When Governments Delay, Victims Pay, And accountability quietly disappears.
When a government makes a serious mistake, who pays?
Usually, the victims.
And when the government takes twenty or thirty years to acknowledge that mistake, the victims pay again.
They pay through years of uncertainty, legal battles, financial hardship and the frustration of being told that their suffering has not yet been officially recognised.
By the time the government finally apologises, many of those responsible have retired, the politicians have moved on, and some of the victims are dead.
Delay doesn't just postpone justice. It can destroy the possibility of accountability.
A recent video by Dr John Campbell examines a British parliamentary debate on 27 October 2026 about the government's response to the UK COVID-19 Inquiry.
During the pandemic, governments exercised extraordinary powers. They confined people to their homes, closed businesses, disrupted education, restricted travel and family contact, and imposed vaccination requirements on sections of the population.
Some emergency measures were justified. Others remain disputed. But the damage caused by restrictions was real, and the decisions deserve rigorous scrutiny.
COVID vaccines reduced the risk of severe illness, particularly among vulnerable people. They also caused rare but sometimes serious adverse reactions. Those recognised injuries deserve proper compensation.
Britain established a major public inquiry in 2022. Its report on vaccines and therapeutics was published in April 2026.
The Inquiry recommended reforming the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme. The government responded in October, acknowledging the need for reform but without committing to the recommended changes or a timetable.
Meanwhile, injured people continue to wait.
This is the problem with inquiries that identify failures but leave the consequences to another department, another review or another government.
An inquiry is not accountability. Accountability requires action.
Campbell's video reminded me how frequently serious institutional failures have followed the same depressing pattern.
First comes the harm. Then denial, resistance or delay. Eventually an inquiry establishes the facts. Years later, there may be an apology or compensation.
By then, the people who made the decisions are often long gone.
Here are examples from Britain, Australia, Canada and the United States.
These cases are not identical. Some involved government decisions, others failures of regulation, corporate misconduct or official secrecy. The dates also distinguish different milestones—recognition, disclosure, apology and compensation are not the same thing.
But the recurring problem is unmistakable.
The institutions responsible for addressing the harm can take years or decades to deliver justice.
Consider the British infected blood scandal. Thousands were infected through contaminated blood products. In 2024, the British Prime Minister finally delivered a comprehensive apology.
Or Hillsborough, where families fought for 23 years before an independent panel exposed the extent of the failures and misleading official accounts.
Or Australia's Robodebt scandal, where people were pursued for debts calculated using an unlawful method before the programme was dismantled and a Royal Commission exposed what had gone wrong.
The victims were expected to comply with government decisions immediately.
The government, however, could take years to accept responsibility.
We tend to treat delays in government inquiries as unfortunate administrative problems.
But delay has consequences—and those consequences are not shared equally.
For the victim, every additional year may mean another year without compensation, another year of legal expenses, another year of illness or financial distress.
For the institution, time can be an advantage.
Public attention fades. Documents become harder to locate. Witnesses die. Ministers retire. Officials move to other jobs.
Eventually, responsibility becomes so dispersed that nobody is held personally accountable.
The government may apologise. Taxpayers may fund compensation. But the individuals whose decisions caused the damage may suffer no consequences at all.
The taxpayer pays for the original failure, pays for the inquiry, and then pays the compensation.
The people responsible may pay nothing.
That is a perverse incentive.
We cannot punish governments for every decision that turns out badly. Emergencies involve uncertainty, and honest mistakes are inevitable.
But serious failures demand more than an apology delivered decades later.
When credible evidence of major government wrongdoing or negligence emerges, there should be a prompt, independent investigation with the power to obtain documents and identify who made the relevant decisions.
Victims should have access to timely compensation without being forced into years of expensive litigation.
Inquiry recommendations should have deadlines, publicly identified responsible officials and regular progress reports.
And where serious negligence, deliberate concealment or misconduct is established, those responsible should face appropriate professional, civil or criminal consequences.
Responsibility should not evaporate simply because someone acted on behalf of the government.
The lesson from these scandals is not that governments must never make mistakes.
It is that governments must not be allowed to escape responsibility by taking decades to acknowledge them.
The COVID pandemic provides another opportunity to test whether we have learned that lesson.
We need to know which decisions were justified, which caused avoidable harm, who made them and what consequences should follow.
We also need to ensure that people genuinely harmed by government policies are not left fighting for recognition until it is too late.
History shows what happens when governments are allowed to delay.
Victims grow old. Some die. The responsible officials disappear into retirement. Eventually a new government offers an apology and sends the bill to taxpayers.
That is not accountability. It is accountability by attrition.
And unless we change the system, the next government failure will follow exactly the same path.
An election must not only be fair. It must be demonstrably fair, so that even those who lose can accept the result.
Democracy rests on a simple proposition: the people choose their government.
But there is an equally important condition. The people must trust that the election accurately reflects their choice.
Without that confidence, democracy begins to lose legitimacy. Winners claim a mandate, losers question the result, and the peaceful transfer of power becomes increasingly difficult.
With the American midterm elections approaching, this is an appropriate time to ask a fundamental question:
What does it take to make an election trustworthy?
Surely we should be able to identify a set of basic safeguards that every functioning democracy can meet.
Russia holds elections. So do numerous other countries that describe themselves as democracies.
But ballot boxes alone do not establish democracy.
If opposition candidates cannot compete freely, voters face intimidation, or electoral authorities answer to the government of the day, an election cannot be considered genuinely free merely because votes were counted.
Established democracies use different systems. Some have compulsory voting, others voluntary voting. Some use proportional representation, others single-member electorates. Some count by hand, others use electronic equipment.
Australia's system is particularly complex, combining compulsory voting, preferential voting and a detailed Senate counting process.
Yet complexity does not necessarily undermine integrity.
What matters is whether the rules are clear, the process is independently administered, and the results can be verified.
Here are eleven practical safeguards against which any electoral system should be assessed.
