#health news queensland

[bradburydental]

World Oral Health Day: Promoting Healthy Smiles with Bradbury Dental Surgery

As we celebrate World Oral Health Day, it's important to recognize the significance of maintaining good dental hygiene practices for a lifetime of healthy smiles. This global initiative serves as a reminder of the importance of oral health and its impact on overall well-being.

One important quality of achieving best oral health is regular dental care, and establishments like Bradbury Dental Surgery play a vital role in this endeavor. With their commitment to excellence in dental services, Bradbury Dental Surgery stands as a guidance of oral health within our community.

At Bradbury Dental Surgery, patients receive more than just routine check-ups; they experience personalized care tailored to their unique needs. From preventative treatments to advanced restorative procedures, the skilled professionals and prioritize patient comfort and satisfaction.

In addition to offering top-notch dental services, Bradbury Dental Surgery is dedicated to patient education. They empower individuals with the knowledge and tools necessary to maintain healthy oral habits at home, ensuring long-term dental wellness beyond the confines of the clinic.

The importance of accessibility to quality dental care. Through community outreach programs and initiatives, they strive to make oral health services accessible to all, regardless of socioeconomic status.

On this World Oral Health Day, let us commend the efforts of establishments like Bradbury Dental Surgery in promoting oral health awareness and making strides towards healthier smiles worldwide. Together, with a commitment to regular dental care and education, we can ensure that everyone has the opportunity to smile confidently and live their best lives.

[porcelain-dollbones]

i don't know if this is being talked about outside of australia, but recently there was a mass stabbing event in my city. six people are dead and eight more badly injured.

the media coverage and public conversation around the stabbing has been really awful. it started with frenzied theorising- without any evidence- that the perpetrator was a muslim extremist, a palestinian hamas agent, including spreading false information about the victims to create a narrative of islamic violence. when it resulted that the perpetrator was a white man from queensland, the coverage instantly shifted- instead of a terror attack, it was now a lone wolf, a non-ideological result of an individual's mental health issues. this is typical of the framing when it comes to perpetrators: a white person is an individual, a brown person is a faceless member of an ideology. but, crucially, the attack was not non-ideological. the perpetrator specifically targeted women, specifically avoiding men except where they were preventing him from getting to women. six out of seven of the deceased victims were women, and in interviews with the perpetrators parents, they talked about his anger at not having a girlfriend. misogyny is ideological, and men are trained to harbour deep resentment towards women that regularly manifests in violence. this event was a targeted act of femicide. while it is unclear if the perpetrator was involved in any specific right-wing groups, that the attack was driven by hatred of women is not in doubt.

the new narrative is one of demonising mental illness, because the perpetrator was diagnosed with schizophrenia and there is no avenue to blame his race. there are now open calls in the media for stricter use of sectioning and more oppressive tracking, forced medication and indefinite institutionalisation of the mentally ill. it is the mentally ill who will suffer from this narrative, while the fostering of violent misogyny goes unchecked. this country never stops letting us down

[lotus-tower]

COVID-19's long-term effects on the body: an incomplete list

COVID’s effect on the immune system, specifically on lymphocytes:

NYT article from 2020 (Studies cited: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.18.101717v1, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.20.106401v1, https://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/citation/32405080/Decreased_T_cell_populations_contribute_to_the_increased_severity_of_COVID_19_, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.08.20125112v1)

 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.10.475725v1

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abc8511 (Published in Science)

 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9057012/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2022/04/14/sars-cov-2-actively-infects-and-kills-lymphoid-cells/

https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/10/in-cleveland-and-beyond-researchers-begin-to-unravel-the-mystery-of-long-covid-19.html

SARS-CoV-2 infection weakens immune-cell response to vaccination: NIH-funded study suggests need to boost CD8+ T cell response after infection

https://www.merckmanuals.com/professional/hematology-and-oncology/leukopenias/lymphocytopenia

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/11/07/COVID-Reinfections-And-Immunity/

Dendritic cell deficiencies persist seven months after SARS-CoV-2 infection

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2022.1034159/full

https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Lauterbach-warnt-vor-unheilbarer-Immunschwaeche-durch-Corona-article23860527.html (German Minister of Health)

Anecdotal evidence of COVID’s effects on white blood cells:

 https://twitter.com/DrJohnHhess/status/1661837956875956224

 https://x.com/TristanVeness/status/1661565201345564673

https://twitter.com/TristanVeness/status/1689996298408312832

Much more if you speak to Long Covid patients directly!

Related information of interest:

China approves Genuine Biotech's HIV drug for COVID patients

COVID as a “mass disabling event” and impact on the economy:

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/report-says-long-covid-could-impact-economy-and-be-mass-disabling-event-in-canada-1.6306608

https://x.com/inkblue01/status/1742183209809453456?s=20

COVID’s impact on the heart:

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/deadly-virus-could-lead-heart-31751263 (Research from: Japan's Riken research institute)

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/unlike-flu-covid-19-attacks-dna-in-the-heart-new-research-20220929-p5bm10.html

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/12/1/186

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-mild-covid-effects-cardiovascular-health.html

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2022/covid-and-the-heart-it-spares-no-one

https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/is-coronavirus-a-disease-of-the-blood-vessels (British Heart Foundation)

COVID’s effect on the brain and cognitive function:

https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/article/brain-infection-by-sars-cov-2-lifelong-consequences/171391/

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-shows-covid-leaves-brain-injury-markers-blood

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/warning-of-serious-brain-disorders-in-people-with-mild-covid-symptoms

Cognitive post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC) can occur after mild COVID-19 

Neurologic Effects of SARS-CoV-2 Transmitted among Dogs

https://journals.lww.com/nsan/fulltext/2022/39030/neurological_manifestations_and_mortality_in.4.aspx

https://www.salon.com/2023/06/17/new-evidence-suggests-alters-the-brain--but-the-extent-of-changes-is-unclear/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-virus-may-tunnel-through-nanotubes-from-nose-to-brain/

https://neurosciencenews.com/post-covid-brain-21904/

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(22)00260-7/fulltext

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-08-covid-infection-crucial-brain-regions.html

https://news.ecu.edu/2022/08/04/covid-parkinsons-link/

Covid as a vascular/blood vessel disease:

https://www.salon.com/2020/06/01/coronavirus-is-a-blood-vessel-disease-study-says-and-its-mysteries-finally-make-sense/

https://www.salon.com/2023/12/27/brain-damage-caused-by-19-may-not-show-up-on-routine-tests-study-finds/

https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/sars-cov-2-infects-coronary-arteries-increases-plaque-inflammation

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/12/6/2123

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211004104134.htm (microclots)

Long Covid:

Post-COVID-19 Condition in Canada: What we know, what we don’t know, and a framework for action

 https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/more-than-two-years-of-long-covid-research-hasn-t-yielded-many-answers-scientific-review-1.6235227

 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/cause-of-long-covid-symptoms-revealed-by-lung-imaging-research-at-western-university-1.6504318

 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/long-covid-study-montreal-1.6521131

https://news.yale.edu/2023/12/19/study-helps-explain-post-covid-exercise-intolerance

Other:

- Viruses and mutation: https://typingmonkeys.substack.com/p/monkeys-on-typewriters

Measures taken by the rich and world leaders

Heightened risk of diabetes

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2805461

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00912-y

Liver damage:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/46-of-covid-patients-have-liver-damage-study/articleshow/97809200.cms?from=mdr

tl;dr: covid is a vascular disease, not a respiratory illness. it can affect your blood and every organ in your body. every time you're reinfected, your chances of getting long covid increase.

avoid being infected. reduce the amount of viral load you're exposed to.

the gap between what the scientific community knows and ordinary people know is massive. collective action is needed.

[reasonsforhope]

"An international research team has found almost a million potential sources of antibiotics in the natural world.

Research published in the journal Cell by a team including Queensland University of Technology (QUT) computational biologist Associate Professor Luis Pedro Coelho has used machine learning to identify 863,498 promising antimicrobial peptides -- small molecules that can kill or inhibit the growth of infectious microbes.

The findings of the study come with a renewed global focus on combatting antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as humanity contends with the growing number of superbugs resistant to current drugs.

"There is an urgent need for new methods for antibiotic discovery," Professor Coelho, a researcher at the QUT Centre for Microbiome Research, said. The centre studies the structure and function of microbial communities from around the globe.

"It is one of the top public health threats, killing 1.27 million people each year." ...

"Using artificial intelligence to understand and harness the power of the global microbiome will hopefully drive innovative research for better public health outcomes," he said.

The team verified the machine predictions by testing 100 laboratory-made peptides against clinically significant pathogens. They found 79 disrupted bacterial membranes and 63 specifically targeted antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli.

"Moreover, some peptides helped to eliminate infections in mice; two in particular reduced bacteria by up to four orders of magnitude," Professor Coelho said.

In a preclinical model, tested on infected mice, treatment with these peptides produced results similar to the effects of polymyxin B -- a commercially available antibiotic which is used to treat meningitis, pneumonia, sepsis and urinary tract infections.

More than 60,000 metagenomes (a collection of genomes within a specific environment), which together contained the genetic makeup of over one million organisms, were analysed to get these results. They came from sources across the globe including marine and soil environments, and human and animal guts.

The resulting AMPSphere -- a comprehensive database comprising these novel peptides -- has been published as a publicly available, open-access resource for new antibiotic discovery.

[Note: !!! Love it. Open access research databases my beloved.]"

-via Science Daily, June 5, 2024

[leveragehunters]

I'm putting my response to this in it's own post. Nothing but respect for the rightful criticisms of the situation described in those articles. The problem is that the articles by Danielle Cahill are grossly, almost negligently, misleading.

I'm not your lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I am an autistic Queensland lawyer who's pretty ticked off at Cahill.

Cahill's articles:

Autistic drivers could find their licences in legal limbo depending on where they live after new standards introduced

New national Fitness to Drive standards are 'discriminatory' and 'humiliating' for autistic drivers, psychologists say

Short version:

If you're autistic you do not automatically have to obtain a medical clearance to hold a Queensland Drivers Licence and there is no 'list of reportable conditions', much less one that includes autism.

Long version with receipts:

The first article purportedly cites a Department of Transport and Main Roads (Transport) spokesperson who they claim said: "…all autistic drivers in Queensland have since 2012 been required to obtain a medical clearance from a doctor to show they are fit to drive." It also says: "In Queensland, the Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) requires drivers to obtain a medical clearance form from a doctor confirming they are fit to drive despite being autistic."

The second article says: "According to the state's Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR), autism was added to the list of reportable health conditions in 2012."  Oh, but wait, what's this from just a little further up in the same article? "A TMR spokesperson told ABC News that "there is no specific legislation that states that people with autism cannot drive".

Let's talk about that specific legislation

Despite what the spokesperson said, there was no change to the law in 2012. A new Transport Regulation, which contains the law about medical clearances for Queensland drivers licences, was, however, passed in 2021. (link to the Regulation)

Typo or ignorance? Why not both.

The 2021 Regulation did not substantively change the law. The new Regulation was a consolidation, modernisation, and streamline of multiple pieces of overlapping legislation. (Explanatory notes)

'Jet's Law', which sets the rules for driver medical clearances, was first introduced in 2008. (Ministerial Statement). It was moved from the old Regulation to the new 2021 one essentially unchanged.

Jet's Law in chapter 3, part 6, division 1 of the 2021 Regulation

Jet's Law as passed in the previous Regulation (scroll down to page 64)

The law in Queensland re: medical clearances is the same as it was in 2008. The only changes were to language, consistent with modern drafting standards, and the addition of a requirement to not drive until you've given notice if a condition develops or worsens.  

What does Jet's Law say?

Section 177 of the 2021 Regulation states:

A person who applies for the grant or renewal of a Queensland driver licence must, when making the application, give a notice to the chief executive about any mental or physical incapacity that is likely to adversely affect the person’s ability to drive safely.

Key words: any mental or physical incapacity that is likely to affect the person's ability to drive.

If you're autistic and your autism isn't likely to affect your ability to drive safely, Jet's Law doesn't require you to give notice to Transport.

But what about that list of reportable conditions the article claims exists?

It doesn't exist. There is no list of reportable conditions.

Transport DOES provide some examples of medical conditions that are likely to affect your ability to drive. You can see them here:

https://www.support.transport.qld.gov.au/qt/formsdat.nsf/forms/S5040/$file/S5040.pdf

https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/licensing/update/medical/fitness#medcond

Here's the licence application form: https://www.support.transport.qld.gov.au/qt/formsdat.nsf/forms/qf3000/$file/f3000_es.pdf. Question 7 states that you must report any medical conditions that may adversely affect your ability to drive and asks if you have any of the following conditions:

Vision or eye disorder (other than wearing glasses or contact lenses) that may adversely affect your driving

Diabetes that requires treatment by tablet, insulin or other medication

Been diagnosed with epilepsy, experienced a seizure; or been required to take anti-epileptic medication after the age of 11

Any other medical condition/s that is likely to adversely affect your ability to drive safely

You know what I don't see anywhere? Autism.

But what about the National Standards?

Cahill managed to get that part of the articles almost right.

All Queensland drivers, regardless of age, must meet the national standards to ensure their health or any physical disability does not increase the risk of a crash. (confirmed by Transport) And before you ask, the national standard is not a list of 'reportable conditions'. (Even if it was, the autism update happened in 2022, not 2012). But what is the national standard if it's not a list of reportable conditions?

The national driver medical standards Assessing Fitness to Drive set out the considerations and medical criteria for safe driving. They also guide the management of drivers with health conditions so that they may continue to drive for as long as it is safe to do so. The standards are used by health professionals to assess and manage patients with health conditions that may affect their ability to drive safely. These assessments and the standards themselves inform Driver Licensing Authority decisions about driver licensing.

