Beyond'25

BEYOND ’25 MAGIC & Mayhem

BEYOND ’25

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

09 Michael Miller

INTRODUCTION

10 Campbell Reid: Magic & Mayhem

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

14 Helena De Bertodano: How to make a superbaby

20 Natasha Robinson: We need to talk about death

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND

30 Ryan Brukardt in conversation with Lucia Rahilly: The case for space

A NEW LESSON FOR LEARNING

40 Natasha Bita: The highwire act of outsourcing brain power and imagination

KICKING THE SOCIAL HABIT

46 Paul Kelly: The biggest blunder we’ve ever made with our children: Jonathan Haidt’s case for change

LIVING THE WEIGHT-LOSS REVOLUTION

56 Johann Hari: I’ve lost 19kg taking a magic pill. But am I at risk?

DIFFERENT ROUTES TO WEALTH AND WORK

66 Katherine Blunt: The influencer is a young teenage girl

74 Jared Lynch: Tech company doubles down on remote working with new “connection hub”

WHAT’S DRIVING THE ROADS TO CHANGE

82 David McCowen: All roads lead to China

THE AUSSIE SPIRIT

90 Trent Dalton: The remarkable quality that holds our nation together

AFTERWORD

98 Campbell Reid: Magic & Mayhem of Artificial Intelligence “A NEW DAWN”

Cover Illustration by Abi Fraser

The illustration takes the mathematical magic of M.C. Escher’s birds and lets them loose to represent the magic and the mayhem of AI. A warning. Without order, chaos ensues. The black and white birds symbolise the dichotomy of progress; and the large format pixelated background represents a new dawn in our digital world.

“It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves.”

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Foreword

MICHAEL MILLER

EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN, NEWS CORP AUSTRALASIA, SINCE 2015. HE HAS HELD SENIOR EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP AND MARKETING ROLES IN THE MEDIA INDUSTRY FOR ALMOST 30 YEARS.

Journalists play several critical roles in our society, each contributing to the function of a free and informed public. One role is to educate – to explore the what ifs and why nots. This can help people to better understand complex issues, explaining their significance and implications, and provide analysis to help the audience understand those issues and encourage public debate.

This year’s BEYOND’25 – the fourth in the series – sets out to highlight how new and emerging technologies and trends can be used for better … or for worse. They can create magic … or mayhem. It is up to society to find a nuanced and balanced middle ground.

In this edition you’ll hear about the challenges and pitfalls of children’s use of social media from The Australian’s Paul Kelly, as he talks to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Writer Johann Hari –who has struggled with his weight since childhood – lost 19kg by taking Ozempic.

But what are the long term effects on his brain? And The Australian’s Natasha Bita explores the benefits and repercussions of introducing AI into our primary, secondary and tertiary classrooms.

Other topics in the book include the growing space economy, the ongoing debate about the most productive workplace, the implications of prescreening embryos and how do we best manage death and dying.

One of the themes running throughout this book – and the entire BEYOND series – is the intersection of technology and the future of existence.

In these pages we continue to explore the potential trajectories of human civilisation – examining both the benefits and the risks of our rapid technological advancement – and how it might redefine what it means to live, to learn, and to be part of society beyond 2025.

While we can speculate on “potential trajectories” it is often unexpected serendipity that can suddenly change those

trajectories with no forewarning, such as when Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in 1928 when he noticed that a mould called Penicillium notatum had contaminated his petri dishes and killed surrounding bacteria. This chance observation led to the development of antibiotics, revolutionising medicine.

Or when Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, discovered the cooking potential of microwave radiation in the 1940s when he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket melted while he was working on radar technology.

These examples illustrate how unexpected discoveries can lead to significant advancements. How magic can still occur through simple good fortune.

As is always my hope, I wish that BEYOND’25 will engage you and stimulate the conversations you’ll have with colleagues, your community and the broader population. Conversations that could help guide the course of our children’s future.

Magic & Mayhem

AS

THE

TECHNOLOGY REVOLUTION CHANGES

THE WAY WE LIVE, THE CHALLENGE FOR ALL OF US IS TO FIND A NEW MIDDLE PATH THAT SHAPES AND ENHANCES OUR SOCIETY.

CAMPBELL REID

GROUP EXECUTIVE, CORPORATE AFFAIRS, POLICY AND GOVERNMENT RELATIONS

In 1888 a young German woman took her husband’s car and went to see her mother.

In today’s world this is an extraordinarily mundane sentence. But 136 years ago it would describe a journey that changed the world.

The woman was Bertha Benz (right), and she had a lot more faith in her husband Karl’s car than he did. So, without him knowing, she took it and drove 100 kilometres across Germany from Mannheim to her mother’s house in Pforzheim.

Imagine the reaction.

A carriage without a horse. A woman at its controls. An insane speed of up to 30km/h. A moment of magic.

And from that first long-distance car journey to Pforzheim in the original Mercedes-Benz, the line of change flows directly to a world altered in ways beyond anyone’s imagination.

The car democratised travel, its invention led to the affordable family holiday and motels and highways and suburbia and the mobile middle class and motor racing and drive-through restaurants and drive-in cinemas and road movies and the moving production line and millions of jobs and luxury versus affordability and tail fins and fashion and Ferrari and fatalities and the road toll and road rage and

traffic jams and air pollution and airbags and seatbelts and workers versus bosses and cities dedicated to building cars and corporate excess and legends and scandal and heroes and villains and robots replacing workers and a clash of technologies and a massive toll on our planet.

The car has been one of history’s most dramatic catalysts for both magic and mayhem – the theme of BEYOND’25

The same is true of any advance that is magical enough to truly change society; the steam engines that powered the industrial revolution, aeroplanes that shrunk the world, the tools of navigation that charted the course for empires, the mechanised weapons that industrialised death and the penicillin that tried to keep it at bay, nuclear energy, the telephone and in today’s world, the information revolution.

In every technological revolution the magic comes with a bang and the mayhem takes its toll by stealth.

The industrial revolution built cities, freed people from feudal servitude, invented affordable consumer goods, revolutionised industry and communications, grew collective wealth and trade. But it also exploited children, denied workers’ rights, worsened the lot of women, led to the emergence of slums, appalling pollution and illnesses and drove an extraordinary

“In every technological revolution the magic comes with a bang and the mayhem takes its toll by stealth.”

gap between the haves and the have-nots. As the magic becomes mundane and the toll of the mayhem becomes impossible to ignore, society begins to search for the acceptable middle ground.

In the story of the car, the middle ground was established through road rules, policing and licensing, enforced safety standards, safer roads, speed limits and demands for cleaner engines and fuel.

Today we live in a world created by the magic and mayhem of the revolutions that have gone before and we are at the start of a new world being created by the information revolution.

We now face our own magic and mayhem moments.

The way we live today is shaped in every aspect by the struggle to find the middle ground after the industrial revolution changed everything.

Think about the rights of children to not be put to work, taxes that shared wealth and funded public services and amenities, fairness and opportunities in working hours, salaries and career advancement, rules to prevent the dominance of corporate monopolies, safety and environmental standards, the quality of housing, education, social welfare and public transport services.

Before the industrial revolution, few if any of these things were part of normal society. They came about through the struggle to balance and correct, to find

a way to distribute wealth, goods and services as fairly as possible, and finding ways of living that benefited as many people as possible.

It is this quest to find the middle acceptable path in the wake of revolution that shapes society and as the digital revolution accelerates the rate of change in every part of how we live, the challenge to find the new middle is ours to take up.

The parallels between today’s technology revolution and preceding revolutions in the past are instructive but not perfect simply because this is a catalyst for change like no other.

The invention of the car presented tangible, physical opportunities and

problems. The digital revolution is intangible to most of us. We don’t know how it works, it plays by no rules and yet it has already impacted literally everything we do individually and as a society.

And the mayhem is unfolding before our eyes.

BEYOND’25 breaks down a selection of the advances and technologies that are currently emerging to celebrate the magic, call out the mayhem and begin to explore the path towards the middle ground.

And just like it was for Bertha Benz, it will be a hell of a ride.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

ILLUSTRATED IN THE STYLE OF VICTOR VASARELY

How to make a superbaby

THE ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND SOCIETAL IMPLICATIONS OF PRE-SCREENING EMBRYOS ARE FAR-REACHING. BUT DO WE HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO MAXIMISE THE WELLBEING OF FUTURE CHILDREN WHILE REDUCING THE BURDEN OF DISEASE ON FAMILIES AND SOCIETY?

HELENA DE BERTODANO

JOURNALIST, THE SUNDAY TIMES AND THE TIMES

Although Noor Siddiqui and her husband have no fertility problems, she has undergone IVF so that she can freeze her embryos. Then, using the technology of her own startup company, Orchid, she is pre-screening each embryo for any potential health problems.

Siddiqui, 29, does not have children yet, nor is she even pregnant, but she knows a lot about her future family. She will have two sons and two daughters and, like any parent, she wants them all to be healthy. Unlike most parents, however, she is almost guaranteed to get what she wants.

We are not talking about simply screening for major birth defects or conditions such as Down Syndrome – we are talking about a full-scale analysis of each embryo’s predisposition to all the 1200-plus diseases and conditions about which we currently have genetic information, including a wide range of cancers, diabetes, coronary artery disease and even Alzheimer’s. Based on the results, prospective parents can decide which embryos to implant. Testing costs US$2500 ($3700) per embryo, on top of the cost of IVF, leading to concerns that the rich will breed “superbabies”

(although Orchid is also planning a select philanthropy program).

The difference between the Orchid testing – which is already available in dozens of clinics across the US – and what Siddiqui refers to as “the old testing” is off the charts. She suggests you think of it “like a book”. “The old testing is only looking at the table of contents, [whereas Orchid] is spellchecking the entire book. So if your genome is 3 billion letters, Orchid is looking at all of them.”

“Look,” Siddiqui adds, pointing to a graph she has pulled up on her iPhone that shows the analysis of one of her embryos. “All these genes that cause horrible diseases are negative. Same for hereditary cancer.” She flicks to another one and I see a solid red line. What’s that? “This embryo was in the 99th percentile for breast cancer. So it has a 37% lifetime risk versus this embryo, which has an 18% lifetime risk.”

She splits the screen so she can compare embryo three – the one with the heightened risk – with embryo five, which shows no heightened risk factor for any disease. So, I say, you would clearly choose embryo five over three. “You can choose whatever embryo you want,” says Siddiqui, who

is hypersensitive to any suggestion that Orchid’s services have any similarity to eugenics. But embryo three would be an unusual choice, wouldn’t it? “Sure,” she concedes. “But embryo three knows at age zero to screen early for cancer.”

We are chatting in the San Francisco apartment of Masha Bucher, a Russian friend of Siddiqui’s and an investor in Orchid who plans to use the service herself. Aged 34, Bucher is married but says she is not ready for a child right now. Dynamic and bossy, she explains why she supports Siddiqui: “We have access to data on so many less important things. I’ve been calculating my calories since I was ten years old, I track how much time I sleep, I have financial apps. Why wouldn’t I use something that helps with such a major decision over the health and future of [my child]?”

In their friend circle, freezing eggs or embryos is the norm. “Many who are younger than me are already doing egg freezing or embryo banking with their partners,” Siddiqui says. “They get engaged and they make embryos and they plan to have kids in ten years, whatever.”

So far, Siddiqui has frozen 16 embryos. “Unfortunately, almost all are

girls.” Just two are boys – and one of them is at a heightened risk for prostate cancer. Not that that in itself is a deal-breaker. “But if you want to have two boys, then you should probably have more than two embryos. Basically, each embryo has a 70% chance of becoming a baby.”

So she is going to freeze more eggs in September. Yes, she says, IVF is uncomfortable. “But it’s really not an ordeal. Women do waxing, Botox, laser hair removal – and it’s completely frivolous. Who cares whether you have hair or not? I care way more if my baby is going to get cancer. I care way more if my child will go blind in college. So why wouldn’t I spend an extra two weeks and a couple of thousand dollars to make sure my child doesn’t suffer? That should not be stigmatised.”

Pretty and slight, Siddiqui seems to be one of those intellectually brilliant people who, on a practical level, is a complete disaster. I rarely feel like the grown-up in any situation that involves organisation, but after a chaotic day with Siddiqui I almost feel like a babysitter. The location and time of the interview change so often I lose track; patients and doctors whom she has lined up to speak to me suddenly evaporate. She doesn’t know which apartment Bucher lives in so we end up knocking on random doors while she tries to contact someone 8000km away who might have the address – except her phone battery dies and she doesn’t have a charger. At one particularly low point in the day I find myself stuck in a fire escape stairwell with her, unable to re-enter the main building because the door has locked behind us.

The day starts smoothly enough, albeit well behind schedule. Siddiqui offers to collect me from my hotel; a white Jaguar pulls up and I get into the back seat next to her. We begin chatting and as the car pulls out into busy traffic, I suddenly realise there is no driver. The car is driving itself. “I hate driving,” she says. “It’s so annoying.” So, being a young San Franciscan, naturally she uses Waymo, the self-driving car app that is rapidly supplanting Uber. “It feels super-futuristic when you first jump in, but then you forget about it,” she says. It is pouring with rain and I ask her if

“We are talking about a fullscale analysis of each embryo’s predisposition to all the 1200plus diseases and conditions about which we currently have genetic information …”

– with all her technological know-how –there might be a way to stop it. Actually, she says, there might be. She knows someone who has a company called Rainmaker. “I don’t know if they can stop the rain, but they can start it.”

The daughter of Pakistani immigrants, both engineers, Siddiqui grew up in Virginia, where discussions around the dinner table were highly intellectual. “My family loves to debate. My older sister and my dad would spar about any topic: political, technical, nuclear power … I would try to insert myself and then, when I went to school, I’d sound so smart because I would just repeat the conversation.”

The one cloud on the family horizon was her mother’s worsening vision. She had been diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, and Siddiqui says that watching her mother struggle with the disease triggered her fascination with genetics. “Just think about it – someone you love, their independence is getting ripped away from them. It just struck me as incredibly unfair.”

As a teenager, she applied to the Thiel Fellowship, a program that funds 20 gifted young people a year to work on their ideas, deferring college. She won a place and founded a startup called Remedy, using

Google’s augmented reality glasses to help healthcare providers care for patients. Later she attended Stanford, graduating with a master’s degree in computer science. By then she had met her future husband, Feross Aboukhadijeh, a fellow student. He is now the founder and CEO of Socket, a security platform, and seen as one of the most brilliant brains in Silicon Valley.

After eight years of dating, they married in a “giant, crazy” three-day wedding in Hawaii in 2022. “It took me way too long to decide to marry.” She was determined to be the one to propose first. “I told him I wasn’t going to accept any inbound [proposal]; I had to ask first.” So, not one to do anything by halves, she organised a flashmob proposal (it’s a thing these days, especially in California), flying in friends and family from around the country and contracting artists to perform his favourite music. He said yes, of course, and then organised his own return proposal with a scavenger hunt. They now live in San Francisco and plan to start a family.

Using her own relationship as an

example, Siddiqui robustly contests the argument that the IVF/freezing embryos route lacks romance. “Think of how much love and energy it takes to say we’re going to plan ahead to make sure this child is healthy,” she says. “This is the biggest gift I could give my child.”

And, she maintains, it is still a magical process. “Of the millions of eggs that existed in me when I was a baby, I capture 20 of them. Think about how miraculous that is. My husband has billions of sperm and it’s these specific magical combinations of literally trillions [of options] that get to be our kids … And we haven’t gotten pregnant yet. The first embryo might not take. So there’s still a lot of mystery.”

Of course, for couples who take the Orchid route to have a baby, sex in itself is unnecessary. “Sex is for fun,” is one of the lines that Orchid uses. “Embryo screening is for babies.”

“It’s a little tongue in cheek,” Siddiqui says. “But that’s what I personally think” As for finding out about potential problems post-conception, the emotional

Left: Noor Siddiqui and below, with her husband Feross Aboukhadijeh.

toll is high. “The current process is much worse: once the pregnancy is already in progress, you can get a very small amount of genetic information and find out about a very small list of those thousands of diseases. And then you have a very tough choice to make: you can either terminate or continue that pregnancy. I would way rather have the information before I’m pregnant.”

I tell her that when I was pregnant with my second son in the US, I had an ultrasound that showed he might have Trisomy 18, also known as Edwards Syndrome, a chromosomal condition that affects the heart and lungs and is so severe that most children do not live beyond the first two weeks of life and fewer than 10% beyond the first year. At the local hospital I was asked if, given the risks, I wanted to con-

tinue with the pregnancy. They offered me counselling and made it sound almost a certainty that he would be born with the condition (even though there was a much higher chance that he would be born without it).

Twenty-one years have passed since then. Obviously, if I had terminated the pregnancy I wouldn’t have my healthy, kind, beautiful son Joe. Or if I’d had the choice of several embryos, it’s unlikely I would have chosen one with an elevated risk of such a condition.

“But you’d have a different son,” Siddiqui says cheerfully, “whom you’d also love.”

She has the same answer to the suggestion that her mother might not have been born if her grandmother had been given a choice of embryos and saw that she had

a heightened risk of blindness. “I’d have a different mother.” Clearly, Siddiqui herself would not exist either, but she thinks I am far too stuck on people who wouldn’t have been born. “People are always thinking about [one] person who wouldn’t exist. You immediately say, ‘I wouldn’t have my son.’ But what about all these future people who wouldn’t exist if you don’t use this technology?”

Perhaps doubting the efficacy of her positivity, she continues, “Think about this: my grandma had my mum when she was 16. Now women go to college and choose when they get married. You killed all the babies that you [could have] had at 16 and 17. And 18 and 19. All those eggs … There are trillions of children and children’s children who didn’t happen because we as a society have said we value women having autonomy over who and when they marry, when they have kids … I don’t think anyone in society would say that women should all be forced to have kids at 16.”

Well, no, but that’s different from selecting embryos when there is no apparent medical need to do so. There is something about the randomness of birth that is seen as almost sacred. Siddiqui is ready for this. “I think because it’s sacred, it is incumbent upon us to use the best science [we have] to give this person we’re bringing into the world the best chance at a healthy life. If a child needs more resources, then we should be summoning those resources earlier, not leaving it to the last minute, once it’s too late to intervene. There are so many of these situations where if you intervene earlier, you can either totally avoid the illness or significantly alter the trajectory of that child’s life.”

She talks at immense speed for hours, the words tumbling out of her. Even my voice recorder can’t keep up with her and at times I have to ask her to slow down. “Sorry, sorry,” she says breathlessly, slowing down a fraction before galloping on again. “When children are born without a skull, they might suffer and die within a week [or be] a stillborn. So it strikes me as very cruel to say to a family who’s going through IVF that you shouldn’t have this information – especially if you’ve already

“Genetics is really messy, and so many things can go wrong. Your genetics is a lottery. Why don’t we try to make it a little more fair?”

manipulating embryos that already exist. This technology is just expanding the menu of choice.”

buried a child … Three per cent of babies are born with birth defects. Six per cent of babies are born with a neurodevelopmental disorder. We don’t have treatments. We have vaccines for smallpox and polio. And that’s about it. So unfortunately, the most humble thing to do is actually to screen embryos and identify the risks early. Because medicine is still in the Stone Age. We can’t cure most chronic diseases. A lot of people we serve weren’t going to have kids because they were so worried about the child suffering … So the idea that you should stigmatise access to information about the health of your embryo is offensive to me.”