There must be a reliable register of eligible voters, maintained by an independent authority.
Citizens should be able to verify their enrolment, correct errors and challenge improper entries through transparent procedures.
Every eligible citizen should have the opportunity to vote, and no person should be permitted to vote more than once.
Before receiving a ballot, voters should establish their identity and eligibility.
Photo identification is one possible method, provided acceptable alternatives are available for people without conventional documents.
The requirements must be practical, consistent and accessible.
The objective is straightforward: ensure that the person casting the vote is entitled to do so, without creating unnecessary barriers for legitimate voters.
An election should have a clearly defined voting day, preferably a weekend or public holiday.
There is a reason for this beyond administrative convenience.
Voters should ideally make their decision with the same information available to everyone at the close of the campaign.
When voting begins weeks before election day, some people cast their ballots before important debates, revelations or policy announcements have occurred.
Those votes cannot be reconsidered.
That raises a legitimate question about the increasingly common practice of extended early voting.
There may be some reasonable exceptions; -people who are travelling, hospitalised, or unable to attend because of disability must have practical alternatives.
But exceptions should not become the normal method of voting simply because they are convenient.
Postal voting is necessary for some voters, but it must operate under clear and verifiable rules.
Applications should be authenticated, ballots tracked and deadlines strictly enforced.
Here an important distinction needs to be made.
A postal vote should be completed and posted no later than election day. It need not necessarily be received by election day.
A ballot legitimately posted on time should not be rejected merely because the postal service delivers it several days later, and there must be a reasonable final deadline for receiving it.
This protects the voter's right to participate while preventing ballots from being cast after the election has concluded.
Every ballot issued must be properly accounted for.
The electoral authority must record who has voted and have procedures to identify attempted duplicate voting.
Postal and other absentee ballots require particular attention because the voter is not physically present at a polling station.
But the secrecy of the ballot is fundamental.
The system must establish who has voted, never how they voted.
No citizen should face an unreasonable burden simply to vote.
There should be sufficient polling places, trained staff and voting materials to keep waiting times within reasonable limits.
A useful operational target would be no more than 30 minutes in the queue under normal conditions.
Polling stations must also accommodate people with disabilities and other legitimate access needs.
Long queues should be treated as an administrative failure requiring attention, not an unavoidable feature of democracy.
Election authorities should have enough staff and resources to complete the initial count of ordinary ballots within 48 hours.
The longer a result remains uncertain, the greater the opportunity for confusion, rumours and disputes.
However, speed must never override accuracy.
Close contests, preferential counts, postal ballots received within the lawful deadline and recounts may legitimately take longer.
What matters is that the public can see how many votes have been counted, how many remain outstanding and why the final result has not yet been declared.
Vote counting should take place in secure, observable facilities.
Continuous video monitoring of counting areas could provide an additional safeguard, provided it protects ballot secrecy and does not interfere with officials.
The public should also have access to clear counting procedures, published results and reconciliation records.
The objective is to make the process verifiable, rather than asking citizens simply to accept an official assurance that everything was done correctly.
Candidates and political parties must have the right to appoint scrutineers to observe counting.
They should be able to examine procedures, raise objections and challenge questionable decisions through established channels.
Counting should always be conducted under conditions that permit independent scrutiny.
However, a party should not be able to obstruct an election simply by refusing to send a scrutineer. Where party representatives are absent, independent observers and documented procedures should provide accountability.
Elections should be administered by a professional institution independent of the government of the day.
It should oversee enrolment, polling arrangements, ballot security, counting and publication of results.
Its leadership should be appointed transparently, protected from political interference and accountable under the law.
Australia's Electoral Commission provides an established example of independent election administration.
Those competing for power should not control the rules or the counting process.
No election involving millions of people will be entirely free of mistakes.
Polling stations may experience equipment failures. Ballot papers may be mishandled. Officials may make errors.
The important question is whether problems can be identified, investigated and corrected.
An independent electoral authority should have clear powers to resolve administrative disputes, publish its findings and take corrective action.
Serious unresolved disputes must also be subject to independent judicial review.
Beyond these eleven requirements, four additional protections are important.
An unbroken chain of custody. Every ballot should be accounted for, from printing and distribution to collection, storage and counting.
Independent audits. Ballots issued, returned, rejected and counted should be reconciled. Discrepancies must be investigated, with recounts and independent audits available where appropriate.
Meaningful penalties. Electoral fraud, intimidation, ballot tampering and deliberate interference should attract enforceable penalties, regardless of political affiliation.
Genuine political competition. Voters must be free to choose between competing candidates and political positions. An impeccably counted election is meaningless if opposition candidates cannot participate freely.
Australia demonstrates that a complicated voting system can nevertheless produce results that are broadly accepted.
Compulsory voting and preferential counting add complexity, yet the Australian Electoral Commission administers elections through established procedures, with scrutineers, ballot reconciliation and avenues for challenging results.
That is a considerable institutional achievement.
But it does not mean every feature of the system is beyond criticism.
Voting before election day is increasingly treated as an ordinary convenience rather than an exception. Yet this means many Australians make their final electoral decision before the campaign has concluded.
A system can be trustworthy and still benefit from reform.
One mistake electoral authorities can make is to assume that citizens should simply trust the system.
Trust should not be automatic.
Citizens are entitled to ask whether electoral rolls are accurate, ballots are secure, votes are counted correctly and irregularities are investigated.
Those questions deserve clear, factual answers.
Equally, allegations of electoral fraud must be supported by evidence.
An accusation does not become true merely because it is repeated, and unsupported claims can themselves undermine confidence in legitimate elections.
The answer to public suspicion is neither blind trust nor endless accusation.
It is a transparent process capable of demonstrating what actually happened.
The ultimate test of election integrity is not whether the winners are satisfied.
Winners usually are.
The real test is whether those who voted for the losing side can examine the process, understand how the result was reached, and accept that the election was conducted fairly.
They may dislike the result. They may strongly oppose the incoming government.