The national standard does refer to "Other neurological conditions including autism spectrum disorder and other developmental and intellectual disabilities". Yes, it was updated in 2022, as indicated by a big red banner across the top of the page. The update notes state:

The review identified that information and guidance was required to enable assessment of persons with ASD. Specialist advice noted that the variability of ASD characteristics and the degree of severity were too diverse for a specific standard. General guidance is however provided in the text of the chapter.

Wait, the review? The changes were made because of a review? They weren't a secret sneaky change as Cahill alleged? There was a public review that called for submissions from stakeholders?  Yes there was.

The review concluded there was not enough evidence to determine the MVC (motor vehicle crash) risk associated with ASD, and "Specialist advice noted that the variability of ASD characteristics and the degree of severity were too diverse for a specific standard."

So what does the standard actually say about autism?

The impact of other neurological conditions including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and developmental and intellectual disability should be assessed individually. A practical driver assessment may be required. If the degree of impairment is static, periodic review is not usually required. People with ASD can have differences in social communication and interaction, with restricted and repetitive patterns of behaviour, interest and activities. Although evidence from driving studies are limited, drivers with ASD may drive differently from people without ASD. Shortcomings in tactical driving skills have been observed, while rule-following aspects of driving are improved. There is considerable difference in the range and severity of ASD symptoms, so assessment should focus on these and the significance of likely functional effects, rather than an ASD diagnosis.

So what does that mean?

It means we're right back at Jet's Law, in section 177 of the 2021 Regulation.

If you have a mental or physical incapacity that is likely to affect your ability to drive you need to declare it.

Could this include autism? Yes.

Does it automatically include autism? Not according to any law or standard currently in force in Queensland.

If you're an autistic Queenslander, your obligations under Jet's Law and the update to the national standard mean it's important that you consider whether your autism is likely to affect your driving ability and, if so, declare it. If it's not, then don't.

[Reminder: I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice]

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

By Joshua Boscaini

In short:

Australia has recorded its first cases of the XEC COVID-19 variant that has been spreading in Europe this year.

The mutation is a "recombinant" variant that is a mix of two previous Omicron subvariants called KS 1.1 and KP 3.3.

What's next?

An infectious disease expert says the strain has the hallmarks of something that could lead to a "summer wave" of infections.

A new highly transmissible variant of COVID-19 has been detected in Australia, raising questions about whether it will lead to a wave of COVID-19 cases over summer.

The XEC strain has been reported in 29 countries including the United States, United Kingdom and China, according to global health data platform GISAID.

Here's what we know about the XEC variant and how many cases have been reported in Australia.

What do we know about XEC?

XEC is a "recombinant" COVID-19 variant, which means it's a mix of two previous Omicron subvariants called KS 1.1 and KP 3.3.

A recombinant variant is created when someone is infected with two strains of a virus that go on reproduce and create another strain.

There are conflicting reports about where the strain originated, but most suggest it was first detected in Germany in May or June.

Cases have been reported in 29 countries, according to GISAID, including Brazil, Canada, China, France, Spain and Japan.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified XEC as a variant under monitoring in September so health authorities could give it more attention and investigate whether it presented an additional threat to global public health.

University of Queensland infectious diseases physician Paul Griffin told the ABC that XEC could become the dominant variant by the end of October.

"It is seeming to grow fairly quickly," Dr Griffin says.

"It's got a significant growth advantage in a number of countries around the world, including our own at the moment, so it does seem to be able to out compete some of the existing sub-variants."

How many cases of XEC are in Australia?

Australia recorded 23 known XEC COVID-19 infections as of September 23, according to the Department of Health's latest Australian Respiratory Surveillance Report.

Dr Griffin says the XEC strain makes up about 5 to 10 per cent of COVID-19 cases in Australia and the strain may have arrived in the country earlier than data suggests.

The National Notifiable Disease Surveillance Dashboard reports 12,037,101 cases of COVID-19 have been detected in Australia as of October 7, 2024 since the start of the pandemic.

But Dr Griffin says case numbers aren't a good indicator of how severe or easily transmissible the XEC variant is because fewer people are getting tested.

"The main things we monitor [for] … is things like cases and outbreaks in aged care, and hospitalisations, intensive care and death," he says.

"To date we haven't see any rise in any of those."

What are the symptoms and how is it transmitted?

Just like other COVID-19 variants, XEC can be transmitted from person to person by respiratory droplets or small airborne particles when an infected person coughs, sneezes or talks.

Symptoms for the XEC variant are the same as most other COVID-19 strains and include fever, coughing, sore throat and shortness of breath.

While some people don't display any symptoms, the disease can be serious for older people, people with underlying health conditions and pregnant people, according to the Department of Health.

"At this stage there's nothing to indicate that it's going to cause any different kind of symptoms or presentations than what we've seen with the other similar sub-variants," Dr Griffin says.

"People can have very different presentations … it's one of those things that can cause such a variable illness in so many different people depending on their level of past exposure and immunity and what other conditions they might have."

The Department of Health says wearing a face mask, practising good hygiene and physical distancing can protect you from contracting the virus. Vaccinations also provide protection against severe illness.

How is XEC different from other COVID-19 variants?

Dr Griffin says the merger of the KS 1.1 and KP 3.3 variants have caused a change to the virus's spike protein, which makes the disease more transmissible.

But he says it's too early to know more about XEC's characteristics because scientists are still examining the virus's sequence.

"At the moment, this is a combination of two very significant sub-variants … that's why we've got a change in the spike protein and the growth advantage that we see."

Dr Griffin says while it's likely there will be more COVID-19 variants, people shouldn't get complacent.

"These changes are truly random. One of these sub-variants could, just by sheer chance, become more virulent, cause more severe disease or gain other properties like evading our testing or anti-virals."

"That's why we do need a level of vigilance to continue so we do keep monitoring, we do keep assessing and we do keep responding and that's really why we can't get complacent."

He says it's uncertain whether the variant will cause a "summer wave" of infections, like with Omicron.

"It certainly has the hallmarks of something that could lead to a significant wave but we could also get a new sub-variant any day or any time into the future from here that could account for that."

Do current vaccinations protect you against XEC?

Dr Griffin says changes to the virus can lead to immune evasion, which means that immunity generated from past infections or vaccination can be slightly less effective against the mutated virus.

He says an updated JN.1 COVID-19 vaccination under review by the Theraputic Goods Administration (TGA) will provide good levels of coverage against the new strain because it's a "closely related" sub-variant.

"We still anticipate those vaccines to be highly effective and the biggest determinant of how well they're going to work is how many people get them," he says.

"The JN.1 boosters that hopefully we'll have soon will be really important for protection in our country and we want really high levels of uptake."

[coochiequeens]

Finally a peice that talks about how 5 of the 6 in the people killed in the sydney stabbings were women. And yes he was mentally ill but he felt entitled to a girlfriend.

By Victoria Smith 16 April, 2024

Did Joel Cauchi, the man who killed six people in a Sydney shopping centre, do so because he was mentally ill? Or did he do it because he hated women?

Five out of six of Cauchi’s victims were women, which does seem targeted. Nonetheless, according to his family, Cauchi, 40, “battled with mental health issues since he was a teenager”. For this reason, some have found talk of misogyny unseemly, if not exploitative. To categorise Cauchi’s act as male violence against women, if not terrorism underpinned by misogynist ideology, can be appear dismissive of genuine sickness. Sometimes, bad things just happen because people are unwell. 

For women who live with men who have severe mental health diagnoses, there is little comfort in discussions such as these. On the one hand, there is an enormous amount of pressure to downplay the idea that mentally ill men are more likely to be violent than other men (they are, but to say so is viewed as contributing to stigma). On the other hand, is it fair for a man with severe mental illness to be judged by the same moral standards as other men? Shouldn’t we be recognising that they cannot control their perceptions and fears?

See rest of article

The Sydney attacker was desperate for a girlfriend, his family has revealed as police confirmed that he had targeted women.

Joel Cauchi killed five women and one man during a knife attack on the Bondi Junction Westfield shopping centre on Saturday.

Karen Webb, the New South Wales police commissioner, said: “The videos speak for themselves. It’s obvious the offender had focused on women and avoided the men.”

The majority of the 12 people Cauchi seriously wounded were female, including a baby girl.

Andrew Cauchi, his father, said on Monday he knew why his mentally unwell son had targeted women. The 76-year-old told reporters outside his home in Queensland: “Because he wanted a girlfriend and he’s got no social skills and he was frustrated out of his brain.”

Describing his son as “very sick”, he described trying to deal with the feelings of “loving a monster”.

A “heroic” policewoman who stopped a lone knifeman mid-rampage during a killing spree in a Sydney shopping centre has been named.

In one of several heroic attempts to disarm the attacker on Saturday, Amy Scott, a NSW Police Inspector, walked up calmly behind the attacker and ordered him to drop his weapon.

When he refused to do so and lunged at her with a knife, she shot him.

Six people were killed after the culprit – later identified by police as Queensland man Joel Cauchi – went on a stabbing spree in Westfield Bondi Junction, including a mother whose baby is reportedly now in a critical condition.

“She is certainly a hero. There is no doubt that she saved lives through her action,” Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, said on Saturday.

[estroniaid]

Australians can go to APAN, Australian Palestine Advocacy Network, which can help you send an email to your local representatives: here, remember you can personalise the email.

They also post about upcoming events and news around Australian Palestinian support. You can also volunteer and/or donate through them.

It's also a good idea to email our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Penny Wong. Her fax and phone call details are here, you can also send a message through the site, or email her at senator.wong@aph.gov.au

There is also AFOPA, Australian Friends of Palestine Association, which is an Adelaide-based organisation. They have events and campaigns listed on their website.

APHEDA, Australian People for Health, Education and Development Abroad, is a non-government organisation of the Australian union movement. They are based in Sydney and do a lot of advocate work in Queensland.

AUSPalestine is an independent network of Australian trade unions and unionists who are in support of Palestine.

Do your part and don't allow the ausgov to simply give words of comfort, especially after abstaining from the humanitarian truce.

Free Palestine.

[leaves-lilies-and-esther]

Teaching primary school children about sexual abuse may help them to tell an adult if they have been abused themselves, according to the results of comprehensive new research. Using data from 24 separate trials involving almost 6,000 children around the world, researchers found that pupils who are taught at school about preventing sexual abuse through games, books and songs are more likely than others to report their own experiences of abuse.

The findings, which were published on Thursday, show that among children who did not receive any teaching about sexual abuse, four in 1,000 disclosed some form of sex abuse. Among those who were taught about it at school, the figure went up to 14 per 1,000.

Children who receive teaching on the subject also seem better equipped to deal with potentially dangerous situations, with those who participated in the education programmes more likely than other children to try to protect themselves in a simulated abuse scenario in which they were asked to leave school with a stranger.

Whether such school-based programmes actually reduce the incidence of abuse is still unclear, however, and the review’s authors have called for more research to build on their findings.

The report concludes: “Even if successful in only a small proportion of situations, given the prevalence of child sexual abuse, it is possible that the skills and knowledge learned in prevention programmes may be of assistance to a considerable number of children.”

The quality and availability of sex education in England’s schools has been under scrutiny in recent months, with a report by MPs on Westminster’s education committee calling for it to be mandatory to help safeguard young people from abuse. As this study shows, however, in certain countries primary-age children are already taught how to recognise, react to and report abuse situations through school-based programmes designed to prevent sexual abuse.

The findings are the result of a Cochrane review of data from trials of prevention programmes in the US, Canada, China, Germany, Spain, Taiwan and Turkey. Cochrane is a highly regarded, not-for-profit global network of researchers and professionals that carries out systematic reviews of the best available health research.

Schools used a variety of methods to educate children about sexual abuse, including films, plays, songs, puppets, books and games. The children, who were almost all of primary-school age, were taught about safety rules, body ownership and who to tell. The report’s authors said there was little evidence that children who took part were worried or in any way adversely affected.

In one American school, children took part in a one-hour Stop programme (stop, tell someone, own your body, protect yourself) taught through role-play; in Germany, children watched a live performance called (No) Child’s Play, and in Turkey there were four hour-long sessions based on a programme called Good Touch, Bad Touch.

Globally it is estimated that at least one in 10 girls and one in 20 boys experience some form of sexual abuse in childhood. Those who have been abused are more susceptible to depression, eating disorders, suicidal behaviour and drug and alcohol problems in later life.

“This review supports the need to inform and protect children against sexual abuse,” said the Cochrane report’s lead author, Kerryann Walsh, of Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. “But ongoing research is needed to evaluate school-based prevention programmes, and to investigate the links between participation and the actual prevention of child sexual abuse. To really know whether these programmes are working, we need to see larger studies with follow-up all the way to adulthood.”

The study also indicated that the programmes were effective in increasing kids’ lasting knowledge of sexual abuse, with children remembering much of what they had been taught six months later. But the authors also said it was difficult to prove the children had learned the skills that would necessarily translate to a real-life future scenario involving abuse.

Walsh said: “Even if a child demonstrates that they know how to behave in a certain scenario, it doesn’t mean they will behave the same in a real situation where there is potential for abuse. Tests cannot mimic real abuse situations very well. For example, we know that most sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone known to the child, whereas in the test situations, unfamiliar actors or research assistants were used.”

[mariacallous]

A child that faces a bedridden life. A girl with intellectual disabilities raped by a family member. Victims of domestic violence or reproductive coercion. There are a variety of distressing reasons women have later stage terminations.

There is no easy definition of when an abortion is considered “late” or “late-term”. It is generally considered anything after 20 weeks’ gestation, but the states and territories have a patchwork of legislation with various milestones.