So what you’re doing is editing out the risk? “Not editing,” she quickly corrects me. “Editing would mean you’d be

Although a lot of what she says makes good sense, I find that anyone I talk to about Orchid recoils when I explain what it is doing. Is she surprised that the subject causes some upset? “It honestly doesn’t make sense to me. People are already choosing embryos based on sex, which is a lot less important. They obsess over the most silly things: playing classical music or rock music during pregnancy; whether to have an organic or non-organic apple.”

Late last year, the first Orchid baby was born to a San Francisco couple. Siddiqui posted a film of herself meeting the baby, Japhy. His mother, Leah, was 38 when she married. “We both have family history of type 1 and 2 diabetes and my husband has a history of bipolar in his family, so we wanted to see if there was anything we could do to mitigate some of those issues,”

Leah says. “It’s a huge relief to have the information to make informed decisions.”

Siddiqui is thrilled to have met Japhy. “This baby represents the future of how all babies will be created, hopefully.”

Dr Michael Feinman, an IVF doctor, says Orchid provides a valuable tool in preventing severe diseases. “While there are ethical considerations and societal implications, the primary focus should always be on the wellbeing of the future child and reducing the burden of disease on families and society.”

Orchid is also working on a way to predict if a future child is predisposed to addiction. “There is a genetic component to substance abuse,” Siddiqui says. There are even, she adds, “certain aspects of personality that have a genetic basis”. Maybe, I speculate, one could stop a future serial killer being born. Or someone like Vladimir Putin. Siddiqui looks doubtful. “I think you still have free will. You’re pre-

disposed to things but I wouldn’t go so far as to say you could predict character.”

She dismisses as “sensational and silly” a recent headline about her that ran, “This woman will decide which babies are born.” “It’s the exact opposite of that. It’s the parents who decide; I don’t decide anything.”

Yet given the strong feelings the technology engenders, I ask if she sees any downside to what her company is doing. “I don’t think so. I think this is something that society has been waiting for. For generations. So much had to develop in the history of humans for us to be able to get here. It’s up to us to decide the morality and how it’s used. It’s just data on embryos at the earliest possible stage.”

She acknowledges that for some people, it is just too much information. “For people who want to take the risk and do it traditionally at home, more power to them.” But, she cautions, “Genetics is really

messy, and so many things can go wrong. Your genetics is a lottery. Why don’t we try to make it a little more fair?”

Society will eventually embrace this technology, she believes. “Previous generations would consider IVF as taboo and stigmatised. And now it’s the opposite.”

We are back in the car and she makes an analogy. “Self-driving cars were considered really scary and crazy, but look at the data: how many car accidents are there with human drivers? Thousands. Waymo had to pass one million miles without an incident. In the future, our grandkids are going to think it was so unsafe on the road before self-driving cars.”

She feels that Orchid is her “life’s work”. “It is the most meaningful work I’ve ever done,” she says. “We want to bring it internationally around the world.” She herself plans to decide which embryos to implant after her second round of IVF. “I built the whole company because I wanted to do that.”

A few minutes after we part, she sends me links to two YouTube videos set to music: one showing her marriage proposal to her partner, the other his proposal to her. The videos are sweet, if corny, and clearly prove the romance in their relationship.

As she runs into his arms on top of a picturesque cliff, I note that Justin Bieber’s “Anyone” is playing and the accompanying lyric is, “You can’t predict the future.” Except now, of course, you actually can.

■ First published in The Times Magazine, 6 July 2024. Reprinted with permission of News Licensing.

■ Helena De Bertodano is a British journalist who specialises in features, celebrity profiles and travel articles for publications including The Sunday Times, The Times, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire.

We need to talk about death

WITH OUR HEALTH SYSTEM UNDER INCREASING PRESSURE, IT’S TIME FOR AN HONEST RECKONING OF HOW WE MANAGE DEATH AND DYING – INCLUDING THE HUMAN COST OF MEDICAL INTERVENTION.

NATASHA ROBINSON HEALTH EDITOR, THE AUSTRALIAN

There are so many things

Melissa Reader wishes she could have said to her husband Mauro Bertolini, the father of her three tiny children, before he died. Chief among them is a simple acknowledgment that death was inevitable.

“That would have been very hard to hear, of course, but I think probably pretty transformative for the decisions we would have made,” Reader says.

Bertolini was only 39 when his abdomen began to swell and his body filled up with fluid. A scan revealed kidney cancer that had been growing silently and had already spread to his liver and lungs. Reader and Bertolini’s eldest child was just five and the youngest only nine months old when the diagnosis of renal cell carcinoma rocked their young family’s world.

“You just go into an absolute fog,” Reader, now 49, says. “Everything you thought you knew to be true changes overnight. We never really understood the severity of his diagnosis. Nobody really explained that to us.

“They immediately put Mauro on treatment, which you think is going to poten-

tially correct this or at least help him stay as well as possible. But there was certainly no conversation that this is life limiting, this is terminal.”

Much of the last 18 months of Bertolini’s life were stressful and traumatic for the whole family as he cycled in and out of hospital.

“There was just a constant flow of treatments and interventions,” Reader says. “His lungs collapsed multiple times, so he would go and have procedures to try and reinstate that. And it just meant that he was in hospital for weeks at a time away from us.

“The kids were really frightened going to hospital, he was really lonely and frightened. And he should have been at home with us, we should have been receiving care at home.

“I felt like I was kind of carrying the weight of betrayal because if I had ever tried to tell him that I was really concerned about where things were going, if I had stepped out of that space of hope and positivity, I really felt like I would have been betraying him. I didn’t have the skills to do that. I didn’t know where to get help.

“For my kids, they didn’t see their dad very much in that last six months. And when they did, they were pretty frightened to see him, you know, hooked up to a bunch of machines in a pretty clinical, frightening setting.”

Bertolini died on 11 February 2011, intubated, in an acute care bed in the Royal North Shore Private Hospital in Sydney.

The night before, Reader had received a hurried call in the middle of the night from the hospital, wanting to discuss a do-not-resuscitate program that she struggled to understand and didn’t have time to process.

Before Bertolini’s consciousness began slipping away, he was administered increasing doses of morphine as his pain escalated, and he was terrified. His two youngest children did not get to say goodbye in those final moments. The scene was too confronting.

The lead-up to Bertolini’s death was so stressful and overwhelming for the family that the unfortunate but essential legal business of death was not attended to. He died without a will. A decade later, Reader is still tying up loose ends from his estate.

“The death that Mauro had was not what anybody would have wanted,” Reader says. “All of that precious memory-making and time that we should have spent together, that would have meant so much to the children now in their teenage years, didn’t happen.

“There was not a single conversation about care planning, or financial or legal planning. I was in an absolute blur and a whirlwind, and I was trying to get through one day at a time, I didn’t know how to approach it any other way.

“Even now, having to push the death certificate over the counter in front of strangers constantly over and over and over again, it’s a horrible experience.”

Now Reader, who has a background in business and brand strategy, is on a mission via the Violet Initiative, a national not-for-profit organisation that she founded, to bring the realities of death out of the shadows. The Violet Initiative, which

“In the Western world we have created a deathdenying culture, which seems unwilling to acknowledge and allow for planning a high-quality death.”

has an associated technology platform that helps people talk about and plan for the last stage of life, is chaired by former ACT

chief minister and former businesswoman Kate Carnell.

It’s a mission aimed squarely at improving the human experience of millions of people facing one of the most stressful and emotionally devastating experiences of their lives, but it’s also a project of critical importance to the sustainability of the nation’s health system.

“We are all going to die,” says Carnell. “The youngest baby boomer will turn 60 this year. And so this big chunk of the Australian population is now moving into the expensive part of healthcare. We’ve got to create a better system and a better experience for people in the final stage of life. It’s bleedingly obvious really.”

With the number of deaths each year expected to double by 2040 as Australia’s population continues to age, the health system will be crippled if the way we manage death and dying does not transform.

Already, 11% of the federal health

Melissa Reader and her children, Leio, Orlando and Mya, at their property in the Southern Highlands.

budget is spent on the 1% of people who die in any given year, with the costs estimated at $4bn annually. Much of that expense relates to the fact many people die in hospital in acute care beds, despite surveys consistently revealing most people want to die at home.

Too often medical intervention is the default response in the care of terminally ill people, without the time or space for an honest reckoning of the utility of such treatments that often simply delays the inevitable without consideration of the human cost.

“In the Western world we have created a death-denying culture, which seems unwilling to acknowledge and allow for planning a high-quality death,” says Australian National University professor Imogen Mitchell, executive director of research and academic partnerships at Canberra Hospital.

Mitchell’s thoughts are contained in a foreword to a research report, launched last week by the Violet Initiative, entitled Too Little, Too Late: The Experience of the Last Stage of Life Across Australia

They are based on her decades of experience as an intensive care unit specialist physician, bolstered by academic research she has led that indicates medical records tend to document formally that a patient is

dying only a very short time before death.

“In acute care hospitals, healthcare professionals are programmed to ‘fix’ patients even in their last stage of life,” Mitchell writes.

“The consequence of such a paradigm is that patients who are dying receive non-beneficial treatments, which can often be invasive and painful, in lieu of ensuring patients are comfortable, relieved of suffering and in an environment of their choice at the time of death.

“With the acute care hospitals bearing much of the load of the dying, it places an additional burden on to the already constrained public healthcare system.

“There is a burning platform for the need to change, given the significant increase in the elderly population over the next 20 years and the number of people dying.

“Without changing the way we care for our dying, individuals and their carers are unlikely to routinely experience a safe and high-quality death.”

The “burning platform” of which

Mitchell speaks is already aptly demonstrated in every public hospital in the country, where an average of one in four beds is taken up by the often frail elderly.

An Australian Medical Association report last year found that 20,000 patients at any time nationwide were stuck in public hospitals waiting to be discharged into appropriate residential or in-home care, and about 10% had been waiting for more than 35 days.

Sadly, some of these patients never make it out of hospital, with the experience of being stuck in a ward leading to rapid deterioration.

Hospital exit block not only means thousands of elderly people are denied the death at home they want, but across the system the knock-on effects are crippling: there are fewer beds for inpatient services, ambulances ramp with patients who cannot be offloaded, emergency departments are clogged, and elective surgery lists frequently must be cancelled.

Canberra grandmother June Emblen

Left: ICU professor and end-of-life expert Ken Hillman. Below: Former ACT chief minister and former businesswoman Kate Carnell.

was 92, fit and independent when a fluid build-up in her body triggered a hospital admission during the October long weekend in 2021. Although the immediate issues were resolved, she was experiencing heart failure and doctors did not believe she could live at home any longer.

But finding an aged care place amid such significant health challenges was almost impossible, says daughter Sheryle Moon. And palliative care usually is provided, sometimes in a hospice, only at the last possible moment, meaning many people miss out on being provided it at all.

Emblen deteriorated rapidly in hospital across the course of three weeks and died in November 2021.

“I think the majority of Australians want to go to sleep one night and not wake up the next morning,” Moon says. “It certainly would have been a preferred option for Mum. I think Mum realised she wasn’t going to go home to her own house. And maybe she just gave up the will. But she did want to die at home.”

Despite society’s modern obsession with longevity, as ICU professor and end-of-life expert Ken Hillman notes in the Violet Initiative research report, “the priorities … of the elderly often do not include living longer. Instead, their needs are society-based, such as a sense of self-worth, loneliness and community support.”

And the terminally ill generally also want to die at home, but it is not usual that any clinician has the time or inclination to embark on a frank end-of-life discussion. These patients instead are often “subject

“The priorities … of the elderly often do not include living longer. Instead, their needs are society-based, such as a sense of selfworth, loneliness and community support.”

to a conveyor belt from home to hospital, often ending on life support in an intensive care unit”, Hillman says.

The Productivity Commission, in its report Caring for Older Australians, outlined the challenges in end-of-life care as long

ago as 2011, but little changed in the intervening period. The commission described fragmented and uncoordinated healthcare delivery and governing systems.

“What we have found in Australia currently is that the investment in palliative care tends to be only in the last month of life,” Palliative Care Australia chief executive Camilla Rowland says. “We know that the investment in palliative care made by states and territories and the commonwealth is not keeping up with demand. We anticipate that there is a significant percentage of people who would benefit from palliative care who are not able to access it.

“So I would say to government, have a look at your in-home care packages, and ensure there’s sufficient funding to enable people to be supported, to be cared for and to die at home. From an economic perspective, also, it is much more cost effective to care for people in their home.”

Reader concurs with the call for greater funding, but she says the narrative on palliative care must be expanded significantly to take in not just discussions on how to

support people in their final weeks and days but to lift what is effectively a society-wide veil of silence on discussing death.

To assist the process, the Violet platform is a sophisticated digital resource that harnesses artificial intelligence to help people answer universal questions surrounding death. There is information on everything from how to have tender conversations with dying loved ones to estate planning and wills.

“There’s indisputably a huge taboo that still sits over this whole experience,” Reader says. “Conversations around last stage of life, death and dying remain really taboo. It’s often thought about to be one of the hardest conversations you’ll ever have.

“The current system is not serving anybody. It’s not serving the people who are in the last stage of life who are not having

the experience that they want or deserve. It’s not serving their families or caregivers well, and it’s putting enormous pressure on our health and aged care systems.

“And I wonder whether some of these medical interventions and treatments that are routinely given are just a response to the fact that the conversation is so hard, because it’s too hard to create the time and the space and the support to help people understand the health decline of someone that they love.

“I’m really interested that we’ve seen things like menopause and miscarriage move into the zeitgeist, and I think this is probably the last human social and health issue that needs to be drawn into the light.

“We’ve got to find the courage to talk about it. If you can open the door to these conversations, and it might take

multiple attempts, if you can open it up and make it safe, it is really transformative. I think it connects people at a deeper level, and it helps to really make the most of the time you have when time is the most precious thing.”

■ Natasha Robinson is Health Editor at The Australian. She is a Walkley Awards finalist and a Kennedy Awards winner. She began her career at The Australian in 2004.

From left: Time is beginning to crawl and Take care of all your memories by photographer Johnny Barker.

MAGIC &

MAGIC

1. A healthy child can’t be a bad thing, right? Genetic embryonic screening allows parents to ensure their child is healthy and free of inherited genetic diseases.

2. We are having fewer babies and later in life. Increased cost of living and career opportunities have affected the birth rate. Age-related fertility issues can be somewhat mitigated through gene editing.

3. We’re living longer and better. Certainly in some cases the ends don’t justify the means in relation to life-extending treatments. But the development of such practices across cancer research and disease prevention has resulted in huge uplift in our quality of life.

4. There’s an economic advantage in a longer-living population. Employees being able to work more productively and for longer is a positive for labour markets –that’s the economic rationale for a healthier and older population.

5. Gene editing and screening is the ultimate form of preventative treatment. Addressing these issues before birth will undoubtedly take the strain off overburdened hospitals and healthcare providers. Medicare and the NDIS make up some of the budget’s biggest spending items.

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH: MIDDLE GROUND

Medical science in the last 10 years has entered the realms of science fiction. Embryonic screening, biohacking and robotic surgeons are now realities of modern medicine. And at the end of life, we are finding more ways to keep people alive for longer. Healthy Life Expectancy (HALE) as measured by the World Health Organization (WHO) has failed to keep pace with the increases in total life expectancy. Effectively we’re living extra years but often in poor health. This is unsurprising given the default position of hospital and health professionals is to administer life-extending treatments to the terminally ill.

The end-of-life process for the elderly often means spending their last weeks undergoing invasive procedures, ending up on life support in ICU. As a result, there have been significant pressures applied to government to fund at-home palliative care programs that prioritise comfort over treatment.

MAYHEM

1. Are we really talking about eugenics?

Genetic modification is fraught, especially in relation to so-called designer babies. Throughout history the idea of a “perfect race” has been used as a justification for horrific actions. The opportunity for this to be used for social stratification is real.

Organisations like The Violet Initiative are having frank discussions around end-of-life care and the priorities of patients. Is the human cost of delaying the inevitable actually worth it?

Meanwhile, fertility clinics are looking to shift the other side of the equation. How do we ensure health keeps up with life expectancy? Their answer is embryonic screening. That is, analysing embryos before they’re fertilised to mitigate the risk of various genetic diseases.

Orchid Health, a fertility clinic operating out of Dubai, offers whole genome embryonic reports which, combined with IVF treatments, can give parents a menu of potential offspring to choose from.

While the focus is on disease prevention and doesn’t involve gene altering per se, it is certainly a fine line to walk. One Chinese cowboy scientist was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in producing genetically edited babies.

The ethics of making “superbabies” is incredibly murky, and one can’t help but see shades of the horrific eugenics experiments of the 20th century. However, there is something to be said for embryo screening during IVF. After all, surely prevention is better than cure? It may just be the key to unlocking the advancements in late-stage health that are currently lacking.

2. What happens to our resilience and adaptability? Notwithstanding the potential for discrimination, our understanding of the biological risks associated with eliminating natural variation is incomplete. The consequences of meddling in this area are completely unknown.

3. The human experience is informed by our differences and imperfections. Art, innovation and culture are a product of a diverse and imperfect population.

4. Is living longer really worth it? Any extension in life expectancy must be accompanied by an increased quality of life. We cannot prolong suffering through a focus on treatment without addressing quality at the end of life.

5. Aged care resources are already inadequate. Our economies are certainly not equipped to accommodate our population living significantly longer lives. Australian aged care expenses are already highly inflated requiring huge government subsidies and support.

“The

great question of the 21st century is whether humanity is up to the task of governing the powerful technologies it has created.”

DAVID KRIEGER

The case for space

SPACE IS THE FINAL FRONTIER, LARGELY UNREGULATED, AND TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES HAVE LED TO A BOOMING GLOBAL SPACE ECONOMY.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE PLANET AND LIFE ON EARTH?

RYAN BRUKARDT IN CONVERSATION WITH LUCIA RAHILLY

The space economy is at an inflection point. Space is reshaping our day-to-day lives in surprising ways, and could help leaders address some of our most pressing business and societal challenges in the future.

The universe isn’t the only thing expanding. Governments have invested in space technology for decades, and now business is accelerating its growth. On an episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey senior partner Ryan Brukardt spoke with global editorial director Lucia Rahilly about the global space economy, where innovation in space-based technology is generating a range of public and private sector opportunities that could reach $US1.8 trillion by 2035 – as well as the imperative to shape space responsibly. This is an edited transcript of that conversation.

THE ALLURE OF SPACE

Lucia Rahilly (LR): Tell us about your background and the origins of your passion for space as a profession.

