Most of us don’t give much thought to going to the toilet. We go when we need to go.
But for a small minority of people, the act of urinating or defecating can be a major source of anxiety – especially when public restrooms are the only facilities available.
Paruresis (shy bladder) and parcopresis (shy bowel) are little known mental health conditions, yet they can significantly compromise a person’s quality of life.
We don’t know how many people have shy bowel, but research has estimated around 2.8%-16.4% of the population are affected by shy bladder. The condition is more common in males.
Our research explored the thought processes that underpin these conditions, with a view to understanding how they might best be treated.
Most of us will feel a little “grossed out” from time to time when using public toilets. But what we’re talking about here is different and more serious.
People with shy bladder and shy bowel experience significant anxiety when trying to go to the toilet, especially in public places like shopping centres, restaurants, at work or at school. Sufferers may also experience symptoms in their own home when family or friends are around.
Their anxiety can present in the form of increased heart rate, excessive sweating, rapid breathing, muscle tension, heart palpitations, blushing, nausea, trembling, or a combination of these.
Most of us prefer to go to the toilet at home. But people with shy bladder or shy bowel may struggle to go anywhere else.From shutterstock.com
Symptoms range in severity. Some people who are more mildly affected can experience anxiety but still be able to “go”, for example when the bathroom is completely empty. Others may urinate or defecate with difficulty – for example their urine stream may be inconsistent. Some people will sit on the toilet and not be able to go at all.
In severe cases, sufferers may hold it in until they get home. This is uncomfortable and can even have health consequences, such as urinary tract infections.
Sufferers report difficulties relating to employment, relationships and social life. For example, they might avoid travelling, going to parties, or attending large events like sports matches because of their symptoms.
Unfortunately, people with shy bladder or shy bowel will often feel shame and embarrassment, making them less likely to seek help.
It’s a type of social anxiety disorder
The DSM-5, a manual designed to help clinicians diagnose mental health conditions, classifies shy bladder as a sub-type of social anxiety disorder.
The DSM-5 doesn’t make specific mention of shy bowel, but with more research we hope to see it included in the future.
Social anxiety disorder is characterised by an excessive fear of social situations, including contact with strangers. People with the condition fear scrutiny by others, whether negative or positive evaluation.
We wanted to understand whether the thought processes that underpin shy bladder and shy bowel are similar to those demonstrated in people with social anxiety disorder.
We canvassed 316 undergraduate students in an online survey on shy bladder and shy bowel. Some 72 participants (22.8%) self-reported symptoms of either one or both conditions.
We found these symptoms were influenced by particular patterns of thinking, including:
a misinterpretation or distortion of information (for example, interpreting laughter in the restroom as being directed towards them)
fears around potential perceived negative evaluation (for example, a fear of being criticised for taking too long to defecate, or for sounds and smells produced during urination or defecation)
fears around potential perceived positive evaluation (for example, a fear of being evaluated too positively for a strong urine stream).
Using statistical modelling, we found fear of negative evaluation was the factor most strongly associated with shy bladder or shy bowel symptoms.
A mental health professional is likely to be able to help.From shutterstock.com
Treatment
While our study was small and more research is needed, the thought processes we identified as underpinning shy bladder and shy bowel are very similar to those we know predict social anxiety symptoms.
As such, people with shy bladder or shy bowel may benefit from the sorts of treatments that help people with social anxiety disorder.
Cognitive behavioural therapy, for example, is known to reduce social anxiety symptoms.
The best way to help people with these conditions will be addressing the thought processes behind shy bladder and shy bowel, especially concerns around the perceptions others might evaluate or criticise one’s urination or defecation.
As well as targeting unhelpful thinking, like all anxiety conditions, reducing avoidance through gradual exposure work (putting oneself in anxiety-inducing situations where one will build confidence and tolerance around anxiety) is also likely to help.
If you can’t do what you need to do in a public restroom, know you’re not alone and you’re not going crazy. Shy bladder and shy bowel are genuine anxiety conditions and can have significant effects on your day-to-day functioning.
Discussing these symptoms with your doctor and/or mental health professional is likely to be an important step to freeing yourself from these conditions.
Humans are more connected to each other than ever, thanks to smartphones, the web and social media. At the same time, loneliness is a huge and growing social problem.
Why is this so? Research shows social media use alone can’t cure loneliness – but it can be a tool to build and strengthen our genuine connections with others, which are important for a happy life.
To understand why this is the case, we need to understand more about loneliness, its harmful impact, and what this has to do with social media.
The scale of loneliness
There is great concern about a loneliness epidemic in Australia. In the 2018 Australian Loneliness Report, more than one-quarter of survey participants reported feeling lonely three or more days a week.
How do we explain such apparent contradictions, wherein both the most and least lonely people are heavy social media users?
Research reveals social media is most effective in tackling loneliness when it is used to enhance existing relationships, or forge new meaningful connections. On the other hand, it is counterproductive if used as a substitute for real-life social interaction.
Thus, it is not social media itself, but the way we integrate it into our existing lives which impacts loneliness.
I wandered lonely in The Cloud
While social media’s implications for loneliness can be positive, they can also be contradictory.
Tech-industry enthusiasts highlight social media’s benefits, such as how it offers easy, algorithimically-enhanced connection to anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time. But this argument often ignores the quality of these connections.
Psychologist Robert Weiss makes a distinction between “social loneliness” – a lack of contact with others – and “emotional loneliness”, which can persist regardless of how many “connections” you have, especially if they do not provide support, affirm identity and create feelings of belonging.
Without close, physical connections, shallow virtual friendships can do little to alleviate emotional loneliness. And there is reason to think many online connections are just that.
On the other hand, social media plays a vital role in helping us stay connected with friends over long distances, and organise catch-ups. Video conferencing can facilitate “meetings” when physically meeting is impractical.
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram can be used to engage with new people who may turn into real friends later on. Similarly, sites like Meetup can help us find local groups of people whose interests and activities align with our own.
And while face-to-face contact remains the best way to help reduce loneliness, help can sometimes be found through online support groups.
Why so lonely?
There are several likely reasons for our great physical disconnection and loneliness.
We’ve replaced the 20th century idea of stable, permanent careers spanning decades with flexible employment and gig work. This prompts regular relocation for work, which results in disconnection from family and friends.
Single-person households are expected to increase from about 2.1 million in 2011 to almost 3.4 million in 2036.
All of the above means the way we manage loneliness is changing.
In our book, my co-authors and I argue people manage their feelings differently than in the past. Living far from friends and family, isolated individuals often deal with negative emotions alone, through therapy, or through connecting online with whoever may be available.
Social media use is pervasive, so the least we can do is bend it in a way that facilitates our real-life need to belong.
It is a tool that should work for us, not the other way around. Perhaps, once we achieve this, we can expect to live in a world that is a bit less lonely.
As unprecedented bushfires continue to ravage the country, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his government have been rightly criticised for their reluctance to talk about the underlying drivers of this crisis. Yet it’s not hard to see why they might be dumbstruck.
The human race has never had to grapple with a problem as large, complex or urgent as climate change. It’s not that there aren’t solutions available. There are already some hopeful signs of an energy transition in Australia. As Professor Ross Garnaut has explained, it would be in Australia’s economic interests to become a low-carbon energy superpower.
To successfully tackle climate change will require some painful transitions domestically, and unprecedented levels of international coordination and cooperation. But that isn’t happening. Global action to cut emissions is falling far short of what’s needed – and meanwhile, though it’s controversial to mention, the world’s population quietly climbs ever higher.
By 2050, the UN predicts that the world’s population will be nearly 10 billion, up from 7.7 billion now. Nine countries are expected to be home to more than half of that growth: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States. The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to double by 2050 (a 99% increase), while Australia and New Zealand are expected to grow more slowly (28% increase).
Given how difficult climate politics have been here in Australia, why would we expect it to be any more politically feasible in say, India, which claims the right to develop as we did? However self-serving Australian coal supporters’ arguments about lifting Indians out of poverty are, the underlying questions of national autonomy and the ‘right’ to develop are not easily refuted.
Even talking about demography is asking for trouble – especially if it becomes caught up with questions of race, identity and the most fundamental of human rights, the right to reproduce.
While reducing population growth is plainly important in the long-term, it isn’t a quick fix for all our environmental problems. In the meantime, research has shown that supporting education for girls in poor countries is one of the single most important things we can do now to address this issue.
How Australia can show leadership
I think we need to understand that global emissions don’t have an accent, they come from many countries and we need to look at a global solution… – Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Insiders, ABC, 12 January 2020
This is the central defence of business as usual: there’s no point in Australia making huge sacrifices and ‘wrecking’ (or transforming, depending on your perspective) the economy if no one else is doing so. We contribute less than 2% to global greenhouse emissions, so – some claim – we can’t make any real difference.
As outlined in my 2019 book, Environmental Populism: The Politics of Survival in the Anthropocene, nations such as Australia can play a useful role by showing what an enlightened country, with the capacity and incentive to act, might do. If we don’t have the means and the compelling environmental reasons to make tough but meaningful policy choices, who does?
But even in the unlikely event that Australians collectively retrofitted the entire economy along sustainable lines, there would still be a lot of the world that wouldn’t, or couldn’t even if they wanted to. The development imperative really is non-negotiable in India, China and the more impoverished states of sub-Saharan Africa.
Will China lead the way?
From the privileged perspective of wealthy Australians, the ‘good’ news is that the ecological footprint of the average Ethiopian is seven times smaller than ours. India’s average is even less, despite all the recent development. However, people in India and Ethiopia may not think that’s a good thing.
One of the paradoxical impacts of globalisation is that everyone is increasingly conscious of their relative place in the international scheme of things. The legitimacy of governments – especially unelected authoritarian regimes like China’s – increasingly revolves around their capacity to deliver jobs and rising living standards. Where governments can’t deliver, the population vote with their feet.
As naturalist Sir David Attenborough warned last week, Australia’s current fires are another sign that “the moment of crisis has come”. He called on China for the global leadership we’ve been missing:
If the Chinese come and say: ‘Not because we are worried about the world but for our own reasons, we are going to take major steps to curb our carbon output […]’, everybody else would fall into line, one thinks. That would be the big change that one could hope would happen.
China has arguably already made the biggest contribution to our collective welfare with its highly contentious, now abandoned one-child policy. China’s population would have been around 400 million people larger without it, pushing us closer to the crisis Sir David fears.
To be clear, I’m not advocating compulsory population control, here or anywhere. But we do need to consider a future with billions more people, many of them aspiring to live as Australians do now.
Looking ahead, will Australians try to keep living as we do today? Or will we decide to set a new example of living well, without such a heavy ecological footprint? Resolving all these conundrums won’t be easy; perhaps not even possible. That’s another discomfiting reality that we may have to get used to.
Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner has won many awards since it was published in 2017, including the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Australian Book Industry Award General Non-Fiction Book of the Year.
While the title may speak of a provocative premise – what is a trauma cleaner? Are there really jobs like this? – it’s not just the content that makes it a wonderful read, it’s also the writing style. Every word, every sentence, is carefully considered, re-considered and re-considered some more, resulting in what can only be described as beautiful language.
I was truly blown away by the power and precision of the prose. Sounds, tastes and smells emanate from the page, creating a visceral experience of protagonist Sandra’s extraordinary, often traumatic, life.
Orchestration of words
Krasnostein uses exquisite turns of phrase. Language is used to excavate facts and polish ideas that are hard to get rid of – things that stick. As Krasnostein writes, the book is “a catalogue of the ways we die physically and emotionally, and the strength and delicacy needed to lift the things we leave behind”.
Introducing her subject, Krasnostein writes:
During my time with Sandra, I met a bookbinder, a sex offender, a puppeteer, a cookbook hoarder, a cat hoarder, a wood hoarder […] I heard Sandra bend and flex language into words and idioms she made her own: “supposably”, “sposmatically”, “hands down pat!”
It is this careful and playful orchestration of words – facts transformed into a scintillating narrative – that makes the book hard to put down. Every page lures you in, making you hungry for more.
Beneath the beautiful language, resonance strikes and asks us to think of our own lives. Expressions hit like a sudden gust of wind. They bring tears to your eyes. We are not asked to feel sad, but to feel what was, and still is, being experienced by these people – to feel the complexity of the circumstances.
Imagine Ailsa, the girl who loves to bake, the woman whose cakes are light and high and whose dark religion tells her to fear her effeminate son […] Imagine that baby as a boy frozen in his bed, straining to read the sound of a motor in the driveway over the noise of his own racing heart.
Krasnostein’s language evokes in us the visceral aspects of a situation – the pain and pleasure of those involved. She says of Sandra, then still Peter, practising his female voice in the shower when wife Linda is out: “the refrain of thrumming along his veins that signifies his only certainty and which says: you don’t belong here”.
Later, of his eventual parting from wife and children towards a new life as Sandra:
When he steps around the food flung on the floor or smells the milk turning in bottles in the sink, or when cries momentarily shatter his sleep like a glass flung against a wall, he doesn’t really notice because in his mind he is dancing at [gay club] Annabel’s with Joe.
Krasnostein is adept at laying out facts with no judgement or flourish, allowing their trauma to speak to us individually. She refuses to manipulate her readers, instead touching the facts lightly with a sense of perspective: “she will never fear what is ahead of her, only what is behind her”.
From one trauma to the next, we learn of the murder of Sandra’s girlfriend, Maria, by a nightclub bouncer. Krasnostein uses repetition to speculate on his motives:
Maybe he has it in for her. Maybe he has it in for dykes. Maybe he’s jealous of her. Maybe he’s jealous of the girlfriend. Maybe he’s repulsed that he’s jealous of either of them […] Maybe he just wants to feel the force of bone on muscle.
Krasnostein gives us story perspective in a light, non-manipulative way. That last line is sparse yet stark, simple yet powerful.
And then this, which winds all the facts into a clean knot that represents the very core of Sandra’s life journey: “Sandra does not need a physics lesson to understand that time dilates; life taught her early that some seconds are cruelly quick and others are tortuously slow”.
Krasnostein pores over language, refining it until it says the most it can in the fewest words possible. “Something you might try to ignore, like a full bladder on a cold night”. “What chips some people like a mug cracks others, like an egg”. “The couch is a grave”.
Writing of writing
The Trauma Cleaner also speaks about the process of its being written, with authority and poignancy:
I scrap draft after draft of my timeline and even when I am assisted in my task by Sandra’s recollection, the narrative remains a tangled necklace. Events link into one another only so far before they halt, abruptly, as some great knot where they loop over each other so tightly that some seem to disappear altogether.
In some ways, the narrative arc of the book is not Sandra’s own journey, but Krasnostein’s understanding of Sandra and what she represents for all of us. This is achieved with a lightness of touch, the author never getting in the way of the reader’s own interpretations.
Krasnostein writes at the start of the book:
And here it hits me what it is we are doing by telling this story. It is something at once utterly unfamiliar and completely alien to Sandra: we are clearing away the clutter of her life out of basic respect for the inherent value of the person beneath.
And then at the end of the book, after we have witnessed all of Sandra’s trauma, humour and resilience, an ordaining of our protagonist in language that is at once beautiful and beatific: “Sandra, you exist in the Order of Things and the Family of People; you belong, you belong, you belong”.
The world’s oldest remaining asteroid crater is at a place called Yarrabubba, southeast of the town of Meekatharra in Western Australia.
Our new study puts a precise age on the cataclysmic impact – showing Yarrabubba is the oldest known crater and dating it at the right time to trigger the end of an ancient glacial period and the warming of the entire planet.
What we found at Yarrabubba
Yarrrabubba holds the eroded remnants of a crater 70 kilometres wide that was first described in 2003, based on minerals at the site that showed unique signs of impact. But its true age was not known.
The Yarrabubba crater is about 70 kilometres across.
We studied tiny “impact-shocked” crystals found at the site, which show the crater formed 2.229 billion years ago (give or take 5 million years).
This new, precise date establishes Yarrabubba as the oldest recognised impact structure on Earth. It is some 200 million years older than the next oldest, the Vredefort impact in South Africa.
More intriguing, the geological record shows the Earth had glacial ice before the time of the impact – but afterwards, ice disappeared for hundreds of millions of years. Was the Yarrabubba impact a trigger for global climate change?
An asteroid strike is one of the most violent geologic events. In an instant, Earth’s crust is squeezed to unimaginable pressures, before exploding and ejecting carnage across the landscape. Large impacts leave behind scars the size of a small city.
The basin formed by an impact will partly fill with molten and pulverised rock from the Earth and from the asteroid itself. The edge of the crater forms a ring of mountains; over time erosion gradually erases the story.
Today, Yarrabubba has been worn down into a minor feature on a barren landscape.
To place the Yarrabubba event in a geologic context, we had to find its age. To find the age, we had to look carefully at minerals in the rocks shocked by the impact.
Geologists date events using “isotopic clocks” in minerals like zircon and monazite. These minerals contain small amounts of uranium, which gradually decays into lead at a known rate.
A shocked zircon crystal used to date the Yarrabubba impact. The margin (pink) recrystallised during impact, leaving the inner core (blue) intact. Scale bar is 80 micrometres, the width of human hair.Author provided
Asteroid strikes raise the temperature in rocks they hit, causing minerals to lose their accumulated lead, which resets the clock. After impact, the isotopic clocks start ticking again as new lead accumulates.
So by measuring the isotopes of uranium and lead in these minerals, we can calculate how much time has passed since the impact.
At Yarrabubba, we identified tiny crystals of zircon and monazite – each about the width of human hair – with textures that show they had been heated by a massive impact.
We analysed the amounts of lead and uranium isotopes in these crystals using mass spectrometry, and found their clocks had been reset 2.229 billion years ago (give or take five million years). That’s when we realised Yarrabubba coincided with a major change in Earth’s climate.
A different Earth
The Yarrabubba impact occurred during a period in Earth’s history called the Proterozoic eon. Long before plants, fish, or dinosaurs, life at this time consisted of simple, multicellular organisms.
These simple bacteria had already begun changing the composition of air. Previously dominated by carbon dioxide and methane, Earth’s atmosphere gradually became oxygenated by life about 2.4 billion years ago.
As oxygen levels built up, rocks started weathering more, and the atmosphere cooled down. And then ice came, plunging Earth into globally frigid conditions.
Earth has repeatedly dipped into glacial conditions over the last 4.5 billion years. We know about these periods because of deposits of solidified rock and mud that were ground up by glaciers as they bulldozed across Earth’s surface.
Studies have found multiple periods in Earth’s history in which glacial deposits occur in rocks of the same age across many continents. These deposits may represent worldwide glacial conditions, often referred to as a “Snowball Earth” event.
In these periods, ice forms from the poles well into the tropics, covering nearly all of Earth.
There is geological evidence that Earth was in an icy phase during the Yarrabubba impact. Rocks in South Africa show that glaciers were present at this time. But it’s not clear if the amount of ice was similar to today, or if it covered the world.
Fire and ice
So we found Earth’s oldest preserved impact crater, and worked out when the asteroid hit. We also know Earth had ice at the time, but not how much.
To understand the effect of the impact on an ice-covered world, we used computer models based on the physics of shockwaves to estimate how much ice would end up in the atmosphere as water vapour. As it turns out, it’s quite a lot.
Our models show that if the Yarrabubba asteroid hit an ice sheet 5 kilometres thick (not an unreasonable estimate), more than 200 billion tons of water vapour would be ejected into the atmosphere. That’s about 2% of the total amount of water vapour in today’s atmosphere, but would have been a much bigger fraction back then.
Water vapour is a serious greenhouse gas. It’s responsible for about half of the heat absorption from solar radiation today.
Global climate models don’t yet exist for the Proterozoic Earth, so we don’t yet know for sure if the Yarrabubba impact pushed the planet past a tipping point that led to more warming and the end of a possible Snowball Earth.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jemma Holt, Research Fellow/ Acting Executive Officer (Research), Tasmania Law Reform Institute, University of Tasmania
Juries are supposed to consider evidence without influence or bias from the outside world. However, the widespread access to and use of the internet and social media threatens to undermine this, with significant consequences for our criminal justice system and those within it.
Given courts cannot effectively police smart-phone use they must adapt to it. This week the Tasmania Law Reform Institute completed its year long inquiry into courts and the information age, and has recommendations as to how they can adapt.
The right to a fair & unbiased trial by your peers
An accused person’s right to a fair trial is the most fundamental principle of our criminal justice system. It is a phrase that describes a system that affords an accused person many protections. That system relies on jurors being impartial and returning a verdict that is based solely on the evidence that is presented within the courtroom.
In the past this was readily easy to achieve. Juror communications during trial hours and even after them could be controlled. News about the trial was generally a local affair, and even when it attracted national attention, the journalists needed to be in the court’s jurisdiction to report, so they and their employers were subject to the court’s authority.
The shift in the way people access news, information and communications in the modern age has changed this reality.
Almost every Australian has access to the internet via their smartphone or other devices, social media use is habitual among much of our population, and the internet is a ubiquitous source of information for most people.
Jurors are no different – in fact, they represent the wider Australian community these statistics describe. While jurors’ smart phones are removed from them during trial, they cannot be before or after the trial period, nor at the beginning or end of the day. As a result jurors may intentionally, or simply by habit seek out or communicate information about the trial.
Between 2018 and 2020 the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute conducted an inquiry into juror misuse of the internet and social media during trials. The institute concluded there is likely to be a high, but unquantifiable and undetectable level of misuse.