What is clear is that later terminations are the new target of anti-abortion activists, now that abortion has been decriminalised across Australia.

On Wednesday South Australia’s upper house voted on legislation that would force women seeking an abortion after 27 weeks and six days – an extremely rare occurrence – to be induced, to deliver the child alive, and keep it or adopt it out.

It was narrowly defeated – nine were in favour and 10 opposed from the 22-person house. The president only casts a deciding vote, while a prominent Liberal critic of the bill, Michelle Lensink, is absent for cancer treatment.

The Liberal frontbencher Ben Hood, who introduced the bill, says the woman’s right to end a pregnancy is kept because the pregnancy ends when the baby is born.

“The innovation of this bill is that it allows a mother to end her pregnancy throughout all nine months and indeed right up to birth,” he says.

The Greens have a different label for it: “forced birth”.

About 1% of all terminations are carried out after 20 weeks.

According to SA Health data gathered in the 18 months after abortion reform in the state, fewer than five terminations were performed after 27 weeks.

Terminations at that point can only be done with the approval of two doctors, and only if it is necessary to save the life of the pregnant person or save another foetus, or poses significant risk of injury or mental health of the pregnant person, or if there is a significant risk of serious foetal anomalies.

Hood said in the upper house on Wednesday night that his bill did not “force birth”. He said any termination at 28 weeks already involved “birth” because women had no other option in how to remove the foetus from the body.

“The only difference is that the baby will have a chance to live,” he said.

He has previously said that, once born, if the baby “isn’t compatible with life”, it would then be given palliative care.

He said on Wednesday night the babies would be admitted to neonatal units, “receiving the best medical attention available if the mother does not wish to keep the baby”.

Adoption would be a compassionate alternative, he said.

Hood indicated on ABC radio that he was not abandoning his mission.

The attorney general, Kyam Maher, says the “Trumpian” bill would wind back abortion care and poses a “real and significant danger, not only to the physical health and safety of all women, but to women’s fundamental right to bodily autonomy”.

He also hit out at the vitriol, nastiness and inflammatory attacks deployed in the campaign.

“I’d encourage those who’ve been involved in this sort of debate to reflect on whether the hyper polarised US style of personal politics really reflects well on SA,” he says.

The bill bears similarities to so-called “born-alive” laws, which have percolated in the US for years. A federal “born alive” bill in Australia was found to have no legal, ethical or medical basis to support it.

The Katter’s Australian party leader, Robbie Katter, has proposed similar legislation in Queensland.

Both Katter and Hood have thanked the anti-abortion activist Joanna Howe for her work on their legislation. Howe wants “an Australia where abortion is unthinkable”.

Hood thanked Howe on Wednesday and said the other people who informed the bill wanted to remain anonymous. Several earlier speakers noted that Hood’s bill was drafted by Howe and anonymous experts while the review that informed decriminalisation involved thousands of experts and many respected institutions who did not remain anonymous, and that it involved months of investigation and a 560-page report.

Abortion has also crept up as a serious issue in the lead-up to the Queensland election after Labor accused the Liberal National party of a “secret plan” to limit abortion rights and the LNP failed to quell the speculation.

The various campaigns have been accused of using misinformation in an attempt to limit access to terminations.

Reasons women might need a late termination include foetal abnormalities, life-threatening conditions, and psycho-social reasons such as the baby being the result of rape or incest.

‘We can’t do this to the baby’

Tiffany’s first baby had spina bifida.

Her baby would have been paralysed from the neck down. She chose a termination. Six years later, Tiffany* was pregnant again. At the 20-week scan, she was told this baby also had spina bifida, but it was not as bad.

“They said wait another two weeks, we’ll do another scan and we’ll go from there,” she says.

“You’re stressing, you’re freaking out. Two weeks felt like an eternity.”

After waiting two weeks and undergoing another scan, Tiffany was again told it didn’t look too bad and she should do another scan in two weeks.

“At 24 weeks, it got worse,” she says.

“He started developing fluid on the brain. It was affecting his nerves, down the spine. It went from numb toes to ‘he’s not going to be able to walk’.”

Another two weeks, another scan. “Everything was failing,” she says. “We did all these tests because I needed to make sure I was making the right decision … we sat down and said ‘we can’t do this to the baby’. He’d be bedridden, have surgery after surgery, a lifetime of hospital visits.”

At 28 weeks, she had the procedure.

An SA Law Reform Institute review of abortion law heard about a girl with an intellectual disability who had been sexually abused by a family member and did not realise she was pregnant until late in the pregnancy.

She made it clear she did not want the pregnancy to proceed. If she had not been able to have an abortion, if she had been forced to have the child, it would have had a “severe and adverse affect on her”, the institute said in its report.

Jacquie* and her husband had a two-year-old and another baby on the way.

They did the usual testing, including a 16-week scan and an amniocentesis. “We got the results back and they said everything was fine,” she says. “But I had a gut feeling and remember saying to my hubby that something was just off.”

At 24 weeks, they got a call. “They said they got the results wrong,” she says. “We thought, ‘shit’. So we were told at 24 weeks that our child did have Down syndrome and we had to make a choice within 24 hours.

“We just had to make the decision around our family and what was best for us. To this day we never say it was the right decision. It was the best choice for us at that time. We had to think about our little one.”

Jacob Mangelsdorf is a counsellor at Red Tree Foundation, an organisation which supports people grieving the loss of a child.

He says the parents that come to him are suffering an “incredibly complex grief”.

“We’re not talking about an easy choice. We’re not talking about something that’s without a high level of complexity,” he says.

“It’s not just losing that baby, it’s about processing that loss and the decision, [thinking] ‘in some ways I made that choice to end that baby’s life’.

“There’s always that little part of their brain grappling with that. It’s really important to acknowledge that the mum at that point has had 20-something weeks to bond with that baby.”

Tiffany says hospitals and health authorities need to do better in supporting women going through horrific experiences like hers. And people need to stop judging others, she says.

“Everyone has an opinion and their own beliefs.

“But if you’re not in my shoes, you don’t know.”

* Full names have not been used to maintain privacy of those interviewed

[warningsine]

Taipei/Sydney, Aug. 22 (CNA) The Australian Senate passed an "urgency motion" Wednesday in support of Taiwan's sovereignty and participation in international organizations.

Senators agreed by vote to move the motion: "That United Nations (U.N.) Resolution 2758 of 25th October 1971 does not establish the People's Republic of China's (PRC) sovereignty over Taiwan and does not determine the future status of Taiwan in the United Nations, nor Taiwanese participation in U.N. agencies or international organizations."

Supported by lawmakers from across the political spectrum, the motion was co-sponsored by Senators David Fawcett of South Australia and Deborah O'Neill of New South Wales, both of whom visited Taiwan last month to attend the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China's (IPAC) annual conference.

Addressing Parliament House in Canberra, Fawcett, of the main opposition Liberal Party, said the motion was "urgent" because of the "growing risk to the security and stability in the Indo-Pacific."

"It's important not just for the human rights of the 23.5 million people in the democracy that is Taiwan," Fawcett said, "but for the impact that a decrease in security and a conflict there would have on the rules-based order that underpins peace and security around the world, as well as for the global economic impact, which Australia would not escape."

O'Neill followed Fawcett's remarks by saying that "the resolution does not mention Taiwan or address its political status."

"Despite this fact, there is an ongoing and egregious campaign currently underway from the PRC to reinterpret the resolution and misrepresent what the resolution actually does," she said, referring to China's attempts to minimize Taiwan's participation in the international community.

O'Neill, of the ruling Labor Party, said it was "not in the interest of the international community to have 24 million Taiwanese excluded" from critical bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization and the World Health Organization.

Senator Jacqui Lambie of Tasmania said that "the people of Taiwan continuously reject reunification with the Chinese Communist Party, with less than 5 percent of support for the reunification in Taiwan."

"The Chinese Communist Party has no business in destroying democracy in Taiwan," she said. "Australia must stand up against the Chinese Communist Party and back the more than 22 million people of Taiwan who choose democracy and freedom over the authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)," she added.

Senator Raff Ciccone of Victoria, who is also deputy government whip in the Senate, said that Australia's economic, trade and cultural interests with Taiwan "cannot be understated."

Pledging to continue energy cooperation and support Taiwan's transition to renewable energies, Ciccone told the house that Australia was currently Taiwan's largest energy supplier, contributing "around two-thirds of Taiwan's coal and almost half of its natural gas."

Senator Pauline Hanson of Queensland voiced her view that Australia and the rest of the world "should recognize Taiwan for the independent sovereign nation it has effectively been since the 1950s."

"[The CCP] regime's highest priority is to capture Taiwan -- most likely by force -- and turn that beautiful island nation of 24 million free people into another oppressed, polluted, communist hellhole," she added.

Rebuking former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, who recently said that the whole world agreed with Beijing's position on Taiwan, Chandler described his claim as "false."

"I think there are questions to be asked about why Australians should pay to support private office for a former official who consistently pushes a false narrative about Australia's policy, especially when that false narrative aligns with that being pushed by foreign regimes such as the CCP," Chandler said.

Finally, Senator Linda Reynolds of Western Australia said Beijing had been "gaslighting" Taiwan and warned that China had formed an "axis of dictatorship and authoritarianism" with Russia, Iran and North Korea.

On Thursday, Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) welcomed the Australian senators' pro-Taiwan motion, describing it as "just."

"MOFA strongly affirms the Australian parliament's firm support for Taiwan's international participation and thanks Australia and IPAC for speaking out for Taiwan," the ministry told CNA.

"We also call on the international community to jointly counter China's misinterpretation of U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758 and China's attempts to make false connections between the resolution and the so-called 'One China' principle."

"We will continue to cooperate with partners like Australia and other countries to jointly defend the core values shared by the global democratic camp and maintain regional peace, stability and prosperity," the ministry added.

The PRC claims Taiwan as a part of its territory and has ramped up threats to use military force to annex the country in recent years. Since assuming China's seat in the U.N. following Resolution 2758 in 1971, the government in Beijing has continually pressured other countries to exclude Taiwan from international organizations.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Bernard Lane

Published: Dec 12, 2023

The gist

Analysis

An Australian health minister, Shannon Fentiman, who is responsible for the busy gender clinic of the Queensland Children’s Hospital, has acknowledged the lack of consensus on how to treat gender dysphoria.

Four words stood out in Ms Fentiman’s otherwise cagey, scripted response to a question in state parliament about the source of the evidence justifying the puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones given to minors by the Brisbane-based clinic.

“Whilst acknowledging that best practices rely on some aspects of transgender health care and there is not consensus [Emphasis added], the work continues,” she said on November 30.

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Jillian Spencer, who has been calling for an independent federal inquiry into the care of gender dysphoric youth, welcomed Ms Fentiman’s concession reflecting the state of medical opinion—a concession not forthcoming from Australia’s other health ministers.

“It is such a relief to have [Queensland’s] health minister finally acknowledge that there is not consensus regarding the best practices for transgender healthcare,” Dr Spencer told GCN.

Dr Spencer is a critic of the “gender-affirming” treatment approach followed by the Queensland gender clinic. Earlier this year she was suspended from clinical duties at the children’s hospital reportedly after a patient lodged a complaint of “transphobia”.

“The minister says that the work of the [clinic] continues despite the lack of consensus on best practice for transgender healthcare,” Dr Spencer said.

“Why is the work of the [clinic] continuing if there is no consensus? Shouldn’t we be more careful than that—especially when the health of children is at stake? Parents want cautious and evidence-based healthcare for their children.

“The children and parents of Queensland deserve to have paediatric gender services that are based on a systematic review of the research evidence similar to what is happening in the UK with the Cass Review.”

She challenged the advice given to Ms Fentiman that the work of the Queensland gender clinic represented “international best practice”.

“[It appears her advisers] have failed to let her know that, internationally, when [countries such as Finland, Sweden and the UK] have conducted independent, systematic reviews of the research literature, they have moved away from an affirmative approach to prioritise psychosocial interventions rather than puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones”.

“A new front in the struggle over transgender issues has opened up. Two [US] medical malpractice lawsuits, each levied by a plaintiff who regrets having undergone medication-based gender-transition treatment—one at age 14—have taken aim at the American medical establishment’s support for prescribing such drugs to minors.”—Journalist Benjamin Ryan, news report, New York Sun, 5 December 2023

---

The detail

Behind the scenes

Minister Fentiman’s remarked on the lack of medical consensus during her short November 30 reply to Robbie Katter MP, whose question was prompted by Ms Fentiman’s earlier reassurance that care at the gender clinic was “of very high quality and based on the best available evidence.”

The minister’s surprising concession to critics of the gender-affirming approach—the approach enforced at the gender clinic—chimes with the reference by Queensland’s chief psychiatrist, Dr John Reilly, to plans for an “independent review” of the clinic.

GCN has sought clarification on both points from the government; there was no reply.

Might Queensland be the first Australian jurisdiction to publicly acknowledge the force of the international debate about medicalised gender change for minors? Have there been frank discussions, even talk of doing something, in Ms Fentiman’s office or among her health and hospital officials?

The main focus now for Queensland’s governing Labor Party is re-election. In power since 2013, the party has shuffled its leadership as it prepares for the state poll scheduled for 26 October 2024.

It appears that Steven Miles, a former health minister, will succeed the long-serving Annastacia Palaszczuk as premier.

Ms Fentiman, a solicitor from the party’s left faction, was briefly in the running. Her narrative was change and renewal, a government with “the maturity to admit where we have fallen short.”

Does anyone think that concerns about gender medicine will have evaporated by next October?

--

Affirmed by guidelines

Minister Fentiman’s November 30 defence of the gender clinic boiled down to its “adherence to peer-reviewed national and internationally accepted published practice clinical guidelines”.