Ryan Brukardt (RB): This might be a bit corny, but as a child, I would look up at space and see the stars. And I just got caught up in that. That’s where I started. I grew up in the ’80s with a space shut-

tle launching periodically here in the US, seeing those astronauts. I went to a space camp. I got a degree in physics and went into the Air Force. Space has always been a passion for me. And it’s great to be part of the thinking behind what’s going to happen in the industry and how it’s going to affect every person on Earth.

LR: What has happened in recent years to make space more accessible than in the past?

RB: Most people probably don’t realise just how much their daily lives interact with space. Every day, people get in cars assisted with navigation by GPS. Every day, people order food online, assisted by both communications and navigation provided by space assets. The presence of space in our lives is probably more ubiquitous than people think.

However, what really has happened in the last several years is access to space, the ability to get to space – the cost of that has come down dramatically. As you might imagine, when you’re trying to put assets into orbit, it can be very expensive. Through a variety of technological advancements, as well as entrepreneurship and private investment in particular, we’ve seen those costs come down.

LR: We’re talking about more than space tourism here, correct?

RB: That’s right. Most of the capabilities we have from space are provided by satellites and other unmanned platforms here in Earth’s orbit. Space tourism is part of the space economy, and people go to space for a variety of reasons – not just for scientific purposes but also for fun. That will increase. However, it is a smaller part of the economy today.

SPACEONOMICS

LR: Let’s turn to the research, starting with the definition of what we’re calling the space economy. What does that mean exactly?

RB: In the past, it has been a bit nebulous. Trying to define what the space economy means was why we set out to do this report to begin with. The way we think about it, there are two large halves. One half is what we call “the backbone”: launch vehicles, rockets, and satellites and all the ground equipment that makes those things work. The other half is what we call “the reach”: the applications that use that backbone to provide goods and services to people on Earth.

LR: Before we get into the specifics on applications, talk to us a bit about the capabilities that industries will be able to develop via investment in space.

RB: We think about them in three buckets. The first is connectivity. We have the ability to communicate with basically anywhere in the world using satellite communications technology. We can now do that with what’s called high bandwidth and low latency. That means we can send a lot of data very quickly. And the types of use cases that allows for are things like video conferencing, etc.

The second bucket is mobility: understanding where you are on Earth. We already do that with cell phones, but increasingly, we’ll do that with even smaller devices to know where anything is in the world.

The third bucket is deriving data that only space-based applications can provide. You will see this in Google Maps –electro-optical imagery or imagery that allows you to see what’s happening on Earth. It used to be that a company or a government would take a picture of Earth once a day or once a week, but now it’s able to take that picture very often.

So you’re able to use not only visual data but also other types of data on what we call a high return aspect to see what changes. Think about crops, for example, and understanding how much water there is to feed those crops, what you may need to do about that, and what actions you may want to take.

TRACKING MOBILITY – FOR BETTER AND WORSE

LR: Let’s pick up the mobility example. Is this improved, more accurate positioning data – or is it something fundamentally different from GPS? And what will we use it for?

RB: First, this data has gotten much more accurate, which allows certain use cases to emerge. Second, the ability to detect those signals used to require big antennas and receivers. Now, you can do it with your cell phone. But pretty soon you’ll be able to do it with even a very, very small low-power sticker that you could put on an asset.

For example, now you can get in your car and take out your phone, and it will

“When you ask who’s responsible, large Western governments and other governments are struggling with that question right now.”

help you navigate to where you want to go. But in the future, we’ll be able to track containers on ships to understand where they are, understand when they’ll arrive somewhere else, and be very discreet in tracking them. Both the proliferation of old use cases to new geographies, as well as the appearance of use cases that didn’t exist before, are going to propel growth.

LR: I live in New York City. We’ve got a

constant dinner table discussion about wearables and tracking, because my kids, terrifyingly, are beginning to be at large.

The research talks about personal tracking services through wearables. What are the applications here? Is privacy a quaint anachronism in this satellite era?

RB: The regulatory environment for space is still maturing. There is an idea that we need the appropriate amount of regulation to be able to manage things like privacy. What’s the air traffic control “system” for that? We talk about ways of responsibly managing bandwidth, to enable communications, whether through satellite or otherwise. This whole idea of privacy needs to come through an effective regulatory environment. That’s still catching up. The rate of technological innovation, in some ways, has outpaced that.

LR: Talk to us about disaster warnings and management. What role does space-based technology play? And what’s the business opportunity here?

RB: There are a couple aspects to disaster response. One is being able to give response agencies and governments

real-time information about what’s happening in a very clear and concise way. The second is communications. For emergency responders and governments, the ability to effectively communicate is extremely important, and communications often go down during disasters.

WHAT HAPPENS TO SATELLITES – AND TRASH?

LR: Another opportunity the research highlights is in-orbit servicing. Is the expectation that existing satellites can be upgraded and repaired or that they are replaced? And in the latter case, what happens to legacy equipment? Does it come down? Or is it up in space interminably?

RB: There is tension right now in the industry between upgrading and repairing satellites in orbit and putting up new satel-

lites to replace the old ones. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, and there’s a role for both. Going back to the regulatory question, it’s getting crowded up there, and there’s a real concern about these satellites running into each other. How do we manage that?

LR: Related, whose responsibility is it to pick up the garbage that is accumulating in space?

RB: That is a hotly debated topic. Many satellites in what we call low Earth orbit or lower orbits are a little bit self-cleaning. So they’ll degrade in orbit; they’ll burn up in our atmosphere. And then they’re just gone. There are satellites far away from Earth for which, to your question on in-orbit servicing, it makes sense in some cases to repair, upgrade, and put more fuel into them.

When you ask who’s responsible, large

Western governments and other governments are struggling with that question right now. What requirements do we put on people who build and launch satellites, to ensure space is free and open for the future? And what does that mean? What cost comes with that? What are the regulatory requirements?

HOW SPACE AFFECTS LIFE ON EARTH

LR: A criticism we sometimes hear about investment in space, or at least certain segments of the space economy, is that there is a genuinely urgent need to address challenges right here on Earth. Talk to us about ways space might help advance progress toward sustainability goals.

RB: When it comes to, “How can we affect life on Earth? Why would we invest there versus in other places?” I’d point to some of the use cases we talked about. The ability to provide essential access and then basically full access to the global knowledge base to places in the world that are underserved or unconnected is huge.

That allows for education. It allows for an understanding of what’s happening in local communities, as well as more broadly. To understand what’s happening, and in some cases hold others accountable for what’s happening on Earth, is something that really only space and some space assets can provide.

And there are a whole bunch of new technologies allowing us to better understand things like carbon, methane, et cetera, where it was hard to pinpoint or address some of the sources. We’re able to provide information and analytics, not only for private industry but also for governments to take action.

Think about a utility in Europe that has to make a choice every day: Do they turn on some kind of power plant that relies on fossil fuels? Or do they rely on wind? With space-based assets, they better predict how good the wind will be. And if they don’t turn on that fossil fuel generator that day, that’s carbon that doesn’t get released.

LR: Related, one of the issues that makes headlines is mining in space, lunar re-

Left: NASA astronauts Sumi Williams and Bruce Wilmore hold a press conference from the International Space Station (ISS) in August 2024.

source extraction, which seems potentially complex ethically, geopolitically, et cetera. Any considerations for businesses to keep in mind in that area, as space becomes increasingly commercialised?

RB: Our ability to extract certain minerals from either asteroids or other planetary bodies like the moon, and some of the decisions regarding responsible extraction, responsible use, and how that all works, are pretty far away.

What I do think is near-term, though, is that many more nations, many more private companies even, are going into space. And they will start to explore, for example, on the moon. The question is, how do we make sure that even in those early steps that we’re all being responsible? Are we cleaning up after ourselves and working well with others and taking care of all our natural resources, whether here or in other places?

THE NEW SPACE RACE

LR: We’ve obviously seen geopolitical risk intensify across the globe in recent years. Is geopolitics a factor in the economy of space? And if so, how?

RB: The short answer is yes. And it always has been. If you look back at the ’60s and the ’50s, there were a couple of countries in a space race. That generated a massive industrial base in those countries. As that race went on, it generated a lot of economic activity and a lot of technological advancement and, at the end of the day, some pretty spectacular achievements during that time period.

If you look today, we’re in another geopolitical environment where living, working, and using space for national security purposes will continue to increase. There are maybe more players that are going to be involved in space.

The number of space agencies has grown. It used to be a very, very small number. And now you see many in the Middle East, in Asia, even appearing in Europe. So the interest in space, the use of space, and in some cases, unfortunately, the exploitation of space is going to be an integral part of many countries’ national security constructs.

JOB CREATION

LR: Any other benefits you want to high-

light that the space economy might confer?

RB: One that it is really helping in many countries is job creation – and in particular, science – and engineering-type jobs, where there weren’t any. Even if a country can’t launch astronauts from its own soil, for example, it might develop its space economy by providing high-tech components for satellites, for launch vehicles, et cetera.

We’ve been working with some clients to think through this: if they were to do that in their country, what would that mean for their economy and for the development of their own universities and whatnot?

If you want to engineer and design high-tech components to be launched into space, you need to have engineers and scientists who understand that technology. You need to have universities that can produce those and a secondary educa-

In 2022 space junk was found near Dalgety on the banks of the Snowy River in NSW.

tion system that gets people interested in it. Many countries thinking through this emerging space economy come all the way back to how they think about their education systems and where, over the next 20 years, they’re going to generate economic returns for their GDP.

CHALLENGES TO CONSIDER

LR: What are the biggest challenges to the space industry at the moment?

RB: Regulation is definitely one. There is tension between how much innovation versus regulation we want as a global economy. The second is tension regarding how many players are involved, whether they’re private companies or governments. We don’t necessarily want a domain to tighten. We want free and open use. How is that going to evolve?

“There is tension between how much innovation versus regulation we want as a global economy... [and] tension regarding how many players are involved, whether they’re private companies or governments.”

The third is how rapidly some of these technologies will be applied to different types of business problems. And it’s on this third one where we spend a lot of our time with client work. We are working with clients in the mining industry and the agriculture industry, for example, to think through: how can they use those capabilities we talked about before ‒communications, mobility, and different types of analytics ‒ to solve their own business problems?

At the end of the day, if you’re an executive working in a particular industry, it doesn’t really matter how you fix your business problems: in space, on the ground, with some other technology, or with generative AI. What they really want is better outcomes for their customers and employees.

STARTING ON YOUR SPACE STRATEGY

LR: You’ve said in the research that the space economy is at an inflection point.

What do you expect to happen in terms of the dynamics of growth in coming years?

RB: The short answer is we’re going to see significant growth in the space economy over the next 10 years. When we set out to think about what’s going to happen in the economy, we didn’t want to use some top-down number. We wanted to think through all the use cases, both government and private sector use cases, and build this projection from the bottom up. We think that’s important because the space economy is likely to almost triple in the next 10 years.

And we talked about this whole concept of backbone and reach. Frankly, as someone who works in the space industry, we have a hard time talking about reach. We like to talk about satellites and launch vehicles. And it is really reach that’s going to propel the space economy from that US$630.0 billion to US$1.8 trillion. It’s an exciting time, which is why we say we’re at this inflection point, as more and more folks on Earth benefit from space and figure out how to use those capabilities.

■ This is an edited extract from The McKinsey Podcast, co-hosted by Lucia Rahilly and Roberta Fusaro. Ryan Brukardt is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Miami office. Lucia Rahilly is the global editorial director of McKinsey Global Publishing and is based in the New York office.

MAGIC &

MAGIC

1. Our knowledge of the universe and fundamental physics is expanding. Whether life exists beyond Earth is one of the most profound questions of all time. Governments have invested in space technology for decades, and now business is accelerating its growth.

2. Technological advancements will have a profound effect on the way we live. New innovations will lead to further developments in connectivity, mobility and data.

3. The space industry creates opportunities. New jobs and new markets lead to economic growth and the space economy is likely to almost triple in the next 10 years, from US$630 billion to US$1.8 trillion.

4. The space industry encourages international collaboration. Geopolitics is a major factor in the economy of space, and there are opportunities for countries to capitalise on their resources even if they are not main players in the space race. The possibilities are endless for broader global connection.

5. Space could spur the greatest-ever mining boom. Rare and as yet undiscovered minerals could positively impact widespread technological advances in medicine, travel, building materials and more.

TO INFINITY AND BEYOND: MIDDLE GROUND

Space remains the last frontier yet it’s now cheaper than ever to leave Earth’s atmosphere. Putting aside for a moment the terrifying prospect of successful space colonisation creating two tiers of humanity – those who remain terrestrial-bound on a dying planet and those who live extraterrestrially – there are endless possibilities for human advancement as the race for space speeds up.

The space revolution raises complex issues such as the environmental impact of space exploration and who will own what. On the upside, new jobs are being created and technologies expanded that will undoubtedly affect the way we live, mostly in positive ways.

Space exploration is important for expanding human knowledge, driving technological progress, and addressing long-term challenges such as planetary defence and the search for new habitats beyond Earth. But we have to take into account the significant costs, environmental concerns, and ethical implications of focusing too heavily on

MAYHEM

space at the expense of pressing issues here on Earth.

Investments in space exploration need to be carefully measured, ensuring that funds are allocated in ways that maximise benefits to humanity. For instance, space programs could prioritise research with direct earthly applications, such as climate monitoring, renewable energy technologies, and advancements in communication and medicine. Collaborative international efforts could be emphasised, promoting shared knowledge and reducing costs.

At the same time, environmental safeguards must be implemented to minimise space debris and pollution from rocket launches, while ethical frameworks should guide the exploration and potential exploitation of extraterrestrial resources, ensuring sustainability and equity. Space exploration should not be pursued at the expense of addressing urgent global challenges like poverty, healthcare, and climate change but would complement efforts to improve life on Earth.

A balanced approach would enable progress in space without neglecting the needs and responsibilities here at home.

The ultimate goal for space exploration is the pursuit of scientific discovery and technological advancement together with responsible stewardship of resources and ethical considerations.

1. The massive investment in space exploration could be better spent on more pressing issues. While it’s getting cheaper, space travel is still very costly. Resources could be better directed towards alleviating global problems such as poverty.

2. Rocket launches contribute to pollution and space debris. Who is responsible for collecting the garbage? What requirements do we put on people who build and launch satellites, to ensure space is free and open for the future?

3. Astronauts face dangers like radiation, equipment failure and isolation. What price is put on human life when it comes to space exploration? Could our space explorers bring new diseases back to Earth?

4. Lack of regulation means space is a wild frontier. Innovation versus regulation, private companies versus government –these tensions are real. The exploitation of space is going to be an integral part of many countries’ national security constructs.

5. Extraterrestrial environments could be exploited. Potential profit could lead the charge, overruling all regard for sustainability. And will we annoy extraterrestrial life that then decides to destroy humanity?

“The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways.”

ROBERT GREENE

A NEW LESSON FOR LEARNING

Pictured: Oliver Flax, 11, with the NSWEduChat AI tool.

The highwire act of outsourcing brain power and imagination

WHAT WILL WE LEARN FROM THE REAL-TIME EXPERIMENT OF LETTING AI LOOSE IN THE CLASSROOM?

NATASHA BITA EDUCATION EDITOR, THE AUSTRALIAN

Today’s children are the first generation to grow up with the magic and mayhem of artificial intelligence. Generative AI chatbots are being embraced as “study buddies’’ – or spurned as “cheatbots’’ – in school classrooms and university lecture rooms, in a global real-time experiment of AI in education.

So far, the talking tech is creating as many problems as it solves. Students are using chatbots as personal tutors to translate, simplify and explain information they can’t understand. Teachers are saving at least an hour a week by using chatbots to write newsletters and multiple-choice quizzes, and to plan lessons tailored to different ages, abilities and learning styles. But they’re also wasting time in the often futile effort to detect cheating and plagiarism, as switched-on students take a lazy short cut for homework and assignments. So what lessons can be learned from the early adoption of AI in the classroom? Is it helping students learn more and faster, or dumbing them down as children outsource their own brainpower and imagination to technology?

The rewards and risks of using AI in schools and universities are spelt out by Australia’s House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training, which spent a year investigating what it describes as the “exciting opportunities and high stakes risks’’ for AI in education.

“If managed correctly, GenAI in the Australian education system will be a valuable study buddy and not an algorithmic influencer,’’ the committee concludes in its report. AI could be used “to create or prompt questions, personalised quizzes and as a reflection tool … or as a personal tutor for students to give them immediate feedback on their progress, helping them to identify areas for improvement.’’

But the hazards of high-tech tutoring –misinformation, algorithmic bias, privacy breaches and even child abuse – are also exposed. An over-reliance on GenAI, the committee warned, “can adversely affect students’ problem-solving skills, interpersonal skills and decision-making skills, and lead to complacency and disengagement from teaching material.’’ The inquiry found that AI tools are already being used

to monitor children’s moods, create convincing deep fakes, rig research results and present fiction as fact.

The committee recommends that AI be banned in childcare centres and limited in primary schools to “bespoke tools’’ trained to work within the Australian curriculum.

Without these controls, it warns, “GenAI is prone to ‘hallucinations’, which can render its data unreliable. There is no expectation that GenAI needs to be truthful, even if the public thinks that it is.’’

NSW and South Australia are the first states to have officially adopted AI in schools. NSW has teamed up with Microsoft to build its own AI tool, NSWEduChat, which was trialled in 50 public schools in 2024 in anticipation of a statewide rollout in 2025. The chatbot can only draw upon information aligned with the NSW curriculum. Unlike global systems such as ChatGPT, NSWEduChat data is kept secure in the NSW Education Department’s own cloud environment in Sydney.

Students can’t use the chatbot to write essays. Instead, when they ask a question or give a command, the bot uses Socratic

questioning to prompt students to think and do their own research and writing. The bot can also automate some administrative tasks, saving teachers involved in the NSW trial an hour a week, on average.

At Sydney Technical High School, deputy principal Kirk Grinham says the technology is “saving at least an hour a day’’. Given that 95% of students speak another language at home, Grinham uses NSWEduChat to translate school newsletters into Chinese and Korean dialect for parents who can’t read English. Many students are using the chatbot to translate words or concepts they find difficult to comprehend in English.

But the bot’s most powerful purpose is to instantly upskill teachers who are teaching out of field, or filling in for unfamiliar classes. “You might be trained as an English teacher but find yourself in a science class,’’ Grinham says. “You can engage with NSWEduChat and ask it to give you 10 quick quizzes, or ask it to find helpful YouTube clips about science concepts or put together formative assessment tasks.

“If you’re a PE [physical education] teacher, teaching maths, you can ask it for different questions on algebra, linked back to the Australian curriculum, so you know it is appropriate and meaningful. It ensures quality control for out-of-field teachers. And in administration, for things that might normally take an hour or two – like putting together the school newsletter, or a breakdown of information, or creating calendars – you can get it done in 10 minutes.’’

Grinham says the hour he saves each day is now spent on instructional leadership. “It means I can be more impactful where it matters most,’’ he says. “It might be working with students directly, or their parents – things no robot can replace.’’

