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Australia’s gender pay gap has been shrinking year by year, but is still over 20% among Australia’s private companies, a new national report card shows.

But that gender gap is even bigger at 25% among chief executive officers, according to figures collected for the first time in 2023–24.

And the widest gap of all is among older workers, with women in their late 50s typically earning $53,000 less each year than men the same age.

The release of the scorecard coincides with the federal government announcing it will introduce legislation this week requiring employers to set gender targets for boards, for narrowing the pay gap and for providing flexible work hours.

These and other measures will apply to companies with 500 or more employees. They build on legislative changes that enables the Workplace Gender Equality Agency to publish the size of their gender pay gaps, which came into effect this year.

Tracking Australia’s gender pay gap

Each year, the gender equality agency measures the gender equality performance of all private sector employers with 100 or more employees. This adds up to more than 7,000 employers and 5 million employees nationally.

Drawing on data collected in the annual employer census, the agency looks at several key indicators including gender composition of the workforce, gender balance of boards and governing bodies and equal pay for equal work.

One important indicator is the gender gap in average total remuneration. This is calculated for all employees – full-time, part-time and casual – by converting employees’ pay into a full-time annualised equivalent.

The gap continued to shrink in the past year to 21.1%. This has been largely fuelled by growth in the pay of the lowest-earning women in the workforce.

This came about, in part, because in June 2023, the Fair Work Commission awarded a 15% minimum pay rise to several aged care awards, where women hold 80% of jobs. Raises were also given to the retail trade, accommodation and food services sectors, also large employers of women.

Another reason the gap narrowed was because the remuneration of women managers rose by 5.9% from 2022-2023, compared to men’s which increased by 4.4% over the same period.

A bigger gap among high earners

The increase was particularly significant for high earning women (up 6.3%) compared to high earning men (4.1%). However, men still outnumber women in management, holding 58% of positions.

For the first time in 2023-24, the agency collected CEO salaries. The gender gap in CEO total remuneration was 25%.

Just one in four CEOs are women, and the gender pay gap for these key roles is the largest of all management roles. Women CEOs are paid, on average, $158,632 less total remuneration than men.

When CEO salaries are added into the mix, the overall gender pay gap stretches to 21.8%.

Little change for women on boards

The gender agency knows that women’s representation on governing boards matters for steering organisational change towards gender equality, monitoring these changes on the scorecard.

However the overall percentage of women on boards has hardly budged in recent years, at around one-third.

And about one-quarter of companies have no women on their governing board at all. This share is even higher in male-dominated industries, such as construction where the boards of 55% of companies are all men.

Women in their late 50s face the biggest pay gap

In dollars, it means Australian women are earning, on average, $28,425 less each year than their male colleagues.

This gap widens further among older workers. At its widest point, women aged 55 to 59 years are earning $53,000 less each year than men – a gap of 32.6%.

One of the big drivers of this pay gap are gender patterns in different industries and occupations.

The gender agency’s scorecard shows that half of all private sector employees work in an industry that is either male-dominated or female-dominated, meaning its workforce least 60% of a single gender.

It’s been a longstanding feature of the workforce that male-dominated industries outstrip the average earnings are female-dominated industries of education and training, and health care and social assistance.

How supportive are employers?

The workplace gender agency also measures employers’ policies supporting work and family balance, such as flexible hours and extra paid parental leave on top of minimal government provisions.

The finding that more employers are offering paid parental leave, rising from 63% to 68% in the past year, is a tick on the scorecard.

Men’s involvement in caregiving has a direct impact, enabling women’s involvement in the workforce. The proportion of parental leave being taken by men is up from 14% to 17%.

These improvements are set to increase under the government’s new legislation.

Providing a safe workplace

The final indicator on the scorecard looks at employers’ actions to prevent and respond to sexual harassment and discrimination in their workplace, as required under new Respect@Work laws.

Almost all (99%) of employers report having a policy in place. But there is scope for improvement in other ways.

Almost half (40%) don’t monitor the outcomes of sexual harassment and discrimination complaints and half don’t review the policy and consult with employees. As well, about 25% don’t incorporate inclusive and respectful behaviour into regular performance evaluation.

How reporting can drive change

As with any report card, there are marks for effort.

In the last year, 75% of companies reported they had analysed their own organisation’s gender pay gap and had made changes. This was up from 60% the previous year.

The gender agency attributes this to the publication of individual organisation’s gender pay gaps for the first time earlier this year.

Almost half (45%) of employers are now setting goals to improve gender equality. This includes targets to boost the number of women in management, reduce the gender pay gap and to achieve a gender-balance in their governing body.

These higher aspirations are likely to also be a response to plans to make target-setting part of the requirements for bidding for government contracts.

These changes show how incentives can bring about improvements. They arose from the 2021 Review to the Workplace Gender Equality Act that used research-based insights, data and community consultation to develop practical steps to reduce the gap and improve conditions for women. Läs mer…

Even before the COVID pandemic, which added significant pressure to the health-care workforce, Australian doctors experienced poor mental health at higher rates than the overall population.

The risk is particularly high for medical students, junior doctors and female doctors. A recent review of data from 20 countries found suicide was 76% more likely among female physicians compared to the general female population.

All this is a problem for the doctors themselves, and often for their loved ones. But it’s also a problem because we rely on doctors to provide high-quality health care for the population. If they’re burnt out, or experiencing anxiety, depression, or other mental health issues, this can affect their capacity to look after us.

Our new study published today in BMJ Open explores how doctors’ workplaces and working conditions affect their mental health.

What we did

We interviewed and then “work shadowed” 14 doctors while they were on shift in a public hospital in South Australia between June and October 2021. The doctors who took part were from varying cultural backgrounds, genders, sub-specialties, and at different stages of their careers (junior and senior).

We asked doctors about their roles, duties they perform, training requirements, and hospital regulations or standards that affect their experiences of their work.