However, there is evidence across Australian jurisdictions that jurors have used their internet connected devices to:
research legal terms or concepts or other information relevant to the trial. A West Australian juror in a drug-related trial obtained information online about methylamphetamine production
research the accused, witnesses, victims, lawyers or the judge. Two South Australian jurors sitting in a blackmail trial against multiple defendants conducted online searches about the accused which disclosed past outlaw motorcycle gang affiliations
communicate with people involved in the trial. Multiple New South Wales jurors on a long-running fraud trial became Facebook friends, sharing posts such as a digitally altered photo of one of the jurors wearing a judge’s wig
publish material about the trial on the internet or social media. A NSW juror sitting in a sexual offending trial posted on Facebook the day before the guilty verdict was returned: “When a dog attacks a child it is put down. Shouldn’t we do the same with sex predators?” This post was accompanied with a photograph that showed images of rooms and implements by which lawful executions are carried out.
Misuse is under-reported. In those few instance where reports are made, fellow jurors, rather than court officers, tend to be the ones who raise the issue. Indeed, it is an important part of their role.
While jurors across Australia are currently told not to conduct online research, wilful disobedience is only part of the problem. It can also involve unintentional acts by jurors who believe they are doing the right thing.
For instance, jurors accessing online news, entertainment or social media sites can be passively influenced by information relevant to the trial. Jurors often misunderstand their role and conduct independent research in the genuine belief their actions are in the pursuit of “fairness” or discovering the truth.
What jurors see online could affect their choice in the courtroom.from www.shutterstock.com
Educate, inform & encourage self-regulation
The law reform institute ultimately concluded it is impossible for, and beyond the capacity of courts to completely police juror internet use. It has thus recommended not reforming the law, but rather strengthening and standardising juror education and directions. These recommendations are divided across two stages of jury selection, as part of an overall strategy:
pre-selection: prospective jurors should receive improved training and information about the role of the juror and the risks of internet use
post-selection: once a jury has been selected, judges need to explain to jurors what dangers arise from using the internet to access and publish on social media, seeking information about the case, parties, court officers, lawyers, and self-conducted research into legal concepts or sentences. The report has recommended the court adopt minimum standard directions, but also have the flexibility to make specific directions relevant to any particular trial.
The report recommended certain current practices and laws should remain unchanged, including:
removing phones from jurors while they are in court (even though the effect is limited it avoids juror distraction)
leaving contempt (punishment) laws in place for those jurors who intentionally ignore court training and directions. That might include monetary fines and, in severe cases, imprisonment.
This process is aimed at encouraging self-regulation among jurors, by educating them how to curtail their internet use and why it’s so important.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christine Carson, Senior Research Fellow, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Western Australia
In the days before antibiotics, deaths from bacterial infections were common. Seemingly minor illnesses could escalate in severity, becoming deadly in a matter of hours or days.
These days, antibiotics can be life-savers. In the community, they’re commonly used to treat bacterial infections of the lung, urinary tract, eye, throat, skin and gut.
But they’re not needed for all bacterial infections – many infections will resolve on their own without treatment.
And of course, antibiotics don’t treat viral infections such as colds and flus, or fungal infections such as tinea or thrush.
Even when antibiotics are necessary, they’re not a one-size-fits-all treatment: not all antibiotics kill all types of bacteria.
What type of bacteria is causing the infection?
If your doctor suspects you have a serious bacterial infection, they will often take a urine or blood test, or a swab to send to the pathologist.
At the lab, these tests aim to detect and identify the bacteria causing the infection.
Some methods only need to detect bacterial DNA. These DNA-based approaches are called “genotypic methods” and are quick and highly sensitive.
Other methods involve attempting to culture and isolate bacteria from the sample. This can take one to four days.
What antibiotic can fight the infection?
If antibiotic treatment is necessary, the isolated bacteria can be used in a second series of tests to help determine the right antibiotic for your infection. These are called antimicrobial susceptibility tests.
Like the tests that first detected the bacterium causing your infection, they can be done using DNA-based (genotypic) methods or by culturing the bacterium in the presence of various antibiotics and assessing what happens (phenotypic methods).
Genotypic tests tend to identify which antibiotics won’t work so they can be ruled out as treatment options; ruling out the ones that won’t work leaves the ones that should work.
For phenotypic tests, the bacterium is regrown in the presence of a range of antibiotics to see which one stops its growth. A range of concentrations of each antibiotic are often used in these tests.
Testing can more accurately determine the right antibiotic for your infection.iviewfinder/Shutterstock
Why you sometimes get a script without testing
Whichever tests are done, the results may not be available for a couple of days. In the meantime, your doctor will probably get you started on an antibiotic that is most likely to be effective. This is called empiric therapy and is the “best guess” treatment while they wait for test results.
Empiric antibiotic choice is based on the doctor’s prior experience with that type of infection, as well as clinical guidelines developed from evidence about that infection type, and ongoing surveillance data from the pathology lab about the types of bacteria generally causing that infection, and which antibiotics those bacteria are susceptible to.
When available, the test results will either confirm the initial choice, or influence the doctor’s decision to prescribe a different antibiotic.
Take urinary tract infections (UTIs), for example. Most are caused by E. coli and there are antibiotics that reliably treat these infections.
Data from the thousands of pathology tests performed each year on the E. coli from other people’s UTIs helps inform the doctor’s choice of empiric antibiotic for you, as do the clinical guidelines.
The doctor can therefore be reasonably confident in prescribing that antibiotic while you wait for the test results from your urine sample. You’ll either get better and need no further intervention, or you’ll come back to the doctor, by which time your test results should be available to fine-tune the choice of antibiotic.
Naturally, you want to receive an antibiotic that will effectively treat your infection. But what’s wrong with taking an antibiotic that does the job too well or, conversely, is ineffective?
Antibiotics that are too strong will not only clear your infection but will also kill other good bacteria, disrupting your microbiome and possibly causing other knock-on effects.
On the other hand, an ineffective antibiotic will not only fail to treat the infection adequately, it can still cause side effects and disrupt your microbiome.
A broader consideration for the judicious use of antibiotics is that overuse, or ineffective use, contributes unnecessarily to the development of antibiotic resistance. All antibiotic use promotes resistance in other bacteria they come in contact with, so minimising and optimising their targeted use is important.
The right antibiotic choice for your infection is a complex decision that must often be made before key additional evidence to support the decision is available.
As test results become available, the treatment antibiotics may be refined, changed or even stopped.
Those who say “I told you so” are rarely welcomed, yet I am going to say it here. Australian scientists warned the country could face a climate change-driven bushfire crisis by 2020. It arrived on schedule.
For several decades, the world’s scientific community has periodically assessed climate science, including the risks of a rapidly changing climate. Australian scientists have made, and continue to make, significant contributions to this global effort.
Today, I will join Dr Tom Beer and Professor David Bowman to warn that Australia’s bushfire conditions will become more severe. We call on Australians, particularly our leaders, to heed the science.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison comforting a man evacuated from his home during then recent bushfires.Darren Pateman/AAP
The more we learn, the worse it gets
Many of our scientific warnings over the decades have, regrettably, become reality. About half of the corals on the Great Barrier Reef have been killed by underwater heatwaves. Townsville was last year decimated by massive floods. The southeast agricultural zone has been crippled by intense drought. The residents of western Sydney have sweltered through record-breaking heat. The list could go on.
How serious might future risks actually be? Two critical developments are emerging from the most recent science.
First, we have previously underestimated the immediacy and seriousness of many risks. The most recent assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that as science progresses, more damaging impacts are projected to occur at lower increases in temperature. That is, the more we learn about climate change, the riskier it looks.
The city I live in, Canberra, experienced an average seven days per year over 35℃ through the 1981-2010 period. Climate models projected that this extreme heat would more than double to 15 days per year by 2030. Yet in 2019 Canberra experienced 33 days of temperatures over 35℃.
Second, we are learning more about ‘tipping points’, features of the climate system that appear stable but could fundamentally change, often irreversibly, with just a little further human pressure. Think of a kayak: tip it a little bit and it is still stable and remains upright. But tip it just a little more, past a threshold, and you end up underwater.
Features of the climate system likely to have tipping points include Arctic sea ice, the Greenland ice sheet, coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, Siberian permafrost and Atlantic Ocean circulation.
Dogs hauling a sled through meltwater on coastal sea ice during an expedition in northwest Greenland in June last year.STEFFEN M. OLSEN/DANISH METEOROLOGICAL INSTITUTE
Heading towards ‘Hothouse Earth’?
These tipping points do not act independently of one another. Like a row of dominoes, tipping one could help trigger another, and so on to form a tipping cascade. The ultimate risk is that such a cascade could take the climate system out of human control. The system could move to a “Hothouse Earth” state, irrespective of human actions to stop it.
Hothouse Earth temperatures would be much higher than in the pre-industrial era – perhaps 5–6℃ higher. A Hothouse Earth climate is likely to be uncontrollable and very dangerous, posing severe risks to human health, economies and political stability, especially for the most vulnerable countries. Indeed, Hothouse Earth could threaten the habitability of much of the planet for humans.
Tipping cascades have happened in Earth’s history. And the risk that we could trigger a new cascade is increasing: a recent assessment showed many tipping elements, including the ones listed above, are now moving towards their thresholds.
Beachgoers swim as smoke haze from bushfires blanketed Sydney last month.Steven Saphore/AAP
It’s time to listen
Now is the perfect time to reflect on what science-based risk assessments and warnings such as these really mean.
Two or three decades ago, the spectre of massive, violent bushfires burning uncontrollably along thousands of kilometres of eastern Australia seemed like the stuff of science fiction.
Scientists are warning that the world could face far worse conditions in the coming decades and beyond, if greenhouse gas emissions don’t start a sharp downward trend now.
Children and young people have been deeply impacted by the current bushfire crisis. Schools have been destroyed and thousands of houses have burnt down. Hazardous air pollution is causing major public health concerns and the devastating impacts on animals and wildlife is leading to emotional distress.
Many children – like 11-year-old Finn who drove a boat with his mother, brother and dog on board to safety – have been directly involved in the emergency response. Vast numbers of tourists have also been affected, many of them children.
This shows how essential it is for all children and young people, regardless of their geographic location in Australia, to have appropriate education about bushfire prevention, mitigation, preparedness and response.
But despite this history, the final report of the 2009 royal commission into Victoria’s Black Saturday fires noted those recommendations were never fully implemented. The commission handed down recommendation six, which attempted to rectify those past failures:
Victoria [should] lead an initiative of the Ministerial Council for Education, Early Childhood Development and Youth Affairs to ensure that the national curriculum incorporates the history of bushfire in Australia and that existing curriculum areas, such as geography, science and environmental studies include elements of bushfire education.
Following this, Victoria took the lead during consultations on the Australian Curriculum in 2012. It obtained agreement from other states to include elements of bushfire education in the curriculum.
As a result, year five geography in the Australian Curriculum now includes “the impact of bushfires or floods on environments and communities, and how people can respond”. More specifically, this content includes:
mapping the location, frequency and severity of bushfires or flooding in Australia
explaining the impacts of fire on Australian vegetation and the significance of fire damage on communities
researching how prevention, mitigation and preparedness minimise the harmful effects of bushfires or flooding.
The Australian Curriculum for year six science now includes “recognising that science can inform choices about where people live and how they manage natural disasters”, and science in year nine includes “investigating how ecosystems change as a result of events such as bushfires, drought and flooding”.
However, the implementation and effectiveness of this curriculum has not been reviewed at a state, territory or national level since it was developed. Given the curriculum isn’t always taught in the same way as it is written, we should not assume bushfire education is being delivered as intended, or that it is being delivered at all.
What works best
One problem with the Australian Curriculum content statements is that they are relatively abstract and detached from children’s lived experiences.
One of the authors conducted interviews with children aged 8-12 to find out their knowledge of bushfire emergency responses. Children revealed many misconceptions about bushfire safety, which often came from a lack of knowledge about bushfire behaviour.
Australian curriculum content statements are abstract and removed from reality.LUKAS COCH/AAP
Such misconceptions are best addressed by making bushfire education more relevant to their own lives. Children need to explore and understand vulnerability to bushfire in their own communities as well as their capacity for reducing risk.
Bushfire education in schools is also more effective when taught across the curriculum, rather than as isolated topics. One example is the bushfire education program at Victoria’s Strathewen Primary School for students in grades five and six. It incorporates science, art, civics and citizenship, design, English and geography.
A recent evaluation of the program showed it increased children’s knowledge of local bushfire risks and the actions people can take to manage them. It also helped increase children’s confidence for sharing their knowledge with others, gave them a sense of empowerment and reduced bushfire-related anxieties.
The program’s benefits extended to families, including increased bushfire planning at home with more participation from children in the process.
Other research shows teachers can better develop curricula that is sensitive to local social, environmental and cultural contexts when they have technical support from emergency services. They also need access to local expertise in topics such as bushfire behaviour, emergency management planning, and Indigenous cultural burning.
Rather than another royal commission, Australia would benefit from an expert panel review of bushfire education. This would examine the best ways to enable teachers to deliver bushfire education that draws on local capacities for bushfire management including Indigenous practices; promotes children’s participation in bushfire safety activities; and leverages community partnerships with schools.
Students need to become life-long bushfire learners, rather than memorising content from 2020 which will go rapidly out of date in our changing climate.
If you’ve ever dreamt of fame and fortune, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle turning their backs on the royal lifestyle might seem churlish. So too their desire to be “financially independent”.
As a senior royal, Harry is at the height of his popularity – a popularity that marrying Markle has only amplified.
On top of the millions he has inherited from his mother and great grandmother, he gets millions more annually, both from his cut of the “sovereign grant” paid by the British government and the allowance from his father (from the revenues of Duchy of Cornwall estate).
Harry and Meghan aren’t exiting the family firm penniless, but if they stayed they would be looked after in luxury for the rest of their lives.
Madness? No. Research suggests Harry and Meghan would be well and truly in their right minds to be sick of royal fame and fortune.
Psychologists, economists and philosophers have confirmed three things. First, money can’t buy happiness. Second, we want to feel we have earned our success and popularity. Third, being looked after from the cradle to the grave has its downsides.
In short, having everything handed to you on a platter just isn’t satisfying.
Money doesn’t buy happiness
Even though this statement is arguably a cliché, there is good evidence it’s true. While money buys happiness up to a point, the positive effects of money on happiness level off once individuals have obtained enough wealth to live a comfortable life.
This relationship has been observed at the country level, with multiple studies showing that, once a nation reaches a certain level of wealth, national happiness does not increase in parallel with extra wealth. This is known as the Easterlin paradox. According to economist John Helliwell, a co-editor of the World Happiness Report, the social context – marriage and family, ties to friends and neighbours, workplace ties, civic engagement, trustworthiness and trust – is more important than wealth.
One reason given for why wealth doesn’t buy individuals any more happiness after a certain point is that money becomes both a reason and means to distance ourselves from others. To paraphrase Christopher Ryan, author of Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress, what people tend to do with extra money is buy separation, whereas researchers “have concluded again and again that the single most reliable predictor of happiness is feeling embedded in a community”.
Extraordinary wealth, then, sets us against what we are programmed to do by evolution: seek out the company of others and band together in a community. Research has repeatedly shown this has a huge mental health cost.
Importantly, too, how we earn our money affects how much we enjoy it. Research among more than 4,000 millionaires in the US, for example, showed those who were “self-made” were moderately happier than those who inherited their wealth.
Taken together, these factors help explain why Harry and Meghan’s wealth might, psychologically speaking, be more curse than blessing.
The popularity paradox
Most of us, particularly teenagers, crave popularity. According to a YouGov poll, Harry is the second-most-popular member of the British royal family – pipped only by Queen Elizabeth. Some are convinced he won’t keep this popularity without his royal status.
Why would someone want to give up being liked and loved by stepping out of the limelight?
Because psychological research shows people feel less pride in their achievements if they attribute it to external reasons. In this case, that would being born as a royal for Harry, and being pretty and marrying into a royal family for Meghan. For their popularity and success to mean something, they would need some “internal attribution” – that it has something to do with their own abilities, effort and skill.
In a world that values meritocracy, as Alain de Botton argues, we need to “own our success” — the very thing Harry and Meghan cannot do as royals.
Trapped by certainty
Most of us aspire to being financially secure for the rest of our lives. Many of us would give a lot to know what lies ahead.
But while there is comfort in some sense of security and predictability, knowing exactly what the future holds might be a curse. This is because humans thrive also on feeling a sense of freedom and choice.
So just as having no certainty can take its mental toll, so does feeling one’s future is totally predetermined and that you have no real control over the way your life will unfold.
Psychologists call the motivation to regain a freedom after it has been lost reactance – and this might be something strong within someone, for example, who has lost freedom due to marrying into a high-profile family.
Seizing control
Do the reasons above explain why Harry and Meghan have left the royal fold? We can’t say that. Only they know their motivations.
But what we do know is that all the research points to fortune, fame and security not necessarily leading to a good, happy life. These things can in fact be burdens, bringing out our worst, not our best.
That happiness comes more from community connection, merit, effort and making our own decisions is good news for the rest of us. Let’s hope it works out for Harry and Meghan too.
In public, the government is crab-walking away from its commitment to a budget surplus, saying since the bushfires that other things have become more important.
Asked directly on Tuesday whether he was prepared to sacrifice this year’s projected surplus to help the bushfire recovery effort, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said:
Our focus is on delivering the services and support to people in need. That’s what we’ve been doing.
But less-publicly, and little noticed in the pre-Christmas release of the mid-year economic and fiscal outlook just before Christmas, the government has quietly buried long-standing targets for restraining spending.
Jettisoning these targets provides it with more wriggle room to increase spending to respond to things such as the bushfires and to boost the economy should it need to in 2020 and beyond.
Under the Charter of Budget Honesty Act 1998 every government must release a fiscal strategy statement alongside the Budget.
The statement is a list of the government’s budget targets. One long-standing target is “to achieve surpluses on average over the economic cycle”. Others relate to spending, tax collections, and public debt.
They are not binding but they provide a useful guide to the government’s thinking.
A looser straitjacket
Revisions to these targets can signal changes to the government’s approach.
In the pre-Christmas Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), the government significantly scaled back its targets – both in number and ambition.
For example, the budget repair strategy it adopted in 2014 committed it to “deliver budget surpluses building to at least 1% of GDP by 2023-24”.
Another component of the original repair strategy was that “new spending initiatives will be more than offset by reductions in spending elsewhere in the budget”.
In other words: if the government wanted to announce a new spending policy, it had to find savings elsewhere to cover the cost.
Targets missing
This target does not appear in MYEFO. A softer replacement says the government intends to “pursue budget savings to make room for spending priorities”.
This relaxing of the purse strings is already evident: the new spending measures in MYEFO on aged-care home packages, bringing forward infrastructure spending, and drought assistance are significant costs that were not paid for by spending reductions elsewhere.
Nor has the government provided any indication that its bushfire relief measures will be funded through savings.
Gone: the commitment to cut the government’s share of the economy over time
The budget repair strategy also required improvements in the budget position due to favourable economic circumstances to be “banked to the bottom line”. That target has now been removed all together.
The medium-term (10-year) fiscal strategy has also been amended to remove some of the more ambitious spending-control targets.
One was to reduce the government’s share of the economy over time.
That target has now gone, even though shrinking government spending as a share of the economy is crucial to the budget projections of growing surpluses and declining net debt over the decade.
The obvious question is – why?
The government is making big spending easier
The government might argue that it no longer needs a budget repair strategy because it expects to a deliver a surplus this year.
But its strategy was always more ambitious than a single surplus.
It wanted to reach continuing surpluses of 1% of GDP. Surplus forecasts of between 0.2% and 0.4% of GDP over the next four years indicate it is still well short of achieving them.
More likely is that it recognises that some of its targets were going to be difficult to meet.
It has already failed on a number of occasions to offset new spending with savings. Around half of this year’s upside from stronger-than-expected commodity prices and employment growth was used to fund tax cuts and extra spending rather than banked to the budget bottom line.
As the Parliamentary Budget Office has pointed out, it becomes even harder to hold down spending as the budget improves.
This is all the truer amid the need for bushfire reconstruction.
It’s better to shift goal posts than repeatedly fail to score
Another possible explanation is that the government is clearing the way for fiscal stimulus. To date it has relied on the efforts of the Reserve Bank and state governments to boost lacklustre economic growth.
“Porn is the billboard. Cam is the product,” my housemate and porn performer in Las Vegas tells me.
She makes most of her money from camming: a form of live streaming, where viewers tip for a sexual performance via webcam. For her, performing in porn films is now more of an ad rather than a source of income.
Performers today are better thought of as internet entrepreneurs, generating income from a range of activities beyond porn and using social media to market themselves.
Due to internet piracy and the widespread availability of online amateur pornography, today’s commercial porn studios face ever-narrowing profit margins. The studios are no longer able to provide a stable income and regular shoots for most porn performers.
Once, porn stars were simply performers. Now, being successful means managing a small online business – requiring a whole new range of skills to succeed.
Performers today have to be technically savvy in operating numerous online platforms and apps like OnlyFans and NiteFlirt. They have to be responsive to changes in remuneration models and algorithms, and prioritise the most profitable income streams to optimise revenue and minimise workload. They also have to be self-disciplined when it comes to scheduling and producing their own productions.
It’s all about the brand
In this online world, porntropreneurs crucially rely on self-branding as the glue that holds their diverse range of sexual and erotic services together.
Just as Apple invests resources in marketing to garner a devout following, a strong personal brand allows performers to attract loyal fans with a promise of high-quality content and the fulfilment of a particular fantasy. This, in turn, helps performers to stand out from the many amateur pornographers who constantly upload free material.
“Fans seek you out to learn more about you,” one performer tells me. “You are a fantasy and you’re building that world for them.”
From platinum blonde Baywatch bombshell, to 1950s pinup model, to tattooed rock chick, to Midwestern girl-next-door, porn is about selling fantasies. The ability to embody a particular fantasy especially well is what distinguishes the porn performer from the porn star.