This doesn’t stop sneaky students using mainstream chatbots to cheat, but Grinham says teachers have “become very adept at spotting generative AI fingerprints in text’’. “There is a certain cadence

“If academics think they can spot an AI-generated paper, they should think again”

patterns in the text they were trained on. “These patterns can lead to the overuse of certain stylistic words and phrases, resulting in works that don’t closely resemble genuine human writing,’’ he says.

and rhythm and structure to AI-generated text that teachers are very good at spotting these days,’’ he says. “They know their students so well, they can see when something doesn’t have the voice of their student.’’

A giveaway is when students use flowery language and repetitive clichés. Central Queensland University Associate Professor Ritesh Chugh, from the School of Engineering and Technology, has noted a surge in the use of words such as “delves’’, “showcasing”, “underscores”, “pivotal”, “realm” and “meticulous’’. He says large language models like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot suggest words based on

Detecting AI-generated essays is a headache for university administrators, given the difficulty in proving its use. In an eye-opening experiment, University of Wollongong law lecturer Dr Armin Alimardani discovered that AI had a 50% chance of passing an exam question on criminal law. Dr Alimardani used ChatGTP to generate 10 answers to an end-ofyear exam question, and then wrote out the responses by hand. He mixed the AI -generated answers with papers written by real students, and handed them to tutors for grading. Not one tutor suspected the work had been AI-generated. “So if academics think they can spot an AI generated paper,’’ Dr Alimardani concluded, “they should think again.’’

The universities’ watchdog, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), has ordered every university to submit its policies on the use of AI in academia. “There is little value in ignoring AI or implementing blanket bans on particular tools or technologies,’’ it has told universities. “As AI use becomes commonplace across schools and workplaces, it will be increasingly important to consider how these tools are integrated into learning and teaching in higher education in intelligent ways.’’

The potential for cheating is bad enough – who wants a doctor or engineer who relied on chatbots to pass exams? But TEQSA has also raised the alarm over the risks to research, warning the parliamentary inquiry that AI “has the capacity to not only generate fake data and images, but also entire studies and journal articles’’.

The parliamentary committee has called on the Albanese government to

Far Left: Law lecturer Dr Armin Alimardani; Below: Teacher Winnie Liu with William Anderrson, 10, Oliver Flax, 11, and Violet Barzegari, 10, using NSWEduChat at Anzac Park Public School in Cammeray, Sydney.

legislate safeguards to prevent children being exploited by AI companies that cash in on student data, or paedophiles who can use AI to groom children for abuse.

“There are many privacy risks around students’ personal data, including profiling and grooming,’’ the committee warned. “Chatbots may … display content that is sexual or violent to children.

“Without strong guardrails, AI could cause great harm.’’

■ Natasha Bita is Education Editor at The Australian. She has won multiple journalism awards, including a Walkley Award and a Queensland Clarion Award for feature writing. She has been at News for 25 years.

MAGIC

1. AI levels the playing field. AI tools have the potential to provide unparalleled access to resources and teaching for those in areas of the globe where access to education has been limited or non-existent. AI can certainly fill the gap.

2. Learning can be personalised. Different abilities require different teaching approaches and AI has the ability to cater specifically for students’ needs. South Korea and the UAE are already introducing personalised AI teaching programmes.

3. AI complements rather than replaces teachers. AI has the potential to release teachers from menial tasks so they can focus on enriching the experience of students in their classrooms.

4. Students have unprecedented access to resources. As a result of the AI revolution, students have ease of access to millions of primary and secondary sources across history, science and the arts. This knowledge hub means students have an unbelievable depth of resources at their disposal.

5. Insights provided by AI teaching tools can drive academic success. AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data to analyse performance means it can pinpoint patterns and trends in students’ learning behaviours. Those insights can drive academic success.

A NEW LESSON FOR LEARNING: MIDDLE

GROUND

Unfiltered AI can’t be trusted around kids. It lies, it cheats and it bullies.

Generative AI gives children instant access to uncensored information – true, fake, fair or foul. It possesses the seemingly magical ability to produce articulate assignments, imaginative essays and creative works of art.

This genie-like power to create words and images upon command relies on machines that feed upon mysterious algorithms, harvested from the history of human knowledge and communication.

When AI gleans information from credible sources, such as history books, textbooks and scientific studies, it can help students learn.

But it also fishes for data in the sewer of social media, plagiarising strangers’ Facebook and Instagram posts to spew forth fake news, discriminatory views and conspiracy theories that can convince children who lack the maturity

MAYHEM

or knowledge to tell fact from fiction.

AI needs to be censored, just as adults have always censored kids’ TV programs, books and video games to ensure they are safe and ageappropriate. Predators can use AI trickery to groom gullible children, by impersonating people and appealing to kids’ online interests. Without controls over content, AI exposes children to pornography and graphic violence, and enables them to bully classmates with deep-fake imagery.

In schools, AI must be harnessed into ageappropriate teaching tools and apps that can only access high-quality and verified information tied to the curriculum.

Even with such controls, the risk is that children will become so accustomed to the convenience of AI that they might never learn the fundamental skills of reading, writing or counting – let alone critical thinking – without assistance from a machine.

Childhood should be the age of innocence. Kids need to discover the potential of their own imagination and explore the real world before they’re exposed to the adults-only realms of artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

Safeguards for children are a must for any adoption of AI in our schools.

Natasha Bita, Education Editor, The Australian

1. AI doesn’t discriminate (sort of). AI consumes everything available to its data scrapers, true and false, nuanced and not. While it has access to the best human ingenuity and knowledge, it also consumes misinformation and conspiratorial content and the qualitative difference is not clear to users.

2. The magic of education lies in the human element. Relationships with teachers and other students make learning environments special. Without careful thought about the role of AI, we risk sucking the soul out of the classroom.

3. Plagiarism and cheating are rife. Any time saved by teachers using AI tools is probably eaten up scrutinising the work of students who misuse them.

4. Imagination is important. AI outputs are lightweight compared to the best of human literature. Children learning the fundamentals of reading and writing using AI tools miss out on appreciation for the beauty in prose and the role of imagination. Universities are seeing an uptick in the use of repetitive cliches.

5. AI learning is high risk without regulation. Decentralised AI learning without proper regulation and oversight means children are at increased risk of exposure to age-inappropriate content.

The biggest blunder we’ve ever made with our children:

Jonathan Haidt’s case for change

THE REVOLUTION STARTS HERE: WE’VE OVER-PARENTED OUR KIDS – BUT LET THEM RUN WILD ON SOCIAL MEDIA. NOW A GROWING MOVEMENT OF FED-UP PARENTS ARE FIGHTING TO KEEP KIDS OFF SMARTPHONES.

PAUL KELLY

EDITOR-AT-LARGE, THE AUSTRALIAN

How would you feel as a parent volunteering your first child, aged nine, to be raised on Mars in an ambitious project to create the first human settlement outside Earth?

Your child is keen to do it, and loads of their friends are going as well – even with puberty looming for them all. But after investigating, you find that no proper studies have been conducted about the impact on children of living on Mars and, even worse, the planners do not seem to care about the children’s safety.

Would you let your child go?

“Of course not. You realise this is a completely insane idea.”

This metaphor is offered by American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Ethical Leadership at the New York University Stern School of Business, at the start of The Anxious Generation, his new book on the contemporary crisis of childhood, what is at stake and what should be done.

Haidt uses the Mars metaphor because this is exactly what has happened, here on Earth, in our own homes and with disastrous consequences for our children. He says the evidence and the data are in.

His chilling thesis is that childhood has been transformed by a small group of Big Tech companies. For the first time in human history, an entire cohort – Gen Z, born after 1995 – has become the collective subject for a global social experiment on a new way of growing up. It was triggered by the embrace of the smartphone, which Haidt says “changed life for everyone after its introduction in 2007”.

“It wasn’t until teens got smartphones that they could be online all the time, even when away from home,” Haidt says. “According to a survey of US parents conducted by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, by 2016, 79% of teens owned a smartphone as did 28% of children between the ages of eight and 12.

“As adolescents got smartphones, they began spending more time in the virtual world. A 2015 report by Pew Research confirms these high numbers: one out of every four teens said that they were online ‘almost constantly’. By 2022, that number had nearly doubled to 46%.

“These extraordinarily high rates suggest that even when members of Gen Z are not on their devices and appear to be doing something in the real world, such as sitting in class, eating a meal, or

talking with you, a substantial portion of their attention is monitoring or worrying (being anxious) about events in the social metaverse.

“As the MIT professor Sherry Turkle wrote in 2015 about life with smartphones, ‘We are forever elsewhere.’ This is a profound transformation of human consciousness and relationships, and it occurred for American teens between 2010 and 2015. This is the birth of the phonebased childhood.”

Haidt argues that our society has presided over “the rewiring of childhood” with this new technology. The years from 2010 to 2015 marked “the definitive end of the play-based childhood”, he says.

Interviewed by The Weekend Australian Magazine, Haidt says of the experiment with the smartphone: “There’s never been anything this big that we’ve done to children ... it’s affecting the majority of children, not just in the United States, but in all the English-speaking countries and in Scandinavia. And while I cannot say that growing up on a smartphone is as bad as being lead poisoned or sent to work in a factory when you’re young, what I can say is that as a choice we made about how to raise our children thinking it was OK, this

is the biggest blunder we have ever made.”

In The Anxious Generation Haidt documents this blunder in all its dimensions: how childhood has been transformed, the evidence showing the harm being done, how to reverse the damage – “what we can and must do now” – and how parents, schools and governments can implement that agenda.

In possibly the most startling aspect of the interview, Haidt is optimistic that the processes damaging children can be reversed. “Most parents are fed up,” he says. “Most parents hate what’s going on and they want to change. They just don’t know how.” The key, he says, is to take collective action.

Haidt’s purpose in the book is to promote four norms that, if adopted, “will turn around the rising rates of mental illness and [enable us to] raise much healthier kids”. He says he has written the book not just for parents and teachers but for anyone who cares about children and wants to understand how this transformation in human relationships has occurred.

The Pew Research that Haidt quotes – the 2015 study that found one in four teens was online “almost constantly”, a figure that by 2022 had risen to 46%, with “almost constantly” extending up to 16 hours a day – is startling. This is a substantial time in which children are “not fully present”, he says.

In assessing the studies Haidt says US teens have displayed a “very large upturn in major depressive episodes”, beginning around 2012. The trend is sharper for girls than boys. Depression has become roughly two and a half times more prevalent across all races and social classes. Studies on anxiety show a similar pattern. A 2023 study of American college students found that 37% reported feeling anxious “always” or “most of the time”, and an additional 31% felt this way “about half the time”. Emergency room visits for self-harm by adolescent girls nearly tripled between 2010 and 2015. The suicide rate for young adolescent girls increased by 167% between 2010 and 2021. (He includes some Australian data, and it is alarming, showing a big rise in mental health hospitalisation from 2010 to 2015, with an 81% increase

“Parents have made two mistakes – they have been over-protective, inhibiting playbased real-world activities, and they have been helpless at managing social media.”

for girls and a 51% increase for boys.)

Haidt says the internet era came in two waves: the 1990s saw an increase in the paired technologies of personal computers and internet access, but with no decline in teen mental health; the turning point was the invention of the smartphone. Apple’s first iPhone was launched in 2007 – and three years later came the iPhone 4 with

a front-facing camera, making it easier to take selfies. In 2012 Facebook (now Meta) bought Instagram and began using algorithmically curated news feeds, setting up content designed to hook kids and motivating other platforms to join the race.

Says Haidt: “By 2015 teens were mostly just going home and sitting on their beds and communicating through a screen.”

During these years “social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast”, he argues.

Asked who is responsible for the rewiring of childhood, Haidt says: “The tech companies and in particular, Meta. So is the US Congress – it gave the companies immunity against lawsuits. The situation we’re in is that a few giant companies have been competing for our children’s attention. They’ve been exposing them to harmful content. They are rearranging their lives and we can’t do anything about it. We can’t sue them.

“Congress isn’t doing anything to stop them. In the United States, we really messed up; we set the standards for the world and now the world is suffering. I hope that you in Australia, in the UK

and the EU, can regulate and impose consequences because we seem unable to do anything in the US.”

The social media, phone-based world is now even eroding democracy, he adds.

“It’s hard for citizens to play their role in a democracy when we cannot establish shared facts. I don’t think we will again have shared facts or shared truths. This is going to make it very hard to have democratic deliberation.”

And there’s a related warning: “If children born after 1995 are more anxious, much less risk tolerant, they’re much less likely to take the risks involved in starting a new company or doing anything ambitious – and so if the coming generation has less confidence and more anxiety, I think there will be economic and political consequences.”

The data shows the first generation of Americans who went through puberty with smartphones in their hands “became more anxious, depressed, self-harming and suicidal”, says Haidt – it’s as though “we sent Gen Z to grow up on Mars in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children”. In the span of just a few years, the traditional play-based childhood with plenty of time outdoors was replaced by a phone-based childhood – and the social consequences are immense. On a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in an hour, each

accompanied by posts (likes) showing whether the post was a success or a failure.

“Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented,” Haidt says. “They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behaviour in a matter of hours, whereas parents can struggle unsuccessfully for years to get their children to sit up straight or stop whining. Parents don’t get to use the power of conformity bias, so they are often no match for the socialising power of social media.”

The related impact concerns prestige bias. Kim Kardashian pioneered a new path to high prestige, beginning with a sex tape that went public on the internet, which led to a reality TV show. Platform designers in Silicon Valley targeted human psychology by displaying the success of every post via likes, shares, comments and retweets. “When the programmers quantified prestige based on the clicks of others, they hacked our psychology in ways that have been disastrous for young people’s social development,” Haidt explains. “On social media platforms the ancient link between excellence and prestige can be severed more easily than ever.”

The upshot is that young people of-

Graph: Rate at which young Australians (ages 12-24) were kept in hospital over night for mental health reasons

Left: Author Jonathan Haidt

ten learn ways of “talking, behaving and emoting that may backfire in an office, family or other real-world setting”. Haidt warns that “identity, selfhood, emotions and relationships may all be different when they develop online rather than in real life”. What gets rewarded and punished – “above all, what is desirable” – is determined by “the thousands of posts, comments and ratings that the child sees each week”.

Parents have made two mistakes – they have been over-protective, inhibiting playbased real-world activities, and they have been helpless at managing social media.

Haidt’s book quotes a 14-year-old girl from Rhode Island, Isabel Hogben, saying: “I was ten years old when I watched porn for the first time. I found myself on Pornhub. The website has no age verification, no ID requirement, not even a prompt asking me if I was over 18. The site is easy to find, impossible to avoid. Where was my mother? In the next room, making sure I was eat-

ing nine different fruits and vegetables.”

As soon as the Gen Z cohort arrived on university campuses with its sensitivity to anxiety and depression, Haidt says, “college counselling centres were overwhelmed”. Books, words, speakers and ideas “that caused little or no controversy in 2010 were, by 2015, said to be harmful, dangerous or traumatising”.

Haidt has identified four foundational harms of the new phone-based childhood – social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction. Gen Z began socially distancing as soon as they got smartphones. A Canadian college student wrote to Haidt saying: “There is hardly a sense of continuity on campus. Often times I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30-plus students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones, afraid to speak and be heard by their peers.”

The average teen now gets only seven hours’ sleep per night and receives about

11 notifications on their smartphone per waking hour. Facebook intentionally hooked teens, as revealed by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, by delving into teen brain vulnerability – with the aim being to keep users engaged for longer with “rewards, novelty and emotions”.

Haidt quotes Stanford University addiction researcher Anna Lembke, writing: “The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.” Giving adolescents smartphones in the early 2010s meant the Big Tech companies were able to use techniques “all day long, training them like rats during their most sensitive years of brain rewiring”; the companies developed addictive apps “that sculptured some very deep pathways into our children’s brains”.

Girls are vulnerable because they see social media as the opportunity to expand their social networks but in the virtual world, Haidt says, they are “subjected to

Graph: Young adults in Australia reporting high or very high psychological distress

hundreds of times more social comparisons than girls had experienced for nearly all of human evolution”, including “more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivise and facilitate relational aggression”.

In the tech company business model, children are not the clients; they are the product, says Haidt. “These things are given to us for free,” he says. “But we give them our attention, which in this age is more valuable than oil. It’s more like gold. The advertisers compete desperately to get our attention. The business model developed by Facebook and other companies required psychological manipulation and engineering to grab hold of eyeballs and hold onto them as long as possible.”

He warns that it is urgent to reverse the trend, because “we are losing a generation”. It’s a crisis that will have profound economic and political ramifications. Haidt calls social media “a fountain of bedevilments” – it trains people to think exactly contrary to the world’s religious and spiritual traditions: the message is, “think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers.” There can be little dispute about his conclusion: “From a religious perspective, social media is a disease of the mind.”

What is the answer?

Haidt rejects the frequent response he hears: “I agree with you, but it’s too late.” He doesn’t pretend everything he says will be proved right. But he says four “foundational” reforms need to happen – more unsupervised play and childhood independence; no smartphones before high school (but allowing basic phones up to age 14); no social media before 16; and phone-free schools. If implemented, Haidt predicts a “substantial improvement” in adolescent mental health within two years. But it would require collective action: each parent who acts makes it easier for other parents to act. The same applies for each school and each community.

“Sadly there is a lot of despair,” he says. “There’s a lot of resignation. But I have not met a parent who is glad their child is on social media. I have not yet met a teacher or school principal who is happy that the kids have phones. I ask the parents:

“Haidt has identified four foundational harms of the new phone-based childhood – social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation and addiction.”

Asked how he thinks the tech companies will react, he says: “They’re making decisions based on what they think is best for their shareholders. I don’t expect any of them to act out of the goodness of their hearts. My hope is the environment will change so that protecting children, not harming them, comes to be something that benefits their shareholders.”

Haidt has been working for years on three major sets of problems – liberal democracy, universities and young people. “The democracy problem is huge,” he says. “And I don’t know how to fix it. The university problem is big, and we’re making progress and things are beginning to turn around. The adolescent mental health problem is gigantic, yet it’s actually easy to fix because we don’t have to persuade people of anything. So we get it.”

why did you give them a phone? And they say, because everyone else did. I ask the principals: why don’t you go phone-free? They say because a small number of parents will freak out and scream at me.

“I believe there is now a majority of parents who want their kids to have a more phone-free childhood. There is a very large majority of teachers and heads of schools who want to go phone-free. I’m confident we’re going to win this by the end of 2025. The revolution has already begun in Britain. It’s a collective action problem. But if we all do it together at the same time, it’s done.

“Nobody’s arguing against me. Nobody’s saying I’m wrong. Nobody, other than the tech companies. The parents are for it, the school principals are for it, and even the kids are for it.”

Haidt sees the childhood crisis not as a moral failure but “as a kind of business tragedy”. He says we rewired childhood thinking “it was going to be good” for kids. Only later did we discover this was wrong. “People who work at Facebook and Meta are good people who want to make the world a better place,” he says. “I’m not moralistic about them. But I think the leadership has pursued policies that ended up hurting a lot of kids.”