But they should have confidence that the votes were honestly cast, accurately counted and independently verified.
That confidence cannot be created by speeches, slogans or demands that people trust the authorities.
It must be earned through an electoral process that is fair, accessible, transparent and open to scrutiny.
Because when people lose confidence in the ballot box, they begin to lose confidence in democracy itself.
And that is a far greater danger than losing an election.
Imagine commissioning an engineer to design a bridge. You pay a substantial fee, confident that the engineer has the qualifications, experience and professional judgement to do the job.
The bridge is built. It collapses. People are killed.
Would we shrug our shoulders and say that engineering is complicated, nobody can predict everything, and perhaps we should learn some lessons for next time?
Of course not.
There would be investigations. Questions about the calculations, materials, assumptions and safety margins. If negligence were established, the engineer could face substantial financial liability, professional sanctions and, in sufficiently serious circumstances, criminal prosecution.
And rightly so.
So why do we appear to apply a different standard to other experts whose advice can affect thousands, even millions, of people?
Consider the latest embarrassment involving Deloitte, one of the world's largest professional consulting firms.
The Western Australian government commissioned a $166,000 feasibility report examining possible university mergers.
The report contained extraordinary financial discrepancies. In one scenario, figures adding up to $659 million were presented as $399 million—a difference of $260 million.
There were also apparently AI-generated references, including one containing ChatGPT metadata.
Deloitte acknowledged using generative AI to assist with aspects of the report. The company has maintained that the errors did not affect the underlying modelling or conclusions.
Perhaps they didn't.
But here's my question: If a consultancy cannot reliably check the arithmetic and references in its own report, why should we trust its more complicated conclusions?
The government is seeking reimbursement. That is a start.
But it raises a much larger question about the responsibilities of professional advisers.
We don't pay experts simply to produce documents. We pay them for their knowledge, judgement, diligence and willingness to stand behind their work.
If the result is wrong because they failed to exercise reasonable professional care, why should their liability end with an apology or a refund?
Then there is Snowy 2.0.
When this enormous pumped-hydro project was announced in 2017, Australians were told it would cost around $2 billion and begin operating in 2021.
The latest assessment, released in October 2026, puts the target cost at $22.2 billion, with a possible $25 billion outcome. Full commissioning has been pushed back to late 2029.
That's more than twelve times the original publicly announced figure.
Twelve times!
Now, I appreciate that Snowy 2.0 is a technically demanding project. Geological conditions are difficult. Labour and material costs change. Unexpected problems arise.
But surely that is precisely why we employ experts.
We don't need highly paid consultants to tell us how much a project would cost if everything went perfectly. We need them to assess what could go wrong, quantify the risks, provide realistic ranges and tell decision-makers when the uncertainties are too great.
The Australian National Audit Office has identified deficiencies in Snowy 2.0's project governance and risk management, with the financial risks increasingly falling on government.
Politicians certainly bear responsibility. They announce projects, approve expenditure and often have powerful incentives to present attractive cost estimates.
But somebody supplies the numbers.
Who produced the original estimates? What assumptions did they make? What warnings were given? Were those warnings communicated honestly to ministers and the public? And did anyone knowingly present an optimistic scenario as a reliable budget?
These questions deserve answers.
A twelvefold cost increase does not, by itself, prove negligence. But it surely justifies an independent examination of the original advice and the professional standards applied.
If the experts did their jobs properly and politicians ignored their warnings, we should know that too.
Accountability should follow the evidence, wherever it leads.
The consequences of questionable expert advice can extend far beyond financial losses.
During COVID, governments relied heavily on epidemiologists, public health officials and other specialists to justify extraordinary restrictions on everyday life.
Businesses closed. Schools shut. Families were separated. People lost jobs, savings and opportunities they could never recover.
Some restrictions undoubtedly helped reduce infections and deaths, particularly when the virus was poorly understood and vaccines were unavailable.
But that cannot be the end of the discussion.
Australia's independent COVID-19 Response Inquiry acknowledged the successes of the early response while identifying serious social, economic and health consequences, including damage to public trust.
The central question is not whether governments should have listened to experts. Of course they should have.
It is whether expert recommendations were subjected to sufficient scrutiny.
Were the benefits of particular restrictions weighed against their wider costs? Were alternative approaches considered? Were assumptions regularly reassessed as evidence changed? Were experts sufficiently candid about uncertainty?
And when restrictions continued long after the original circumstances had changed, who was responsible for demanding a fresh assessment?
There is an important distinction between a decision that proves wrong because circumstances were genuinely unknowable and one that proves wrong because contrary evidence was ignored.
The first is an unavoidable feature of decision-making under uncertainty.
The second may be a failure of professional responsibility.
We need to establish which was which, rather than automatically excusing every mistake as the unavoidable consequence of a crisis.
This brings me to what I believe is the heart of the problem.
People respond to incentives.
Suppose you are a consultant preparing a feasibility study for a government project.
You know the minister wants to announce it. You know your client would prefer a favourable assessment. You know a pessimistic report might make you unpopular and jeopardise future contracts.
And you know that if the project eventually costs three times as much as predicted, you are unlikely to suffer any personal consequences.
What incentive do you have to challenge the assumptions aggressively?
Professional pride? Ethics? Reputation?
All important. But are they enough?
Now imagine a different arrangement.
You know that if your estimates are found to have been prepared negligently, you could lose your professional accreditation, face substantial financial liability and suffer serious reputational damage.
If you knowingly falsify evidence or recklessly conceal critical risks, criminal penalties might follow.
Would you be more careful?
Would you insist on independent verification? Document your assumptions? Disclose worst-case scenarios? Refuse to sign off on figures you couldn't defend?
I suspect you would.
And that is precisely the point.
Accountability is not primarily about punishing mistakes after they happen. It is about creating incentives to prevent avoidable mistakes in the first place.
There is an obvious objection.
