Experts Call for Digital Shift Amid Rising Election Waste
Australia's federal election has generated a record amount of paper, plastic, and cardboard waste, prompting experts to call for a shift to more sustainable—and possibly digital—voting methods.
The Australian Electoral Commission says it prints around 55 million ballot papers, 25,000 copies of the electoral roll, and 12 million household guides. Along with that are 250,000 pencils and 250,000
There are also 80,000 cardboard ballot boxes, 1.4 million plastic security seals, and 20,000 lanyards—all of which will eventually head to a recycling station or landfill.
It does not just happen once every three years at a federal election but is repeated on a smaller scale for every state and territory election and, on a larger scale, for every council and shire.
The problem is only going to get bigger as the population grows: the 2025 federal election was Australia's biggest yet, with 710,000 more people on the electoral roll than in 2022.
Calls for Reform
The growing scale of elections has prompted calls to explore waste-minimising alternatives.
Professor of Information Sciences at RMIT University, Lisa Given, thinks it's time to consider a more efficient approach to creating, using, recycling, and disposing of election materials, including possibly switching to online voting.
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'We need to think creatively about this,' Professor Given said. 'I'm of the view that if I can do my banking online and it's relatively secure, there must be a way for that to be scaled to other industries.'
Mandatory ID Card a Prerequisite
She pointed to Estonia, which has
However, it relies on a mandatory ID card, which also allows Estonians to access a range of services, including accessing health records, government services, and secure digital signatures.
Australians are required to vote in person, so online voting would require changes to the law.
'I think what we want to see is that the government actually decides, 'Hey, we should explore this and see what's possible,'' Given said.
Current Efforts and Limitations
Some Australian jurisdictions have begun experimenting with digital tools. The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Electoral Commission
In New South Wales (NSW), the Electoral Commission has issued a formal request for information (RFI) on internet voting systems, but for now, the technology will be available only to an estimated 4,000 blind or low-vision voters in the state at the 2027 state election.
Environmental Costs Beyond Paper
Others argue that while digital voting remains controversial, Australia could take simpler steps to reduce election waste.
University of Adelaide political analyst Clem Macintyre said he was 'not a fan' of online voting, citing global concerns about electoral integrity.
'I think while we've got the mood around the world where the results of elections that appear clear-cut and honest are doubted, the more physical evidence you can show for an outcome, the better,' he said.
However, he would favour a ban on corflute signs—many of which are not recycled—similar to that imposed by South Australia, and an end to how-to-vote cards.
'They're generally single-use, and the more that we can just stop creating them, the better off the environment is going to be,' he said.
Most councils require corflutes to be collected within seven days of an election, but no rules govern their reuse or disposal.
While they are made from recyclable polypropylene, a lightweight plastic, most recycling facilities do not accept them.
In 2019, India's election commission directed parties to eliminate single-use plastic, including corflutes.
AAP contributed to this story.
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I'm Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is (Again)
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive. The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil ('I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,' The American Prospect's David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. 'One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,' my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote. [Read: Stephen Miller triggers Los Angeles] As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground. All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown. Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what's happening in L.A. varies considerably. Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one's impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of 'mostly peaceful protests' as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It's likely that my grasp of the events and their politics are shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption. Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump's wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.) I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they're cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as 'CIVIL WAR ALERT' and 'DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!' All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I've written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user's TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it's not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country's largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives. On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I've seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers' market—and lots of pictures of the city's unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it's hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it's unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters 'to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.' [Read: I'm running out of ways to explain how bad this is] In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn't matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to 'Send in the Troops' to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline 'Send in the Troops, for Real.' (For transparency's sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.) There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration's second term. The administration's policies are more extreme, and there's a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody's even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government's deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not. This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump's second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way. Article originally published at The Atlantic
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Aukus: Could Trump sink Australia's submarine plans?