We then watched the same doctors working at different times of the day, observing:

features of their working environments (such as pace and demands)
interpersonal relationships (team dynamics, mentoring, supervision, patient interactions)
the types of pressures they contended with alongside delivering clinical care (patient loads, administrative tasks).

During the shadowing, we explored with doctors how their workplaces could better support their mental health.

Our research focused on a public hospital setting.
hxdbzxy/Shutterstock

Administrative burdens on top of patient care

Among several challenges participants reported in their day-to-day work, the burden of administrative processes (such as completing paperwork and gaining approvals required for referrals) was a particularly strong theme.

One doctor said “the hospital processes are more stressful than clinical scenarios”.

The administrative burden required on top of clinical care left doctors feeling disenfranchised and negatively affected their satisfaction with service delivery. One said:

If the [patient’s] outcome is poor because they’ve had a terrible accident or got a terrible illness, I can rationalise that. But if they’ve had a poor outcome because we’ve not been able to deliver them a good service that feels a lot worse.

Workforce and rostering shortages

Doctors also described under-staffing and fragmented teams, which often required them to absorb pressure to provide high-quality care. This, compounded by the effects of shift work, led to exhaustion and took a toll on their mental health.

Despite this, doctors described feeling unable to refuse shifts or take leave for fear of losing professional credibility among colleagues or with senior staff who might control future job opportunities. One participant said:

We just keep taking it, keep taking it, keep taking it […] until we can’t. And I think, particularly doctors who don’t want to be seen as causing trouble or rocking the boat […] or seen as weak. You don’t want to be the one to admit that actually, this is impossible for one person to do.

Under-resourcing was regarded as a big problem.
Twinsterphoto/Shutterstock

A combination of pressures

Doctors in our study were highly trained, motivated and proficient in providing clinical care relative to their career stage.

However, their medical practice occurred within work environments characterised by high patient loads, time constraints, geographical challenges (services dispersed across sites) and administrative burdens. As one participant explained:

I think that just bubbles over years and it just makes this horrible feeling of injustice. Which is why I think doctors just feel burnt out, tired, frustrated, because they’re trying to do the right thing, and they’re trying to be better, and the system just doesn’t allow it.

The combination of competing pressures often collided with ambitions of being “a good doctor”. As one junior doctor explained:

In addition to all that knowledge and actual competence that you need to have, it is so important to convey to others that you are this rational, measured human being who is there to get the job done in an efficient way, in the right way. You just have to step up to that role and fulfil all these different tasks, and different expectations within this one job.

What next?

Our study was conducted only in South Australia’s public hospital system, so our findings can’t be generalised to other hospitals or other health-care settings where doctors might work.

But to our knowledge, ours is the first study of doctors’ mental health where, alongside interviews, researchers entered participants’ workplaces to observe their working conditions. In this way, it provides unique insights on the organisation and system-level factors which influence doctors at all career stages.

Our findings indicate doctors’ working conditions can have a direct impact on their mental health.

Protecting doctors’ mental health often focuses on how individual doctors can build resilience and increase their capacity to manage stress, for example through employee assistance programs.

While these approaches are important, they place ultimate responsibility for mental health on the individual doctor. This will not be enough, because doctors’ working conditions are largely outside of their control.

Programs are also not always accessible, for example due to stigma, workplace and professional culture, concerns about confidentiality or perceived risks to registration.

Protecting doctors’ mental health will require system-level changes, including addressing workforce shortages and restructuring leave provisions so that staff feel able to take time off. These changes are a crucial starting point to better look after our doctors, so they can look after us.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. Läs mer…

If parents have a choice, the decision about where to send a child to school and what will be best for them can be a really difficult one.

One question that comes up frequently in media reporting is whether single-sex or co-ed schools are better for students. There is ongoing debate about this for both private and public schools.

There has been community outcry over some schools’ plans to go co-ed. So it may surprise parents to know this isn’t a key question for many education researchers.

As someone who studies gender, social justice and schools, there are other questions I consider to be more important, such as: does a school give students equal opportunities for education and future life success? And how do we make sure all our schools do this?

What does the research say?

Single-sex vs co-ed debates have been going for decades. Which creates better outcomes? Is co-ed better for boys? Is single-sex more suitable for girls?

But decades of research into the topic is inconclusive.

What we can say is that the biggest predictors of a student’s academic success are socio-economic status, whether they live in a rural or remote area, and whether they are Indigenous.

There is also a widespread view it’s good for boys to be with girls, but better for girls to be on their own. But again, there is little comprehensive research evidence to support this premise.

These debates are also dominated by a belief that girls and boys learn differently. There is no strong basis for this in educational research.

Read more:
Why do we have single sex schools? What’s the history behind one of the biggest debates in education?

A different question

Looking only at gender differences between boys and girls at school can mean we ignore other important factors that impact on students’ educational success such as social class, race, school location and funding.

This is why, instead of getting stuck in old debates about single-sex vs co-ed schools, we should be asking more important questions:

do schools support all students?
do they create an environment that gives every student a fair chance to succeed?

US philosopher Nancy Fraser has a helpful framework for us to think about these questions. Her framework provides guidance about what schools and schooling systems should focus on to provide a fair and quality education.

This includes three elements: economic, cultural and political justice. These elements support not only students’ academic and social learning but also their physical, social and emotional wellbeing.

If we just look at gender differences we can ignore other important components of school success.
Jacob Lund/ Shutterstock

What about funding?

Economic justice is about fair access to resources. In Australia, reforms like the Gonski model aim to do this by focusing on student needs, such as location, Indigenous background, disability and language support. The idea is schools in needier areas should get more government funding and support.

However, there’s still a long way to go for funding equity. Public schools that serve the most disadvantaged students remain underfunded compared to private schools, which receive substantial government support.

This funding gap limits students’ access to the resources, safe spaces and support they need to thrive.

Respecting all backgrounds

But money alone isn’t enough. Schools need to respect and value the different backgrounds and experiences students have.

In Australia, with its rich multicultural makeup, it’s important schools focus on cultural justice by recognising and challenging discrimination based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religious background and ability.