Experts cannot guarantee their forecasts. Economies change. Viruses mutate. Geological surprises happen. Even the most diligent professional can be wrong.
Absolutely.
I am not suggesting that every failed prediction should result in a lawsuit, much less a prison sentence.
That would discourage honest advice and encourage defensive, excessively cautious behaviour.
What I am suggesting is that professional responsibility should depend on the quality and integrity of the work, judged against what was reasonably knowable when the advice was given.
An expert who carefully investigates the evidence, discloses uncertainty, tests alternative scenarios and honestly communicates the risks should not be punished merely because events turn out differently.
But an expert who ignores obvious risks, presents speculation as certainty, fails to perform elementary checks or knowingly supplies misleading figures should face consequences proportionate to the misconduct and resulting harm.
We already recognise such distinctions in engineering, medicine, accounting and other professions.
Why should major public-policy and management advice be treated differently?
I would like to see several changes.
First, major government projects should require genuinely independent assessment of costs, benefits and risks before political commitments are made.
Second, every major consultancy report should be personally signed and certified by the senior professionals responsible for its conclusions.
Not merely issued under a corporate logo.
The signatories should identify themselves, their qualifications and their responsibilities, and formally certify that the report has been prepared with appropriate professional care, that material assumptions have been tested, and that significant uncertainties have been disclosed.
Their signatures should carry legal and professional consequences.
If serious negligence is subsequently established, those individuals should not be able to hide behind the corporate entity that employed them.
This would not make them guarantors of every forecast. It would make them personally accountable for the professional integrity of the work they have certified.
Imagine how much more carefully a consultant might examine a report if their own name, reputation, professional standing and financial liability were attached to it.
Third, assumptions, uncertainty ranges and significant dissenting opinions should be documented and, wherever possible, publicly available.
Fourth, professional advisers should face meaningful financial and disciplinary consequences where negligence or serious breaches of professional standards are established. Appropriate professional indemnity insurance should be part of the system, not a substitute for personal responsibility.
And finally, deliberate falsification, fraud or sufficiently reckless misconduct causing serious harm should be capable of attracting criminal sanctions, subject to proper investigation and due process.
Not because an expert's forecast was wrong.
Because the expert failed in a duty that society had every right to expect them to fulfil.
Politicians, of course, must also be accountable for decisions they make, particularly when they ignore professional warnings.
The expert's responsibility is to provide competent, honest advice.
The politician's responsibility is to decide what to do with it.
Neither should be able to hide behind the other.
Today, the rewards of expert advice are often private, while the consequences of defective advice fall on the public.
The consultant collects the fee. The politician gets the announcement. The project blows its budget. The taxpayer pays.
Or expert advice underpins a damaging public policy, and those who suffer its consequences are offered little more than an assurance that lessons have been learned.
That is not good enough.
We cannot eliminate uncertainty or punish every honest mistake. But we can demand professional diligence, transparency and accountability.
Make the experts put their names to their work. Make them responsible for the professional standards behind their conclusions. And when serious negligence is established, make the consequences real.
Because accountability does more than punish failure. It changes the incentives that lead to failure in the first place.
We expect that of the engineer who designs a bridge.
Why should we accept anything less from the experts whose advice can cost billions, destroy livelihoods or restrict our freedoms?
Grappy
Millions of people believe they are allergic to one of medicine's most useful antibiotics. New medical guidelines suggest that most of them may be wrong.
Imagine being told as a child that you are allergic to penicillin.
Perhaps you developed a rash while being treated for an infection. Your doctor, understandably cautious, recorded a penicillin allergy in your medical history.
From that day forward, every doctor who treated you avoided prescribing penicillin.
Twenty, forty, even sixty years later, the warning is still there.
But what if you were never allergic in the first place?
According to new Australian medical guidelines, that possibility is far more common than most people realise.
On 20 October, the Australasian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy (ASCIA) released updated guidelines for assessing penicillin allergies in adults.
The figures are remarkable.
Approximately 10% of people report being allergic to penicillin, yet fewer than 1% of the population are thought to have a genuine allergy.
More than 90% of people carrying a penicillin-allergy label can tolerate the antibiotic following appropriate medical assessment and testing.
In Australia alone, an estimated 2.8 million people have a reported penicillin allergy.
That suggests an extraordinary number of people may be living with a medical warning that is no longer valid—or perhaps never was.
And this is not just an Australian phenomenon.
There are several explanations.
A child taking penicillin develops a rash. The rash may actually have been caused by the infection rather than the antibiotic.
Sometimes an ordinary side effect, such as nausea or diarrhoea, is mistaken for an allergic reaction.
In other cases, a genuine childhood allergy may disappear over time.
But once the allergy is entered into the medical record, it tends to remain there.
Future doctors understandably take the warning seriously. Few have the time or opportunity to investigate an event that may have occurred decades earlier.
The result is a medical label that can become virtually permanent, even when the evidence supporting it is questionable.
Penicillin and related antibiotics remain among medicine's most valuable treatments for bacterial infections.
When doctors believe a patient is allergic, they may prescribe an alternative antibiotic.
Sometimes that alternative is entirely appropriate. But it may also be less effective for the particular infection, more expensive or more likely to cause unwanted side effects.
Some alternatives are broad-spectrum antibiotics, which affect a wider range of bacteria than necessary.
Their unnecessary use can contribute to antibiotic resistance—one of modern medicine's most serious challenges.
An incorrect allergy label can therefore have consequences extending well beyond the individual patient.
It can influence treatment outcomes, healthcare costs and the effectiveness of antibiotics for everyone.
There is an important qualification.
Genuine penicillin allergies exist, and some reactions can be life-threatening.
Nobody should simply disregard an allergy recorded in their medical history or experiment with taking penicillin.
The new guidelines instead encourage properly supervised reassessment.
A doctor can review the original reaction, determine the level of risk and decide whether further testing is appropriate. Some low-risk patients may be assessed in general practice, while others require specialist investigation.
