In his second term, US President Donald Trump has gone the way of past executive tribunes of the American imperium in seeking land and resources like a kleptomaniacal pincher. This has been bracing, n...

The Australian Greens is Australia's fastest growing political party. By joining the Greens, you become a part of our vision of an Australia with the courage to take action on important issues.

Opposition leader Angus Taylor has unveiled plans to cut Australia’s temporary migration intake by about 650,000 people over four years in what he says would be the “biggest cuts to immigration in the history of this country”. An elected Coalition government would more than halve net migration for two years to 100,000 annually, 130,000 in its third year and 160,000 in the fourth. Following this, the Coalition would link net migration levels to the pace of housing completions. The Coalition says it would abolish temporary graduate visas, halve the humanitarian intake to 10,000 places a year, and reduce bridging visas by forcing temporary visa holders to leave Australia if they want to apply for a new visa. The Coalition would also cap international student commencements at 240,000. The Coalition’s plan follows Labor’s announcement it would target a net overseas migration figure of 245,000 this year and 225,000 in 2027-28. Meanwhile, One Nation has already said it would implement a “negative” intake for three years, and then set a target of 130,000 people in the “long term”. One Nation would cut 750,000 temporary visas over three years. Speaking on Tuesday, Taylor said he had confidence the plan would be “budget neutral” because the cuts made to temporary visas would be offset by higher tax income from an increase in skilled migrants. This includes around 60,000 additional temporary skilled visa holders and 15,000 skilled project visas which would prioritise sectors like healthcare. Taylor has not released any costing for the migration policy, nor has he acknowledged the profound impact it may have on feminised industries. ## The impact on women So what does all this mean for women, especially in sectors like aged care which are heavily female-dominated? Speaking to the ABC’s _7.30_ , Taylor said he did not have the “exact number” of aged care workers who would be affected by the visa changes. He acknowledged “some” aged care would be affected, while others would be unaffected. He noted there is an exemption, or “transition arrangement” for healthcare workers in regional areas. ## What counts as “skilled” work? Another question to consider is what counts as “skilled” work and whether the migration policy will favour occupations associated with higher wages or particular skills that are more likely to be held by men. Taylor said the Coalition would focus on bringing in high-value migrants who would pay more tax, but could this lead to the squeezing out of essential but undervalued work that is often done by women in low-paid sectors? We may see migrant women currently working in aged care, disability care and early childhood education lose access to a pathway to permanent residency or face changes to their visa arrangements. It’s worth considering what kind of flow-on impact this might have on women across Australia, who tend to take on more of the unpaid care work at home when formal services can’t meet demand. ## Women refugees to be hit hardest And with the Coalition set to halve the government’s humanitarian intake, women and children will be among those hardest hit. In 2024-35, just over half of Australia’s offshore humanitarian visa recipients were women, while 42.6 per cent were children under aged 18. Meanwhile, in the same period, 981 visas were granted to ‘vulnerable’ women and children. As global conflict surges, the Coalition’s plan will see more vulnerable women and children rejected. **_Want more stories like this sent straight to your inbox?_ _Join the free Women’s Agenda Daily newsletter_ _and support independent, women-led journalism._** Share this Angus Taylormigrationmigration policy by Madeline Hislop 7 hours ago ## Stay Smart! Get Women's Agenda in your inbox * X/Twitter This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. * Email SUBSCRIBE ## Latest news ### The flexibility trap: why working mothers are getting stuck in jobs they’ve outgrown ### I couldn’t find the baby food I wanted to feed my own children. So I created it. ### Everyone is talking about Cornell. But what about the woman at the centre of it? ### Sam Wood was Australia’s dreamboat. The allegations against him should make us reflect. ### Climate, rising prices, conflict: The compounding crises leaving women hungrier, poorer and less resilient ### Podcast: Why it’s time to quit being nice

Three years of attacks has devastated Gaza, killing tens of thousands, destroying homes, and collapsing basic services.

