From evolving colony to bicultural nation, Queen Elizabeth II walked a long road with Aotearoa New Zealand

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Pickles, Professor of History, University of Canterbury

The death of Queen Elizabeth II brings to an end a long, complex and remarkable chapter in the history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s evolution from colony to independent, bicultural and multicultural nation.

Throughout that period, however, New Zealanders have generally admired and even loved the monarch herself, even if the institution she represented lay at the centre of a vexed, often traumatic, reckoning with the colonial past.

If there was a highpoint in New Zealand royalism, it was witnessed during the first visit by the young Queen and Duke of Edinburgh between December 23 1953 and January 30 1954. An estimated three in every four people turned out to see the royal couple in what historian Jock Phillips has called “the most elaborate and most whole-hearted public occasion in New Zealand history”.

After decades of economic depression and war, Elizabeth’s June 1953 coronation heralded an optimistic postwar atmosphere. Following the conquest of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay – claimed as a jewel in the new Queen’s crown – the royal tour was the perfect moment for New Zealand to celebrate.

The Queen’s presence also fulfilled the long anticipated wish that a reigning British monarch would visit. War, then bad health, had previously dashed hopes for a tour by George VI.

Elizabeth II made a huge impression. She appeared as a youthful, radiant, even magical queen, one dedicated to serving her people. She charmed an older generation and embedded herself in the memories of the children who lined up to see her. They would all grow up to be, one way or another, “royal watchers”, aware of her reign and its milestones, keeping up with the lives of her children, their spouses and her grandchildren.

And then, less than 40 hours after her arrival, the young Queen’s leadership was put to the test when 151 people died in the Tangiwai rail disaster on Christmas Eve. She visited survivors and included words of comfort in her speeches, cementing her connection to the grieving, and to the country.

The Duke of Edinburgh places a wreath at the mass funeral in Wellington for victims of the Christmas Eve rail disaster at Tangiwai.
Getty Images

The female crown

Remarkably, it was not until 2011 that females became equal to males in the rules of British royal succession. Queens only came to power in the absence of a male heir. And yet, this historical sexism also endowed queens with an exceptional quality – strong mother figures presiding over their subjects.

Indeed, in the past two centuries of the British monarchy, it is Queen Victoria (who reigned for almost 64 years) and Queen Elizabeth II (reigning for 70 years) who stand out as not just the longest-serving, but also most significant monarchs. Both played a crucial part in New Zealand’s history.

In my work as a historian I have argued that the politically conservative “female imperialism”, emblemised in the reigns of Victoria and Elizabeth, encouraged women to support the British Empire and Commonwealth. In turn, it helped raise women’s status in society.

For example, both queens inspired women to “take up their mantle” and work for empire and nation: often in maternal roles with children as teachers and nurses. The female crown encouraged citizenship based on British values, offering school prizes and support for migrants.

The young Elizabeth’s volunteer work during the second world war set an example for youth, as did her longtime role as patron of the Girl Guides. The gender-power of the Queen was already on display during the 1952-53 tour when she visited servicewomen, nurses and mothers with new babies, and was given presents for her own children.

The Queen talks with Māori guide Rangi during the visit to the village of Whakarewarewa.
Getty Images

Celebrity status

Over the past 70 years, the Queen also became something of a modern celebrity, a fixture in women’s magazines, on radio, television and now social media. As well as turning out to see her in person during her ten visits, New Zealanders “took her into their homes” with press clippings, souvenir pictures and keepsakes.

During that first tour, the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly pronounced upon the Queen’s role in the enduring relationship with Britain:

An even stronger link will be consolidated and spiritual stimulus given to life by the influence of one who is an inspiration to all.

She was described as “enchanting”, with her “exquisite complexion, her eyes like sapphires […] and her beautiful mobile mouth as she talked and smiled”. In 1963 she was “lovely” with “the breathtaking brilliance of [her] peacock silk outfit against the broad canvas of sea and sky”.

In 1970 she was “a fairytale Queen – a glittering image such as children visualise when they think of the word Queen”. In 1977, “The Queen is perfection”. On a 1986 visit she was reportedly closer and more familiar than ever, but at nearly 60 her “movements are inclined to be slower, her smile reflects more understanding than youthful sparkle […] and there were times when she looked as if she would rather kick off her shoes and have a cup of tea”.

By the 1980s, the glamour baton had passed to the next generation, notably the hugely popular Diana, Princess of Wales. Proving that royalty was not immune from modern life, three of the Queen’s four children divorced, most publicly and scandalously. Ironically (perhaps absurdly), there were accusations the Queen was out of touch with the times.

Queen Elizabeth and Christchurch mayor Hamish Hay during her 1977 visit.
Getty Images

Relationship with a colony

As power devolved around the Commonwealth during the Queen’s reign, the relationship with New Zealand inevitably changed too. Notions of a settler colony of Anglo-Celtic descendants emulating a “superior” British imperial economy, politics and culture – with a distant monarch as head of state – became outmoded.

Most importantly, the colonisation and assimilation of Indigenous peoples were challenged.

As historian Michael Dawson has shown, Māori involvement was minimal at the 1950 Commonwealth Games in Auckland. There was no Māori welcome or presence in the opening or closing ceremonies, with only a musical performance as athletes and officials arrived in the country.

It was left to King Korokī and Te Puea Herangi to hold their own welcome for athletes at Ngāruawāhia. The prime minister of the day, Sidney Holland, attended and considered the event an excellent example of good race relations. But rather than Māori being partners in the planning of the first royal tour, they were largely expected to fit in, mostly providing entertainment.

In the original tour plans, Arawa were expected to represent all Māori during a lunch stop. Only when they asked for more time were plans changed. Meanwhile, the Kīngitanga had to lobby hard for the Queen to visit Ngāruawāhia. This eventually happened, with the Queen and Duke spontaneously deciding to spend more time there than had been allocated.

Importantly, through the Queen’s reign, the Crown’s role in redressing the past became an essential part of New Zealand’s post-colonial development. After much agitation, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up in 1975 to investigate Crown breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi.

In 1987, Māori became an official language. Rather than assimilating into a devolved settler state, decolonisation came to mean mana motuhake for Māori.

By the 1974 Commonwealth Games – the “friendly games” – in Christchurch, Māori “were centrally incorporated” into the festivities, including a leading role in the opening ceremony. By the 1990 games in Auckland, also the 150th anniversary of signing of the Treaty, emerging biculturalism was evident in the medals incorporating Māori design.

Abandoning Britain?

In late 20th century New Zealand there were simmering republican sentiments. At the same time, because of the regenerating Iwi-Crown relationship under the Treaty, there was a reluctance to move away from Britain constitutionally.

Ironically, it was Britain going its own way – most notably by joining the EEC in 1973 – that moved the issue along. Symbolically, the number and length of temporary working visas for New Zealanders were cut back, despite an “OE” in the “mother country” being still viewed as a rite of passage.

There were other reasons republicanism was not a priority for the state. The shift towards a laissez-faire, free-market economic ideology shifted the ground; the move to a new electoral system in the 1990s underscored New Zealand’s growing independence.

But through those decades of change, the popularity of the Queen provided a constant. If there was a moment when the republican break might have happened, it was missed. New Zealand has been more reticent than Australia, where a referendum on becoming a republic was only narrowly defeated in 1999.

New Zealand has also retired and then later reinstated the royal honours system. Attempts to change the flag and remove the Union Jack from its corner came to nothing in a 2016 referendum.

And New Zealand still doesn’t have its own constitution outlining its fundamental laws of government. Rather, we rely on a conglomerate constitution, messily located in 45 acts of parliament. And of course, the head of state remains a hereditary monarch who lives half a world away.

The Queen during a walkabout at the America’s Cup Village in Auckland, part of her Jubilee tour in 2003.
Getty Images

Aotearoa after Elizabeth

The Queen’s death presents another opportunity for New Zealand to reassess its nationhood – and perhaps be creative.

King Charles and the Queen Consort Camilla simply don’t have the appeal of Elizabeth II. But postcolonial Britain and the modern, diverse Commonwealth still have much to offer an increasingly multicultural New Zealand.

Most importantly, it is time for a broad conversation about how the various dymamics of contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand – liberal and egalitarian traditions, Pākeha settler notions of governance, Te Ao Māori, and the special Iwi-Crown connection – might work together in the future.

After all, Māori signed the Treaty with Queen Victoria at least in part as protection from the behaviour of unruly settlers. Does 21st-century New Zealand still need a monarch to protect against settler colonialism?

Whatever the answer, any move away from the Crown needs to honour the history of which Elizabeth II has been such a significant part.

Katie Pickles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. From evolving colony to bicultural nation, Queen Elizabeth II walked a long road with Aotearoa New Zealand – https://theconversation.com/from-evolving-colony-to-bicultural-nation-queen-elizabeth-ii-walked-a-long-road-with-aotearoa-new-zealand-179933

3 ways the fossil fuel industry failed women (and how clean energy can learn from its mistakes)

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Finch, Research Affiliate, Monash University

A crucial outcome of Australia’s jobs summit last week was the commitment to review programs aimed at boosting the number of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) careers.

Energy is a particularly male-dominated STEM industry, with clean energy on the brink of massive expansion. However, to ensure the clean energy industry is truly sustainable, it must learn from the mistakes of the mining and fossil fuel industry.

If mining workplaces are anything to go by, the clean energy sector will have their work cut out for them to retain women in the workforce.

It’s easy to understand why women are leaving careers in the fossil fuel sector. For example, a Western Australian parliamentary inquiry earlier this year revealed appalling reports of widespread sexual harassment and assault in the state’s fly-in-fly-out mining industry.

As a woman who used to work in and with the mining sector, these findings were no surprise to me. Only by creating workplaces that are inclusive of women and other underrepresented groups will the clean energy sector unlock the economic and innovation benefits of a diverse workforce.

By the numbers

At a glance, it seems Australia’s clean energy industry is making great progress.

A 2021 Clean Energy Council survey found 39% of Australia’s clean energy workforce identify as women. Compare this to 32% of the global renewables sector, 25.9% in Australia’s oil and gas sector, and 17.5% in coal mining.

However, the Australian result was based on a voluntary survey of the renewables sector, which people who feel marginalised by their diversity are more likely to opt into. This means the percentage of women in the sector actually may be lower.

The male-dominated renewables construction sector also had low representation in survey responses, further skewing results.

If we look at the mining sector overall, census data reveals that at junior levels there is a relatively even gender split, with women comprising roughly 40% of 20-27 year olds in the industry.

But this gender split doesn’t persist for long. The proportion of women in mining begins to decrease from age 28, so that in the 56-59 age bracket, women comprise less than 15% of the workforce. The census data also reveal there has been little improvement in these numbers in the last 15 years.

So why are women leaving the mining industry? There are three main reasons.

1. Sexual assault and harassment

The mining industry, including the fossil fuel industry, can be a dangerous place for women.

In early 2022, an external review of Rio Tinto’s workplace culture found bullying, sexism and racism are systemic across the company.

In the last five years, 28% of women had experienced sexual harassment at Rio Tinto worksites, and 21 women were victims of actual or attempted rape or sexual assault.

This finding is consistent with the WA parliamentary inquiry, which found sexual harassment is, and has long been, prevalent across the industry. It is fostered by gender inequality, power imbalances and exacerbated by high alcohol consumption.

The inquiry’s report highlighted that when women tried to report harassment and assault they were bullied, threatened or lost their jobs.

The parliamentary inquiry made a number of recommendations to improve the safety of women in the FIFO mining industry, such as an overhaul of reporting structures within companies.

So far Rio Tinto is the only major mining company that has announced their plan to overhaul their systems to protect women. There has been no word from governments outside of WA on any action in the face of this damning parliamentary inquiry.

2. Biases against women

Women tend to face more obstacles to progression and job satisfaction than men do, because there are systematic biases against them. While a minority belief persists that biases against women simply do not exist, we have known of bias in science for a long time.

In Australia, as in many nations, women do more household and caring work, and STEM fields are generally male dominated. Our expectations of the roles of each gender are influenced accordingly, creating implicit bias against women in science.

Research shows these biases negatively affect all decisions made about women in a professional context, including hiring, promotion, awards, the value of their work, and other professional opportunities.

This means once women are in STEM careers, especially in male-dominated industries such as the mining industry, they encounter more barriers to success than their male colleagues.

3. Parental leave

It’s clear having children isn’t the sole cause of women leaving STEM careers, otherwise we’d see a flood of childfree women in leadership positions throughout the STEM sector, and this is certainly not the case.

However, in Australian heterosexual couples, women generally shoulder the bulk of childcare. This is perhaps in part because men are not ordinarily given equal access to parental leave and flexible working arrangements.

When both parents have equal access to parental leave, families can structure home and outside work equitably. On the other hand, providing birth mums vastly more leave can incentivise inequality, since families may be better off financially or otherwise by not using childcare.

Some mining companies recognise that flexible working conditions could increase retention, and have policies allowing any employee to work flexibly. Others have “family friendly” FIFO rosters, which tends to involve prescription of the roster they believe to be family friendly.

Woman standing in front of mining machinery — 39% of Australia’s clean energy workforce identify as women.
Marta del Pozo/IWiM, CC BY-NC-ND

We need systemic change

Like the fossil fuel industry, women in renewables face barriers to retention and promotion.

Representation of university-qualified women decreases in leadership roles and above age 40. Women in the renewables sector make up just 32% of senior leadership or executive roles, 19% of board positions, and 62% of administrative roles.

In Australia’s mining and energy sector, some people are pushing for change and equity, but the problems are widespread and can be difficult to detect.

We need sector-wide, systemic change. This must be brought about by thoughtful and insightful leadership at our most senior levels, guiding new policies and procedures to make workplaces more inclusive of women.

Research shows achieving greater gender balance leads to better economic performance and outcomes, and more innovation. In many STEM industries, we have a strong pipeline of women university graduates being lost to other sectors in their early to mid-careers.

In fact, shifting only 1% of Australia’s workforce into STEM jobs would add $57.4 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product over 20 years.

The clean energy sector has an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the mining and fossil fuel sector and harness the untapped potential of women in Australia’s STEM-trained workforce. Doing so will deliver even greater economic and environmental benefits.

Emily Finch has previously received funding from an Australian Postgraduate Award and a Society of Economic Geologists Graduate Student Fellowship.

Melanie Finch receives funding from the Australian Research Council and is the President of Women in Earth and Environmental Sciences Australasia (WOMEESA).

– ref. 3 ways the fossil fuel industry failed women (and how clean energy can learn from its mistakes) – https://theconversation.com/3-ways-the-fossil-fuel-industry-failed-women-and-how-clean-energy-can-learn-from-its-mistakes-189965

Australia has a new head of state: what will Charles be like as king?

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jess Carniel, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland

With the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, Australia has a new king. The BBC has confirmed Charles will take on the regnal name of “King Charles III”.

Charles was made the Prince of Wales at age nine in 1958 – with his investiture held a decade later – making him the longest serving royal heir in the longest reign of a British monarch.

We are familiar with him as a senior royal, but what will it be like now he is king?

Who is Charles?

With the popularity of Netflix drama The Crown and Pablo Larrain’s Spencer, starring Kristen Stewart, we are currently awash with fictional (re)imaginings of Charles.

Of particular interest, however, is his marriage to Princess Diana. Despite now being married to Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, for almost 16 years, the pageantry of his wedding to Diana and the subsequent divorce still loom large in the public imagination.

Prince Charles and Princess Diana standing in front of Lodge Canberra, Australia. — Public perceptions of Prince Charles have been significantly shaped by his tumultuous, and ultimately tragic, marriage to Diana.
AP/AAP

Romantic entanglements aside, Charles’s career as a senior royal has been plagued by scandals.

Two salient examples include his association with Jimmy Saville and, more recently, cash-for-honours allegations against his foundation.

He has also had a tumultuous relationship with the press, filing a successful court case against the Mail on Sunday in 2006 for publishing excerpts from his private journals. Charles was also one of several royals targeted by the News of the World phone hacking affair.

Like other senior royals, Charles is patron of numerous charities.

However, the issue apparently most dear to his heart is the environment. He has long advocated for environmental sustainability and even has his own organic brand and sustainably-built urban village.

The British monarch is intended to be a non-partisan, impartial head of state. As heir, however, Charles has been prolific in letters lobbying various government ministers. This makes Charles much more interventionist than his predecessors.

Will Charles make a ‘good king’?

Since 2019, British market research firm YouGov have maintained a poll tracker asking this very question.

The results paint the very picture of ambivalence, with 34% of respondents endorsing King Charles and 33% opposing such an outcome. The final 33% were unsure.

Importantly, despite being the second most popular royal, Prince William is not necessarily viewed as “king material”. In fact, only 37% of Brits expressed a preference for Prince William to lead the monarchy over Charles.

A similar poll taken while the queen was alive asking whether she was doing a good job found 59% believe she did, while only 4% believe she did not.

But what do we mean by a “good king” or “good queen” in a constitutional monarchy where political power rests largely with the parliament?

We shouldn’t simply dismiss the political power of the monarch entirely – after all, they can still sack the government.

However, the idea of a good king or queen today is more linked to their symbolic power. They derive this symbolic power not only from their ceremonial roles, but from what they mean to the ordinary Commonwealth citizen.

The long reign of Queen Elizabeth II has made her an icon of familiarity and constancy, particularly amid a tumultuous 20th and 21st centuries.

As her long-serving heir, Charles has also come to represent stability, but has generally failed to capture public sentiment.

So even if Charles succeeds in meeting some objective criteria to become a “good king”, he may not assume this role with the same public favour as his mother.

What will this mean for Australia and the Commonwealth?

Australia arguably has sentimental meaning for Charles. He spent a semester of his schooling at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop campus, and at one point was even keen to become its governor-general.

However, this idea proved to be unpopular with both Australians and the Queen, albeit for different reasons.

Today, modern attitudes to the monarchy and the question of an Australian republic remain ambivalent.

A 2021 Ipsos online poll found that republican attitudes in Australia had subsided since their peak in 1999 – the year of the failed republic referendum.

Only 34% agreed that Australia should become a republic, while 40% were against the proposal. The other 26% were unsure. This uncertainty was highest among respondents aged between 18 and 24.

The future of the monarchy is an issue entwined with the historical and contemporary legacies of colonialism. Combined with the personal ambivalence some may feel towards Charles, his succession may reignite republican debates.

Jess Carniel does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Australia has a new head of state: what will Charles be like as king? – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-a-new-head-of-state-what-will-charles-be-like-as-king-176878

Doomscrolling is literally bad for your health. Here are 4 tips to help you stop

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Mannell, Research Fellow in Digital Childhoods , Deakin University

Doomscrolling can be a normal reaction to living through uncertain times. It’s natural to want to understand dramatic events unfolding around you and to seek out information when you’re afraid. But becoming absorbed in bad news for too long can be detrimental.

A newly published study has found that people with high levels of problematic news consumption are also more likely to have worse mental and physical health. So what can you do about it?

We spoke to Australians in the state of Victoria about their lengthy lockdown experiences and found how they managed to stop doomscrolling. Here are some tips to help you do the same.

Doomscrolling – unhelpful and harmful

“Doomscrolling” describes what happens when someone continues to consume negative news and information online, including on social media. There is increasing evidence that this kind of overconsumption of bad news may have negative impacts.

Research suggests doomscrolling during crises is unhelpful and even harmful. During the early COVID-19 pandemic, consuming a lot of news made people feel overwhelmed. One study found people who consumed more news about the pandemic were also more anxious about it.

Research into earlier crises, like 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombings, also found that sustained exposure to news about catastrophes is linked to negative mental health outcomes.

Choosing to take control

During the peak of COVID-19 spread, many found themselves doomscrolling. There was lots of bad news and, for many people, lots more spare time. Several studies, including our own, have found that limiting news exposure helped people to cope.

Melbourne, the state capital of Victoria, experienced some of the longest-running lockdowns in the world. Wanting to know how Victorians were managing their news consumption during this time, we launched a survey and held interviews with people who limited news consumption for their own wellbeing.

We found that many people increased their news consumption when the lockdowns began. However, most of our participants gradually introduced strategies to curb their doomscrolling because they realised it was making them feel anxious or angry, and distracted from daily tasks.

Our research found these news-reduction strategies were highly beneficial. People reported feeling less stressed and found it easier to connect with others. Here are some of their strategies, which you might want to try.

1. Make a set time to check news

Rather than checking news periodically across the day, set aside a specific time and consider what time of day is going to have the most positive impacts for you.

One participant would check the news while waiting for her morning cup of tea to brew, as this set a time limit on her scrolling. Other participants preferred saving their news engagement for later in the day so that they could start their morning being settled and focused.

2. Avoid having news ‘pushed’ to you

Coming across news unexpectedly can lure you into a doomscrolling spiral. Several participants managed this by avoiding having news “pushed” to them, allowing them to engage on their own terms instead. Examples included unfollowing news-related accounts on social media or turning off push notifications for news and social media apps.

3. Add ‘friction’ to break the habit

If you find yourself consuming news in a mindless or habitual way, making it slightly harder to access news can give you an opportunity to pause and think.

One participant moved all her social media and news apps into a folder which she hid on the last page of her smartphone home screen. She told us this strategy helped her significantly reduce doomscrolling. Other participants deleted browser bookmarks that provided shortcuts to news sites, deleted news and social media apps from their phones, and stopped taking their phone into their bedroom at night.

4. Talk with others in your household

If you’re trying to manage your news consumption better, tell other people in your household so they can support you. Many of our participants found it hard to limit their consumption when other household members watched, listened to, or talked about a lot of news.