To brand themselves and create this online persona, porntropreneurs use social media in much the same way other online influencers do.
Performers organise photo shoots for their various social media accounts, do Q&As with fans on Instagram, post behind-the-scenes material on Twitter, and vlog about their daily lives on YouTube.
“I do [Instagram] stories every three hours,” a performer says. “It’s a lot of work. Doesn’t matter if you’re ill, you have to do it. Consistently.”
More content shared translates into more followers, which ultimately means more income. Viewers click on links during videos or in posts that take them to websites where they can buy clips or join the current cam show.
Similar to other social media influencers who advertise sponsored products, performers may lock in sponsored partnerships from sex toy brands, beauty clinics and even marijuana dispensaries.
In many instances, performers have to be careful as social media platforms increasingly target sex workers and shut down their accounts.
“It’s frustrating, because you’ll see these movie stars naked in sexual ways on their Instagram posts, and everybody will be like ‘You’re a beautiful, strong woman! How brave of you to do this!’ and then I pose in an artistic way and my stuff gets flagged,” one performer laments.
Porn is a mirror of our times
Pornography is a set of cultural practices reflective of our political, economic, technological and social circumstances.
From being a battleground against rapid social and economic changes in the late 1800s to becoming a flashpoint in the 1970s and ’80s around issues of sexism and violence against women, porn has always been about more than just smutty images. It is part of society, and so reflects society.
The rise of the porntropreneur can, in a similar vein, be used to understand some of the broader economic and social issues of today. From freelance journalists to aspiring academics, professionals in today’s gig economy are expected to be independent, flexible, constantly online, always hustling and able to market themselves.
Porn performers, as my research shows, are no different.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Arnold Belau, Ligia Giay, Febriana Firdaus and Belinda Lopez of Voice of Papua
Everything about what happened in the Papuan provincial regency of Nduga just over a year ago is still a blur and closed off. It remains an elephant in the room, just like another mass killing case in West Papua during the 1970s.
No case has been brought to justice. The killing is still happening until now.
Let us start explaining what happened there by showing this map of where Nduga is located (the red loop marked Papua).
Map: Voice of Papua
Since December 2018, Nduga has made headlines in national media and some international media after the military attempted to crush Papuan independence fighters who attacked workers of the Trans-Papua Highway construction project (killing at least 17 people).
The Indonesian military bombed the villages and forced 45.000 Ndugans to flee into the jungle and nearby regencies for safety. Many of them are women and children.
Historical background What makes Nduga so unique as the centre of the rebellion?
– Partner –
In 1969, Indonesia took control the of the western half of New Guinea by handpicking only 1,026 people to vote in favour for integration in a plebiscite backed by the United Nations.
It is one of the biggest scandals in world history. The event prompted the Papuan rebels to form the West Papua National Liberation Army (then called Organisasi Papua Merdeka – OPM), which has continued the struggle for independence ever since, including in Nduga.
Nduga is a mountainous area with pristine tropical forests, well-known for its cultural diversity and is part of the World Heritage-listed Lorentz National Park. It is inhabited by indigenous Melanesian people who were largely cut off from the outside world until missionaries arrived well into the 20th century.
They are widely known as the most resistant of Papuans across the region in the struggle against the Indonesian government. The people refuse to admit their region is part of Indonesia and refuse to speak Bahasa Indonesian.
Even for other Papuans – who are suspected of “working together” with the Indonesian government – it is difficult to gain their trust. Therefore, it is hard even for other Papuans to approach them.
Until today, the Indonesian military is still struggling to occupy the region. The challenge for the Indonesian army is to adapt to the weather — the mountains in Nduga are covered by glaciers and it is bitterly cold.
Joining the rebels But the Ndugans are used to being guerrillas in the mountains. Traditionally, they have followed their elders to join rebels to take revenge on the killing of their parents and family members, and training themselves to survive under the cold weather.
One of the well-known events that have marked the history of violence in West Papua, particularly Nduga, is the Mapenduma Operation in 1996. Then, a group of environmental researchers were kidnapped by the rebels.
The military rescue operation and its aftermath are shrouded with stories of trauma, when the effort to capture Kelly Kwalik and his group allegedly caused numerous deaths among the civilian villagers.
Aside from the difficulties in communicating with Ndugans, fortunately, they still open the door for the Christian church.
One of the Protestant churches in Baliem Valley has managed to distribute food and clothes to them. Even the emergency school has been built just next to the church.
Collecting data But is that enough to help them survive?
The Voice of Papua’s team is collecting data on the ground because last month marked one year since the Ndugans became refugees. These are important issues for the Nduga IDP (internally displaced people) that need to be addressed soon by local and central government.
So far, 238 people have died. On 10 December 2019, we published a special report on “one year of Nduga Internally Displaced Persons or IDP” by interviewing Raga Kogoya, one of the leading volunteers in the highlands of Wamena.
“At least 238 (of the IDP) have died, some of them suffered from gun wounds, and some of them were ill,” she told us. This number is higher than the one released by the Indonesian Social Affairs ministry (MoSA).
Raga added that the number is higher, but some of the Ndugan IDP people did not report their case to the volunteers. Here are some of the details.
A thousand students were not able to join national exams. Back when one of our editors visited the Ndugan shelter in 2019, there was an emergency school for the children run by churches and volunteers.
The school is built from wood and tarpaulin with students sitting on wooden benches beneath a tin roof.
During the monsoon season, the classroom is flooded by rainwater.
No exams or credits Even though they can attend the class, the students find it difficult to get access to national exams.
Raga said the volunteers and the teachers are unable or do not have enough legal standing to issue reports for them. Therefore, they cannot get any credit for their hard work studying at the emergency school.
“The government is very ignorant. They don’t want to open their hands and serve these children,” she said.
Also, the local hospital also refuses to serve the children, saying that they only serve Wamena’s residents.
Hence, the children among the Nduga IDPs lack access to education and health services.
Children join rebels As many children do not get this access to education and health services, some of them prefer to stay in the jungle and even join the rebels.
Father Jon Djonga called it a “cycle of revenge”. Take a look at the case of the current leader of the West Papua Liberation Army-Free Papua Movement in Nduga, Egianus Kogoya. He is apparently the youngest son of the group’s former leader Silas Kogoya who was killed during the Mapenduma Operation.
A trauma healing centre is urgently needed. The Indonesian government, via the Social Affairs ministry, has not yet provided any trauma healing therapy for the Nduga Children’s IDP.
The volunteer has requested the treatment since the first wave of Nduga IDP flooded into Wamena in 2018. Children in Nduga are still traumatised from the incident, as some of them witnessed how the military bombed their village, and how their friends and siblings were shot to death or were starving while fleeing to the forest.
The volunteer told us, if only the government would provide the trauma healing therapy, perhaps we could cut the “cycle of revenge” and prevent the children from joining the rebel army.
The killing is still happening. Residents and human rights activists found a total of five bodies, suspected to be victims of shootings by unscrupulous members of the Indonesian military in Iniye village, Mbua District, on Thursday, 10 October 2019.
The five bodies were three women and two young men. They were found in a hole covered with leaves before being buried in the ground.
The family of Samuel Tabuni, one of the Nduga youth leaders who died, explained that on 20 September 2019 the victim brought food from Wamena, driving a Strada car to Nduga via the Trans-Papua Highway. He was allegedly shot by the Indonesian military.
In another case in Nduga, a driver named Hendrik Lobere was shot dead by the Indonesian military, prompting Nduga’s vice-regent Wentius Nimiangge to resign in protest. Security Minister Mahfud MD denied the accusation that it was the military forces who had killed the driver.
Nduga’s IDP have been living in 23 shelters in Wamena city, Jayawijaya regency, without decent toilets and proper beds.
The latest story we published was about the plan of the regent of Jayawijaya to invite his Nduga counterpart and their officials to talk about the IDP. One of the crucial topics of discussion will be the budget allocation for the IDP which reached Rp 75 billion (about NZ$8.3 million).
The question is where did the money go?
Budget for the Nduga internally displaced people – where did the funding go? Image: Voice of Papua
The Indonesian military wields iinternet “news” as a weapon in Papua. A Reuters investigation found that the Indonesian military funds 10 websites, some of which have been operating since mid-2017. The websites uniformly publish positive coverage of government, military and police alongside articles that demonise government critics and human rights investigators.
The subjects of some stories told Reuters the websites attributed invented quotes to them and published other falsehoods.
Sarawak’s logging tycoons Over the past 50 years it has been common for certain leaders, particularly in East Malaysia, to criticise past colonial ills while at the same time embarking on their own unprecedented rampage of resource grabbing, first within their own borders and then throughout the region.
The consequences have been described by many victims in Papua New Guinea to Sarawak Report as “worse than colonialism” – a sentiment echoed by many of the native peoples of Sarawak whose lands were snatched by outside interests aided and abetted by corrupt local leaders.
Arnold Belau is chief editor of Suara Papua; Ligia Giay is a Papuan writer and historian-in-training; Febriana Firdaus is an Indonesian investigative journalist and Voice of Papua newsletter co-founder; and Belinda Lopez is an Australian journalist, researcher and audio documentary maker.
Engineering skills underpin the functioning of our societies and economies. As we face the global challenges presented by a changing climate, food and water scarcity, loss of biodiversity and globalisation, these skills will only become more important.
In Australia, we have a high demand for qualified engineers but we train relatively few compared with similar industrialised nations.
As a consequence, about half of Australia’s engineers come from other countries. While skilled migration is an important and largely positive element of our economy, relying on skilled workers from overseas could leave us vulnerable to factors outside our control.
Extending the talent pool
One part of the engineering pipeline problem is the lack of diversity in those who engage with the subject.
Industry values diversity because it boosts innovation and improves financial performance. Despite numerous outreach and engagement programs and initiatives, however, only a small fraction of undergraduate engineering students are women.
In vocational training, the number is less than one in ten; at universities it’s around one in six.
This enormous disparity means women are missing out on designing the future. It also means that engineering challenges are being tackled from a narrow set of perspectives.
A search for new ideas
In 2019 the deans of engineering at Monash University, the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales created the Engineering for Australia Taskforce. The goal of the taskforce is to find ways to boost the numbers of women applying for university engineering programs.
The taskforce has two major concerns. First, engineering enrolments do not reflect the diversity of the Australian population, particularly gender diversity. Second, engineering has a low visibility in schools and society in general.
Today, the taskforce launched a new report that explores what factors affect girls’ participation in engineering.
The report is authored by Professor Deborah Corrigan and Dr Kathleen Aikens from Monash University. Based on a review of international peer-reviewed research, they argue that engineering urgently needs to rebrand itself.
What can be done
The report identifies three key actions:
Create an inclusive vision for STEM and engineering to address stereotypes. This vision will invite and welcome excluded groups to see engineering careers as a real possibility
Work with the education sector to create a STEM and engineering identity in schools, by making engineering activities prominent, positive and relevant
Evaluate engineering intervention programs to find out what works.
Potential interventions could involve changes to the school curriculum, adding extracurricular activities or through media campaigns, or something else.
Engineering identity
The lack of an “engineering identity” in schools is a persistent problem and one that resonates particularly strongly with me.
As Australia’s Women in STEM Ambassador, I have visited schools and observed science classes in every state and territory of Australia. I have seen students carrying out sophisticated engineering projects that tackle important societal and environmental challenges.
Often, students don’t recognise that what they are doing is engineering. Students either don’t understand what engineering is, or they don’t see engineering as an attractive career.
Ask a year 9 student if she wants to design a system for rare pygmy possums to safely cross a highway, and you will probably get an enthusiastic yes.
Ask the same student if she wants to be a mechanical engineer, and the response may be lukewarm at best.
So identifying engineering by name where it happens in schools, emphasising the social context of engineering and socialising female role models in engineering are all important steps.
Plan and evaluate
As with all educational interventions, it is vital to plan carefully based on specific desired outcomes and evaluate how effective the program has been.
This will ensure dollars are well spent, and also provide a framework for future educational programs. Evaluation lets us learn the best ways to engage target groups in strategically important areas of training or study for Australia’s economy.
The Engineering for Australia Taskforce report provides important engineering-specific information. Its recommendations are consistent with those of the Australian Academy of Science’s broader Women in STEM Decadal Plan, which aims to guide interventions to boost STEM engagement.
The taskforce, my office (the Office of the Women in STEM Ambassador) and the broader STEM sector will be working hard to implement these recommendations across Australia. Together, we can achieve a more inclusive, creative innovation sector and a more resilient economy.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicola Hancock, Lead, Mental Health Stream, Centre for Disability Research and Policy, University of Sydney
The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) promises a life-changing opportunity for Australians living with disabilities to get the supports they need to engage and participate fully in their communities.
The size, complexity and rapid roll-out of the NDIS meant that teething problems would inevitably arise.
An independent review, released yesterday, shows these problems are particularly serious for people with mental illnesses – also known as psychosocial disabilities.
People with a mental illness were the last group to be included in the NDIS. Initial planning focused on physical and intellectual disability, failing to recognise the unique needs and challenges of people with psychosocial disabilities.
While some refinements have occurred in the years since the roll out, more changes are needed to make it easier for eligible Australians with a severe mental illness to get into the NDIS, and then get the supports they need.
To gain access to the NDIS, people need to gather and submit evidence to prove that their mental illness results in a disability.
Sometimes a mental illness does not have a long-term effect on the person’s ability to study, work or look after themselves. These people don’t have a psychosocial disability and they don’t need the NDIS.
However mental illnesses – including schizophrenia, depression, and a range of other types of illness – do often have a long-term effect on a person’s ability to do these everyday activities. This is when their mental illness results in a psychosocial disability and the NDIS is needed.
To gain access to the NDIS, they also need to prove that this disability is permanent.
This can be incredibly difficult.
Many people with a severe mental illness don’t recognise they have an illness or disability and don’t access supports and treatments.
They may be unaware that they’re potentially eligible, or too unwell or fearful to engage with the NDIS, unless someone reaches out and builds their trust over time.
People with psychosocial disabilities often live transient lives, disconnected from or only sporadically involved with mental health services. This means they won’t have the evidence they need to prove permanency.
Another barrier is that psychosocial disabilities, unlike other types of disability, typically fluctuate. Many people – whether they have schizophrenia, depression or another mental illness – have times where they’re unable to do even the most basic tasks needed to look after themselves and just getting out of bed is a struggle, while at other times their illness has less impact.
Finally, a mismatch between the NDIS language of disability, and the strengths-focused language that mental health services use, can create additional barriers to accessing the system.
While NDIS requires the person to be “permanently impaired”, clinicians strive to focus on hope and the potential of living a meaningful life. So they avoid using hopeless language such as “permanent”. If clinicians don’t use disability-related language in evidence they provide, the person is likely to be assessed as ineligible.
Clinicians try to avoid using hopeless language such as ‘permanent’ but this can be a barrier to accessing services.Chanintorn.v/Shutterstock
How to make it easier to get into the NDIS
The proposed solutions in this week’s independent review mirror those suggested by the more than 80 Australian mental health organisations that participated in our twonational studies.
There is now strong evidence on what would make it easier for people with psychosocial disabilities to access the NDIS. This includes:
assertive yet respectful and skilled outreach to those who are hard to engage
stronger, more targeted support to help people navigate the NDIS
better training and support for assessors to understand the fluctuating nature of psychosocial disabilities
assessments that consider a span of time, not just how a person is functioning in the moment.
Even if a person has successfully navigated the application process and are assessed as eligible, they might encounter problems accessing services that meet their needs.
These problems can include:
inappropriate NDIS plans: a lack of understanding of mental illness can lead to plans that are more relevant for a person with a physical disability. (An NDIS plan is a package of services allocated to a particular person based on their initial NDIS assessment)
inability to coordinate services: depending on the complexity of a person’s disability, they may need help to organise appropriate services. But this help isn’t always available. This can result in the person not using the funding in their plan
thin markets: appropriate services may not be available because they’re either not offered nearby, or are too expensive to be accessible through NDIS funds. This is a particular problem for people in rural and remote regions
poorly trained workforce: untrained support workers often provide services with limited supervision, raising issues of both quality and safety
inflexible plans: NDIS plans often aren’t flexible enough to account for the fluctuating needs of people with mental illnesses.
The NDIS needs a new, psychosocial-specific stream with trained assessors, increased flexibility of plans and recognition of the need for support coordination.
For the NDIS to live up to its potential it needs not only flexibility, but ongoing input from experts, including people living with mental illnesses and their families.
In 1886, a year before American journalist Nellie Bly feigned insanity to enter an asylum in New York and became a household name, Catherine Hay Thomson arrived at the entrance of Kew Asylum in Melbourne on “a hot grey morning with a lowering sky”.
Hay Thomson’s two-part article, The Female Side of Kew Asylum for The Argus newspaper revealed the conditions women endured in Melbourne’s public institutions.
Her articles were controversial, engaging, empathetic, and most likely the first known by an Australian female undercover journalist.
A ‘female vagabond’ Hay Thomson was accused of being a spy by Kew Asylum’s supervising doctor. The Bulletin called her “the female vagabond”, a reference to Melbourne’s famed undercover reporter of a decade earlier, Julian Thomas.
But she was not after notoriety.
– Partner –
Unlike Bly and her ambitious contemporaries who turned to “stunt journalism” to escape the boredom of the women’s pages – one of the few avenues open to women newspaper writers – Hay Thomson was initially a teacher and ran schools with her mother in Melbourne and Ballarat.
In 1876, she became one of the first female students to sit for the matriculation exam at Melbourne University, though women weren’t allowed to study at the university until 1880.
Hay Thomson, standing centre with her mother and pupils at their Ballarat school, was a teacher before she became a journalist. Image: Ballarat Grammar Archives/Museum Victoria
Going undercover Hay Thomson’s series for The Argus began in March 1886 with a piece entitled The Inner Life of the Melbourne Hospital. She secured work as an assistant nurse at Melbourne Hospital (now The Royal Melbourne Hospital) which was under scrutiny for high running costs and an abnormally high patient death rate.
Doctors at Melbourne Hospital in the mid 1880s did not wash their hands between patients, wrote Catherine Hay Thomson. Image: State Library of Victoria
Her articles increased the pressure. She observed that the assistant nurses were untrained, worked largely as cleaners for poor pay in unsanitary conditions, slept in overcrowded dormitories and survived on the same food as the patients, which she described in stomach-turning detail.
The hospital linen was dirty, she reported, dinner tins and jugs were washed in the patients’ bathroom where poultices were also made, doctors did not wash their hands between patients.
Writing about a young woman caring for her dying friend, a 21-year-old impoverished single mother, Hay Thomson observed them “clinging together through all fortunes” and added that “no man can say that friendship between women is an impossibility”.
The Argus editorial called for the setting up of a “ladies’ committee” to oversee the cooking and cleaning. Formal nursing training was introduced in Victoria three years later.
Kew Asylum Hay Thomson’s next series, about women’s treatment in the Kew Asylum, was published in March and April 1886.
While working in the asylum for a fortnight, Hay Thomson witnessed overcrowding, understaffing, a lack of training, and a need for woman physicians. Most of all, the reporter saw that many in the asylum suffered from institutionalisation rather than illness.
Kew Asylum around the time Catherine Hay Thomson went undercover there. Image: Charles Rudd/State Library of Victoria
She described “the girl with the lovely hair” who endured chronic ear pain and was believed to be delusional. The writer countered “her pain is most probably real”.
Observing another patient, Hay Thomson wrote:
She requires to be guarded – saved from herself; but at the same time, she requires treatment … I have no hesitation in saying that the kind of treatment she needs is unattainable in Kew Asylum.
The day before the first asylum article was published, Hay Thomson gave evidence to the final sitting of Victoria’s Royal Commission on Asylums for the Insane and Inebriate, pre-empting what was to come in The Argus. Among the Commission’s final recommendations was that a new governing board should supervise appointments and training and appoint “lady physicians” for the female wards.
Suffer the little children In May 1886, An Infant Asylum written “by a Visitor” was published. The institution was a place where mothers – unwed and impoverished – could reside until their babies were weaned and later adopted out.
Hay Thomson reserved her harshest criticism for the absent fathers:
These women … have to bear the burden unaided, all the weight of shame, remorse, and toil, [while] the other partner in the sin goes scot free.
For another article, Among the Blind: Victorian Asylum and School, she worked as an assistant needlewoman and called for talented music students at the school to be allowed to sit exams.
In A Penitent’s Life in the Magdalen Asylum, Hay Thomson supported nuns’ efforts to help women at the Abbotsford Convent, most of whom were not residents because they were “fallen”, she explained, but for reasons including alcoholism, old age and destitution.
Throughout, she continued writing, becoming Table Talk magazine’s music and social critic.
In 1899 she became editor of The Sun: An Australian Journal for the Home and Society, which she bought with Evelyn Gough. Hay Thomson also gave a series of lectures titled Women in Politics.
A Melbourne hotel maintains that Hay Thomson’s private residence was secretly on the fourth floor of Collins Street’s Rialto building around this time.
Home and back After selling The Sun, Hay Thomson returned to her birth city, Glasgow, Scotland, and to a precarious freelance career for English magazines such as Cassell’s.
Despite her own declining fortunes, she brought attention to writer and friend Grace Jennings Carmichael’s three young sons, who had been stranded in a Northampton poorhouse for six years following their mother’s death from pneumonia.
After Hay Thomson’s article in The Argus, the Victorian government granted them free passage home.
Hay Thomson eschewed the conformity of marriage but tied the knot back in Melbourne in 1918, aged 72. The wedding at the Women Writer’s Club to Thomas Floyd Legge, culminated “a romance of 40 years ago”. Mrs Legge, as she became, died in Cheltenham in 1928, only nine years later.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cris Brack, Associate Professor, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University
Australia is a land that has known fire. Our diverse plant and animal species have become accustomed to life with fire, and in fact some require it to procreate.