His task is not just to rescue kids, but to rescue parenthood – to see a good parent as “one who gives their kids a play-based childhood and doesn’t send a kid off to Mars at the age of ten”. His ambition for his book The Anxious Generation is “to reclaim human life for human beings in all generations”.

■ Paul Kelly is Editor-at-Large at The Australian and has spent most of his journalism career at News since joining in 1971. Former Editor-in-Chief of The Australian, he is the nation’s foremost analyst of politics and foreign and domestic policy.

■ Jonathan Haidt’s most recent book is The Anxious Generation (2024). His previous books include The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), The Righteous Mind (2012) and The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Haidt also writes at After Babel on Substack.

MAGIC &

MAGIC

1. Smartphones are great for connectivity. It’s easy to stay in touch with friends, family and communities and take up opportunities to expand social networks. Never before in history have humans been so connected to each other on a global scale.

2. Information is received and shared at high speed. We’re all used to having realtime news, knowledge and educational content at our fingertips and kids expect to have that too. In 2023, 20% of Australians said social media was their main source of news, up from 17% in 2022.

3. Being active online means you’ll never be left behind. Social media is a great way to know what everyone else is doing, wearing, buying and thinking about.

4. The world of social media is great for creative expression. Individuals can not only freely share their work, ideas and personal achievements, they can get direct feedback.

5. Promote your cause. Social media is a highly effective way to amplify voices, mobilise communities and organise support for social, political and charitable causes.

KICKING THE SOCIAL HABIT:

MIDDLE GROUND

The smartphone has become an integral part of modern-day life, offering significant advantages such as increased connectivity, access to information, business growth opportunities, and platforms for social activism, but it also brings huge challenges that are growing exponentially, mostly through overuse. These include mental health concerns, privacy risks, scams, misinformation and cyberbullying.

Users can enjoy the benefits of social media but they have to be aware of the risks. This is especially true of the very young and the elderly, who are most susceptible to scams.

For individuals, this means setting boundaries to prevent overuse and practising digital literacy to distinguish reliable information from misinformation.

For the tech monopolies, this means they have to mitigate the harms, harassment and divisive rhetoric and face the consequences if they do not.

To achieve this, the tech monopolies and regulators need to collaborate to create policies that protect user privacy, combat the spread of false information, and enforce stricter antibullying measures. Transparency in how personal data is collected and used is key, and there should be more accessible tools for users to control their online presence.

Social media needs to find the right balance between the benefits of responsible engagement and the need to mitigate and take responsibility for its negative effects.

The challenges lay largely with the tech monopolies to change the algorithmic bias that can amplify polarising or harmful content. It is a conflict between their business interests and user well-being. But there is also a responsibility on the users to take active roles in reporting any harmful material such as scams and inappropriate content.

The balanced approach ensures that smartphones and associated social media use enhances rather than detracts from the quality of people’s lives, encouraging healthy online behaviour while maintaining the platform’s role in fostering global communication and innovation.

MAYHEM

1. Mental health issues are on the rise, especially for young people. Living life through a smartphone can contribute to anxiety, depression and other mood disorders. It can increase body image dissatisfaction and loneliness.

2. Misinformation can spread like wildfire. False information and conspiracy theories travel quickly and widely on social media. This is particularly dangerous for younger minds; the long-term effects are emerging.

3. Social media is largely a selfregulated arena. Government regulation against cyberbullying, harassment and harmful content is evolving but social media companies are not taking responsibility for meeting their (implied) social obligations to mitigate safety, security and privacy risks.

4. Too much time on a smartphone distorts reality. The lack of sleep and reduced time in real-life interactions that often accompany compulsive phone use affects productivity, health and wellbeing.

5. Smartphones encourage intense self focus. There is plenty of evidence of a link between social media and a rise in the need for attention and approval and narcissistic behaviour. That’s not good for individuals or society.

“The future is already here it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

WILLIAM GIBSON

ILLUSTRATED IN THE STYLE OF VICTOR VASARELY

I’ve lost 19kg taking a magic pill.

But am I at risk?

JOHANN HARI, WHO HAS STRUGGLED WITH HIS WEIGHT SINCE CHILDHOOD, DECIDED TO TRY OZEMPIC AND WAS DELIGHTED WITH THE RESULT. THEN HE TALKED TO SCIENTISTS ABOUT ITS POSSIBLE IMPACT ON THE BRAIN AND BEGAN TO HAVE SECOND THOUGHTS.

JOHANN HARI WRITER AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR

When the financial analyst Emily Field was commissioned by Barclays to predict the likely economic implications of the new generation of weight-loss drugs, she came back with a startling answer: this will be comparable to the invention of the smartphone. For 40 years, people have been gaining weight, with a trebling in global obesity rates since 1975 ‒ but that trend now looks likely to be slammed into reverse. These new drugs, working in a very different way to previous weight-loss drugs, cause remarkable levels of physical shrinking: for Ozempic and Wegovy, people lose on average 15% of their body weight in a year, while for the newer drugs coming down the line, it’s a staggering 24%. As these drugs become more widely available, we are going to see a rapid shrinking of large parts of the population. Financial analysts have advised airlines that they will need to spend less money on jet fuel, because the average passenger is going to weigh so much less. When I first learnt about these drugs, I realised they were going to deeply challenge me ‒ in complex ways. Ever since my late teens, my weight has seesawed

between being slightly underweight and obese. I kept receiving wake-up calls about where I could be heading that never quite woke me up. For example, on the afternoon of Christmas Eve in 2009, I went to my local branch of KFC in east London. I gave my standard order ‒ a bucket of grease and gristle so huge that I’m too embarrassed to list its contents here. The man behind the counter said, “Johann! We have something for you.” He walked off behind where they fry the chicken and returned with all the other staff who were working that day. Together, they handed me a massive Christmas card. I opened it. They had addressed it, “To our best customer,” and all written personal messages. My heart sank, because I thought, this isn’t even the fried chicken shop I come to the most.

Then, just as Ozempic came onto the market, I received two jolts. I realised that I was now older than my grandfather ever got to be. He died of a heart attack at 44, and many of the men in my family are prone to serious heart problems. Around the same time, I learnt that an old friend ‒ one of the wittiest people I have ever known ‒ had died in her forties of a

heart attack that took place while choking on food. We had built our friendship on our love of junk food and laughing at our swelling weights. Those jokes now turned to dust in my mouth.

I could immediately see the appeal of a drug that interrupts your unhealthy relationship with food and seems to reset it. But I was also intensely conflicted. I felt like I had seen this film before: once every few decades, going right back to the Twenties, a miracle anti-obesity drug is announced and people start to hoover it up ‒ only for some catastrophic side-effect to be discovered, leaving a trail of sickened people in its wake. When it comes to the body, can there really be such a thing as a (smaller) free lunch?

To investigate this, I spent a year taking these drugs and doing a deep dive into their effects all over the world, from the United States to Japan to Iceland, interviewing more than 100 of the leading experts and others affected by these drugs in different ways. Almost at once, I began to see their power. Two days after I first injected myself with Ozempic, I went to Camden Market to meet up with a friend. I have wandered through its food

stalls, chowing down a multicultural range of junk, since I was a small kid. I walked through all my favourite venues, and I experienced something unprecedented: I didn’t want to eat any of it. In the weeks that followed, it felt like my appetite had been almost amputated.

Even more strikingly, my tastes changed. I wanted healthier food. My godsons wanted to go to McDonald’s, and when I didn’t order anything, they stared at me, agape, and asked if I had been replaced by an impostor. Over the next year, I lost three stone [19 kilos]. I knew it was possible this was saving my life: people taking the drugs have a reduction in their risk of heart attack and stroke by 20%, and this is just one of many remarkable health benefits that take place when you lose a large amount of weight. We know from studies of bariatric surgery patients — the best comparison group for the effects of these drugs — that following their operation, they are 60% less likely to die of cancer and 92% less likely to die of diabetes-related causes.

These drugs are often described by the people using them as “magic” — but as I explored the science behind them with the people doing cutting-edge work on their effects, I realised there are three ways in which they could be thought of in this way. The first is in the sense that they could be a solution to this problem — one so swift and so simple that it seems almost miraculous. There were days when it felt like this, and I thought to myself, all my life I craved this crappy food and now a little jab once a week has taken it all away? The second

Above: Ozempic and Wegovy are the same drug, marketed under different names. Opposite: Nicole and Duncan Astley from WA who have collectively lost 50-plus kilos on Ozempic.

is that they could turn out to be an illusion that, when you look closer, is not what it seems — a magic trick. Or they could be magic in a third sense. Think about the most famous stories about magic — Aladdin or Fantasia. You get your wish, but your wish unfolds in ways you could never have imagined and causes all kinds of chaos. I realised I needed to find out: what kind of magic are these drugs?

It was disconcerting to learn how much we don’t know. Startlingly little is known about their long-term effects or even how they work. We know a few things, for sure. When you eat something, after a while your pancreas produces a hormone named GLP-1 (glucagon-like peptide 1), which is part of your body’s natural signals saying, stop eating, you’ve had enough. But nat-

ural GLP-1 only stays in your system for a few minutes, and then it’s washed away. So Ozempic and Wegovy (the same drug, marketed under different names) inject you with an artificial copy of GLP-1 that stays in your system for a whole week. That’s why I felt so full, so fast.

At first, it was thought that since this is a gut hormone, the effects of these drugs are primarily on your gut. But now the picture is shifting. Interviewing leading neuroscientists and studying their research, I learnt that there are GLP-1 receptors in your brain too — and many scientists believe that these drugs are primarily affecting their users by changing how their brains function. It felt like a more intimate and more risky transformation. As I studied the science, I discovered there are

12 significant risks associated with these drugs, beyond the well-known side-effects of nausea and constipation. One of them may be connected to this tricky question of how the drugs work on our brains.

Six months after I started taking Ozempic, I noticed something. Every morning, when I woke up, I experienced two sensations at the same time. I felt that my body was shrinking. I could put my hands on my stomach and feel that, where I had been pot-bellied, I was now lean. But I also felt something else. My mood was strangely muted. I didn’t feel as excited for the day as I normally do. I don’t want to overstate this — I wasn’t depressed. I was, some of the time, emotionally dulled.

There are two broad ways of thinking about the potential psychological effects of these drugs. The first is that the drugs affect your psychology and how you think about yourself, and this may make some people feel sharply worse. The second is that they have a physical effect on your

“I could immediately see the appeal of a drug that interrupts your unhealthy relationship with food and seems to reset it. But I was also intensely conflicted.”

got by on 1,800 calories. Those other calories, it’s clear, were doing something else.

About seven months after I started taking these drugs, I had a rough day. I was in Las Vegas, investigating the murder of somebody I knew and loved for a book I am working on. It was harrowing. On autopilot, I went to a branch of KFC, and ordered what I would have asked for a year before. I sat there with a bucket of chicken and a feeling of sadness I wanted to drown in saturated fats, and realised I couldn’t eat it. Colonel Sanders was staring down at me from the wall and it felt like he was asking, “What happened to my best customer?” I thought: you’re just going to have to feel your feelings.

brain. (Of course, it could be some mixture of both.) I started by investigating the psychology. Before I began writing my book, if you had asked me why I ate, I would have said, obviously, the main reason is to sustain my body. But then Ozempic stripped me down to the core physical function of eating, and it dawned on me how little of my relationship with food had been driven by this urge. Before Ozempic, I ate around 3,200 calories a day. Now, when I ate only to keep my body going, I

Nearly 31% of women and 19% of men say they respond to stress by eating in order to feel better. Sitting in that branch of KFC, I realised something sobering. It’s only when your eating habits are taken away from you that you understand the job they were doing for you all along.

This shouldn’t be surprising — because we can look at what happens in the only other circumstance where people lose dramatic amounts of weight as a result of a medical intervention. Dr Carel Le Roux, a metabolic medicine specialist at University College Dublin, who played a key role

in developing the new weight-loss drugs, believes that for some patients, overeating has performed a psychological function, and afterwards there’s “this hole, this space, left in their reward areas that’s not filled any more”.

In addition, some people believe that losing weight will solve all their problems and set them free to become who they really want to be, but when they actually lose weight, many of them, he said, then realise, “I have the same job and I drive the same car and I live in the same house and I have the same partner. Actually, it wasn’t the disease of obesity that made my life terrible. It was all this other stuff.”

But there is another way of thinking about why these drugs could potentially be having this effect. In addition to having positive effects on your brain, could they also be having negative effects on it?

It was disconcerting to realise that the scientists studying this don’t know much about how it is affecting the brain, only that it is having a profound effect there.

I put the concerns about the drugs potentially causing depression to the companies that make them. Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, said it “will continue to monitor reports of adverse drug reactions, including suicide and suicidal ideation, through routine pharmacovigilance and in cooperation with local health authorities”. It pointed out that because the drugs affect the nervous system, they carry a suicide warning in the US, and pointed to one study that suggested no increase in psychiatric disorders for these drugs after 39 months of exposure. Neither the United States Food and Drug Administration nor the European Medicines Agency has been persuaded by the evidence presented so far that these drugs may be linked to depression or suicide. Eli Lilly, which makes the other weight loss drug in this class available in the UK, Mounjaro, declined to comment.

After several months of taking the drugs, I went to visit an old friend and told her I was thinking of quitting them, because of these effects. She put her hand

“It was disconcerting to realise that the scientists studying this don’t know much about how it is affecting the brain, only that it is having a profound effect there.”

on mine. “Johann, it’s not triggering these issues. These issues were there all along. It’s just bringing them into view.” She leant forward. “I don’t believe that Ozempic is the drug that caused this problem. I

think it’s just reduced your ability to use the drug you were using to soothe yourself for so long — food. You can stop taking the Ozempic, sure. Stop if you want to. But these issues will still be driving you. Use this as an opportunity to figure out why you ate in the way you did and change it.”

I realised that she was right. I continued to take these drugs — but I also began to explore with a therapist the complex reasons why I began to overeat when I was a child. Just as importantly, at the embarrassingly late age of my mid-forties, I learnt how to cook and how to dance. Slowly, I started trying to take pleasure in them, to learn not to judge my body for how it looked, but to appreciate it for what it can do and the joy it can give me. As I did, the negative psychological effects of taking these drugs have faded away.

I could not have predicted at the start that taking Ozempic would send me on this emotional journey. In a similar way, I don’t think that as a society we have begun to properly plan and assess where these drugs are going to take us — though we can begin to see significant hints.

In 2007, when Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone, nobody could have guessed the road it would send us all on — to Twitter, TikTok and Trump. Similarly, the new weight-loss drugs aren’t going to only affect our weights. They are going to reshape our psyches and our societies — in complex and unpredictable ways. Some are clearly disturbing: eating disorder experts are worried there will be reams of dead young girls when anorexics get hold of these drugs. Do the 12 risks associated with these drugs outweigh the risks of continuing to be obese? How do we deal with the underlying social factors that made so many of us obese in the first place, so our children and grandchildren don’t face this lousy choice between a risky medical condition and a risky drug?

But right now, every overweight person who can afford these medications is going to have to make a decision. Dr Shauna

Levy, an obesity specialist at the Tulane School of Medicine, told me, “We don’t know the long-term side-effects,” of these new weight-loss drugs. “But we do know the long-term side-effects of living with obesity.” And they are grim.

Reluctantly, with a lot of doubt, I have chosen my set of risks. Now, while I continue to take them and periodically feel torn about what I am doing, I remember what Professor John Wilding — who leads research into obesity at the University of Liverpool and helped develop these drugs — said about weight loss. “Why should we make it really difficult for people? Are we just punishing them for being fat? I say we should make it easier for them. We will then improve health.”

■ This is an edited extract from Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight Loss Drugs by Johann Hari (Bloomsbury).

Left: Johann Hari, before and after taking Ozempic. Right: Model Lottie Moss, 26, was rushed to hospital after she took high amounts of Ozempic.

MAGIC &

MAGIC

1. Drugs like Ozempic tackle the obesity epidemic. This could be life-changing for many people. In 2022, one in eight people in the world were living with obesity, one of the world’s biggest killers.

2. Fast-tracked weight loss is a great opportunity to build better habits. The reality is, 80% of diets fail. GLP-1 (glucagonlike peptide 1) drugs act on the brain hormones that control hunger and satiety, switching off the relentless compulsion to eat and creating an easier path to set up good eating and exercise habits.

3. The mental health benefits are real. Those who are overweight often struggle with depression and anxiety so alleviating one root cause of these is a net positive.

4. GLP-1 drugs have multiple positive medical flow-on effects. Drugs like Ozempic have been found to have incredible cardiovascular benefits, significantly improve sleep apnoea and potentially treat fatty liver diseases.

5. At-home treatments are good for healthcare systems. There are more of us and we are living longer so hospitals and medical resources are increasingly strained. At-home treatments like Ozempic could alleviate some of the pressures on healthcare systems across the world.

LIVING THE WEIGHTLOSS REVOLUTION: MIDDLE GROUND

As a health writer and avid follower and participant in every nutrition and exercise trend under the sun, I’ve watched Ozempic sweep the world with a mixture of hope and concern. The Ozempic Games – the battle to secure the magic weight-loss drug – is an expensive business. In Australia, there’s no public funding for the GLP1 drugs. The newer drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro can set you back almost $400 a month. Of great concern is the widespread level of ignorance as to the importance of nutrition and exercise among those who can afford to pay (or pay anyway, come what may). Eating well and being active takes time, effort and money which is precisely what makes popping a pill so enticing. It’s clear that so many users are, to be blunt, still eating crap – highly processed food that is lauded as healthy in our current protein powder craze. Many don’t understand the importance of strength training, especially on Ozempic, and run the risk of ending up “skinny fat”, losing significant muscle mass as well as fat.

MAYHEM

Ideally, what is undoubtedly the world’s first effective weight-loss medicine would get to the most needy people living with obesity, who tend to suffer multiple layers of disadvantage, at an affordable price. So far, this has gone utterly unrealised. Doctors in public hospitals have told me that it’s virtually impossible to obtain the drugs on the public purse. Indigenous people in dialysis clinics in Alice Springs, caught in a terrifying sweep of an aggressive new form of diabetes in remote Australia that hits the young, face devastatingly early deaths. To my knowledge, an Ozempic pen has rarely been seen in the town.

To ringfence who gets access to this potentially life-changing medication is far from unusual in Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme deliberations on the public funding of drugs. What I hope is that those who truly would benefit the most from these promising new medications can access them with a public subsidy, while receiving the multidisciplinary care that is required to combat obesity.

But perhaps the biggest question of all – the one that nobody seems to want to address in the age of Ozempic – is why we have such a desperate need for these drugs in the first place. How did we get so fat?

Natasha Robinson, Health Editor, The Australian

1. The high cost of the drugs means they don’t really tackle the obesity epidemic. Obesity and poverty are inextricably linked and the cost is prohibitive for those who arguably need it the most.