In the best cases, having a discussion helped people come to common agreements, even when one person found the news comforting and another found it upsetting. One couple in our study agreed that one of them would watch the midday news while the other went for a walk, but they’d watch the evening news together.

Staying informed is still important

Crucially, none of these practices involve avoiding news entirely. Staying informed is important, especially in crisis situations where you need to know how to keep safe. Our research shows there are ways of balancing the need to stay informed with the need to protect your wellbeing.

So if your news consumption has become problematic, or you’re in a crisis situation where negative news can become overwhelming, these strategies can help you strike that balance. This is going to remain an important challenge as we continue to navigate an unstable world.

James Meese currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Meta. He is also a member of the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network.

Kate Mannell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Doomscrolling is literally bad for your health. Here are 4 tips to help you stop – https://theconversation.com/doomscrolling-is-literally-bad-for-your-health-here-are-4-tips-to-help-you-stop-190059

When does COVID become long COVID? And what’s happening in the body when symptoms persist? Here’s what we’ve learnt so far

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Hellewell, Research Fellow, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University, and The Perron Institute for Neurological and Translational Science, Curtin University

As the COVID pandemic nears 1,000 days in Australia, we’re well-versed in recognising the cough, fever and fatigue that characterise the infection.

Almost 50% of Australians have now had COVID. Most of us will recover well, but some will experience lingering or new symptoms for extended periods.

As we ride out COVID’s peaks and troughs, a new wave of long COVID is emerging. But there’s still a lot we don’t know about it.

When does COVID become long COVID?

As a new illness, there is no one definition of when COVID ends and long COVID starts.

The Australian Department of Health defines long COVID as symptoms persisting or emerging at least four weeks after initial infection.

In contrast, the Word Health Organization’s guidelines say long COVID starts three months after infection.

These wide-ranging timeframes have led to estimates that between 5 and 50% of people with COVID infections will develop long COVID.

What are the symptoms?

Definitions of long COVID are further complicated by a list of more than 200 symptoms across ten parts of the body.

The most common and longest-lasting symptoms include brain fog and impaired memory and concentration, fatigue, headaches, tinnitus (ringing in ears), breathing difficulties, and loss of taste and smell.

For many people, these symptoms flare up after physical or mental exertion.

Older woman sits on a park bench, her head in her hand, resting — Symtoms can flare up after physical exertion.
Unsplash/Matias N Reyes

Rarer symptoms include chest pain and heart palpitations, visual impairment and diarrhoea.

People suffering long COVID have also reported dental problems, with teeth becoming loose and crumbling, and gums bleeding.

What causes long COVID?

We know very little about how long COVID affects the body, and why some people develop ongoing symptoms and others don’t.

A recent study found COVID causes increases in chemical messengers that signal inflammation. Over time, this damages the insulating myelin layer of nerve cells that are essential for nerves to carry and co-ordinate messages around the body and brain.

The immune system may also be acting in more obscure ways. Antibodies produced against the SARS-CoV-2 virus may be targeting specialised cells in the walls of blood vessels in the brain, allowing inflammatory cells to enter brain tissue more easily.

Although preliminary, these studies could hint at the underlying mechanisms of brain fog and problems with memory and concentration.

Other studies are so fresh from the research lab they are yet to be peer-reviewed (so should be interpreted more cautiously).

One such new study showed people with long COVID have higher numbers of immune cells circulating in the body, and abnormally low levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

Aside from stress, cortisol is also important for regulating inflammation, so low cortisol levels may be one way the immune system becomes over-active. However, these results are far from clear.

Another new study comparing people who recovered to those who developed long COVID found no significant changes in immune signalling chemicals in the blood, no differences in memory and thinking tests, and no differences between groups in lung or heart function.

Together, these research studies suggest that persistent activity of the immune system might contribute to long COVID in multiple and overlapping ways in the brain and other organs.

Person looks at their phone while laying in bed, by a window — There’s still a lot to learn about long COVID.
Shane/Unsplash

The causes and consequences of long COVID are a key focus of research worldwide, and are yet to be clearly defined. This is an important line of research because identifying what’s happening in the body will also help us identify targets to treat long COVID.

Long COVID can have far-reaching impacts

We also need to understand how long COVID affects sufferers in more definable ways, such as their ability to work or study, and their quality of life.

The federal government recently announced a parliamentary inquiry into long COVID, which will seek to answer these questions.

Although long COVID sufferers are in the minority, the lowest estimate of a 5% rate of long COVID equates to an estimated 500,000 Australians who currently have, or will soon develop, long COVID.

If you’re one of them, your GP should be your first port of call for assessment and ongoing management.

If needed, your GP can refer you to one of the specialised long COVID clinics opening across Australia. These clinics aim to treat the symptoms of long COVID using multidisciplinary approaches, and act as a central hub for patients to access evidence-based medical care to combat long COVID.

Sarah Hellewell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. When does COVID become long COVID? And what’s happening in the body when symptoms persist? Here’s what we’ve learnt so far – https://theconversation.com/when-does-covid-become-long-covid-and-whats-happening-in-the-body-when-symptoms-persist-heres-what-weve-learnt-so-far-188976

3 ways the fossil fuel industry has failed women – clean energy must learn from its mistakes

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily Finch, Beamline Scientist at ANSTO, and Research Affiliate, Monash University

If mining workplaces are anything to go by, the clean energy sector will have their work cut out for them to retain women in the workforce.

By the numbers

At a glance, it seems Australia’s clean energy industry is making great progress.

The male-dominated renewables construction sector also had low representation in survey responses, further skewing results.

If we look at the mining sector overall, census data reveals that at junior levels there is a relatively even gender split, with women comprising roughly 40% of 20-27 year olds in the industry.

So why are women leaving the mining industry? There are three main reasons.

1. Sexual assault and harassment

The mining industry, including the fossil fuel industry, can be a dangerous place for women.

In early 2022, an external review of Rio Tinto’s workplace culture found bullying, sexism and racism are systemic across the company.

In the last five years, 28% of women had experienced sexual harassment at Rio Tinto worksites, and 21 women were victims of actual or attempted rape or sexual assault.

The inquiry’s report highlighted that when women tried to report harassment and assault they were bullied, threatened or lost their jobs.

The parliamentary inquiry made a number of recommendations to improve the safety of women in the FIFO mining industry, such as an overhaul of reporting structures within companies.

2. Biases against women

This means once women are in STEM careers, especially in male-dominated industries such as the mining industry, they encounter more barriers to success than their male colleagues.

3. Parental leave

We need systemic change

Like the fossil fuel industry, women in renewables face barriers to retention and promotion.

In Australia’s mining and energy sector, some people are pushing for change and equity, but the problems are widespread and can be difficult to detect.

In fact, shifting only 1% of Australia’s workforce into STEM jobs would add $57.4 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product over 20 years.

Emily Finch has previously received funding from an Australian Postgraduate Award and a Society of Economic Geologists Graduate Student Fellowship.

Melanie Finch receives funding from the Australian Research Council and is the President of Women in Earth and Environmental Sciences Australasia (WOMEESA).

– ref. 3 ways the fossil fuel industry has failed women – clean energy must learn from its mistakes – https://theconversation.com/3-ways-the-fossil-fuel-industry-has-failed-women-clean-energy-must-learn-from-its-mistakes-189965

Will 7-star housing really cost more? It depends, but you can keep costs down in a few simple ways

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Trivess Moore, Senior Lecturer, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University

The required energy-efficiency rating of new housing in Australia will increase from 6 to 7 stars from October next year. Some claim this will greatly increase housing costs. But is this true?

Costs for new home owners are the sum of three things:

capital costs to build the home
costs to heat, cool and live in the home
mortgage costs.

The focus has been on the upfront capital costs of new homes – over a million are expected to be built over the next three years. The costs of living in the home and impacts on mortgage payments are neglected. Given the move to 7 stars will cut energy use for heating and cooling by about 24%, the cost savings will outweigh any increase in mortgage repayments in many circumstances.

And there are simple ways to achieve a 7-star rating on a budget, as we’ll explain.

How will the new standards be applied?

The recently announced improvements to Australian housing performance standards were the most significant in a decade. As well as the 7-star standard – on a scale from 0 (worst) to 10 (best) – a whole-of-home energy budget will be introduced. It’s based on the performance of a “benchmark home”, including the building shell, heating and cooling equipment, water heating and lighting.

A dwelling will be compliant if it has the same societal cost of operating as the benchmark home. Societal costs here relate to the wider financial costs of infrastructure (e.g. energy networks) and the environment (e.g. carbon emissions).

If one element performs worse than the benchmark, it will need to be offset by outperforming the benchmark in other areas, or by installing on-site renewable energy sources such as solar panels.

These changes are an important first step towards more sustainable housing. Future changes in 2025 and 2028 will likely improve performance to near-zero emissions.

What does the evidence say about costs?

The regulatory impact statement provided for the ministers modelled the changes. For detached housing and townhouses it estimated an average capital cost increase of A$1,704 to achieve the higher standard. The figure varied from $545 in Queensland to $3,275 in the Northern Territory.

For apartments, the average increase is $2,051. Queensland was again lowest at $464, with Western Australia the highest at $2,975.

These increases amounted to 0.1-0.8% of total capital costs. Energy bill savings generally outweighed any increase in mortgage repayments. However, the analysis does find in some locations, such as Brisbane and Sydney, the move to 7 stars may not be cost-effective based upon the conservative assumptions it applied.

These costings are broadly in line with research findings over the past decade. Our 2012 research estimated the cost of moving from a 6 to 7-star detached dwelling in Victoria at $3,012, but as low as $400 in some cases. A 2015 analysis estimated achieving 7.5-star performance in South Australia would cost $3,500. And 2018 Climateworks Centre research put the cost of moving to 7 stars at between $650 and $3,000.

In some cases, this could be done for almost no extra cost. In a 2012 analysis of 20 dwellings across eight climate locations in Australia, Sustainability House found the average cost could be as low as $37!

Did costs rise with previous code changes?

In the past, improving energy efficiency added little to new home costs. Reserve Bank analysis shows the construction cost inflation rate barely changed when 5-star (2006) and 6-star (2011) standards came in.

In fact, CSIRO research found prices dropped in 2006. New houses built to a 5-star standard or above were cheaper on average than lower-rated houses by about $5,000 in Melbourne and Adelaide and $7,000 in Brisbane. Other reviews found the move to 6 stars cost less than predicted.

Government assumptions tend to be conservative. They often overlook the capacity of designers, builders, manufacturers and consumers to find cost efficiencies. International evidence shows costs for higher performance have been over-estimated and fall more quickly than policymakers and industry predict.

How to achieve 7 stars on a budget

One reason costs have been less than expected is because construction prices depend on design. When the 5-star standard came in, houses became more compact. External walls and windows (which cost more per square metre than walls) were reduced.

Orientation makes a big difference too. Research has found a difference in performance of 1-2 stars between best and worst orientation. Simply ensuring your dwelling faces the right way (north) can greatly improve performance, or cut the costs of achieving compliance.

House size also affects construction and running costs. Star ratings express the energy demand per square metre, so a big 7-star home will cost more to heat and cool than a smaller 7-star home.

Australian homes are among the largest in the world. New home buyers should think about the number and size of their rooms and corridors if they wish to keep costs low.

Other basic and low-cost things you can do include adding more insulation (ceiling, floors, walls) and external shading. Windows are also important and the cost of high-performing double-glazed windows will fall as they become the norm.

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel to get to 7-star homes. Online resources such as Your Home already have freely available 7-star house plans.

And we can easily exceed 7 stars. Real-world examples include Lochiel Park, Cape Paterson ecovillage and Nightingale Housing.

More than capital costs

Capital costs are just one element of the whole-of-life cost. Running costs depend on:

thermal performance of the building envelope – walls, windows, doors, roof, air-leakage gaps
efficiency of heating and cooling appliances
daily electricity and gas tariffs.

Higher-performing dwellings and all-electric homes with heat pumps will save money and be more resilient in a changing climate. Increasing research shows their financial, social and environmental benefits.

We need to move beyond the narrow focus on capital costs, which are often overstated. We should think about how higher standards improve our quality of life and liveability.

For example, a growing body of research suggests improved energy efficiency can produce more comfortable temperatures and reduce mould, improving respiratory health. And, if that doesn’t convince you, improving a home’s sustainability greatly increases resale value, outweighing any extra capital costs!

Trivess Moore has received funding from various organisations including the Australian Research Council, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Victorian Government and various industry partners. He is a trustee of the Fuel Poverty Research Network.

Nicola Willand receives or has received funding for research from various organisations, including the Australian Research Council, the Victorian State Government, the Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation, the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, the Future Fuels Collaborative Research Centre and the Australian National Health and Medical Research Centre.

– ref. Will 7-star housing really cost more? It depends, but you can keep costs down in a few simple ways – https://theconversation.com/will-7-star-housing-really-cost-more-it-depends-but-you-can-keep-costs-down-in-a-few-simple-ways-189627

If your landlord wants to increase your rent, here are your rights

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Grigg, Senior Lecturer in Law, Flinders University

Inflation is pushing up interest rates. Interest rates are pushing up mortgage costs. There’s talk of a rental supply crisis. This means there’s a good chance your landlord wants to increase your rent.

So what are your rights as a renter? That depends on where you live, because residential tenancy laws are determined by state and territory governments. There are, however, many commonalities. Here’s a rundown.

When can your landlord raise the rent?

In every state and territory there are limits on when and how often your landlord can raise the rent.

If you are on a fixed-term lease your rent cannot be increased during the lease period, unless the lease itself specifically provides for such an increase. This makes it worthwhile to negotiate a longer fixed-term lease if you can.

If you are on a periodic (month-to-month) lease, state and territory laws set limits on the frequency with which the rent can be increased. For the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia, rent can be raised every six months. Elsewhere, it is every 12 months.

What must the landlord inform me of?

Landlords do not need to provide a reason for increasing the rent.

They are, however, required to strictly follow notification procedures – informing you in writing, using forms that are specified in relevant regulations, and giving you advance notice of the increase.

Minimum notice periods for increasing rent differ, from 30 days in the Northern Territory to 90 days in New South Wales. For the other state and territories it is about 60 days (see the table above).

If your landlord does not comply with these requirements, you are not obliged to pay the higher rent.

Is there any limit on how much my rent can increase?

The Australian Capital Territory is the only jurisdiction that puts a cap on rent increases. They are limited to no more than 10% above the Consumer Price Index for Canberra. Any larger increase must be approved by the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal.

In all jurisdictions, however, you can appeal to the tribunal or court that oversees residential tenancy laws if you believe a rent increase is excessive.

These bodies have the power to reduce or refuse the increase. They can also order landlords to reduce the rent in some circumstances (such as if disrepair or damage makes the property less fit for living).

No state and territory residential tenancy legislation defines what makes rent “excessive”. But they do include similar lists of things a tribunal or court may consider to determine whether rent is excessive.

These include the rent of comparable premises, and the property’s value and condition. You will need to provide this evidence, because the burden of proving your rent is excessive is on you.

Can I be evicted so the landlord can charge more rent?

A landlord can terminate a fixed-term lease at its expiry for any reason (as long as they follow the notice provisions).

They cannot terminate a fixed-term lease earlier than its expiry just so they can raise the rent for new tenants. They must have a legitimate reason, for instance if you are continually breaching the terms of the lease, or making the property uninhabitable. They must provide the reason in writing.

With the exception of Victoria, a landlord can terminate a periodic lease for any reason. The only requirement is a minimum notice period. In Victoria, your landlord must give and substantiate a valid reason. Wanting to lease out the property at a higher rent is not a valid reason.

In short, what to check?

1) Check your lease. If it’s a fixed-term lease, look to see if the terms allow for a rent increase.

2) Check your landlord has used the correct form for the notice and given you at least the minimum notice period.

3) Seek advice from your local tenants’ advisory service or relevant government tribunal or agency if you are in doubt. The organisations in the following table are a good place to start.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. If your landlord wants to increase your rent, here are your rights – https://theconversation.com/if-your-landlord-wants-to-increase-your-rent-here-are-your-rights-190126

Canterbury ratepayers risk paying the price twice if Tarras airport takes off

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

This week saw the 12th anniversary of the first major Canterbury earthquake on September 4 2010. Since that event and the catastrophic aftershock of February 22 2011, the Canterbury economy has proved quite resilient. So it’s a good time to ask where the region as a whole is heading.

This is especially important in light of plans by Christchurch Airport to build a new airport at Tarras in Central Otago.

This ambitious project has the potential to reshape Christchurch’s role in the economy of the South Island. And yet it remains unclear how much the Otago airport plans take the recovery of Christchurch into consideration.

Behind this lies the larger question of what happens to the Christchurch and Canterbury economies, now that almost all insurance claims have finally been resolved, houses have been rebuilt, and many (though not all) of the larger public infrastructure projects have been completed.

Helped by public funding worth many billions, the Canterbury economy grew rapidly in the years following the quakes. This isn’t unusual, as the flow of funds from insurance and government typically turbocharges the reconstruction. But this construction-based growth is not sustainable, and the real test is what happens next.

Will Christchurch emerge with an economy that was “built back better” to serve its residents, the South Island and Aotearoa New Zealand in general? Or will it slowly lose its economic vitality, now the large inflow of investment funding in reconstruction is petering out?

Crucially, where does the proposed new airport at Tarras sit within this broader perspective?

Why a new airport?

Christchurch International Airport Ltd (CIAL) is set up as a commercial enterprise, with 75% ownership by Christchurch City Holdings Ltd, the asset management arm of Christchurch City Council. The other 25% is owned by the Crown.

So it’s ultimately the ratepayers of Christchurch who must decide, through their elected representatives, whether it’s in their best interests to develop a new airport in Central Otago.

Does a Tarras airport make sense from a commercial, profit-seeking perspective? More importantly, will the airport development benefit the ratepayers of Christchurch, who ultimately own CIAL? To answer these questions, we first need to ask how the recovery from the Canterbury earthquake sequence is fairing in 2022.

One sector has dominated Christchurch’s economy since 2011 – construction. Not surprisingly, it doubled in size between 2011 and 2015 when reconstruction activity peaked.

Since then, however, it has been slowly declining (though it’s still about 20% larger than it was the year before the earthquakes). Now that a lot of the infrastructure in Christchurch is new, the city will need even less investment in construction than it did before the earthquakes.

What replaces construction?

The worry – one that has plagued many other urban recovery projects after large earthquakes – is that no other economic sector is taking construction’s place as the major source of employment and growth in the city.

The knowledge sectors (information technology, education, professional and scientific industries) have all seen a relative decline or have been stagnant in the past few years.

Tourism, accommodation and hospitality declined a lot after the earthquakes, and haven’t fully recovered. But they can be part of the solution to filling the emerging gap as construction activity unwinds.

It’s therefore important to understand how the plans at Tarras relate to these long-term challenges for the city. Will a new airport help fill that gap? Maybe, though the case has yet to be made convincingly.

One chief concern is that the other three airports in or near Central Otago (Queenstown, Dunedin and Invercargill) are not far away, are all centred around larger population centres and therefore cheaper to run, and are operating below capacity.

Tarras in Central Otago: from rural township to international hub?
Shutterstock

Other costs to consider

The future profits from a new airport, should they materialise, also need to be weighed against other costs – some of them borne much sooner. Climate change, in particular, is leading to a dramatic rethink of many lifestyle habits. And all the indications are that one of the first sectors this will test is long-distance tourism.

Barring a significant (and unlikely) increase in the number of long-distance tourists (coming maybe from the mega-cities of Asia), the project will only be profitable if it manages to divert traffic from the other airports in the South Island, and especially from Christchurch International Airport.

Christchurch Airport is the one airport in the South Island that already lets wide-body planes land, so it should be the one most concerned about competition from a Tarras airport with a similarly wide runway. Would CIAL be shooting itself in the foot by developing this new airport? If so, it would be the ratepayers of Christchurch who would be left standing unsteadily.

The most likely scenario is that a Tarras airport will not be a profitable asset for many years, due to the high cost of development and operation. It would also divert domestic and international tourists, and lucrative freight, away from Christchurch, thus hitting the city’s ratepayers twice (losing money as the owners of Tarras, and losing business as the owners of Christchurch Airport).

The airport is far from a certainty. As CIAL Project Director Michael Singleton said recently: “If the economic case doesn’t stack up, the airport won’t be built. On that basis, those who’re saying it’s nonsensical should be quite relaxed about our exploring it.”

But CIAL has already spent $45 million directly to buy the Tarras land, and more on other related expenses. Given the double jeopardy the project entails for Christhchurch’s ratepayers, it’s an open question as to how relaxed they will remain, especially given the upcoming local elections.

Ilan Noy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Canterbury ratepayers risk paying the price twice if Tarras airport takes off – https://theconversation.com/canterbury-ratepayers-risk-paying-the-price-twice-if-tarras-airport-takes-off-189369

16 visits over 57 years: reflecting on Queen Elizabeth II’s long relationship with Australia

By The Conversation -

September 9, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Giselle Bastin, Associate Professor of English, Flinders University

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip drive down Victoria Park racecourse, in Adelaide, 1963. AP Photo

“Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth” has died. Given her advanced years, this has long been expected, yet it still seems incredible this woman who has been Australia’s queen for the duration of most Australians’ lives is no longer with us.

While the focus of the formalities and ceremony of the passing of Queen Elizabeth II will centre on London and the UK, there is no doubt it will be keenly observed by many Australians.

The queen liked Australia and Australians. She came here 16 times throughout her reign and was, famously, on her way to our shores in 1953 when she learned her father had passed on and she was now queen.