She cited the latest, 8th edition of standards of care issued last year by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which she said evinced “a rigorous and evidence-based approach”.

She also invoked the 2017 clinical guideline of the Endocrine Society, offering to get a copy for Mr Katter, who represents a minor party in the parliament.

And she cited a third document, the 2018 “Australian standards of care” issued by the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne.

Back in September, Ms Fentiman had said the gender medicine practised by the Queensland clinic was “an emerging field globally—no-one shies away from that—but the evidence base is sound.”

In fact, the evidence base for medicalised gender change for minors is very weak and uncertain, according to five independent systematic reviews since 2019 in Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom (one review each for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones) and the American state of Florida.

The founder of the Queensland gender clinic, Dr Stephen Stathis, recently conceded the complaint of sceptics that the evidence base for gender-affirming treatment is of low quality, although he argued this was not unusual in the field of child and adolescent psychiatry.

Lack of solid evidence has led gender-affirming clinicians and activists to rely heavily on treatment guidelines and position statements from medical organisations when claiming that puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery are “settled science”.

But systematic reviews are regarded as the highest form of evidence, while treatment guidelines and position statements—representing expert opinion or professional consensus—are the lowest.

And it’s arguable that gender-affirming treatment guidelines do not even reflect expert consensus, as Ms Fentiman’s arresting remark suggests.

The extent of health professional dissent from the gender-affirming model is masked because it is well known that critics will be smeared as “transphobic”, subjected to bad-faith complaints and have their careers put at risk.

If in truth there is no consensus, the treatment guidelines cited by Ms Fentiman are misleading and cannot justify the risky medical interventions given by the gender clinic.

It’s unclear how this contradiction in the minister’s November 30 statement arose. Does it reflect a confused briefing from her advisers and officials, or a belated awareness that gender-affirming medicine is hardly settled science?

--

Reviewphobia

In any case, the problem for Ms Fentiman is that her faith in those three treatment guidelines is misplaced.

The “rigorous” WPATH guideline process involved a chaotic last-minute abandonment of minimum ages for most hormonal and surgical interventions; the rationale appears to be to give clinicians better protection against malpractice suits.

Credible guidelines draw on a systematic review of the evidence. WPATH’s new chapter on adolescents—the group that is the focus of international concern—involved no such review. WPATH pleaded the scarcity of studies on early medical intervention.

And yet early medical intervention is what the guideline recommends. Perhaps WPATH was worried about the predictable output of a systematic review, not the meagre input.

Scarcity of studies did not prevent Sweden’s systematic review of the evidence. Its literature search began with almost 10,000 research abstracts and identified just 24 relevant studies for evaluation.

One of the experts involved, Professor Mikael Landén of the Karolinska Institute said—

“Against the background of almost non-existent long-term data, we conclude that [puberty blocker] treatment in children with gender dysphoria should be considered experimental treatment rather than standard procedure. This is to say that treatment should only be administered in the context of a clinical trial under informed consent.”

The gender clinic that Ms Fentiman celebrates for its “life-changing care” gives puberty blockers as routine treatment. And remember, Queensland’s parliament has been assured by the minister that “the evidence base is sound”.

--

A matter of trust

Ms Fentiman also cited the 2018 “Australian standards of care” from the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne (RCH), noting its publication as a position statement in the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA).

But that cut-down version of the guideline, shielded by the journal’s pay wall, contains an admission not found in the full guideline which is the document that is readily available on the hospital website and relied on by youth gender clinics across Australia.

The MJA version says: “The scarcity of high-quality published evidence on the topic prohibited the assessment of level (and quality) of evidence for these recommendations.”

Earlier this year, GCN put this claim to Professor Gordon Guyatt, a pioneer of evidence-based medicine and the GRADE system for rating evidence quality.

“[That claim] is enough for me to say this is not a trustworthy guideline”, Professor Guyatt said.

The RCH guideline was considered for inclusion in the National Health and Medical Research Council’s online portal Australian Clinical Practice Guidelines but did not qualify.

“At the screening stage it was determined that the guideline did not include a funding statement, an evidence base for the recommendations or information about conflict of interest, and that it would not meet the portal selection criteria, so a full assessment was not carried out,” a spokeswoman for the NHMRC said in 2021.

[ Screenshot: Advice from the 2018 RCH “Australian standards of care” document ]

--

Divided opinion

Also in 2021, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP), which had previously endorsed the RCH guideline, issued a new more cautious policy on gender dysphoria.

Its policy says that “evidence and professional opinion is divided as to whether an affirmative approach should be taken in relation to treatment of transgender children or whether other approaches are more appropriate.” (Note: After posting this article, I was alerted to an update of the RANZCP’s gender dysphoria policy, which I will report elsewhere.)

In its recently updated guide, the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists says “there is no consensus that medical treatments such as the use of puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones or sexual reassignment surgery lead to better future psycho-social adjustment.”

No consensus, but the Queensland Children’s Hospital requires health professions to follow the gender-affirming model rather than allowing a neutral therapeutic approach.

We know this because psychiatrist Dr Spencer has raised concerns—initially within the hospital, then publicly—about the potential harm done to minors by unthinking “affirmation”. She even wrote to the minister about this.

“I started testosterone five years ago today. After 4+ years of weekly injections to maintain such dangerously high hormone levels, I had elevated liver enzymes, heightened red blood cell counts, and regular heart palpitations. I am so grateful I stopped when I did.”—American detransitioner Morgan, tweet, 4 December 2023

--

Low-quality advice

Ms Fentiman’s third guideline, from the Endocrine Society, has an important feature that her advisers appear to have overlooked.

Unlike the RCH document, the 2017 Endocrine Society guideline did rate the quality of evidence supporting their treatment recommendations.

Five of the society’s six recommendations on puberty blockers depend on evidence rated as “low quality”.

The sixth recommendation—for administering blockers in early puberty, as is done at Queensland’s gender clinic—rests on “very low-quality” evidence, the lowest possible rating. Awkward but important details, rarely mentioned.

Also unmentioned is the society’s careful disclaimer that its “guidelines cannot guarantee any specific outcome, nor do they establish a standard of care.” Not helpful for those demanding a monopoly for gender-affirming care.

In July this year, the society’s president, Dr Stephen R Hammes, made the claim that, “More than 2,000 studies published since 1975 form a clear picture: Gender-affirming care improves the well-being of transgender and gender-diverse people and reduces the risk of suicide.”

This, he said in a letter to The Wall Street Journal, was the evidence used by the society in its “rigorous process” to develop the 2017 treatment guideline.

He provoked a dramatic and humiliating response—a letter of sharp dissent signed by 21 clinicians and researchers from nine countries involved in the care of teenagers with gender distress.

Among them was Finland’s reformist pioneer of gender medicine, Professor Riittakerttu Kaltiala, whistleblower clinicians from England’s Tavistock clinic Dr Anna Hutchinson and Dr Anastassis Spiliadis, and Belgian expert on evidence-based medicine Dr Patrik Vankrunkelsven.

All systematic reviews to date, the letter’s authors pointed out, had “found the evidence for mental-health benefits of hormonal interventions for minors to be of low or very low certainty.”

“Dr Hammes’s claim that gender transition reduces suicides is contradicted by every systematic review, including the review published by the Endocrine Society, which states, ‘We could not draw any conclusions about death by suicide.’ There is no reliable evidence to suggest that hormonal transition is an effective suicide-prevention measure.

“The politicization of transgender healthcare in the US is unfortunate. The way to combat it is for medical societies to align their recommendations with the best available evidence—rather than exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the risks.”

So, is Minister Fentiman confident that she had been given an apolitical and accurate summary of the benefits and risks of treatment at Queensland’s gender clinic?

“Opinion is divided about the certainty of the evidence base for gender-affirming medical interventions in youth. Proponents claim that these treatments are well supported, while critics claim the poor-quality evidence base warrants extreme caution. Psychotherapy is one of the only available alternatives to the gender-affirming approach. Discussion of the treatment of gender dysphoria in young people is generally framed in terms of two binary approaches: affirmation or conversion. Psychotherapy/exploratory therapy offers a treatment option that lies outside this binary, although it is mistakenly conflated with conversion therapies.”—Psychiatrist Dr Roberto D’Angelo, article, Journal of Medical Ethics, 2023

--

Just the one

Also, in the spirit of governments owning up to mistakes, Ms Fentiman might revisit something she said about Dr Spencer.

On September 14, Mr Katter raised the issue of the compulsion for doctors to use the gender-affirming model with dysphoric children, and asked, “Will the minister intervene to restore the ability of doctors—including Dr Jillian Spencer, who has been stood down—to use their professional medical discretion when treating gender dysphoric children?”

Ms Fentiman replied—

“I understand there have been a number of complaints made by patients in relation to Dr Spencer. These complaints are subject to a number of HR processes within Children’s Health [which runs the hospital] as well as referrals to [the health professions regulator] Ahpra and the Health Ombudsman.”

A possible implication of Ms Fentiman’s comment is that Dr Spencer had engaged in a pattern of conduct attracting multiple complaints from patients.

Last month, thanks to a right of reply mechanism, a correction from Dr Spencer was placed on the parliamentary record—

“The minister’s statement suggests that I am the subject of a number of patient complaints. That is incorrect. There is only one patient complaint lodged against me.”

--

“After being expelled from my master’s degree for speaking out about the impact of gender ideology on child safeguarding, I am extremely pleased to announce that I have agreed a settlement with the UK Council for Psychotherapy. [The council] have published a formal statement protecting therapists who believe in biological reality and stand against irreversible medicalisation of children. They say training institutions should never discriminate against students on this basis.”—UK lawyer turned trainee therapist James Esses, tweet, 11 December 2023

GCN sought comment from Ms Fentiman and RCH

==

Australia lumbers drunkenly towards figuring out this is all a major medical disaster.

[musickickztoo]

CONTRA2024-13

06092024 (ALL NEW)

TRACKLIST:

The Jesus and Mary Chain - Pop Seeds Kim Deal - Crystal Breath The Courettes - Boom Boom Boom Hinds - On My Own Nix & The Nothings - I Try The Smile - Zero Sum Humdrum - There And Back Again Tape/Off - Paris, Texas, Queensland Gut Health - Stiletto Benny Trokan - Get It In The End Fleur - Nous Continuerons A Marcher Ensemble The Bug Club - Better Than Good The Courettes - Run Run Away (feat. La La Brooks) The Mellons - Please Baby Please Vincent Reese - Chips On Your Shoulder Kim Gordon & model home - Razzamatazz The Snares - What You Said!? Santo Blanco - Blade

The 13th playlist of the year!!

Listen: https://www.mixcloud.com/Contraflow/contra2024-13-06092024-all-new/

[prokyon]

UPDATE: I moved house!

I am so exhausted, and sore, and I don't have internet yet...

But I am in my forever home and I am finally able to look after my mum better to manage her stress and health. We're no longer living in a place with mould and biohazard carpets and shitty plumbing (punintended). Even though the new house still has work to be done, it's livable and comfortable. I'm not living in the middle of a renovation zone or a health hazard and it feels safer already.

I will still be travelling a lot to do minor fixes and clean the rental house before our lease is up to make sure we get our bond money back. We're probably going to have to fight for it anyway. That real estate is extremely hostile to us, and our health, and has ignored dangerous issues brought up not only by us but professionals who inspected the property. We've only ever gotten them to action repairs for things that will unequivocally get them in trouble with the law, while they pretend the other law-breaking problems don't exist.

The location was amazing and the house had great construction, but the real estate has actively inhibited maintenance at every step of the way and are allowing a good house to rot. I am so ready to be done with it all and I am so lucky I got the chance to buy at the price I did.

I am 26 and the new place is the 14th house I've lived in. I've had to move, on average, more frequently than every two years my entire life. Only four of those moves were initiated by us and none were because we were at fault. There are many studies that say moving stress is life-shortening and the conditions that cause and accompany it are inhumane. Renters in Queensland have almost no rights (until 2023/2024) and our legal avenues have been overseen by people who side with landlords as the default. Until this/last year, you could be evicted "without grounds" and with very short notice. Many landlords/real estates conduct illegal evictions without notice or without grounds and get away with it because the time, money, and stress put into a legal battle destroys the victims. Every renter has a story like that happening to them.

I like to think that maybe I am getting lucky with this opportunity to make up for the rest of my life, but that would mean these things happen for a reason. They don't. They happen because bad people and bad systems constantly enforce and reinforce this statistically-probable hell for poor people. I just got dealt a good hand for once and I'm gonna try my best to snowball my wins and keep the momentum going.

TLDR: Moved house. No internet. I'm sorry I haven't gotten to my DMs yet. Things should be sorted by the end of September. My cat is settling in at the new place.