The objective is not to remove allergy warnings indiscriminately. It is to distinguish those that are justified from those that are not.
The process even has a name: penicillin allergy de-labelling.
What interests me most about this story is the broader lesson.
Modern medicine rightly places enormous importance on maintaining accurate patient records.
But there is a difference between recording a diagnosis and establishing that it remains correct.
A warning entered decades ago can be repeated so often that nobody thinks to question it.
Every subsequent doctor acts responsibly by respecting the record. Yet the combined result may be unnecessarily restricted treatment choices for millions of patients.
Nobody needs to have made a serious mistake for the system to produce an undesirable outcome.
Perhaps we should pay as much attention to reviewing old diagnoses as we do to recording new ones.
If you have been told you are allergic to penicillin, particularly following a childhood reaction, the new guidelines suggest a simple question worth discussing with your doctor:
Am I genuinely allergic, or have I simply been carrying the label all these years?
The answer could make a significant difference the next time you need antibiotics.
And it leaves us with a wider question.
How many other things in our medical records do we continue to accept as facts, simply because nobody has thought to check them?
Patient information: ASCIA — Penicillin Allergy: Frequently Asked Questions
An ancient skeleton, a mysterious wound and a discovery that challenges what we thought we knew about our closest extinct relatives.
Some 75,000 years ago, in a cave in what is now northern Iraq, a Neanderthal suffered a terrible facial injury.
Somehow, this individual survived. The injury healed, suggesting a recovery that may have required help from others.
But there was another injury. A small, circular hole in the shoulder blade, just 15 millimetres across, that researchers believe may have been caused by a wooden spear.
Was this Neanderthal the victim of violence? A hunting accident? We will probably never know.
Yet the damaged bones, recently examined by researchers studying remains from Shanidar Cave, tell a story that challenges our traditional image of Neanderthals.
For generations, Neanderthals were portrayed as primitive, brutish creatures: intellectually inferior cousins of modern humans, destined to disappear when the more sophisticated Homo sapiens arrived.
That picture has been steadily changing.
Archaeological discoveries suggest that Neanderthals made sophisticated tools, controlled fire, hunted cooperatively and lived in complex social groups. There is also evidence that they sometimes cared for injured or disabled companions.
At Shanidar Cave, several Neanderthal individuals were found close together, raising the possibility that the dead were deliberately placed there.
The evidence is not conclusive. Surviving a serious injury does not prove that someone provided nursing care, and the apparent spear wound does not establish murder.
Nevertheless, a picture is emerging of creatures far more complex than the lumbering brutes of popular imagination.
They suffered injuries, survived hardships, formed relationships and perhaps mourned their dead.
Does that sound so different from us?
Neanderthals were not alone.
While they occupied much of Europe and western Asia, another human population was developing in Africa: Homo sapiens, our direct ancestors.
Eventually, the two populations encountered one another.
Were they enemies? Did they compete for territory and food? Did they sometimes cooperate?
We don't know. Their encounters may well have involved all these possibilities.
But one thing is certain. They interbred.
Modern genetic research has established that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had children together, and those children had descendants.
The implications are extraordinary.
Most people with ancestry outside Africa carry approximately 1–2% Neanderthal DNA. Smaller amounts also occur in some populations with predominantly African ancestry.
Different people carry different fragments of that inheritance, which means that collectively, humanity retains a substantial portion of the Neanderthal genetic legacy.
Some inherited variants influence our immune systems and other biological characteristics.
So Neanderthals did not simply disappear without a trace. Their genes became part of our own evolutionary story.
This does not mean that the individual discovered at Shanidar Cave was one of our ancestors. There is no evidence of that.
Nor do we know whether the companions who may have helped that individual survive were Neanderthals or Homo sapiens. The evidence offers no basis for identifying them.
But the broader discovery is unmistakable: the boundary between these ancient human populations was not absolute.
Neanderthals disappeared as a distinct population roughly 40,000 years ago. Why remains debated. Climate change, competition, small populations and interbreeding may all have played a part.
For a long time, we imagined their disappearance as the triumph of modern humanity over a lesser species.
The reality appears considerably more complicated.
Seventy-five thousand years separate us from the individual whose bones were discovered in Shanidar Cave.
We know nothing of that person's name, relationships, fears or hopes. We cannot know whether the final injury resulted from an accident or an act of violence.
Yet those bones suggest a life marked by injury, survival and perhaps the kindness of others.
And modern genetics tells us something even more remarkable.
Neanderthals were not merely another kind of human who vanished into prehistory. Part of them lives on in us.
Perhaps the greatest surprise is not how different they were.
It is how much we have in common.
From Australia, the images are difficult to comprehend. Burning streets. Smashed shopfronts. Police retreating under a barrage of projectiles. People cheering as their own cities suffer damage.
The immediate questions are understandable. Who are these people? What do they hope to achieve? How does destroying a school improve education?
But another question deserves attention: what happened before the first window broke?
By the time the evening news shows flames above a barricade, much of the opportunity to prevent disorder has passed. The critical decisions concern preparation, police deployment, communication with organisers and intervention when violence first appears.
Arresting offenders afterwards is necessary. Preventing the destruction is the more demanding test of government.
France’s October 17 demonstrations exposed serious weaknesses. Le Monde reports that intelligence services struggled to estimate how online mobilisation would translate into attendance. Police units became overstretched as confrontations developed at scattered locations. The interior minister denied underestimating the operation, blaming dispersed groups of rioters and looters. That explanation leaves an obvious question: why was the operation unable to cope with them? Le Monde
A country with France’s experience of public disorder should prepare for more than an orderly march along an agreed route. Contingency planning must cover larger crowds, simultaneous confrontations and attacks away from the main demonstration.
Officers need sufficient numbers, trained support and reserves available before a local confrontation becomes an invitation to wider disorder.
Police weakness can change a crowd’s calculations. Research into England’s 2011 riots found that perceptions of police vulnerability emboldened participants. Shared hostility towards police also helped people identify with one another and join the confrontation. Control and legitimacy both mattered. University of Sussex
That makes the first interventions especially important.