Her visits to Australia – from her first in 1954 through to her last in 2011 – offer a snapshot of the changing relationship Australians have had with their sovereign and with the monarchy.

An enthusiastic nation

The queen’s 1954 tour took place during a time described by historian Ben Pimlott as the age of “British Shintoism”. Deference to the Crown was paramount in Britain and the Commonwealth, and many Australians were madly enthusiastic about their queen.

After her arrival at Farm Cove in Sydney on February 3 1954, Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to set foot on Australian soil. The royal tour lasted nearly two months and consisted of a gruelling schedule taking in visits to every state and territory apart from the Northern Territory.

During the tour, the queen greeted over 70,000 ex-service men and women; drove in cavalcades that took in massive crowds; attended numerous civic receptions; and opened the Australian Parliament in Canberra. The tour saw Elizabeth travel 10,000 miles by air and 2,000 miles by road – including 207 trips by car and by appointed royal trains.

It is estimated as much as 75% of the population saw the queen and Prince Philip during this tour.

No Australian prime minister has ever had a reception on this scale or exposure to so many of the country’s citizens.

A “new” and prosperous country

During her first two tours in 1954 and 1963, the Australia laid-out for display for the queen was depicted as having gone from being a small colonial settlement to a thriving economy that had ridden to prosperity “on the sheep’s back”.

The queen was treated to endless displays of sheep shearing, surf carnivals, wood chopping, whip cracking, and mass displays of dancing and singing by school children. Federal and state dignitaries, mayors and civic leaders from across the political divide jostled to meet and be seen with her; the country’s florists were emptied of flowers for the hundreds of bouquets presented to her by dozens of shy, nervous school children nudged gently forward by awe-struck parents.

During the early tours, Aboriginal Australians were kept at a discreet distance. Apart from a demonstration of boomerang and spear throwing, the closest the queen came to experiencing anything of Indigenous Australian culture was a ballet performed by the Arts Council Ballet titled Corroboree, with no Aboriginal dancers but dancers with blackened faces.

During the 1970 visit, the queen witnessed the re-enactment of Captain James Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay, with Cook and his crew meeting “the resistance of the Aborigines with a volley of musket fire”.

By 1973, Indigenous Australians were given a more significant role in the royal tours. Aboriginal actor Ben Blakeney, one of Bennelong’s descendants, gave the official welcome during the opening of the Sydney Opera House, and the then unknown actor David Gulpilil was among those performing a ceremonial dance.

Queen Elizabeth II declares open the Sydney Opera House complex, 1973.
AP Photo

Invited guest, not ruler of the land

As early as the 1963 tour, the nation-wide royal fervour had dimmed a little. The 1963 visit witnessed smaller crowds and fewer mass public events. When Prime Minister Robert Menzies courted the queen with the now-famous line, “I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die”, the ensuing blushes – including the queen’s own – reflected many Australians’ growing sense of embarrassment at public displays and unquestioning expressions of deference.

Despite this, Menzies’ displays of public ardour saw him being granted The Order of the Thistle shortly after, a bestowal which must surely remain the envy of some subsequent prime ministers.

The 1977 Silver Jubilee and 1988 Australian bicentenary visits perhaps marked the end of a period of royal tours as overt celebrations of Australia’s ties to Britain. This new flavour of tours positioned the sovereign as an invited guest to an independent, modern and multi-cultural nation.

On her 10th tour in 1986, the queen returned to sign the Australia Act, which brought to an end the ability of the UK to create laws for Australia.

Her role as our sovereign subtly transformed from cutting ribbons and opening Parliament to signing the documents that slowly, by degrees, contributed to the cutting of Australia’s ties to the UK and the Crown.

A question of the republic

By the 12th tour in 1992, the cost of the queen’s visits to Australia were increasingly scrutinised by a public feeling largely indifferent about the royal family. The prime minister of the day, Paul Keating, was seen not so much as an entranced liege lord revelling in the opportunity to see his sovereign “passing by” as one who instead – unthinkingly – committed an act of lèse majesté by placing his bare hand on the royal back and waist as he guided her through the crowd.

The gloves, it seemed, were coming off.

The queen made it clear in her last visits to our shores that whether or not Australia should become a republic was a decision for its own citizens to make. Her official announcement after she learned of the result of the 1999 Republic Referendum confirmed this:

I have always made it clear that the future of the Monarchy in Australia is an issue for the Australian people and them alone to decide, by democratic and constitutional means. … My family and I would, of course, have retained our deep affection for Australia and Australians everywhere, whatever the outcome.

In the last decades of her life, the queen retained the affection of many. Her popularity seemed to grow in line with Australians’ increased disenchantment with their home-grown political leaders: the former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Julia Gillard are right to have sensed that any discussion about an Australian republic would have to wait until after Elizabeth II’s death.

Queen Elizabeth II reigned across seven decades and her tours to Australia served as a marker of Australia’s changing relationship with the Crown as well as with its own colonial past and national identity.

Almost certainly, Elizabeth II’s reign as the stalwart, loyal, dutiful, and most cherished and admired of “Glorianas” is one we are unlikely ever to see again.

Giselle Bastin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. 16 visits over 57 years: reflecting on Queen Elizabeth II’s long relationship with Australia – https://theconversation.com/16-visits-over-57-years-reflecting-on-queen-elizabeth-iis-long-relationship-with-australia-170945

Grattan on Friday: Albanese’s commitment to transparency should apply to national cabinet

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

The change of government has transformed many things but, unfortunately, not the secrecy surrounding national cabinet.

Anthony Albanese beats his drum about transparency but he has rejected calls for more light to be shed on the meetings he has with his state and territory counterparts.
Last week’s national cabinet decision that cut the COVID quarantine time from seven to five days highlights the case for the public to be better informed, especially when controversial matters are being decided.

That decision saw health and economic considerations collide. Health experts point out people can be still infectious after five days and so, some maintain, a cautious approach should be retained. But many businesses, and individuals, say we are now “living with COVID” and economic and social considerations should be put first.

Neither stand is objectively “correct” – it’s how you balance risks and priorities. The point is, the community should be given the information that played into the course the national cabinet chose.

When Albanese was asked early last week (ahead of the isolation decision) about his keeping national cabinet papers secret, his response was dismissive.

He lauded the fact that after these meetings he spoke for all the leaders, in contrast to the Morrison days, when the PM’s news conference would be followed (or even preceded) by premiers putting out their own takes. He also suggested there weren’t papers for meetings these days.

There are spurious arguments. Unanimity might be desirable, but if there are differences and they are aired, at least the public have an idea of what’s going on. And there are always minutes.

The Morrison government lost a legal challenge brought by then-crossbench senator Rex Patrick to prise open national cabinet, making it subject to freedom-of-information applications. In that case, the government argued national cabinet was a committee of federal cabinet, which was obviously absurd.

Although Patrick won, the Prime Minister’s Department frustrated later attempts to get information. Little has changed with the new administration.

Patrick was defeated at the election but is still on the national cabinet issue. He applied for the minutes of the new government’s first meeting on June 17. His application was rejected by the decision-maker, an assistant secretary in the PM’s Department.

Patrick was told disclosure of the document would or could “cause damage to Commonwealth-State relations” by adversely affecting the trust and co-operation that underpins the national cabinet, and in particular the ability to freely raise and discuss agenda items.

“Disclosing the requested document would inhibit the ability of First Ministers to conduct robust deliberations and make decisions on critical intergovernmental policy issues […]

“This would undermine the trust between the Commonwealth and the States and Territories and would prevent full and frank discussions that achieve the best outcomes for the Australian public […]

“In turn this would lead to poorer outcomes and adversely affect all governments’ abilities to consider and respond urgently to issues of national interest, and would undermine the key decisions needed to deliver outcomes in the public interest.”

But material genuinely demanding confidentiality obviously could be redacted, rather than refusing to release anything.

Patrick has now applied for any advice the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) – which comprises state and territory health officers and advises national cabinet – distributed to national cabinet for the August 31 meeting that decided to reduce the isolation period.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet led the charge for last week’s decision. Albanese earlier had resisted a change to the isolation period, but was now ready to move.

Ahead of the meeting, Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly put a recommendation to the AHPPC to shift to five days.

But the AHPPC is supposed to operate by “consensus” and Kelly could not get general acceptance for the recommendation.

Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria favoured staying with seven days. Other states either supported change or were willing to go along with it.

Some AHPPC participants were discontented at being presented with what they saw as a done deal by the Commonwealth. When this was raised, Kelly strongly rejected any suggestion he was acting politically.

Michael Kidd (acting chief medical officer on the day) presented the epidemiology and the outcome of the AHPPC meeting to national cabinet. Kidd gave a verbal briefing on the different views. As there was not an AHPPC consensus, there wasn’t a paper from that body, but presumably what was non-advice would be reflected in the minutes.

The Australian Medical Association immediately called for the government to make public the advice.

AMA President Steve Robson, pointing out that up to three in ten people were likely to be still infectious after five days, said: “Throughout this pandemic the AMA has continuously said governments must base their decision-making on the health and medical advice and we need to see that advice and whether it supports today’s decision.”

The AMA received short shrift from the PM. “The chief health officers in every state are responsible for their respective advices, so that’s a matter for the
state governments as to whether that happens or not,” he said.

Medicos in the Labor caucus weren’t consulted before the decision. One of them, Mike Freelander, who’s chairing a House of Representative inquiry into long COVID, admitted to the ABC national cabinet had made a “political” decision, adding “we have got to live with it”.

Another doctor, Labor’s new member for Higgins, Michelle Ananda-Rajah, had already tweeted “5 days is not enough”.

The way the decision on the isolation period played out can be seen as bringing full circle the story of experts in this pandemic.

At the start, panicked politicians, with little clue what they were dealing with, leaned heavily on the health experts. “We follow the health advice,” became the mantra, justifying what was done.

Leaders used the health experts as crutches, and as political shields (even though with Morrison there was always a tug of war between health and economic considerations – he elevated economics wherever possible).

These days, the politicians – on both sides – have grabbed back their agency. Political leaders know the community – or a majority of it – has moved on, despite the tens of COVID deaths daily. COVID case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths are now to be reported on a weekly, rather than daily, basis. The escalating cost of living has well and truly taken over from COVID as the hottest issue in the public mind.

Be that as it may, the public still deserve to know about the health advice on COVID issues. More generally, Albanese needs to live up to his professed views on transparency. As things stand, Patrick is right when he says that Albanese “has taken the blue secrecy blanket off national cabinet and replaced it with a red secrecy blanket”.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Albanese’s commitment to transparency should apply to national cabinet – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-albaneses-commitment-to-transparency-should-apply-to-national-cabinet-190242

Politics with Michelle Grattan: Simon Holmes à Court on ‘community independents’ and two state elections

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Simon Holmes à Court and his Climate 200, the body that provided funding for “teal” and some other independent candidates who promoted action on climate change, integrity and women’s issues, had great success at the federal election. But will community candidates become a big force in November’s Victorian poll and the March NSW election?

In this podcast, Holmes à Court talks about the “enthusiasm” from the community independents movement about the desertion by voters of the major parties, and the mobilisation already under way in various areas to get behind candidates. But he stresses there will be new challenges to face in the two state campaigns. A major one is the more restrictive arrangements around funding, compared with the federal election.

Community independents in the state elections will target frustrations in their local areas, but climate change and integrity will be strong themes of their campaigns. “In Victoria, our polling shows that climate is very high [in voters’ minds] and people are frustrated with the pace of change in some of the Andrews government’s actions there – we have the dirtiest grid in the country and a less certain plan for phasing out coal than New South Wales, for example”.

Federally, teal candidates ran in Liberal seats. In Victoria, where there is a long-time Labor government, can we expect to see strong community independents also in Labor seats?

“There is talk in Victoria that there might be some independents or minor parties challenging more in the outer suburbs and putting a lot of heat on the Andrews government, responding to the frustrations in those communities.”

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Simon Holmes à Court on ‘community independents’ and two state elections – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-simon-holmes-a-court-on-community-independents-and-two-state-elections-190248

Politics with Michelle Grattan: Simon Holmes à Court on ‘community candidates’ and two state elections

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Community candidates in the state elections will target frustrations in their local areas, but climate change and integrity will be strong themes of their campaigns. “In Victoria, our polling shows that climate is very high [in voters’ minds] and people are frustrated with the pace of change in some of the Andrews government’s actions there – we have the dirtiest grid in the country and a less certain plan for phasing out coal than New South Wales, for example”.

Federally, teal candidates ran in Liberal seats. In Victoria, where there is a long-time Labor government, can we expect to see strong community candidates also in Labor seats?

Michelle Grattan ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Simon Holmes à Court on ‘community candidates’ and two state elections – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-simon-holmes-a-court-on-community-candidates-and-two-state-elections-190248

Keith Rankin Chart Analysis – The Signature of a Disease that scared the world: Cholera

By Keith Rankin -

September 8, 2022

Analysis by Keith Rankin.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Please refer to an updated version of this article by clicking here.

I have been investigating the epidemiology of the disease that arguably created the science of epidemiology; a blend of statistics, medical science, and demography.

The cholera outbreak in London in 1854 is particularly well-known, because of the reverence now given to the statistical analysis (by Dr John Snow) of the episode in London’s Soho which he demonstrated was centred around a drinking water pump in Broad Street (now Broadwick St.).

Recently I read the 2006 book by Steven Johnson – The Ghost Map – which gives a discussion of multiple themes: the spread of disease, the shortcomings of scientists, the huge potential of maps as a means of communication, and the sustainability benefits of uber-urban living.

I have also had the benefit of reading Frank Snowden’s 2019 book Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, which has helped me on one particular point that Johnson’s account missed.

Here I will just look at the key facts of cholera in England from 1840 to 1867, with my sole data-source being ‘registered deaths’ per quarter, by district. England commenced birth, death, and marriage registration in 1837, so I am unable to show the first English outbreak in 1831.

Cholera, by the way, is a disease the lower digestive tract caused by the presence of the bacterium vibrio cholerae. It is characterised by extreme diarrhoea, with death coming – as it often but by no means always did – through extreme dehydration. It is transmitted via the oral-faecal route. It is not, as was widely believed throughout the nineteenth century, an airborne condition. Outbreaks occurred in the late summer.

The first chart acknowledges that Liverpool, not London, was England’s ‘cholera central’. Liverpool was England’s most important seaport in those ‘Victorian’ times. I contrast it with Preston, an industrial revolution cotton-milling city (and minor port) 40 kilometres northeast of Liverpool. The railway arrived in Preston as soon as 1838.

Rather than showing a strong correlation, Liverpool shows clearly all four major cholera outbreaks in England in those decades (1847, 1849, 1854, 1866) whereas Preston shows none. While Preston probably had more air-pollution than Liverpool, it was Liverpool which was much characterised by water-pollution. (Nonetheless, my great-great-great grandfather-in-law, and his wife, died of cholera in September 1849, despite living in Clitheroe, upstream from Preston. He was a bookkeeper-manager of a small and successful factory, so he may have been in Liverpool just prior to his death, or Manchester which correlates with Liverpool while having significantly less cholera overall.)

The second chart shows Liverpool and London together. While London shows minimal cholera in 1847, it shows that the other outbreaks were perfectly synchronised with Liverpool. Already it is clear that cholera was most likely an imported – and reimported – disease. It substantially affected England’s points of entry the most. (As of course, Covid19, which was synchronised in many countries through their airports.)

In the Liverpool/London chart, I attempt a ‘counterfactual analysis’. This is made simpler by the fact that cholera is clearly a seasonal disease, at least in places with highly seasonal climates. The dashed lines represent the likely numbers of deaths if cholera had not been present.

Much of the writing about cholera in Europe has little to say about this important seasonal feature of the disease. Outbreaks occurred in late summer (a little earlier in Liverpool in 1847), tending to peak (in the northern hemisphere) in early September. There are two reasons for cholera’s seasonality. Firstly, the bacterium (originally from Bengal, India) cannot easily survive in cold water. Second, and it’s only from Frank Snowden that I understood this, vibrio cholerae evades the defences of person’s stomach if they have eaten overripe fruit. Thus, the increased urban consumption of fruit made possible by the early railways almost certainly contributed to cholera epidemics. And poorer people living in places with contaminated water supplies were more likely to acquire their fruit in the market at lower prices, when it was past its best.

The third chart compares the Strand district of London, which includes Soho, with the rest of London. It shows clearly that the Soho outbreak was comparatively small. I estimate that 50,000 people died of cholera in London during the period, with 12,000 deaths in the 1854 event. Of those 12,000, I calculate 125 deaths in the Strand District, with perhaps 100 of them being due to the contamination of the water in the famous Broad Street pump. A significant local outbreak, but a small part of London’s total experience.

The final two charts refer back to Liverpool. They compare Liverpool with two of London’s major port districts: Stepney and Bermondsey. Stepney District is north of the Thames, downstream from the Tower Bridge. (The Tower Bridge did not exist at the time, however.) Bermondsey is on the south bank of the Thames, again downstream of the Tower Bridge.

Stepney shows three of the four late-summer cholera ‘spikes’: 1849, 1854, and 1866. Indeed the 1866 outbreak was largely confined to Stepney. (Johnson explains why.)Bermondsey, which missed the 1866 outbreak, was more dramatically affected in 1849 and 1854 than most of the rest of London. In 1849 its deaths trebled in the third quarter of 1849, just as Liverpool’s deaths had.

Other major ports of international trade – Hull, Sunderland, Newcastle, Aberdeen, Bristol – also synchronise to one or more of the Liverpool cholera outbreaks. Hull, renown as part of the migrant route from the Baltic to New York had a particularly severe outbreak in 1849. Grimsby, a prosperous fishing port on the other side of the Humber estuary from Hull, had almost none of that, but (unlike Hull) did get a share of London’s 1854 outbreak.

Note on John Snow, and on the multiple arrivals of cholera in Britain

John Snow, by the way, made a very significant professional contribution to medical science for his development of techniques in obstetric anaesthesia. He even attended at least one of Queen Victoria’s births. But he was an ‘establishment outsider’. As an epidemiologist, he was an amateur, as many pioneers were; epidemiology was his ‘hobby’. Nevertheless, in 1849 he effectively proved and published his theory about cholera as being waterborne rather than airborne after fieldwork he did in Bermondsey. However, despite Snow’s conclusive efforts in 1849 and 1854, in Europe as late as the 1890s an ‘expert narrative’ continued to maintain that cholera was an airborne disease. Much of Naples was rebuilt in the 1890s on this basis, though that intervention did not stop cholera returning.

It also turns out that hamburgers were not Britain’s only legacy from Hamburg. All of Britain’s cholera outbreaks appear to have originated in the free port of Hamburg, perhaps Europe’s busiest port city then, and still one of the biggest today. I am waiting to receive the book Death in Hamburg by Richard Evans, from Book Depository.

This is the blurb about that book on Penguin’s website:

‘Why were nearly 10,000 people killed in six weeks in Hamburg [in 1892], while most of Europe was left almost unscathed? As Richard J. Evans explains, it was largely because the town was a “free city” within Germany that was governed by the “English” ideals of laissez-faire. The absence of an effective public-health policy combined with ill-founded medical theories and the miserable living conditions of the poor to create a scene ripe for tragedy. The story of the “cholera years” is, in Richard Evans’s hands, tragically revealing of the age’s social inequalities and governmental pitilessness and incompetence; it also offers disquieting parallels with the world’s public-health landscape today.’

Steven Johnson notes that Hamburg repeatedly launched cholera epidemics upon the world. At the same time as Hamburg’s later episodes, Berlin was the world’s leading centre for research into epidemic diseases, and Germany was a sophisticated society with a rapidly centralising state. Nevertheless, science in its heyday – pure and applied science – failed Hamburg and the world with which it traded.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.

Australia finally has new climate laws. Now, let’s properly consider the astounding social cost of carbon

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Thomas Longden, Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

The federal government’s climate change bill passed the Senate on Thursday. Among the mandates in the new Climate Change Act are assessments of the social, employment and economic benefits of climate change policies.

These assessments will be included in annual statements, prepared by the government with input from the Climate Change Authority.

A letter we published today in The Lancet Planetary Health outlines the importance of measuring the effects of climate change on human health when assessing the social cost of carbon.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will improve the health of Australians, especially by reducing air pollution from electricity generation and road transport. Every year, around 2,600 (2% of) Australian deaths are attributed to air pollution from human activities such as transport, mining, and power generation using fossil fuels.

And as the planet continues to warm, heatwaves, bushfires and floods will bring a heavier social impact. For example, natural hazards are responsible for an estimated 30% of total insurance costs today. Australian home insurance premiums would increase by as much as 15% (A$782 million) by 2050 if global emissions continue unabated.

So let’s explore what the social cost of carbon entails, and why it should inform policymaking in Australia in areas such as fossil fuel extraction, infrastructure projects and emissions reduction.

What is the social cost of carbon?

The social cost of carbon is a monetary value of the harms of climate change associated with emitting an additional tonne of carbon dioxide.

Estimating this cost should capture harms to human health, decreased agricultural productivity, damages from natural disasters and other effects on the economy.

A study this month in Nature put the global social cost of carbon at A$275 per tonne of CO₂ released. Impacts on health (49%) and agriculture (45%) accounted for most of this.

The estimate should cover harms from natural disasters.
Shutterstock

Climate change poses grave risks to many Australian homes, lives and livelihoods through, for example, worsening floods, heatwaves and bushfires.

Australia’s new climate change law legislates emissions reduction of 43% below 2005 levels by 2030, and reaching net-zero by 2050. It also requires climate policy benefits to be assessed each year.