They can do this by, for example, including Indigenous perspectives across the curriculum, teaching gender respect in relationships and setting up classrooms where cultural differences are valued. This helps create a welcoming and supportive school environment for everyone.

This is not about reducing identities to stereotypes. It is about supporting a deep understanding of different cultures that goes beyond labels and addresses the issues that keep certain groups marginalised.

Read more:
Australian schools need to address racism. Here are 4 ways they can do this

Are all voices heard?

Schools also need to foster political justice. Good schools provide opportunities for all voices — especially those from marginalised communities — to be heard and be part of decision-making.

This is something that can easily be obscured in debates about single sex or co-ed schools being better for one gender. For example, while single-sex schools may try to address gender-specific needs, they often reinforce stereotypes and can exclude non-binary and transgender students.

Schools can foster political justice by creating ways for all students, families, and communities to have a real say in policies and practices.

Inclusive decision-making helps students, families, and the school community feel connected and valued.

Schools should allow all students to contribute to decisions and policy.
DGL Images/ Shutterstock

What can you look for in a school?

Parents interested in whether a school is working to give all its students opportunities to succeed, could ask questions such as:

how does the school allocate resources to support disadvantaged students and ensure equal access to facilities and opportunities?
does the curriculum include diverse perspectives, celebrate cultural differences, and address issues like racism, sexism, and ableism?
are teachers trained to respond to diverse student needs?
how does the school ensure students, families and communities have a voice in decision-making?
finally, does the school’s staff reflect the diversity of its student body and if not, are there steps to rectify this? Läs mer…

It is a new idea to many Australians that their past is connected to the tragic history of transatlantic slavery.

Some aspects of this relationship have begun to be uncovered: for instance when Britain abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies – places such as Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Grenada – it struck a deal with the slave-owners to pay them £20m compensation for the loss of their human “property”.

An online database hosted by The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery allows anyone to search for the individuals and companies that benefited from this money. New historical research has traced the extensive investments of this compensation in the settler colonies of Australasia.

Review: Black Convicts: How slavery shaped Australia – Santilla Chingaipe (Scribner)

Along with capital, investors brought knowledge and attitudes – how to grow sugar in Queensland, for example, using techniques developed on slave plantations in British Guiana.

Digging the Cane-holes. Ten Views in the Island of Antigua,1823.
Wikimedia Commons

Likewise, British military forces violently quelled slave rebellion in the Caribbean and then travelled to Australia, where they applied the same techniques of violent punishment against First Nations Australians. Using biographical and genealogical methods, many stories are also tracking the movement of people from Caribbean slave-worked colonies to places such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

But this is frequently a top-down view, reflecting the continuing imbalance of power, recorded evidence, and prejudices flowing from this unequal past. In her new book, award-winning filmmaker Santilla Chingaipe sets out to explore links to slavery and their legacies from another direction, focusing on Black convicts of African descent.

Santilla Chingaipe.
Scribner

Ambitiously, and “with much urgency” she also aims to investigate how hierarchies of race, class and gender came to be in the Australian justice system.

Chingaipe began this journey in 2018 after visiting an exhibition about the colonisation of Australia. It mentioned at the start that Africans were among the first arrivals here – but did not further explore this history.

She undertook her own research about men of African descent on the First Fleet and in colonial Australia. “What I was not expecting,” she writes, “was for quite literally hundreds of non-white people from across the British Empire to reveal themselves in the archives.”

Her publisher tells us that Black Convicts “builds on” and takes further “Chingaipe’s critically acclaimed and award-winning [2021] documentary Our African Roots”. While not a professional historian, Chingaipe undertook study in history to acquire the tools she needed to research and tell this story.

Narrowing her focus to convicts – and consequently the convict colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemens Land – Chingaipe engages with a “handful of scholarly accounts” and archival sources, as well as drawing from newspaper accounts, radio interviews, and websites in producing her “collection of transatlantic stories”.

She is also critical of some previous historians in this field, singling out award-winning writer and historian Cassandra Pybus for her use of “racialized language and stereotyping” in writing about certain Black subjects. As a Zambian-born Australian, Chingaipe seeks to write something “beyond” history that might “act as a partial corrective to the epistemic violence of these narratives” and to help “us see these people as more than commodities and convicts”.

However Chingaipe’s aim to counter the misrepresentations of previous accounts perhaps leads her to overlook or deny existing scholarship, with some ill effects. Early in the book she states, “I have been able to conclusively identify at least ten people of African descent” who were convicts on the First Fleet, based on their archival description.

These are John Moseley, John Caesar, John Coffin, John Randall, John Martin, Daniel Gordon, John Williams, Black Jemmy Williams, Thomas Orford and Samuel Chinnery.

This misleadingly gives the impression that no one had done so before her – yet all of these figures have been previously researched and written about by historians, notably in Pybus’ 2006 Black Founders and Mollie Gillen’s 1989 The Founders of Australia: A Biographical Dictionary of the First Fleet.

Indeed almost all are subjects of online biographies published by the Australian Dictionary of Biography or People Australia. In “correcting” previous biases I believe it is important not to introduce new ones.

In places, this partial engagement with conventional historiography shallows Chingaipe’s analysis: for example, the case of Mauritian convict Eugene Doucette who in 1848 helped arrest a First Nations man has been researched by Queensland historian Libby Connors, who noted his friendship with Noonuccal man Bobby Winter and his acceptance by the Noonuccal at Amity Point on Minjerribah (Stradbroke Island).

Connors pointed out that Doucette’s and Winter’s arrest of another First Nations man “was probably a product of traditional law” as much as British colonial justice”. Her analysis opens up our understanding of the sophistication and underlying logic of First Nations law rather than seeing these events through the colonisers’ lens.

A fresh perspective

These limitations aside, Chingaipe brings a fresh and urgent perspective to bear on Australian history, re-telling many stirring, surprising, captivating moments of encounter or Black experience. Over much of the book, reflecting its foundation in her documentary film, she adopts a movie-like method of gleaning a crucial point or argument from the work of an established historian, whom she then interviews or takes to visit a historical site.