Stay safe everyone <3

[detectivenyx]

2023 In Review

for me, 2023 just kind of... came and went. very quickly. i kind of wish it didn't.

there's been some horrific mental-health stuff, not aided by what's going on, both in my little corner of the world and across the world in general. i'll start with the negatives, so we can end on a positive note - that seems like a good outlook for the year.

there's obviously the horrendous situation with the writers and actors strike, where garbage studios think paying people for their hard-made art is very much an optional thing rather than fucking mandatory. yet in this year, warner bros, the company who's the most mask-off with their transphobia (still releasing HP stuff and hiring a TERF and sandy hook truther to voice one of the most well-known female characters in mortal kombat), releases a 2 hour toy commercial and gets heralded a Feminist Masterpiece for the same messages that Mean Girls and Legally Blonde had shovelled out two decades earlier. there's also just the countless fucking genocides. i'm hoping and praying that the victims of those genocides are not wiped out, even if i've acknowledged i cannot help directly.

but in addition, i think this year just sealed the deal for me about the cosplay community. i'm still routinely dragged to cosplay events - it's either that or be socially isolated for two whole months as it's all that gets talked about - and the local 'in-crowd' community is as garbage as ever. someone a close friend wanted to hitch a ride back towards the city with just. randomly started spouting anti-trans sports propaganda to us? she started complaining about trans women 'having a biological advantage' by being taller or whatever. the absolute second that this person was away from a transmasc friend and with two people she didn't fully know, she just assumed we were both cis and went full mask-off with transphobia, and that indicates to me that things have gotten worse since i left. i want to return to cosplay badly, but the fucking community just keeps letting shit like that slide, going to a con run by a neonazi and excusing it with 'it lets me see my friends!' like they've never learned how to plan an outing more than two weeks in advance before. ultimately it makes cosplaying barely worth it; it's an expensive hobby that now only for my own validation. there's no leftist cosplayers in queensland - only people cosplaying as leftists.

it also doesn't help that, off-topic, i am pretty sure i know my dad's care for me is hollow now; something happened in september to prove it to me. there's also the fact that this year introduced me to now having chronic back pain thanks to his neglect, and i don't think i'll ever get any sort of apology from him. and while probably the least-bad thing in the list, one of the more charismatic members of a channel i'd just got introduced to had sexually harassed a semi-guest of the channel.

that said: in newer spaces, and in general, i think things are looking up. the aforementioned channel kicked the sexual harasser, and re-structured so that it was unlikely to ever happen again. i joined up with a new group of people to play Blood on the Clock Tower in-person every month and online a few times a week - and quite frankly i would trust those people with my life. i think just having something to do that isn't a popularity contest has been healing. i'm not super close to the people there yet (or maybe im misjudging it? i don't know how healthy relationships irl work if i'm honest). sewing has been fun, as has finding out an interest in vintage patterns - i'm hoping in 2024 to actually make some of them. finding resources for free patterns (via mood.com - a really good resource, i've found) and having fun with the creation has also been fun, though my fabric stash is getting pretty full now thanks to my many trips to a second-hand fabric store. the last con of the year also wasn't all bad; really only cementing my decision to remove myself at the very end of the con day. i wouldn't have considered coming back at all if the con hadn't been a fun time; even getting to meet someone who was a fan of my youtube channel. a recent bout of hostility for a two-year-old video because someone decided to grift off it had given me doubts about my channel; bad or not, those videos are still fully mine, more than, say, somerton- sorry, i mean someone can say. but i think just being able to see someone, physically, who liked my videos, made it a lot better. (and i purchased a pronoun pin from them and the pin is super duper cute and they gave me a really cute sticker oh my god--)

so, rather than setting resolutions, i tend to set themes for years after seeing this video by SCP Grey that offers it as an alternative. this year was the Year of Education - a year where i did my best to focus on my learning and educational pursuits. at the start of the year i set myself three semi-goals that could change; to do my Master's in Arts, to keep learning Japanese, and to learn corsetmaking techniques.

i wound up re-joining my university in the middle of the year to do my Honours in Creative Industries, focusing on adapting social deduction games and their game theories into the design of a narrative. i'm a little behind on the narrative itself, but the articles i've read and the definitely-research-and-not-a-thinly-veiled-excuse-to-play-games have both been fascinating for me, both in how much theory is kind of just ableist bonkers nonsense and what thin bits of truth are actually present (in all people, deception requires more cognitive thought; there's usually either scriptedness or a very slight delay when someone's trying to deceive - which proved useful when i finally watched roblox_oof.mp3 and noticed both in mister tallarico's behaviour).

my education with japanese fell by the wayside - i got burned out trying to keep up my streak with moving house yet again, and just kind of did the bare minimum to keep up the streak and stay in the diamond league. i think some of my basics have gotten a bit stronger, but that's all.

with that said, i learned a lot more about making clothes over the course of the year! admittedly, i still struggle with making a skirt fit correctly (it is either severely too big for me even with elastic in the back, or just small enough to be uncomfortable in day-to-day wear) but i think i've created a bodice block that fits close enough. i've also kind of fallen in love with a second hand place sort-of near my house that sells a lot of vintage and second-hand fabrics for cheap, which is really useful as a seamstress living on unemployment who'd like to make All Of The Things. i did also make a corset this year, but aside from the busk, it used some really shoddy materials - i accidentally made the lining layer out of broadcloth rather than twill or herringbone and the outer layer was a polyester brocade and a polyester waist tape, meaning the entire thing was just. the itchiest fucking thing in the universe. (and i was wearing an underlayer, it didn't do much to help). i have materials to remake it, i've just been unsure how to go about it.

so that's been my year (alongside obscene amounts of baldur's gate 3). onto 2024 and the goals there!

[wikipedia-the-non-official]

What's Austrailia (i want to bring up the wikipedia article for it)

Australia. , officially the Commonwealth of Australia,[19] is a country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands.[20] Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest,[21] flattest,[22] and driest inhabited continent,[23][24] with the least fertile soils.[25][26] It is a megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with deserts in the centre, tropical rainforests in the north-east, tropical savannas in the north, and mountain ranges in the south-east.

The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south-east Asia 50,000 to 65,000 years ago, during the last glacial period.[27][28][29] They settled the continent and had formed approximately 250 distinct language groups by the time of European settlement, maintaining some of the longest known continuing artistic and religious traditions in the world.[30] Australia's written history commenced with European maritime exploration. The Dutch were the first known Europeans to reach Australia, in 1606. British colonisation began in 1788 with the establishment of the penal colony of New South Wales. By the mid-19th century, most of the continent had been explored by European settlers and five additional self-governing British colonies were established, each gaining responsible government by 1890. The colonies federated in 1901, forming the Commonwealth of Australia.[31] This continued a process of increasing autonomy from the United Kingdom, highlighted by the Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942, and culminating in the Australia Acts of 1986.[31]

Australia is a federal parliamentary constitutional monarchy comprising six states and ten territories: the states of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia; the major mainland Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory; and other minor or external territories. Its population of nearly 27 million[13] is highly urbanised and heavily concentrated on the eastern seaboard.[32] Canberra is the nation's capital, while its most populous cities are Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, which each possess a population of at least one million inhabitants.[33] Australian governments have promoted multiculturalism since the 1970s.[34] Australia is culturally diverse and has one of the highest foreign-born populations in the world.[35][36] Its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade relations are crucial to the country's economy, which generates its income from various sources: predominantly services (including banking, real estate and international education) as well as mining, manufacturing and agriculture.[37][38] It ranks highly for quality of life, health, education, economic freedom, civil liberties and political rights.[39]

Australia has a highly developed market economy and one of the highest per capita incomes globally.[40][41][42] It is a middle power, and has the world's thirteenth-highest military expenditure.[43][44] It is a member of international groups including the United Nations; the G20; the OECD; the World Trade Organization; Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation; the Pacific Islands Forum; the Pacific Community; the Commonwealth of Nations; and the defence and security organisations ANZUS, AUKUS, and the Five Eyes. It is also a major non-NATO ally of the United States.[45]

The name Australia (pronounced /əˈstreɪliə/ in Australian English[46]) is derived from the Latin Terra Australis ("southern land"), a name used for a hypothetical continent in the Southern Hemisphere since ancient times.[47] Several 16th-century cartographers used the word Australia on maps, but not to identify modern Australia.[48] When Europeans began visiting and mapping Australia in the 17th century, the name Terra Australis was applied to the new territories.[N 5]

Until the early 19th century, Australia was best known as New Holland, a name first applied by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman in 1644 (as Nieuw-Holland) and subsequently anglicised. Terra Australis still saw occasional usage, such as in scientific texts.[N 6] The name Australia was popularised by the explorer Matthew Flinders, who said it was "more agreeable to the ear, and an assimilation to the names of the other great portions of the Earth".[54] The first time that Australia appears to have been officially used was in April 1817, when Governor Lachlan Macquarie acknowledged the receipt of Flinders' charts of Australia from Lord Bathurst.[55] In December 1817, Macquarie recommended to the Colonial Office that it be formally adopted.[56] In 1824, the Admiralty agreed that the continent should be known officially by that name.[57] The first official published use of the new name came with the publication in 1830 of The Australia Directory by the Hydrographic Office.[58]

Colloquial names for Australia include "Oz", "Straya" and "Down Under".[59] Other epithets include "the Great Southern Land", "the Lucky Country", "the Sunburnt Country", and "the Wide Brown Land". The latter two both derive from Dorothea Mackellar's 1908 poem "My Country".[60]

Indigenous Australians comprise two broad groups: the Aboriginal peoples of the Australian mainland (and surrounding islands including Tasmania), and the Torres Strait Islanders, who are a distinct Melanesian people. Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun 50,000 to 65,000 years ago,[27][61][62][28] with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea crossings from what is now Southeast Asia.[63] It is uncertain how many waves of immigration may have contributed to these ancestors of modern Aboriginal Australians.[64][65] The Madjedbebe rock shelter in Arnhem Land is possibly the oldest site showing the presence of humans in Australia.[66][67] The oldest human remains found are the Lake Mungo remains, which have been dated to around 41,000 years ago.[68][69]

Aboriginal Australian culture is one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.[30][70][71][72] At the time of first European contact, Aboriginal Australians were complex hunter-gatherers with diverse economies and societies, and spread across at least 250 different language groups.[73][74] Estimates of the Aboriginal population before British settlement range from 300,000 to one million.[75][76] Aboriginal Australians have an oral culture with spiritual values based on reverence for the land and a belief in the Dreamtime.[77] Certain groups engaged in fire-stick farming,[78][79] fish farming,[80][81] and built semi-permanent shelters.[82][83] The extent to which some groups engaged in agriculture is controversial.[84][85][86]

The Torres Strait Islander people first settled their islands around 4,000 years ago.[87] Culturally and linguistically distinct from mainland Aboriginal peoples, they were seafarers and obtained their livelihood from seasonal horticulture and the resources of their reefs and seas.[88] Agriculture also developed on some islands and villages appeared by the 1300s.[89]

By the mid-18th century in northern Australia, contact, trade and cross-cultural engagement had been established between local Aboriginal groups and Makassan trepangers, visiting from present-day Indonesia.[90][91][92]

European exploration and colonisation

The Dutch are the first Europeans that recorded sighting and making landfall on the Australian mainland.[93] The first ship and crew to chart the Australian coast and meet with Aboriginal people was the Duyfken, captained by Dutch navigator Willem Janszoon.[94] He sighted the coast of Cape York Peninsula in early 1606, and made landfall on 26 February 1606 at the Pennefather River near the modern town of Weipa on Cape York.[95] Later that year, Spanish explorer Luís Vaz de Torres sailed through and navigated the Torres Strait Islands.[96] The Dutch charted the whole of the western and northern coastlines and named the island continent "New Holland" during the 17th century, and although no attempt at settlement was made,[95] a number of shipwrecks left men either stranded or, as in the case of the Batavia in 1629, marooned for mutiny and murder, thus becoming the first Europeans to permanently inhabit the continent.[97] In 1770, Captain James Cook sailed along and mapped the east coast, which he named "New South Wales" and claimed for Great Britain.[98]

Following the loss of its American colonies in 1783, the British Government sent a fleet of ships, the First Fleet, under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, to establish a new penal colony in New South Wales. A camp was set up and the Union Flag raised at Sydney Cove, Port Jackson, on 26 January 1788,[99][100] a date which later became Australia's national day.

Most early settlers were convicts, transported for petty crimes and assigned as labourers or servants to "free settlers" (willing immigrants). Once emancipated, convicts tended to integrate into colonial society. Martial law was declared to suppress convict rebellions and uprisings,[101] and lasted for two years following the 1808 Rum Rebellion, the only successful armed takeover of government in Australia.[102] Over the next two decades, social and economic reforms, together with the establishment of a Legislative Council and Supreme Court, saw New South Wales transition from a penal colony to a civil society.[103][104][105][page needed]

The indigenous population declined for 150 years following European settlement, mainly due to infectious disease.[106][107] British colonial authorities did not sign any treaties with Aboriginal groups.[107][108] As settlement expanded, thousands of Indigenous people died in frontier conflicts while others were dispossessed of their traditional lands.[109]

In 1803, a settlement was established in Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania),[110] and in 1813, Gregory Blaxland, William Lawson and William Wentworth crossed the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, opening the interior to European settlement.[111] The British claim extended to the whole Australian continent in 1827 when Major Edmund Lockyer established a settlement on King George Sound (modern-day Albany).[112] The Swan River Colony (present-day Perth) was established in 1829, evolving into the largest Australian colony by area, Western Australia.[113] In accordance with population growth, separate colonies were carved from New South Wales: Tasmania in 1825, South Australia in 1836, New Zealand in 1841, Victoria in 1851, and Queensland in 1859.[114] South Australia was founded as a free colony—it never accepted transported convicts.[115] Growing opposition to the convict system culminated in its abolition in the eastern colonies by the 1850s. Initially a free colony, Western Australia practised penal transportation from 1850 to 1868.[116]

The six colonies individually gained responsible government between 1855 and 1890, thus becoming elective democracies managing most of their own affairs while remaining part of the British Empire.[117] The Colonial Office in London retained control of some matters, notably foreign affairs.[118]

In the mid-19th century, explorers such as Burke and Wills charted Australia's interior.[119] A series of gold rushes beginning in the early 1850s led to an influx of new migrants from China, North America and continental Europe,[120] as well as outbreaks of bushranging and civil unrest; the latter peaked in 1854 when Ballarat miners launched the Eureka Rebellion against gold license fees.[121] The 1860s saw a surge in blackbirding, where Pacific Islanders were forced into indentured labour, mainly in Queensland.[122][123]