But we don’t know exactly how the assessments will be conducted, and the law does not explicitly mention measuring the social cost of carbon.

Weighing up the social cost of projects

Accounting for the social cost of carbon would lead to investment and policy decisions that support emissions reduction. It would also deter support for projects that increase emissions, such as new coal mines.

Decision-makers often use a cost-benefit analysis to assess and compare projects. If a project increases emissions, the social cost of carbon multiplied by the expected emissions should be added to the overall costs of the project.

Projects that decrease emissions, such as a new offshore wind farm, should have these benefits included in the assessment, bringing the overall net cost of the project down. Infrastructure Australia’s guide to economic appraisal mentions such an approach.

How to apply the SCC in decisions related to emissions.
RFF

The United States and Canada already include the social cost of carbon in assessments of federal regulatory proposals and investments. 14 US states, including California and New York, also use the measure.

Last year, the Biden administration announced it would increase the social cost of carbon to A$76 per tonne of CO₂, which is much higher than the A$10 per tonne of CO₂ used by the Trump administration.

Also in 2021, the Australian Capital Territory became the first and only Australian jurisdiction to adopt the social cost of carbon. It was set at an interim A$20 per tonne of CO₂ and will be reviewed in future.

What we’re calling for

A key component of calculating the social cost of carbon is a damage function that typically uses a single equation to estimate a global GDP loss.

However, as we argue in our letter, regional and sub-national damage functions would better capture the diverse range of climate change impacts, especially for human health and agriculture.

For example, losses in agricultural and labour productivity from heat stress differ by country. Economic losses range from less than 2% per year to over 28% per year in 2100, depending on the country and emissions scenario used.

Also, climate zones are a key determinate of the number of deaths associated with extremely hot and cold temperatures.

Our arguments are echoed by a US Interagency Working Group on the social cost of carbon. In 2017, it recommended separating market and non-market climate damages by region and sector.

Australia’s new annual climate change statement should also explicitly examine the health benefits of climate policies. These are likely to include fewer respiratory illnesses as a result of cleaner air, and increases in exercise associated with active travel options such as walking and cycling.

Understanding these health benefits will also improve decision-making and could change our approach to dealing with climate change.

How climate zones differ across Australia.
Longden (2019)

Better climate decision-making

Climate change and related extreme events are already being felt in Australia. Back-to-back floods this year and the devastating Black Summer bushfires are just a few examples of our vulnerability to extreme weather events.

Governments must account for the impacts of these events when making decisions. Annual assessments of climate change policies are a decent start. Establishing a robust method to explicitly measure the social cost of carbon would go one better.

Thomas Longden receives funding from the Healthy Environments And Lives (HEAL) National Research Network as part of the National Health and Medical Research Council special initiative in Human Health and Environmental Change (grant number 2008937).

He also receives funding from the Australian Government Department of Defence.

He is a member of the ACT Climate Change Council, which provides advice to the Minister for Water, Energy and Emissions Reduction on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change.

Richard Norman receives funding from the NHMRC through the HEAL Network

Sotiris Vardoulakis is the Director of the Healthy Environments And Lives (HEAL) Network, which receives funding from the NHMRC Special Initiative in Human Health and Environmental Change. He also receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the NSW Government, CSIRO, Asthma Australia, and Dyson. He is a member of the Public Health Association of Australia and of the Climate and Health Alliance.

Tom Kompas receives funding from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planing.

– ref. Australia finally has new climate laws. Now, let’s properly consider the astounding social cost of carbon – https://theconversation.com/australia-finally-has-new-climate-laws-now-lets-properly-consider-the-astounding-social-cost-of-carbon-190050

The best films at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Danks, Associate professor in Cinema and Media Studies, RMIT University

After two years online, the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) returned to its regular, outsized form spread across a range of inner-city, suburban and regional Victorian locations.

It’s been many years since the experience of the same festival has been something to share with fellow moviegoers. These days, everyone traces their own path through the myriad of bad, good and excellent films and related experiences on offer.

If anything, this has been accentuated post-lockdown, now it is also possible to watch some films online and stick to particular geographic locations. This certainly has had an impact on the festival, fragmenting any real sense of a coherent and truly shared experience. This is not really a criticism – as there are many advantages to being able to cherry-pick and fully curate your own festival – but a reality that reflects the smorgasbord of what is on offer.

This is also reflected in the attendances at the festival. These varied massively between the small number of blockbuster films on offer (things like Park Chan-wook’s atmospheric but insubstantial Decision to Leave) and the many sparsely populated screenings that characterised the two-and-a-half weeks back in the cinema.

The festival is a unique and essential event, but it has been as affected by the challenges of clawing back an audience. In this regard, it was fascinating to see one of the festival’s highlights, Gus Berger’s The Lost City of Melbourne. This conventional archival documentary with talking heads spoke with some urgency about the legacy and impermanence of Melbourne’s built environment with a particular focus on its many lost and few surviving picture palaces.

Of the 25 or so films I watched – life didn’t stop to allow me to fully feast at the table – here are five that have stayed with me.

Man on Earth

Over the past 20 years, Amiel Courtin-Wilson has emerged as one of Australia’s most perceptive, challenging, honest and adventurous filmmakers. His latest film, Man on Earth, is an unflinching, unguarded and deeply affecting experiential portrait of the last seven days in the life of Bob Rosenzweig.

Living in Washington and suffering from Parkinson’s, Bob has chosen to die with dignity. Courtin-Wilson’s intimate and deeply respectful documentary provides a touching portrait of a man making peace with those around him, including the filmmaking team. Man on Earth emerged from another project that used thermal imagery to record the final moments of human life and its afterglow. It is a true collaboration between the filmmakers and Bob, who asked them to document his last days.

This provides a wonderful sense of encounter and discovery as the filmmakers (who remain careful observers and not the object of the film) get to know their subject in the hyper-aware, emotionally charged and privileged moments that mark the end of his life. Although the film remains focused on Bob and his encounters with friends and family – his last call to one of his sons on the day of his death is heart-wrenching – it also highlights the passage of time, the changes in weather and the arcs of light that sculpt his final days.

Man on Earth is a beautiful, pensive, deeply engaged companion piece to an extraordinary group of intimate portraits (of Jack Charles, Cecil Taylor, Robina Courtin and Ben Lee) that have provided the spine of Courtin-Wilson’s filmmaking career.

Senses of Cinema

This edition of the MIFF provided a rich slate of what might be called contemporary independent Australian films. A wonderful counterweight to this was John Hughes and Tom Zubrycki’s long-in-gestation Senses of Cinema, a deeply archival portrait and argument for the ongoing legacy of the film cooperative movement in Sydney and Melbourne in the late 1960s, ‘70s and early ’80s.

Senses of Cinema draws on archival material, especially recorded interviews with key players such as Albie Thoms, Margot Nash and Phillip Noyce, as well as footage from an astute collection of the widely varied but often activist films shown and distributed by the co-ops. It provides a convincing argument for the essential contribution of these collaborative and politically charged organisations to Australian cinema.

A co-op meeting as documented in Senses of Cinema.

The co-ops didn’t fund or make films, but provided an essential space for local and international work to be shown and debated. Hughes and Zubrycki’s documentary borrows its name from the more recent and groundbreaking online film journal, Senses of Cinema. In so doing, it recognises a shared connection between the various facets of non-mainstream, activist, grassroots and experimental screen culture in Australia. It sits alongside the extraordinary group of documentaries devoted to leftist film history Hughes has completed over the past 40 years, as well as the more observational and deeply committed works Zubrycki has created over the same period.

Made by two of Australia’s most important and, at times, maverick documentarians in the twilight of their careers, Senses of Cinema speaks, in every way, to the importance of collaboration and the necessary recognition and resurrection of often-forgotten parts of our film history and culture.

The Afterlight

Both Man on Earth and Senses of Cinema document lives, events and organisations as they pass into memory. Charlie Shackleton’s archival documentary, The Afterlight, memorialises those who live within an “afterlife” stored on celluloid.

The Afterlight is part of a broader movement in contemporary cinema and gallery art that highlights the decay and impermanence of the moving image, particularly in its material form prior to the digital turn. Taking its place alongside the work of filmmakers and video artists such as Bill Morrison and Christian Marclay, it collages together images from hundreds of films – all in black and white – that feature actors who are no longer alive. In some respects, the implications of Shackleton’s film are banal – who hasn’t registered that the images you might be watching are of people who are no longer alive? But his work is given force by both the way the images are organised and the conceptual conceit that surrounds the film’s distribution and exhibition.

Afterlight was completed on celluloid and only exists in a single 35mm print that will tour the world and eventually weather and disintegrate. The varying quality of the footage it includes also speaks to the unequal fate of marginalised films alongside those that have been carefully guarded and monetised by the archive. In its global circulation it will also melancholically map the dwindling capacities of the world’s cinema to show archival films in their original state.

R.M.N.

Since his Cannes Palme d’Or-winning film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu has been carefully building a rich filmography exploring the legacies of communism and the Ceausescu regime. His work also focuses on the deep-seated traditions and faith of Christianity, the impact of multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity on more traditional, often insular communities, and the opening up of contemporary Romania to the rest of Europe.

Set during the holiday period in the early days of winter, R.M.N. provides a subtle yet ultimately devastating portrait of a community gradually undone by the arrival of overseas workers, and the tide of xenophobia that crests in their wake. Centring on a local resident returning from his employment in Germany, Mungiu provides an unsettling vision of contemporary Transylvania. It shows a community embracing the modern world while also returning to the ancient prejudices and behaviours that lie just beneath the surface.

Taking its name from the Romanian acronym for a MRI, R.M.N. is an outstanding portrait of a physical, experiential and psychological environment. It’s a film that seems usefully unresolved, providing a heat map of the urges, prejudices and troubling histories that sit just below its often-beautiful, wintry surface.

Corsage

Along with R.M.N., Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and will undoubtedly move on to a relatively wide release in the world’s arthouses.

On one level, it follows the conventions of what we might expect of a late 19th-century period piece. But it combines this with a revisionist account of the life of Empress Elizabeth of Austria (popularly know as Sissi) as she turns 40 and starts to question the restrictive public role she has been corseted into.

The cinematic representation and legacy of the figure of Sissi is indelibly marked by the trilogy of films made in the 1950s featuring the breathtakingly young and beautiful Romy Schneider in the title role. Kreutzer provides a different perspective on Sissi’s life, experience and appearance, drawing an extraordinary performance out of Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) in the central role.

Corsage wades into very crowded waters alongside other 21st-century feminist takes on historical figures like Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana – and the use of modern pop songs on the soundtrack certainly brings to mind Sofia Coppola’s opus. Nevertheless, it provides a singular account of famous and admired woman trying to break free from the shackles of both societal expectation and history.

I do know several of the filmmakers mentioned in this article – Ameiel Courtin-Wilson, John Hughes & Tom Zubrycki (this is not surprising within Australian screen culture & considering my role as a curator). I have curated programs of their works perviously for the Melbourne Cinematheque. Other than co-programming screenings devoted to the Co-ops, I have had no direct involvement with any of these films.

– ref. The best films at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival – https://theconversation.com/the-best-films-at-this-years-melbourne-international-film-festival-189530

Penny Wong’s diplomacy efforts in the Pacific begin to bear fruit with PNG security pact

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael O’Keefe, Director, Master of International Relations, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, right, poses for a photo with Samoa’s Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa AP

Papua New Guinea (PNG) has announced it wants to establish a security agreement with Australia, welcome news for analysts wary of rising Chinese influence.

This decision reflects well on Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s tireless diplomacy with Pacific Island capitals. Since becoming Foreign Minister a little over three months ago, Wong has made four separate trips to the Pacific; to Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, New Zealand and Solomon Islands, as well as engaging with Pacific leaders during July’s Pacific Islands Forum Summit.

And these efforts appear to be paying off. Not only has PNG expressed an interest in a security pact with Australia, but Timor-Leste has also just signed a defence cooperation agreement.

However, there is both much more and much less to the PNG security announcement than meets the eye.

The announcement by Justin Tkatchenko, PNG’s new foreign minister, was light on detail. Tkatchenko said the security treaty with Australia has been in the works since 2019 but has been spurred by the recent security agreement between Solomon Islands and China.

Filling current security “loopholes”

In 2019, Australia and Papua New Guinea signed up to a Comprehensive Strategic and Economic Partnership, which included a commitment to “develop a bilateral security treaty to further promote our shared security interests”. Progress then stalled.

Tkatchenko noted the proposed new agreement will “fill in the loopholes” caused by the current security situation in the region and complement the regional security agreement the two countries already have in place. He mentioned that discussions were at early stages and could be expanded to include New Zealand and the US, due to the importance of regional security.

Tkatchenko also expressed hopes an agreement could be reached by the end of the year, but didn’t provide much context of how the new agreement would complement other regional security agreements.

Not surprisingly, Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles were cautious in response. Wong confirmed talks were at a “very early stage”, while Marles went to great lengths to note the initiative originated in Port Moresby rather than Canberra.

Why now?

The announcement was a signal of PNG’s strategic intent and its concern over the security arrangement signed by Solomon Islands and China in April.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, right, locks arms with visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Honiara, Solomon Islands. The PNG/Australia security pact was spurred by the security agreement between the Solomon Islands and China in April.
AP

PNG is now declaring its security interests are aligned with the US and Australia, a move sure to please Canberra. But this announcement places PNG is a peculiar position.

Like Australia, China is PNG’s number one trading partner, but Port Moresby has declared its hand by siding with Australia.

Australia has been punished with hefty trade sanctions by Beijing for “accusing and smearing China” in the past. However, knowledge of these actions have not (yet) dissuaded PNG’s leaders from siding against China.

History of cooperation

There is a sound basis for a security agreement between Australia and PNG. The Australian Defence Force has been the PNG military’s primary partner since PNG established independence in 1975. Through a Status of Forces agreement developed at the time, the two nations have effectively conducted numerous cooperative defence activities.

Security cooperation between the two countries was established through Australia’s Defence Cooperation Program. In fact, the structure and doctrine of PNG’s military was strongly influenced by Australia’s military, and commanders of the PNG military have been trained in Australian defence colleges.

In contrast, practical defence cooperation has been longstanding and significant. Practical defence cooperation involves training at all levels in PNG and in Australia. Forces from both nations have operated together in peacekeeping operations in Bougainville and Solomon Islands.

Australian Major General Scott Winter inspects Papua New Guinea Defence Force troops during a welcome parade. The structure of PNG’s military has been strongly influenced by Australia’s.
Department of Defence

Australia also regularly provides humanitarian assistance after natural disasters in PNG. In June, Australian forces and aircraft were also deployed to provide security and assist during PNG’s election.

The most significant activity at the moment is the $170 million redevelopment of the Lombrum naval base on Manus Island (in cooperation with the US). Facilities are being upgraded to house patrol boats donated by Australia, but it’s important to note that Canberra’s offer only came after a Chinese attempt to rebuild Lombrum in 2018, pointing again to the importance of geopolitical considerations.

A strong signal from Pacific nations

High-level support in Port Moresby and Canberra is essential to the success of this new security agreement. Pressure on Port Moresby is likely to be intense, as will inducements to change direction.

The announcement of the security pact sends a strong signal that Pacific states are making choices about where they stand in the geo-political contest between the US and China. The Solomon Islands security treaty with China showed that the contest has well and truly arrived in Australia’s backyard.

The Albanese government promised to listen to Pacific interests, and under Wong’s leadership, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has responded effectively with compromises on climate change and providing additional development assistance.

And in a refreshing shift in policy, Canberra has not rushed to frame any agreement between itself and a Pacific nation as part of a geo-strategic competition. Now PNG has spoken and no doubt more Pacific Island nations will follow suit.

Michael O’Keefe has received funding from the Australian Army Research Centre.

– ref. Penny Wong’s diplomacy efforts in the Pacific begin to bear fruit with PNG security pact – https://theconversation.com/penny-wongs-diplomacy-efforts-in-the-pacific-begin-to-bear-fruit-with-png-security-pact-189710

Pakistan floods: will rich nations ever pay for climate loss and damage?

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Pill, Research fellow, Australian National University

A third of the country underwater. Crops washed away. Some 33 million people homeless. Billions of dollars of damage. A looming food crisis. And still the unprecedented rains come. Pakistan’s mega-monsoon dumped up to 700% of the usual August rainfall on parts of the country, with floodwaters boosted by glacial melting from the enormous heatwave that hit the country in March. Climate experts say climate change amplified the event, at the very least.

It’s small wonder Pakistan’s climate minister, Sherry Rehman, is calling not only for immediate aid, but for compensation by rich industrialised countries for the damage caused by their greenhouse gas emissions.

As she told The Guardian, Pakistan has emitted less than 1% of the world’s greenhouse gases – but is already amongst the hardest-hit nations. “The bargain made between the global north and global south is not working … climate change is accelerating much faster than predicted.”

Rich countries, however, show very little enthusiasm for paying for loss and damage caused in part by their emissions. But as climate impacts worsen, can this last?

Rich countries don’t want to talk about compensation – and you can see why

One thing is not subject to debate: loss and damage from climate change is happening. “Loss and damage” is the phrase used by climate negotiators at the annual United Nations climate summits to refer to impacts caused by climate change.

But while all 165 nations party to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change agree it is happening, there is no agreement on who should pay for it.

The recent G20 talks in Bali failed, in part over this exact issue. The question of who pays caused major debate between industrialised and developing nations, which also disagreed over how strongly to criticise the failure by rich countries to deliver a promised A$145 billion annually in climate finance by 2020.

But this is changing. Increasingly, action and funding for loss and damage is being seen a necessity – even by developed countries. Even so, compensation for historical emissions is still off the table.

In part, this is fair enough. While we know early industrialising countries like the United States have emitted disproportionate volumes of greenhouse gases, it’s much harder to pin down how much climate change has contributed to specific events.

In Pakistan, for instance, the monsoon season has always been part of the region’s weather patterns. It would be challenging to fairly allocate compensation if you don’t know the amount a high-emitting nation contributed to the disaster.

Having said that, given the key role fossil fuel companies have played in causing climate change – and in lobbying to prevent climate action – it will likely be easier to determine liability for private companies rather than whole nations.

That’s not the only problem. Where would compensation go? Would it flow to the most-affected communities, or would much of it be absorbed by central bureaucracies? And what about emerging high polluters such as China, which is still considered a developing country but emits about a third of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than double the annual emissions of the US? Which courts would decide on the compensatory amount, given there are no “climate courts” equipped to deal with these questions?

Perhaps most important is the legal precedent set if rich nations explicitly compensated developing nations for losses due to climate change. Legally, compensation is paid by a person, organisation or country to a victim. So if rich countries begin to pay compensation, it could become a bottomless pit.

This is why the topic of compensation is fraught and contentious. Despite its popularity with some leaders of developing nations and climate justice advocates, the legal complexities and potentially enormous sums involved mean it’s never likely to get traction.

What we’re more likely to see is increased funding and ambition for climate adaptation and disaster response – climate finance, as it’s known. The difference here is the funding is being given willingly. But at present, climate finance is not flowing at anywhere near the levels needed.

Will the issue of compensation stall climate progress?

Despite the improbability, some developing countries are strongly focused on compensation. That’s understandable, given their relatively minuscule emissions and the disproportionate damage being done. But it remains a dealbreaker for rich countries.

The problem is, the issue risks overshadowing crucial climate negotiations. As the question of compensation is politicised, it stalls other areas of climate change action where we urgently need progress, such as securing more immediate funding for people affected by climate-fuelled natural disasters.

Pakistan will head the bloc of developing countries in negotiations at the November COP27 climate change conference in Egypt. Expect to see fierce negotiations and strong opinions on compensation payments and finance for loss and damage.

This year’s conference was already expected to be tense, given the background of the energy crisis gripping Europe and the scramble for more fossil fuels to shore up supply gaps, as well as multiplying climate disasters. We can expect to see fierce negotiations and strong opinions on compensation payments and finance for loss and damage.

As the unprecedented European and American droughts show us, rich countries are hardly immune to climate impacts. They do, however, have a greater ability to cope and bounce back.

Research has shown communities and global policymakers are not convinced compensation is a solution.

What is clear is that climate finance needs to ramp up and be spent effectively. It must be pragmatic and practical, moving away from politicised debate over loss and damage and compensation in favour of making sure people on the ground – such as the millions left without homes in Pakistan – can access help.

As research fellow at the Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Dr Melanie Pill receives funding from the Australian Government for research on climate change adaptation.

– ref. Pakistan floods: will rich nations ever pay for climate loss and damage? – https://theconversation.com/pakistan-floods-will-rich-nations-ever-pay-for-climate-loss-and-damage-190127

A giant ‘bullseye’ on the Nullarbor Plain was created by ancient sea life

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milo Barham, Senior Lecturer, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University

Environments across the planet are changing dramatically in response to human population growth and climate change. Some scientists even say human activity has pushed Earth into a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

Amid this rapid transformation some special places, protected by fortuitous geography and geology, change so slowly they preserve evidence of Earth’s past over unfathomable timescales.

One such place is the flat, dry expanse of the Nullarbor Plain in southern Australia, where traces still remain of events millions of years in the past. Using high-resolution satellite imaging we have begun to map out some of these traces.

In new research published today in Earth Surface Processes and Landforms, we report the discovery of an enigmatic “bullseye” structure more than a kilometre across. We believe it is the remains of an ancient reef, created by microbes some 14 million years ago when the Nullarbor was at the bottom of the ocean.