2. Without weight-management education, GLP-1 users can backslide quickly. The biggest challenge comes after the weight loss when users are being weaned off the drug. If positive habits aren’t formed while on the drug, users tend to end up back on the weight-loss merrygo-round.

3. Long-term side-effects and the potential for addiction are unknown. While some side-effects are well understood, what about those that may emerge over time when millions upon millions have taken the drugs for years?

4. Get-thin-quick drugs exacerbate problems around eating disorders. There is a real risk of further fuelling extreme weight loss culture with the prevalence of GLP-1 type drugs.

5. Weight-loss drugs and their rip-offs could fuel illegal trade. As hard-to-get or banned substances, they now have the potential to lead to a new unregulated or illegal trade. There is also the potential for profiteering by big pharma at the expense of the consumer.

“The future influences the present just as much as the past.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

ILLUSTRATED IN THE STYLE OF MARINA APOLLONIO

The influencer is

a

young teenage girl. The audience is 92% adult men.

THERE’S A HIGH PRICE TO PAY FOR REACHING THE INFLUENCER STRATOSPHERE, AS ONE FAMILY DISCOVERED. IF YOU WANT TO EARN BIG MONEY WORKING WITH BRANDS, THE ALGORITHM CALLS ALL THE SHOTS.

KATHERINE BLUNT REPORTER, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The mom started the Instagram account three years ago as a pandemic-era diversion – a way for her and her daughter, a preteen dancer, to share photos with family, friends and other young dancers and moms. The two bonded, she said, as they posted photos of the girl dancing, modelling and living life in a small Midwestern town.

The mom, a former marketing manager, oversaw the account and watched as the number of followers grew. Soon, photographers offered to take professional shots for the girl. Brands began sending free apparel for her to model.

“We didn’t even have the page for a month, and brands were like, ‘Can we send her dancewear?’” the mom said. “She became popular really fast.”

The mom also began to notice a disturbing trend in the data that showed up on the account dashboard: Most of the girl’s followers were adult men.

Men left public comments on photos of the daughter with fire and heart emojis, telling her how gorgeous she was. Those were the tamer ones. Some men sent direct messages proclaiming their obsessions with the girl. Others sent pictures of male genitalia and links to porn sites.

Sometimes the mom spent two to four hours a day blocking users or deleting

inappropriate comments. At the same time, more sponsorships and deals were trickling in.

“It just kept growing, and then the brands weren’t just dance brands anymore,” the daughter, who’s now in high school, said. “It was actually really cool.”

The daughter loved coming up with creative posts. She told her mom she wanted to become an influencer, a “dream job” she could pursue after school and dance practice.

“It wasn’t like I was trying to push her to be a star, but part of me thought it was inevitable, that it could happen someday,” the mom said. “She just has that personality.”

The mom was torn. To reach the influencer stratosphere, the account would need a lot more followers – and she would have to be less discriminating about who they were. Instagram promotes content based on engagement, and the male accounts she had been blocking tend to engage aggressively, lingering on photos and videos and boosting them with likes or comments. Running them off, or broadly disabling comments, would likely doom her daughter’s influencer aspirations.

That was a reason to say no. There were also reasons to say yes. The mom felt the account had brought her closer with her daughter, and even second- and third-tier

influencers can make tens of thousands of dollars a year or more. The money could help pay for college, the mom thought.

The mom said yes. And with that, she grew to accept a grim reality: Being a young influencer on Instagram means building an audience including large numbers of men who take sexual interest in children.

“It’s not that I liked it, ever. Ever. It just is what it is,” the mom said. At times, she’s questioned her decision to keep the account going. The account dashboard had recently put the number of male followers at 92%. At one point, she offered Instagram subscriptions to users willing to pay a monthly fee for extra photos and videos. Many of them were also men.

Thousands of other young female influencers, and their parents, have made similar calculations in using social-media sites to promote posts and products. Parents have found that Instagram, owned by Meta Platforms, is a particular problem. Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognising that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as

well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers.

“If you want to be an influencer and work with brands and get paid, you have to work with the algorithm, and it all works with how many people like and engage with your post,” said the Midwestern mom. “You have to accept it.”

Meta has said that it has spent more than a decade working on keeping children safe online, and developed tools, features and resources to support teens and their parents. In response to Journal articles over the past year showing how its algorithms connect pedophilic accounts and promote material that sexualises children, the company said it took a series of measures to remove violating accounts and enhance safety.

The company has been developing technology to identify accounts belonging to potentially suspicious adults. It said it has removed tens of thousands of such accounts in recent months.

Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishised specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.

One man, speaking about one of his favourite young influencers in a Telegram exchange captured by a child-safety activist, said that her mother knew “damn well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “pervy adult men.”

“We’re all model scouts, agents and brand owners,” another man replied in jest. “We’re totally NOT jerking off to the pics.”

The Midwestern mom, in interviews by phone and at her home on a suburban cul-de-sac, said she tried to position herself as the barrier between her daughter and the pedophiles following along. After she learned that her daughter’s photos were

trading on Telegram, she sought brand partnerships offering school and leisure outfits instead of tight-fitting dancewear.

Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses.

The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations.

Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies.

‘GORGEOUS!’

The Instagram posts started three years ago, the mom said. Her daughter, whom she describes as a “little ham” who loves

the spotlight, had hundreds of photos from dance practice and competitions. She and her daughter enjoyed posting them and connecting with other young dancers online.

“It felt very safe,” her mother said. “Whether or not it was, it felt that way.” Young influencers began following the account. But many followers lacked proper names and personal photos – signs of possible burner accounts for users with sexual interest in children to consume content anonymously. Some had crude or obscene usernames.

Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate.

“Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content.”

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicised a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.

The mom and daughter began putting in hours of work throughout the week to produce a steady stream of content. Some brands paid several hundred dollars for photos or Reels, with stipulations for how and when to post them.

Like many young girls, the daughter envied fashion influencers who made a living posting glamour content. When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact

with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live.

The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers. The daughter’s popularity earned her invitations to modelling events in big coastal cities where she met other young influencers.

CLOSER CONTACT

Children, often with parental encouragement, have posed and performed for money for decades in beauty pageants, modelling gigs or television and movie spots. Predators have been there just as long, watching and participating.

Social-media platforms have helped level the playing field for parents seeking an audience for their children’s talents. Instagram, in particular, is visually driven and easily navigable, which also makes it appealing for child-focused brands.

But the platforms also have brought children and predators into closer contact.

While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. Often those accounts are pursuing influencer status, part of a burgeoning global influencer industry expected to be worth $US480 billion by 2027, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report.

Young influencers, reachable through direct messages, routinely solicit their followers for patronage, posting links to payment accounts and Amazon gift registries in their bios.

In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paid-subscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.

The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different because it didn’t involve a one-on-one transaction.

“There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monet-

ise from this fame that’s impersonal.”

The content she started charging for was simply more of the types of photos and videos they posted free, but hundreds of accounts soon subscribed. Some were other young influencers. Many others were adult men.

The mom allowed the men to purchase subscriptions so long as they kept their distance and weren’t overtly inappropriate in messages and comments.

“In hindsight, they’re probably the scariest ones of all,” she said.

Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.

SAVING FOR COLLEGE

A straight-A student who hangs out with a small group of studious friends, the daughter talked excitedly in an interview about wanting to go to a large public university in her state. She thinks she might like to study business.

On a recent spring day, the girl was taking a break from making content for the Instagram account as she studied for her tests.

“They do come before modelling,” she said. “I just want that 4.0 GPA.”

Her focus on the account would resume as her friends sought summer jobs babysitting, teaching swim lessons and working in coffee and ice cream shops.

“I definitely consider it a job,” the girl said, adding that she saves almost all of her earnings for a car and for college.

To date, she has saved about $US20,000, her mother said.

Most of the comments the daughter has seen on her posts are encouraging reactions from other young influencers she has gotten to know through the account. Her mom filtered some of the comments from men, and direct messages have been funnelled to inboxes that only her mom had access to.

Still, the girl knows that men have accounted for tens of thousands of her followers, and said she sees it as inevitable.

The mom has spoken frankly with her daughter about the fact that most of

her followers are men, many potentially dangerous. Several times, the mom has explained how to identify sextortion attempts and warned against responding to anyone trying to make direct contact. She has warned her daughter to be wary of anyone claiming to have nude photos or other means of blackmail.

“We’ve never taken a bad picture. That’s stupid. I would just block them,” the mom recalled her daughter responding.

“But I’m like, these people are really smart and they could try to trick you,” the mom said. “We have conversations like this.”

The mom saw her daughter, though young, as capable of choosing to make money as an influencer and deciding when she felt uncomfortable. The mom saw her own role as providing the support needed for her daughter to do that.

The mom also discussed safety concerns with her now ex-husband, who has generally supported the influencer pursuit. In an interview, he characterised the untoward interest in his daughter as “the seedy underbelly” of the industry, and said he felt comfortable with her online presence so long as her mom posted appropriate content and remained vigilant about protecting her physical safety.

NO SWIMSUITS

The mom knew there was opposition to accounts like her daughter’s. Some child-safety activists argued that parents running such accounts exploited their girls by knowingly accepting money from users who were sexually interested in the content.

Some criticised the Midwestern mom specifically, in messages or reports to Meta. She felt unfairly targeted. She saw other accounts featuring skimpier outfits or more risqué poses. She also had heard stories about parents selling custom photo sets to fans willing to pay substantial sums.

She had at first been vaguely aware from other influencer moms that men traded photos in private chats, she said, “but I didn’t really know what happened.”

That changed last spring, when an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing

“Sometimes the mom spent two to four hours a day blocking users or deleting inappropriate comments. At the same time, more sponsorships and deals were trickling in.”

her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.

The mom tried to better tailor the photos and videos to reach young girls and moms.

“I try to keep it girlie. I always have bows in my hair and cute stuff,” the daughter said. “Girls obviously want to see fashion inspiration and hairstyles. I also never post in swimsuits, ever. That’s the No. 1 way to attract men, so that’s a big no.”

Still, the mom realised she couldn’t stop

men from trading the photos, which will likely continue to circulate even after her daughter becomes an adult.

“Every little influencer with a thousand or more followers is on Telegram,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”

In one exchange saved by child-safety activists about another young girl who now has more than 300,000 followers on Instagram, a user digitally altered a photo of her wearing a tank top to make it look like she was wearing a micro-bikini top, with only small triangles of fabric.

“You guys like my improvement?” he asked the group.

“Beautiful breasts,” another responded. “How old is she?”

A person in the group used Google to identify the girl and determine she was 13 or 14 years old.

ASSESSING THE RISKS

Early last year, Meta safety staffers

began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behaviour toward children.

The staffers found that the subscribers mostly liked or saved photos of children, child-sexualising material and, in some cases, illicit underage-sex content. The users searched the platform using hashtags such as #sexualisegirls and #tweenmodel.

The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. In every case, they concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were

motivated by sexual gratification.

In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run modelling accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines for users.

The Journal asked Meta about several accounts that appeared to have violated platform rules in how they promoted photos of their children. The company deleted some of those accounts, as well as others, as it worked to address safety issues.

Meta’s internal report also had highlighted the Midwestern mom’s account as part of a look at subscribers to hundreds of popular tween and teen influencer accounts. At the time, the account had 428 subscribers, about 42% of whom had shown problematic behaviour, the staffers found.

The Midwestern mom had no knowledge of Meta’s internal investigation then, but she had become concerned about the prospect of losing her account. Meta, without explanation, had removed several photos she had posted for subscribers of her daughter dressed in casual clothes and athleticwear. She expressed her worry and confusion over the removals in a story posted to the account.

The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why.

The removal of the account made for a despondent week for the mom and daughter. The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.

“If I could go back, I don’t know if I would do it all again,” she said at the time. “There are too many flaws in it all.”

The daughter said she felt as if her hard work in building a following had disappeared overnight. But the two had another account, established years earlier as a backup. The daughter told her mom she

wanted to use it to rebuild her following.

“It was disappointing, you know?” the daughter said. “I didn’t want to quit, but if I didn’t have the backup, I don’t know if I would have kept going.”

Her mom felt deeply conflicted. She thought about the Telegram screenshots. Child-safety activists had expressed concerns to her daughter’s dance studio. Someone had once emailed a blackmail attempt to her and other influencer accounts, messages she didn’t respond to but felt compelled to show to brand sponsors. But she didn’t want to disappoint her daughter.

The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how.

Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts.

The mom and daughter have been debating how to proceed. They offer some subscription content on another platform, but the majority of their followers were on Instagram. The mom said she is now considering allowing her daughter to open a new Instagram account of her own – figuring Instagram would allow that – and leaving the girl to mostly manage it herself, with some oversight and limitations.

“She just wants to figure out how to keep working with her brands and do her job,” the mom said. “I would love to boycott Instagram altogether, but that’s really hard if you’re trying to work with brands.”

■ Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. License number 5876190951839.

MAGIC &

MAGIC

1. The playing field is now more level. In the online world there is no requirement for a degree or demonstrable work experience in order to succeed. You simply need an idea that can be commercialised.

2. The internet has become a knowledge hub. While critics view social media platforms as a place for the vain to showcase themselves, the online world is full of people sharing their knowledge, whether it be a chef’s latest recipe or a sport psychologist’s tips on how to lower your handicap.

3. Leveraging your knowledge to create an additional income stream is an attractive prospect. Wage stagnation, especially in Australia, is a thing. Employees feel as though they are working twice as hard for the same pay as 10 years ago, and the data to an extent reflects this.

4. Social media feeds niche markets. People’s weird and wacky interests can bring in huge view counts. Budding entrepreneurs can now pursue their (traditionally unprofitable) passions with the added benefit of financial independence.

5. Entrepreneurship is on the rise. Young people increasingly find the idea of working for someone else unpalatable. The opportunity to create your own business spurs innovation and creativity.

DIFFERENT ROUTES TO WEALTH: MIDDLE GROUND

The meteoric rise of “lawfluencers”, “finfluencers”, and every -fluencer in between has shifted the goalposts in terms of making money. Whether it’s young Gen Zers dropping university studies to chase financial independence or corporate professionals taking up side-hustles to make an extra buck or two, the rules around wealth creation are being rewritten. Having been priced out of the housing market and hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis, PAYG workers are looking to social media for an extra income stream. An avenue that only a couple of years ago seemed frivolous now presents a huge opportunity for young professionals looking to make a name for themselves.

Acting as a window into the corporate world, work influencers are racking up unbelievable numbers. And brands are alive to this. Part of what makes social media so lucrative is that companies are willing to spend top dollar for creators with high engagement.

MAYHEM

1. Social media wealth is largely illusory. The online appearance of people getting rich is merely part of social media’s inherent “it’s all about me” narcissism.

The effectiveness of influencer-based marketing has been such that employers have begun to utilise in-house staff to build a presence on social media, a phenomenon known as employeegenerated content (ECG). This personable, relatable content has sprung up on company social feeds everywhere.

Of course, the influencer phenomenon presents itself in more sinister ways, one of which is the proliferation of “finfluencers”. That is, unregulated and unqualified creators providing financial advice to a huge viewership across the world. While ASIC has developed a regime to ensure some semblance of consumer protection against such content, the sheer volume from US-based creators makes this a tall task.

Social media users, after viewing one selffinance post, are inundated with unscrupulous content. Without the tools to discern the good advice from the bad, consumers are left completely unprotected.

The rise of “influencing” has opened new pathways to wealth, and in a way has democratised fame. However, largely unregulated platforms inevitably give rise to radical voices. Social media companies must do better, promoting positive and instructive creators while protecting consumers from dangerous and deceitful content.

2. The risks of exploitation are ever present. The risks for young people on social media are well documented and governments are scrambling to develop suitable protection. Influencers are no exception.

3. Your livelihood is at the whim of the algorithm. While casual employment isn’t new, the risks of making money from social media remain the same – lack of workplace protections and job security. One thing is for sure: there is little certainty in a career on social media.

4. Is it a productive sector? As the returns on alternative forms of money-making increase, young people will be drawn away from traditional pathways. Is trading a degree in science or commerce for a career on Instagram a productive outcome for the nation?

5. Continued success is challenging. Social media runs on trends and they’re here one day and gone the next. Generally personal brands or businesses blow up on the back of one of these trends. Influencers can quickly fall by the wayside without a sound model for sustainable success.

DIFFERENT

Pictured: Atlassian co-founder and co-chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes

Tech company doubles down on remote working with new “connection hub”

PRODUCTIVITY IS BEING REDEFINED YET BOSSES AT AUSTRALIA’S BIGGEST COMPANIES ARE STILL OBSESSING OVER “WHERE” INSTEAD OF “HOW” WORK IS DONE, AT THE EXPENSE OF ESTABLISHING REAL CONNECTION.

JARED LYNCH TECHNOLOGY EDITOR, THE AUSTRALIAN

The A$71 billion company

Atlassian company has begun a 12-month trial in Melbourne – once Australia’s most lockeddown city – as it aims to revolutionise the nature of office work.

More than 480 Atlassian staff are based in the Victorian capital, despite the company not having an office there, making it home to its biggest cluster of remote employees.

Atlassian co-founder and co-chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes has been one of the biggest advocates of more flexible employment arrangements, saying it works so long as corporates don’t “hire a bunch of idiots”.

Mr Cannon-Brookes said the Melbourne trial aimed to create space – which he calls a “connection hub” rather than an office – to enhance collaboration and productivity among staff. But attendance is not mandatory, with the trial centred on offering employees choice and retaining talent in a tight labour market.

“As a global company with Aussie roots, we’re running a first-of-its-kind experiment in Melbourne and taking the learnings to our offices around the world,” he said. “The Melbourne Connection Hub

plays an important role in our Team Anywhere strategy, allowing us to have the best of in-person and remote work.

“Because the flexibility to choose where to work is more than just a perk – it fundamentally changes how people live.”

Atlassian, which makes software that enables distributed work, has been at the forefront of the biggest workplace shift in decades. But its near evangelism towards remote working has its limits. For example, it has pushed back against the growing fad of companies offering staff four-day work weeks with no loss of pay, saying it presents the view that staff working from home want to work less.

Atlassian head of workplace experience operations Gina Creegan said employers needed to think more about “how” work was done than about its location.

“We are obsessed about ‘where’ – is it at home, is it in Melbourne, is it in England?” she said. “Instead of actually how people are working and the environment that we provide to enable people to work in a different way, because that’s really what’s required.

“Whatever the choices you make for your individual company, your suppliers, your vendors, the trade organisations that

govern the way you do work, the government – they are distributed. And so you know, even if your choice is to be in one location, there’s an element of distributed work that plays into everyone’s business today, no matter who you are, if you’re an engineer, a teacher, a journalist.”

But Ms Creegan said initial feedback from staff surveys had been promising, with 38% reporting they feel more connected, 24% more creative and 20% more productive.

Despite employees embracing distributed work arrangements – with numerous surveys reporting that workers feel more energised without commuting to CBDs five days a week – some of Australia’s biggest companies, including National Australia Bank and Commonwealth Bank have attempted to reverse the trend via office mandates.