A competent operation must distinguish peaceful demonstrators from those throwing projectiles, attacking people or destroying property. It must protect the former while acting against the latter. Broad interventions that sweep peaceful participants into confrontation risk enlarging the hostile crowd. Allowing violent groups to act unchecked creates opportunities for others to join them.
The objective is clear: stop violence while retaining the cooperation of everyone willing to remain peaceful.
But policing is only part of the story.
Order also depends on people feeling that the streets, schools and businesses around them belong to a society of which they are part. A shop window represents somebody’s livelihood. A school serves somebody’s children. Public property is something neighbours must pay to replace.
The Nordic countries offer a useful comparison. OECD adult-skills survey results show much higher interpersonal trust in Denmark, Norway and Finland than in France. Sweden also employs specialist dialogue police who work with demonstration organisers before events. These are practices and social conditions worth studying. They do not provide complete immunity: Sweden experienced serious riots over Easter 2022. They do, however, direct attention towards the relationships on which public order rests.
A durable sense of belonging requires mutual obligations. Citizens must accept that grievance does not confer a licence to destroy. Institutions must demonstrate that peaceful participation receives a fair hearing. Police must enforce the law consistently and account for their own conduct.
Repeated disorder makes those obligations more urgent. Each episode should produce identifiable changes in preparation, command and practice. Otherwise, the next declaration that authorities were overwhelmed becomes harder to accept.
France needs a credible examination of what failed: attendance estimates, deployment, reserves, communication and the decisions that preceded escalation. Responsibility for arson, assault and looting remains with the offenders. Responsibility for an effective public-order operation rests with those who planned and commanded it.
No police force can prevent every act of violence. Governments can still be judged on whether they anticipated foreseeable dangers and contained them effectively.
For Australia, the lesson reaches beyond police equipment and officer numbers. We should examine the strength of our own shared belonging, and whether our institutions earn the cooperation they depend upon.
The burning barricade is the visible failure.
The work of preventing it begins much earlier—with capable policing, credible institutions and citizens who still see their neighbours’ losses as their own.
A business does not need artificial intelligence to replace every employee. It only needs AI to make fewer employees necessary.
That is the employment threat we need to take seriously.
As AI improves and becomes embedded in everyday business systems, organisations will use it to answer enquiries, process accounts, prepare documents, schedule work and manage routine administration. Where fewer people can deliver the same output, reducing labour costs will be an obvious attraction.
Some businesses will expand and redeploy employees. Others will cut staff. The savings can arrive quickly. Replacement livelihoods may take years.
Agriculture offers a warning.
Over roughly 150 years, mechanisation and economic change helped turn farming from a major source of employment into an occupation employing only a small percentage of workers in developed economies. In the United States, agriculture’s share of employment fell from 13 per cent in 1948 to 2 per cent in 2017 alone. USDA
Society had generations to adjust. Even then, the transition brought upheaval.
What happens if a comparable contraction in demand for office workers unfolds in ten years?
This is a scenario, not a prediction. But it is serious enough to demand a plan.
Banks, insurers, call centres, government departments and large corporate offices employ substantial numbers of people whose work involves processing information. If these employers reduce staffing together, displaced workers will find fewer opportunities to move into similar jobs elsewhere.
An organisation may solve its cost problem while society inherits an employment problem.
“Retraining” is the usual answer. Retraining for what?
Training takes time, costs money and needs to lead to an actual vacancy. A displaced administrator cannot simply become a specialist engineer. Nor can everyone move into management: there are fewer positions, and managerial work is also exposed to AI.
“New jobs will emerge” is another answer. They may—but not necessarily in the right places, requiring the right skills, or soon enough to pay next month’s mortgage.
Service industries may absorb some workers. But care, hospitality, retail and transport do not offer unlimited vacancies. These jobs have their own skill requirements, and an influx of applicants could increase competition for hours and put pressure on wages.
The damage may extend well beyond unemployment. People may accept lower incomes, insecure contracts or work that uses little of their experience. Young people may struggle to get started as the routine tasks through which beginners learn are automated.
We should be preparing several responses now.
Retraining and redeployment can help, but only when tied to realistic employment opportunities. A course completion certificate is not a livelihood.
Shorter working weeks could spread available work, but preserving incomes requires productivity gains to be shared. Employers and workers will not automatically agree on how.
Investment in care, infrastructure and other unmet needs could create useful employment. It requires funding, planning and time, and the jobs may not suit everyone displaced.
Stronger income support could protect families through the transition. It also needs a sustainable funding base, and financial support alone cannot replace the purpose and social connection people find in work.
There is no single, painless answer. That is precisely why planning cannot wait.
The ILO identifies clerical occupations as the most exposed to generative AI. Exposure does not tell us how many jobs will disappear, but it tells us where to pay attention. ILO
We should watch falling recruitment, shrinking graduate intakes and employees who leave without being replaced. By the time mass redundancies dominate the headlines, the adjustment may already be well underway.
AI could deliver extraordinary prosperity. It could also displace workers faster than our institutions can respond.
A transition that was manageable over generations could become a crisis if compressed into a decade.
Developed societies face the risk of an employment tsunami. We do not need certainty about its arrival to start preparing.
It is time to wake up.
The World Bank has a problem.
Its president, Ajay Banga, recently revealed that the Bank is discussing possible emergency financial assistance with between 30 and 40 countries.
The immediate causes are familiar: rising energy and fertiliser prices, economic disruption and increasingly expensive borrowing.
But behind these emergencies lies a much older problem.
According to the World Bank's latest International Debt Report, developing countries paid $741 billion more in principal and interest on external debt between 2022 and 2024 than they received in new financing.
Think about that.
Countries desperately needing capital to develop their economies are collectively sending hundreds of billions of dollars more to creditors than they receive in new loans.