But in recent decades the pattern of fires – also known as the fire regime – is changing. Individual fires are increasingly hotter, more frequent, happening earlier in the season and covering larger areas with a uniform intensity. And these changes to the fire regime are occurring too fast for our native flora and fauna to adapt and survive.
Many of Australia’s iconic eucalypts are “shade intolerant” species that adapted to exist within a relatively harsh fire regime. These species thrive just after a major fire has cleared away the overstory and prepared an ash bed for their seeds to germinate.
Some of our most majestic trees, like the alpine ash, can only regenerate from seed. Those seeds germinate only on bare earth, where the leaf litter and shrubs have been burnt away.
But if fire is so frequent the trees haven’t matured enough to produce seed, or so intense it destroys the seeds present in the canopy and the ground, then even these fire-adapted species can fail.
The current fires are re-burning some forests that were burnt only a decade ago. Those regenerating trees are too young to survive, but also too young to have started developing seed.
With the disappearance of these tree species, other plants will fill the gap. Acacias (wattles) are potential successors as they mature much earlier than alpine ash. Our tall, majestic forests could easily turn into shrubby bushland with more frequent fires.
Wattles mature early and could take over Eucalypts.from www.shutterstock.com
Even within a burnt area, there are usually some unburnt patches, which are highly valuable for many types of plants and animals. These patches include gullies and depressions, but sometimes are just lucky coincidences of the terrain and weather. The patches act as reserves of “seed trees” to provide regeneration opportunities.
Recent fires, burning in hotter and drier conditions, are tending to be severe over large areas with fewer unburnt patches. Without these patches, there are no trees in the fire zone to spread seeds for regeneration.
Eucalypt seed is small and without wings or other mechanisms to help the wind disperse it. Birds don’t generally disperse these seeds either. Eucalypt seed thus only falls within 100 – 200 metres of the parent tree. It may take many decades for trees to recolonise a large burnt area.
That means wind-blown or bird-dispersed seeds from other species may fully colonise the burnt area well before the Eucalypts. Unfortunately many of these windblown seeds will be weed species, such as African Love Grass, which may then cover the bare earth and exclude successful Eucalypt regeneration while potentially making fires even hotter and more frequent.
Animals have fewer places to hide
Young animals are significantly more vulnerable to disturbances such as fire than mature individuals. So the best time to give birth is a season when fire is rare.
Spring in the southern zones of Australia has, in the past, been wetter and largely free from highly destructive fires. Both flora and fauna species thus time their reproduction for this period. But as fire seasons lengthen and begin earlier in the year, vulnerable nestlings and babies die where they shelter or starve as the fires burn the fruits and seeds they eat.
Australian fauna have developed behaviours that help them survive fire, including moving towards gullies and depressions, climbing higher, or occupying hollows and burrows (even if not their own) when they sense fire.
Many native animals have learnt to sense fire and take cover, but with greater areas burning, there are fewer places to hide.from www.shutterstock.com
But even these behaviours will fail if those refuges are uncharacteristically burning under hotter and drier conditions. Rainforest, marshes and the banks of watercourses were once safe refuges against fire, but we have seen these all burn in recent fires.
All aspects of fire regimes in Australia are clearly changing as a result of our heating and drying climate. But humans can have a deliberate effect, and have done so in the past.
Indigenous burning created a patchwork of burnt areas and impacted on the magnitude and frequency of fires over the landscape. These regular burns kept the understory under control, while the moderate intensity and patchiness allowed larger trees to survive.
There have been repeated calls of late to reintroduce Indigenous burning practices in Australia. But this would be difficult over vast areas. It requires knowledgeable individuals to regularly walk through each forest to understand the forest dynamics at a very fine scale.
More importantly, our landscapes are now filled with dry fuel, and shrubs that act as “ladders” – quickly sending any fire into tree canopies to cause very destructive crown fires. Given these high fuel conditions along with their potentially dangerous distribution, there may be relatively few safe areas to reintroduce Indigenous burning.
The changed fire conditions still require active management of forests, with trained professionals on the ground. Refuges could be developed throughout forests to provide places where animals can shelter and from which trees can recolonise. Such refuges could be reintroduced by reducing forest biomass (or fuel) using small fires where feasible or by mechanical means.
A Kangaroo Island landscape devastated by fire.David Mariuz/AAP
Biomass collected by machines could be used to produce biochar or other useful products. Biochar could even be used to improve the soil damaged by the fires and excess ash.
Midstory species could be cut down to prevent the development of fire ladders to tree crowns. Even the overstory could be thinned to minimise the potential for crown fires. Seed could also be collected from thinned trees to provide an off-site bank as ecological insurance.
Such active management will not be cheap. But using machinery rather than fire could control biomass quantity and distribution in a much more precise way: leaving some biomass on the ground as habitat for insects and reptiles, and removing other patches to create safer refuges from the fires that will continue to come.
Textbooks should be changed to underscore the atrocities committed by the Philippines martial law regime of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, rather than make light of these violations and rehabilitate the Marcos’ reputation as proposed by former Senator Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., says Vice-President Leni Robredo. advertisement
“Medyo nakakatawa kasi [na] iyon [ang pinopropose niya] kasi kung may kailangang baguhin, kailangan siguraduhin na ma-inculcate sa bawat mamamayang Pilipino kung ano iyong kasamaan na dinala sa atin ng diktaturya,” she said.
“[Ngayon kasi] pinapayagan ulit natin iyong mga Marcos na mamayagpag… gustong sabihin, hindi tayo natuto. Kaya kung mayroong kailangang baguhin [sa textbooks], iyon yon,” Robredo added.
Marcos Jr., the only son of the late dictator, said in his proposal that textbooks needed to mention that the Sandiganbayan had dismissed at least five ill-gotten wealth cases against the Marcos family.
However, while at least five corruption cases against the Marcoses were dismissed by the Sandiganbayan in 2019, the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) had also recovered at least P171 billion worth of Marcos ill-gotten wealth since 1987.
– Partner –
There are also at least 12 ill-gotten wealth cases pending against the Marcos family before the Sandiganbayan.
Human rights violations, plunder In 2012, then President Benigno Aquino III signed the Marcos Compensation Law which granted financial remuneration to victims of human rights violations during the Martial Law years (1972 to 1981) — violations that included summary executions, enforced disappearances and torture — using the late dictator’s and his family P10 billion in ill-gotten wealth, retrieved by the Philippine government from Swiss banks.
In 2003, the Supreme Court also ruled with finality that the 10,000 human rights victims during Marcos’ martial law regime were entitled to this compensation from Marcos’ $10 billion Swiss bank deposits, which the ruling also deemed to be ill-gotten.
Meanwhile, in mid-January 2020, Marcos human rights victims slammed the Cultural Centre of the Philippines (CCP) for hosting a dinner for former First Lady Imelda Marcos to mark the CCP’s 50th founding anniversary, pointing out that such a lavish dinner was tantamount to glorifying the Marcoses’ corruption.
“Her founding of the CCP had nothing noble in her heart for the Filipino people. We should not glorify the leaders of a brutal and bloody dictatorship under Martial law,” Etta Rosales, a torture victim during the dictatorship, told GMA News Online in a text message.
“CCP is after the stolen wealth too? [That apparently] it can’t survive without it? That tells you how low our society has sunk with the devil on top of you. If only people could see that the wealth of the evil will flow to the hands of the righteous someday soon not through human effort but through God, they wouldn’t have to taint themselves with vomit,” poet Mila Aguilar, who was detained during the dictatorship for opposing martial law, said in a separate statement.
In November 2018, the Sandiganbayan convicted Imelda of seven counts of graft for having pecuniary interests and for participating in the management of several non-government organizations in Switzerland from 1978 to 1984, a time when she was prohibited to be involved in such businesses since she was the incumbent Minister of Human Settlements, Metro Manila Governor, and a member of the Interim Batasan Pambansa.
Imelda Marcos, who was sentenced to six to 11 years in prison for every count of the graft conviction, was never arrested.
The latest release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics Prisoners in Australia data provides a surprising change: for the first time in seven years, the national imprisonment rate has not increased. In fact, it has decreased by 1%.
The female imprisonment rate decreased by 5%, breaking the trend of a vastly increasing number of women in prison since 2011. And this decrease is most pronounced with respect to Indigenous women, seeing their imprisonment rate going down by 11% over the last year. (Although they remain the fastest growing subgroup within the prison population as their imprisonment rate has more than doubled since 2000.)
So why have we seen a decrease? Looking at the data paints a complicated picture.
As Australia consists of eight independent jurisdictions, each with its own legislation and penal culture, there are significant differences in the size of their prison populations.
All jurisdictions, except for Tasmania and Victoria, show a small decrease in their imprisonment rate over the last year. However, it’s still the case that the Northern Territory imprisons proportionally about four times as many people as the national average, followed by Western Australia (1.6 times). Both jurisdictions having been in pole position for decades.
While imprisonment rates are historically well below the national average in Victoria, they have been increasing continuously since 2010, including over the last year.
Important subpopulations
There are also some subgroups that have been a matter of specific concern for some years.
The proportion of people on remand, awaiting their trial, is still increasing. These people, who are technically “innocent until proven guilty”, now account for 33% of the total prison population. This increase started in 2010 following several changes to the legislation restricting the use of bail, which has a stronger impact on Indigenous defendants. This is due to their offending and remand history, as well as social, economic and cultural disadvantage.
The stagnation of the Indigenous imprisonment rate, and particularly the decrease for Indigenous women, still leaves us with a very bleak picture when it comes to Indigenous over-representation. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are still 12 times more likely to be in prison. Indigenous women are 19 times more likely than non-Indigenous women.
From the limited data we have available on Indigenous offending, we know the rate of Indigenous people charged with offences is higher than for non-Indigenous people, but remains stable over time. Therefore, it is not an adequate explanation for their rapid increase in the prison population until this year.
The data also provide a snapshot of the profile of people in prison on the 30th of June of that year. As Indigenous people tend to serve shorter terms in prison, they are less likely to be captured on a one-off date.
Data from another Australian Bureau of Statistics source show the influx of Indigenous men and women into the prison system is going up, particularly in the Eastern states.
Uncharacteristically, it’s Western Australia and the Northern Territory that are showing the most consistent decrease in Indigenous prisoner receptions.
International comparison
A decrease in the prison population is part of a more global trend. While prison populations were increasing from the second half of the eighties and throughout the nineties in most countries where consistent data was available, this started to reverse in the first decade of the new millennium.
Looking at the World Prison Brief data, imprisonment rates are currently decreasing in several Anglo-Saxon countries (which traditionally have high imprisonment rates), in continental European countries (which tend to have lower rates), and in Nordic countries (which for many years have had very low imprisonment rates).
Crime or policies?
There is the question as to whether this decrease is caused by a reduction in rates of criminal behaviour or whether it has been driven by changing public and criminal justice policies. From an international perspective, crime rates have been going down since the nineties.
Australia also experienced a significant fall in recorded crime rates between 2002 and 2016. The murder rate fell by 33%, the rate of kidnapping/abduction fell by 29%, the robbery rate fell by 58%, the rate of burglary/break-and-enter fell by 55%, the rate of motor vehicle theft fell by 54% and the rate of other theft fell by 26%.
But over the same period, the Australian imprisonment rate grew by 36%. This is most likely due to changes in crime (increase of drug-related crime), stricter penal policies towards certain forms of crime, but even more so, targeted policing.
Australian penal politics have strongly been driven by a “law and order” discourse, often in a bet for electoral win. However, crime and justice have been less prominent in recent state elections, or the punitive approach was not supported (see the 2014 Victorian election, and the 2015 Queensland election).
As prison populations are the outcome of a complex interaction of several factors, it’s not easy and probably too early to understand what led to a drop in numbers over the past year.
What’s important is that there are now numerous reports and countless recommendations to address the overuse of imprisonment, as it is expensive and has been proven to be little effective. Hopefully this means Australia is joining the international trend of a more parsimonious use of the most severe sanction as a means to combat crime.
How similar do you think you are to your second cousin? Or your estranged great aunt?
Would you like to have people assess your behaviour from what your great aunt has done? How would you feel if courts used data gained from them to decide how you are likely to behave in the future?
Scientists are making connections between a person’s DNA and their tendencies for certain kinds of behaviour. At the same time, commercial DNA databases are becoming more common and police are gaining access to them.
When these trends combine, genetic data inferred about offenders from their relatives might one day be used by courts to determine sentences. In the future, the data from your great aunt could be used by a court to determine how severely you are punished for a crime.
DNA databases can be used to identify relatives of criminals
A Florida judge recently approved a warrant to search a genetic genealogy database, GED Match. This American company has approximately 1.3 million users who have uploaded their personal genetic data, with the assumption of privacy, in the hope of discovering their family tree.
The court directly overruled these users’ request for privacy and now the company is obliged to hand over the data.
Police can search through the genetic database to identify people who are likely to be relatives of a person who left DNA at a crime scene. Then, by creating a family tree, police may be able to work out the probable identity of the criminal they are looking for.
This is how the infamous Golden State Killer was identified, many years after his serial killings.
Genealogy databases and sentencing
So far, prosecutors have used DNA evidence to persuade courts that a defendant was present at the scene of a crime and is likely to have committed it. But what if they want to use DNA evidence at sentencing to show the defendant is dangerous, and thus merits a longer sentence?
Genetic information – including from relatives – can be used not just to identify who you are, but to work out your likely behavioural and psychological features. The science is still in its infancy, but many traits are influenced by one’s DNA, including aggression.
This DNA information may well be used in the criminal justice system, in order to predict how a person may behave in the future.
Let’s assume the prosecution wants to show an offender is dangerous. Some research has suggested males with a low-activity monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA), who experienced maltreatment when young, are significantly more likely to be impulsive and aggressive than the general population.
So if genetic data inferred from an offender’s relatives in a database suggests they have low-activity MAOA, and there is evidence about the offender’s adverse childhood, an expert witness might argue their likely impulsivity and aggression presents an increased risk of future violence.
This might be used by the prosecution to make the case for a longer sentence. In some jurisdictions and circumstances, the prosecution may have a means of obtaining a sample of DNA directly from the offender. But where this is not legally possible without the offender’s consent, the inference from relatives might fill a gap in the prosecution’s case about how dangerous the offender is.
In short, the prosecution may be able to discover previously private information about offenders, which could be used in creative and concerning ways to argue for more severe punishment.
Reasons to be concerned
The stumble towards using this technology is unsettling on several fronts. It seems to provide luck with a disconcerting role in punishment. Should the way our carers treated us when we were young, and the genetic constitution of relatives (perhaps even those who we have never met), really have a significant role in how we are evaluated and sentenced?
A second issue is privacy. When you contribute your DNA to a genetic genealogy database, are you happy with the thought that your contribution might be used in criminal proceedings against a relative to argue for an extra year to be added to their sentence?
Once the DNA data is submitted, courts, governments, and businesses for generations to come will be able to infer the genetic constitution of your relatives.
Companies that collect genetic data, 23andMe and Ancestry.com, make a profit through selling it to researchers and other companies. The monetisation of this data is already under way, with 23andMe last week announcing they are licensing a drug created using their databases.
Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal there is good reason to worry about the dangers of businesses like these, which collect highly detailed information about the public in order to sell it for a profit.
Next time your family gathers together, you might want to discuss some of these issues. Who do you want to have your genetic data for generations to come? And how do you want it to be used?
Suicide among nursing home residents is a major concern. Between 2000 and 2013, around 140 Australian nursing home residents took their own lives.
This issue has been hidden for too long, and met with minimal efforts targeted at prevention.
We consulted with experts and stakeholders in aged care, geriatric medicine, old age psychiatry, suicide prevention and public policy to develop 11 recommendations for the prevention of suicide among nursing home residents.
In our recently published study, we put forward three of these as the highest priorities for implementation: expanding suicide prevention frameworks to include aged care residents, aligning nursing home life with community living, and improving residents’ access to mental heath services.
The scope of the problem
Risk factors for suicide among nursing home residents include having diagnosed depression, declining physical health, and being within the first 12 months of residency. This suggests adjustment – to the onset of health problems or to life in a nursing home – can be problematic.
More than half of nursing home residents suffer symptoms of depression. This is compared to 10-15% of adults of the same age living in the community.
Notably, young people in nursing homes (64 years and younger) are three times more likely to take their own life than their counterparts aged 65 and over.
Although the reported number of suicides each year in nursing homes (around ten) is relatively small, deaths from suicide represent only the “tip of the iceberg” of self-harm and suicidal behaviour in nursing homes. Research has shown one in every seven residents exhibits self harming behaviours on a weekly basis, such as cutting, hitting, or eating foreign objects.
The first key recommendation is expanding existing state and national suicide prevention frameworks to include older adults and those living in institutional settings with targeted prevention strategies.
In practical terms, this would offer care providers clearer guidelines to recognise and address suicidal ideation and behaviour in nursing home residents, taking into account this group’s unique set of risk factors.
Older people living in nursing homes have a unique set of risk factors for mental health problems.From shutterstock.com
Making nursing homes less like institutions
The second recommendation is aligning nursing home life with community living to make nursing homes a place where most people would be happy to live.
This requires addressing the physical presence of the nursing home within our community. As one research participant commented:
[…] many care residences isolate residents from the community. Most residences are fortress-like, closed, inward-looking buildings with few public views to the outside.
Evidence points to better quality of life among residents of smaller cottage style or cluster communal residences, compared to standard Australian models of residential aged care.
We can also look to examples of innovative nursing home design outside of Australia.
Another aspect of this recommendation is addressing the atmosphere and organisational culture within the nursing home.
Organisational culture differs between facilities, but a common thread is staff being more task-oriented, or focused on ticking boxes, than person-centred in their care approach. This is due to time pressures and is notoriously difficult to change.
Improving the mood in nursing homes would involve emphasising person-centred care, and encouraging residents to be social and involved in the wider community.
Ultimately, we need to address negative community attitudes towards transitioning into a nursing home and challenge the prevailing societal view death is preferable to living in residential aged care.
Better access to mental health services
The third recommendation is improving residents’ access to mental health services, including allied health and medical specialists.
This will be essential to manage the high prevalence of depression, anxiety and other mental health issues, as well as to support residents with their progressive decline in health and independence.
We’ve already seen steps to change the Medicare system to ensure residents have access to medical and psychological treatments for mental health disorders, with additional funding announced in the 2018-19 federal budget.
Further steps might include routine mental health assessments alongside physical health check ups for all residents. This would see mental health issues identified early and treatment plans put in place.
Encouraging social activities among residents can be part of aligning nursing home life with community living.From shutterstock.com
These recommendations provide the first substantive foundation for suicide prevention strategies in nursing homes in Australia. If no action is taken, older people, their families, staff and the community will continue to suffer.
The next step requires action from government, regulators, professional organisations and the aged care sector to support implementation and evaluation of these recommendations.
That a billion animals may die as a result of this summer’s fires has horrified the world. For many conservation biologists and managers, however, the unprecedented extent and ferocity of the fires has incinerated much more than koalas and their kin.
The scale of the destruction has challenged what is fundamentally an optimistic worldview held by conservationists: that with sufficient time, love and money, every species threatened by Australia’s 250 years of colonial transformation cannot just be saved from extinction, but can flourish once again.
The nation’s silent, apocalyptic firescapes have left many conservation biologists grieving – for the animals, the species, their optimism, and for some, lifetimes of diligent work.
So many of us are wondering: have lives spent furthering conservation been wasted? Should we give up on conservation work, when destruction can be wrought on the environment at such unprecedented scales?
The answer is, simply, no.
A brushtail possum with ears and legs burnt in a bushfire in January.STEVEN SAPHORE
Acknowledge the grief
Federal government figures released on Monday showed more than half of the area occupied by about 115 threatened species has been affected by fire. Some of these species will now be at significantly greater threat of extinction. They include the long-footed potoroo, Kangaroo Island’s glossy black-cockatoo and the East Lynne midge orchid.
Some field ecologists lost study populations of species that had been researched and monitored for decades. Anecdotally, the fires have affected the best known population of the northern corroboree frog. Others lost substantial amounts of field equipment such as long-established automatic cameras needed to monitor wildlife responses to fire.
Of course, action is an effective therapy for grief. There is plenty to do: assess the extent of damage, find and nurture the unburned fragments, and feed the survivors.
The official recovery response has been swift. Victoria, New South Wales and now the Commonwealth have all issued clear statements about what’s happened and how they’re responding. The determination and unity among government agencies, researchers and conservation groups has been remarkable.
A dead koala after the Kangaroo Island bushfires.David Mariuz/AAP
However, busyness may just be postponing the grief. Many universities have rightly offered counselling to affected staff – as, presumably, have other institutions. Many researchers are bereft and questioning their chosen vocation.
But as we grieve, we must also remember that decades of conservation work has not been in vain. Some populations and species may indeed have been lost in the recent fires – we shall not know until long after the smoke clears. But the conservation efforts of the past mean fewer species have been lost than would have been the case otherwise.
Focus on survivors
Take the subspecies of glossy black cockatoos endemic to Kangaroo Island. Up to 80% of the area the cockatoos occupy has been burnt – but some survivors have been sighted.
Decades of work by researchers, conservation managers and the community had reportedly brought the cockatoos’ numbers from about 150 to 400. Without this extraordinary effort, there would have been no cockatoos to worry about during these fires, no knowledge of how to help survivors and no community of cockatoo lovers to pick up the work again.
Or take the southern corroboree frogs. At Melbourne Zoo, a giant black and yellow frog guards the entrance to a facility where the species is being bred for release. This success is the result of decades of research into this highly imperilled species.