No trees, no water, but not boring

Named the Nullarbor Plain (meaning “treeless”) during colonisation, and Oondiri (meaning “waterless”) by some of the First Nations people of the area, the region is notoriously dry, flat and barren. The exceptional overall flatness of the plain (the average slope is much, much less than 1°) is one of the first indicators of the region’s stability.

The rocks beneath the Nullarbor Plain are made of limestone that originally formed in shallow marine seagrass meadows. Such rocks can dissolve in weakly acidic rain and groundwater.

Man abseils into a cave opening in a flat plain — Abseiling into Murra-El-Elevyn cave, Nullarbor Plain, Western Australia. Photo courtesy of Mateja Ferk.

Due in part to its dryness, the region has not been intensively dissolved, or eroded by rivers or glaciers in the millions of years since it emerged from the ocean. This is in stark contrast to the classic ruggedness of much younger tropical landscapes (such as the volcanic Hawaiian islands), which are far wetter and more geologically active.

The plain covers some 200,000 km² and, like the curvature of the Earth, landscape features on the Nullarbor Plain are almost imperceptible to the human eye. Despite this subtlety, the area is not as featureless as you might think.

Careful scientific study and high-resolution satellite data are increasingly revealing the secrets of the Nullarbor Plain’s past.

Mummified marsupials and ancient dunes

Isolated caves do punctuate the Nullarbor Plain. Within their dry chambers, remarkably preserved fossils yield glimpses of Australia’s extinct animals that would rival the most wondrous zoo menagerie.

A photo showing a mummified Tasmanian tiger lying in sediment. — A mummified thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) preserved in Thylacine Hole cave on the Nullarbor Plain, Western Australia.
David C Lowry via Spelio / Flickr, CC BY-SA

Mummified thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) remains and complete thylacoleo (marsupial lion) skeletons from thousands of years ago capture striking snapshots of changing ecosystems.

Older still are gentle linear ridges that cross the Nullarbor Plain. Recently, we showed these ridges are relics of a long-vanished landscape. Ancient sand dunes controlled the gentle dissolution of the underlying limestone to leave a subtle imprint of windblown patterns from millions of years ago.

Coloured map showing a digital model of the landscape preserving linear dune features. — A digital model of the landscape showing the imprinted relic of ancient, vanished dunes on the Nullarbor Plain.
Burnett et al., Author provided

The bullseye

For our most recent work, we used landscape data from the TanDEM-X Digital Elevation Model produced by the German Aerospace Centre, which has a resolution of around 12 metres.

Studying these images of the Nullarbor revealed a previously unnoticed “bullseye” feature: a ring-shaped hill with a central dome, just over a kilometre wide and only a few metres high.

Coloured map showing bullseye structure. — Digital elevation model of the newly discovered bullseye remnant structure.
Lipar et al., Author provided

Initially, we thought we had found the first meteorite impact crater to be discovered on the Nullarbor Plain. The area is famous for meteorites that can help us understand the history of our solar system, but to date no definitive craters caused by meteorites have been found.

However, when we took a closer look at the bullseye we saw none of the chemical or high-pressure indicators of an impact.

We uncovered the real explanation for the bullseye after cutting and polishing samples of rock thin enough to let light shine through, and inspecting them under a microscope. Unlike the limestone seen at hundreds of other sites across the plain, here we saw evidence for tiny microbial organisms holding the sediment together.

Supported by similar “doughnut” structures formed by algae on the Great Barrier Reef, we interpreted the bullseye as an ancient isolated “reef”. This biogenic mound formed on the seabed long ago but degraded so slowly after the land was lifted above the waves that it is still recognisable roughly 14 million years later.

How understanding the past can help the future

Our findings add to increasing recognition of the region as an exceptional archive of environmental change that we must better understand and protect.

The emergence of the Nullarbor Plain has been an important driver of the evolution of plants and animals. Ancient fossils and even DNA preserved due to the stable conditions will help us more accurately reconstruct its vanished ecosystems.

More complete understanding of how landscapes and ecosystems were transformed in the past will in turn help us conserve the animals, plants and environments we have today, and minimise the negative impacts of future anthropogenic climatic change.

Milo Barham receives funding from the Minerals Research Institute of Western Australia, as well as Iluka Resources Ltd. for investigating mineral sands, including on the margins of the Nullarbor Plain.

Dr. Matej Lipar receives funding from Slovenian Research Agency, Australian Speleological Federation Karst Conservation Fund, and German Aerospace Centre TandemX.

– ref. A giant ‘bullseye’ on the Nullarbor Plain was created by ancient sea life – https://theconversation.com/a-giant-bullseye-on-the-nullarbor-plain-was-created-by-ancient-sea-life-189125

The Rings of Power is suffering a racist backlash for casting actors of colour – but Tolkien’s work has always attracted white supremacists

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Young, Lecturer, Deakin University

Since Amazon announced actors of colour among the cast of its new series The Rings of Power in February this year, criticisms of their inclusion have gained media attention.

The coverage typically positions criticisms of The Rings of Power as “backlash” from true, “diehard” fans resisting so-called “wokeness”.

This misrepresents the situation. There are also fans who welcome the increased diversity over what is seen in Tolkien’s novels and previous adaptations.
Racist abuse of actors of colour and a “review bombing” campaign against The Rings of Power suggest that there is more going on than just fan disagreement about Tolkien’s world.

As Tolkien researcher Craig Franson explains, far-right political actors are whipping up the controversy, weaponising it to help get fascist talking points into the mainstream. Franson shows that the right-wing “outrage machine” stirred up “a massive hate mob” through mainstream right-wing press.

Fans who feel they are defending Tolkien’s legacy are being used as pawns to serve dangerous anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian agenda and siding, whether they mean to or not, with racist extremists.

Fascist appropriation of Tolkien’s work may seem surprising given his anti-Nazi statements, which include calling Hitler a “ruddy little ignoramus.” It is not new, however. In the 1970s, the books became a favourite of Italian fascists who even held a Camp Hobbit festival to promote their politics.

In the early 2000s, the now former extremist Derek Black Jr started a chat forum dedicated to the Lord of the Rings on a major white supremacist website when Peter Jackson’s films came out. He told The New York Times:

I figured you could get people who liked with such a white mythos, a few turned on by white nationalism.

Not all racism is fascist (a specific political ideology), but the far-right always has racist elements in its ideologies.

Ismael Cruz Córdova, who plays Arondir, a Silvan Elf in The Rings of Power.
Matt Grace/ Prime Video

Why do racists like Tolkien and Middle-Earth?

Tolkien made statements against Nazis and also apartheid, but this is not the same as being anti-racist or pro-equality. His condemnation of Hitler, he wrote in the same letter, was for

ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to preserve in its true light.

The comment shows that he believed that some people were essentially different to and better than others. This notion is foundational to racism.

Tolkien’s belief in racial difference translated to Middle-earth. Within the imaginary species (elves and humans in particular) there are hierarchies. Some humans are inherently better than others; we see this when Faramir talks about “High, Men of the West… the Middle Peoples, Men of the Twilight… the Wild, the Men of Darkness” in The Two Towers.

Individuals from “High” races may have moral failings and become evil, but collectively they do not serve it. Physical characteristics (like hair and skin colour) are linked to non-physical traits in ways that reflect the logics of real-world racism.

There are traces of evidence that Tolkien did not imagine “good” peoples as exclusively white. The ways these are expressed still sometimes reinforce racial hierarchies. In The Return of the King, some people who fight against Sauron are counted as

men of Gondor, yet their blood was mingled, and there were short and swarthy folk among them” because some of their ancestors are not “High, Men of the West.

“Good” species and races in Middle-Earth are constructed through references to European cultures (especially northwestern Europe), and the “bad” races are constructed through orientalist stereotypes. Tolkien’s letters show the ways that real-world ideas about race influenced Middle-Earth. He wrote “I do think of the ‘Dwarves’ like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations.”

In a 1958 letter about a film treatment of The Lord of the Rings he wrote:

Orcs are … squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol types.

There is evidence that he revised his representation of Dwarves between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to try move away from anti-Semitic stereotypes. There is no such evidence for Orcs even though he wrestled with the moral problem of a purely “evil” species of beings.

The combination of racial stereotypes and hierarchies built into Middle-Earth make Tolkien’s work appealing to racists and a useful political tool for the far-right. There is, however, more to the world and stories he created.

Being troubled by racism is also not just a new “woke” reading of Tolkien’s writing. C.S. Lewis wrote a review in 1955 of Lord of the Rings that reported some readers “imagine they have seen a rigid demarcation between black and white people” draw along clear moral lines.

Given Lewis was Tolkien’s friend, it’s not surprising that he defended the books. A letter in the fanzine Xero from 1963 expressed concern about “subtle racism,” hierarchies within humanity, and “monochromatic” representation of elves and orcs in Middle-Earth.

The contradiction in Tolkien’s world

The need to overcome differences to form alliances and make the world better is a central theme in Tolkien’s writing. Evil is defeated only when different peoples of Middle-Earth, such as Elves, Dwarves and Humans, fight against it together.

The prosocial values of cooperation and acting for the good of others are embedded in Tolkien’s stories of Middle-earth. They are also at odds with racism and fascism which see “others” as not only different but inferior, dangerous, not to be trusted, that is, as enemies.

Scholar and fan Dimitra Fimi has written:

Tolkien’s racial prejudices are implicit in Middle-Earth, but his values – friendship, fellowship, altruism, courage, among many others – are explicit, which makes for a complex, more interesting world.

Protecting Tolkien’s legacy

Casting actors of colour to play Elves, Dwarves and Harfoots in The Rings of Power does not insert beings who are not white into the imaginary world of Middle-Earth. They were already there, constructed through out-dated (even for Tolkien’s time) concepts of racial difference among humans and false stereotypes about real peoples.

Tolkien’s imagination was vast and varied, but it was not without limits. The world he created reflected some of the worst aspects of reality with its racist stereotypes and hierarchies.

All adaptations, including of Tolkien’s writings, change their source material in ways that reflect the time and place in which they are made.

With The Rings of Power, Amazon, the Tolkien Estate (headed by his grandson Simon) and their partners have decided to protect the positive, humane aspects of Tolkien’s legacy which represented the best, rather than the limits, of his imagination.

Helen Young does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Rings of Power is suffering a racist backlash for casting actors of colour – but Tolkien’s work has always attracted white supremacists – https://theconversation.com/the-rings-of-power-is-suffering-a-racist-backlash-for-casting-actors-of-colour-but-tolkiens-work-has-always-attracted-white-supremacists-189963

Curious Kids: why do seashells sound like the ocean when you put them to your ear?

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Brennan-Jones, Head of Ear Health, Telethon Kids Institute, Curtin University

Why do seashells make a sound like the ocean when you put them to your ear? – Remy, age 9, Wangaratta, Victoria

Thanks for the great question Remy!

My kids and I have collected a lot of seashells and we love listening to them to remind us of the sea.

But the seashells are not actually making any sounds themselves. So what’s going on?

Seashells ‘catch’ sounds

Each seashell is a unique shape. Hollow and curved ones can “catch” some of the sounds around you. That’s when sound enters the opening of the shell.

Once in the shell, these sounds bounce around. This makes the sounds get slightly louder (or amplified) before they leave the shell.

The sounds seashells “catch” tend to be what scientists call lower-frequency sounds. Think of these as deeper, or more rumbling sounds.

The sound of the ocean is also a low-frequency sound. That’s why it sounds similar to the sounds caught in a shell.

But why can I hear it?

The sound you hear when you put a shell against your ear is actually parts of the background noise around you, just turned up a little by the shell.

So if you’re next to the ocean, the shell picks up the sounds of the ocean. If you’re nowhere near the ocean, the shell picks up other deep and rumbling sounds, such as the wind or the fridge.

There is nearly always some kind of background noise around us the shell can pick up, even when it is very quiet.

As the shell turns up the sound, this means you can hear it over the other background noise around you.

Here’s why you can hear the sound of the ocean.

It’s not just seashells

Sounds are turned up all the time in nature. It’s not just with seashells.

In fact, our own ears are shaped to make important sounds around louder for us.

If you hold an empty cup to your ear, you might also hear a sound like the sea. But there is something special about holding a seashell in your hand, knowing it is from the beach. Sometimes the shell even smells like the beach.

Even though it is not actually the sound of the sea you are hearing, if you close your eyes and listen closely it can almost feel like you are back sitting by the water.

Chris Brennan-Jones receives funding for research from the NHMRC and the Western Australian Department of Health.

– ref. Curious Kids: why do seashells sound like the ocean when you put them to your ear? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-do-seashells-sound-like-the-ocean-when-you-put-them-to-your-ear-188650

ABC, USP Journalism keen to boost Pacific media partnerships

By Asia Pacific Report -

September 8, 2022

By Geraldine Panapasa in Suva

The University of the South Pacific’s Journalism Programme is open to strengthening engagement and partnership with the Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) following the recent visit of senior ABC executives to Fiji.

Last week, ABC International Services head Claire Gorman, ABC International Development public affairs lead Jo Elsom, ABC Sport head Nick Morris and ABC Asia Pacific News managing editor Matt O’Sullivan met USP Journalism coordinator associate professor Shailendra Singh and staff to discuss ways ABC International Development (ABCID) and its regional media development programme (PACMAS) could assist the media in Fiji and journalism students at USP.

The discussions with the visiting ABC delegation focused on the possibility of content sharing, student professional attachments as well as priority areas for partnership such as youth, gender and regional cooperation to strengthen capacity-building and opportunity for growth.

USP Journalism students and staff have participated in a number of ABCID/PACMAS capacity-building workshops and training, including the Women Leaders Media Masterclass, Reporting the Story of Us: Media Masterclass, Factcheck webinar, Pacific Resilience Masterclass as well as a Training of Trainers short-course for Fiji journalists at the Fiji National University’s National Training Productivity Centre.

The ABC executives were also given a brief tour of the newly-refurbished USP Journalism facilities at Laucala campus.

Geraldine Panapasa is editor-in-chief of the University of the South Pacific’s award-winning journalism newspaper Wansolwara. Republished under a partnership between Asia Pacific Report and Wansolwara.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

From microbes to forest bathing, here are 4 ways healing nature is vital to our recovery from COVID-19

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jake M Robinson, Ecologist and Researcher, Flinders University

It’s been more than two years since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of us vividly recalls the first confirmed cases being reported in our home towns. COVID-19 spread across the planet at lightning speed, and the confirmed death toll is approaching 6.5 million. Communities and economies around the world have been devastated, and many societies need a recovery plan.

A growing number of scientists, including us in an article published today in The Lancet Planetary Health, argue protecting and restoring nature can help societies recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and even help prevent future pandemics. Thriving ecosystems are vital for humans and the rest of nature.

The ongoing destruction of nature is a recipe for disaster. Research points to direct links between the destruction of nature and infectious disease outbreaks such as COVID-19.

For instance, the removal of rainforests for agriculture and new towns increases our contact with wildlife that host novel viruses – the kind that “jump the species barrier”. Some cause major disease outbreaks like COVID-19.

In our Lancet Planetary Health paper, we use COVID-19 as a case study to demonstrate how restoring ecosystems can help to combat the health and social problems associated with pandemics.

We are running out of time to restore ecosystems

Ecosystem restoration is the repair of natural systems – such as forests, grasslands and coral reefs – that have been damaged or destroyed. Unfortunately, human activities such as urbanisation, deforestation and pollution could leave 95% of the planet’s land severely damaged by 2050.

The UN has declared 2021 to 2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. The declaration reflects the growing urgency and scale of ecosystem restoration that we must undertake.

There are several ways in which protecting and restoring nature are vital to humanity’s recovery from COVID-19.

1. Enhancing the immune system

The environment is brimful of microscopic life forms: dense clouds of bacteria, tiny fungi, algae and other life forms live in the soil, plants, water and air. Growing evidence suggests exposure to a diverse range of these invisible critters from an early age is vital to our health.

This exposure “primes” our immune systems and allows them to build strong armies of cells that protect us from pathogens. Indeed, having a healthy immune system is important in combating diseases such as COVID-19.

However, the diversity of these beneficial microbes is often much lower in degraded ecosystems than in more natural and diverse areas, such as forests with many different species of plants and animals. Therefore, restoring degraded ecosystems is important for both wildlife and our immune systems.

Furthermore, research suggests exposure to chemicals emitted by some plants – called phytoncides – can boost our immune system and help us fight off viral infections.

2. Letting nature be thy medicine

Spending time in natural environments is widely recognised as important for our health and wellbeing. After all, we are part of nature!

Evidence shows engaging with natural spaces such as forests, meadows and lakes can improve our mental health, reduce blood pressure and enhance our recovery from stress. In Japan, forest bathing – shinrin-yoku – is officially endorsed as a form of nature therapy.

In another of our studies, we showed spending time in nature helped people cope with the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, many people don’t have easy access to high-quality, biodiverse environments. Restoring these environments in urban areas is fundamental to people’s ability to cope with current and future pandemics. And some cities are doing just that; the Adelaide National Park City is a case in point.

Adelaide became the second city in the world to gain National Park City status in December 2021.

3. Reducing the risk of future pandemics

Restoring wild places and reducing human-wildlife interactions could keep diseases at bay and minimise the risk of spillover events. These events occur when a pathogen in one species jumps to another, such as humans. This pathogen can then wreak havoc on human populations and lead to the next pandemic.

It’s important to prevent further encroachment by humans into these wild places for our own sake!

4. Improving social equity

The pandemic shone a spotlight on social inequity and its impacts on public health. Many people in deprived areas:

were more easily infected by the SARS-CoV-2 virus
suffered from more severe COVID-19 symptoms
had fewer opportunities to enhance their general wellbeing.

Our paper discusses the importance of ensuring equal access to biodiverse environments. Restoring ecosystems can improve people’s living environments and create “green job” opportunities in deprived areas. Actions such as tree planting, ecotherapy and environmental management are emerging areas of job growth.

However, we also have a warning: creating green spaces in urban areas can lead to deprived residents being displaced by more affluent ones. Effective safeguards against this gentrification are needed.

Ecosystem restoration should be viewed as a public health intervention. Urgent policy action is required at all levels, from local government to intergovernmental platforms, to transform social, economic and financial models to deliver a simultaneous healthy recovery of ecosystems and humanity.

Jake M Robinson is affiliated with Flinders University and is a member of the UNFCCC Resilience Frontiers think tank.

Christopher Daniels receives funding from the Department for Environment and Water South Australia via the Koala Life not for profit foundation and from the Australian Research Council. He is Chair of the Green Adelaide Landscape Board and holds Adjunct Professor positions at the University of South Australia and Adelaide University.

Martin Breed receives funding from the Australian Research Council, Flinders Foundation, and New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment.

– ref. From microbes to forest bathing, here are 4 ways healing nature is vital to our recovery from COVID-19 – https://theconversation.com/from-microbes-to-forest-bathing-here-are-4-ways-healing-nature-is-vital-to-our-recovery-from-covid-19-188458

World’s earliest evidence of a successful surgical amputation found in 31,000-year-old grave in Borneo

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Ryan Maloney, Research fellow, Griffith University

Modern medicine seems to advance with time thanks to research breakthroughs. Hence it’s often thought that further into the past, only simpler medical practices existed.

The medical expertise of foraging communities such as hunter-gatherers has been thought to be rudimentary and unchanging. It’s been argued that shifts towards settled agricultural life within the past 10,000 years were what created new health problems and advances in medical culture; this includes surgery.

Published today in the journal Nature, we report a discovery shattering this longstanding trope of popular imagination – the skeleton of a young adult from Borneo whose lower left leg was amputated in childhood by a prehistoric surgeon 31,000 years ago.

The outline of a skeleton visible on a cave floor — Oldest burial of a modern human currently known from Island Southeast Asia, dating to 31,000 years ago.
Tim Maloney, Author provided

This finding pre-dates the previous oldest known evidence for amputation surgery by a staggering 24,000 years. It suggests that human medical knowledge and surgical procedures were far more advanced in the distant past of our species than previously thought.

The Borneo discovery

In 2018, some of the earliest known rock art was found in caves of East Kalimantan, Borneo, dating to 40,000 years ago.

The following year, archaeologists from Griffith University, University of Western Australia, and Indonesian institutions of archaeology and conservation (Arkeologi, Bahasa dan Sastra, Pusat Riset Arkeometri BRIN / Balai Pelestarian Cagar Budaya Kalimantan Timur) searched remote caves in dense rainforest for archaeological finds that could shed light on the lifeways of these early artists.

A green and blue map with the outlines of several countries — Map showing the location of the area.
Maria Kottermair, Author provided

Led by local Dayak colleagues, the team travelled to a remote camp via a multi-day canoe and hiking journey. It was accessible only by boat at certain times of the year.

During these field trips, in early 2020 the team conducted archaeological excavation within Liang Tebo cave. There, they uncovered a complete human burial, with grave goods of brightly coloured red ochre pigments and stone burial markers.

Upon closer analysis of the leg bones of the remains, an unexpected discovery emerged.

Close-up of an orange clay-like substance next to a bone covered in sand — Ochre nodule next to the jaw bone.
Tim Maloney, Author provided

Evidence for amputation at 31,000 years

Multiple dating techniques (radiocarbon, uranium-series, and electron-spin-resonance) confirmed the burial had taken place 31,000 years ago, making it Southeast Asia’s oldest known grave. Skeletal analyses confirmed the lower left limb had been surgically amputated; the way the bone tissue had changed over time (known as “bone remodelling”) matched clinical cases of successful amputation that hadn’t become infected.

The healed bone confirms an injury that wasn’t fatal to the patient, implying the surgeon or surgeons likely understood the need to manage and treat it. They were able to prevent infection after the invasive surgery, allowing the person to survive into adulthood.

