Holocaust.

Raven Mother: War, family and inheritance: a memoir – Jane Messer (NewSouth Books)

Since the turn of this century, the desire to discover and document the histories of families whose worlds were decimated by the Nazis has driven a publishing phenomenon. It’s not just a Jewish project. Millions around the world have taken up the hunt for their family origins, helped in part by the rise of genealogical sites such as Ancestry or My Heritage, and a revolution in DNA science.

This accelerated modern-day quest to solve what for many has become the greatest historical detective story of our era – the puzzle of our identities, presumed to be rooted in our very DNA – is now the fastest growing hobby in the western world.

For second and third generation Holocaust survivors, there is the added urgency that comes with the loss of parents and grandparents, many of whom remained silent about their experiences either because they couldn’t bring themselves to speak of the horrors they had endured and the people they had lost, or because it was felt such experiences were best suppressed as they forged new lives and new families.

Many have detailed the “ambiguity and secrecy” that permeated childhoods growing up with Holocaust survivors. Secrets surrounded lost spouses, old lovers, missing family members or the parentage of children.

As Jane Messer discovers in her own quest to unravel the mystery of her Jewish grandmother, Bella, there is no single truth to a life. Messer never knew Bella, who died before she was born. But when she was in her early twenties, her parents decided it was time to tell her the truth of Bella’s suicide, which until then had been their own dark secret.

Bella committed suicide in 1949, two years after arriving in Australia to join her husband and two grown children living in Melbourne. From the day Bella died, she was rarely spoken of.

Messer sets herself the task in this book of discovering this grandmother she never knew, a woman who defied many expectations of her era, yet ultimately was undone by the tragedies of war, displacement, exile and separation.

A different kind of woman

Born in Berlin, Bella grew up during the early years of the 20th century in a comfortably assimilated middle class family. She trained as an early childhood teacher, taking this training with her into World War I and later again, during World War II when she was in Palestine.

These scraps of information, bestowed by her father in his factual but brief typewritten account, “The History of My Family”, are the beginning for Messer’s considerable odyssey to uncover Bella’s life. She writes:

For years all physical traces of her were kept out of sight; these documents and photographs were stored in cupboards and sheds. They were never discussed, never brought out to look over.

It’s a lot of material work, Messer informs us, and footwork too, taking her across the world in the search for traces of her grandmother.

In the process, Messer attempts to find a different kind of woman to the one whose memory her father has been carrying, of a woman who abandoned him as a child in England in 1935, and 14 years later, abandoned him with her suicide; of a woman who he believed never loved him.

In 1935, Messer’s father Michael was eight years old when, together with his older sister, Ruth, he was enrolled in an “exile” school set up by a German-Jewish education reformer Dr Anna Essinger for German Jewish children in Kent, England.

It was made possible by Bella’s friendships with the network of educators forged among women such as Essinger, and was an extremely lucky escape for Michael and Ruth from Nazi Germany, at a time when it was becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews and countries around the world were closing their borders.

But for Michael, the sudden absence of his parents, the feeling of being left by his mother, was a betrayal he never recovered from. “She abandoned me, and she lied to me,” he told Messer. “She said she’d be back, and she never came.”

After securing the safety of their children, Bella and her husband Willy, a wholesale cap manufacturer, returned to Berlin, where they set about organising their own emigration to Palestine in 1937.

Two years later, the family was separated once more. Although the plan had been to come to Australia together, there was a problem with the landing permits, and only Willy and daughter Ruth were able to arrive in 1939.

Landing permits for Jewish refugees were becoming increasingly rare; it was not uncommon for one family member to emigrate to Australia first, in the hope of bringing out the rest of the family at a later date. The outbreak of war, however, shut down possible travel routes. The family remained separated across three continents: Michael spent the war years in Kent, Bella remained behind in Palestine. Most of the rest of their family were murdered in the Holocaust.

In 1947, Michael, now a young man, joined his sister and father in Melbourne. His mother came ten months later. Yet, writes Messer, she “didn’t survive the surviving”. In December 1949, she overdosed on barbiturates while her husband was at work. From then on, her death shaped a wounded silence that settled over the family, “separating one from the other for the rest of their days”.

