Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra

The government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, has recommended universities that fail to properly deal with the issue should have government funding terminated.

In her Plan to Combat Antisemitism, launched Thursday, Segal says she will prepare a report card “assessing each university’s implementation of effective practices and standards”.

This would cover complaints systems and whether the campus and online environment “is conducive to Jewish students and staff participating actively and equally in university life”.

“Should significant problems remain at universities by the start of the 2026 academic year, as assessed by the Envoy’s report card, a dedicated judicial inquiry should be undertaken to address systemic issues,” the Envoy’s report says.

That should include “investigation of foreign sources of funding for antisemitic activities and academics at universities”.

“Universities must embrace cultural change to end their tolerance for anti-semitic conduct,” the Segal report says.

It says the envoy will work with government to enable funding “to be withheld, where possible, from universities, programs or individuals within universities that facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism”.

The envoy also wants public grants to university centres, academics or researchers to be subject to termination if the recipient engages in antisemitic or other hateful speech or actions.

In the wake of the October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israelis, and Israel’s military response in Gaza, a number of Australian universities saw big pro-Palestinian protests, including encampments. At some universities Jewish students and staff felt unsafe going to classes or to their offices.

More generally, antisemitism has been rife since the October attacks, with most recently a spate of incidents in Melbourne in the last week. These included setting fire to the door of a synagogue and protesters rampaging through a restaurant that is part of an Israeli chain.

The envoy’s report was launched at a joint press conference attended by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, and Segal.

The ambitious plan is broad, also covering security, law enforcement, and online regulation among other areas.

But it is unclear how much of it the government will take up.

Asked whether the government was committed to the plan “in full”, Albanese was noncommittal.

“We welcome the plan, to be very clear. Some of the plan requires a long-term approach, some of it requires action by state governments, some of it requires action by society.

“What we will do is work constructively with the envoy,” he said.

“This isn’t something that is okay on the 10th of July, done, tick, and we move on. This will be a process.”

The plan includes embedding Holocaust and antisemitism education in school curricula.

Research the envoy commissioned found a substantial difference between the attitudes of Australians under 35 and those older. These reflected differences between the generations in media consumption and perceptions younger people have of the Middle East and the Jewish community.

“There also appears to be generational differences in the understanding of the Holocaust and its impacts on society,” the report says.

The envoy flags her intention, with the support of government, to “review, and where appropriate strengthen federal, state and territory legislation addressing antisemitism and other hateful or intimidatory conduct”.

Among the recommendations is the removal of tax deduction status from any charitable institution which promotes speakers or engages in conduct that promotes antisemitism.

The report says that from October 2023 to September 2024 antisemitic incidents increased by 316%, with more than 2,000 cases reported. These included threats, assaults, vandalism and intimidation.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Li Eriksson, Griffith University; Paul Mazerolle, Griffith University; Richard Wortley, UCL, and Samara McPhedran, Griffith University

We’ve long known there’s a link between alcohol and violence, but when it comes to homicide the stories behind the statistics are harder to grasp.

Our study sheds rare light on what actually happens when drinking precedes killing, because it draws not just on police or court records but on the first-hand accounts of convicted offenders.

We interviewed 205 Australian men and women across Australia aged between 15 and 65 at the time of homicide and 20 to 71 when interviewed.

Nearly half (43%) said they’d been drinking immediately before committing the act. While levels of intoxication varied, many described being heavily under the influence at the time.

One man, when asked about his alcohol consumption, stated he had drunk “shitloads” before the incident occurred, adding he intended to “write (himself) off” that night.

The study offers a disturbing but important window into the realities of alcohol-involved homicide.

What do we know about alcohol and homicide?

Most of our knowledge about homicide and alcohol comes from police reports, forensic toxicology and court proceedings. These are useful but limited. They often lack detail about how much was consumed, when and in what context.

Self-report data – what offenders themselves say about their state of mind and substance use – add depth to this picture.

While not without its flaws (memory and honesty being obvious concerns), such data helps us understand the psychological and situational dynamics of homicide better than numbers alone.

What the study found

Of the 205 homicide offenders interviewed, those who had been drinking prior to the offence shared some distinct characteristics.

Alcohol-involved homicides were more likely to occur at night, happen in public places such as pubs or parks, involve older offenders, and be committed with knives.

Interestingly, these cases weren’t necessarily the result of long-planned acts.

Rather, they had many markers of impulsivity – spontaneous, emotionally charged and often reactive violence.

Alcohol’s impact here could have played a role, as our study found drinkers and non-drinkers had similar self-control levels.

Self-control is the ability to manage impulses, emotions and actions in pursuit of long-term goals and is typically seen as a buffer against offending.

This suggests alcohol may overpower people’s behaviour even if they boast moderate impulse control.

Why chronic alcohol problems matter

The strongest predictor of alcohol-involved homicide wasn’t age, gender, or criminal history. It was whether the offender had ongoing problems with alcohol misuse.

This points to the deeply entrenched nature of alcohol dependence and its capacity to fuel extreme violence. It also has clear implications for prevention.

Tackling long-term alcohol abuse isn’t just a health issue – it’s a public safety issue.

The data suggest that had some of these people received support or intervention earlier, lives may have been saved.

More than a disinhibitor?

We often think of alcohol as a “disinhibitor” – something that lowers self-control and makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do.

That’s true to an extent but this study highlights the story is more complex.

Many of these homicides didn’t happen because someone simply “lost control”, they happened in a context shaped by years of alcohol misuse, patterns of violence and social disadvantage.

In some cases, alcohol didn’t cause the violence, it gave it an opportunity.

What can we do?