Yellowed bone remains on a black background, one shown in close-up detail — Left: Left and right legs with pelvic girdle demonstrating complete absence of left lower leg. Right: Close up of tibia and fibula showing remodelled bone.
Tim Maloney, Author provided

Medical developments in tropical rainforests

In the tropical rainforests of Borneo, hot and humid conditions create the perfect breeding ground for various microbes, and therefore increase the chances of getting a wound infected. But the rainforests also have astonishingly rich plant species diversity. This vast “natural pharmacy” may have prompted early flourishing in the use of botanical resources.

The surgeons treating the amputation patient could have drawn upon locally available botanical resources before, during, and after the procedure. Such medicinal plants could have provided anaesthetics and antimicrobial remedies preventing infection.

View of a green landscape from the inside of a stone cave — Tropical rainforest at Liang Tebo.
Tim Maloney, Author provided

Surviving a childhood amputation and living into adulthood among rainforest caves of Borneo also suggests a high degree of community care. A community that painted complex figurative art had also seemingly mastered the complexities of surgical amputation 31,000 years ago.

Sea levels being much lower at this time, Borneo was still connected to Asia. This means the survivor of this surgery also lived close to the potential departing shorelines of ice-age Asia, from where the world’s first mariners departed earlier still, eventually reaching what is now Australia.

This new finding adds to a growing body of evidence that the first modern human groups to reach our part of the world tens of thousands of years ago had medical knowledge and skills beyond what was previously thought.

Tim Ryan Maloney receives funding from the Australian Research Council FT170100025, as well as DP220100462.

Adam Brumm receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Adhi Oktaviana is PhD Candidate at Griffith University, Australia and Researcher at Research Center of Archaeometry, BRIN, Indonesia

Dr India Ella Dilkes-Hall receives funding from Forrest Research Foundation.

Maxime Aubert receives funding from the Australian Research Council, The National Geographic Society, and Google.

Melandri Vlok is a member of the research team.

Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. World’s earliest evidence of a successful surgical amputation found in 31,000-year-old grave in Borneo – https://theconversation.com/worlds-earliest-evidence-of-a-successful-surgical-amputation-found-in-31-000-year-old-grave-in-borneo-189683

Dutton’s high-wire act: holding the Coalition together while presenting as an alternative government

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Kenny, Professor, Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University

When the Liberal Party’s most senior right-wing figure, Peter Dutton, forced a leadership spill in 2018, ending Malcolm Turnbull’s premiership, even some moderates in the party room preferred him over the hyper-ambitious Scott Morrison.
Yet it was to the latter they reluctantly turned, judging him less frightening to voters.

That calculation paid off handsomely with Morrison’s almost lone-hand “miracle” win in the 2019 general election.

Four years later though, after the religious and secretive Morrison had steered the party into its current trench, Liberals unanimously decided there was no viable alternative to Dutton as leader after all.

Many on the Labor side were delighted, viewing Dutton as essentially unelectable, citing his bullish fear-mongering over African gangs, Chinese drums of war, and asylum-seekers.
The decision to install, unopposed, a largely unpopular right-wing leader after Australian voters had just shifted to the left and towards female candidates, speaks to an entirely different calculation being made by Liberals about their leadership in 2022.

Where Morrison had been considered more sellable, by 2022, Dutton’s image problem with young people, cosmopolitans, and particularly with women, hardly mattered.

It was not his ability to win seats three years hence that was paramount in their minds, but the Queenslander’s bona fides as a native conservative speaker capable of holding the centre-right parties together after their electoral drubbing.

Put simply, the fact that Dutton is from Queensland, is well-liked internally, and moreover is trusted, meant he offered the best chance of steadying a party banished from office and adrift from its core values of small government and fiscal restraint.

It is against this largely existential metric in the early months of an ascendant Labor government that Dutton’s preferment is best understood.

The fact Peter Dutton is from Queensland, and well-liked within his party, made him the only viable option for opposition leader.
Lukas Coch/AAP

Of course, from Dutton’s point of view, he wants to do both – hold his beleaguered show together and then win back voters by putting Labor under such extreme pressure that he might ultimately become prime minister.

Right now though, these objectives are pulling him (and them) in different directions.

Published opinion polls such as Resolve Monitor and Newspoll suggest voters saw little in Dutton’s ascension to reassure them that the former government imbibed their stern message through the ballot box.

Yet Dutton remains unchallenged in his leadership and committed to his course. So far, there has been no moderate repositioning.

Despite a key take-out from the election being the defeat of several prominent Liberal men in “safe seats” at the hands of strong female independent candidates, it was left to Dutton’s deputy leader Sussan Ley to acknowledge the Liberal Party’s need to do better on women’s issues.

Neither was there any acceptance that the Coalition’s decade-long assault on climate science had been a political and policy disaster, damaging Australia’s reputation and driving voters across the country towards pro-climate action candidates.

True to his image, Dutton offered no real contrition or apology, no reflection on the electorate’s judgement, and no white flag.

The reason for this bullish stance, underlined by refusing to support the 43% 2030 target in legislation? In two words, Coalition unity.

Presumably, Dutton knows that retreating on climate would weaken a distinct electoral advantage now enjoyed by Labor, while also helping to soften his “hard man” image into the bargain.

Yet the fear is that certain Nationals and even some hard-line Liberals, would rebel and perhaps even break away if the Coalition parties were to go green. Defections to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, and from the Liberals to the Nationals, are thought possible.

As one party insider and Dutton admirer told me, “Peter can’t guarantee a win at the next election from here but he can pretty much lock in a loss if the centre-right fractures or goes to war with itself”.

Yet Dutton faces a critical dilemma. Self-evidently, playing hard-ball to hold his forces together in defeat takes him further away from the disaffected Liberal voters he needs to win back to be competitive.

Boycotting the recent jobs and skills or “union” summit as he dubbed it, while decrying attendees as union “thugs”, seems straight out of the high-impact/maximum aggression playbook used by Tony Abbott.

Does Dutton seriously hold the view that this tactic can work again in the greener and more feminised politics of the 2020s – especially against a unified Labor government?

For him, reaching the requisite 76 seats in the 151-seat House of Representatives without retaking some or all of the previously “safe” electorates lost to so-called “teal” independents in 2022 is a mammoth task. It could even see further metropolitan losses to highly credentialed independents.

And yet retaking these electorates without a decisive step to the middle-ground on key issues such as climate, women’s representation, corruption/parliamentary integrity, and the Uluru agenda, seems equally unlikely.

Reclaiming previously Liberal seats won by the teal independents will be a mammoth task for Dutton without shifting on some policy issues – particularly climate.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

However, according to one school of thought, Dutton has made all the right calls.

On emissions, former minister and fellow Queensland senator, George Brandis, has argued Dutton should ignore current public opinion, and presumably the national interest (or even what is right) and hope that soaring energy and living costs remain sufficiently salient at the next election to drive voters back to the Coalition. Again, this is right out of the Abbott playbook.

This might play well in the base but risks further shredding the Liberal Party’s standing in middle Australia – especially as younger voters enter the electoral roll. Is it worth the reputational damage?

It is well known in Australian politics that opposition leaders appointed in the wake of removal from office almost never become prime minister. Some don’t even get the chance to contest an election.

The last example federally was in the 1910s.

This is hardly surprising when you consider that the most recent single-term government federally was Labor’s James Scullin 1929-32. Thirty-two, by the way, was also the unemployment rate, whereas currently it is closer to 3%.

Strategically, Dutton is right to prioritise his own survival, given that opposition leaders are more vulnerable to their own party rooms than they are to voters.

But he must also lead in a way that provides his colleagues with a realistic belief that government is attainable. This is where greater electoral sensitivity might be useful.

While new governments are invariably re-elected, what is less appreciated is that they also tend to lose seats at their first return to the ballot box. Think Bob Hawke in 1984, John Howard in 1998, Kevin Rudd/Julia Gillard in 2010 and Tony Abbott/Malcolm Turnbull in 2016.

Anthony Albanese’s two-seat majority would be easily obliterated by the seat losses sustained by each of these prime ministers facing their first elections as incumbents.

So the question for Dutton is, does aggressive partisanship on climate, women, and the other issues, really offer the best hope for regaining Australia’s centre-ground in 2025?

An alternative course would be to use his conservative credibility with his colleagues to affect a modernisation along similar lines to those of the broader population.

Call it the difference between being a leader or merely a cheerleader.

Mark Kenny does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Dutton’s high-wire act: holding the Coalition together while presenting as an alternative government – https://theconversation.com/duttons-high-wire-act-holding-the-coalition-together-while-presenting-as-an-alternative-government-189964

The end of jargon: will New Zealand’s plain language law finally make bureaucrats talk like normal people?

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andreea S. Calude, Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, University of Waikato

Which sentence is easier to understand? “He was conveyed to his place of residence in an intoxicated condition.” Or, “He was carried home drunk.” Most people choose the latter, for obvious reasons.

This century-old example is a useful illustration of how “plain language” can be used to communicate more clearly, from everyday interactions right through to government documents.

The new Plain Language Bill now before parliament aims to make this more than just an ideal. Comprehensible information from government organisations, it argues, is a basic democratic right.

The push for simplicity

Plain language movements originated in the 1970s in several countries, including the UK, US and Canada. And there’s some indication the very first mention of plain language dates back as far as the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1300s.

However old, these movements strove for clear, straightforward and accessible language in official documents. This is not merely a “nice-to-have”. In some cases it can save your life – pandemic instructions from the Ministry of Health, for example.

And there is also an element of linguistic equality to it: minority, migrant and marginalised communities have more difficulty understanding complex and jargon-laden documents, which tip the scales even further against them.

Older woman reading documents at home — Plain language is a justice issue, allowing non-native English speakers to better understand official documents.
Getty Images

What is plain language?

There is no single definition of plain language, but both the UK and US commonly use the one proposed by the International Plain Language Working Group:

A communication is in plain language if its wording, structure, and design are so clear that the intended audience can easily find what they need, understand what they find, and use that information.

In practice, it is easier to recognise a text written in plain language than one that is not. But it also depends on who is reading it. What may be plain language for some, will not be for others.

That said, basic tenets of plain language texts in English include:

using concise sentences (15-20 words max)
positive (not negative) clauses
active, not passive voice (“if you break the law” not “if the law is broken”)
verbs rather than complex nouns (“identify” not “indentification”)
common words rather than jargon.

Although the principles of plain language are not new, mandating them through New Zealand legislation is.

The Plain Language Bill

Aotearoa New Zealand’s Plain Language Bill aims to:

improve the effectiveness and accountability of public service agencies and Crown agents, and to improve the accessibility of certain documents that they make available to the public, by providing for those documents to use language that is (a) appropriate to the intended audience; and (b) clear, concise, and well organised.

The bill before parliament does not explicitly define plain language beyond this description. We’ll have to wait for the details.

If the bill is passed into law, the Public Service Commissioner will have to produce material to help agencies comply with plain language requirements.

Only after seeing this guidance material will we know what effect reforms might have on government documents. So, MPs will essentially be voting without knowing what the bill will actually require agencies to do in practice.

The devil in the details

There are some other important things to note about what the bill does and doesn’t do.

It aims to improve accessibility of documents for people with disabilities. It does not affect the use of te reo Māori in government agency documents, nor does it propose to compel agencies to translate documents into languages other than English.

Perhaps most importantly, the bill does not include any enforcement mechanisms, although agencies and agents will be required to report their progress.

The bill is procedural in nature: it creates no enforceable rights or obligations. Members of the public will not be able to seek any form of remedy if they continue to find documents difficult to understand.

International experience

Given that New Zealand’s bill is closely modelled on the Plain Writing Act 2010 in the US, it is useful to consider the law’s impact there.

After it was passed, plain language advocates in the US were initially unimpressed by its impact. But the Center for Plain Language, a non-governmental organisation that publishes report cards on writing quality in government agency documents, noted significant improvements between 2013 and 2021.

In 2013, half of the 20 agencies reviewed either failed or required improvement to meet plain writing requirements, while in 2021 every agency passed.

Will it work?

Will this bill work to make government documents more accessible for New Zealanders? The short answer is, we don’t know yet. But the US experience suggests some progress is likely.

One thing the New Zealand bill is already doing, however, is increasing awareness of the need for clear communication. Some MPs have voiced concern about the cost of the reforms, the lack of enforceability, and even that the new law will increase bureaucracy.

However, important insights can be gained from regular reporting. There are also potential financial benefits from reducing the volume of followup communication with government agencies.

Overall, there is a clear social benefit in improving official communication. And instead of being conveyed to their place of residence in a state of intoxication, perhaps drunks will just be carried home.

Andreea S. Calude received funding from The Royal Society Marsden Grant (2018-2020).

Sam Campbell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The end of jargon: will New Zealand’s plain language law finally make bureaucrats talk like normal people? – https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-jargon-will-new-zealands-plain-language-law-finally-make-bureaucrats-talk-like-normal-people-189870

It’s RUOK Day – but ‘how can I help?’ might be a better question to ask

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Stone, General practitioner; Associate Professor, ANU Medical School, Australian National University

Mental health and suicide prevention have become critical topics of public discussion in the last few decades. Awareness of mental illness has been advanced by public campaigns and personal stories.

There has been tireless advocacy from consumer and carer organisations and mental health institutes. Health care workers, teachers and community members have increased their capacity and expertise in mental health work.

Despite this, mental illness rates continue to rise. Suicide has increased over the last decade, particularly in adolescents and even in children.

So on another RUOK Day, it is understandable we feel unsure a simple question can make a difference. What good is simply asking a family member, friend, or colleague if they are OK? Are we just performing empathy without purpose, making a token query that is ultimately futile? And what do we do if they say “no”?

Poor mental health and mental illness are not the same thing. Just like physical wellbeing, we can be unhealthy without being sick. So how can we best offer support to people who need help across a range of mental health needs?

Recognising stress

Sometimes, people are mentally unwell because of situational stress. Grief, relationship breakdown, job stress, natural disasters and other difficult life circumstances can affect our health, and mean we need additional support.

For other people, stress is long term and severe. People who live with poverty, violence, carer stress, discrimination and loneliness often experience a life of poor health.

People with chronic severe stress often develop physical and mental illnesses, and need additional support.

Increasingly, we are also seeing people struggling with deeper existential issues, particularly in adolescence. Issues like climate change can be so overwhelming young people can feel life has no purpose or meaning.

Deeper existential issues can feel overwhelming.
Pexels/Alex Green, CC BY

Knowing how to help

When people disclose the pain of grief, the feeling of overwhelm, or the hopelessness of poverty, it can be difficult to know how to help. Practical strategies like dropping off a meal, or offering to pick up the children from school can be enormously helpful. But so can listening without judgement or offering remedies. A person living with a difficult situation has likely already done their best to solve problems. They may need support more than solutions.

We can help on an individual level, but we can also contribute as a community to local initiatives like food banks, visiting services for the elderly, youth health initiatives.

We can also advocate for fairer and more equitable policies at a state and federal level. No mental health initiative will protect vulnerable Australians if they don’t have a roof over their head, food on the table and safe refuge from violence.

Understanding trauma

People who live with the legacy of trauma can have memories, experiences and emotions that affect them daily, often without warning. Survivors of trauma often have poor physical and mental health. We are only beginning to understand the impact trauma has on the body as well as the mind.

If people disclose trauma, the most important response is to listen. We shouldn’t try to take over managing the situation. People who live with trauma often have little control over their situation, and it is important to support their own decisions and choices.

A simple question like “how can I help?” can allow people to seek support while still maintaining a sense of control.

Treating mental illness

There is a spectrum of mental ill-health, and people who are very unwell may be experiencing mental illness. Mental illnesses can be short term or lifelong, mild to severe, and cover a range of symptoms including distressing thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and behaviours.

People with long term mental illnesses can have periods of stability, and times of crisis, and often need to rely on carers for support.

The diagnosis of a mental illness is often quite difficult, particularly for people who live with other complex needs. Cultural diversity, intellectual disability, physical illness, neurodiversity and other issues can complicate diagnosis. So it’s essential to consult a health professional who is able to make a diagnosis safely.

Although it is tempting to make a diagnosis of depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions using online programs and checklists, mental health symptoms can overlap with a number of physical diseases, including thyroid disease, anaemia and even diabetes or heart disease. For this reason, a physical check-up with a GP can help.

On RUOK Day, checking in with people with a known history of mental illness is important. Although there is often support in the early stages of illness, people with chronic disease of any type often describe feeling lonely and isolated in the longer term.

Living with suffering

We do not have a cure for everything. It is uncomfortable to recognise life is not fair and bad things can and do happen to good people.

It is tempting to offer a raft of potential remedies to avoid having to sit with the profound pain of another human being. It makes us realise we are also vulnerable, and this is uncomfortable.

For this reason, many people with long term suffering often experience loneliness. On RUOK Day, it is worth considering how we as a community can better support the people who need comfort and care all year round.

Are we OK?

We may feel comfortable discussing mental health for others but find it difficult to seek mental health support for ourselves.

Self-stigma is real, and prevents us from seeking appropriate care. Guilt and shame can also be symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Perhaps RUOK Day is a good opportunity to book a physical and mental health check-up with your GP.

Finally, we all need to honestly discuss and address the ways we contribute to poor mental health in the community. Workplaces that normalise financial abuse, bullying and harassment cause harm. Domestic violence causes harm. Poverty and discrimination cause harm.

Checking in and connecting with those around us has merit in some circumstances – but we can all reduce mental harm by addressing our own behaviour at an individual, local and national level.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Louise Stone receives funding from ACT health to research mental health services for young people in the ACT.

– ref. It’s RUOK Day – but ‘how can I help?’ might be a better question to ask – https://theconversation.com/its-ruok-day-but-how-can-i-help-might-be-a-better-question-to-ask-190064

Heat pumps can cut your energy costs by up to 90%. It’s not magic, just a smart use of the laws of physics

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Pears, Senior Industry Fellow, RMIT University

Heat pumps are becoming all the rage around a world that has to slash carbon emissions rapidly while cutting energy costs. In buildings, they replace space heating and water heating – and provide cooling as a bonus.

A heat pump extracts heat from outside, concentrates it (using an electric compressor) to raise the temperature, and pumps the heat to where it is needed. Indeed, millions of Australian homes already have heat pumps in the form of refrigerators and reverse-cycle air conditioners bought for cooling. They can heat as well, and save a lot of money compared with other forms of heating!

Even before the restrictions on Russian gas supply, many European countries were rolling out heat pumps – even in cold climates. Now, government policies are accelerating change. The United States, which has had very cheap gas in recent years, has joined the rush: President Joe Biden has declared heat pumps are “essential to the national defence” and ordered production be ramped up.

The ACT government is encouraging electrification of buildings using heat pumps, and is considering legislation to mandate this in new housing developments. The Victorian government recently launched a Gas Substitution Roadmap and is reframing its incentives programs towards heat pumps. Other states and territories are also reviewing policies.

Just how big are the energy cost savings?

Relative to an electric fan heater or traditional electric hot water service, I calculate a heat pump can save 60-85% on energy costs, which is a similar range to ACT government estimates.

Comparisons with gas are tricky, as efficiencies and energy prices vary a lot. Typically, though, a heat pump costs around half as much for heating as gas. If, instead of exporting your excess rooftop solar output, you use it to run a heat pump, I calculate it will be up to 90% cheaper than gas.

Heat pumps are also good for the climate. My calculations show a typical heat pump using average Australian electricity from the grid will cut emissions by about a quarter relative to gas, and three-quarters relative to an electric fan or panel heater.

If a high-efficiency heat pump replaces inefficient gas heating or runs mainly on solar, reductions can be much bigger. The gap is widening as zero-emission renewable electricity replaces coal and gas generation, and heat pumps become even more efficient.

Horizontal bar chart showing cost savings for a typical home using electric and split systems for heating compared to gas heating — Data: State of Victoria Gas Substitution Roadmap 2022, CC BY

How do heat pumps work?

Heat pumps available today achieve 300-600% efficiency – that is, for each unit of electricity consumed, they produce three to six units of heat. Heat pumps can operate in freezing conditions too.

How is this possible, when the maximum efficiency of traditional electric and gas heaters is 100%, and cold air is cold?

It’s not magic. Think about your fridge, which is a small heat pump. Inside the fridge is a cold panel called an evaporator. It absorbs heat from the warm food and other sources, because heat flows naturally from a warmer object to a cooler object. The electric motor under the fridge drives a compressor that concentrates the heat to a higher temperature, which it dumps into your kitchen. The sides and back of a typical fridge get warm as this happens. So your fridge cools the food while heating the kitchen a bit.

A heat pump obeys the laws of thermodynamics, which allow it to operate at efficiencies from 200% to over 1,000% in theory. But the bigger the temperature difference, the less efficient the heat pump is.

If a heat pump needs to draw heat from the environment, how can it work in cold weather? Remember your fridge keeps the freezer compartment cold while pumping heat into your kitchen. The laws of physics are at play. What we experience as a cold temperature is actually quite hot: it’s all relative.

Outer space is close to a temperature known as absolute zero, zero degrees Kelvin, or –273℃. So a temperature of 0℃ (at which water freezes), or even the recommended freezer temperature of -18℃, is actually quite hot relative to outer space.

The main problem for a heat pump in “cold” weather is that ice can form on its heat exchanger, as water vapour in the air cools and condenses, then freezes. This ice blocks the air flow that normally provides the “hot” air to the heat pump. Heat pumps can be designed to minimise this problem.

How do you choose the right heat pump for your home?