Messer also learns another “terrible secret even more unspeakable than suicide”: her grandmother was, allegedly, a “nymphomaniac”. This accusation, originating with his father Willy, had led Michael to believe that his mother had never come back for him as a child at school in Kent because she “had been too busy having affairs”. Her apparent promiscuity was another nail in the coffin of her failed maternity.

Yet Bella had simply fallen in love another man who was not Willy. She had met Walther Strauss in Berlin sometime in the 1930s, before he also immigrated to Palestine together with his wife and child.

Messer is also at pains to address some of the broader inheritances – as the subtitle of her book indicates – of the histories through which her grandmother lived, in particular that of Israel.

The fact that Bella spent a decade there is the occasion for Messer to investigate the years leading up to the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, when Bella had already left for Australia. She wonders often about the suffering this history has caused.

Many will applaud the history presented here. But others will be uncomfortable with some of its assertions and its moral activism. The historical labour of the book is immense, but at times distracting from the thread of the family story.

A puzzle

At the end of the book, Messer returns to the puzzle of Bella’s love affair with Walther Strauss. Under Messer’s forensic investigation, we learn Strauss was educated and handsome, becoming a leading professor in the field of public health. Bella and Walther had shared interests and purpose, not just sex.

Messer is strongest when contemplating the greater puzzle of how to understand, to unknot, the mystery of a person’s life.

I might guess at but finally know nothing absolute about what was in Bella’s heart or loins, or how she experienced her marriage to Willy, or who she loved the most as a mother, or if mothering was important to her.

There is a beautiful relationship between father and daughter at the heart of this book, and through this journey of writing it, a healing between her father and his long-dead mother that is, to my mind, an incredible gift.

Ruth Balint receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Teenagers lead busy lives.

And to get through everything from school exams to softball games, they need nutritious food.

But research suggests Australian teens aren’t getting the nutrients they need, because their diets often revolve around sugary, salty and processed foods.

So what’s behind this? And how can we help our teens eat better?

The teenage years

Adolescence is a crucial time of growth and development.

During this time, teenagers go through various physical changes. They generally double their body weight and go through a growth spurt. They also experience rapid hormonal changes, as the adolescent brain pumps out more hormones related to growth, stress and sexual development.

At the same time, they are dealing with various social and emotional pressures. This includes their growing desire to be independent which may involve distancing themselves from – or in some cases actively rebelling against – their family values. They may also develop new friendships, juggling these with other commitments such as schoolwork and sport.

Good nutrition helps teens navigate all these changes. However, research suggests teenagers aren’t eating enough healthy foods.

What teens are eating

Australian teenagers get, on average, around 35% of their daily energy from nutrient-poor, energy-dense foods. These include confectionery, processed meats and salty snacks. Young Australians also consume a lot of sweetened drinks, such as soft drinks and energy drinks. On average, teens have sugary drinks at least once a week.

Compared to other age groups, adolescents are the least likely to eat the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables – two serves of fruit and five serves of vegetables each day. Worryingly, only 4% of teenagers meet that recommendation.

Worse still, globally roughly one-third of teenagers can’t access enough food. This may be because they live in regions affected by poverty, conflict or climate change.

One 2022 study examined the eating habits of students aged between 11 and 18, across 95 countries. It found up to 30% had experienced food insecurity – meaning they couldn’t access enough safe and nutritious food – in the last month. This study also suggested a link between food insecurity and reduced school attendance and physical activity, as well as poorer mental health.

Not just ‘bad choices’

So why are teenagers choosing unhealthy foods over healthy ones?

They are not simply making bad choices. So criticising their eating habits will only harm their relationship with food, and may contribute to feelings of shame and low self-esteem.

Research suggests teenagers make food choices based on various factors.

One is relationships. As teenagers grow and mature, they spend less time with their family and more time with their peers. As a result, their food choices are increasingly shaped by what their friends eat. Research suggests teenagers’ food choices are also influenced by where they socialise, such as fast food restaurants. The price of food also matters, with teenagers more likely to eat unhealthy foods because they are cheaper.