Australia's defence minister woke up to a nightmare earlier this week - and it's one that has been looming ever since the United States re-elected Donald Trump as president in November. A landmark trilateral agreement between the US, UK and Australia - which would give the latter cutting-edge nuclear submarine technology in exchange for more help policing China in the Asia-Pacific - was under review. The White House said on Thursday it wanted to make sure the so-called Aukus pact was "aligned with the president's America First agenda". It's the latest move from Washington that challenges its long-standing friendship with Canberra, sparking fears Down Under that, as conflict heats up around the globe, Australia may be left standing without its greatest ally. "I don't think any Australian should feel that our ally is fully committed to our security at this moment," says Sam Roggeveen, who leads the security programme at Australia's Lowy Institute think tank. On paper, Australia is the clear beneficiary of the Aukus agreement, worth £176bn ($239bn; A$368bn). The technology underpinning the pact belongs to the US, and the UK already has it, along with their own nuclear-powered subs. But those that are being jointly designed and built by the three countries will be an improvement. For Australia, this represents a pivotal upgrade to military capabilities. The new submarine model will be able to operate further and faster than the country's existing diesel-engine fleet, and allow it to carry out long-range strikes against enemies for the first time. It is a big deal for the US to share what has been described as the "crown jewel" of its defence technology, and no small thing for the UK to hand over engine blueprints either. But arming Australia has historically been viewed by Washington and Downing Street as essential to preserving peace in the Asia-Pacific region, which is far from their own. It's about putting their technology and hardware in the right place, experts say. But when the Aukus agreement was signed in 2021, all three countries had very different leaders - Joe Biden in the US, Boris Johnson in the UK and Scott Morrison in Australia. Today, when viewed through the increasingly isolationist lens Trump is using to examine his country's global ties, some argue the US has far less to gain from the pact. Under Secretary of Defence Policy Elbridge Colby, a previous critic of Aukus, will lead the White House review into the agreement, with a Pentagon official telling the BBC the process was to ensure it meets "common sense, America First criteria". Two of the criteria they cite are telling. One is a demand that allies "step up fully to do their part for collective defence". The other is a purported need to ensure that the US arms industry is adequately meeting the country's own needs first. The Trump administration has consistently expressed frustration at allies, including Australia, who they believe aren't pulling their weight with defence spending. They also say America is struggling to produce enough nuclear-powered submarines for its own forces. "Why are we giving away this crown jewel asset when we most need it?" Colby himself had said last year. The Australian government, however, is presenting a calm front. It's only natural for a new administration to reassess the decisions of its predecessor, officials say, noting that the new UK Labor government had a review of Aukus last year too. "I'm very confident this is going to happen," Defence Minister Richard Marles said of the pact, in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). But there's little doubt the review would be causing some early jolts of panic in Canberra. "I think angst has been inseparable from Aukus since its beginning… The review itself is not alarming. It's just everything else," Euan Graham, from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, tells the BBC. There is growing concern across Australia that America cannot be relied upon. "[President Donald Trump's] behaviour, over these first months of this term, I don't think should fill any observer with confidence about America's commitment to its allies," Mr Roggeveen says. "Trump has said, for instance, that Ukraine is mainly Europe's problem because they are separated by a big, beautiful ocean. Well of course, there's a big, beautiful ocean separating America from Asia too." Washington's decision to slap large tariffs on Australian goods earlier this year did not inspire confidence either, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese saying it was clearly "not the act of a friend". Albanese has stayed quiet on the Aukus review so far, likely holding his breath for a face-to-face meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in Canada next week. This is a chat he's still desperately trying to get the US president to agree to. But several former prime ministers have rushed to give their two cents. Scott Morrison, the conservative leader who negotiated the Aukus pact in 2021, said the review should not be "over-interpreted" and scoffed at the suggestion another country could meet Australia's security needs. "The notion… is honestly delusional," he told ABC radio. Malcolm Turnbull, who was behind the French submarine contract that Morrison dramatically tore up in favour of Aukus, said Australia needs to "wake up", realise it's a "bad deal" which the US could renege on at any point, and make other plans before it is too late. Meanwhile, Paul Keating, a famously sharp-tongued advocate for closer ties with China, said this "might very well be the moment Washington saves Australia from itself". "Aukus will be shown for what it always has been: a deal hurriedly scribbled on the back of an envelope by Scott Morrison, along with the vacuous British blowhard Boris Johnson and the confused President Joe Biden." The whiff of US indecision over Aukus feeds into long-term criticism in some quarters that Australia is becoming too reliant on the country. Calling for Australia's own inquiry, the Greens, the country's third-largest political party, said: "We need an independent defence and foreign policy, that does not require us to bend our will and shovel wealth to an increasingly erratic and reckless Trump USA." There's