Selecting a suitable heat pump (more commonly known as a reverse-cycle air conditioner) can be tricky, as most advisers are used to discussing gas options. Resources such as yourhome.gov.au, choice.com.au and the popular Facebook page My Efficient Electric Home can help.

All household units must carry energy labels (see energyrating.gov.au): the more stars the better. The independent FairAir web calculator allows you to estimate heating and cooling requirements of a home and the size needed to maintain comfort.

Energy rating label for reverse-cycle air conditioner showing performance for different climate zones — The government is phasing in this climate zone label to replace the old star rating label on reverse-cycle air conditioners. Unfortunately, the phase-in is slow, so many products still do not show climate-related performance differences.
Author provided

Bigger heat pumps are more expensive, so unnecessary oversizing can cost a lot more. Also, insulating, sealing drafts and other building efficiency measures allow you to buy a smaller, cheaper heat pump that will use even less energy and provide better comfort.

When using a heat pump, it is very important to clean its filter every few months. A blocked filter reduces efficiency and the heating and cooling output. If you have an older heat pump that no longer delivers as much heat (or cooling), it may have lost some refrigerant and need a top-up.

Alan Pears provides advice and consults to the Australian Alliance for Energy Productivity and Energy Efficiency Council as well as governments and community groups such as Renew on issues related to heat pumps.

– ref. Heat pumps can cut your energy costs by up to 90%. It’s not magic, just a smart use of the laws of physics – https://theconversation.com/heat-pumps-can-cut-your-energy-costs-by-up-to-90-its-not-magic-just-a-smart-use-of-the-laws-of-physics-185711

Labor’s climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are omitted

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Jotzo, Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy and Head of Energy, Institute for Climate Energy and Disaster Solutions, Australian National University

As of Wednesday night, Labor’s climate change bill was poised to pass the Senate after the government agreed to amendments proposed by independent senator David Pocock to improve accountability and transparency.

The law would set a national emissions target for 2030 and define a process to ratchet it up over time, as well as enshrining the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. The independent Climate Change Authority will recommend future targets. These are sound and useful elements and will serve Australia’s climate policymaking well.

Yet three important elements are not in the bill: a long-term roadmap, securing the future of the Climate Change Authority, and measures for a proper national conversation on our journey to net-zero emissions. And the 43% emissions reduction target should be considered only a starting point.

man speaks at lectern — Independent senator David Pocock proposed amendments to the bill.
Mick Tsikas/AAP

Is 43% emissions reduction enough?

The bill mandates that Australia reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 43% by 2030, compared to 2005 levels. Labor took that target to the federal election and has been unwilling to negotiate on it since winning office.

Is a 43% reduction in Australia’s emissions adequate in the context of the Paris Agreement?

There is no single objective yardstick for which country should do how much towards a global goal. And the trajectory of global emissions after 2030 – as well as before – matters greatly for longer-term global warming.

But an assessment is nevertheless possible, and it suggests that strengthening the target, perhaps by a lot, would be appropriate.

Emissions reductions in this broad range are what’s needed globally to limit warming to 2℃ compared to pre-industrial levels.

But high-income, high-emitting countries – Australia prominent among them – are rightfully expected to reduce their carbon footprint more quickly than developing countries, or countries where the economy is already relatively low-carbon.

What’s more, the effort needed by Australia to meet the 43% target is less than that required by many other countries. This is due to reductions in emissions from the land use and forestry sector more than a decade ago, and because we have lots of opportunities to cut emissions easily.

Big further reductions can be made by accelerating the shift from coal to renewables, better energy efficiency, electrifying transport, and cleaner processes in industry and agriculture.

An Australian reduction of the present order is definitely incompatible with limiting global warming to 1.5℃ – the global aspiration for limiting climate change. And it would be a contortion to argue it’s somehow in line with “well below 2℃”, the Paris Agreement’s long-term goal.

All that said, a 43% emission reduction target improves a lot on the previous government’s target. And enshrining it in law sends an important message. It makes zero-emissions options much more investable, and signals internationally that Australia is back on climate change action.

red-hot roll of metal at steelworks — Big further reductions can be made through various means, including cleaner processes in industry.
Dean Lewins/AAP

A trajectory to net-zero

Attention will soon shift to Australia’s 2035 emissions target. The bill commits the Climate Change Authority to recommend that target, and new targets every five years from then on.

If the government of the day does not accept that advice, it will need to explain its dissent to parliament. That is good process.

But Australia also needs to plot a forward trajectory beyond the next five-year period, because the investments that matter most are made on longer timescales.

Such “roadmapping” would shed light on questions such as:

what are the indicative targets for 2040 and beyond, on the way to net-zero emissions?
what might be the balance between remaining greenhouse gas emissions and removing emissions from the atmosphere, whether through forests and land-based carbon, or technological solutions?

The Climate Change Authority may choose to do such an analysis, mapping out scenarios and possible trajectories. But such advice would have stronger standing if there was a legal requirement for it.

farm scene with trees and crops — The roadmap should answer questions around the extent to which land-based carbon will reduce emissions.
Shutterstock

Securing the Climate Change Authority

The bill puts the Climate Change Authority centre stage, but it doesn’t make sure it will always be properly equipped to do its job.

A future government might not like to hear a strong independent voice, and could quieten it by starving it. It’s happened before, following the Abbott government’s attempt to abolish the authority.

The Climate Change Authority needs to run a deeply inclusive and very extensive consultation process for future recommendations on the target. Not just roundtables and submissions to a website, but a really big effort to take the analysis to groups right across Australian society and take their views into account.

Let’s hope this and future governments will give their political backing for an inclusive process, and fund the authority to do so.

A proper national conversation

In any case, Australia needs a national long-term emissions reduction strategy. It should answer questions such as:

what will the shift to net-zero emissions mean for our economy, both nationally and regionally?
what needs to be done to prepare for the changes, maximise the upsides and deal with the downsides?

Such a strategy must be much more than just another report based on modelling with some stakeholder discussions along the way. What’s needed is a proper national conversation about how we tackle the transition to net-zero emissions.

worker in hard hat in front of machinery — A national strategy should consider how to prepare for the changes ahead. Pictured: a worker at the Snowy Hydro scheme.
Lukas Coch/AAP

This would bring out all available information and the many different perspectives, opportunities and vulnerabilities. It requires people coming together to really understand the issues and, where possible, to forge agreement.

That conversation should involve all major groups: businesses and business associations, non-government organisations, unions, community leaders, youth groups and so forth. The research sector would provide data and analysis, and the media would make the debate a public one, in many formats and dimensions.

Governments at all levels would be involved – but they would not control the process.

Some political instincts run against such truly open processes. But they’re essential – and the climate change bill doesn’t directly provide for them.

Frank Jotzo has no affiliations or funding that present a conflict of interest with regard to this article.

– ref. Labor’s climate change bill is set to become law – but 3 important measures are omitted – https://theconversation.com/labors-climate-change-bill-is-set-to-become-law-but-3-important-measures-are-omitted-190102

Yes, some students are dropping out of teaching degrees, but not at the rate you think

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shane Dawson, Executive Dean UniSA Education Futures, University of South Australia

We know Australian schools are in the grip of a teacher shortage. Federal and state education ministers are currently putting together a plan to fix it, which is due in December.

One of the key planks so far is making sure more students finish their teaching degrees.

Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has regularly cited Education Department data which shows people are not finishing their teaching degrees at higher rates than other fields of study. This is based on looking at student cohorts over a six-year period. As he said last month:

50% of young people who go into a teaching degree finish it. On average it’s about 70% of people who go into any other degree finish it. Now what’s going wrong there?

At first glance these figures are alarming. But they are also an overly simple and misleading way to look at the issue. In fact, completion rates for teaching degrees are comparable to other similar programs.

What are university completion rates?

University completion rates are worked out using the total number of students who start a degree for a given year and then calculating the percentage of this group who graduate four, six or nine years later.

For example, assume 100 students start a teaching degree in 2012. A 50% completion rate translates to 50 students completing that degree by 2018 (six years post commencement is the generally noted range).

Comparatively, the average for other programs is noted as 70% – meaning that in the same time frame and with the same commencing number of students, 70 students completed their degree by 2018.

Three year degrees vs four year degrees

While the figures for teaching degrees look grim, it is important to note that degrees are not all of the same duration.

Three-year degrees are most common at the undergraduate level, but there are also four and five year bachelor degrees.

Undergraduate, teaching (education) programs are four years. This means a student doing part-time study will take eight years to graduate. This muddies the calculations.

For example, let’s compare a three-year bachelor of science degree with a four-year bachelor of education. Let’s assume they each have 100 students and the retention rate is 90% for each year of study. In this example, the completion rate for the three year program is 73%. For a four-year program with the same retention rate that figure drops to 65%.

Students walking on campus. — When looking at completion rates, it is important to also look at how long the degree with take to complete part-time.
Dean Lewins/AAP

The retention rate is the same in both examples, but the completion rate changes because the degree takes one year longer.

So, if we are going to look at completion rates over a six-year period (as Clare is doing with that headline figure), it would be to more accurate to compare teaching degrees with other four-year undergraduate courses.

For example, the four-year social work undergraduate degree has a six-year completion rate of 50%, like teaching degrees.

And if you look at the Education Department’s data over a nine-year period (which gives people plenty of time to complete the degree part-time), the difference between teaching and other degrees is much smaller. There is a 69% completion rate for primary and secondary teacher undergraduate education compared to 73% for all other programs.

When comparing postgraduate masters-level teacher education programs, which typically take 18 months to two years full-time, the teaching qualifications have much higher completion rates. Postgraduate completion rates over a four-year time period for primary and secondary teaching are 76% compared to 71% for all other postgraduate programs.

What is ‘going wrong’?

While there are always improvements that can be made to teaching degrees, a more complete understanding of “what’s going wrong” is critical before planning further reforms within a discipline that has been in constant reform for most of the past decade.

This is particularly the case when Clare is talking about allocating funding to universities based on the “highest completion rates”.

The new national plan to tackle teacher shortages must consider how Australia can increase the number and diversity of teachers graduating and entering the workforce. At the same time, there is a dire need to address issues linked to retaining quality teachers within the profession.

The use of data to make sweeping generalisations will do little to help.

Clare’s comment

A spokesperson for Clare told The Conversation:

There is a shortage of teachers in Australia and the data shows that the graduation [rate] is still too low.

That is why the Minister has asked University of Sydney Vice Chancellor Mark Scott to lead a review into Initial Teacher Education [degrees which qualify teachers for the classroom], the details of which will be announced shortly.

Shane Dawson receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Anna Sullivan receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is Board Chair and Director of the Media Centre for Education Research Australia.

Barney Dalgarno has received research grant funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a Board member of the Australian Council of Deans of Education and of the ACT Teacher Quality Institute.

Donna Pendergast is a Director of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership.

– ref. Yes, some students are dropping out of teaching degrees, but not at the rate you think – https://theconversation.com/yes-some-students-are-dropping-out-of-teaching-degrees-but-not-at-the-rate-you-think-189467

British investors could sue Australia over climate action if UK joins trans-Pacific trade pact

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patricia Ranald, Honorary research associate, University of Sydney

British oil and gas miner Rockhopper Explorations last month won £210 million plus interest (about A$360 million) in compensation over Italy’s 2015 ban on oil and gas drilling within its territorial seas.

It’s a portent of claims Australia may face from British companies invested in Australia’s fossil-fuel industries if the United Kingdom gets its way and joins the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), to which Australia is a signatory.

Rockhopper had invested £33 million in plans to drill for oil off Italy’s east coast in the Adriatic Sea. The compensation covers all profits it would have made. Its claim was enabled by a so-called investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) clause in the Energy Charter Treaty signed by Italy and Britain in the 1990s.

All trade agreements have systems for settling disputes between governments. Some also have ISDS clauses that give private foreign investors the right to claim compensation for future lost profits due to changes in law or policy.

Since the late 1980s, British companies have lodged 90 claims against foreign governments using ISDS provisions – the third-highest number after US and Dutch companies.

This raises the question of what may happen if British mining and energy companies gain ISDS provisions to seek compensation from the Australian government over its climate policies.

Britain’s interest in the CPTPP

ISDS provisions are what tobacco giant Philip Morris used to claim A$4 billion in compensation after the Australian government introduced plain packaging laws for tobacco products in 2011.

It did so under an Australian investment agreement with Hong Kong. Though this gambit ultimately failed, the case took years and cost the Australian government $12 million in legal costs

Currently there are no ISDS provisions in treaties between Australia and the UK.

ISDS was excluded from the Australia-UK Free Trade Agreement (AUKFTA) signed in December 2021 due to “the confidence we share in each other’s legal systems” – although only after a robust public debate. (The treaty, not yet in force, is being reviewed by an Australian parliamentary committee prior to ratification.)

But ISDS is included in the existing Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) between Australia and ten other Pacific rim nations, which the UK is keen to join.

As UK Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan outlined while in Australia last week:

The UK is aiming to accede by the end of this year, and joining CPTPP is a demonstration of our foreign policy focus aligning with the global economic tilt towards the Indo-Pacific.

British interests in Australian mining and energy

Australia and the CPTPP’s other members – Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam – must agree for the UK application to succeed.

Trevelyan argued the UK would “bring a new, strong and persuasive voice” to the partnership as “a like-minded friend to Australia”. But its membership would also expose the Australian government to ISDS cases by UK companies against climate action regulation.

The UK is the second-highest source of foreign investment in Australia. UK-based fossil-fuel investors include Anglo American, BP and Shell.

Climate concerns about ISDS claims

A comprehensive study published in May shows increasing use of ISDS clauses in trade agreements by fossil fuel companies to claim billions in compensation for government decisions to phase out fossil fuels. The study’s authors recommend ISDS mechanisms be removed from trade agreements.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s May 2022 report Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability also warns that ISDS clauses in trade agreements threaten action to reduce emissions.

For example, the Westmoreland Coal Company sought compensation from Canada over the province of Alberta’s decision to phase out coal-fired electricity generation by 2030.

The US-based company, an investor in two Alberta coal mines, did so using ISDS provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It case was unsuccessful, but only due to technicalities regarding changes in the company’s ownership.

In Europe, German energy companies RWE and Uniper have ISDS cases pending against the Netherlands (under the Energy Charter Treaty) over its moves to phase out coal-fired power stations by 2030.

But there is a simple solution

The Australian government has an easy option to stop this exposure, based on two precedents: the exclusion of ISDS from the Australia-UK free-trade deal; and how Australia and New Zealand have dealt with ISDS in the CPTPP.

Before signing the CPTPP in 2018, Australia and New Zealand exchanged legally binding side letters excluding each other from using the ISDS clauses against each other.

It makes sense for the Australian government to do the same with the UK, given the disproportionate risk of ISDS claims by British fossil fuel investors.

The Albanese government was elected with a policy platform opposing ISDS. It can easily implement this by making a similar exchange of letters a condition of agreeing to the UK joining the CPTPP.

Dr Patricia Ranald is an honorary research associate at the University of Sydney and the honorary convener of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network. She does not receive any benefits or external funding.

– ref. British investors could sue Australia over climate action if UK joins trans-Pacific trade pact – https://theconversation.com/british-investors-could-sue-australia-over-climate-action-if-uk-joins-trans-pacific-trade-pact-190049

My pilgrimage to the site of Paul Klee’s Hammamet with Its Mosque

By The Conversation -

September 8, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Roger Benjamin, Professor in Art History, University of Sydney

Paul Klee (1879–1940), Hammamet with Its Mosque, 1914.
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Wikimedia Commons

In this new series, our writers introduce us to a favourite painting.

For almost as long as I can remember I have loved the pictures of Paul Klee (1879-1940). When I was growing up my parents owned a strange little lithograph by him called Phantom Perspective. It shows a wafer-thin man lying asleep in a dormitory of inflowing straight lines.

Like one of the curious fish in Klee’s child-like visual aquaria, I was hooked.

It was on his famous trip to Tunisia in April 1914 that Klee painted Hammamet with Its Mosque, now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Travelling down the east coast of the Maghrebian nation with two artist pals, August Macke and Louis Moilliet, the trio used lightweight watercolour kits and sketching blocks to record their impressions.

An old postcard capturing the town of Hammamet.
Author provided

Tunis, St. Germain, Hammamet and the holy city of Kairouan became the sites of their collaborative visual enterprise.

Klee had recently been in Paris to visit Robert Delaunay, the artist who converted Picasso’s and Braque’s austere version of Cubism into a lyrical interplay of coloured squares and triangles.

Klee adapted this language in all his Tunisian works, and it was in Kairouan, in a café at the end of a day’s painting the domes of the city, that he declared in a moment of ecstasy:

Colour and I are one. I am a painter!

Hammamet with Its Mosque, as solid in its composition of diagonals within squares as its substance is evanescent, proves him right.

‘The city is magnificent’

Hammamet was a small fishing port – the Hadrumetum of Carthaginian times – whose walled medina and inner fortress or Casbah still exist today. I spent three days there in 2014 on an aesthetic pilgrimage.

I was armed with maps from the Baedeker guidebook the German-speaking trio had used, postcards of the town dating from 1905, and the delightful diaries in which Klee wrote:

The city is magnificent, right by the sea, full of bends and sharp corners.

Hammamet’s medieval mosque, with its square minaret, crenellated muezzin’s gallery, and flagstaff at 45 degrees, is depicted in Klee’s watercolour with surprising accuracy.

The mosque in Hammamet today.
E.Selmaj via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

My eyes told me as much, as did the vintage postcards. But one building was missing: Klee’s right-hand tower with its wine-coloured windows. There was nothing in today’s cleaned-up Casbah that corresponded to it.

And why, I asked myself, did the painter embellish the foreground of buff and pink triangles with star-shaped forms and green stripes?

My general thesis, in contrast to scholars who saw Klee as an abstractionist who used free invention in making his coloured pictorial tapestries, was that Klee (and Macke) used “real” elements from the observed world to fuel their plastic inventions – savvy combinations of the observed, the supposed and the superposed.

A postcard of the Minaret of the Great Mosque of Hammamet, c 1950.
Author provided

‘Archives of the planet’

Through a painstaking sifting of photographic evidence, I learned that from around 1910 until Tunisian Independence in 1956, Hammamet’s Kasbah was surmounted by a two (and then three) storey blockhouse called the “poste optique”, or optical station.

Since 1881 Tunisia had been a French Protectorate. With war looming, the French army set up a flashing optical telegraph using towers with a clear line of sight up and down the coast.

Hammamet’s new poste optique was photographed by a visiting French officer, a Lieutenant Klipfel, in 1910.

But this account of Klee’s image was incomplete because the minaret and the poste optique stood over 100 metres apart. Did Klee bring the two towers together artificially, using a painter’s creative license? That would hardly be unusual, landscape painters having done as much, from Claude Lorrain in the 17th century.

A chance discovery at the Musée Albert Kahn, outside Paris, provided the explanation.

Albert Kahn was a wealthy French philanthropist who from 1909-1931 sent photographers to 50 countries around the world to form the “Archives of the Planet”, using the new technologies of colour photography and film.

Kahn’s most prolific opérateur was Frédéric Gadmer, who on April 26 1931 visited Hammamet and took three colour photographs – two from the beach, and the other beyond the crumbling walls of the medina. This last view brought together the minaret in the centre and the poste optique well behind it.

Frédéric Gadmer’s photograph of the minaret and buildings of the Kasbah.
© Archives de la Planète – Collection Albert Kahn, CC BY-NC-SA

In the foreground is flowering ground-cover and a few low-lying gravestones: the start of the Hammamet’s sandy Marine Cemetery which still stands today.

Painter and photographer had found the same motif – the floral and the ancient with a spice of modern – in their rambles around Hammamet.

Pre-war avant-garde painting

This snippet of art-historical research convinced Michael Baumgartner, former curator of the Paul Klee Foundation, that Klee was more concerned than we knew with the architectural substance of this culture which he so admired.

Indeed from this perfectly-balanced, whimsical sketch – which he cut up at home, gluing the bottom red strip to the top and providing a handwritten title and date – Klee derived a series of three increasingly grand compositions.

Paul Klee (1879–1940), On a Motif from Hammamet, 1914.
Kunstmuseum Basel

These were Motif from Hammamet, Abstraction of a Motif from Hammamet and On a Motif from Hammamet.

The four of them together comprise one of the great moments of pre-war avant-garde painting.

As a child I admired Klee, who was himself one of the first modern artists to admire child art. The apparent simplicity of Hammamet with Its Mosque, this little picture with a monumental impact, belies a complex history of cross-cultural encounter.

Roger Benjamin receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. My pilgrimage to the site of Paul Klee’s Hammamet with Its Mosque – https://theconversation.com/my-pilgrimage-to-the-site-of-paul-klees-hammamet-with-its-mosque-187359

The Southern Ocean absorbs more heat than any other ocean on Earth, and the impacts will be felt for generations

By The Conversation -

September 7, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maurice Huguenin, PhD Candidate, UNSW Sydney

Over the last 50 years, the oceans have been working in overdrive to slow global warming, absorbing about 40% of our carbon dioxide emissions, and over 90% of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere.

But as our research published today in Nature Communications has found, some oceans work harder than others.

We used a computational global ocean circulation model to examine exactly how ocean warming has played out over the last 50 years. And we found the Southern Ocean has dominated the global absorption of heat. In fact, Southern Ocean heat uptake accounts for almost all the planet’s ocean warming, thereby controlling the rate of climate change.

This Southern Ocean warming and its associated impacts are effectively irreversible on human time scales, because it takes millennia for heat trapped deep in the ocean to be released back into the atmosphere.

This means changes happening now will be felt for generations to come – and those changes are only set to get worse, unless we can stop carbon dioxide emissions and achieve net zero.