Another factor is social trends. Research suggests targeted advertising and celebrity endorsements have a disproportionate impact on adolescent food choices. And they mainly promote convenient, nutrient-poor options such as fast food and confectionery. Food trends, many of which are driven by social media, may also influence what teenagers eat. Recent examples include microwave-friendly mug cakes and the TikTok-famous “girl dinner”, both of which generally have little nutritional value.

Teenagers also care about taste. It goes without saying, junk food is delicious. That’s because food companies design it in a way that taps into our cravings, making us eat more. Research suggests teenagers may struggle to resist or stop eating unhealthy foods because they haven’t fully learnt to control their appetites. Advertising exacerbates this by framing unhealthy food as the most delicious and convenient option.

Raising healthier teens

The good news is, we can help our teens eat more nutritious foods. But that requires action on both a policy and household level.

In policy

Unfortunately, we tend to overlook teenagers in nutrition research and policy. Our new global framework for adolescent nutrition aims to change that. With help from young people and international nutrition experts, we developed several key recommendations:

• boost nutrition education in schools, by establishing a national school curriculum to safely promote healthy eating and combat nutrition misinformation from social media
• increase access to healthy, affordable foods by providing or subsidising healthy school meals, expanding community food programs in places where teenagers hang out such as sporting clubs and supporting local produce markets
• regulate how companies market unhealthy foods to young people, by restricting teen-directed advertising in apps and gaming platforms and banning unhealthy food marketing near schools, sporting fields and on public transport.

At home

There are also practical ways parents and families can help teenagers eat more healthily.

Here are some ideas:

• make your teen the “cook of the day”, assigning them one day each week where they choose and/or cook a nutritious meal that helps build their cooking skills
• involve your teen in meal planning, encouraging them to brainstorm healthy meals that are also tasty and affordable
• eat shared meals, ideally as a family and without any devices.

As policymakers, we must make healthy foods more visible, convenient and affordable for teenagers. And as parents, we shouldn’t shame teens for their eating habits, but instead show them how fun and achievable healthy eating can be. Together, these actions will help our teenagers grow into healthy, active adults.

Catharine Fleming receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Medical Research Future Fund, Australian Research Council, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, Nutrition International and United Nations Children's Fund. She is a member of the Global Adolescent Nutrition Network.

The New Yorker magazine’s recently published investigation into OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman posed a loaded question: can the people building this powerful technology actually be trusted?

The report described a system where commercial incentives drive behaviour and oversight is treated as a nuisance. In Aotearoa New Zealand, there is a similarly urgent question: can the governance frameworks we are building to manage that technology be trusted to work?

This is particularly relevant to the public service and government agencies, now being encouraged to embrace AI. At a recent International Research Society for Public Management conference, the global research community grappled with how AI can align with the public interest.

A clear divergence is emerging. Some jurisdictions are building surveillance-heavy data systems, while others are constructing robust, binding systems to protect citizen consent.

Aotearoa New Zealand occupies a precarious middle ground. The Public Service AI Framework names the right principles: transparency, fairness and human oversight. But it is explicitly non-binding.

We have dubbed it a “Pollyanna policy” – based on the Pollyanna principle which describes a general bias towards positivity and optimism about outcomes.

AI and institutional complexity

In the area of AI governance, this becomes a matter of stating good intentions and issuing non-binding guidance, trusting existing frameworks will absorb genuinely novel challenges.

We argue this underestimates the institutional constraints, conflicting incentives and strategic vulnerability of that middle ground, without legislative armour to protect citizen data.

It also underestimates the “institutional friction” that defines modern public institutions where many people and departments have power over policy. This tends to weaken responsiveness to problems.

Governance in a typical public sector agency is not a clean, ordered structure. It is an accumulation of layer upon layer of policy, operational procedure, ministerial expectation, legislative obligation and professional conventions.

New regulatory instruments rarely replace old ones. They are added alongside them, often interacting in unpredictable ways.

AI is a “flat” technology that processes information as a statistical landscape. It lacks the institutional memory to know that a prompt today might quietly undermine the kinds of political and constitutional compromises, made over time, that are central to effective government.