This technique enlivens her narrative and links it to the present, as she literally travels from places such as the ruins of Fort Dundas in the Tiwi Islands, where a disproportionate number of Black convicts were sent in 1824, to rowing across Sydney Harbour in a boat like that of ferryman William (“Billy”) Blue.

Born into slavery in the United States, Blue became a soldier in the British army. In London in 1796 he was sentenced to transportation for stealing sugar. In Sydney he married white convict Elizabeth Williams and they had six children together. As harbour watchman and ferryman, Blue became well-known and is still remembered through landmarks such as Blues Point.

This book is perhaps best appreciated as a film rendered in words, and is no less powerful for being so.

‘Ugly truths’

With a bowerbird eye Chingaipe looks again at our seemingly well-known, White-dominated past to show Black people as active and indeed integral participants across the colonial period.

For example, she examines the status of Black emancipist John Johnstone as a perpetrator of the 1838 Myall Creek Massacre of Wirrayaraay people in New South Wales.

Johnstone was of African descent, born in Liverpool, Britain, and was transported to New South Wales in 1829. Chingaipe points out that

to presume Johnstone’s actions could be predicted from the colour of his skin is exactly the sort of blindness this book sets out to challenge.

Scribner

As her account shows, by the time of the massacre, Johnstone had spent a decade on the violent frontier, his shifting status as victim/perpetrator shattering the binary view of colonial race relations.

In telling her cinematic stories, Chingaipe raises numerous topics and places, threading together Africa, the Caribbean, Mauritius, and the Australian colonies. Her book shows how themes such as water, sugar, capital, labour, Black protest and resistance, the survival of African religious beliefs, and the experience of Black women and children weave through Australian history, embedding it within global processes.

One revealing life journey is that of Robert James, born in 1809 in Barbados, and transported for the rape of a white woman. He made a life for himself in Hobart, where he married Lucinda, a woman from St Helena, their marriage witnessed by two other Black convicts, Thomas and Mary Jane Burrows.

The couple opened a lodging house in Collins Street, which was seemingly a haven for Black people, and James died at a venerable 86. Their friends, the Burrows family were not so fortunate. Their son Francis Burrows’ story is especially confronting.

Aged ten, Francis was living with a white farmer, ominously named Charles Slaughter, charged with looking after his cattle. Following continued mistreatment and abuse Francis died in late 1859. Slaughter was exonerated of murder. As Chingaipe comments, “it’s hard not to feel that” this injustice “had something to do with Francis being Black”.

While underlying structures linking slavery and colonisation remain implicit, as collective biography these empathetic stories build up a picture of Black experience across diverse contexts and moments.

Clearly-written, with a frequently poignant turn of phrase, the result is a fresh and compelling account of Chingaipe’s journey of discovery, that carries the reader along with her.

Foregrounding her Black perspective on a seemingly well-known narrative, Chingaipe achieves her aim to ask “us, as Australians, to confront some of the ugly truths of our history”. Läs mer…

Drag Race Down Under is back for a fourth season, only this time something is different. The Australasian franchise is no longer helmed by the eponymous RuPaul. Instead, this season the main judge and host is RuPaul’s long-term “best Judy” Michelle Visage, a woman from New Jersey who came to fame in the late 1980s as a member of dance-pop group Seduction.

Visage has worked as a panellist and judge on all US variations of Drag Race since 2011, and on the UK and “Down Under” (Australia-New Zealand) spinoffs.

On Down Under, Visage has now become the authority who determines who sashays and who stays in the fierce contest between ten queens.

This promotion has significance far beyond Visage’s own career. Importantly, it has prompted debate in drag communities that brings to light tensions across queer gender politics, and also reveals shifts in drag culture – for which Drag Race’s huge global popularity is largely responsible.

The mother of queens

On one hand, Visage’s elevation to host can be seen as a milestone for cisgender women in the world of drag, a culture long dominated by cisgender gay men such as RuPaul himself.

Along with the rising mainstream profile of drag over recent years, a growing number of cis women have identified and performed as drag queens (a category sometimes called “bioqueens”).

In 2021, UK Drag Race contestant Victoria Scone made headlines as the first cis woman to compete on a Drag Race franchise.

More recently, runaway pop sensation Chappell Roan – famous for elaborate costumes and makeup – has claimed the mantle of drag queen. Cis women have also performed as drag kings for decades, though “kinging” remains comparatively marginal and under-resourced.

Visage taking the reins is something categorically different: a position of power and authority within the drag world conferred by no less than RuPaul, the world’s preeminent drag artist.

It’s one thing for a cis woman to self-identify as a drag artist; it is quite another to be anointed as a drag gatekeeper by the individual who almost single-handedly brought this queer artform to the mainstream.

Although notoriously reluctant to allow trans women to compete in Drag Race, RuPaul has no qualms about extending queendom to Visage. In the foreword to Visage’s 2015 memoir The Diva Rules, RuPaul wrote Visage “knows the world of drag (she’s a drag queen herself)”.

RuPaul wrote Visage ‘knows the world of drag (she’s a drag queen herself)’.
Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP

Not so long ago, cisgender heterosexual women in gay culture were often dismissed as “fag hags”, a sometimes misogynistic (and also homophobic) label that reduced them to mere hangers-on.

Now, Visage is in the spotlight. The season’s blocking, editing, wardrobe and dialogue all position Visage as direct successor and equal to RuPaul.

There can be no doubt: on Drag Race Down Under, this cis woman is now the mother of all queens.

More than an ally

Since Visage was announced as host, Drag Race fandom has been alight with debate, with many concluding Visage lacks necessary credentials.

Online disputes among Drag Race fans flared on Reddit, asking if “they couldn’t find an Aussie?” and questioning whether Visage could legitimately be considered a drag queen herself.

Most conspicuously, Willam – a US Drag Race celebrity alum – was indignant “a drag ally is the host of a drag show”.