The captive colony was established exactly because a catastrophic event could overwhelm the species in the wild. This fire season is the latest in a sequence of existential threats.
This hard-won knowledge of threats is also improving the nature and speed of fire response. For example, there is now far greater awareness of the damage introduced predators can wreak, especially after severe fires when animals are exposed and vulnerable in a burnt landscape. Control of feral cats and foxes will be critical.
Introduced herbivores such as deer will remove food resources for native herbivores, and weeds will take advantage of the cleared ground. Managing these threats at large scale after the fire season will also be needed.
A wildlife volunteer nurses a rescued flying fox earlier this month.Stephen Saphore/AAP
Outside the fire zones
The conservation focus of late has, understandably, been on areas burnt. But it is also critical to continue conservation efforts away from the fire zones.
A recent analysis of the 20 species of mammals and birds most likely to become extinct in the next 20 years showed they are scattered across the country, mostly in places far from those recently burnt.
The bushfires require large-scale urgent action. But we must not withdraw attention and resources from species elsewhere that need saving. If anything, now we know the unprecedented scale of threats such as fire, more conservation funds are required across the board to prepare for similar events.
A rare pygmy possum found after bushfires swept through Kangaroo Island.David Mariuz/AAP
We must not give up
Biodiversity loss is mounting across the world. If this generation is to pass on its biological inheritance to the next, more conservation science and management is urgently needed.
History does not have to repeat itself. Conservation programs have been severely set back, and people are right to mourn the severe impacts on biodiversity. But they should also take solace that their earlier efforts have not been wasted, and should recommit to the fight for recovery.
In future fire seasons, the emergency response is likely to be better prepared to protect natural assets, as well as life and property. For example, the extraordinary emergency operation to protect the Wollemi pine in NSW could be carried out for multiple species.
Those involved in conservation should lose neither hope nor ambition. We should learn from these fires and ensure that losses are fewer next time.
School will start on a somewhat sombre note this year. Some schools will still be shrouded in smog from the bushfires. Some students will be grieving the loss of property, animals or even family and friends. Some remain evacuated and others are part of the recovery effort.
In recent days, Australia’s education minister Dan Tehan highlighted the importance of schools supporting students in the aftermaths of the bushfires.
Announcing A$8 million for mental-health liaison officers and clinicians to work with schools and early childhood services in affected communities, Tehan said:
[…] child care centres, preschools, schools and universities are important community touchpoints that are helping families and children get back on their feet after the bushfires.
Even students not directly affected by the fires might be distressed by images they have seen or stories they have heard.
So, what can schools and teachers do to help students cope in the aftermaths of this crisis?
Schools can provide a sense of familiarity, routine and security among chaos. Even if a school has been affected by fires, it’s important it still feel like school with familiar things such as books, desks and chairs, classes and lunch breaks.
But these same structures should, for a time, be more flexible than before. Time spent on activities might be shorter, the breaks a little longer and the pace a little slower. Providing options to share or respond in different ways gives students a sense of control in a world that, for a time, seemed out of control.
Schools are also supportive communities. Researchers who studied the experiences and the responses of schools in the immediate aftermath of the 2011 earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan, suggest it is important to provide opportunities for students to process their experiences in a safe and structured way.
Schools can provide routine and structure for students whose worlds have been out of control. (Christchurch 2011 earthquake).DIANNE MANSON
Students should not be forced to share their feelings but can be guided in a calm manner that avoids further trauma. A teacher who provided help after Hurricane Sandy suggested teachers model calm and optimistic behaviour, acknowledging students’ distress but demonstrating constructive actions that provide hope for the future.
For example, creating a photoboard of communities coming together in recovery can be a powerful civics lesson. Or students could write letters of thanks to volunteers in a literacy lesson.
Creative activities are helpful for students to express their experience. This could be done through writing, drawing, painting, making things with their hands, moving to or creating music, singing, drama or photography.
Some older students may have controversial questions or opinions about climate change or the funding of emergency services. Teachers can lean into difficult conversations and allow for respectful debate.
Perhaps collate a reputable series of articles for students who want to know more.
‘A teaspoon of light’ project helped students deal with the trauma of earthquakes using drama.
Distracting children from going over things they find distressing is important too. There comes a time when teachers can gently move on from acknowledging students’ fears or sadness to another activity – especially calming ones such as relaxation exercises, listening to a story or quiet music.
Following the 2010 Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand, researchers suggested teachers help students regulate their emotions with relaxation exercises or using play, and re-frame their thoughts more positively such as by thinking of happy things like their pets.
Traumatised children
Young people who have been injured, or have suffered a major loss (a loved one or a home) might have difficulty adjusting to returning to school. Those who have experienced prior trauma or have a history of mental illness are more at risk of adjustment difficulties.
It helps if schools can brief teachers on signs of trauma and ways to notice unusual behaviours, such as becoming quiet and withdrawn or appearing nervous and fidgety. Some students might cry, some might get angry and some might even laugh inappropriately. Some might be frightened by sudden noises.
There is no blueprint for how or when people might respond to their experiences. Students might appear fine initially but later display unusual behaviours. With younger children, this might be nighttime (or even daytime wetting), clinginess, restlessness or tiredness.
Older children might display hyperactivity, aggression, withdrawal, lethargy or panic. Teenagers could also have poor impulse control or show a loss of interest in friends and activities. Students might have arrived at school distressed, but over time gain control of their feelings, or they might take it all in their stride.
There is no blueprint for how children will be affected by a natural disaster.DEAN LEWINS
Research shows most students who have experienced trauma as a result of natural disaster adjust in a year or two but might have ups and downs depending on other factors in their lives, such as family relocation or financial difficulties. But up to 20% of these young people might have prolonged symptoms that stop them engaging in or enjoying everyday activities.
These students will need professional help beyond what teachers can provide. This is why keeping in touch with parents is essential. If necessary, teachers and parents should agree on strategies that will support students at home and school.
Eventually, a school in recovery will settle into the routine of a new normal, in which students become a little more used to their changed lives and continually changing world – although they may have occasional emotional or behavioural wobbles.
And it is still OK to have fun. Playing games, re-reading a favourite story or watching a video can help lift the mood. Dancing or getting outdoors can release energy and tension. Talking about the future and discussing what has been learned from the experience is also part of healing and moving forward.
We are entering a new world where skyscrapers and other huge buildings are becoming redundant and need significant overhaul or replacement. The process is called unbuilding or, if you’re a bit highfalutin, deconstruction.
These so-called spreadsheet towers populate every major city. They signalled modernity and provided huge profits for those who built them. But these buildings are profligate users of fuels for light, power and services.
Most developed world cities started building skyscrapers after the second world war. These buildings were International Style architecture, unrecognisable is terms of a particular locale, universal in terms of their ubiquitous metal, concrete, glass – and fully air-conditioned. Now they are ageing, their use-by date is up and their balance sheet profitability no longer attracts.
The challenges of demolition and reuse
The question is: how do we safely dismantle these high-rise structures, which are generally located in busy cities?
Reminders of the dangers of explosive demolition are tragedies such as the death of 12-year-old Katie Bender. She was struck by flying debris when the Royal Canberra Hospital was razed in 1997 to make way for the new National Museum of Australia.
A news report of the 1997 Royal Canberra Hospital demolition that resulted in the death of 12-year-old Katie Bender.
A recent demolition, and the tallest ever to be unbuilt, is 270 Park Avenue, New York City. Its 52 floors were built in 1960 for the Union Carbide chemical company. The building was for 50 years the tallest ever designed by a female architect (Natalie de Bios of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Is that another low hit for gender equality?) Its replacement by architects Norman Foster will be twice as high.
The business of disassembling these skyscrapers is just now developing, but it will gain pace as more become obsolete.
Some still get imploded, but usually, in a busy city, demolition techniques must be unobtrusive, as quiet and clean as possible. The techniques used for cleaning up the World Trade Centre testify to the wastefulness of a more destructive approach.
Unbuilding the World Trade Centre: an account by William Langewiesche who reported exhaustively on the work.
The 40-storey Akasaka Prince Hotel in Tokyo was slowly demolished in 2012-13 using a technique where a cap was built on top of the building. It was stripped floor by floor as the cap was lowered, so all the dust, mess and debris was contained and removed with no effect on the environment.
The Akasaka Prince Hotel shrank floor by floor as it was demolished.
Buildings are wrapped in scaffold and protective fabric then literally dismantled in the reverse order to which they were built. In the process building waste can be recycled and reused rather than dumped.
Reverse building involves removing the glass, then the frames, taking off the wall cladding, then scraping away at the concrete and steel frames bit by bit. Concrete is removed to expose the steel reinforcing bars, which are then separately removed and recycled. In the process unwanted material can be uncovered, like asbestos, which needs particular care in handling.
Interiors are unbuilt the same way – remove floor coverings, cupboards, doors and lightweight walls, strip the electrical wiring and pipes, take out air conditioning and lifts, remove stairs and escalators.
These removalists act smartly, as materials and fabric are recycled and often reused for another building. It is a sustainable way of dealing with the issue. Things that might normally have been reduced to dust and mud by destruction are instead usefully salvaged and recovered for an extended life cycle.
It also provides new construction sites. This means cities need not expand beyond existing boundaries and the infrastructure of services, roads and public transport need not be extended.
Building with an eye to unbuilding
What has interested those involved with this work is the capacity of building designers (let’s call them architects) to creatively improve their buildings in terms of life after use-by date. Techniques are being developed that assist in unbuilding and salvaging materials, even down to basic principles such as ease of access to pipes and wires, modular components and simplified connection practices.
The logic is that clarity of building structure and services makes retrieval simpler. Less complexity of materials and components means a building can be untangled more efficiently.
Fastening devices can be simplified and mechanical (rather than using glues and sealants), toxic materials avoided, materials selected with an afterlife in mind and structures designed for simplicity and accessibility. Also important is a clear set of as-built documents that map the original building so it can be disassembled.
Clear design thinking will have value for unbuilding and recycling in the future.
Making construction more sustainable
The construction industry is a main consumer of fuels, timber, steel and other metals, concrete and plastics. That demand drives the logging of forests, mining and extraction, leading to material production and transport that contributes to emissions and pollution.
The UK Green Building Council estimates the construction industry generates about 22% of UK carbon emissions, uses 40% of drinking water, contributes 50% to climate change and over half our landfill waste, and accounts for 39% of global energy use. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) also reports that the industry contributes to asthma and lung cancer by producing radon via contaminated applied finishes (paint).
Driving the need for much greater reuse of old building materials is an awareness of the fragility of our resources and the energy we use to consume them.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip C. Almond, Emeritus Professor in the History of Religious Thought, The University of Queensland
Since his inauguration on January 20, 2017, US President Donald Trump has tweeted the words “Witch Hunt” (always with or in capitals) 337 times, or roughly once every three days in his presidency.
As the US Senate’s impeachment trial looms, it is timely to place witch hunts into some historical perspective.
Although the term did not come into common usage until the 1950s — when Arthur Miller wrote his play The Crucible — it refers to the witchcraft persecutions that took place in Europe and America from around 1450 to 1750.
The victims have sometimes been estimated at up to nine million, but modern estimates put the total number in Europe across 300 years as somewhere between 40,000 and 100,000. Although some men were accused and executed, the victims of the witch hunts were mainly women, often socially and economically marginalised.
President Trump has dismissed the US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing examining the Inspector General’s report on alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as a ‘witch hunt’.EPA/Erik S. Lesser
Wicked women
Although there are significant variations across countries and regions, the incidence of women among those prosecuted runs at about 75-80%. In the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692–3, around 78% of those accused and convicted were women.
Two alleged witches being tried in Salem, Massachusetts, as part of the infamous witch hunts.Wikimedia
These Salem trials are the only witch trials to which Trump has specifically referred and he has judged them as affording the defendants more proper judicial process than him. By the end of these trials, nineteen people had been hanged, one man was pressed to death with heavy stones, and several had died in prison.
Nearly 200 people were accused of practising demonic magic. It is unlikely any of them would agree with the President’s characterisation of his treatment.
All Eve’s fault
Commonplace in Christian thinking was the idea the evidence for the weakness of women, and their capacity to be “seduced” by Satan, was grounded in the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden.
She was “the weaker vessel” compared to Adam as one biblical text (1 Peter 3.7) put it. Thus, it was believed, women were more prone to the temptations of Satan and thus more likely to be witches.
At the popular level too, women were more likely to be perceived as witches. This is, at least in part because, more often than men, they were on occasion just that. Many women who were persecuted were in the magic or cunning business.
The cunning or wise folk were practitioners of benevolent magic. They used herbal and magical medicine to heal the sick and the bewitched, find buried treasure, identify thieves, tell fortunes, induce love, and undo malevolent magic. But cunning women could turn nasty. Cursing, angry women with the imagined power to do harm were perceived as dangerous disturbers of the social order.
Women were many times more likely to be accused and persecuted as witches than men. The Witch Hunt by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1888)Wikiart
Demons, sex and sabbaths
The witchcraft persecutions were driven by Christian theorising about the Devil and his minions. Witches were thought to do evil but they were also heretics.
In his translation of The Malleus Maleficarum, a late medieval text on witchcraft first published in 1486-7, scholar Christoper S. Mackay wrote that this sorcery had six hallmarks: a pact with the Devil, attendance at Satan’s debauched assemblies (called “sabbaths”), sex with the Devil, aerial flight, maleficent magic and the slaughter of babies. None of the President’s so-called “witch hunters” has accused him of any of these activities, so far.
It is likely such cults never existed, and that the witch hunts were the outcome of fears of ideological and social enemies — a hidden “other” working from within society to destroy it.
In Francisco Goya’s Witches Sabbath (1798) the devil in the form of a garlanded goat is surrounded by a coven of disfigured, young and ageing witches.Wikiart
An allegory
It is not a matter for surprise, perhaps, that such a theory should later arise in the Western world, itself tormented by the fear of the subversive Communist operatives within its democracies.
Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials was an allegory of the persecution of suspected communists by the American state, spearheaded by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
From Miller’s The Crucible and the McCarthy investigations, there is a straight line to Trump’s understanding of a witch hunt – the American state as the inquisitor and persecutor of an innocent individual.
Being a witch is one of the things President Trump has not been accused of.EPA/Shawn Thew
That confessions to impossibly horrible crimes, and fingers pointed at others, were extracted from supposed witches in Europe and Scotland was often the consequence of torture. By contrast, in England, torture was not used to extract confessions nor to “finger” others.
In England, despite King James’s book Daemonologie in 1597 which outlined his belief in witchcraft and the death penalty for those that practised it, it was earthly crime and not demonic dealing that dominated the courts.
Thus, in England, witchcraft persecutions were the consequence of village tensions, of interpersonal conflicts, and of economic difficulties. This was the understanding of witchcraft outlined by English sceptic Reginald Scot in his 1584 book The Discovery of Witchcraft:
She was at my house of late, she would have had a pot of milke, she departed in a chafe because she had it not, she railed, she curssed, she mumbled and whispered, and finallie she said she would be even with me: and soone after my child, my cow, or my pullet died, or was strangelie taken.
The enchanted world
Witchcraft beliefs were deeply embedded in early modern societies among both demonologists in priestly and courtly circles and in the rural and urban masses. They reflect a world radically different from ours, although vestiges of it live on in conservative Christian circles still.
It was a world of ever-present “natural” disasters, both collective and individual – events like the death of a child, the lameness of a pedlar, a wife’s madness, a child’s frightening tantrum, the death of livestock, fires, floods and famine.
In the early modern period, the distinction between the natural and the supernatural was anything but clear.
Elements of the natural world were closely interwoven with reports of supernatural experiences — the appearance of a spectre, talking animal spirits, sex with the Devil, a corpse bleeding in the presence of its murdering witch, levitating children and flying witches, ghosts and goblins, and a punishing God. In the witchcraft persecutions, the natural and the supernatural worlds clashed in reckoning.
The Witches Convention by William Holbrook Beard (1876).Wikiart
Historians take seriously the persecution, torturing, and executions of innocent men and women for crimes that they could not have committed in an enchanted world most of us no longer believe in. Their deaths were among the darkest historical moments in Western civilisation.
It borders on the ludicrous to hear the US President, touted as the most powerful man in the world, complain of being persecuted like a witch. The deaths of those convicted of witchcraft should not be demeaned and belittled by irresponsible, inaccurate, and plainly ignorant statements.
Scott Morrison’s Monday salvo against the NSW environment minister, Matt Kean, one of the Liberal progressives on climate change, was gratuitous and inept.
Quizzed about Kean’s claim that there’s pressure from senior Liberals for strong climate policies, Morrison let fly on the ABC.
Matt Kean doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t know what’s going on in the federal cabinet. Most of the federal cabinet wouldn’t even know who Matt Kean was.
The put down came across as arrogant and rude. As for saying “most” of the federal cabinet wouldn’t know who Kean was … really? Given the centrality of energy and environmental issues, and the fact Kean has hardly been low profile, such alleged ignorance is not something to use as a political weapon.
On Nine Morrison said: “I think Matt should focus on hazard reduction and I’ll focus on emissions reduction”.
The attack on Kean – who had cast his remarks on Sky quite respectfully – can do little for relations with a sister Coalition government charged with the major heavy lifting in the state’s fire crisis. (It also fuelled tensions within that government – deputy premier John Barilaro is a critic of Kean.)
It was a flash of the Morrison temper – another example of the Prime Minister having trouble striking the right tone in responding to these devastating events.
In his Monday round of interviews to spruik the government’s announcement of a package for fire-hit small businesses, Morrison seemed to dig in against any change on emissions policy, putting the emphasis on adaptation and response.
Some Liberal sources believe (or hope) this isn’t so much indicating Morrison will do nothing, as showing he wants anything he does to be on his own terms – a reflection of his personality, as well as the debilitating sensitivity of the climate issue within the Liberal party.
No one thinks there’s any chance of the government toughening its emissions reduction target. But it is likely there will be measures over time to try to speed the achievement of the target. (Electric cars will no longer be a threat to the Australian weekend!)
Whether additional measures collectively will be significant or just at the margin is another matter.
Anything extra done on climate policy (as distinct from changes to bushfire response arrangements, such as for mobilising the army) will be, as far as Morrison is concerned, driven substantially by politics.
The prime minister is not galvanised by the importance of the climate issue itself.
For example when pressed on Monday about whether zero net emissions would be achievable by 2050 – widely recognised as imperative in the battle to contain global warming – Morrison’s emphasis was on the downside.
“We undertook to look at that through the Pacific Islands Forum,” he told 3AW:
But what does that mean for jobs? I can’t answer that question right now about what that would mean for jobs. But I’m concerned that it wouldn’t be a good thing and so I think people who make these commitments need to be able to tell people what that will cost them.
Morrison is focusing on unattainable precision. We are talking about three decades on. Decarbonising will create new jobs as well as costing some old ones. Anyway, the jobs outlook so far ahead will be affected by many factors, including some not on the radar now.
Meanwhile, the government is under increasing pressure on its earlier near-religious commitment to a surplus this financial year – a commitment from which it is being forced to retreat from or hedge.
In the pre-Christmas budget update the projected surplus was revised from about $7 billion to $5 billion. Where the budget bottom line will now land is anybody’s guess.
At the PM’s joint news conference on Monday, treasurer Josh Frydenberg acknowledged the cost to the budget this financial year of the fire relief can be expected to be above the $500 million figure the government has been using.
He refused to be pinned down on the status of the projected surplus.
Asked “do you think it’s likely you will deliver a surplus or you won’t?”, Frydenberg said: “Look, I’m not in a position to give a firm answer to that question because the full economic impact is still uncertain”.
On the other side of politics, Anthony Albanese finds himself in an awkward spot by again declining to be specific about Labor’s future climate policy in his Sunday remarks on the subject.
While this has left him open to criticism when the climate debate is intensifying, it is a sensible strategy for the long game.
To spell out detail now would turn the focus sharply onto Labor, when Albanese wants maximum attention on the government.
Elements in this debate can change over the next year and beyond. Although some will believe Labor should be more decisive, it make political sense for Albanese to retain flexibility until closer to the election.
We already know how deadly this summer’s fires have been for mammals, birds, and reptiles across Australia. But beyond this bushfire season, many of those same species – including our bats, which make up around a quarter of all Australian mammal species – are facing another devastating threat to their survival.
White‐nose syndrome has recently decimated bat populations across North America. While the fungal pathogen responsible for this disease, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, currently doesn’t occur in Australia, the fungus is virtually certain to jump continents in the next decade.
Our recent research, published in the journal Austral Ecology, attempted to quantify this risk – and the results are not encouraging. Up to eight bat species occupy caves in south-eastern Australia that provide conditions suitable for the fungus to grow.
Large parts of southern Australia provides cave habitat suitable for growth by the cold-loving fungus responsible for white-nose syndrome.Turbill & Welbergen 2019
Even before this summer’s fires, seven of those types of bats were listed on state or federal legislation as threatened with extinction. This includes the critically endangered southern bent-winged bat (Miniopterus orianae bassanii), a species whose caves would all provide optimal conditions for growth of the fungus.
All caves occupied by the critically endangered southern bent-winged bat provide ideal thermal conditions for white-nose syndrome.Dr Lindy Lumsden
Millions of bats wiped out in North America
White-nose syndrome was first detected in the United States in 2006 at a popular tourist cave in the state of New York. Since then, the disease has spread across North America, killing millions of bats in its wake, with many local populations experiencing 90 to 100% mortality.
The novel pathogen hypothesis explains why P. destructans has such catastrophic impacts on North American bats: the immune system of these species is evolutionarily naive to this fungal attack. Accordingly, in Europe and Asia, where P. destructans is endemic and widespread, few bats exhibit white‐nose syndrome and mortalities are rare.