The harms of AI to women are usually discussed in the future tense and separately from the more dominant conversations about data centres, copyright, and productivity. Meanwhile, abusive partners are using smart devices and remote car locking to control and surveil women. An estimated 98 per cent of deepfake videos are pornographic and 99 per cent of those feature women and girls. And Jobs and Skills Australia data shows 15 of the 20 occupations most exposed to automation are female-dominated. These are just some of the findings in _Gender and AI: Where’s the Harm?_ , a Research Snapshot released today by the Victorian Women’s Trust. It identifies 20 harms that disproportionately affect women, girls and gender diverse people, and it’s described as the first known attempt in Australia to map these risks at a systems level. The 20 harms range from the above to those that get far less attention, including reproductive surveillance, financial exclusion through algorithmic credit scoring, the ‘AI ethics mental load that’s failing women, homogenised beauty standards and young people’s growing reliance on AI to navigate relationships (full list below). And far from being harms that might happen in the future, most of these harms are affecting women in Australia now. Dr Elise Stephenson, Deputy Director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at ANU and the Trust’s inaugural Feminist Researcher in Residence, led the research (and is pictured above). I spoke to Elise for the Women’s Agenda Podcast, where we examined some of these risks, including around tech-facilitated abuse, AI companions and what they are teaching young people about relationships, the targeting of women in politics – and what it’s doing to democracy – and whether women should be using AI at all. Elise’s starting point is that we may hear about deepfakes, job losses, and data centres as key issues separately, but we rarely discuss the full picture. “What I failed to see was a linked-up picture, kind of a systemic look at what is happening when it comes to gender,” she told me. The report says the harms cascade. When women are excluded from designing and governing AI (and currently, 88 per cent of leading AI researchers globally are men) the consequences multiply across safety, work and political representation. “This isn’t speculative. It isn’t theoretical,” Elise said. “There are parts of the AI story that are a little bit theoretical, but there’s certainly a lot of harm that’s already happening.” Take the car as an example. Being able to lock and unlock a vehicle from a distance is being reported as a means of control. Elise notes the same feature could help someone escape a violent situation, which is why blanket rules won’t work and why careful regulation, community standards, and education are needed. We still don’t know how common some of the risks discussed in the report are, as prevalence data is missing. Also missing is an extensive understanding of who is funding and coordinating some of the well-resourced AI-enabled campaigns and attacks against women in public life or women running for office. Then there are the AI gendered harms that are harder to count. In the research, youth advocates have raised the issue of AI girlfriends and boyfriends, which are cheap, increasingly used and are ultimately built to comply – offering completely unrealistic ideas around what real relationships and conversations with people are all about. As Elise asked, “What does it mean if you can kind of boss AI around and if AI doesn’t push back and maybe doesn’t set boundaries?” Elise worries about how our interactions with AI subtly shift norms, because the full consequences won’t be visible for years. But that doesn’t mean we should wait for the full consequences before anticipating them and acting. While this research snapshot has been released now, the recommendations aren’t due until early 2027 – and the release of these risks highlights the urgency of understanding the issue. According to the Trust’s Executive Director, Dr Kirsten Abernethy, safeguards are scarce when it comes to AI, and Australia is relying on a “patchwork of anti-discrimination, privacy, and consumer protection laws that were never designed to address algorithmically-driven harm.” “We are at a crossroads, and Australia is on the cusp of making policy decisions that will impact generations to come,” Abernethy said. “Without gender-responsive legislation, we are putting women’s safety, autonomy, political agency and economic security at risk.” In my conversation with Elise, I asked about something I hear often: that a feminist response to AI is to refuse to use it at all. Elise believes women should use it, and that women carry more of the ethical worry about AI than the men in their lives, or than business. But AI learns from the people who use it, and when women withdraw, their voices drop out of the loop. A feminist approach to AI, Elise says, starts by rejecting the idea that technology is neutral or that its path is inevitable. We put guardrails around nuclear technology and aviation, so why not AI? “There’s a huge amount of things to be scared about and worried for when it comes to these gendered harms, but I think it’s also probably irresponsible for us to walk away,” Elise said. But when it comes to AI leadership, I noted the lack of women in the room – something made stark during a press conference at the White House last week as AI leaders met to sign a “morally binding” document on safety. Not one woman was among the dozen or so leaders at the press conference with President Donald Trump, and only two women were among the 32 invited to the lunch where the issues were discussed. Australia has an opportunity to address how it responds. The policy decisions that are being made now, and the people making them, should be asked where gender sits in their plans and who is in the room. **_Gender and AI: Where’s the Harm? is available at theTrust’s website. You can hear the full conversation with Dr Elise Stephenson on the Women’s Agenda Podcast._** ## **The 20 gendered harms of AI include:** **Labour market inequality, disruption and job losses:** female-dominated jobs disproportionately automated, and biased recruiting systems that suppress wages and widen pay gaps **Financial exclusion:** inequality embedded in algorithmic credit scoring, and scam losses affecting women **Gendered digital exclusion:** an AI literacy gap, unequal access to tools, and women’s inputs not training the models **Care burden intensification:** women taking on the “AI ethics mental load” and more work monitoring AI outputs **Deepfakes and synthetic abuse:** reputation damage, sextortion and sexual abuse **Technology-facilitated gender-based violence:** doxxing, automated stalking and harassment, and coordinated abuse of women leaders **Surveillance and privacy violations:** non-consensual surveillance, video and photos **Reproductive and bodily autonomy risks:** surveillance of reproductive choices, predictive profiling of pregnancy, and misuse of health and fertility data **Gendered AI companions:** normalising submissive AI personas and patterns of control, with offline impacts **Emotional and relational manipulation:** AI reinforcing gender stereotypes and power dynamics in relationships **AI-assisted social dependence:** reliance on AI for interpersonal communication, at a cost to social skills, empathy and trust **AI-mediated consumption:** hyper-targeted marketing of harmful content, such as nudify apps targeted at men **Aesthetic standardisation:** homogenised beauty standards through generated imagery **Civic and political exclusion:** women withdrawing from public debate, and a chilling effect from online abuse **Synthetic social normalisation:** AI-generated content overwhelming public discourse, with disinformation and echo chambers **Societal backsliding:** discriminatory systems institutionalised across services, and AI content relied on in place of women’s real experiences **Under-representation and exclusion from AI:** concentrated ownership, and women’s perspectives excluded from design **Biased AI systems:** biased datasets, healthcare and legal inaccuracies, and algorithmic acceleration of the manosphere **Unchecked AI action:** safety limits removed and loss of control of systems, with gendered patterns in who is making the decisions **Environmental and intergenerational harm:** resource-intensive AI amplifying climate change, itself a multiplier of inequity **_Want more stories like this sent straight to your inbox?_ _Join the free Women’s Agenda Daily newsletter_ _and support independent, women-led journalism._** Share this Women and AI by Angela Priestley 1 day ago ## Stay Smart! Get Women's Agenda in your inbox * Company This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. * Email SUBSCRIBE ## Latest news ### The Coalition wants to cut migration, but what does it mean for women and the female-dominated care workforce? ### The flexibility trap: why working mothers are getting stuck in jobs they’ve outgrown ### I couldn’t find the baby food I wanted to feed my own children. So I created it. ### Everyone is talking about Cornell. But what about the woman at the centre of it? ### Sam Wood was Australia’s dreamboat. The allegations against him should make us reflect. ### Podcast: Why it’s time to quit being nice