On the podcast Race Chaser, Willam said:

Why would you have someone who is not a drag queen hosting a drag show? […] It’s like someone who is coeliac hosting a baking competition.

But Willam seems to have missed some new developments, as well as certain histories, in drag culture.

Visage and RuPaul first met in New York’s ballroom scene, a subculture established in the mid-20th century by Black and Latinx queers, especially trans women (or “femme queens”) in response to racism in white-dominated drag spaces.

In ballroom, individuals are adopted into Houses, who then compete in categories such as “Vogue” (a dance style inspired by fashion modelling) or “Face” (a beauty category that focuses on the contestant’s face) at regular balls. Ballroom and drag are not synonymous, but ballroom has been a strong influence on contemporary drag culture and Drag Race.

Visage entered the ballroom world in the late 1980s, adopted into the House of Magnifique, becoming a top vogue dancer. As she said in her memoir, she was a “wild drag child”.

As a white, cisgender heterosexual woman, Visage was an outlier in ballroom but, nonetheless, the community became her “surrogate family”. During these years Visage created her drag persona. Born and raised as Michelle Shupack, she changed her named to Visage (French for “face”) after winning the Face category at many balls.

Drag and ballroom were once necessarily peripheral. They were spaces marginalised queer people carved out for themselves where they could celebrate, empower and compete, setting their own rules.

Yet, in the past decade, the global Drag Race phenomenon and social expansions of gender categories have changed how people engage with these previously underground subcultures.

All drag is valid

In this new drag-world order, Visage can ascend to a rightful place as a bona fide drag queen – a status she claims with “drag queen” tattooed on her upper thigh.

For Visage, all genders have equal claim to the artform:

I think that trans women do drag just like biological women do drag, just like trans men do drag […] all drag is valid, and all drag is welcome.

As the drag artist Michelle Visage, her name has become synonymous with a distinctive aesthetic: leopard print, exaggerated make-up, big hair, long nails and (until recently) artificial DD breasts – a high-camp nod to her New Jersey roots.

Michelle Visage’s elevation to Drag Race Down Under host is a milestone for cis women in drag.
Stan

“This is my shield, my superhero costume,” Visage explains. “When I put on my makeup, my drag, I feel like I can take on the world.”

She may not yet have conquered the world, but this queen has certainly conquered Drag Race, forging a new frontier for cis women in drag culture. Läs mer…

The global shortage of trained nurses has been described as a health emergency by the International Council of Nurses.

In response, Australia and other countries have developed nursing workforce strategies to protect their health systems. But there has been no response to calls for a similar approach in New Zealand.

Registered nurses make up the largest proportion of the healthcare workforce, in New Zealand and elsewhere. A sustainable supply of culturally and clinically competent nurses is fundamental to a safe health system. But because of funding constraints, New Zealand is grappling with both a nursing shortage and an oversupply.

Earlier this year, hundreds of experienced international nurses registered to work in New Zealand struggled to find jobs. At the same time, nurses continue to report being short-staffed, with no back-filling for staff on leave or off sick.

It is difficult to respond to rapid changes in demand because the time it takes to train a nurse creates a significant supply lag. But not maximising nursing investment makes little strategic sense and I argue New Zealand urgently needs a workforce strategy.

Investing in growing our own

Preparing a registered nurse for practice requires significant investment. It takes three years of full-time undergraduate or two years of full-time postgraduate study.

The study pathway is intensive, with at least 1,000 hours spent in clinical learning across multiple health settings in primary and community care, mental health and hospital services. This includes undertaking rostered and rotating shift work as preparation for registered nursing practice.

The Tertiary Education Commission investment in undergraduate nursing represents around a third of all undergraduate health funding and 7% of all undergraduate funding in the tertiary sector.

In 2023, 1,784 new New Zealand-educated registered nurses were available for employment in the system. This represents a cumulative national investment of around $70 million.

“Cost-containment” cuts previously led Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand to freeze employment of graduate nurses into the hospital system. This risks not only losing these valuable new health professionals but also reducing new enrolments into nursing programmes.

Nursing programmes are financially challenging. Many nursing graduates incur considerable debt related to their tuition fees (around NZ$30,000 across the whole programme), plus the additional costs associated with the clinical learning requirements (immunisations, clinical equipment, uniforms and travel).

Recent announcements in Australia of financial support for health students to address placement poverty (financial hardship during unpaid clinical placements) have been welcomed. There are no plans for similar initiatives in New Zealand.

Potential triple impact on nursing

Addressing the financial barriers to nursing students completing their education and subsequent employment is critical to achieving equitable access to healthcare and universal health coverage.

Creating a sustainable nursing workforce has a triple impact in supporting better health outcomes, the economic growth of communities and gender equality.

The latest government policy statement on health sets an objective for a culturally competent and homegrown workforce that reflects the population of New Zealand.

According to the Nursing Council’s 2023 annual report, New Zealand’s current nursing workforce is making slow progress toward better reflecting the population it serves. But we have a solution within the current body of nursing students.

Of the 8,885 students enrolled in nursing bachelor programmes in 2023, 18% identified as Māori, 15% as one or more Pacific ethnicities, and 25% as Asian. This student body (if retained) will have a positive impact on the current profile of nursing in New Zealand.

There is also an international expectation that developed countries reduce their reliance on the recruitment of qualified nurses from less developed countries, which places their health systems in peril. New Zealand ranked second in the OECD in having the lowest proportion of domestically educated nurses in 2021, at just 70.1%.

Most other OECD countries in that year reported that 90-95% of their nurses were domestically educated. Australia is an outlier at 82%.

But now New Zealand’s proportion of domestically-trained nurses has declined even further to only 53.7%. Our current reliance on internationally qualified nurses is not a sustainable strategy and risks not delivering on government workforce policy and equity targets for Māori.

Where to from here

Registered nurses are critical to the sustainability of health systems globally. New Zealand will not be able to continue to pull from overseas jurisdictions. We need to grow and keep our own domestic nursing graduates to meet government targets around the health workforce.