Australia’s unique wildlife is inherently at risk from invasive novel pathogens because of its long‐term biogeographical isolation. Thus Australian bats, like their distant North American relatives, probably lack an effective immune response to P. destructans and would be susceptible to developing white-nose syndrome.
Since its detection in the United States in 2006, white-nose syndrome has received extensive media attention globally.
Hibernation is the key risk period
Most fungal pathogens grow best at cool temperatures, and a high body temperature in mammals and birds provides an effective barrier against fungal diseases. The fungus causing white-nose syndrome is also cold-loving, ceasing to grow at temperatures above 20°C. The only time it can infect and kill bats is when they hibernate.
Bats go cold (use torpor) during hibernation to prevent starvation over winter in temperate climates. Hibernating bats that are infected by P. destructans rewarm more frequently than normal. These unscheduled bursts of metabolic heat production prematurely burn up the body fat of overwintering bats. Hence, despite the damage caused by white-nose syndrome to the bat’s skin tissue, they apparently die due to starvation or dehydration.
The infection is easily visible under UV light.Turner et al. 2014
Hibernation is key to predicting the susceptibility of bat populations to mortality from white-nose syndrome: those with less energy to spare over winter are more at risk. Consequently, white-nose syndrome has fuelled a large research program on the winter ecology and hibernation physiology of North American bats.
Bats in south-eastern Australia do enter a period of winter hibernation, but that is about the extent of what we know. This knowledge gap makes it impossible to predict how they will respond if exposed to P. destructans. Even non-lethal impacts, however, will worsen the extinction-bound trajectory of several cave-roosting species, most notably the eastern and southern bent-winged bats.
What can Australia do?
Given the impending arrival of P. destructans in Australia, and our study’s findings of widespread thermal cave suitability in south-eastern Australia, we urge immediate action. This includes tightening biosecurity measures and gaining missing information on bat biology so we are better prepared for a possible white-nose syndrome epidemic.
The importance of this threat has not been missed by Wildlife Health Australia, which has produced guidelines for reporting and response to incursion. Advice is also available from the Commonwealth. Just recently, white-nose syndrome was listed in the national priority list for exotic environmental pests and diseases, ranking in the top five of native animal diseases and their pathogens.
Cave enthusiasts have also been proactive in alerting members to white-nose syndrome and the risk of accidentally introducing P. destructans, especially when returning from overseas caving adventures. And the Australasian Bat Society – a strong advocate for bat conservation – has alerted the public and government agencies to this potential new threat.
Action now is critical
At present, there is little that would prevent P. destructans from making it its way to Australian caves, despite two years passing since experts assessed the risk of incursion as almost certain.
We need effective measures at all levels, from requiring incoming visitors to identify contact with cave environments, to decontamination procedures at caves popular with international tourists.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service’s White-nose Syndrome Response Team produced this infographic, including what you can do to help bats.
Predicting the impact of white-nose syndrome on Australian bats is currently not possible because we know so little about their winter biology. We urge the Australian government to fund specific research to gain this information.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has injected more than US$46 million since 2008 into research and fieldwork to address the threat. Australian researchers can use this work to focus on the critical data needed to inform models that predict the vulnerability of local bat populations.
Why we need bats to survive
Bats are incredibly valuable in their own right. But the world needs healthy bat populations: a single insectivorous bat can eat up to half its body mass in insects each night, and together colonies of bats provide a service with an estimated value to the agricultural industry alone in the billions of dollars per year.
We hope this terrible disease will not threaten Australian bats. But the precautionary principle dictates we should plan and act now, assuming the worst-case scenario. Alarm bells are ringing.
A selection of Australia’s bat diversity. Top row from left: grey-headed flying-fox; orange leaf-nosed bat; common blossom bat; large-footed myotis. Bottom row: golden-tipped bat; eastern horseshoe bat; common sheath-tailed bat; ghost bat.Justin Welbergen (grey-headed flying-fox, eastern horseshoe bat); Nicola Hanrahan (ghost bat); Bruce Thomson (golden-tipped bat); Steve Parish & Les Hall for remainder of species
Review: Bran Nue Dae, by Jimmy Chi and Knuckles and directed by Andrew Ross for Sydney Festival
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names of deceased people.
It is exciting to see such a range of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander productions offered at this year’s Sydney Festival, including the first major revival of the 1990 award-winning musical Bran Nue Dae.
As my son and I arrived, we were greeted by a crowd of people dressed in their finest. There were many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander theatregoers who, like us, were excited to see a production written and performed by Aboriginal people. There was one particular young Aboriginal girl singing “nothing I’d rather be, than be an Aborigine!”
Despite her mother’s attempts to silence her, she was clearly happy to be at the event.
In Bran Nue Dae, Willie (Marcus Corowa) is expelled from the boarding school he is attending in Perth for “stealing” chocolates.
On the streets of Perth with no way to get home to Broome, he meets up with his Uncle Tadpole (veteran actor Ernie Dingo, in the role he played in both the original production and the 2009 film adaptation). Together they begin their journey to their homelands.
Ernie Dingo revisits the role he first played in 1990.Prudence Upton
Uncle Tadpole throws himself in front of a combi van driven by German tourist Slippery (Callan Purcell) and free-loving hippie Marijuana Annie (Tuuli Narkle), and the travellers feel obliged to give the pair a lift.
Together, they take a road trip 2,200km north, encountering Willie’s love interest Rosie (Teresa Moore); finding themselves in the Roebourne Lockup; swimming in a watering hole on the Roebuck Plains; before making it home to Broome and the mangroves.
A semi-autobiographical play by the late Jimmy Chi and his band, Knuckles, Bran Nue Dae is set in Western Australia in the 1960s: oppressive times for Aboriginal people.
Opening with a song set in the future by an elderly Willie, “Acceptable Coon” is a powerful introduction to the political messages of the work:
They taught me the white ways, and bugger the rest,
Cause everything white is right and the best.
So learn all the white things they teach you in school,
And you’ll all become acceptable coons.
Chi’s lyrics draw attention to Aboriginal deaths in custody, dispossession and assimilation, and the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families.
One of the more sombre songs, “Listen to the News”, asks: “is this the end of our people?”
Thirty years on, their content is still relevant.
Aboriginal resilience
My son had not seen the 2009 film, and I was keen to see what he thought of the performance. Like me, he very much enjoyed the music. The singing is exceptional, highlighting the immense talent of the cast.
But there was a sense for both of us that the music itself was the highlight and the storyline was somehow obscured.
For my son, this was particularly notable: he came to the event fresh and expressed his difficulty in being able to follow the plot, despite being an avid theatregoer.
The core of this production are the songs – and so sometimes the plot gets lost.Prudence Upton
The original stage show had much more dialogue and the film with screen director Rachel Perkins was able to expand the narrative and provide far more context. This production cuts out a lot of the dialogue from the original script.
We both came away feeling that more dialogue would have ensured the audience understood the politics of this wonderful play which, for me, in its original form brilliantly documents many aspects of Aboriginal history in this country.
Both my son and I enjoyed the play immensely, although as a scholar who has a great deal of interest in the politics of identity I was left with a few questions.
I understand the reconciliatory theme of the show and the message that we are all “one race”. However, given the focus on identity we see regularly in the media, some of the “discoveries” of Aboriginal identity hung in the air uncomfortably.
In one scene, Marijuana Annie has an epiphany and announces “I too am an Aborigine!”, remembering Black faces around her as she was removed as a child.
Here, Marijuana Annie is played by an Indigenous actor, unlike previous renditions (Missy Higgins played the role in the screen version), and so her revelations are not as problematic as it has been. But still, the cast break into song, making light of the situation and offering a more palatable version of such histories.
There is more room for the production to explore the violence of colonialism, while retaining Chi’s lightness and humour.
Bran Nue Dae is an Australian classic.Prudence Upton
Bran Nue Dae is an Australian classic. It tells of the enduringness of colonialism and does so in a way that invites audiences into the humour of tragedy and the ways in which Aboriginal people express resilience to colonial rule.
And, like the young girl outside the theatre, by the end of the play the audience – including my son and I – were singing along.
Bran Nue Dae is at Riverside Theatres Parramatta for Sydney Festival until February 1, then tours Perth, Geelong, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra and Adelaide.
Most of our laws are dense, obscure and effectively unintelligible for most people (even some lawyers). In a country where, every year, 25% of the population face serious legal issues yet often cannot afford to protect their rights in court, any move to make the law more comprehensible seems like a good idea.
However, reforms proposed by CSIRO to embrace “legislation-as-code” – where the law would be directly read and applied by machines – is not just misguided and deaf to history, it’s dangerous.
The argument for this idea goes that, as the law is just a series of rules, we should be able to reduce those rules to programmable code. When the legislation is drafted, it will be written both in human-readable words and machine-readable code. The aim is legislation could be directly applied by machines.
This agenda in Australia is being led by Digital Transformation Agency and Department of Human Services in collaboration with Data61, CSIRO’s AI and digital science arm. The approach promises “a world where government rules are easy to find, understand and follow” which should improve compliance while reducing costs. In recent submissions made to the Senate, CSIRO said:
The goal is that computer-assisted reasoning using these logics should give the same answers as judges and lawyers doing legal reasoning about the black-letter law.
The move to experiment with legislation as code is attracting attention across the world, with Australia following Denmark’s and New Zealand’s leads.
Unfortunately, as great as these ambitions sound, they ignore the very nature of law itself.
Law in practice is always dynamic and discretionary. Every law requires interpretation: does a directive to only drive on the left allow you to drive on the right to avoid a child playing in the road? What if it were not a child, but a dog? The law does not and cannot provide a single right answer, and will always depend upon judgement.
The law says cars must drive on the left in Australia. But what if they have to cross the road to avoid hitting a child?from www.shutterstock.com
It follows that judges make law. Not in the same way as parliament which actually passes the laws, but in their complex choices, judges contribute to the changing way we interpret and enforce laws.
The problem with codifying law
To understand the problem, some history is in order. During the French Revolution, the gross misbehaviour of the aristocratic judges of the Ancien Régime motivated the restriction of judicial power.
In the new order judges were expected to be the “bouche de la loi”: the mouthpiece for the law. The great Napoleonic Code of 1804 sought to reduce all French law into a single comprehensive and exhaustive document, clearly written and accessible to all, which judges could apply in an objective, disinterested and purely logical manner.
This conception of the judge held sway for much of the 19th century, yet every attempt to prevent judges considering factors beyond the code, or altering the law by its application, ended in failure. While the concept was politically attractive, it was internally incoherent and bore little relationship to practice.
This period showed that laws are incomplete, logical deduction isn’t always adequate, and judges need to be able to properly evaluate and take extra-legal considerations into account.
[the] life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.
It is beyond ironic that the “legislation-as-code” movement now shares a name as well as an ambition with the Napoleonic Code. By misconceiving law as a complete system of rules that can be reduced to logical code that excludes discretion and evaluation, it is doomed to repeat the errors of the past.
To allow machines to “interpret” legislation as code does not eliminate the role of values, but rather replaces the evolving values of the judiciary with the values of the programmer and reinforces bias towards past values choices.
The “legislation-as-code” approach risks reinforcing a disingenuous conception of judges as mere dispute-resolvers and not as co-equal governors; the third arm of government.
It distracts from the many ways judges are held to account and promotes an expansive role for parliament and the executive. And as the robodebt saga has already shown, it will inevitably be the vulnerable who suffer most when the technology fails.
One of Australia’s top telescopes will receive an A$2.6 million upgrade to help extend its three-decade record of improving our understanding of the Universe.
The Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), near Narrabri in NSW, has been one of the top few radio telescopes in the world since it began operations in September 1988.
Conceived and run by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, ATCA ushered in a new era of astronomical discovery in this country. The construction of the telescope was nearly all Australian, triggering the development of Australian communications companies and playing a key role in the invention of fast WiFi.
Prime Minister Bob Hawke and other VIPs at the opening of ATCA in 1988.John Masterson / CSIRO
Fundamental discoveries
Since that opening, thousands of astronomers from around the world have used the telescope to make fundamental discoveries about the evolution of stars and galaxies. Even now, about 450 researchers and students use it each year to study the molecules in our galaxy, the magnetic fields that thread through galaxies, and the black holes that lie at their centres.
Particles emitting radio waves (shown in purple) stream millions of lightyears into space from the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy Centaurus A, as observed with the ATCA by Ilana Feain and colleagues.Author provided.
The ATCA has been instrumental in identifying the sources of gravitational wave signals, such as colliding black holes or neutron stars. It has mapped the gas in nearby galaxies and has, unexpectedly, discovered gas in clusters of galaxies billions of light years away.
Hydrogen gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy to our own Milky Way, observed with the ATCA by Sungeun Kim and colleagues.csiroCarbon monoxide gas (shown in blue) in the Spiderweb cluster of galaxies, 10 billion light years away, observed with the ATCA by Bjorn Emonts and colleagues.M. Kornmesser / ESO.
New telescopes
Meanwhile, in the north of Western Australia, CSIRO has just completed construction of the revolutionary A$188 million Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope (ASKAP).
ASKAP is set to survey radio-frequency signals across the whole sky, increasing our knowledge of the radio sky by a factor of about 30, and providing new views of the Universe, potentially leading to unexpected discoveries.
So you might think the 30-year old ATCA could now be retired. However, the demand for the ATCA will increase, not decrease.
ASKAP looks at a huge area but doesn’t see in great detail. But when ASKAP makes a new discovery, ATCA can look at it with higher resolution and using a different range of frequencies. This versatility will be vital for understanding what ASKAP’s discoveries mean.
The ASKAP telescope near Murchison in Western Australia.CSIRO
A new brain
How do you refurbish a 30-year old telescope for a reasonable cost? The answer lies in the fact that the large dishes are only the first stage of a signal processing system, and the ATCA’s dishes are still amongst the best available.
Just as important as the dishes are the computing hardware and software to interpret the signals received by the dishes – these are the brain of a modern telescope. Modern computing techniques mean that this brain can be doubled in speed and versatility for a modest cost.
ATCA will receive A$530,000 from the Australian Research Council towards an A$2.6 million project, led by Western Sydney University and CSIRO, to replace the electronic “brain” of the telescope, which was originally built using custom chips and hand-crafted code. The rest of the funding will be provided by CSIRO and other university partners.
The upgraded telescope will have a state-of-art heart using Graphics Processor Units first designed for Playstations and Xboxes, together with modern signal processing techniques and cutting-edge software.
This will double the amount of bandwidth that can be observed, and make ATCA far more versatile than its old hard-wired hand-crafted brain could manage. The upgrade will vastly increase its ability to understand the science from the discoveries made with ASKAP, and to detect radio signals from gravitational wave events.
For example, using ASKAP we have recently discovered many strange and unexpected objects such as the two “dancing ghosts” show below.
Two ‘dancing ghosts’ recently discovered using ASKAP, which might be a binary system of black holes about to merge.Baerbel Koribalski / CSIRO
The upgraded ATCA will be able to give us a detailed picture of these objects at many different frequencies, helping to locate their parent black holes and clear up what’s happening.
After the brain transplant, the rejuvenated ATCA will begin its second career. It will enable Australian researchers to do more ambitious research despite the increasing radio-frequency interference from radio transmitters, make more discoveries, and perhaps understand some more of the mysteries of the Universe.
Hi, I have mental health issues and I would like to know what makes a good or bad psychiatrist, psychologist or neuropsychologist.
Key points
Understanding the different roles of psychologists and psychiatrists, and how they align with your needs, will help you decide what type of therapist to see
find a therapist you feel safe and secure with, even if that means trying a few before finding one you like
find out how much they charge in advance. If cost or access are issues, or if it would make you more comfortable, consider going online for help.
Who does what in mental health care?
Each type of mental health worker will have a different area of speciality, as well as different qualifications, training and experience.
In your question, you talked about psychologists and different areas of specialisation like clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists and psychiatrists, all of whom play a role in the assessment and treatment of mental health conditions.
Understanding the role of each and how it aligns with your needs may help you in your decision.
Psychologists in general
Psychologists provide assessment and therapy to clients, either through individual or group format and aim to enhance a person’s well-being.
A psychologist typically completes a minimum of six years of training, including university and practical experience, and is required to be registered with the Psychology Board of Australia.
Clinical psychologists
Clinical psychologists provide a range of psychological services to people across their life. Services typically focus on the assessment, diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.
Clinical psychologists complete additional supervision in the practice of clinical psychology beyond their six years of university.
Clinical neuropsychologists
Clinical neuropsychologists assess and treat people with brain disorders that affect memory, learning, attention, reading, problem-solving and decision-making.
Like clinical psychologists, neuropsychologists complete those six years and receive additional supervision in the practice of clinical neuropsychology.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have different backgrounds but both assess and treat mental illness.Kaleidico
Psychiatrists
Psychiatrists are doctors who are experts in mental health. They diagnose and treat people with mental illness and prescribe medications, if appropriate.
Psychiatrists typically complete four to six years of an undergraduate medical degree before undergoing general medicine training within a hospital. Then they complete several years of specialist training in psychiatry and must be registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.
You might need to try a few therapists to find the right one
Therapy requires a person to feel safe and secure and establish trust with another person. So the fit between the two of you matters.
In the same way you may try a few hairdressers or GPs before you feel in safe hands, you may need to try out a few therapists before you find the right one.
Try not to feel disheartened; your persistence in this area will pay off.
Ideally, you should select a therapist who is appropriately qualified but also, one you can connect and engage with. To test this, you should leave the first session with a sense of hope, even in the face of challenges.
This is not to say therapy will always be a comfortable process. It will be your therapist’s job to encourage and support you in making uncomfortable changes, so there may be times where you feel challenged or uncomfortable. It’s helpful to communicate this openly with your therapist and allow space to explore this with their support.
Ask your community for recommendations
Word of mouth can be an excellent tool when sourcing a good therapist. Consider asking your GP, family, friends or local community who they recommend.
Once you have some names, do your homework. Look up their qualifications, read about them if you can, and make sure that they practise in the area that you need.
Mental health is a broad term and as such, therapists may choose to focus on particular areas within it. If the therapist you’ve chosen doesn’t practise in your area, don’t worry – just ask them if they have a referral suggestion for you.
Find out how much they charge
In Australia, there are a lot of different ways to access mental health support. Some options include private practitioners working in clinics or schools, community services and public mental health services. Each of these settings will have a different fee or access structure associated.
For example under Medicare, a person may be eligible for up to ten sessions (individual and/or group) with a registered psychologist per calendar year with a referral from their GP.
These sessions may be bulk billed (with no out-of-pocket expense), or there may be a fee associated and rebates available. Fees can vary greatly, however the Australian Psychological Society recommends a fee of A$251 per 50-60 minute session. Medicare rebates range from A$86 (for psychologists) to A$126.50 (for clinical psychologists and neuropsychologists). This would leave you out of pocket A$124.50 or A$165.
Out-of-pocket costs for private psychiatrists also vary. They may be bulk billed, or charge a fee. An initial consultation may cost around A$400, with a Medicare rebate of A$201.35, leaving you out of pocket A$178.65.
Mental health services at headspace are either free or low cost. And some schools also offer free psychological services.
Ask your GP about the specific costs and rebates when you discuss referral options.
While there is much to be gained from the personal experience of therapy, access can be a problem in some regional and remote area of Australia.
Thankfully, there are a number of excellent online resources available:
Centre for Clinical Interventions provides online resources and self-directed therapy modules for bipolar, anxiety, depression, eating disorders and other mental health conditions
Beyond Blue provides support for anxiety, depression and suicide prevention
Black Dog Institute is dedicated to understanding, preventing and treating mental illness. It has a range of resources, particularly for depression and anxiety
Remember, we all struggle from time to time. For many, therapy plays an important role in improving their mental health and setting them back on their path.
I Need to Know is our series for teens in search of reliable, confidential advice about life’s tricky questions. Here are some questions we’ve already answered.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Coghlan, Senior Research Fellow in Digital Ethics, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne
A remarkable combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has produced the world’s first “living robots”.
This week, a research team of roboticists and scientists published their recipe for making a new lifeform called xenobots from stem cells. The term “xeno” comes from the frog cells (Xenopus laevis) used to make them.
One of the researchers described the creation as “neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal”, but a “new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism”.
Xenobots are less than 1mm long and made of 500-1000 living cells. They have various simple shapes, including some with squat “legs”. They can propel themselves in linear or circular directions, join together to act collectively, and move small objects. Using their own cellular energy, they can live up to 10 days.
This time-lapse video shows cells being manipulated and assembled to create xenobots. (Original video: Douglas Blackiston, Tufts University)
While these “reconfigurable biomachines” could vastly improve human, animal, and environmental health, they raise legal and ethical concerns.
Strange new ‘creature’
To make xenobots, the research team used a supercomputer to test thousands of random designs of simple living things that could perform certain tasks.
The computer was programmed with an AI “evolutionary algorithm” to predict which organisms would likely display useful tasks, such as moving towards a target.
After the selection of the most promising designs, the scientists attempted to replicate the virtual models with frog skin or heart cells, which were manually joined using microsurgery tools. The heart cells in these bespoke assemblies contract and relax, giving the organisms motion.
The creation of xenobots is groundbreaking.
Despite being described as “programmable living robots”, they are actually completely organic and made of living tissue. The term “robot” has been used because xenobots can be configured into different forms and shapes, and “programmed” to target certain objects – which they then unwittingly seek.
They can also repair themselves after being damaged.
Possible applications
Xenobots may have great value.
Some speculate they could be used to clean our polluted oceans by collecting microplastics.
Similarly, they may be used to enter confined or dangerous areas to scavenge toxins or radioactive materials.