every chance the US turns around in a few weeks and recommits to the pact. At the end of the day, Australia is buying up to five nuclear-powered submarines at a huge expense, helping keep Americans employed. And the US has plenty of time - just under a decade - to sort out their supply issues and provide them. "[The US] also benefit from the wider aspects of Aukus - all three parties get to lift their boat jointly by having a more interoperable defence technology and ecosystem," Mr Graham adds. Even so, the anxiety the review has injected into the relationship is going to be hard to erase completely – and has only inflamed disagreements over Aukus in Australia. But there's also a possibility Trump does want to rewrite the deal. "I can easily see a future in which we don't get the Virginia class boats," Mr Roggeveen says, referring to the interim submarines. That would potentially leave Australia with its increasingly outdated fleet for another two decades, vulnerable while the new models are being designed and built. What happens in the event the US does leave the Aukus alliance completely? At this juncture, few are sounding that alarm. The broad view is that, for the US, countering China and keeping the Pacific in their sphere of influence is still crucial. Mr Roggeveen, though, says that when it comes to potential conflict in the Pacific, the US hasn't been putting their money where its mouth is for years. "China's been engaged in the biggest build-up of military power of any country since the end of the Cold War and the United States' position in Asia basically hasn't changed," he says. If the US leaves, Aukus could very well become an awkward Auk – but could the UK realistically offer enough for Australia to sustain the agreement? And if the whole thing falls apart and Australia is left without submarines, who else could it turn to? France feels like an unlikely saviour, given the previous row there, but Australia does have options, Mr Roggeveen says: "This wouldn't be the end of the world for Australian defence." Australia is "geographically blessed", he says, and with "a reasonable defence budget and a good strategy" could sufficiently deter China, even without submarines. "There's this phrase you hear occasionally, that the danger is on our doorstep. Well, it's a big doorstep if that is true… Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney." "There is this mental block in Australia and also this emotional block - a fear of abandonment, this idea that we can't defend ourselves alone. But we absolutely can if we have to." What is Aukus, the submarine deal between Australia, the UK and US? Submarine deal sends powerful message to China The laidback Australian city key to countering China Donald Trump is looming over Australia's election
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The L.A. Distortion Effect
One hallmark of our current moment is that when an event happens, there is little collective agreement on even basic facts. This, despite there being more documentary evidence than ever before in history: Information is abundant, yet consensus is elusive. The ICE protests in Los Angeles over the past week offer an especially relevant example of this phenomenon. What has transpired is fairly clear: A series of ICE raids and arrests late last week prompted protests in select areas of the city, namely downtown, near a federal building where ICE has offices, and around City Hall and the Metropolitan Detention Center. There have been other protests south of there, around a Home Depot in Paramount, where Border Patrol agents gathered last week. The majority of these protests have been civil ('I mostly saw clergy sit-ins and Tejano bands,' The American Prospect 's David Dayen wrote). There has been some looting and property destruction. 'One group of vandals summoned several Waymo self-driving cars to the street next to the plaza where the city was founded and set them ablaze,' my colleague Nick Miroff, who has been present at the demonstrations, wrote. As is common in modern protests, there has also been ample viral footage from news organizations showing militarized police responding aggressively in encounters, sometimes without provocation. In one well-circulated clip, an officer in riot gear fires a nonlethal round directly at an Australian television correspondent carrying a microphone while on air; another piece of footage shot from above shows a police officer on horseback trampling a protester on the ground. All of these dynamics are familiar in the post-Ferguson era of protest. What you are witnessing is a news event distributed and consumed through a constellation of different still images and video clips, all filmed from different perspectives and presented by individuals and organizations with different agendas. It is a buffet of violence, celebration, confusion, and sensationalism. Consumed in aggregate, it might provide an accurate representation of the proceedings: a tense, potentially dangerous, but still contained response by a community to a brutal federal immigration crackdown. Unfortunately, very few people consume media this way. And so the protests follow the choose-your-own-adventure quality of a fractured media ecosystem, where, depending on the prism one chooses, what's happening in L.A. varies considerably. Anyone is capable of cherry-picking media to suit their arguments, of course, and social media has always narrowed the aperture of news events to fit particular viewpoints. Regardless of ideology, dramatic perspectives succeed on platforms. It is possible that one's impression of the protests would be incorrectly skewed if informed only by Bluesky commentators, MSNBC guests, or self-proclaimed rational centrists. The right, for example, has mocked the idea of 'mostly peaceful protests' as ludicrous when juxtaposed with video of what they see as evidence to the contrary. It's likely that my grasp of the events and their politics are shaped by decades of algorithmic social-media consumption. Yet the situation in L.A. only further clarifies the asymmetries among media ecosystems. This is not an even playing field. The right-wing media complex has a disproportionate presence and is populated by extreme personalities who have