From 1886, Australian colonial governments began introducing policies resulting in the removal of many Aboriginal children from their families and communities.[124] The Second Boer War (1899–1902) marked the largest overseas deployment of Australia's colonial

Federation to the World Wars

On 1 January 1901, federation of the colonies was achieved after a decade of planning, constitutional conventions and referendums, resulting in the establishment of the Commonwealth of Australia as a nation under the new Australian Constitution.[127]

After the 1907 Imperial Conference, Australia and several other self-governing British settler colonies were given the status of self-governing dominions within the British Empire.[128] Australia was one of the founding members of the League of Nations in 1920,[129] and subsequently of the United Nations in 1945.[130] The Statute of Westminster 1931 formally ended the ability of the UK to pass laws with effect at the Commonwealth level in Australia without the country's consent. Australia adopted it in 1942, but it was backdated to 1939 to confirm the validity of legislation passed by the Australian Parliament during World War II.[131][132][133]

The Australian Capital Territory was formed in 1911 as the location for the future federal capital of Canberra.[134] While it was being constructed, Melbourne served as the temporary capital from 1901 to 1927.[135] The Northern Territory was transferred from the control of the South Australian government to the federal parliament in 1911.[136] Australia became the colonial ruler of the Territory of Papua (which had initially been annexed by Queensland in 1883) in 1902 and of the Territory of New Guinea (formerly German New Guinea) in 1920.[137][138] The two were unified as the Territory of Papua and New Guinea in 1949 and gained independence from Australia in 1975.[137][139]

In 1914, Australia joined the Allies in fighting the First World War, and took part in many of the major battles fought on the Western Front.[140] Of about 416,000 who served, about 60,000 were killed and another 152,000 were wounded.[141] Many Australians regard the defeat of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at Gallipoli in 1915 as the "baptism of fire" that forged the new nation's identity.[142][143][144] The beginning of the campaign is commemorated annually on Anzac Day, a date which rivals Australia Day as the nation's most important.[145][146]

From 1939 to 1945, Australia joined the Allies in fighting the Second World War. Australia's armed forces fought in the Pacific, European and Mediterranean and Middle East theatres.[147][148] The shock of Britain's defeat in Singapore in 1942, followed soon after by the bombing of Darwin and other Japanese attacks on Australian soil, led to a widespread belief in Australia that a Japanese invasion was imminent, and a shift from the United Kingdom to the United States as Australia's principal ally and security partner.[149] Since 1951, Australia has been allied with the United States under the ANZUS treaty.[150]

Post-war and contemporary eras

In the decades following World War II, Australia enjoyed significant increases in living standards, leisure time and suburban development.[151][152] Using the slogan "populate or perish", the nation encouraged a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with such immigrants referred to as "New Australians".[153]

A member of the Western Bloc during the Cold War, Australia participated in the Korean War and the Malayan Emergency during the 1950s and the Vietnam War from 1962 to 1972.[154] During this time, tensions over communist influence in society led to unsuccessful attempts by the Menzies Government to ban the Communist Party of Australia,[155] and a bitter split in the Labor Party in 1955.[156]

As a result of a 1967 referendum, the federal government gained the power to legislate with regard to Indigenous Australians, and Indigenous Australians were fully included in the census.[157] Pre-colonial land interests (referred to as native title in Australia) was recognised in law for the first time when the High Court of Australia held in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) that Australia was neither terra nullius ("land belonging to no one") or "desert and uncultivated land" at the time of European settlement.[158][159]

Following the abolition of the last vestiges of the White Australia policy in 1973,[160] Australia's demography and culture transformed as a result of a large and ongoing wave of non-European immigration, mostly from Asia.[161][162] The late 20th century also saw an increasing focus on foreign policy ties with other Pacific Rim nations.[163] The Australia Acts severed the remaining constitutional ties between Australia and the United Kingdom while maintaining the monarch in her independent capacity as Queen of Australia.[164][165] In a 1999 constitutional referendum, 55% of voters rejected abolishing the monarchy and becoming a republic.[166]

Following the September 11 attacks on the United States, Australia joined the United States in fighting the Afghanistan War from 2001 to 2021 and the Iraq War from 2003 to 2009.[167] The nation's trade relations also became increasingly oriented towards East Asia in the 21st century, with China becoming the nation's largest trading partner by a large margin.[168]

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, several of Australia's largest cities were locked down for extended periods and free movement across the national and state borders was restricted in an attempt to slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.[169]

Surrounded by the Indian and Pacific oceans,[N 7] Australia is separated from Asia by the Arafura and Timor seas, with the Coral Sea lying off the Queensland coast, and the Tasman Sea lying between Australia and New Zealand. The world's smallest continent[171] and sixth-largest country by total area,[172] Australia—owing to its size and isolation—is often dubbed the "island continent"[173] and is sometimes considered the world's largest island.[174] Australia has 34,218 km (21,262 mi) of coastline (excluding all offshore islands),[175] and claims an extensive exclusive economic zone of 8,148,250 square kilometres (3,146,060 sq mi). This exclusive economic zone does not include the Australian Antarctic Territory.[176]

Mainland Australia lies between latitudes 9° and 44° South, and longitudes 112° and 154° East.[177] Australia's size gives it a wide variety of landscapes, with tropical rainforests in the north-east, mountain ranges in the south-east, south-west and east, and desert in the centre.[178] The desert or semi-arid land commonly known as the outback makes up by far the largest portion of land.[179] Australia is the driest inhabited continent; its annual rainfall averaged over continental area is less than 500 mm.[180] The population density is 3.4 inhabitants per square kilometre, although the large majority of the population lives along the temperate south-eastern coastline. The population density exceeds 19,500 inhabitants per square kilometre in central Melbourne.[181] In 2021 Australia had 10% of the global permanent meadows and pastureland.[182]

The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest coral reef,[183] lies a short distance off the north-east coast and extends for over 2,000 km (1,200 mi). Mount Augustus, claimed to be the world's largest monolith,[184] is located in Western Australia. At 2,228 m (7,310 ft), Mount Kosciuszko is the highest mountain on the Australian mainland. Even taller are Mawson Peak (at 2,745 m (9,006 ft)), on the remote Australian external territory of Heard Island, and, in the Australian Antarctic Territory, Mount McClintock and Mount Menzies, at 3,492 m (11,457 ft) and 3,355 m (11,007 ft) respectively.[185]

Eastern Australia is marked by the Great Dividing Range, which runs parallel to the coast of Queensland, New South Wales and much of Victoria. The name is not strictly accurate, because parts of the range consist of low hills, and the highlands are typically no more than 1,600 m (5,200 ft) in height.[186] The coastal uplands and a belt of Brigalow grasslands lie between the coast and the mountains, while inland of the dividing range are large areas of grassland and shrubland.[186][187] These include the western plains of New South Wales, and the Mitchell Grass Downs and Mulga Lands of inland Queensland.[188][189][190][191] The northernmost point of the mainland is the tropical Cape York Peninsula.[177]

The landscapes of the Top End and the Gulf Country—with their tropical climate—include forest, woodland, wetland, grassland, rainforest and desert.[192][193][194] At the north-west corner of the continent are the sandstone cliffs and gorges of The Kimberley, and below that the Pilbara. The Victoria Plains tropical savanna lies south of the Kimberley and Arnhem Land savannas, forming a transition between the coastal savannas and the interior deserts.[195][196][197] At the heart of the country are the uplands of central Australia. Prominent features of the centre and south include Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock), the famous sandstone monolith, and the inland Simpson, Tirari and Sturt Stony, Gibson, Great Sandy, Tanami, and Great Victoria deserts, with the famous Nullarbor Plain on the southern coast.[198][199][200][201] The Western Australian mulga shrublands lie between the interior deserts and Mediterranean-climate Southwest Australia.[200][202]

Lying on the Indo-Australian Plate, the mainland of Australia is the lowest and most primordial landmass on Earth with a relatively stable geological history.[203][204] The landmass includes virtually all known rock types and from all geological time periods spanning over 3.8 billion years of the Earth's history. The Pilbara Craton is one of only two pristine Archaean 3.6–2.7 Ga (billion years ago) crusts identified on the Earth.[205]

Having been part of all major supercontinents, the Australian continent began to form after the breakup of Gondwana in the Permian, with the separation of the continental landmass from the African continent and Indian subcontinent. It separated from Antarctica over a prolonged period beginning in the Permian and continuing through to the Cretaceous.[206] When the last glacial period ended in about 10,000 BC, rising sea levels formed Bass Strait, separating Tasmania from the mainland. Then between about 8,000 and 6,500 BC, the lowlands in the north were flooded by the sea, separating New Guinea, the Aru Islands, and the mainland of Australia.[207] The Australian continent is moving toward Eurasia at the rate of 6 to 7 centimetres a year.[208]

The Australian mainland's continental crust, excluding the thinned margins, has an average thickness of 38 km, with a range in thickness from 24 km to 59 km.[209] Australia's geology can be divided into several main sections, showcasing that the continent grew from west to east: the Archaean cratonic shields found mostly in the west, Proterozoic fold belts in the centre and Phanerozoic sedimentary basins, metamorphic and igneous rocks in the east.[210]

The Australian mainland and Tasmania are situated in the middle of the tectonic plate and have no active volcanoes,[211] but due to passing over the East Australia hotspot, recent volcanism has occurred during the Holocene, in the Newer Volcanics Province of western Victoria and south-eastern South Australia. Volcanism also occurs in the island of New Guinea (considered geologically as part of the Australian continent), and in the Australian external territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands.[212] Seismic activity in the Australian mainland and Tasmania is also low, with the greatest number of fatalities having occurred in the 1989 Newcastle earthquake.

The climate of Australia is significantly influenced by ocean currents, including the Indian Ocean Dipole and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which is correlated with periodic drought, and the seasonal tropical low-pressure system that produces cyclones in northern Australia.[215][216] These factors cause rainfall to vary markedly from year to year. Much of the northern part of the country has a tropical, predominantly summer-rainfall (monsoon).[180] The south-west corner of the country has a Mediterranean climate.[217] The south-east ranges from oceanic (Tasmania and coastal Victoria) to humid subtropical (upper half of New South Wales), with the highlands featuring alpine and subpolar oceanic climates. The interior is arid to semi-arid.[180]

Driven by climate change, average temperatures have risen more than 1°C since 1960. Associated changes in rainfall patterns and climate extremes exacerbate existing issues such as drought and bushfires. 2019 was Australia's warmest recorded year,[218] and the 2019–2020 bushfire season was the country's worst on record.[219] Australia's greenhouse gas emissions per capita are among the highest in the world.[220]

Water restrictions are frequently in place in many regions and cities of Australia in response to chronic shortages due to urban population increases and localised drought.[221][222] Throughout much of the continent, major flooding regularly follows extended periods of drought, flushing out inland river systems, overflowing dams and inundating large inland flood plains, as occurred throughout Eastern Australia in the early 2010s after the 2000s Australian drought.[223]

Biodiversity

Although most of Australia is semi-arid or desert, the continent includes a diverse range of habitats from alpine heaths to tropical rainforests. Fungi typify that diversity—an estimated 250,000 species—of which only 5% have been described—occur in Australia.[224] Because of the continent's great age, extremely variable weather patterns, and long-term geographic isolation, much of Australia's biota is unique. About 85% of flowering plants, 84% of mammals, more than 45% of birds, and 89% of in-shore, temperate-zone fish are endemic.[225] Australia has at least 755 species of reptile, more than any other country in the world.[226] Besides Antarctica, Australia is the only continent that developed without feline species. Feral cats may have been introduced in the 17th century by Dutch shipwrecks, and later in the 18th century by European settlers. They are now considered a major factor in the decline and extinction of many vulnerable and endangered native species.[227] Seafaring immigrants from Asia are believed to have brought the dingo to Australia sometime after the end of the last ice age—perhaps 4000 years ago—and Aboriginal people helped disperse them across the continent as pets, contributing to the demise of thylacines on the mainland.[228][page needed] Australia is also one of 17 megadiverse countries.[229]

Australian forests are mostly made up of evergreen species, particularly eucalyptus trees in the less arid regions; wattles replace them as the dominant species in drier regions and deserts.[230] Among well-known Australian animals are the monotremes (the platypus and echidna); a host of marsupials, including the kangaroo, koala, and wombat, and birds such as the emu and the kookaburra.[230] Australia is home to many dangerous animals including some of the most venomous snakes in the world.[231] The dingo was introduced by Austronesian people who traded with Indigenous Australians around 3000 BCE.[232] Many animal and plant species became extinct soon after first human settlement,[233] including the Australian megafauna; others have disappeared since European settlement, among them the thylacine.[234][235]

Many of Australia's ecoregions, and the species within those regions, are threatened by human activities and introduced animal, chromistan, fungal and plant species.[236] All these factors have led to Australia's having the highest mammal extinction rate of any country in the world.[237] The federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 is the legal framework for the protection of threatened species.[238] Numerous protected areas have been created under the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia's Biological Diversity to protect and preserve unique ecosystems;[239][240] 65 wetlands are listed under the Ramsar Convention,[241] and 16 natural World Heritage Sites have been established.[242] Australia was ranked 21st out of 178 countries in the world on the 2018 Environmental Performance Index.[243] There are more than 1,800 animals and plants on Australia's threatened species list, including more than 500 animals.[244]

Paleontologists discovered a fossil site of a prehistoric rainforest in McGraths Flat, in South Australia, that presents evidence that this now arid desert and dry shrubland/grassland was once home to an abundance of life.[245][246]