The system designed to finance development has, for many borrowers, become an enormous drain on their resources.
And the proposed solution?
More financial assistance.
There is nothing inherently wrong with borrowing.
A developing country might borrow to build a port, improve its electricity network or establish a reliable water supply. If the investment generates economic growth, jobs and additional income, the country becomes better able to repay its debt.
That is productive borrowing.
But suppose the money finances government consumption, an uneconomic prestige project or infrastructure that never delivers the expected return.
The debt remains. The additional income does not materialise. Eventually another loan is required, or the original debt must be restructured.
The country is no closer to self-reliance.
Of course, education, public health and sanitation may deliver enormous long-term benefits without generating immediate financial returns.
But the principle remains: borrowing should improve a country's future capacity to prosper, not merely finance its present expenditure.
When an international institution lends hundreds of millions of dollars to a developing country, how confidently can it establish where that money ultimately goes?
The World Bank's 2025 report on debt transparency provides a disturbing answer.
Although more than 75% of low-income countries publish some debt information, only 25% disclose loan-level information about newly contracted debt.
The Bank also warns about hidden liabilities, off-budget borrowing and increasingly complex financing arrangements.
This does not mean that most development loans are stolen or wasted. But it does mean that citizens, lenders and international institutions may lack the information needed to judge how effectively governments are managing their obligations.
Governments borrow. Projects are announced. International institutions report the money committed or disbursed.
But who returns five or ten years later to establish whether the investment actually delivered the promised improvement in living standards?
Here lies a deeper problem, one regular readers will recognise.
The incentives of those making decisions are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the people they are supposed to help.
A government may benefit politically from spending borrowed money today, leaving future taxpayers to repay it.
A lender may be rewarded for expanding its loan portfolio, even when the long-term economic benefits are uncertain.
A development agency may measure success partly by the money it distributes and the projects it supports, rather than by how quickly recipients become independent of assistance.
And when a country gets into trouble, creditors may prefer restructuring the debt to acknowledging that the original lending decision was unsound.
None of this requires corruption or bad intentions.
It simply requires people responding rationally to the incentives confronting them.
Unfortunately, those ultimately paying the price are often the people least responsible for the decisions.
What makes a poor country prosperous?
Foreign assistance can help. But sustained prosperity requires something more fundamental.
Businesses must be able to invest, employ people, trade and retain enough of their earnings to make further investment worthwhile.
Governments need functioning courts, enforceable contracts, reliable infrastructure and predictable rules. Entrepreneurs need opportunities rather than political connections.
Without these foundations, even substantial foreign investment may deliver disappointing results.
South Korea, Singapore and Vietnam followed very different political and economic paths, but each demonstrates that long-term growth ultimately depends on productive capacity, not permanent foreign assistance.
Money can finance development. It cannot substitute for the conditions that make development possible.
Certainly not.
Humanitarian assistance is essential when people face famine, disease or disaster. Development grants can finance vital services, while carefully designed loans can help build productive infrastructure.
But these activities should be judged differently.
Humanitarian assistance should be measured by the lives it saves.
Infrastructure loans should be assessed by the economic and social benefits they deliver.
Development programmes should ultimately be judged by whether they reduce the need for further assistance.
Debt relief may be necessary when repayments become unsustainable. But forgiving debts without addressing the conditions that produced them risks restarting the same cycle.
And creditors must accept responsibility for imprudent lending. Financial discipline cannot be demanded only of borrowers.
Imagine an international development institution that measured success not primarily by how much money it distributed, but by how many countries no longer needed its assistance.
It would insist upon transparent borrowing, independently assessed projects and measurable long-term results.
It would help countries attract productive private investment, improve institutions and participate in international trade.
And it would be prepared to acknowledge when its programmes had failed.
The objective would not be to create better-managed debtors.
It would be to create prosperous, self-reliant countries.
The World Bank and other international institutions have helped finance genuine improvements in health, education and infrastructure. Those achievements should not be dismissed.
Nor can every debt crisis be blamed on irresponsible spending. Wars, pandemics, natural disasters and global interest-rate shocks can overwhelm even well-managed economies.
But after decades of development lending, why do so many countries remain dependent upon further borrowing and assistance?
Perhaps we have concentrated too heavily on how much money the world provides, and too little on whether that money produces lasting independence.
The ultimate measure of successful foreign assistance should not be how much we give, but how little assistance the recipient eventually needs.
This article continues a theme explored in two earlier Grappy's Soapbox posts: how well-intentioned policies can produce unintended and sometimes harmful consequences when the incentives of decision-makers differ from the interests of those they are meant to serve. See Perverse Incentives: How Good Intentions Can Produce Bad Outcomes and Perverse Incentives — Part 2.
When those making the decisions don't bear the consequences, whose interests are really being served?
Some time ago, I wrote about perverse incentives — situations in which individuals or organisations, acting quite rationally in their own interests, produce outcomes that are contrary to the interests of society as a whole.
It is one of the most important, and least appreciated, explanations for why institutions so often fail to deliver what they were created to achieve.
A recent article in TrialSite News, Was the COVID-19 Pandemic a Trojan Horse?, by Dr Ronald N. Kostoff, provides a fascinating case study.
The article asks a provocative question: did the extraordinary measures introduced during the pandemic serve purposes beyond protecting public health?
My interest is in a somewhat different question.
What happens when the people making decisions benefit from those decisions, while the costs are borne by someone else?
Consider a public health official confronting a new and potentially dangerous virus.
If the official recommends severe restrictions and those restrictions later prove excessive, the consequences are largely borne by businesses, workers, schoolchildren and families.
But if the official recommends restraint and the disease spreads disastrously, the professional and political consequences could be devastating.
Which course is the safer one for the official?
The answer is obvious. And therein lies the problem.
The decision that minimises personal or institutional risk is not necessarily the decision that produces the best outcome for society.
This does not require dishonesty, corruption or even bad intentions. It requires only ordinary human behaviour responding to a particular set of incentives.