Understanding the characteristics of alcohol-involved homicide can help shape more effective crime prevention strategies.

Some takeaways include:

• Early intervention: addressing problem drinking before it escalates into chronic misuse is critical. This includes better screening, treatment programs and community-based support services.
• Night-time and public place policing: since these homicides are more likely to happen in public at night, there may be a role for targeted interventions in high-risk locations—especially around bars, clubs and events where alcohol flows freely.
• Knife crime prevention: the strong association with knife use suggests we also need to examine how accessible knives are in public settings and educate people about the risks of carrying them.

Looking to the future

This research doesn’t offer easy solutions but it does reinforce a vital truth: preventing homicide isn’t just about catching violent people, it’s about understanding the conditions that make violence more likely.

By listening to those who’ve committed the ultimate crime, we might just learn how to help better prevent it from happening in the first place.

Anna Hartley, science communicator at Griffith University, contributed to this article.

Li Eriksson, Senior Lecturer, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University; Paul Mazerolle, Director, Violence Research and Prevention Program, Griffith University; Richard Wortley, Professor of Security and Crime Science, UCL, and Samara McPhedran, Principal Research Fellow, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Patrick Dodd, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

For a long time, universities worked off a simple idea: knowledge was scarce. You paid for tuition, showed up to lectures, completed assignments and eventually earned a credential.

That process did two things: it gave you access to knowledge that was hard to find elsewhere, and it signalled to employers you had invested time and effort to master that knowledge.

The model worked because the supply curve for high-quality information sat far to the left, meaning knowledge was scarce and the price – tuition and wage premiums – stayed high.

Now the curve has shifted right, as the graph below illustrates. When supply moves right – that is, something becomes more accessible – the new intersection with demand sits lower on the price axis. This is why tuition premiums and graduate wage advantages are now under pressure.

According to global consultancy McKinsey, generative AI could add between US$2.6 trillion and $4.4 trillion in annual global productivity. Why? Because AI drives the marginal cost of producing and organising information toward zero.

Large language models no longer just retrieve facts; they explain, translate, summarise and draft almost instantly. When supply explodes like that, basic economics says price falls. The “knowledge premium” universities have long sold is deflating as a result.

Employers have already made their move

Markets react faster than curriculums. Since ChatGPT launched, entry-level job listings in the United Kingdom have fallen by about a third. In the United States, several states are removing degree requirements from public-sector roles.

In Maryland, for instance, the share of state-government job ads requiring a degree slid from roughly 68% to 53% between 2022 and 2024.

In economic terms, employers are repricing labour because AI is now a substitute for many routine, codifiable tasks that graduates once performed. If a chatbot can complete the work at near-zero marginal cost, the wage premium paid to a junior analyst shrinks.

But the value of knowledge is not falling at the same speed everywhere. Economists such as David Autor and Daron Acemoglu point out that technology substitutes for some tasks while complementing others:

• codifiable knowledge – structured, rule-based material such as tax codes or contract templates – faces rapid substitution by AI
• tacit knowledge – contextual skills such as leading a team through conflict – acts as a complement, so its value can even rise.

Data backs this up. Labour market analytics company Lightcast notes that one-third of the skills employers want have changed between 2021 and 2024. The American Enterprise Institute warns that mid-level knowledge workers, whose jobs depend on repeatable expertise, are most at risk of wage pressure.

So yes, baseline knowledge still matters. You need it to prompt AI, judge its output and make good decisions. But the equilibrium wage premium – meaning the extra pay employers offer once supply and demand for that knowledge settle – is sliding down the demand curve fast.

What’s scarce now?

Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize–winning economist and cognitive scientist, put it neatly decades ago: “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” When facts become cheap and plentiful, our limited capacity to filter, judge and apply them turns into the real bottleneck.

That is why scarce resources shift from information itself to what machines still struggle to copy: focused attention, sound judgement, strong ethics, creativity and collaboration.

I group these human complements under what I call the C.R.E.A.T.E.R. framework:

• critical thinking – asking smart questions and spotting weak arguments
• resilience and adaptability – staying steady when everything changes
• emotional intelligence – understanding people and leading with empathy
• accountability and ethics – taking responsibility for difficult calls
• teamwork and collaboration – working well with people who think differently
• entrepreneurial creativity – seeing gaps and building new solutions
• reflection and lifelong learning – staying curious and ready to grow.

These capabilities are the genuine scarcity in today’s market. They are complements to AI, not substitutes, which is why their wage returns hold or climb.

What universities can do right now

1. Audit courses: if ChatGPT can already score highly on an exam, the marginal value of teaching that content is near zero. Pivot the assessment toward judgement and synthesis.

2. Reinvest in the learning experience: push resources into coached projects, messy real-world simulations, and ethical decision labs where AI is a tool, not the performer.

3. Credential what matters: create micro-credentials for skills such as collaboration, initiative and ethical reasoning. These signal AI complements, not substitutes, and employers notice.

4. Work with industry but keep it collaborative: invite employers to co-design assessments, not dictate them. A good partnership works like a design studio rather than a boardroom order sheet. Academics bring teaching expertise and rigour, employers supply real-world use cases, and students help test and refine the ideas.

Universities can no longer rely on scarcity setting the price for the curated and credentialed form of information that used to be hard to obtain.

The comparative advantage now lies in cultivating human skills that act as complements to AI. If universities do not adapt, the market – students and employers alike – will move on without them.

The opportunity is clear. Shift the product from content delivery to judgement formation. Teach students how to think with, not against, intelligent machines. Because the old model, the one that priced knowledge as a scarce good, is already slipping below its economic break-even point.

Patrick Dodd, Professional Teaching Fellow, Business School, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.