Australia is a constitutional monarchy, a parliamentary democracy and a federation.[247] The country has maintained its mostly unchanged constitution alongside a stable liberal democratic political system since Federation in 1901. It is one of the world's oldest federations, in which power is divided between the federal and state and territory governments. The Australian system of government combines elements derived from the political systems of the United Kingdom (a fused executive, constitutional monarchy and strong party discipline) and the United States (federalism, a written constitution and strong bicameralism with an elected upper house), resulting in a distinct hybrid.[248][249]

Government power is partially separated between three branches:[250]

Legislature: the bicameral Parliament, comprising the monarch, the Senate, and the House of Representatives

Executive: the Cabinet, led by the prime minister (the leader of the party or Coalition with a majority in the House of Representatives) and other ministers they have chosen; formally appointed by the governor-general[251]

Judiciary: the High Court and other federal courts

Charles III reigns as King of Australia and is represented in Australia by the governor-general at the federal level and by the governors at the state level, who by section 63 of the Constitution and convention act on the advice of their ministers.[252][253] Thus, in practice the governor-general acts as a legal figurehead for the actions of the prime minister and the Cabinet. The governor-general may in some situations exercise powers in the absence or contrary to ministerial advice using reserve powers. When these powers may be exercised is governed by convention and their precise scope is unclear. The most notable exercise of these powers was the dismissal of the Whitlam government in the constitutional crisis of 1975.[254]

In the Senate (the upper house), there are 76 senators: twelve each from the states and two each from the mainland territories (the Australian Capital Territory and the Northern Territory).[255] The House of Representatives (the lower house) has 151 members elected from single-member electoral divisions, commonly known as "electorates" or "seats", allocated to states on the basis of population, with each of the current states guaranteed a minimum of five seats.[256] The lower house has a maximum term of three years, but this is not fixed and governments usually dissolve the house early for an election at some point in the 6 months before the maximum.[257] Elections for both chambers are generally held simultaneously with senators having overlapping six-year terms except for those from the territories, whose terms are not fixed but are tied to the electoral cycle for the lower house. Thus only 40 of the 76 places in the Senate are put to each election unless the cycle is interrupted by a double dissolution.[255]

Australia's electoral system uses preferential voting for the House of Representatives and all state and territory lower house elections (with the exception of Tasmania and the ACT which use the Hare-Clark system). The Senate and most state upper houses use the "proportional system" which combines preferential voting with proportional representation for each state. Voting and enrolment is compulsory for all enrolled citizens 18 years and over in every jurisdiction.[258][259][260] The party with majority support in the House of Representatives forms the government and its leader becomes Prime Minister. In cases where no party has majority support, the governor-general has the constitutional power to appoint the prime minister and, if necessary, dismiss one that has lost the confidence of Parliament.[261] Due to the relatively unique position of Australia operating as a Westminster parliamentary democracy with a powerful and elected upper house, the system has sometimes been referred to as having a "Washminster mutation",[262] or as a semi-parliamentary system.[263]

There are two major political groups that usually form government, federally and in the states: the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition, which is a formal grouping of the Liberal Party and its minor partner, the National Party.[264][265] The Liberal National Party and the Country Liberal Party are merged state branches in Queensland and the Northern Territory that function as separate parties at a federal level.[266] Within Australian political culture, the Coalition is considered centre-right and the Labor Party is considered centre-left.[267] Independent members and several minor parties have achieved representation in Australian parliaments, mostly in upper houses. The Australian Greens are often considered the "third force" in politics, being the third largest party by both vote and membership.[268][269]

The most recent federal election was held on 21 May 2022 and resulted in the Australian Labor Party, led by Anthony Albanese, being elected to government.[270]

Australia has six states—New South Wales (NSW), Victoria (Vic), Queensland (Qld), Western Australia (WA), South Australia (SA) and Tasmania (Tas)—and two mainland self-governing territories—the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and the Northern Territory (NT).[271]

The states have the general power to make laws except in the few areas where the constitution grants the Commonwealth exclusive powers.[272][273] The Commonwealth can only make laws on topics listed in the constitution but its laws prevail over those of the states to the extent of any inconsistency.[274][275] Since Federation, the Commonwealth's power relative to the states has significantly increased due to the increasingly wide interpretation given to listed Commonwealth powers and because of the states' heavy financial reliance on Commonwealth grants.[276][277]

Each state and major mainland territory has its own parliament—unicameral in the Northern Territory, the ACT and Queensland, and bicameral in the other states. The lower houses are known as the Legislative Assembly (the House of Assembly in South Australia and Tasmania); the upper houses are known as the Legislative Council. The head of the government in each state is the Premier and in each territory the Chief Minister. The King is represented in each state by a governor. At the Commonwealth level, the King's representative is the governor-general.[278]

The Commonwealth government directly administers the internal Jervis Bay Territory and the other external territories: the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, the Coral Sea Islands, the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, the Indian Ocean territories (Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands), Norfolk Island,[281] and the Australian Antarctic Territory.[282][283][251] The remote Macquarie Island and Lord Howe Island are part of Tasmania and New South Wales respectively.[284][285]

Foreign relations

Australia is a middle power,[43] whose foreign relations has three core bi-partisan pillars: commitment to the US alliance, engagement with the Indo-Pacific and support for international institutions, rules and co-operation.[286][287][288] Through the ANZUS pact and its status as a major non-NATO ally, Australia maintains a close relationship with the US, which encompasses strong defence, security and trade ties.[289][290] In the Indo-Pacific, the country seeks to increase its trade ties through the open flow of trade and capital, whilst managing the rise of Chinese power by supporting the existing rules based order.[287] Regionally, the country is a member of the Pacific Islands Forum, the Pacific Community, the ASEAN+6 mechanism and the East Asia Summit. Internationally, the country is a member of the United Nations (of which it was a founding member), the Commonwealth of Nations, the OECD and the G20. This reflects the country's generally strong commitment to multilateralism.[291][292]

Australia is a member of several defence, intelligence and security groupings including the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand; the ANZUS alliance with the United States and New Zealand; the AUKUS security treaty with the United States and United Kingdom; the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with the United States, India and Japan; the Five Power Defence Arrangements with New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Malaysia and Singapore; and the Reciprocal Access defence and security agreement with Japan.

Australia has pursued the cause of international trade liberalisation.[293] It led the formation of the Cairns Group and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation,[294][295] and is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO).[296][297] Beginning in the 2000s, Australia has entered into the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership multilateral free trade agreements as well as bilateral free trade agreements with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, with the most recent deal with UK signed in 2023.[298]

Australia maintains a deeply integrated relationship with neighbouring New Zealand, with free mobility of citizens between the two countries under the Trans-Tasman Travel Arrangement and free trade under the Closer Economic Relations agreement.[299] The most favourably viewed countries by the Australian people in 2021 include New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Thailand, the United States and South Korea.[300] It also maintains an international aid program under which some 75 countries receive assistance.[301] Australia ranked fourth in the Center for Global Development's 2021 Commitment to Development Index.[302]

The power over foreign policy is highly concentrated in the prime minister and the national security committee, with major decision such as joining the 2003 invasion of Iraq made with without prior Cabinet approval.[303][304] Similarly, the Parliament does not play a formal role in foreign policy and the power to declare war lies solely with the executive government.[305] The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade supports the executive in its policy decisions.

Military

The two main institutions involved in the management of Australia's armed forces are the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and the Department of Defence, together known as "Defence".[306] The Australian Defence Force is the military wing, headed by the chief of the defence force, and contains three branches: the Royal Australian Navy, the Australian Army and the Royal Australian Air Force. In 2021, it had 84,865 currently serving personnel (including 60,286 regulars and 24,581 reservists).[307] The Department of Defence is the civilian wing and is headed by the secretary of defence. These two leaders collective manage Defence as a diarchy, with shared and joint responsibilities.[308] The titular role of commander-in-chief is held by the governor-general, however actual command is vested in the chief of the Defence Force.[309] The executive branch of the Commonwealth government has overall control of the military through the minister of defence, who is subject to the decisions of Cabinet and its National Security Committee.[310]

In 2022, defence spending was 1.9% of GDP, representing the world's 13th largest defence budget.[311] In 2024, the ADF had active operations in the Middle-East and the Indo-Pacific (including security and aid provisions), was contributing to UN forces in relation to South Sudan, Syria-Israel and North Korea, and domestically was assisting to prevent asylum-seekers enter the country and with natural disaster relief.[312]

Major Australian intelligence agencies include the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (foreign intelligence), the Australian Signals Directorate (signals intelligence) and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (domestic security).

Human rights

Legal and social rights in Australia are regarded as among the most developed in the world.[39] Attitudes towards LGBT people are generally positive within Australia, and same-sex marriage has been legal in the nation since 2017 (LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOO!!) .[313][314] Australia has had anti-discrimination laws regarding disability since 1992.[315] However, international organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have expressed concerns in areas including asylum-seeker policy, indigenous deaths in custody, the lack of entrenched rights protection and laws restricting protesting.[316][317]

Economy

Australia's high-income mixed-market economy is rich in natural resources.[318] It is the world's fourteenth-largest by nominal terms, and the 18th-largest by PPP. As of 2021, it has the second-highest amount of wealth per adult, after Luxembourg,[319] and has the thirteenth-highest financial assets per capita.[320] Australia has a labour force of some 13.5 million, with an unemployment rate of 3.5% as of June 2022.[321] According to the Australian Council of Social Service, the poverty rate of Australia exceeds 13.6% of the population, encompassing 3.2 million. It also estimated that there were 774,000 (17.7%) children under the age of 15 living in relative poverty.[322][323] The Australian dollar is the national currency, which is also used by three island states in the Pacific: Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu.[324]

Australian government debt, about $963 billion in June 2022, exceeds 45.1% of the country's total GDP, and is the world's eighth-highest.[325] Australia had the second-highest level of household debt in the world in 2020, after Switzerland.[326] Its house prices are among the highest in the world, especially in the large urban areas.[327] The large service sector accounts for about 71.2% of total GDP, followed by the industrial sector (25.3%), while its agriculture sector is by far the smallest, making up only 3.6% of total GDP.[328] Australia is the world's 21st-largest exporter and 24th-largest importer.[329][330] China is Australia's largest trading partner by a wide margin, accounting for roughly 40% of the country's exports and 17.6% of its imports.[331] Other major export markets include Japan, the United States, and South Korea.[332]

Australia has high levels of competitiveness and economic freedom, and was ranked fifth in the Human Development Index in 2021.[333] As of 2022, it is ranked twelfth in the Index of Economic Freedom and nineteenth in the Global Competitiveness Report.[334][335] It attracted 9.5 million international tourists in 2019,[336] and was ranked thirteenth among the countries of Asia-Pacific in 2019 for inbound tourism.[337] The 2021 Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report ranked Australia seventh-highest in the world out of 117 countries.[338] Its international tourism receipts in 2019 amounted to $45.7 billion.[337]

Energy

In 2021–22, Australia's generation of electricity was sourced from black coal (37.2%), brown coal (12%), natural gas (18.8%), hydro (6.5%), wind (11.1%), solar (13.3%), bio-energy (1.2%) and others (1.7%).[339][340] Total consumption of energy in this period was sourced from coal (28.4%), oil (37.3%), gas (27.4%) and renewables (7%).[341] From 2012 to 2022, the energy sourced from renewables has increased 5.7%, whilst energy sourced from coal has decreased 2.6%. The use of gas also increased by 1.5% and the use of oil stayed relatively stable with a reduction of only 0.2%.[342]

In 2020, Australia produced 27.7% of its electricity from renewable sources, exceeding the target set by the Commonwealth government in 2009 of 20% renewable energy by 2020.[343][344] A new target of 82% percent renewable energy by 2030 was set in 2022[345] and a target for net zero emissions by 2050 was set in 2021.[346]

Science and technology

In 2019, Australia spent $35.6 billion on research and development, allocating about 1.79% of GDP.[347] A recent study by Accenture for the Tech Council shows that the Australian tech sector combined contributes $167 billion a year to the economy and employs 861,000 people.[348] In addition, recent startup ecosystems in Sydney and Melbourne are already valued at $34 billion combined.[349] Australia ranked 24th in the Global Innovation Index 2023.[350]

With only 0.3% of the world's population, Australia contributed 4.1% of the world's published research in 2020, making it one of the top 10 research contributors in the world.[351][352] CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, contributes 10% of all research in the country, while the rest is carried out by universities.[352] Its most notable contributions include the invention of atomic absorption spectroscopy,[353] the essential components of Wi-Fi technology,[354] and the development of the first commercially successful polymer banknote.[355]

Australia is a key player in supporting space exploration. Facilities such as the Square Kilometre Array and Australia Telescope Compact Array radio telescopes, telescopes such as the Siding Spring Observatory, and ground stations such as the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex are of great assistance in deep space exploration missions, primarily by NASA.[356]

Demographics

Australia has an average population density of 3.4 persons per square kilometre of total land area, which makes it one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world. The population is heavily concentrated on the east coast, and in particular in the south-eastern region between South East Queensland to the north-east and Adelaide to the south-west.[357]

Australia is also highly urbanised, with 67% of the population living in the Greater Capital City Statistical Areas (metropolitan areas of the state and mainland territorial capital cities) in 2018.[358] Metropolitan areas with more than one million inhabitants are Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.[359]

In common with many other developed countries, Australia is experiencing a demographic shift towards an older population, with more retirees and fewer people of working age. In 2021 the average age of the population was 39 years.[360] In 2015, 2.15% of the Australian population lived overseas, one of the lowest proportions worldwide.[361]

Ancestry and immigration

Between 1788 and the Second World War, the vast majority of settlers and immigrants came from the British Isles (principally England, Ireland and Scotland), although there was significant immigration from China and Germany during the 19th century. Following Federation in 1901, a strengthening of the white Australia policy restricted further migration from these areas. However, in the decades immediately following the Second World War, Australia received a large wave of immigration from across Europe, with many more immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe than in previous decades. All overt racial discrimination ended in 1973, with multiculturalism becoming official policy.[363] Subsequently, there has been a large and continuing wave of immigration from across the world, with Asia being the largest source of immigrants in the 21st century.[364]