Mr Cannon-Brookes has branded such moves “draconian” and a productivity crusher, stemming more from real estate decisions than from what’s best for a company and its employees.

Ms Creegan said it was a challenge to create a space that aims to enhance collaboration among a remote workforce rather than a conventional office.

“You typically have 50 to 60 desks in this kind of space, and we’ve only got 12,” she said.

“You typically have quite a few meeting rooms. There’s only two or three meeting rooms, because it is about social connection. It’s actually quite hard to hold true to that. There were moments where I was like, ‘I’m losing my nerve, let’s just put 20 more desks.’

“But we were like, we’re really going to do this, let’s do it properly and hold out on that traditional office set-up to really test the hypothesis around, how can we deliver on social kind of connection for these teams, and see if it works.”

About half of Atlassian’s Melbournebased staff say they plan to regularly use the space.

Atlassian work futurist Dom Price said the space looked more like a “first-class airport lounge” rather than office, albeit with some distinct Melbourne touches such as preloved furniture.

But he said to make it work, companies needed to “identify their North Star”.

“The first question is ‘what are you measuring?’ Like, what honestly does success look like?” he said. “Because I think once you know that, then everything else is relatively straightforward.

“I’m not underplaying all the execution but if you don’t agree on that North Star, like, for us, it’s like our North Star was ‘will people be more connected, right?’ Will they feel more creative in this space by having these incidental conversations, a space to play in, a place to work in, and a place uniquely Atlassian?”

This compares with many companies focusing on yield – for example, cost per square metre and how many hours staff spend in a building – as a way to measure a productive office space.

“That’s the challenge a lot of these organisations have, like, they’ve got incumbent space, and have always measured yield,” Mr Price said. “But there’s no correlation or causation between me and you physically being in the same building and the amount of outcomes we achieve. So we’ve had to unlearn those pretty quick-

ly. If we had a measure of yield, right, or dollars per square foot, we would have designed the space completely differently.

“Our measure of success is connection, not how many people sit at a desk and how many words they type out, but if they feel more connected, more loyal, more engaged, then we’re winning.”

■ Jared Lynch is Technology Editor at The Australian and has extensive experience in markets, start-ups, media and corporate affairs. He has been at News since 2019.

Left: Atlassian’s “connection hub” in Melbourne. Above: Atlassian work futurist Dom Price and head of workplace experience operations Gina Creegan.

“Our measure of success is connection, not how many people sit at a desk and how many words they type out.”

MAGIC &

MAGIC

1. Employers and workers benefit from a wider search for talent. With skill shortages rampant in sectors like tech, flexible working conditions have allowed companies to spread their recruiting net far and wide. Flexibility is a lure for talent.

2. Flexible working is a positive for female labour participation. WFH arrangements enable more parents to re-enter or stay in the workforce.

3. Flexible working arrangements make workers more productive. There is evidence to suggest productivity goes up when workers have fewer distractions, and can organise their own time outside office restrictions. Daily commutes into the office, $6 coffees and lunch at your desk are not all they’re cracked up to be.

4. Absenteeism is reduced. Feeling under the weather? Don’t particularly want to brave the cold morning commute into the office? Why take a sick day when you can WFH!

5. WFH is more cost-of-living and climate friendly. Flexible work has allowed people to relocate to more affordable areas outside of major hubs. This is stimulating regional economies. Also, no emissions walking from your bed to your desk … Who can argue with saving the planet!

DIFFERENT

ROUTES TO WORK:

MIDDLE GROUND

ABCs of WFH

As a newcomer to corporate working life amidst much chatter around flexible work arrangements, I thought I would bring it back to basics with the ABCs of the revolution that is Working From Home.

Atlassian vs Amazon

The talent war between these two tech behemoths intensified in September as they exchanged barbs over Amazon’s five-day return-to-office order. Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes said such measures were “draconian”. A survey conducted by professional social network Blind reported 73% of Amazon professionals were now looking for new employment as a result of the policy.

In some ways Amazon is an outlier in the tech sector, with Atlassian, Telstra and Medibank remaining staunch advocates for flexible working arrangements. And it makes sense. A relatively resilient labour market and significant shortages in skilled migration means the balance of power lies with employees. A whopping 58% of local tech

companies report losing staff to rivals who offer WFH arrangements.

Bludging, busses and boredom

The release of June’s quarterly growth figures, showing a measly 0.2% increase in GDP, will undoubtedly reinvigorate the productivity debate. Historically executives have blamed employees abusing WFH for languishing productivity growth. And the supporting data is compelling.

Outside the tech sector, RTO mandates are becoming increasingly popular, with the NSW public service and Tabcorp joining the long line of corporations ordering their staff back to the office. Given the economic climate, efficiency is certainly front of mind for business leaders. Bludgers beware …

Covid-change, cavoodles and carbon emissions

Covid-19 demonstrated WFH was a viable option for white-collar professionals. And understandably there is noticeable resistance to pre-pandemic ways of working. Those who have purchased property outside major cities, or whose pets have developed attachment issues, might feel particularly irked by their bosses’ U-turns on flexible work.

Whatever way you look at it, WFH is here to stay. Flexible working is a positive tool, but we must remember it is just that. A tool. WFH should be the exception to the rule, not the rule itself.

Thomas Henry, Cadet Reporter, News Corp Australia

MAYHEM

1. Office culture has taken a hit. With the introduction of flexible work, there is no replacement for face-to-face interaction. Zoom meetings filled with grey screens and muted microphones leave workers looking to their dog for real connection.

2. Where’s the line with work-life balance?

For workers, WFH means work can easily intrude on time with family and friends. For employers, workers’ personal issues can easily eat into work hours.

3. Flexible working arrangements make workers less productive. There is evidence to suggest fully remote working arrangements are significantly less productive than traditional in-office work. A Stanford paper found a 10–20% decrease in productivity.

4. Creative output is in decline. More isolated work environments result in lower levels of human interaction which then affect creative output. There is something to be said for spontaneously bouncing ideas off colleagues in an office environment.

5. WFH makes it harder for those entering the workforce to skill up. Learning the tools of the trade, being a sponge and utilising the expertise of colleagues is made infinitely harder working in solitude from a home office.

“Life is divided into three terms – that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.”

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

WHAT’S DRIVING THE ROADS TO CHANGE

All roads lead to China

ELECTRIC CARS ARE NOT A PASSING FAD – THEY REPRESENT A ONCE-IN-A-CENTURY SHIFT THAT COULD CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT POWER.

DAVID McCOWEN CONTENT DIRECTOR, MOTORING, NEWS CORP AUSTRALIA

Iwas representing News Corp at an automotive press conference when my phone rang. Dismissing the call, I continued to ask questions of Zeekr, a Chinese electric car brand with strong ambition in Australia.

That missed call was from a company called Inchcape, the Australian distributor for brands such as Subaru, Peugeot and Citroen. Its staff rang to say Citroen will stop selling new cars in November.

A hopelessly irrelevant European brand with more than 100 years of history deciding to leave Australia on the same day a Chinese upstart announced its arrival? It’s a metaphor for the systemic change coursing through the automotive industry.

Few manufacturers are less relevant than Citroen, a brand outsold this year by Ferrari despite charging one tenth its prices. And Zeekr? Part of the Geely group that also owns Volvo, Polestar and Lotus, it promises to take on the likes of Tesla with more features for less money.

The car market is in the midst of a transformation moving the auto industry’s centre of gravity toward China and away

from the US, Europe or Japan.

Detroit is known as Motor City. Maybe that nickname should shift to Shenzen, where China’s BYD Auto is headquartered. It sold more electric cars around the world than any other manufacturer in 2023, a year when the electric Tesla Model Y overtook western staples such as the Toyota Corolla and Ford F-150 to become the world’s bestselling car.

Though people associate Tesla with Elon Musk and California’s Silicon Valley, every model sold by the brand in Australia comes from China. The same is true of BYD, the second-highest selling EV brand in the country. The third, BMW, is based in Munich, but builds its most popular EVs in China. The same is true for fellow European brands Mini, Volvo and Polestar.

China’s gravitational pull on the electric car game is so strong that manufacturers such as Kia are investing billions in production, research and development facilities there, shifting manufacturing away from South Korea and the Czech Republic.

Australia has been used as an experiment by Chinese car brands testing the waters ahead of an assault on Europe and the US.

The success of brands such as MG and BYD prompted car makers overseas to lobby for protection in the form of taxes levelled against Chinese cars. The EU –home to vulnerable brands such as Citroen – has introduced huge import duties levelled against Chinese EVs. The US is considering similar action.

That’s because legacy brands are struggling to make EVs work. Stuttgart giants Mercedes and Porsche have pushed back EV sales targets and cancelled models such as the successor to Benz’s electric EQS limousine, a car it had to discount by $100,000 in Australia.

It’s a similar story for Ford, which slashed electric Mustang Mach-E prices around the world, killed a planned seven-seat electric SUV and postponed construction of an Electric Vehicle-only plant in Tennessee.

Smaller models like Fiat’s Abarth 500e have also struggled – the company’s New

Zealand importer slashed a staggering $35,000 from the cost of its electric hatchback this year.

Profitability is hard to find in the world of electric cars, where business cases are planned years in advance, anticipating that demand will continue to grow.

When Tesla joined rivals in cutting EV prices in Australia earlier this year, Kia Australia CEO Damien Meredith commented that there are a whole lot of variables that are now catching up with EV sales. He said, “the early adopters have done all they can and now we are looking at the market reality”.

It’s too late for Australia to try to protect a local manufacturing industry that died when Holden turned off the lights in Adelaide’s outer suburbs, back in 2017.

The fuel excise tariff paid by petrol and diesel drivers is a key government revenue stream worth about $20 billion per year. Electric car drivers don’t buy petrol, so beancounters pushed for them to pay their share with additional road-user charges.

South Australia has a strong understanding of the car game. It was the first state to conduct a local trial for driverless vehicles and in 2021 was the first to introduce legislation requiring electric car owners to pay additional tax. However, a change of government saw current premier Peter Malinauskas repeal the law in 2023.

A similar initiative introduced by then Victorian premier Dan Andrews required electric car owners to record their mileage and pay additional fees when renewing their vehicle’s registration each year. That scheme was struck down as constitutionally invalid by the High Court of Australia, prompting the Victorian Government to refund millions of dollars.

The question of how to charge EV drivers for road use remains unanswered. As does the question of how to maximise the potential for electric cars to change the way we think about power.

“The car market is in the midst of a transformation moving the auto industry’s centre of gravity toward China and away from the US, Europe or Japan.”

every household in a suburb cranks up its air conditioning on a hot summer evening. There is certainly plenty of mayhem surrounding electric cars. There are issues surrounding the total environmental impact of the material used to make batteries, the social and environmental impact of lithium or cobalt mining in emerging markets, and the societal changes surrounding cars that aren’t as suitable for long road trips.

Many EVs have a “vehicle to load” function that allows you to draw power from their massive battery, perhaps to run an appliance or two at a picnic. Some of them have the potential to feed significant power back into a home or business – enough to keep the lights on during a power outage.

Electric cars could be used to stabilise the power grid in times of peak demand. But widespread adoption of EVs could also cause problems – the sort we see when

EVs have historically been more expensive to purchase than petrol equivalents, though fierce competition and deep discounting is changing that.

Of course, there is also a little magic to electric cars.

Looking at the big picture, China’s switch to EVs has worked miracles in improving air quality in its cities. There’s plenty of evidence attributing tiny particles from exhaust pipes to poor respiratory outcomes for millions of

people around the world each year.

A switch to EVs would also reduce Australia’s reliance on offshore oil and petroleum production, improving our energy security.

And as for individual consumers?

EVs are much cheaper to run than petrol powered vehicles, particularly if you can charge at home. They’re also smooth, quiet and surprisingly rapid. Zeekr, Volvo, Polestar, and Smart cars that share common running gear can reach 100kmh in less than four seconds – Porsche-rivalling pace for a fraction of the cost.

And the simpler mechanical layout of an EV, without conventional gearboxes, emissions systems, fuelling and cooling requirements, opens new design possibilities for the interior space and exterior shapes of next-gen models.

Simpler hardware also makes it easier to introduce right-hand drive versions of models previously off limits to Australia.

From left: BYD electric cars waiting to be loaded onto a ship at the international container terminal of Taicang Port at Suzhou Port, in China; car manufacturing factory assembly line; Zeekr X electric car.

That’s one of the reasons General Motors (Holden’s parent company) will launch Cadillac in Australia as an EV-only prestige brand.

In the same way that Bertha Benz could not have known that her 100km drive in her husband’s motor car in 1888 would lead to everything from Formula 1 to pizza delivery, we still don’t know what the full impact of EVs will be.

■ David McCowen is Content Director, Motoring and has been at News since 2019. A passionate car enthusiast, he has more than a decade of experience covering the automotive industry.

MAGIC &

MAGIC

1. New EV manufacturers and models are in the market. The car market is in the midst of a transformation, with consumers increasingly prioritising sustainability and fuel efficiency.

2. EVs are cheaper to operate than combustion cars. Going electric means you get to skip pricey trips to the servo. EV drivers are looking at fuel savings of up to 70% and maintenance savings of around 40%.

3. EVs are becoming more affordable. Apart from EV manufacturers slashing prices and federal incentives for eligible buyers, leasing arrangements are making EVs an affordable option for more consumers.

4. Widespread use of EVs leads to improved air quality. Emissions from petrol and diesel engines can contribute to respiratory illnesses and cancer. The average EV produces emissions that are only 12% of those from a traditional combustion engine vehicle. China has already seen a miraculous improvement in the air quality in densely populated cities.

5. Some EVs have the potential to feed significant power back into a home or business. This might be enough to keep the lights on during a power outage or to stabilise the power grid in times of peak demand.

WHAT’S DRIVING THE ROADS TO CHANGE: MIDDLE GROUND

The things that make those of us who want to save the planet feel good about ourselves are often the very things that require mass amounts of energy – for example, electric cars that chew up a huge amount of electricity.

Electric cars have shifted from the domain of tech-bro early adopters and virtue signalling eco-warriors to become the smart choice for new car customers.

Fierce competition in the space has pushed car manufacturers to slash prices from time to time with outrageous discounts of up to $20,000 on regular vehicles and six-figure sums for high-end luxury models.

Volatile prices mean customers need to time purchases carefully, as shifts can be sudden and dramatic. Models that have been on the market for more than a year are especially vulnerable to significant changes in value. While you might get a good deal, the downside is that EV resale figures are particularly hard to predict.

Folks interested in leasing their next car will quickly learn the cheapest cars they can choose are electric. You can lease a cheap electric hatchback for about $150 per week, or step up to a Tesla for about $230 per week. At $65,000, electric cars are cheaper to lease than $40,000 petrol models thanks to a government EV discount that waives the fringe benefit tax (FBT) normally applied to salary sacrificed cars.

While other countries offered generous cashback concessions for EVs, Australia jumpstarted the electric car market by encouraging people to lease them for three or four years, hoping this would also stimulate the used car market.

The scheme is a raging success.

Initial estimates suggested the FBT exemption would cost $260 million in the first four years of the policy, which came into effect in July 2022. But those numbers were revised in January, when Treasury reported the first four years of the scheme are expected to cost $1.15 billion – more than four times the original figure.

People don’t buy EVs, they lease them. And if you want to lease a new car, you would be mad not to at least consider an electric vehicle.

David McCowen, Content Director, Motoring, News Corp Australia

MAYHEM

1. We are seeing the rise of Chinese auto dominance. Car makers overseas are lobbying for protection in the form of taxes levelled against Chinese cars. China has a stranglehold on the supply chain for EV batteries, which could lead to a high-stakes game against the EU.

2. Traditional auto brands are struggling. Legacy brands manufactured in the US, Europe or Japan are finding it difficult to make EVs profitable.

3. Fuel excise shortfall affects government revenue. Electric car drivers don’t buy petrol, so there goes about $20 billion per year in Australia. Different ways of charging EV drivers for road use are being explored.

4. Production of EV batteries relies on precious metals/mining. There are issues surrounding the total environmental impact of the materials used to make batteries. Reduced reliance on petrochemicals will shift global politics, especially in the Middle East, which could cause new points of conflict and war.

5. The infrastructure is struggling to keep up with the growth. By 2033, Australia will need 27,500 new public chargers, which is an eight-fold increase on current capacity. Regulation around EV supply equipment, cybersecurity, smart functionality and responsible battery disposal is urgent.

“Don’t

worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia.”

CHARLES M. SCHULZ

Pictured: World champion surfer Mick Fanning

Australia’s unique resilient spirit

FOR 23 YEARS, TRENT DALTON HAS BEEN DOCUMENTING AUSTRALIANS WHO SIMPLY REFUSE TO SUCCUMB TO WHATEVER PERVADING DARKNESS THREATENS TO BLACKEN THEIR LIGHT. THEIR STORIES REVEAL SOMETHING OF OUR NATIONAL CHARACTER THAT IS BOTH DOWN-TO-EARTH AND INSPIRING.

TRENT DALTON

WRITER, THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE AND BESTSELLING AUTHOR

Intrarectalcranialitis. The scientific term for having one’s head unmistakably stuck up one’s backside. Otherwise known as “cranial rectal inversion” or “CRI” for short. I’ve endured a few suffocating bouts in my time. This inherently anti-social condition is thankfully one of only a few real dangers –eye strain, finger lock, gin lust – facing the full-time contemporary Australian writer. My wife, mercifully, can spot symptoms early: excessive criticism of the Qantas Club breakfast menu or finishing sentences with, “… and that’s why I never read Foucault after 9pm”.

It is during prolonged periods of acute CRI that I often find myself ducking under my writing desk and digging into an $11 transparent plastic IKEA storage box filled with the newspaper and magazine clippings of all the feature stories I have written for The Australian of which I’m most proud. These stories are the keepers. The ones that stayed with me. Stories of great Australians and famous Australians and ordinary unknown Australians who deserved so much more than fate allowed. Only recently did I discover, while piling endless articles from the box onto my lap,

that all these pieces are linked by a common thread; one single theme rippling through every real-life narrative, passing across time and place, from feature to feature. I kept identifying the same remarkable and infectious human quality. One beautiful word kept bouncing between the colour portrait photographs of all these glorious persons of journalistic interest. From Betty Cuthbert to Mick Fanning. From Grantham flood victims to Black Summer bushfire survivors. One perfect word reverberating triumphantly between the gaps in all that press ink.

Resilience.

Time and again, it seemed, I left my desk in the Brisbane bureau of The Australian in Bowen Hills and set off into some corner of the country in search of resilience. I realise now that I have been obsessed with the stuff for most of my adult life. For 23 years, as a working journalist, I have been documenting Australians who simply refuse to succumb to whatever pervading darkness threatens to blacken their light.