Multiculturalism should mean equality of all cultures in Australia — an example to be proud of.

The Coalition promises the biggest migration cut in Australian history, but its policy confuses arrivals with net migration, oversimplifies housing pressures and mistakes political symbolism for serio...

Does protesting actually work?Yes — just look at history.My friend, activist and author Annie Leonard, explains why prot

Coalition leader’s proposal goes further than Peter Dutton’s 2025 election promise and beyond even Pauline Hanson’s bottom line

Jeff Bezos recently announced that the Washington Post would henceforth dedicate its op/ed pages to “free markets and personal liberties”. His Whole Foods business also asked the National Labor Relati...

So, here’s the bad news: fascism isn’t coming to America; it’s here.

So, here’s the bad news: fascism isn’t coming to America; it’s here.

European experts say combined MMR vaccine is the best way to stop epidemic

Anduril said it would invest $3.7bn to develop shipyard that would build submarine parts.

Ruling on Mount Pleasant coalmine shows ‘we cannot continue to dig up coal … and pretend the consequences have nothing to do with us’, group says

It has just been revealed that One Nation’s latest advertisement is an AI slop (almost) word-for-word copy of an ad for Netanyahu. The video for their Victorian launch was more toxic AI slop.

It has just been revealed that One Nation’s latest advertisement is an AI slop (almost) word-for-word copy of an ad for Netanyahu. The video for their Victorian launch was more toxic AI slop.

The government doesn’t track how often immigration officers detain U.S. citizens. So ProPublica did. We’ve found more th