no problem embracing nonsense AI imagery and flagrantly untrue reporting that fits their agenda. Here you will find a loosely affiliated network of streamers, influencers, alternative social networks, extremely online vice presidents, and Fox News personalities who appear invested in portraying the L.A. protests as a full-blown insurrection. To follow these reports is to believe that people are not protesting but rioting throughout the city. In this alternate reality, the whole of Los Angeles is a bona fide war zone. (It is not, despite President Donald Trump's wildly disproportionate response, which includes deploying hundreds of U.S. Marines to the area and federalizing thousands of National Guard members.) I spent the better part of the week drinking from this particular firehose, reading X and Truth Social posts and watching videos from Rumble. On these platforms, the protests are less a news event than a justification for the authoritarian use of force. Nearly every image or video contains selectively chosen visuals of burning cars or Mexican flags unfurling in a smog of tear gas, and they're cycled on repeat to create a sense of overwhelming chaos. They have titles such as 'CIVIL WAR ALERT' and 'DEMOCRATS STOKE WW3!' All of this incendiary messaging is assisted by generative-AI images of postapocalyptic, smoldering city streets—pure propaganda to fill the gap between reality and the world as the MAGA faithful wish to see it. I've written before about how the internet has obliterated the monoculture, empowering individuals to cocoon themselves in alternate realities despite confounding evidence—it is a machine that justifies any belief. This is not a new phenomenon, but the problem is getting worse as media ecosystems mature and adjust to new technologies. On Tuesday, one of the top results for one user's TikTok search for Los Angeles curfew was an AI-generated video rotating through slop images of a looted city under lockdown. Even to the untrained eye, the images were easily identifiable as AI-rendered (the word curfew came out looking like ciuftew). Still, it's not clear that this matters to the people consuming and sharing the bogus footage. Even though such reality-fracturing has become a load-bearing feature of our information environment, the result is disturbing: Some percentage of Americans believes that one of the country's largest cities is now a hellscape, when, in fact, almost all residents of Los Angeles are going about their normal lives. On platforms such as Bluesky and Instagram, I've seen L.A. residents sharing pictures of themselves going about their day-to-day lives—taking out the trash, going to the farmers' market—and lots of pictures of the city's unmistakable skyline against the backdrop of a beautiful summer day. These are earnest efforts to show the city as it is (fine)—an attempt to wrest control of a narrative, albeit one that is actually based in truth. Yet it's hard to imagine any of this reaching the eyes of the people who participate in the opposing ecosystem, and even if it did, it's unclear whether it would matter. As I documented in October, after Hurricanes Helene and Milton destroyed parts of the United States, AI-generated images were used by Trump supporters 'to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.' In the cinematic universe of right-wing media, the L.A. ICE protests are a sequel of sorts to the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020. It doesn't matter that the size and scope have been different in Los Angeles (at present, the L.A. protests do not, for instance, resemble the 100-plus nights of demonstrations and clashes between protesters and police that took place in Portland, Oregon, in 2020): Influencers and broadcasters on the right have seized on the association with those previous protests, insinuating that this next installment, like all sequels, will be a bigger and bolder spectacle. Politicians are running the sequel playbook—Senator Tom Cotton, who wrote a rightly criticized New York Times op-ed in 2020 urging Trump to 'Send in the Troops' to quash BLM demonstrations, wrote another op-ed, this time for The Wall Street Journal, with the headline 'Send in the Troops, for Real.' (For transparency's sake, I should note that I worked for the Times opinion desk when the Cotton op-ed was published and publicly objected to it at the time.) There is a sequel vibe to so much of the Trump administration's second term. The administration's policies are more extreme, and there's a brazenness to the whole affair—nobody's even trying to justify the plot (or, in this case, cover up the corruption and dubious legality of the government's deportation regime). All of us, Trump supporters very much included, are treated as a captive audience, forced to watch whether we like it or not. This feeling has naturally trickled down to much of the discourse and news around Trump's second presidency, which feels (and generally is) direr, angrier, more intractable. The distortions are everywhere: People mainlining fascistic AI slop are occupying an alternate reality. But even those of us who understand the complexity of the protests are forced to live in our own bifurcated reality, one where, even as the internet shows us fresh horrors every hour, life outside these feeds may be continuing in ways that feel familiar and boring. We are living through the regime of a budding authoritarian—the emergency is here, now—yet our cities are not yet on fire in the way that many shock jocks say they are. The only way out of this mess begins with resisting the distortions. In many cases, the first step is to state things plainly. Los Angeles is not a lawless, postapocalyptic war zone. The right to protest is constitutionally protected, and protests have the potential to become violent—consider how Trump is attempting to use the force of the state to silence dissent against his administration. There are thousands more peaceful demonstrations scheduled nationally this weekend. The tools that promised to empower us, connect us, and bring us closer to the truth are instead doing the opposite. A meaningful percentage of American citizens appears to have dissociated from reality. In fact, many of them seem to like it that way.