The accountability gap

Before AI can be usefully deployed, agencies must do the diagnostic work of understanding what that governance environment actually is.

The instinct instead is to add further AI governance guidance to a system already straining under accumulated advice.

As Australia’s Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme demonstrated, algorithmic systems deployed without this kind of clarity can produce catastrophic harm.

The non-binding nature of the Public Service AI Framework abdicates central responsibility, offloading accountability to individual agencies with vastly different levels of capability.

Algorithmic decision-making disrupts traditional accountability within organisations because information, justification and consequences can no longer be traced through a single responsible chain.

The framework assumes organisational readiness, but the evidence does not support this. The 2025 Public Service Census found that while a third of public servants had used AI for work, only 14% used it regularly.

This gap is driven by the friction that arises when a general-purpose tool like AI meets the accumulated complexity of how decisions actually get made.

Don’t get us wrong: the framework names the right principles. But principles without a legislative mandate become aspirational without accountability. In an already strained system, another non-binding document changes very little.

Māori data sovereignty

In Aotearoa New Zealand, this governance vacuum has an added dimension. Māori data sovereignty is a constitutional imperative under the Treaty of Waitangi, not a technical add-on.

The bureaucracy has an obligation to protect Indigenous sovereignty, yet the current approach leaves the gate unguarded. As legal scholars Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey argue in their 2025 article “How AI Destroys Institutions”:

AI systems are built to function in ways that degrade and are likely to destroy our civic institutions. [They] have the effect of eroding expertise, short-circuiting decision-making, and isolating people from each other.

This risk is amplified by the current state of AI technology. “Hallucinations” are not bugs but inherent statistical features of large language models. And evidence confirms they remain a risk in high-stakes settings such as medicine.

The Five Eyes security agencies evidently agree: their April 2026 joint guidance on agentic AI calls explicitly for incremental deployment, continuous threat assessment and sustained human oversight.

When these models hallucinate legal facts they risk overwriting Indigenous knowledge with plausible fictions.

This is compounded by the “sycophantic” tendency of large language models to mirror the user’s bias. In a policy system grappling with the legacy of colonisation, this can simply reinforce an echo chamber.

Building a counterweight

Used well, AI does present opportunities. It can reveal inconsistencies in policy frameworks and interrogate inherited assumptions.

But realising that opportunity requires that organisations understand themselves well enough to know where the technology will fail.

If these AI tools are built by companies where incentives outpace ethics, the burden on public institutions is to act as a genuine counterweight.

This means moving beyond “responsible” adoption toward creating formal, protected roles where officials interrogate AI output for bias and fabrication, rather than accepting speed as a proxy for quality.

The strategy, standards and guidance documents point in the right direction. But in the gap between aspiration and accountability, we must ask whether we continue to rely on optimism, or will we build the strong, ethical oversight capable of catching what the technology cannot?

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Every day, we publish a selection of your emails in our newsletter. We’d love to hear from you, you can email us at yoursay@theconversation.edu.au.

Monday May 11

The politics of fear

“How can we take a politician seriously if all she has is stirring up hate on immigrants and Indigenous people with no other stated policies? Apparently, it seems quite easy. In his book Goliath’s Curse, author Luke Kemp cites countless examples of individuals taking leadership roles by stirring up fear of external threats to take our ‘lootable assets’ (jobs, houses, and anything of physical value). Surveys across eight modern, high-income countries found that around 10–25% ranked as highly authoritarian. We, it seems, might be on the cusp of going the same way with the surge of extreme right-wing politicians in Australia using the external threat as their only policy.”

Paul Campbell, West End QLD

The great tax debate

“To tax or not to tax? Presently, the reason for not taxing gas exports as I understand it is to keep faith with our trading partners. From my experience in competitive markets, when economic circumstances change and costs go up there’s a choice. You can put your prices up and if that makes you more expensive, then the market will react and you then have the choice of accepting less market share and retaining profit margin or accepting a lesser margin and retaining market share. Either way, a tax will benefit the Australian public and industry, either from increased federal revenue or greater gas supply at lower prices.”