Today, Australia has the world's eighth-largest immigrant population, with immigrants accounting for 30% of the population, the highest proportion among major Western nations.[365][366] In 2022–23, 212,789 permanent migrants were admitted to Australia, with a net migration population gain of 518,000 people inclusive of non-permanent residents.[367][368] Most entered on skilled visas,[364] however the immigration program also offers visas for family members and refugees.[369]

The Australian Bureau of Statistics asks each Australian resident to nominate up to two ancestries each census and the responses are classified into broad ancestry groups.[370][371] At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated ancestry groups as a proportion of the total population were:[372] 57.2% European (including 46% North-West European and 11.2% Southern and Eastern European), 33.8% Oceanian,[N 8] 17.4% Asian (including 6.5% Southern and Central Asian, 6.4% North-East Asian, and 4.5% South-East Asian), 3.2% North African and Middle Eastern, 1.4% Peoples of the Americas, and 1.3% Sub-Saharan African. At the 2021 census, the most commonly nominated individual ancestries as a proportion of the total population were:[N 9][4]

English (33%)

Australian (29.9%)[N 10]

Irish (9.5%)

Scottish (8.6%)

Chinese (5.5%)

Italian (4.4%)

German (4%)

Indian (3.1%)

Aboriginal (2.9%)[N 11]

Greek (1.7%)

Filipino (1.6%)

Dutch (1.5%)

Vietnamese (1.3%)

Lebanese (1%)

At the 2021 census, 3.8% of the Australian population identified as being Indigenous—Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.[N 12][375]

Language

Although English is not the official language of Australia in law, it is the de facto official and national language.[376][377] Australian English is a major variety of the language with a distinctive accent and lexicon,[378] and differs slightly from other varieties of English in grammar and spelling.[379] General Australian serves as the standard dialect.[380]

At the 2021 census, English was the only language spoken in the home for 72% of the population. The next most common languages spoken at home were Mandarin (2.7%), Arabic (1.4%), Vietnamese (1.3%), Cantonese (1.2%) and Punjabi (0.9%).[381]

Over 250 Australian Aboriginal languages are thought to have existed at the time of first European contact.[382] The National Indigenous Languages Survey (NILS) for 2018–19 found that more than 120 Indigenous language varieties were in use or being revived, although 70 of those in use were endangered.[383] The 2021 census found that 167 Indigenous languages were spoken at home by 76,978 Indigenous Australians — Yumplatok (Torres Strait Creole), Djambarrpuyngu (a Yolŋu language) and Pitjantjatjara (a Western Desert language) were among the most widely spoken.[384] NILS and the Australian Bureau of Statistics use different classifications for Indigenous Australian languages.[385]

The Australian sign language known as Auslan was used at home by 16,242 people at the time of the 2021 census.[386]

Religion

Australia has no state religion; section 116 of the Australian Constitution prohibits the Australian government from making any law to establish any religion, impose any religious observance, or prohibit the free exercise of any religion.[387] However, the states still retain the power to pass religiously discriminatory laws.[388]

At the 2021 census, 38.9% of the population identified as having "no religion",[4] up from 15.5% in 2001.[389] The largest religion is Christianity (43.9% of the population).[4] The largest Christian denominations are the Roman Catholic Church (20% of the population) and the Anglican Church of Australia (9.8%). Non-British immigration since the Second World War has led to the growth of non-Christian religions, the largest of which are Islam (3.2%), Hinduism (2.7%), Buddhism (2.4%), Sikhism (0.8%), and Judaism (0.4%).[390][4]

In 2021, just under 8,000 people declared an affiliation with traditional Aboriginal religions.[4] In Australian Aboriginal mythology and the animist framework developed in Aboriginal Australia, the Dreaming is a sacred era in which ancestral totemic spirit beings formed The Creation. The Dreaming established the laws and structures of society and the ceremonies performed to ensure continuity of life and land.[391]

Health

Australia's life expectancy of 83 years (81 years for males and 85 years for females),[392] is the fifth-highest in the world. It has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world,[393] while cigarette smoking is the largest preventable cause of death and disease, responsible for 7.8% of the total mortality and disease. Ranked second in preventable causes is hypertension at 7.6%, with obesity third at 7.5%.[394][395] Australia ranked 35th in the world in 2012 for its proportion of obese women[396] and near the top of developed nations for its proportion of obese adults;[397] 63% of its adult population is either overweight or obese.[398]

Australia spent around 9.91% of its total GDP to health care in 2021.[399] It introduced a national insurance scheme in 1975.[400] Following a period in which access to the scheme was restricted, the scheme became universal once more in 1981 under the name of Medicare.[401] The program is nominally funded by an income tax surcharge known as the Medicare levy, currently at 2%.[402] The states manage hospitals and attached outpatient services, while the Commonwealth funds the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (subsidising the costs of medicines) and general practice.[400]

Education

School attendance, or registration for home schooling,[403] is compulsory throughout Australia. Education is primarily the responsibility of the individual states and territories, however the Commonwealth has significant influence through funding agreements.[404] Since 2014, a national curriculum developed by the Commonwealth has been implemented by the states and territories.[405] Attendance rules vary between states, but in general children are required to attend school from the age of about 5 until about 16.[406][407] In some states (Western Australia, Northern Territory and New South Wales), children aged 16–17 are required to either attend school or participate in vocational training, such as an apprenticeship.[408][409][410][411]

Australia has an adult literacy rate that was estimated to be 99% in 2003.[412] However, a 2011–2012 report for the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that 44% of the population does not have high literary and numeracy competence levels, interpreted by others as suggesting that they do not have the "skills needed for everyday life".[413][414][415]

Australia has 37 government-funded universities and three private universities, as well as a number of other specialist institutions that provide approved courses at the higher education level.[416] The OECD places Australia among the most expensive nations to attend university.[417] There is a state-based system of vocational training, known as TAFE, and many trades conduct apprenticeships for training new tradespeople.[418] About 58% of Australians aged from 25 to 64 have vocational or tertiary qualifications[419] and the tertiary graduation rate of 49% is the highest among OECD countries. 30.9% of Australia's population has attained a higher education qualification, which is among the highest percentages in the world.[420][421][422]

Australia has the highest ratio of international students per head of population in the world by a large margin, with 812,000 international students enrolled in the nation's universities and vocational institutions in 2019.[423][424] Accordingly, in 2019, international students represented on average 26.7% of the student bodies of Australian universities. International education therefore represents one of the country's largest exports and has a pronounced influence on the country's demographics, with a significant proportion of international students remaining in Australia after graduation on various skill and employment visas.[425] Education is Australia's third-largest export, after iron ore and coal, and contributed over $28 billion to the economy in 2016–17.[352]

Culture

Contemporary Australian culture reflects the country's Indigenous traditions, Anglo-Celtic heritage, and post 1970s history of multicultural immigration.[427][428][429] The culture of the United States has also been influential.[430] The evolution of Australian culture since British colonisation has given rise to distinctive cultural traits.[431][432]

Many Australians identify egalitarianism, mateship, irreverence and a lack of formality as part of their national identity.[433][434][435] These find expression in Australian slang, as well as Australian humour, which is often characterised as dry, irreverent and ironic.[436][437] New citizens and visa holders are required to commit to "Australian values", which are identified by the Department of Home Affairs as including: a respect for the freedom of the individual; recognition of the rule of law; opposition to racial, gender and religious discrimination; and an understanding of the "fair go", which is said to encompass the equality of opportunity for all and compassion for those in need.[438] What these values mean, and whether or not Australians uphold them, has been debated since before Federation.[439][440][441][442]

Arts

Australia has over 100,000 Aboriginal rock art sites,[444] and traditional designs, patterns and stories infuse contemporary Indigenous Australian art, "the last great art movement of the 20th century" according to critic Robert Hughes;[445] its exponents include Emily Kame Kngwarreye.[446] Early colonial artists showed a fascination with the unfamiliar land.[447] The impressionistic works of Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and other members of the 19th-century Heidelberg School—the first "distinctively Australian" movement in Western art—gave expression to nationalist sentiments in the lead-up to Federation.[447] While the school remained influential into the 1900s, modernists such as Margaret Preston and Clarice Beckett, and, later, Sidney Nolan, explored new artistic trends.[447] The landscape remained central to the work of Aboriginal watercolourist Albert Namatjira,[448] as well as Fred Williams, Brett Whiteley and other post-war artists whose works, eclectic in style yet uniquely Australian, moved between the figurative and the abstract.[447][449]

Australian literature grew slowly in the decades following European settlement though Indigenous oral traditions, many of which have since been recorded in writing, are much older.[450] In the 19th century, Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson captured the experience of the bush using a distinctive Australian vocabulary.[451] Their works are still popular; Paterson's bush poem "Waltzing Matilda" (1895) is regarded as Australia's unofficial national anthem.[452] Miles Franklin is the namesake of Australia's most prestigious literary prize, awarded annually to the best novel about Australian life.[453] Its first recipient, Patrick White, went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1973.[454] Australian Booker Prize winners include Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally and Richard Flanagan.[455] Australian public intellectuals have also written seminal works in their respective fields, including feminist Germaine Greer and philosopher Peter Singer.[456]

In the performing arts, Aboriginal peoples have traditions of religious and secular song, dance and rhythmic music often performed in corroborees.[457] At the beginning of the 20th century, Nellie Melba was one of the world's leading opera singers,[458] and later popular music acts such as the Bee Gees, AC/DC, INXS and Kylie Minogue achieved international recognition.[459] Many of Australia's performing arts companies receive funding through the Australian government's Australia Council.[460] There is a symphony orchestra in each state,[461] and a national opera company, Opera Australia,[462] well known for its famous soprano Joan Sutherland.[463] Ballet and dance are represented by The Australian Ballet and various state companies. Each state has a publicly funded theatre company.[464]

Media

The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), the world's first feature-length narrative film, spurred a boom in Australian cinema during the silent film era.[465] After World War I, Hollywood monopolised the industry,[466] and by the 1960s Australian film production had effectively ceased.[467] With the benefit of government support, the Australian New Wave of the 1970s brought provocative and successful films, many exploring themes of national identity, such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, Wake in Fright and Gallipoli,[468] while Crocodile Dundee and the Ozploitation movement's Mad Max series became international blockbusters.[469] In a film market flooded with foreign content, Australian films delivered a 7.7% share of the local box office in 2015.[470] The AACTAs are Australia's premier film and television awards, and notable Academy Award winners from Australia include Geoffrey Rush, Nicole Kidman, Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger.[471]

Australia has two public broadcasters (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the multicultural Special Broadcasting Service), three commercial television networks, several pay-TV services,[472] and numerous public, non-profit television and radio stations. Each major city has at least one daily newspaper,[472] and there are two national daily newspapers, The Australian and The Australian Financial Review.[472] In 2020, Reporters Without Borders placed Australia 25th on a list of 180 countries ranked by press freedom, behind New Zealand (8th) but ahead of the United Kingdom (33rd) and United States (44th).[473] This relatively low ranking is primarily because of the limited diversity of commercial media ownership in Australia;[474] most print media are under the control of News Corporation (59%) and Nine Entertainment Co (23%).[475]

Cuisine

Most Indigenous Australian groups subsisted on a hunter-gatherer diet of native fauna and flora, otherwise called bush tucker.[476] It has increased in popularity among non-Indigenous Australians since the 1970s, with examples such as lemon myrtle, the macadamia nut and kangaroo meat now widely available.[477][478]

The first colonists introduced British and Irish cuisine to the continent.[479][480] This influence is seen in dishes such as fish and chips, and in the Australian meat pie, which is related to the British steak pie. Also during the colonial period, Chinese migrants paved the way for a distinctive Australian Chinese cuisine.[481]

Post-war migrants transformed Australian cuisine, bringing with them their culinary traditions and contributing to new fusion dishes.[482] Italians introduced espresso coffee and, along with Greeks, helped develop Australia's café culture, of which the flat white and "smashed avo" on toast are now considered Australian staples.[483][484] Pavlovas, lamingtons, Vegemite and Anzac biscuits are also often called iconic Australian foods.[485]

Australia is a leading exporter and consumer of wine.[486] Australian wine is produced mainly in the southern, cooler parts of the country.[487] The nation also ranks highly in beer consumption,[488] with each state and territory hosting numerous breweries.

Sport and recreation

The most popular sports in Australia by adult participation are: swimming, athletics, cycling, soccer, golf, tennis, basketball, surfing, netball and cricket.[490]

Australia is one of five nations to have participated in every Summer Olympics of the modern era,[491] and has hosted the Games twice: 1956 in Melbourne and 2000 in Sydney.[492] It is also set to host the 2032 Games in Brisbane.[493] Australia has also participated in every Commonwealth Games,[494] hosting the event in 1938, 1962, 1982, 2006 and 2018.[495]

Cricket is a major national sport.[496] The Australian national cricket team competed against England in the first Test match (1877) and the first One Day International (1971), and against New Zealand in the first Twenty20 International (2004), winning all three games.[497] It has also won the men's Cricket World Cup a record six times.[498]

Australia has professional leagues for four football codes, whose relative popularity is divided geographically.[499] Originating in Melbourne in the 1850s, Australian rules football attracts the most television viewers in all states except New South Wales and Queensland, where rugby league holds sway, followed by rugby union.[500] Soccer, while ranked fourth in television viewers and resources, has the highest overall participation rates.[501]

The surf lifesaving movement originated in Australia, and the volunteer lifesaver is one of the country's icons.[502]

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