These journalistic endeavours, I assure you, have transformed my life. They have shaped me as a father, a husband, a brother, a son and a man. I have no doubt this

obsession is rooted in my need to make sense of the ways in which, through much of the 1980s and 1990s, I watched someone I love very much – my mum – overcome everything from drug addiction to imprisonment to domestic abuse drawing on nothing, from what I could observe, beyond a particularly Australian kind of in-built human resilience.

We are a nation of scrappers. We have been blessed with enormous resources of coal, gold, iron ore, nickel and pluck. Emotional minerals. True grit. Real salts. We have the mongrel underdog in us. For Australia is an underdog story. Australia is a resilience story. It is a 60,000-year-old story of a First Nations people who adapted and thrived in a 7.7 million square kilometre frying pan dotted with eucalypts. It is the story of a fleet of British thieves and hustlers and ne’er-do-wells sent to a saltwater prison in an unknown south, in quite possibly the most audacious, obnoxious and pitiless social relocation experiment in human history. Who could possibly imagine a place more bitterly and cynically formed in the gutter and at once so giddily and profoundly intent on looking up at the stars? Modern Australia is a 250-year-old

THE AUSSIE SPIRIT

multicultural story of ordinary men and women turning nothing into something. Towns from tents. Cities from dirt. Hope from despair. Light from dark.

Here’s a newspaper feature about floods in Grantham, south-east Queensland. I’ve spent countless hours knocking on doors in towns and cities across Australia ravaged by fire and flood. It’s the newspaper feature writer’s job to come in and try to make sense of the devastation. Find some meaning in all the rotten, sometimes irreversible, climatic happenstance. Not uncommon to find yourself asking questions of people standing in doorways of mud-caked and ruined homes, scratching their heads and wondering why God’s dice rolled down their street. Not uncommon to find those same people turning to spot some miraculously untouched corner of the house where the water didn’t reach and uttering something soft and utterly resilient: “Well, at least we saved Gran’s recipe book.”

I remember a bloke crawling around an upside-down caravan in a flood-ravaged Goodna caravan park, south-west of Brisbane; summer 2011. The caravan was literally covered in toxic human shit and I’ve seen few smiles as wide as the one this man offered when he found an unbroken bottle of XXXX Gold in his half-sized upturned Kelvinator. Whatever gets you through the night. Whatever gets you through the nightmare. I remember interviewing Lockyer Valley disaster victims during the floods of January 2013 who had only just repaired their homes from the floods of January 2011. I watched their faces turn from darkness to light as they shrugged their shoulders, houseless and broken, and found silver linings in the most absurd truths: “Well, at least it’s not as bad as last time.” That was invariably when some misguided and young media person standing in the main street of Grantham, battling a bad case of intrarectalcranialitis, would whisper something out of their rear end such as, “Why the f..k didn’t they move?”

Why? Because they had nowhere else to go. Because they were penniless. Because they were screwed by God and their insurer. And because they were resilient.

“We have the mongrel underdog in us. Australia is an underdog story. ”

south coast. I knocked on his door with a single question: “What the hell did you just live through?”

Courage is a quality we have built a national identity upon. Battlefield heroics and sacrifices. Sporting glories. Our collective resilience should be no less celebrated or unifying. Resilience ripples daily through every office space, every factory floor, every suburban street across the country where yet another glorious and indefatigable Australian worker is waking at dawn to march off to the job they’ve hated for 25 years on account of its hamster-wheel drudgery and mundanity. But that’s all OK because Jenny really, really loved the white Nike Air Force shoes with the thick soles that she got for her 16th birthday. That kind of unheralded national resilience makes this shimmering island tick. It’s just not so easy to capture such resilience in bronze.

Here’s a man named Wazza Shaw in a piece I wrote about the Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20. I will remember Wazza Shaw’s light for the rest of my days. Wazza lived in Mogo on the NSW

“The apocalypse,” Wazza said. A father of two. Mullet haircut. Wazza got his family to safety then returned to his Mogo street where he fought a raging kilometre-long firefront with a makeshift fire hose that he ran from a generator fixed to the back tray of his ute. After he saved his house, he put his life in profound danger to save the homes of his neighbours. Terrifyingly and unmistakably alone, he drove up and down his abandoned street wetting down houses as the fire lashed and spat, eventually surrounding him with zero exit points. Plan A: keep wetting the houses until the fire swept out of Mogo. Plan B: lift the iron grate in the gutter on the street and slide into the stormwater drain and pray that a bloke don’t suffocate. “Thank f..k I never had to go to plan B,” he said. His brain told him he was dead. His busy head was certain of it. But his heart told him something else. His heart said there was hope. And that was the theme of that endless summer. All that

light from the dark. All that quintessentially Australian resilience.

I remember the resilience of the land that summer. I called it “resilience green”. That rare and inspiring emerald colour that started to pop from black burnt matchstick forests. New growth. New life. I described it as a green so ancient and true that it made roadside kids giggle with wonder at the sight of it. Hope green. Resilience green.

Kerry Shepherd. Her warm, welcoming face in a portrait for a story in The Weekend Australian Magazine we headlined “Love and Fate”.

Kerry has become a dear friend. I wrote a story in 2013 about the day Kerry lost her beloved husband, Chris Walton. He was crushed by a Burleigh Heads shopfront awning that randomly collapsed above him, two days before Christmas in 2012. Chris’s final act before he died was to push two children to safety. I could write a novel detailing the depths of Kerry Shepherd’s resilience. But I’m thinking, here and now, about Kerry and Chris’s son, Fin, who was only 13 when his dad

died. It was Fin who got his mum through the grief of his father’s death. Kerry calls him a revelation. “As long as the wheels were turning, as long as he had normality – and an incredible friendship group – he was handling it,” Kerry later told me.

Fin and I caught up recently for a beer at a brewhouse he liked in Brisbane. He had just returned from a trip through the United States and Canada with two dear friends. Fin’s a rock climber. Nothing but peace and pain to be found on the face of a granite monolith. Fin spent half an hour detailing a life-changing climb he completed, scaling the mighty El Capitan, a vertical rock formation rising 914m out of Yosemite National Park. There is a light in this beautiful young Australian that will never go out and I’ve been wondering lately if his light is a byproduct of tragedy. Resilience as an equal and opposite reaction to sorrow. Training got Fin up that El Cap

rock face, of course. Rock smarts got him up there, too. But I knew there had to be something else. “Was your dad with you?” I asked. And he shook his head in the way young men do when they’re in complete agreement with something. “Of course he was,” Fin said.

Irene Tchaikovsky. I spent a night on the street with Irene. I was writing about homelessness in Australia. Irene was 70 years old and slept regularly in a bus stop on Adelaide Street, Brisbane. Her possessions were one towel, seven shirts, one dress, five pairs of underpants, a dressing gown and a pencil case filled with a toothbrush and seven lipsticks. “What keeps you going, Irene?” I asked. She thought about this for a moment. “Hagar the Horrible,” she said. Every night when Irene briefly gave her mind over to thoughts of packing it all in – ending the grinding 24-7 struggle to find shelter,

From left: Grantham residents Ester and her daughter Joan Hurley; Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20; Thanks from Grantham.

food, clothing, dignity – she thought about missing out on reading the next morning’s Hagar the Horrible cartoon in The CourierMail, and that was a fate she was resolutely, resiliently, unwilling to accept.

Here’s a piece I wrote on the great Betty Cuthbert as she was nearing the end of her life. Here she is in a wheelchair. Always something narratively meaningful about our beloved Golden Girl – a four-time Olympic sprint champion – incapable of using her wondrous legs. As if the mid-century sporting peaks weren’t breathtaking enough in Betty’s story. Then you come to the part where she lived with multiple sclerosis for almost half a century, tirelessly campaigning for MS research and disability awareness, before she died in 2017.

Here’s a piece on Mick Fanning. You want to know something about an Australian’s capacity to fight back? This guy fought back against a shark. Of course, the great truth about Mick’s unbreakable resilience is that he fought all his toughest battles long before he encountered that great white in the waters of Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. He’s the son of a workingsingle-mum-battler-nurse who raised five children on her own. When he was 17, he lost his beloved brother, Sean, in a car accident. Mick locked himself in his bedroom and refused to leave it for a week. When he finally did, he had a powerful and private notion swirling through his head: to honour his brother by becoming a world champion surfer. That foolish shark didn’t stand a chance.

I keep flipping through the articles. On and on it goes. Endless Australians who steel and stir my soul, just by living, just by working.

Geoff Beattie. The south-east Queensland dairy farmer who fell into a deep depression when he lost his wife, Elaine, to leukaemia. This happened around the same time the Australian dairy industry went south, along with Geoff’s livelihood. He hit the bottle. The hard stuff. Whiskies and brandies. All the stuff Elaine used to pour into her country fruitcakes. Then one day his young kids said they were worried about him. And something clicked in Geoff overnight. Instead of slamming

“Australia is a resilience story. It is a 60,000-yearold story of a First Nations people who adapted and thrived in a 7.7 million square kilometre frying pan dotted with eucalypts.”

whisky down his gullet, he poured the whisky into a fruitcake mix. Light from the dark.

Today, Geoff Beattie is an icon of the Royal Queensland Show, and one of the most decorated country cake makers in Australia. Resilience is a key ingredient

in his famous recipes. The stuff is whisked deep into every cake mix he slides into an oven. And so is his love for Elaine. Because love and resilience are, I realise, so often connected.

If you’ll permit me a moment of shameless CRI, I want to briefly consider the notion that resilience is formed from love. So often do we Australians carry on in the memory of someone we’ve lost, or in the name of someone we love. What if it’s actually love that’s been keeping this whole wild and shimmering island moving forward for all these years? I never really had to do 23 years of journalism to work out why my own mum kept standing up, moving forward, carrying on through her darkest hours. I’ve always known it was love. Love of her four sons. Love of me. And then I come to the most resilient man I know. Paul Stanley. I owe him a phone call. Been too long between chats. I’m holding his picture in my hands. A Weekend Australian Magazine piece straplined, “The Fight That Never Ends”. Eyes downcast in the magazine portrait photograph. Scruffy snow-coloured hair. Wrinkles of time across his face. Wrinkles of grief.

I remember the first time I went to Paul Stanley’s house in east Brisbane to interview him about the death of his 15-yearold son, Matthew, who was killed by a king hit – a coward punch, as it would become known – at an 18th birthday party in 2006. Paul was in the early stages of creating the Matthew Stanley Foundation, which would go on to transform Queensland’s awareness and response to youth party violence. Light from the dark.

We must have spoken for four hours. Much of that time I spent in silence as I waited for Paul to recover from the body-buckling, tear-streaming, spit-lipped grief of “losing Matty”, the headline we used for that early story. I will never forget the way he walked me out to my car after our chat. Sunset in the suburbs. Birds whistling. He asked me, in the interests of filling a silent space with small talk, how the rest of my week was shaping up. And I told him that my wife was scheduled to

give birth to our daughter in the Mater Hospital. In a matter of days, I explained, I was going to become a dad. And Paul threw his head back and laughed. When he looked back at me I could see there were tears in his eyes. I swear to you now they were tears of joy. This man, who had just spent four brutally honest hours talking about the tragic loss of his son, had somehow dug deep inside himself to find the resilience – and the love – to find joy inside a quiet suburban moment between two men standing beside the same Toyota hatchback that I drove my daughter home in three days later. “You will never do anything more beautiful in your life,” Paul said.

Hard to lose your head up your own backside when you are reminded of words like that from people like Paul Stanley. Physically impossible, in fact.

I decide to give Paul a call on his mobile. He doesn’t pick up so I send him a text. I

tell him what day it is today. It’s my daughter’s 17th birthday. Kid just had her school formal. Two days ago she was singing until she lost her voice with 96,000 friends at the Taylor Swift concert. “You once told me being a dad would be the most beautiful thing I’d ever do,” I tap with my right thumb. “Just wanted you to know, you were right. Love you mate. Trent.”

■ Trent Dalton is a writer for The Weekend Australian Magazine and has been with News since 2000. He has won worldwide acclaim for his bestselling novels Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Skies and Lola in the Mirror.

Opposite: Four-time Olympic sprint champion, Betty Cuthbert. Above: South-east Queensland dairy farmer, Geoff Beattie.

MAGIC &

MAGIC

1. We do nature big and magical in Australia. The Great Barrier Reef is the largest coral reef system; the Nullarbor Plain is the largest single piece of limestone; Western Australia’s Mount Augustus is the world’s largest rock; K’gari is the largest sand island.

2. We lead the world for special manmade “big things”. Here are a few: big banana, big prawn, big pineapple, big cane toad, big gumboot, big barramundi, big cassowary, big lobster, big merino, big potato, big kangaroo, big bullock, big rocking horse, big crocodile, big penguin, big koala, big galah, even a big stubbie.

3. We’re resilient. Despite what Mother Nature dishes up, we bounce back.

4. We’re one of the world’s most culturally diverse populations. We are home to nearly 280 cultural and ethnic groups, with immigration accepted as a nation-building strategy.

5. We’re relatively peaceful. According to the Global Peace Index (2019), our level of societal safety and security, the extent of our ongoing domestic and international conflict, and our degree of militarisation put us at the top end of the scale.

THE AUSSIE SPIRIT:

MIDDLE GROUND

Australia: peaceful one day, deadly the next. The great contradiction of modern Australia is that arguably one of the world’s most harmonious countries is also one of the most dangerous. At every turn in Australia there is both magic and mayhem. Our stability, created by a unique political system – we’re the only Englishspeaking democracy with compulsory voting – is undermined constantly by Mother Nature. Our geographical position makes us special. The Great Southern Land – the only continent that is a country, an island, and without an active volcano – is the driest inhabited continent yet home to lush rainforests, wet tropics and savage cyclones.

We do nature on a grand scale. And we are never going to create the world’s smallest tourist attraction. In fact, we have more than 150 “big things”, some of which are a bit magical on scale alone.

But there is always unexpected mayhem in Australia.

In the water, our blue-ringed octopuses each

carry enough venom to kill more than 25 people, box jellyfish have claimed 70 lives, tiny Irukandji jellyfish hospitalise 100 people a year, shark attack victims now number more than 230 people, crocodiles have killed more than 30 and a stingray took the life of crocodile hunter Steve Irwin.

On the land, our taipan and brown snakes are among the world’s most venomous. Snakes in and around the home are common in the warmer climes and funnel-web and redback spiders often hang out in dark corners of houses. Even going to the toilet can be risky.

Some Aussies go so far as to think the brutality of tropical heat melts brains, hence why they say people have “gone troppo” in the far north.

Bushfires have cost 900 lives in the past century and billions of dollars in damage, while floods have killed more than 160 people in the past decade and the damage toll from tropical cyclones over the past 50 years now tops $25 billion.

But for all of this, what’s undisputedly magical about Australia is that we’re one of the world’s most multicultural societies.

How we have created this magical haven of relative peace and harmony for those from troubled or impoverished lands sets an example for the rest of the world.

Glenn Stanaway, Head of Strategic Communications, News Corp Australia

MAYHEM

1. Australia is dangerous. It’s perhaps the only place you can die without being murdered or having an illness by swimming (drowning excluded), walking, gardening or just being at home.

2. Injuries from weather extremities are increasing. More than 9100 people have been hospitalised in the past decade –1000 related to heat and 677 people have died from it. In other words, hot weather is killing almost 70 Aussies a year.

3. We bounce back from natural disasters but at what cost? Over the next 40 years, the cost of natural disasters to the Australian economy is expected to be at least $1.2 trillion in present value terms, according to a 2021 Deloitte report.

4. “Caring for country” needs to be better understood. Indigenous land and sea management is happening around Australia, yet it is not always integrated into disaster prevention.

5. We must take great care to avoid our political landscape becoming defined by religion. Ongoing tensions in the Middle East could challenge Australian values of unity and tolerance, dominating politics as experienced in France and Britain.

BEYOND ’25

BRAINSTORM TEAM

Maddison Brennan-Mills Audience Growth Producer, news.com.au

Stephen Coombs

Senior Legal Counsel, Editorial

Nadja Fleet Editor, Geelong Advertiser

Claire Harvey Editorial Director, The Australian

Peter Judd Data Journalism Editor

Rose Owen General Counsel

Campbell Reid Group Executive, Corporate Affairs, Policy and Government Relations

Natasha Robinson Health Editor, The Australian

Kerry Warren Editor, news.com.au

Sharyn Whitten Head of Brand Communications

Magic & Mayhem of AI

CAMPBELL REID

GROUP EXECUTIVE, CORPORATE AFFAIRS, POLICY AND GOVERNMENT RELATIONS

To create this edition of the BEYOND series the editorial team set out to discover whether AI could do the job for us.

And if it couldn’t do the whole job, could it help us do it better, more quickly, more comprehensively than we could do it ourselves?

We hope our process can help others get a little clarity about AI’s strengths and weaknesses; when it’s helpful and when it’s hopeless.

To conduct the experiment, we assembled a diverse group of our editors, journalists, lawyers and free thinkers in a room and started talking about the issues we wanted to tackle.

Yes, AI could produce this book. Trouble is it wouldn’t be very good.

Here’s the reason. AI’s large language models excel at average and write in a language style that could be described as “California Corporate”.

In a nice, reasonable tone it is prone to stringing meaningful words into meaningless sentences. It is magnetically attracted to endless variations of the good old “on the one hand and on the other hand” cliches which means it doesn’t actually take a position on anything.

Now, that’s just the first cut. If you want it to do a better job, you can challenge it, demand it take a position, remove the cliches, write more concisely and so on. However, by the time you have been through that process you realise it would have been quicker, more unique and more rewarding to have done it yourself.

So can it produce the ordinary at pace? You bet.

Can it produce the unique and the challenging? Not so much.

Our conclusion is that if you ask AI to do your thinking for you you’re not going to be very thoughtful.

Because AI regurgitates what other people have already said or thought, it is the enemy of originality.

Was the idea a bust? Hell no, it was great!

To create content for a book in the BEYOND series takes months of briefings, commissioning, negotiating, editing, rewriting, rejecting and correcting.

By using AI for what it is good at, we squeezed a huge chunk of the process (not all of it, but a lot) into a two-hour brainstorm followed by a couple of weeks of human writing and editing.

So how did it help?

Firstly, it recorded and transcribed the entire conversation. This allowed us to let our brainstorm conversation flow without having to stop, take notes or repeat what was said.

Then it had the first and second go at capturing the bullet points for the key topics.

We were able in real time to use, then challenge, our own thoughts by playing back what it knew so there was an intellectual check-and-balance process going on.

AI has the ability to capture creativity by cutting out the functional processes that slow down spontaneity and free thinking. And knowing that AI can do the ordinary, us human thinkers can challenge ourselves to aim for the extraordinary.

(But just for the challenge, we did ask it to pretend it was a human writing about the world we envisage through the chapters in this book ... the result is unreal.)

BEYOND’25: created by humans and AIded by machines.

CONCEPT AND FOREWORD

Michael Miller

EDITORIAL

Campbell Reid

Sharyn Whitten

Glenn Stanaway

John Barker

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Abi Fraser

EDITORIAL MANAGEMENT

Andrea McNamara

“Together we will inspire, inform, connect and entertain all Australians.”