The are some potential solutions already in place. The current voluntary bonding scheme could start in the final year of the pre-registration programme to address some of the placement poverty issues.

Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand could explore models such as the New South Wales state government’s GradStart approach which provides a job with the option of metro-to-rural or rural-to-rural employment exchanges offered through a supported central system.

There is a critical need for the development and resourcing of a New Zealand nursing workforce strategy that considers recruitment (growing our own) and retention (keeping them). Both are critical elements of a sustainable workforce plan informed by Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

This would support the system to proactively plan for and resource a more sustainable approach to protect the investment we have already made in nursing education. Läs mer…

Why do people attend college or university? While there are many reasons to do so, a widely accepted outcome of completing post-secondary education is increased opportunity. Gaining and keeping stable employment at a higher income than a high school graduate is significant.

In Canada, median incomes for bachelor’s degree graduates are 47 per cent higher then those with a high school diploma. Nearly 75 per cent of employment growth in Canada is connected to occupations requiring a post-secondary credential. Currently, the majority of those with lived experience in Canada’s child welfare system are not completing high school. This contributes to youth unemployment.

More targeted efforts by provincial and federal governments are required to monitor and evaluate health, social, economic and educational impacts on the lives of those who have experience with child welfare systems.

Recent study on youth homelessness

A recent national study on youth homelessness by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness included 1,103 youth respondents who experienced homelessness. Among these youth from 47 different communities across Canada, more than 60 per cent had a history of involvement with the child welfare system.

A man walks through an encampment on Notre-Dame Street in the east end of Montréal in October 2024.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes.

Those with experience in the child welfare system face emotional challenges related to trauma, abuse and neglect. In addition, they contend with multiple changes in their living situations and schools. As a result, they generally have less education: for example, former youth in care are less likely to have graduated from high school or to complete post-secondary education than those without care experience. Consequently, they earn less income as adults.

Post-secondary graduation has the potential to transform lives and reduce unemployment. It is also a pathway for historically marginalized populations to improve their life chances and overall quality of life.

Black, Indigenous, 2SLGBTQ+ youth

Existing data indicate that post-secondary education not only contributes to employment and income over a person’s lifetime. It also positively impacts health and social outcomes, making education a key social determinant of health.

Education is a key social determinant of health.
(Pexels/Newman Photographs)

Despite this, Black, Indigenous and 2SLGBTQ+ youth who are over-represented in the Canadian child welfare system are vastly under-represented in post-secondary programs.

Providing better access to post-secondary education for former youth in care can help improve their individual circumstances. It can also address intersecting social, employment and income disparities more broadly.

Addressing barriers

Data from a recent Ipsos poll conducted in April 2024 indicates that 91 per cent of Canadians agreed that post-secondary education is beneficial for the future prospects of youth in Canada. The poll was conducted for the Children’s Aid Foundation of Canada.

Ninety-three per cent of those surveyed felt that youth in care should receive equal access to education. The same percentage of respondents agreed this would be beneficial for all Canadians and for our collective economic prosperity.

Considering the low income levels among those with experience in the child welfare system, and their disparities in finishing high school and post-secondary education, it’s clear greater action is needed to address barriers to education and employment.

Better data needed

Increased government efforts to bolster equitable educational opportunities and supports for people with experience with child welfare systems are needed. Actions should include collecting comprehensive, longitudinal data on indicators of success, such as:

completing high school;
successfully transitioning to college or university;
getting and maintaining employment;
securing stable housing;
improved physical and mental health.

A lack of comprehensive longitudinal data is part of the overall problem in understanding the complex issues facing former youth in care. Scholars from the University of Kansas have offered plausible strategies for research with youth in foster care. Such data would better clarify whether and how current child welfare initiatives contribute to better outcomes across people’s lives.

We need to better understand how former youth in care secure stable housing over time.
(Shutterstock)

Wrap-around supports critical

To further reduce disparities in the employment and income of those with experience in the child welfare system, we must ensure that appropriate wrap-around care supports are provided.

Child care, mental health services and housing need to be available and accessible to ensure equitable access to education. This is supported by recent research in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.

Research from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs indicates that Canada is among governments falling behind in ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting life-long learning opportunities — Sustainable Development Goal 4.

A provision in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that “every child has the constitutional right to access the benefits of education.” However, this isn’t the case for far too many youth with child welfare system experience.

More inclusive pathways needed

It doesn’t have to be this way. In 2020, the not-for-profit organization People for Education released The Right to Education Framework.

Schools, boards, policymakers and education systems can use this framework to monitor, measure and be publicly accountable for ensuring every person can access a quality education that prepares them for a brighter future.

By monitoring and evaluating core educational equity issues impacting youth with care experience, Canada can establish more inclusive and supportive pathways to education and employment. Through needed efforts, the overall quality of life of people with care experience can be vastly improved. Läs mer…

Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his creation of the eccentric detective, Sherlock Holmes. But he was also interested in architecture and worked on several projects throughout his life, from his home in Surrey to a golf course in Canada. Now, a building designed by Conan Doyle, the Lyndhurst Park Hotel in Hampshire, is under threat of demolition. The hotel’s east wing was designed from sketches provided by the author during a stay there in 1912.

In The Greek Interpreter (1893), Holmes tells Watson that he has “art” in his “blood” from a French relative. Conan Doyle too had art in his blood. After settling in London in the 1820s his Dublin-born and art-trained grandfather, John Doyle (1797-1868), became a famous political cartoonist. He even sketched Queen Victoria when she was a child.

Conan Doyle’s uncle, Richard “Dick” Doyle, was a fairy painter and provided the illustrations for the cover of Punch magazine. Another uncle, Henry, became the National Gallery of Ireland’s first director in 1869. Even Conan Doyle’s godfather, Michael Conan, from whom he acquired part of his surname, had trained in art.

His father, Charles, also had artistic talent and took up an architectural post in the Office of Works in Edinburgh as a designer and draughtsman. However, in contrast to his elder brothers’ success, Charles’s career was marred by alcoholism, leading to his committal to asylums.