Xenobots designed with carefully shaped “pouches” might be able to carry drugs into human bodies.
Future versions may be built from a patient’s own cells to repair tissue or target cancers. Being biodegradable, xenobots would have an edge on technologies made of plastic or metal.
Further development of biological “robots” could accelerate our understanding of living and robotic systems. Life is incredibly complex, so manipulating living things could reveal some of life’s mysteries — and improve our use of AI.
Legal and ethical questions
Conversely, xenobots raise legal and ethical concerns. In the same way they could help target cancers, they could also be used to hijack life functions for malevolent purposes.
Some argue artificially making living things is unnatural, hubristic, or involves “playing God”.
A more compelling concern is that of unintended or malicious use, as we have seen with technologies in fields including nuclear physics, chemistry, biology and AI.
For instance, xenobots might be used for hostile biological purposes prohibited under international law.
More advanced future xenobots, especially ones that live longer and reproduce, could potentially “malfunction” and go rogue, and out-compete other species.
For complex tasks, xenobots may need sensory and nervous systems, possibly resulting in their sentience. A sentient programmed organism would raise additional ethical questions. Last year, the revival of a disembodied pig brain elicited concerns about different species’ suffering.
Managing risks
The xenobot’s creators have rightly acknowledged the need for discussion around the ethics of their creation.
The 2018 scandal over using CRISPR (which allows the introduction of genes into an organism) may provide an instructive lesson here. While the experiment’s goal was to reduce the susceptibility of twin baby girls to HIV-AIDS, associated risks caused ethical dismay. The scientist in question is in prison.
When CRISPR became widely available, some experts called for a moratorium on heritable genome editing. Others argued the benefits outweighed the risks.
While each new technology should be considered impartially and based on its merits, giving life to xenobots raises certain significant questions:
Should xenobots have biological kill-switches in case they go rogue?
Who should decide who can access and control them?
What if “homemade” xenobots become possible? Should there be a moratorium until regulatory frameworks are established? How much regulation is required?
Lessons learned in the past from advances in other areas of science could help manage future risks, while reaping the possible benefits.
Long road here, long road ahead
The creation of xenobots had various biological and robotic precedents. Genetic engineering has created genetically modified mice that become fluorescent in UV light.
Robots can incorporate living matter, which we witnessed when engineers and biologists created a sting-ray robot powered by light-activated cells.
In the coming years, we are sure to see more creations like xenobots that evoke both wonder and due concern. And when we do, it is important we remain both open-minded and critical.
As the Australian Open gets underway, one question on every tennis fan’s mind is whether 2020 will be yet another year dominated by the “Big 3”, the nickname given to the three most accomplished players of the Open era – Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer.
That success can be best captured by their results at the Grand Slams. Since 2003, the year Federer won his first major title at Wimbledon, there have been 68 majors up for grabs and the Big 3 have collectively won 55 of them – or about 80%.
Federer now has 20 major singles titles, making him the all-time Grand Slam leader among the men, though Nadal (19) and Djokovic (16) are not far behind.
What is especially remarkable is that, with a total of 104.8 years between them, the Big 3 are still at the top of the ATP world rankings. And they will be the favourites to win yet another Grand Slam trophy at this month’s Australian Open as the top three seeds.
Player
World Ranking
Current Age
Grand Slam Finals (2003 – Present)
Grand Slam Titles (2003 – Present)
Rafael Nadal
1
33.6
27
19
Novak Djokovic
2
32.7
25
16
Roger Federer
3
38.5
31
20
The ‘Next Gen’ players most likely to succeed
Although many will expect another Grand Slam sweep by the Big 3 this year, the 2019 season ended with strong indications that the reign of Djokovic, Nadal and Federer could be nearing its end.
The main indicators were several big results from a young crop of players. Seven players born after 1990 all had victories over one or more of the Big 3 last year – Stefanos Tsitsipas, Alexander Zverev, Andrey Rublev, Daniil Medvedev, Dominic Thiem, Nick Kyrgios and Grigor Dimitrov.
Matteo Berrettini can also be added to this group for breaking into the Top 10 and reaching the ATP Finals, despite still having no wins over the Big 3.
Generation Next Player
Birth Year
Country
Career Wins Over Big 3
2019 Wins Over Big 3
Stefanos Tsitsipas
1998
GRE
5
4
Alexander Zverev
1997
GER
8
2
Andrey Rublev
1997
RUS
1
1
Daniil Medvedev
1996
RUS
2
2
Matteo Berrettini
1996
ITA
0
0
Nick Kyrgios
1995
AUS
6
1
Dominic Thiem
1993
AUT
13
6
Grigor Dimitrov
1991
BUL
3
1
One of the notable achievements of these “Next Gen” players (as the ATP Tour calls the younger stars) was a combined 3-2 record against the Big 3 in Grand Slams last year. Djokovic lost to Thiem at the French Open, while Federer fell to Dimitrov at the US Open and to Tsitsipas at the Australian Open.
The two “Next Gen” losses both came in the finals and both at the hands of Nadal: Thiem at the French Open and Medvedev at the US Open.
These rising stars reached their greatest heights in the last quarter of the season. Three “Next Gen” players eliminated the Big 3 before the semifinals of the Shanghai Masters, something that has only happened 11 times out of 72 Masters events played since 2011.
The four who did reach the Shanghai semifinals – Thiem, Tsitsipas, Medvedev and Berrettini – were also the four youngest players to qualify for last year’s ATP Finals, where only the top eight players in the world compete.
Tsitsipas has five career wins over the Big 3, including a victory against Federer at last year’s Australian Open.Dave Hunt/AAP
Rating players over their careers
A Grand Slam title is the final milestone – and the most difficult – for a “Next Gen” player to achieve. Could 2020 be the year when one of them finally breaks through? And who are the best prospects among them?
One indicator is the journey each of the Big 3 took before their maiden Grand Slam titles. This can show us which up-and-comers are following a similar path.
Player ratings, a statistical measure of a player’s strength at any point in time, are a great way to trace a career journey because they are updated with every new result and adjusted for the strength of a player’s opponents, which makes cross-generational comparisons possible.
Most of the top 100 male players in the world are currently rated between 2,000 and 2,300 points on the scale. The Big 3 are far ahead of the field, however, with ratings between 2,560 and 2,670. Djokovic has the highest rating going into the Australian Open, after his success at the ATP Cup earlier this month.
When we chart the ratings of the Big 3 from age 18 until they won their first Grand Slam, we can see each took a different course to get there (these are indicated by the blue lines in each panel below).
Nadal exploded onto the scene, winning his first French Open title in 2005 before his 19th birthday. Djokovic was next-fastest, getting his first major title at the 2008 Australian Open at just 20 years old. Federer, meanwhile, had the longest journey to his first major title, which he didn’t win until Wimbledon in 2003, when he was two months away from his 22nd birthday.
Nadal and Federer before their semifinal match at the 2005 French Open.Olivier Hoslet/EPA
Despite these differences, there were some important commonalities in the ratings of the Big 3 heading into their maiden major win.
Six months before this milestone, all had a rating between 2,000 to 2,200 points and all saw an increase in their rating over that time period of 100 points or more.
Which younger players are poised for a breakthrough?
If we look at the same trajectories for the best prospects of the players born in the 1990s, we find that three of them, Dimitrov, Kyrgios and Thiem, have already surpassed the ages of the Big 3 when they won their first majors.
Tsitsipas and Rublev, by contrast, are the only two among the younger players who still have a chance to stay on track with the progress of one of the Big 3. Tsitsipas’ player rating trajectory is most similar to Djokovic’s path, while Rublev’s chart is tracking closely to Federer’s so far.
Medvedev and Thiem have taken longer in their careers to get closer to the Big 3’s Grand Slam results, but the upward trend of their player rating trajectories indicate a breakthrough could be in the making.
This is especially true for Medvedev, the younger of the two. His player rating plateaued at age 21, much like Federer. Since then, however, he has amassed hundreds of rating points in a short time and has reached one Grand Slam final.
He is now just a few points shy of 2,500, a rating on par with Nadal and Djokovic around the time of their the first Grand Slam wins. On the basis of his ratings curve, Medvedev would seem overdue for a Major win.
Medvedev is currently ranked a career-high No. 4 in the world.Dan Himbrechts/AAP
That is even more the case for Thiem, who is the only other player among the eight with a current rating over 2,400. His comparatively longer journey to a Grand Slam title could be the result of playing in the same era as Nadal, the “King of Clay”. Thiem, a clay court specialist, has come up short to Nadal twice in the French Open final (2018, 2019).
Rublev and Berrettini have only recently surpassed a rating of 2,250, and both are remarkable in how quickly they have risen in recent months.
The paths of Zverev and Kyrgios, on the other hand, were tracking parallel to Djokovic’s until age 21. Since then, however, they have each seen a downturn in their results, putting their hopes for a major title in 2020 in serious doubt.
Of course, no two player paths are exactly alike, so we can never exclude any of these “Next Gen” players from future greatness. But if history does repeat itself, there is a reason to expect big things from Tsitsipas, Medvevdev, Rublev and Berrettini this tennis season.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Bateson, Clinical Associate Professor, Discipline of Obstetrics, Gynaecology and Neonatology, University of Sydney
About one-third of people using contraception use the pill. But how effective is it?
There are two types of contraceptive pill – the combined pill, containing oestrogen and progestogen, and the progestogen-only-pill (often referred to as the mini-pill).
While most evidence about pill effectiveness relates to the combined pill, both pill types are quoted as being 93% effective in typical use and 99.5% effective in perfect use.
So what do these figures mean and how were they derived?
To test the efficacy of the pill, women were enrolled in studies and instructed to take their pill at the same time every day. Perfect use was calculated from those who stuck to study rules by never running out of pills, never missing a day, and not taking any medications that can decrease the pill’s effectiveness. The studies assumed the women were all equally fertile and “at risk” of pregnancy.
Under these strict conditions both pill types were around 99.5% effective. This means within a 12 month period, five out of a thousand women could be expected to become pregnant.
But, most people’s lives do not reflect perfect research conditions and it’s more realistic to consider effectiveness in “typical use”. Both pill types have typical use effectiveness of 93% which means seven users in every 100 become pregnant in a 12 month period.
The lower rate of 93% reflects everyday life where pills may be missed, packs run out with no time to get a new prescription, pills are not absorbed because of vomiting or diarrhoea or the pill’s effectiveness is reduced by another medication (including some common herbal over-the-counter preparations such as St John’s Wort).
In reality, the probability of pregnancy is likely to lie somewhere between the 93% and 99.5%. And effectiveness may improve over time as users become more accustomed to taking the pill every day.
Most people won’t be able to consistently take the pill at the same time each day without fail.from www.shutterstock.com
Effectiveness can be increased by also using condoms (which have the added advantage of preventing sexually transmissible infections), and by using emergency contraception if pills are forgotten.
The combined pill primarily works to stop the release of an egg from the ovary each month. While a routine of same-time daily pill-taking is important, the combined pill will continue to be effective if it’s taken up to 24-hours late as ovulation will continue to be prevented.
The less commonly prescribed progestogen-only pill mainly works by thickening the mucus at the cervix to prevent sperm from swimming up into the uterus and fallopian tubes to fertilise an egg.
This effect wears off after approximately 27 hours, which means it needs to be taken within a narrow three-hour window each day. For this reason, the progestogen-only-pill is more likely to sit towards the lower 93% mark than the upper level of 99.5% compared to the combined pill.
Women in their teens and early twenties are likely to have a higher pill failure rate than older users. This might be because they’re more fertile, or because they have more trouble remembering to take the pill each day and fill their repeat prescriptions.
For this reason the progestogen-only-pill is rarely prescribed for this age group and more effective methods such as an implantable contraceptive device or a combined pill are generally recommended.
As a general rule, the less the contraceptive user needs to do in order to make it effective, the more effective it’s likely to be. The long acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) are recognised worldwide as the most effective methods because they don’t depend on human behaviour once they’re put in.
An intrauterine device can be implanted and can last for up to ten years.from www.shutterstock.com
LARCs include the contraceptive implant which lasts for up to three years and the hormonal or copper-intrauterine devices (IUDs) which last up to five and ten years respectively.
They are 99.5-99.95% effective because once inserted there is no need for the user to remember to do anything on a regular basis, which can make them an attractive alternative to the pill for those wanting a reliable method.
Side-effects, risks, costs and additional benefits are just some of the other features that influence how women choose which method of contraception to use, in addition to effectiveness. Understanding what effectiveness means and how it is calculated is an important step towards making an empowered choice.
Calls from industry and unions for increased thinning in forests to reduce bushfire risks have been met with concern from conservation scientists. They suggest forest thinning makes forests more fire prone.
So who’s right? Well, it’s complicated. The short answer is forest thinning is a good way to lower the risk of fire and is a widely-used strategy to improve forest health. However, there are potential downsides. Thinning needs to be carefully planned to avoid effects on soil, water or sensitive habitats.
Unlike clearfell logging and selection harvesting, mechanical thinning for timber involves felling about half the trees in even-aged, uniformly structured forests. Recently, forest managers are using the practice more for ecological outcomes.
If we look to the future, the recent fires have created conditions for forest regeneration on a large scale. These regenerating forests will thin naturally over time, creating more fuel and increased risk of more large-scale fires. Mechanical thinning can remove this potential flammable vegetation.
Forest thinning should be one of the ways we tackle fire management and forest resilience in future, but we need more research to understand the best way to go about it. Here’s what the evidence says.
What is thinning?
Thinning is a natural forest process, where tree numbers in most even-aged forests reduce through competition over time. For example, Mountain ash forests regenerating naturally after a severe fire might have hundreds of thousands of new seedlings per hectare that self-thin to a few thousand after 20 years, and a few hundred after 80 years.
Heavily stocked unthinned forest in East Gippsland. Thinning is increasingly being used for environmentally friendly reasons.Rod Keenan
Mechanical thinning for producing timber is a long-standing commercial forestry practice that uses herbicides, chainsaws or mechanical harvesters. It reduces tree numbers and concentrates growth on fewer trees so they reach a valuable size more quickly. This is to improve commercial timber quality, or to more quickly remove trees that would die through natural thinning.
Thinning for ecological outcomes, on the other hand, is a relatively recent practice being tested in many parts of Australia. It can produce more rapid development of “old-growth” forest features, such as large trees, branches, hollows and coarse woody debris – all important wildlife habitats.
Forest managers are using thinning for other reasons, too. For example, to adapt to climate change by reducing stresses on individual trees from increased drought, heat, insects, disease or wildfire because, among other things, thinning takes away the added stress of competition.
Looking ahead, thinning combined with Indigenous cultural burning may even be a way to restore Australian forests to more open park-like conditions observed at the time of arrival of Europeans.
The case for thinning to reduce fire risk
Thinning to reduce fire risk is intended to slow the rate fire spreads, lower flame heights and improve recovery after wildfire hits. This was shown in a 2016 extensive review of US research, which found thinning and prescribed burning helped reduce fire severity, tree mortality and crown scorch. A 2018 study on Spanish pine forests had similar results.
A mechanically thinned eucalypt forest in East Gippsland.Rod Keenan
Our own research on Australian forests also supported these findings. We found mechanical thinning plus burning in silver top ash reduces fire fuel hazard, with major reductions in dead trees, stumps and understory.
We compared thinned and unthinned alpine ash forests using computer modelling, simulating severe to extreme weather conditions. And we found modelled fire intensity decreased by 30% and the rate of fire spread and spot fires moving ahead of the main fire decreased by 20% with thinning.
Reducing tree density and fuel through thinning can also make it easier and safer for fire-suppression activities, like direct attack with fire hoses, litter raking or back burns, increasing our chances to control the size of wildfires.
Another study from 2015 in East Gippsland forests found that while overall fuel hazard was lower at thinned sites than nearby unthinned sites, larger woody debris from thinning persisted for 15 years or longer.
This is both a good and bad thing. More logs or woody debris may slow fire spreading, but can make it harder to completely extinguish fires after the fire front passes through.
The downsides
Thinning is potentially costly, but selling the wood or other organic matter may offset the cost. Timber harvesting machines can also disturb soils or wildlife habitat, but these can be minimised with modern equipment and careful planning.
What’s more, forests store carbon. Thinning can, in the short term, release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The overall effect on carbon emissions in the long term, however, depends on the extent thinning reduces fire risk and intensity. In some cases, we may need to accept decreased forest carbon storage in return for reduced risks.
A thinned river red gum forest. Thinning has the potential to disturb wildlife habitats and soil.
We’ve seen in the media arguments about using thinning to manage bushfire risks. It’s important conservation and bushfire scientists, the timber industry and government bodies understand all concerns and create space for inclusive dialogue to identify where thinning and prescribed burning are best practised.
In any case, whether you’re for or against the practice, more research is needed to determine how much we should use it. In 2017, the Federal Government funded mechanical fuel reduction trials in three states. But these trials must be expanded to a national program.
This can be done in using adaptive management – trialling the practice at larger scale and monitoring the outcomes.
The evidence from Australia and overseas is compelling, but we need careful planning and thoughtful discussion about how to use thinning to its full potential as part of our strategy in addressing the escalating risks of bushfires in a changing climate.
From Australian superstars such as Cate Blanchet, Russell Crowe, Chris Hemsworth and Nicole Kidman to Hollywood heavyweights including Ellen DeGeneres and Bette Midler, a lengthening list of celebrities are helping to shine a spotlight on Australia’s bushfires.
Some have donated large sums of money and used social media to publicise their donations, encouraging fans to follow suit. Some have used their profile and platforms such as the Golden Globes awards to draw attention to the fires. Others are donating items for auction or appearing in charity events.
For attracting attention and money to a cause, celebrity-driven attention is hard to beat. But there’s also a downside. If that interest is superficial and fleeting, it may actually hinder recovery efforts in disaster-ravaged regions.
Our research into disaster recovery efforts for Victoria’s Gippsland region after the deadly “Black Saturday” fires in 2009 suggests celebrities’ best contribution needs to be in the weeks and months to come – and requires them putting “boots on the ground”.
It’s great that celebrities want to use their influence for good causes. Not all celebrity advocacy, though, should be applauded uncritically. One study has suggested it is less effective than sometimes supposed for development causes, and can simplify a complex issue to a single outcome – usually giving money. This fails to address how people can make an ongoing difference in other ways.
In terms of natural disasters, a very practical way to help communities recover is the resumption of tourism. Perceptions play a big part in this, and celebrities can play a big part in forming images. It’s why they have long featured in tourism campaigns, from Paul Hogan in the 1980s to Kylie Minogue and others in the humorously idealised imagery presented by Tourism Australia to Britons a few weeks ago.
Tourism Australia’s ‘Matesong’ campaign fronted by Kyle Minogue has now been suspended.
Now these images are being replaced by the message globally that Australia is “on fire, literally”, and that much of the country is an “apocalyptic nightmare”.
Tourism effects
Even if celebrities have the best of intentions, their emotional appeals and shared of images of red skies and smoke-filled cities along with heartbreaking images of devastation and loss can contribute to fans cancelling holidays plans, even while they’re donating to bushfire appeals.
US singer Rihanna shared this graphic representation of the Australian bushfires, which was widely mistaken to be an image taken by a satellite.Twitter
It doesn’t help when misleading information is spread, as the American singer Rihanna inadvertently did when she shared an image on Twitter that exaggerated the size of the bushfires. This image suggested huge swathes of Australia were no-go zones.
Our research confirms the further someone is from a destination in crisis, the more likely they are to be confused about the location and think a greater area is affected.
Fires in the Blue Mountains area of New South Wales, for example, were called “the “Sydney fires” elsewhere in Australia. Overseas they were referred to as the “Australian bushfires”, confusing domestic and international tourists.
Where celebrities can really help
So while celebrities might have the very best of motivations, their contribution in generating donations in the short term might be offset by the longer-term effect of amplifying the misconception that Australia is not safe for tourists.
Affected areas and number of casualties from the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. Gippsland covers all of Victoria east of Melbourne.Nick Carson/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA
This is demonstrated by past experience. After Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires, the the Gippsland region experienced a major tourism downturn, despite just 5% of the region being directly affected.
But celebrites can also use their mass-pull to aid tourism recovery.
Our research suggests their star power is unmatched as a means to encourage tourists back to regions recovering from disaster.
In the case of Gippsland, we surveyed 691 people with nine different advertising messages. Themes included solidarity, community readiness and even short-term discounts. We found celebrity endorsement made the greatest impression, with test subjects indicating it made them more likely to visit the region.
In the months after the Black Saturday bushfires, former Miss Universe Jennifer Hawkins and legendary cricketer Shane Warne visited affected towns. These highly publicised events sent the message these towns were ready to welcome visitors again.
Model Jennifer Hawkins, Miss Universe 2004, poses with students in the town of Whittlesea, north of Melbourne, in May 2009, three months after the town was ravaged by bushfires .Julian Smith/AAP
So celebrities can definitely help in the coming weeks and months.
They can share positive stories about local communities’ resilience, and maybe even visit.
This is likely to do more for recovery efforts in the long term than helping to spruik for donations.
Many animals and plants have been incinerated or suffocated by smoke and ash. Others may have escaped the blaze only to die of exhaustion or starvation, or be picked off by predators.
But even these huge losses of individual animals and plants do not reveal the full scale of impact that the recent fires have had on biodiversity.
Plants, invertebrates, freshwater fish, and frogs have also been affected, and the impact of the fires is likely to be disproportionately greater for threatened species.
To delve deeper into the conservation impact, we used publicly available satellite imagery to look at the burnt areas (up to January 7, 2020) and see how they overlapped with the approximate distributions of all the threatened animals and plants listed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
We restricted our analysis to the mediterranean and temperate zone of south-east and south-west Australia.