During COVID-19, this asymmetry was particularly pronounced. The consequences of doing too little were immediate and visible. Many of the consequences of doing too much — educational losses, business failures, delayed medical treatment, psychological distress and social isolation — emerged more slowly.
The incentives favoured caution, even when caution imposed enormous costs on others.
Kostoff's article examines the extraordinary redistribution of economic activity, institutional power and financial resources during the pandemic.
Consider some of the outcomes.
Large businesses versus small businesses. While many small shops and restaurants were forced to close, large retailers and online businesses were often able to continue operating. Some emerged with stronger market positions, while smaller competitors disappeared.
Pharmaceutical companies. Vaccine manufacturers benefited from substantial government funding, enormous purchasing commitments, accelerated regulatory processes and significant liability protections. Some of these arrangements may have been justified by the emergency, but they also created powerful commercial incentives.
Technology companies. Lockdowns accelerated the shift to online shopping, remote working, digital education and electronic communication. Companies already dominating these markets benefited enormously.
Government agencies. Emergency powers allowed executives and administrators to make decisions that would ordinarily have required extensive consultation, parliamentary scrutiny or judicial review. Once acquired, such powers are not always surrendered enthusiastically.
Public spending. Trillions of dollars were distributed through emergency programmes, often with reduced scrutiny. The United States Government Accountability Office subsequently documented extensive fraud and weaknesses in oversight.
None of these outcomes proves that the beneficiaries engineered the policies that benefited them.
But that is not the point.
Once a policy creates winners and losers, the winners acquire a powerful incentive to preserve it — even when its original justification has weakened.
Kostoff goes further than this.
In his concluding remarks, he advances the hypothesis that the pandemic was used deliberately to bring about political change in the United States, with economic disruption and changes to voting procedures serving that objective.
That is a serious allegation, and one that requires considerably stronger evidence than the identification of those who benefited.
Indeed, an important part of the analysis presented in the article makes precisely this distinction.
It separates four questions:
What actions were taken?
What consequences followed?
Who benefited?
Is there evidence that those benefits motivated the original decisions?
The first three questions can often be answered with reasonable confidence. The fourth is considerably more difficult.
And here is where I think the concept of perverse incentives offers a more compelling explanation.
We do not need to believe that someone planned the entire sequence of events.
A genuine emergency can create extraordinary opportunities. Individuals, businesses, bureaucracies and political institutions then respond to those opportunities in ways that advance their own interests.
The resulting pattern may look remarkably coordinated, even when no central coordination exists.
It is the cumulative consequence of many people pursuing their own objectives.
In a competitive marketplace, poor decisions generally carry consequences for those making them.
A business that repeatedly misjudges its customers risks losing those customers. An investor who makes poor investments loses money.
But government and large institutions frequently operate under a different set of rules.
The people making decisions are often insulated from their consequences.
A bureaucrat who imposes an unnecessary restriction does not personally compensate the business owner who loses everything.
A policymaker whose decisions damage children's education does not necessarily bear the long-term costs.
An institution that expands its authority during an emergency may have every reason to defend that expansion long after the emergency has passed.
This is not an argument against government, public health or collective action.
It is an argument for recognising that good intentions do not eliminate bad incentives.
Indeed, the more noble the declared objective, the easier it can become to overlook the incentives operating beneath it.
The pandemic presented governments with genuine and difficult choices, particularly when knowledge of the virus was limited. Some interventions saved lives; others imposed substantial collateral costs. Their effectiveness and proportionality varied by policy, place and time.
But whatever one's assessment of the individual measures, the experience should have taught us something about institutional behaviour.
Emergency powers require independent scrutiny.
Temporary measures need clear conditions for their termination.
The people advising governments should be required to consider not merely the benefits of their recommendations but also their economic, social and human costs.
And where possible, the consequences of decisions should be visible to — and influence the accountability of — those making them.
Most importantly, we should resist the temptation to judge a policy solely by the intentions of its proponents.
The relevant question is not simply, "What are they trying to achieve?"
It is also, "What incentives are driving their behaviour, and who bears the cost if they get it wrong?"
Regular readers of Grappy's Soapbox will recognise this as a theme I have explored before.
In Perverse Incentives — How Good Intentions Go Bad and its follow-up, Perverse Incentives — Part 2, I explored how individuals and institutions, acting quite rationally in pursuit of their own interests, can produce outcomes that are contrary to the interests of society as a whole.
The COVID experience provides another, particularly dramatic illustration of the same underlying problem.
The essential question is not whether the decision-makers believed they were doing the right thing. Many undoubtedly did.
It is whether the incentives governing their decisions encouraged outcomes that were also right for the wider community.
When personal or institutional success becomes disconnected from the public good, even well-intentioned decisions can lead us badly astray.
Perverse incentives are not confined to pandemics.
They can be found in climate and energy policy, financial regulation, education, welfare, corporate management and virtually every field in which decision-makers are rewarded for achieving narrow objectives while the broader costs fall on others.
They explain why bureaucracies expand, why temporary programmes become permanent, why regulations sometimes protect established businesses against competition, and why policies that demonstrably fail can nevertheless survive.
We often look for villains when institutions produce bad outcomes.
Sometimes villains exist. Corruption and deliberate exploitation are real.
But often the explanation is more mundane — and therefore more troubling.
Ordinary people, pursuing entirely understandable personal and institutional interests, can collectively produce extraordinary harm.
The greatest danger may not be a conspiracy of bad people. It may be a system in which perfectly ordinary people are rewarded for making decisions that are bad for everyone else.
And unless we understand that, we are destined to repeat the same mistakes.
For readers interested in the detailed analysis, Dr Ronald N. Kostoff's article, “Was the COVID-19 Pandemic a Trojan Horse?”, published by TrialSite News on 6 October 2026, examines the economic, political and institutional consequences of the pandemic response. It is an opinion article, and some of its more far-reaching hypotheses should be distinguished from its documented observations.