Charles’s only lasting achievement was to design the statues of the fountain, commissioned by Queen Victoria, in the forecourt of the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The deterioration in his health and his frequent inability to work created an unstable home for his wife, Conan Doyle and his siblings. Much of the rest of Conan Doyle’s life was dictated by a need for financial and domestic (and so architectural) security.

Building Undershaw

This need was underlined by the design and building of Undershaw in Hindhead in Surrey for his wife Louisa. Undershaw was a medical necessity as well as a home. In October 1893, Louisa was diagnosed with tuberculosis, then an incurable disease. Two months later, Conan Doyle had Holmes grapple with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland in The Final Problem (1893). It marked the end of the detective – or so readers believed.

The Conan Doyle family spent the succeeding years travelling between Switzerland and Egypt to alleviate Lousia’s symptoms, until the novelist Grant Allen advised them to try the Surrey air.

Conan Doyle duly purchased a plot and drafted designs before hiring his friend, the architect Joseph Henry Ball. The pair had bonded over their shared interest in paranormal investigations.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s children playing on the driveway that leads to Undershaw.
Victorian Society, CC BY-SA

The name of the house came from its setting under the trees (“shaw” is from the Anglo-Saxon meaning wood or copse). The 11-bedroomed house provided a comfortable interior for Louisa with special door handles fitted to aid her rheumatism, and featured stained-glass windows with the coats of arms of his family. The family moved into their new home in October 1897. Built by profits from the Holmes stories, Undershaw was a testament to Conan Doyle’s literary status and, poignantly, a refuge for a wife who could not be cured.

It was while living at Undershaw that Conan Doyle returned to Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901.

Described as a “block of a building” covered with ivy from which “a window or a coat of arms broke through” and with “twin towers, ancient, crenellated, and pierced with many loopholes,” Baskerville Hall is a home under threat. The Baskervilles live under the shadow of a curse, seemingly haunted by a spectral hound. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead at the edge of the moor near the giant footprint of a hound, it seems that the curse has struck again.

Architecture in Sherlock Holmes

In many of the Sherlock Holmes stories, the detective fixes the problems in the home by investigating its architecture.

In The Speckled Band (1892) the crumbling country pile of Stoke Moran reflects the decay of its owner, Doctor Grimesby Roylott. Roylott tricks his stepdaughter, Helen Stoner (her surname suggestive of both abuse and incarceration), into occupying the room where her sister died on the pretext that building work on the house requires the move. When Holmes investigates the bedroom, he discovers a vent which adjoins Roylott’s room, through which Roylott sends a deadly snake, Julia’s killer. Roylott wants the sisters’ inheritances to shore up his home.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum at 221B Baker Street.
Wiki Commons

The story marking Holmes’s return from the Reichenbach Falls in 1903 is called The Empty House. Here Holmes and Watson hide in an unoccupied house directly opposite 221B Baker Street to catch a murderer intent on shooting Holmes.

The building of 221B Baker Street is perhaps Conan Doyle’s finest piece of literary architecture. The house, which did not exist in Conan Doyle’s time, functions as both Holmes and Watson’s lodgings and their detective agency. A Baker Street property modelled to recreate the stories’ conception of 221B was established in 1990 as a museum. There, visitors can believe that Holmes and Watson really existed because Conan Doyle “built” them so well.

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In villages across the country, irate farmers have accused the government of trying to end the tradition of the family farm by scrapping agricultural property relief, a measure which previously sheltered farms from having to pay inheritance tax on farmland.

Since Brexit a consensus has emerged that farmers should have to produce public goods in order to receive public payments. These “goods” include enhanced biodiversity, which could oblige farmers to plant trees or wildflower meadows.

How will scrapping agricultural property relief affect these plans for a green transformation of farming? First, let’s consider the changes.

The government has introduced a new minimum threshold for inheritance tax which means that farm assets worth over £1 million (US$1.3 million) will be charged, albeit at the discounted rate of 20% (instead of the standard 40%). Some farms may be able to claim a threshold of £2 million or even £3 million.

Labour claims this tax will only target rich landowners by asking them to pay a fair share of tax. One argument in favour of the tax is that it might deflate land prices and make it easier for new people to enter farming. The outcome is hard to predict, but this seems unlikely.

Despite the tax there will still be increasing demand for land to accommodate bigger farms, conservation areas, timber plantations, solar panels, wind farms, housing developments, and the like. This is, after all, an explicit aim of this Labour government: to stimulate investment in new green infrastructure.

In interviews, the chancellor of the exchequer, Rachel Reeves, has repeated the line that 73% of UK farms are not liable for the tax. But the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has challenged this, claiming that around half of all working farms will be hit. These are farms that produce a lot of food, with high turnover and a lot of capital tied up in land, but low profit margins. Which farms get taxed and which dodge it will depend on who has the best plan put in place by their accountant.

The NFU says that more farms will be liable for the tax than the government claims.
Mminson/Shutterstock

The NFU’s figures illustrate the possibility that, even spread over ten years, the inheritance tax bill alone could erase all of a farm’s would-be profits.

Meanwhile, it’s hard to know how much money the new inheritance tax arrangement will raise for the treasury as there are many ways to dodge it, such as gifting the farm to children seven years before the death of the landowner or putting the farm in a trust. The sudden death of the legal landowner before an effective plan is put in place could see a hefty tax bill fall upon the next generation.

How it will affect tenant farmers, those who rent from a landowner, is harder to predict. Landlords might seek to evict tenants in order to sell the land and pay the tax bill. Or it might mean more land is available for tenants to buy themselves.

Eating away at farm profits

What has received less attention, despite also costing farmers, is a new carbon tax called the carbon border adjustment mechanism. This will be applied to imported fertiliser, as well as steel, cement and hydrogen. The EU is bringing in the same taxation policy but at a slower pace, giving European farmers a competitive advantage in the meantime and a chance to adapt.