Hugh Kushner

General practitioners (GPs) and hospital doctors are usually the first contact point for patients, but as our new research shows, they can take on different roles, acting either as gatekeepers or brokers.

As gatekeepers they make sure unnecessary investigations are avoided and scarce resources used efficiently. As brokers, they advocate for their patients’ access to the limited resources available.

For people living with life-limiting disease, the role a doctor adopts can mean the difference between timely care and dangerous delay.

Our research focused on people who had lived with a terminal cancer diagnosis for a long time. The impact of these different roles can be seen clearly.

When GPs were concerned a person’s symptoms could indicate cancer, most patients were referred to specialist services quickly so diagnostic work could be undertaken.

But there were also cases where patients, even with a history of cancer, were not referred quickly. There are several reasons why this might occur.

One is that the GP thinks the patient’s symptoms are due to a different condition. For example, one of the people in our study had a history of breast cancer, but also of mental health issues. When they presented with breathlessness, their GP prescribed an antidepressant.

The breathlessness persisted and the patient returned to the GP and eventually ended up in the emergency department where they were diagnosed with lung metastases.

Another patient had a lump on her breast ten years after breast cancer. Her GP said it was a cyst, and it was not until she saw a female doctor that she was sent to her specialist to find the cancer had metastasised.

Even in the hospital sector resources could be withheld from patients.

One study participant was found to have a terminal brain tumour and was sent home and told treatment would be “a waste of time”. It was only due to the tenacity of their spouse that the patient was eventually sent for possible treatment.

Doctors as advocates

In contrast, for some patients a health professional will broker access to resources others might not be given.

Again, reasons for this vary, but can often come down to some assessment about who is worthy of this extra effort.

One of the patients we spoke to had malignant melanoma that had been misdiagnosed years earlier as benign. Their specialist went in to bat for them, working to get them onto a vaccine trial, trying to make up for that system failure.

Another patient, a medical professional, was one of only 100 people in New Zealand put on an unsubsidised medication at no cost to them. Yet another, who was in their 30s, was placed on a number of trials for melanoma, even in circumstances where they did not meet the trial protocol.

We can see some clear reasons why a health professional may broker access to scarce resources for their patient. The patient may have been let down by the health system earlier, they may have strong connections with the health system because of their work, and they may be regarded as being more worthy because of their age.

There will be many other factors, but we have no systematic research on this issue. What we do have, though, is a situation where health professionals are making determinations about who is worthy of access to resources.

These decisions are not mere judgements about need or likely clinical benefits.

Reinforcing existing inequities

For Māori, gatekeeping and brokering may have very different effects.

Gatekeeping may not be malicious but can reproduce the experience of later diagnosis and poorer outcomes, which is already more common for Māori.

Māori are also less likely to start with the advantages that make a patient “broker-worthy”. If brokerage is informal and discretionary, it risks reinforcing inequities the system nominally wants to reduce.

A third role we saw was less about tests and treatments and more about what kinds of knowledge and practice are allowed into the clinic. Some practitioners acted as boundary enforcers, defending the edge of Western evidence-based medicine by excluding or ignoring other approaches to cancer and healing.

One patient in our study rejected Western medicine, concluding that doctors did not listen to them or understand their cultural and spiritual world.

GPs and hospital specialists will always have to balance finite resources, uncertain evidence and competing obligations. But whether they primarily act as gatekeepers, brokers, boundary enforcers or as bridge builders across these roles has real consequences for who is diagnosed, who is treated, and who lives well with cancer in Aotearoa.

For Māori, whose cancer journeys are already shaped by structural inequity, getting those roles right is not an abstract policy debate. It is a matter of life and death.

We need to understand medical practitioners’ decisions about which role they take on. This knowledge may help patients to advocate for themselves and researchers to analyse whether these decisions are fostering equitable outcomes.

Kevin Dew receives funding from the Marsden Fund

Chris Cunningham receives funding from The Marsden Fund, the Health Research Council and National Science Challenges.

Kerry Chamberlain receives funding from the Marsden Fund.

Richard Egan receives funding from the Marsden Fund and the Health Research Council.

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