The bad news
We found that 99% of the area burned in the current fires contains potential habitat for at least one nationally listed threatened species. We conservatively estimate that six million hectares of threatened species habitat has been burned.
Given that many fires are still burning and it is not yet clear how severe the burning has been in many areas, the number of species affected and the extent of the impact may yet change.
What we do know is that these species are already on the brink of extinction due to other threats, such as land clearing, invasive species, climate change, disease, or previous fires.
Approximately 70 nationally threatened species have had at least 50% of their range burnt, while nearly 160 threatened species have had more than 20% of their range burnt.
More threatened plants have been affected than other groups: 209 threatened plant species have had more than 5% of their range burnt compared to 16 mammals, ten frogs, six birds, four reptiles, and four freshwater fish.
Author supplied
Twenty-nine of the 30 species that have had more than 80% of their range burnt are plants. Several species have had their entire range consumed by the fires, such as the Mountain Trachymene, a fire-sensitive plant found in only four locations in the South Eastern Highlands of NSW.
Other species that have been severely impacted include the Kangaroo Island dunnart and the Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoo. These species’ entire populations numbered only in the hundreds prior to these bushfires that have burned more than 50% of their habitat.
The Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoo has had more than 50% its habitat impacted by fire.Mike Barth
Glossy black cockatoos have a highly specialised diet. They eat the seeds of the drooping sheoak (Allocasuarina verticillata). These trees may take anywhere from 10 to 50 years to recover enough to produce sufficient food for the black cockatoos.
The populations of many species will need careful management and protection to give their habitats enough time to recover and re-supply critical resources.
The figures above do not account for cumulative impacts of previous fires. For example, the critically endangered western ground parrot had around 6,000 hectares of potential habitat burnt in these fires, which exacerbates the impact of earlier extensive fires in 2015 and early 2019.
Threatened species vary in their ability to cope with fire. For fire-sensitive species, almost every individual dies or is displaced. The long-term consequences are likely to be dire, particularly if vegetation composition is irrevocably changed by severe fire or the area is subject to repeat fires.
More than 50% of the habitat of several species known to be susceptible to fire has been burnt – these include the long-footed potoroo and Littlejohn’s tree frog.
The endangered long-footed potoroo has had more than 50% of its potential habitat impacted by fire.George Bayliss
Some species are likely to thrive after fire. Indeed, of the top 30 most impacted species on our list, almost 20% will likely flourish due to low competition in their burnt environments – these are all re-sprouting plants. Others will do well if they are not burnt again before they can set seed.
Rising from the ashes
For fire-sensitive threatened species, these fires could have substantially increased the probability of extinction by virtue of direct mortality in the fires or reducing the amount of suitable habitat. However, after the embers settle, with enough investment and conservation actions, guided by evidence-based science, it may be possible to help threatened species recover.
For species on the brink of extinction, insurance populations need to be established. Captive breeding and release can complement wild populations, as occurs for the regent honeyeater.Dean Ingwersen / BirdLife Australia
Protection and conservation-focussed management of areas that have not burned will be the single most important action if threatened species are to have any chance of persistence and eventual recovery.
Management of threatening processes (such as weeds, feral predators, introduced herbivores, and habitat loss through logging or thinning) must occur not just at key sites, but across the landscapes they sit in. Maintaining only small pockets of habitat in a landscape of destruction will lock many species on the pathway to extinction.
In some cases, rigorous post-fire restoration will be necessary to allow species to re-colonise burnt areas. This may include intensive weed control and assisted regeneration of threatened flora and specific food sources for fauna, installing nest boxes and artificial cover, or even targeted supplementary feeding.
Unconventional recovery actions will be needed because this unique situation calls for outside-the-box thinking.
These fires were made larger and more severe by record hot, dry conditions. Global temperatures have so far risen by approximately 1°C from pre-industrial levels.
We are in a moment of collective grief for what has been lost. A species lost is not just a word on a page, but an entire world of unique traits, behaviours, connections to other living things, and beauty.
These losses do not need to be in vain. We have an opportunity to transform our collective grief into collective action.
Australians are now personally experiencing climate impacts in an unprecedented way. We must use this moment to galvanise our leaders to act on climate change, here in Australia and on the world stage.
The futures of our beloved plants and animals, and our own, depend on it.
Dr David Robie, has been recognised in the King's Honours List and named as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
By Camille Abiel H. Torres, Charm Ryanne C. Magpali, Laurd Menhard Salen of The Varsitarian in Manila
A New Zealand media academic and freedom advocate has warned that shutting down the Philippines’ largest and most popular media network would be a move toward dictatorship.
Professor David Robie, director of the New Zealand-based Pacific Media Centre and journalism professor at Auckland University of Technology, said President Rodrigo Duterte’s displeasure toward ABS-CBN Corporation was not enough reason to deprive it of a franchise.
“There’s no justification in doing that [not renewing the franchise of ABS-CBN]. Doing that is moving towards dictatorship,” Dr Robie said in the recent annual memorial John Jefferson Siler lecture-forum at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.
Duterte has vowed to block the renewal of ABS-CBN’s franchise, which is pending in Congress. The president claims ABS-CBN swindled him during the 2016 campaign when the Lopez-led television network did not air his political ad.
The ad was in response to a 30-second spot paid for by then opposition senator Antonio Trillanes IV, showing children reacting to the ex-Davao City mayor’s profanity-laden speeches.
– Partner –
“Your franchise will end next year. If you expect it to be renewed, I’m sorry. I will see to it that you’re out,” Duterte said in remarks at Malacañang Palace last month.
Congress has yet to act on the renewal of ABS-CBN’s 25-year broadcasting franchise, which will expire this March.
Journalists rallied yesterday for a “black Friday” protest in support of the ABS-CBN Corp. urging Congress to “repudiate” President Rodrigo Duterte’s “vindictive assault” on the channel and extend the media company’s franchise.
‘Open season’ against journalists Dr Robie, who is also convenor of the Pacific Media Watch freedom project, talked about human rights and press freedom violations in the Indonesian-ruled region of West Papua, saying it was “open season” against journalists.
He also recalled the 2009 Ampatuan massacre on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao that killed 58 people, including 32 journalists, which marked its 10th anniversary on November 23.
“What you experience in the Philippines is replicated around the world,” Dr Robie said, blaming much of the increased global dangers for journalists on hostile anti-media rhetoric from leaders such as US President Donald Trump and President Duterte.
“We have many leaders around the world…who are basically, constantly attacking and denigrating the media,” he added.
The Rappler video feed on the Ampatuan convictions last month.
For decades, the feared Ampatuan clan held sway in the impoverished province of Maguindanao in Mindanao in the southern Philippines. Through a ruthless private army and a reported “propensity for beheadings”, the clan cultivated a culture of impunity. Now, however, reports David Robie, a courageous judge has challenged the horror by jailing the masterminds of the 2009 Ampatuan massacre for life.
SPECIAL REPORT:By David Robie in Manila
The families of the 58 victims – 32 of them journalists or media workers – had waited for 10 years for justice in the Philippines.
With the judge almost two hours late in arriving at the fortified special courtroom in Camp Bagong Diwa, a police barracks with a jail annex in Manila’s satellite Taguig City, fears were expressed for her safety.
The 101 accused (although three were missing and cited for possible contempt of court) for the heinous crime, dressed in yellow jail tees, were housed in in a barred cage sandwiched between lawyers and some 200 heavily armed police guards and waiting.
The lawyers for both prosecution and defence were waiting.
Live television
The public, glued to their television sets or live streaming from CNN and the state-run People’s Television, were waiting.
In the end, the historic judgment took only 52 minutes.
Many of the victims’ families burst into spontaneous applause for the jailing of the ringleaders; others wept for joy with the convictions. While other families of some of the accused were relieved with the acquittals.
Judge Joycelyn Solis-Reyes of the Quezon Trial Court Branch 221 announced to the court that she could deliver the shortened verdict rather than the full 761-page judgement or “it could take all day”.
In fact, broadcaster Peter Musngi reckoned it would have taken “43 uninterrupted days” to read the full judgement. Both prosecution and defence lawyers agreed to the short reading with the full judgment being made available online – read it here on Rappler.
Guilty verdicts for the masterminds of the 2009 Ampatuan massacre.
Image: CNN Philippines screenshot/David Robie
Judge Solis-Reyes sentenced the 28 principal accused – including three brothers of the powerful Ampatuan warlord clan from Mindanao – to life in prison without parole and ordered them to pay a total of more than 155 million pesos (almost NZ$5 million) in changes to the heirs of 57 victims killed in the massacre.
The judge reduced the “official” death toll from 58 to 57 because the body of photojournalist Reynaldo Momay was never found. This means that the Momay family was not granted compensation even though it was commonly known that he was with the journalists who were killed and never been seen since. There was also dental evidence linking him found at the multiple murder scene.
Appealing sentences
Some of those jailed announced last week that they are appealing against their sentences, and the prosecution is also appealing over the acquittals and the judge’s Momay finding.
While it has been a long wait for justice for the victims, it had also been a long wait for the judge herself. Judge Solis-Reyes had shelved her own plans for career advancement so that she could see the notorious case through to judgment.
She was forced to brave death threats and political pressure over the case. At least three witnesses were killed during the course of the trial.
The judge had earlier admitted in interviews that she had wanted to pursue a career in broadcast media and had studied journalism at the Lyceum of the Philippines.
Describing the atmosphere in the courtroom with 400 people packed in to hear the verdict of the century” on December 19, Tempo columnist Jullie Y. Daza wrote that the judge “deserves the nation’s gratitude for her dedication and deportment”.
“All I can say is,” she added, “you’re priceless, Your Honour.”
Judge Solis-Reyes broke down her summary into 1. Those guilty beyond reasonable doubt; 2. Accessories; 3. Those released on the basis of reasonable doubt; 4. Those facing arrest warrants.
FLASHBACK: Then ARMM governor Zaldy Ampatuan (left) and his brother Andal Ampatuan Jr. (face covered),
when the latter was turned over to Secretary Jesus Dureza at the compound of the provincial capital in Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao, on 26 November 2009. Image: Mindanews
Police officers acquitted
Forty-three people, including leaders of the Ampatuan clan, were convicted of mass murder or being accessories, and 58 other accused – many of them police officers – were acquitted in the infamous case.
The Ampatuan power matrix. Image: CNN Philippines freeze frame
Sentenced to reclusion perpetua, or up to 40 years in prison without parole – effectively life – on 57 counts of murder were prominent clan members Datu Andal “Unsay” Ampatuan Jr; his brothers, former Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) governor Datu Zaldy “Puti” Ampatuan Sr, and Anwar Ampatuan Sr, former mayor of Shariff Aguak town.
Another brother was acquitted. Two other prominent members of the clan – nephews Anwar Ampatuan Jr and Anwar Sajid Ampatuan – and 23 others were also found guilty of the multiple murders.
Fifteen other accused – almost all of them policemen – were convicted as accessories to murder and sentenced to between six and 10 years in prison.
The Ampatuan accused in the courtroom cage. Image: CNN Philippines screenshot/David Robie
It took 10 years, 424 trial days, to hear the testimonies of 357 witnesses against 197 who were originally charged.
During the long-running trial, six accused were acquitted and the clan patriarch, Andal Ampatuan Sr, also accused, died in prison from a sudden heart attack in 2015, aged 74.
One of his daughters, Rebecca, told the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) that her father had six wives and 40 children. The PCIJ closely followed the case for a decade with a series of special reports in The Maguindanao Chronicles.
Ampatuan massacre … wheels of justice. Graphic: CNN Philippines News
The killings in 2009 sent shockwaves around the world because of the brazenness of the attack. The victims, including 20 women, were kidnapped and clubbed before they were executed, mutilated and buried in shallow graves.
FLASHBACK: Bodies of the Ampatuan massacre victims being exhumed from the freshly dug
mass graves in November 2009. Image: Mindanews
Mass graves
The backhoe digger, using a government machine, who excavated and filled the mass graves, was among the convicted accessories.
The ambushed electoral convoy had been taking the registration papers to enable challenger Esmael “Toto” Mangudadatu to contest the governorship of Maguindanao in defiance of threats by the Ampatuans. He was not with the convoy, but his wife, Genalyn, was shot 17 times: “They shot her on her breasts, her private parts. Such unimaginable cruelty.”
Congressman Esmael “Toto” Mangudadatu … his wife was killed in the Ampatuan massacre.
Image: CNN Philippines screenshot/David Robie
He subsequently won the election in a landslide in 2010 and has since been elected to the Philippine national Congress.
The mass murders were widely condemned around the world by governments, global media freedom organisations and human rights groups. The US ambassador at the time, Kristie Kenney, described the killings as “barbaric” and then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the brutal political violence in the southern Philippines.
The Malacañang presidential palace welcomed the convictions last month, saying the rule of law had prevailed in closing one of the darkest chapters of Philippine history.
“The Maguindanao massacre marks a dark chapter in recent Philippine history that represents merciless disregard for the sacredness of human life, as well as the violent suppression of press freedom,” said presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo, who ironically was once one of the lawyers for the Ampatuans.
“This savage affront to human rights should never have duplication in this country’s history.”
Philippine press responses to the Ampatuan guilty verdicts. Image: David Robie/PMC
Editorial opinions cautious
However, most editorial opinion in the nation’s media and human rights groups greeted the “historic” judgment with caution.
“Justice at last, but …” summed up the headline on a Philippine Star editorial, warning “a victory has been achieved, but the pursuit of justice is far from over”. Said the Star:
“Amid the rejoicing are the disappointments and concerns about what might happen next. With 56 defendants cleared, including two members of the Ampatuan clan, there are valid concerns raised by the victims’ families that violence remains a serious threat in the clan’s turf.
“Most of the guns believed owned by the Ampatuans and their private army remain unaccounted for. The claim is believed to continue enjoying control over substantial funds and other assets.
“Harassment of witnesses, victims’ relatives and prosecution lawyers are possible. At least three witnesses were killed in the course of the trial.
“There are 80 suspects still to be brought to justice, and an appeals process that could take another decade to complete. There is the equally complicated task of going after the assets of the Ampatuan clan.
“There are other criminal cases – about 200 of them – still being pursued, including complaints for corruption and obstruction of justice, as well as cases related to the murders and disappearances of witnesses.”
‘Terrible crime’
The Philippine Daily Inquirer noted in an editorial that this daily newspaper – along with other media – had “faithfully reported on the terrible crime that thrust the Philippines squarely on the map for the single deadliest attack on journalists in the world.
“In bearing witness, we strived mightily to ‘piece together the bloody shards of the crime’, and to find the words to ‘approximate the horror’.”
But the Inquirer added that there were significant lessons to be learned – and acted upon – in spite of the hope stirred by Judge Solis-Reyes’ guilty verdicts, such as the “endless delay” caused by defence motions that reflected the “dismaying state of the judicial system”.
“And journalists and media workers remain in peril in the fast-shrinking democratic space.”
Philippine Star columnist Ana Marie Pamintuan described the Ampatuan clan as “Monsters Inc.” and was candid in a wide-ranging article about the challenges ahead after the judgment.
One challenge is to “catch the 80 suspects who remain at large and bring them to justice”. Another is the expected “spirited fight for their acquittal” on appeal for those who were convicted.
“Let’s hope the road to final judgment won’t take another 10 years,” warned Pamintuan.
Another huge challenge is the legal fight to have the Ampatuans’ massive wealth forfeited by the state, and payment of civil damages to the victims’ families.
Property freeze orders
Freeze orders have been issues by the courts on bank accounts, real estate property and other identified assets of the Ampatuan clan.
“Prosecutors believe, however, that substantial amounts of cash have been stashed away by the clan the old fashioned way – not in banks where there is a paper trail, but perhaps in boxes, chests or baul [a Tagalog word meaning a traditional clothes trunk], buried somewhere or concealed within walls the way South American narcos do with their mountains of dirty money,” says Pamintuan.
“In one of the poorest regions in the country, the Ampatuans thrived, driving around in convoys of luxury vehicles with their private armies, living it up in fortified mansions. How do local executives in third-class municipalities and impoverished provinces, with their modest salaries, manage to accumulate that kind of wealth?”
The last challenge – and probably the toughest – is how to “eliminate the environment that creates monsters and breeds impunity”?
Etta Rosales, former chair of the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, described the Mindanao environment as like the “wild, wild west”, warning it remained “compromised injustice” until the private armies and political dynasties were rooted out.
While the Ampatuan massacre remains the worst example of this environment, there are many other regions of the Philippines where the local population are ruled by patronage and fear.
The implications for press freedom in the Philippines have not been lost on students and tertiary journalism schools.
‘Already afraid’
Writing on Rappler, Diwa Donato, a political science graduate from Saint Louis University, Baguio City, who has dedicated 13 years of her life to campus journalism as an advocate for youth empowerment, press freedom and democracy, says she will never forget the day of the massacre.
She was aged 10 at the time – and she was “already afraid to continue my dream of pursuing journalism”.
“The Philippines remains one of the deadliest countries for journalists in Southeast Asia,” she says.
“The fight of professional journalism will always be the fight of campus journalism. We celebrate the Ampatuan massacre verdict, hope for justice, and continue to address the struggles of press freedom.
“For now, democracy and press freedom have won. But we do not fight to win, we fight to be free. There is more to be done.”
NUJP chair Nonoy Espina talks to CNN Philippines in a live interview.
Image: CNN Philippines screenshot/David Robie
National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) chair Nonoy Espina also fears for the future.
“The culture of impunity for crimes against journalists means that massacres like the one in Ampatuan can happen again,” he says. “Without justice, the bloodshed will continue.”
The NUJP played a key role in independent investigations and keeping a watch on government, also sponsoring family members of slain journalists to get to Manila for the trial.
Ruthless warlords
The Ampatuans were the warlords of Maguindanao and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).
“Even Andal Ampatuan Jr’s ruthlessness and sociopathic violence served a purpose,” admits Pamintuan. “Cops and soldiers who were assigned to the ARMM talk of the Islamic separatists being terrified of incurring the ire of Andal Jr because of his reported propensity to decapitate and mutilate anyone who crossed him.”
“There are other political warlords still out there – running their own fiefdoms like gangsters, naming streets and villages and government projects after their family members, freely using public money for private purposes and controlling every aspect of the local criminal justice system.”
Yes, a victory, but the fight to end impunity in the Philippines has just begun.
Professor David Robie, director of the Pacific Media Centre, has been in the Philippines on a research sabbatical.
A primary school in East Gippsland was burnt down in the current bushfire crisis. While Premier Daniel Andrews immediately committed to rebuilding the school as it was, media reported the local CFA captain didn’t want it rebuilt.
Screen Shot from abc.net.au.https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-15/bushfire-destroys-clifton-creek-primary-school-gippsland/11860490
Public support for rebuilding in the same disaster affected places is often high. But as fire-fighting agencies are aware, our bushfires are increasing in size, intensity and duration, and a warming climate will continue to worsen these factors. We need to start being more strategic about where we rebuild homes and facilities lost to fire, and how.
Rush now, regret later
As there are sadly many people without homes and many businesses that have suffered lost income from reduced tourism and other activities, urgency in such a response seems reasonable.
But there’s a risk that rebuilding the same buildings in the same areas may not mitigate the current risks or any future risks under new climate scenarios – existing and new communities will be vulnerable. Planning can assist with managing future bushfire risks by helping decide where homes, buildings and infrastructure should be located.
Importantly, we must not rush to rebuild the same buildings in the same location. We need to consider risks from natural hazards in these bushfire prone areas such as ember attack, radiant heat, flammable building materials and safe evacuation routes.
If homes and some community buildings, such as schools, are located in areas that are too risky and likely to be lost in future bushfires then we need to consider our options. These may include changing the land use zoning to allow only lower-risk buildings (for industrial rather than residential use), or increasing building requirements for bushfire protection.
Cobargo, NSW after bushfires tore through the town in December.AAP/Sean Davey
Before commencing rebuilding, planning agencies need to plan how communities can be made resilient and if there is opportunity to use the affected land for houses designed with the highest bushfire attack level or shops or offices with higher fire ratings.
Alternatively, planning agencies can choose to use cleared land adjacent to high bushfire risk as parks or roads to provide additional separation between buildings and vegetation.
Organisations involved in planning need to focus on increasing the separation between buildings and vegetation, as well as additional fire safety measures for buildings.
How to rebuild
We need to consider increased construction standards for buildings to better protect them against bushfires — things like fire resistant walls, thicker glass and metal screens for windows, non-combustible roofs and access to water to fight fires.
However these provide only some protection. Buildings may continue to be lost in future bushfires, so what we construct in these areas needs to be reconsidered.
Options to rebuild in high risk areas should include buildings that are seen as low risk to human life and livelihoods such as storage or warehouse-style buildings and light industrial buildings. Owners of these buildings may need to accept they may be lost to bushfire.
Buildings that contain large numbers of people that need assistance during bushfires such as schools, aged care and hospitals should be located with extensive separation from bushfire risk, as well as with increased construction standards with multiple evacuation routes.
High-risk areas could be used as parks. This could also increase the separation between vegetation and dwellings.from www.shutterstock.com
The speed and intensity of recent fires shows there may be less time to evacuate under existing and future disaster conditions, so continuing to build in high hazard prone areas may no longer be appropriate.
A new national planning policy should guide the states in considering the exposure of communities to these hazards and their capacity to respond, such as evacuation routes, distance to refuge centres and distance from fire services.
A national policy
Before we rush to rebuild our homes, roads and infrastructure we need to review planning policies and bushfire hazard maps produced by state fire services and have their involvement in future decision making around this area.
We need a national bushfire planning policy to address risk that crosses state boundaries and to provide a consistent approach to identifying where communities can locate and what activities can occur in high risk areas.