Labour plans to accelerate the transition from the previous subsidy scheme, which paid farmers for the amount of land they managed, to the new one, which aims to pay farmers for public goods. Add in a tax rise on double-cab pickup trucks and a rise in national insurance contributions for employers and it will be businesses already struggling that will feel the biggest pinch.

In a global economic system characterised by competition and uneven regulation and taxation, if British farms cannot afford to produce food then production will shift to where it is cheaper (and probably more environmentally destructive) to do so, blunting any attempt to curtail carbon emissions. It would also see British food production decline.

It doesn’t help its case that the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has been underspending its budget for the environmental land management schemes, the replacement subsidies for farmers aimed at paying for actions such as improved soil management. Frustratingly, Defra is going to return that money (£100 million) to the treasury rather than commit to spending it next year. Defra has also said the department was not properly consulted on the inheritance tax change.

The overall result is that farmers feel neglected during what is an increasingly difficult time. One researcher has documented a mental health crisis among farmers who are struggling to grow food in increasingly volatile weather, with little to no external support.

A genuinely green transition of agriculture will require both investment and radical reform of the entire food and farming system. Labour is showing no appetite for this.

The contradictions of the market

Farm businesses were already feeling the squeeze. The budget will tighten their economic constraints.

It might’ve helped Labour to sugarcoat its bitter changes by committing to other incentives or reforms. After all, it’s hard for farmers to repair ecosystems and reduce carbon emissions when invoices are coming thick and fast. There have to be carrots along with the stick.

Climate change has made food production more difficult to manage.
EPA-EFE/Tolga Akemn

Some notable farming figures have celebrated the rich paying a fairer share of tax. In reality, it is likely that it will only generate what the treasury calls a “rounding error” – in other words, relatively little. It may backfire and harm working farms and, in turn, the environment, if farms choose to intensify their operations by demanding more produce from the same land in order to remain profitable.

As author and shepherd James Rebanks has pointed out, repairing ecosystems requires a profitable business in order to fund the work required. Farmers have to shell out first and claim back later. Where a farm can’t afford work, like creating new wildlife ponds, the work simply won’t be done.

Whatever Labour’s long-term plans, stoking resentment among farmers in order to raise a relatively small amount of money will surely prove counterproductive for a green transition.

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Much is made of the alleged state of Bregret – the idea that even those who voted for Brexit now regret their decision. It is true that a majority (54%) now think Britain was wrong to vote to leave the EU. According to a YouGov poll, 62% of people think Brexit has been more of a failure than a success. We even know that 18% of leave voters would now vote remain if they could have another go at the 2016 referendum.

But conjuring up the past is a logical impossibility. A “rejoin” option would not be the same as the “remain” option. The European Union would have understandable hesitations about readmitting the UK without greater commitments than in the past – and might, for example, expect the UK to join the euro.

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When studying attitudes towards rejoining the EU, it quickly becomes apparent that voters see this clearly. The feeling of having made one’s bed and now having to lie in it is quite widespread.

When polled about a potential referendum on rejoining the EU, only 48% of the UK public solidly supported it. When asked if they would rejoin were monetary union to be on the table, support for rejoin dwindles to 34%, showing just how conditional support for rejoining actually is.

The rejoin option is particularly polarising. It drives leave and remain voters further apart than any other option.

And no-one wants to re-hash Brexit divisions: the issue has fallen precipitously in terms of salience (from its heights of nearly 70% in the negotiations period, to a mere 12% today). The public doesn’t want to touch the subject of Brexit with a barge pole – and it should come as no surprise that the current UK government doesn’t want to either. The current public mood is more one of bresignation than bregret.

Both leavers and remainers are in an impossible bind. They recognise that the process of leaving the EU was very far from the pipe dream sold by the Leave campaign but neither can do anything about it.

A new government and a chance to reset.
Flickr/Number 10, CC BY-NC-ND

For leavers, the idea that Brexit was a mistake triggers discomfort. They are in what behavioural scientists call a state of cognitive dissonance. When we cannot change a past action, we often decide to change how we see and interpret new evidence about that action in order to avoid the cognitive inconsistency and the psychological discomfort of being wrong about it.

This is natural and human, it happens to all of us. Together with my colleague Sara Hobolt, I have shown how since the 2016 vote, both remainers and leavers have chosen to retain and believe different aspects of official information on the state of the UK economy to suit their own view on Brexit.

For leavers, this means joining the 47% who think that Brexit is not done, or the nearly 30% who think it could have been a success if the UK had better politicians and negotiators.

These numbers are not negligible: any call for rejoining the EU is, at this point in time, unwise and likely to be seen as extremely radical.

The big reset

To overcome this state of “bresignation” and truly trigger a reset in UK-EU relations, the UK government first needs to gather information on how the current arrangement – the Trade and Cooperation Agreement – is going, and to communicate this evidence in a unifying way.

Some evidence shows that factual information about Brexit effects (e.g. economic repercussions, repercussion on young UK citizens of the end of freedom of movement), or lack thereof (for example, illegal immigration issue not being “solved” by Brexit), are getting across to the UK public.

Commissioning more research on how minimal access to the EU market is affecting the UK economy – and disseminating this evidence in a way that does not point the finger at leave voters – is an essential step. They need to be protected from feeling primarily responsible to be shielded from the state of cognitive dissonance.

Given that it was the responsibility of the Leave and Remain campaigns to clearly spell out the meaning of Brexit, freeing leave voters from blame is also simply the right thing to do.

Public opinion is still very much in favour of retaining control over UK regulations and trade deals, making joining the customs union and single market particularly unpalatable. But there is significant support for a closer relationship with the EU and for the removal of most – if not all – trade barriers on goods and services.

There is, therefore, scope to sell regulatory alignment by focusing on its flexible, conditional nature and on the perks of easing trade with the world’s largest trading block.

People are also less fussed about conditional freedom of movement than the government thinks. They favour flexible immigration quotas to dynamically deal with sectoral shortages, such as in the NHS, or for high-skilled talent.

A reset is in the realms of possibility, therefore. But the UK government first needs to break us free from the state of bresignation. Läs mer…