Penguins in Antarctica — The Southern Ocean comprises the Earth’s southernmost waters.
Shutterstock

It’s important yet difficult to measure ocean heating

Ocean warming buffers the worst impacts of climate change, but it’s not without cost. Sea levels are rising because heat causes water to expand and ice to melt. Marine ecosystems are experiencing unprecedented heat stress, and the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is changing.

Yet, we still don’t know enough about exactly when, where and how ocean warming occurs. This is because of three factors.

First, temperature changes at the ocean surface and in the atmosphere just above track each other closely. This makes it difficult to know exactly where excess heat is entering the ocean.

Second, we don’t have measurements tracking temperatures over all of the ocean. In particular, we have very sparse observations in the deep ocean, in remote locations around Antarctica and under sea ice.

Last, the observations we do have don’t go back very far in time. Reliable data from deeper than 700 metres depth is virtually non-existent prior to the 1990s, apart from observations along specific research cruise tracks.

Earth’s heat inventory since 1960 (ZJ = 10²¹ J). Credit: von Schuckmann et al. (2020).

Our modelling approach

To work out the intricacies of how ocean warming has played out, we first ran an ocean model with atmospheric conditions perpetually stuck in the 1960s, prior to any significant human-caused climate change.

Then, we separately allowed each ocean basin to move forward in time and experience climate change, while all other basins were held back to experience the climate of the 1960s.

We also separated out the effects of atmospheric warming from surface wind-driven changes to see how much each factor contributes to the observed ocean warming.

By taking this modelling approach, we could isolate that the Southern Ocean is the most important absorber of this heat, despite only covering about 15% of the total ocean’s surface area.

In fact, the Southern Ocean alone could account for virtually all global ocean heat uptake, with the Pacific and Atlantic basins losing any heat gained back into the atmosphere.

One significant ecological impact of strong Southern Ocean warming is on Antarctic krill. When ocean warming occurs beyond temperatures they can tolerate, the krill’s habitat contracts and they move even further south to cooler waters.

As krill is a key component of the food web, this will also change the distribution and population of larger predators, such as commercially viable tooth and ice fish. It will also further increase stress for penguins and whales already under threat today.

So why is the Southern Ocean absorbing so much heat?

This largely comes down to the geographic set-up of the region, with strong westerly winds surrounding Antarctica exerting their influence over an ocean that’s uninterrupted by land masses.

This means the Southern Ocean winds blow over a vast distance, continuously bringing masses of cold water to the surface. The cold water is pushed northward, readily absorbing vast quantities of heat from the warmer atmosphere, before the excess heat is pumped into the ocean’s interior around 45-55°S (a latitude band just south of Tasmania, New Zealand, and the southern regions of South America).

This warming uptake is facilitated by both the warmer atmosphere caused by our greenhouse gas emissions, as well as wind-driven circulation which is important for getting heat into the ocean interior.

And when we combine the warming and wind effects only over the Southern Ocean, with the remaining oceans held back to the climate of the 1960s, we can explain almost all of the global ocean heat uptake.

But that’s not to say the other ocean basins aren’t warming. They are, it’s just that the heat they gain locally from the atmosphere cannot account for this warming. Instead, the massive heat uptake in the Southern Ocean is what has driven changes in total ocean heat content worldwide over the past half century.

We have much to learn

While this discovery sheds new light on the Southern Ocean as a key driver of global ocean warming, we still have a lot to learn, particularly about ocean warming beyond the 50 years we highlight in our study. All future projections, including even the most optimistic scenarios, predict an even warmer ocean in future.

And if the Southern Ocean continues to account for the vast majority of ocean heat uptake until 2100, we might see its heat content increase by as much as seven times more than what we have already seen up to today.

This will have enormous impacts around the globe: including further disturbances to the Southern Ocean food web, rapid melting of Antarctic ice shelves, and changes in the ocean conveyor belt.

To capture all of these changes, it’s vital we continue and expand our observations taken in the Southern Ocean.

One of the most important new data streams will be new ocean floats that can measure deeper ocean temperatures, as well as small temperature sensors on elephant seals, which give us essential data of oceanic conditions in winter under Antarctic sea ice.

Even more important is the recognition that the less carbon dioxide we emit, the less ocean change we will lock in. This will ultimately limit the disruption of livelihoods for the billions of people living near the coast worldwide.

Maurice Huguenin is supported by a Scientia PhD scholarship from the University of New South Wales.

Matthew England receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Ryan Holmes receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. The Southern Ocean absorbs more heat than any other ocean on Earth, and the impacts will be felt for generations – https://theconversation.com/the-southern-ocean-absorbs-more-heat-than-any-other-ocean-on-earth-and-the-impacts-will-be-felt-for-generations-189561

Civicus raps Solomon Islands over rights curbs, tighter media controls

By Asia Pacific Report -

September 7, 2022

Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

The Civicus Monitor has documented an uptick in restrictions on civic space by the Solomon Islands government, which led to the downgrading of the coiuntry’s rating to “narrowed” in December 2021.

As previously documented, there have been threats to ban Facebook in the country and attempts to vilify civil society.

The authorities have also restricted access to information, including requests from the media. During violent anti-government protests in November 2021, journalists on location were attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets from the police.

Elections are held on the Solomon Islands every four years and Parliament was due to be dissolved in May 2023.

However, the Solomon Islands is set to host the Pacific Games in November 2023, and Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has sought to delay the dissolution of Parliament until December 2023, with an election to be held within four months of that date. The opposition leader has criticised this delay as a “power grab”.

There have also been growing concerns over press freedom and the influence of China, which signed a security deal with the Pacific island nation in April 2022.

Journalists face restrictions during Chinese visit
In May 2022, journalists in the Solomons faced numerous restrictions while trying to report on the visit of China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi to the region.

According to reports, China’s foreign ministry refused to answer questions about the visit.

Journalists seeking to cover the Solomon Islands for international outlets said they were blocked from attending press events, while those journalists that were allowed access were restricted in asking questions.

Georgina Kekea, president of the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI), said getting information about Wang’s visit to the country, including an itinerary, had been very difficult.

She said there was only one press event scheduled in Honiara but only journalists from two Solomon Islands’ newspapers, the national broadcaster, and Chinese media were permitted to attend.

Covid-19 concerns were cited as the official reason for the limited number of journalists attending.

“MASI thrives on professional journalism and sees no reason for journalists to be discriminated against based on who they represent,” Kekea said.

“Giving credentials to selected journalists is a sign of favouritism. Journalists should be allowed to do their job without fear or favour.”

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said that “restriction of journalists and media organisations … sets a worrying precedent for press freedom in the Pacific” and urged the government of the Solomon Islands to ensure press freedom is protected.

Government tightens state broadcaster control
The government of the Solomon Islands is seeking tighter control over the nation’s state-owned broadcaster, a move that opponents say is aimed at controlling and censoring the news.

On 2 August 2022, the government ordered the country’s national broadcaster — the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, known as SIBC – to self-censor its news and other paid programmes and only allow content that portrays the nation’s government in a positive light.

The government also said it would vet all stories before broadcasting.

The broadcaster, which broadcasts radio programmes, TV bulletins and online news, is the only way to receive immediate news for people in many remote areas of the country and plays a vital role in natural disaster management.

The move comes a month after the independence of the broadcaster was significantly undermined, namely when it lost its designation as a “state-owned enterprise” and instead became fully funded by government.

This has caused concerns that the government has been seeking to exert greater control over the broadcaster.

The IFJ said: “The censoring of the Solomon Island’s national broadcaster is an assault on press freedom and an unacceptable development for journalists, the public, and the democratic political process.

“The IFJ calls for the immediate reinstatement of independent broadcasting arrangements in the Solomon Islands”.

However, in an interview on August 8, the government seemed to back track on the decision and said that SIBC would retain editorial control.

It said that it only seeks to protect “our people from lies and misinformation […] propagated by the national broadcaster”.

Authorities threaten to ban foreign journalists
The authorities have threatened to ban or deport foreign journalists deemed disrespectful of the country’s relationship with China.

According to IFJ, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement on August 24 which criticised foreign media for failing to follow standards expected of journalists writing and reporting on the situation in the Solomons Islands.

The government warned it would implement swift measures to prevent journalists who were not “respectful” or “courteous” from entering the country.

The statement specifically targeted a an August 1 episode of Four Corners, titled “Pacific Capture: How Chinese money is buying the Solomons”. The investigative documentary series by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was accused of “misinformation and distribution of pre-conceived prejudicial information”.

ABC has denied this accusation.

IFJ condemned “this grave infringement on press freedom” and called on Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to “ensure all journalists remain free to report on all affairs concerning the Solomon Islands”.

Republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Seven-year-old boy shot dead by younger brother, say Tonga police

By Asia Pacific Report -

September 7, 2022

RNZ Pacific

Tongan police have confirmed the death of a seven-year-old boy after he was shot.

Police report the shooting occurred at the boy’s residence at the village of Ha’ateiho, on the main island of Tongatapu, last Friday evening local time.

The boy’s father has been arrested, but police said the victim died after his four-year-old brother fired four shots while playing with the firearm.

Police said the firearm used was a .22 rifle with unlicensed ammunition.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Suspicious ‘Papuan’ tweets promoted Indonesian government’s agenda

By Asia Pacific Report -

September 7, 2022

ANALYSIS: By David Engel, Albert Zhang and Jake Wallis

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has analysed thousands of suspicious tweets posted in 2021 relating to the Indonesian region of West Papua and assessed that they are inauthentic and were crafted to promote the policies and activities of the Indonesian government while condemning opponents such as Papuan pro-independence activists.

This work continues ASPI’s research collaboration with Twitter focusing on information manipulation in the Indo-Pacific to encourage transparency around these activities and norms of behaviour that are conducive to open democracies in the region.

It follows our August 24 analysis of a dataset made up of thousands of tweets relating to developments in Indonesia in late 2020, which Twitter had removed for breaching its platform manipulation and spam policies.

This report on Papua focuses on similar Twitter activity from late February to late July 2021 that relates to developments in and about Indonesia’s easternmost region.

This four-month period was noteworthy for several serious security incidents as well as an array of state-supported activities and events in the Papua region, then made up of the provinces of West Papua and Papua.

These incidents were among many related to the long-running pro-independence conflict in the region.

A report from Indonesia’s Human Rights Commission detailed 53 violent incidents in 2021 across the Papua region in which 24 people were killed at the hands of both security forces and the armed wing of the Free Papua Organisation (OPM) separatist movement, the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB).

‘Armed criminal group’
Jakarta normally referred to this group by the acronym “KKB”, which stands for “armed criminal group”.

This upsurge in violence followed earlier cases involving multiple deaths. The most notorious took place in December 2018, when TPNPB insurgents reportedly murdered a soldier and at least 16 construction workers working on a part of the Trans-Papua Highway in the Nduga regency of Papua province (official Indonesian sources have put the death toll as high as 31).

The Indonesian government responded by conducting Operation Nemangkawi, a major national police (POLRI) security operation by a taskforce comprising police and military units, including additional troops brought in from outside the province.

The security operation led to bloody clashes, allegations of human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings, and the internal displacement of many thousands of Papuans, hundreds of whom, according to Amnesty International Indonesia, later died of hunger or illness.

Besides anti-insurgency actions, an important component of the operation was the establishment of Binmas Noken Polri, a community policing initiative designed to conduct “humanitarian police missions or operations” and assist “community empowerment” through programmes covering education, agriculture and tourism development.

“Noken” refers to a traditional Papuan bag that indigenous Papuans regard as a symbol of “dignity, civilisation and life”. Binmas Noken Polri was initiated by the then national police chief, Tito Karnavian, the same person who created the recently disbanded, shadowy Red and White Special Task Force highlighted in our August 24 report.

A key development occurred in April 2021 when pro-independence militants killed the regional chief of the National Intelligence Agency (BIN) in an ambush. Coming on the back of other murders by independence fighters (including of two teachers alleged to be police spies earlier that month), this prompted the government to declare the KKB in Papua—that is, the TPNPB “and its affiliated organisations”—”terrorists” and President Joko Widodo to order a crackdown on the group.

9 insurgents killed
Nine alleged insurgents were killed shortly afterwards.

In May 2021, hundreds of additional troops from outside Papua deployed to the province, some of which were part of an elite battalion nicknamed “Satan’s forces” that had earned notoriety in earlier conflicts in Indonesia’s Aceh province and Timir-Leste.

During the same month, there were large-scale protests in Papua and elsewhere over the government’s moves to renew and revise the special autonomy law, under which the region had enjoyed particular rights and benefits since 2001.

The protests included demonstrations staged by Papuan activists and students in Jakarta and the Javanese cities of Bandung and Yogyakarta from May 21-24. The revised law was ushered in by Karnavian, who was then (and is still) Indonesia’s Home Affairs Minister.

The period also saw ongoing preparations for the staging of the National Sports Week (PON) in Papua. Delayed by one year because of the covid-19 pandemic, the event eventually was held in October at several specially built venues across the province.

The dataset we analysed represents a diverse collection of thousands of tweets put out under such hashtags as #BinmasNokenPolri, #MenolakLupa (Refuse to forget), #TumpasKKBPapua (Annihilate the Papuan armed criminal group), #PapuaNKRI (Papua unitary state of the Republic of Indonesia), #Papua and #BongkarBiangRusuh (Take apart the culprits of the riots).

Most were overtly political, either associating the Indonesian state with success and public benefits for Papuans or condemning the state’s opponents as criminals, and sometimes doing both in the same tweet.

Papuan Games tweets
Among several tweets under #Papua proclaiming that the province was ready to host the forthcoming PON thanks to Jakarta’s investment in facilities and security, 18 dispatched on June 25 proclaimed: “PAPUA IS READY TO IMPLEMENT PON 2020!!! Papua is safe, peaceful and already prepared to implement PON 2020. So there’s no need to be afraid. Shootings by the KKB … are far from the PON cluster [the various sports facilities] … Therefore everyone #ponpapua #papua”.

Many tweets were clearly aimed at shaping public perceptions of the pro-independence militia and others challenging the state.

Under #MenolakLupa in particular, numerous tweets related to past and contemporary acts of violence by the pro-independence militants. Two sets of tweets from March 22 and 24 that recall the 2018 attack at Nduga are especially noteworthy, in that both injected the term “terrorist” into the armed criminal group moniker that the state had been using hitherto, making it “KKTB”. This was a month before the formal designation of the OPM as a “terrorist” organisation.

As if to stress the OPM’s terrorist nature, subsequent tweets under #MenolakLupa carried through with this loaded terminology. For example, tweets on June 15 stated that in 2017 “KKTB committed sexual violence” against as many as 12 women in two villages in Papua.

A fortnight later, another set of tweets said that in 2018 the “armed terrorist criminal group” had held 14 teachers hostage and had taken turns in raping one of them, causing her “trauma”. Others claimed former pro-independence militants had converted to the cause of the Indonesian unitary state and therefore recognised its sovereignty over Papua.

Some tweets relate directly to specific contemporary events. Examples are flurries of tweets posted on July 24-25 in response to the protests against the special autonomy law’s renewal that highlight the alleged irresponsibility of demonstrations during the pandemic, such as: “Let’s reject the invitation to demo and don’t be easily provoked by irresponsible [malign] people. Stay home and stay healthy always.”

Others are tweets put out under #TumpasKKBPapua after the shooting of the two teachers, such as: “Any religion in the world surely opposes murder or any other such offence, let alone of this teacher. Secure the land of the Bird of Paradise.”

Warning over ‘hoax’ allegations
Other tweets warn Papuans not to succumb to “hoax” allegations about the security forces’ behaviour or other claims by overseas-based spokespeople such as United Liberation Movement of West Papua’s Benny Wenda and Amnesty International human rights lawyer Veronica Koman.

Tweets on April 1 under #PapuaNKRI, for example, warned recipients not to “believe the KKB’s Media Propaganda, let’s be smart and wise in using the media lest we be swayed by fake news.”

Many of the tweets in the dataset are strikingly mundane, with content that state agencies already were, or would have been, publicising openly. A tweet on February 27 under #Papua, for example, announced that the Transport Minister would prioritise the construction of transport infrastructure in the two provinces.

Those under #BinmasNokenPolri often echoed advice that receivers of the tweet could just as easily see on other media, such as POLRI’s official Binmas Noken website.

Some were public announcements about market conditions and community policing events where, for example, people could receive government assistance such as rice, basic items and other support.

Most reflected Binmas Noken’s community engagement purpose, ranging from a series on May 20 promoting a child’s “trauma healing” session with Binmas Noken personnel to another tweeted out on June 20 advising of a badminton contest involving villages and police arranged under the Nemangkawi Task Force.

‘Healthy body, strong spirit’
A further 34 tweets on June 20 advised that “inside a healthy body is a strong spirit”, of which the first nine began with the same broad sentiment expressed in the Latin motto derived from the Roman poet Juvenal, “Mens sana in corpore sano.” (Presumably, after this first group of tweets it dawned on the sender that his or her classical erudition was likely to be lost on indigenous Papuan residents.)

As with the tweets analysed in our August 24 report, based on behavioural patterns within the data, we judge that these tweets are likely to be inauthentic—that is, they were the result of coordinated and covert activity intended to influence public opinion rather than organic expressions by genuine users on the platform.

Without conclusively identifying the actors responsible, we assess that the tweets mirror the Widodo government’s general position on the Papuan region as being an inalienable part of the Indonesian state, as well as the government’s security policies and development agenda in the region.

The vast majority are purposive: by promoting the government’s policies and activities and condemning opponents of those policies (whether pro-independence militia or protesters), the tweets are clearly designed to persuade recipients that the state is providing vital public goods such as security, development and basic support in the face of malignant, hostile forces, and hence that being Indonesian is in their interests.

Dr David Engel is senior analyst on Indonesia in ASPI’s Defence and Strategy Programme. Albert Zhang is an analyst with ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre. His research interests include information and influence operations, and disinformation. Dr Jake Wallis is the Head of Programme, Information Operations and Disinformation with ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre. This article is republished from The Strategist with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Australia’s June quarter national accounts show GDP doing well – for now

By The Conversation -

September 7, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

Tuesday’s national accounts show Australia ending 2021-22 on a strong note.

Gross domestic product grew by a historically robust 0.9% in the three months to June, and by an unusually-high 3.6% over the year.

Australia’s economy is now more than 5% bigger than it was before COVID, a better performance than most comparable economies.

The main drivers of the 0.9% jump in activity were household spending and exports.

Household spending grew 2.2% in the quarter, exports grew 5.5%.

Each contributed about one percentage point to the growth in GDP. Working the other way was a smaller build-up of inventories (unsold stock) that lowers the amount of production needed to meet the increased demand.

Households have been saving less in order to spend more. Since the start of this year, household saving has slipped from 13.5% to a more normal 8.7%.

Spending has also been supported by the fall of unemployment, now down to a near half-century low of 3.4%, a low that might be sustained for quite a while.

In good news for government tax revenue, the value of Australia’s mineral exports also climbed due to higher commodity prices.

Price isn’t taken into account in compiling the most-widely quoted GDP measure, which is “real” GDP, a measure of volumes rather than prices.

Australia’s terms of trade (the ratio of export prices to import prices) reached an all-time high.

Investment spending by companies continued to remain flat, after rebounding from COVID last year.

As highlighted by ACTU secretary Sally McManus, the share of national income accruing to labour remains at a near 60-year low.

In the June quarter profits again grew faster than wages. It remains to be seen whether initiatives from the Jobs and Skills Summit will do much to change this.

Today’s good-looking news may not be a good guide to the future.

The three months to June were barely affected by the Reserve Bank’s five successive interest rate rises that began in May.

Monetary policy is famously said to have “long and variable lags”.

The Reserve Bank is almost certainly not done with interest rate increases. On Tuesday it said it expected to increase rates “further over the months ahead”.

But it also said it was “not on a pre-set path”.

Economic management is about to get harder

The Bank has to navigate between the Scylla of the inflation it would get from not lifting interest rates enough and the Charybdis of the recession it would get from lifting them too much. It is trying to find a Goldilocks path of “just right”.

As it happens, there’s a piece of news that should gladden its heart in the national accounts. Last year, it was giving the impression it wouldn’t lift rates until wage growth took off. This year in May it lost patience and lifted rates anyway, saying its business liaison program suggested companies were starting to pay more.

The national accounts show the compensation of employees (wages plus super) grew 7% over 2021-22, well above the official wage growth figure of 2.6%.

It might be beginning to get what it wanted.

John Hawkins formerly worked as a senior economist in the Reserve Bank and Australian Treasury.

– ref. Australia’s June quarter national accounts show GDP doing well – for now – https://theconversation.com/australias-june-quarter-national-accounts-show-gdp-doing-well-for-now-189951

With better standards, we could make plastics endlessly useful – and slash waste. Here’s how

By The Conversation -

September 7, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Qamar Schuyler, Research Scientist, Oceans and Atmospheres, CSIRO

If you flip over a plastic food container, you’ll see tiny writing on it – something like “AS 2070”. This means the product meets the Australian standard for plastics safe to use for food.

These often unrecognised standards are a part of daily life. Australia has a set of exacting standards which set quality benchmarks for many products. They act as guidelines for design and manufacture of plastic items, shaping the specific polymers used, the ability to use recycled content, and compostability.

There’s a real opportunity to do more here. The issues of plastic waste in our seas and the effects on wildlife are catalysing major public concern. Part of the problem of plastic waste is the difficulty of reusing many types of plastics as the feedstock for new products. We also need stronger incentives to reduce plastic in manufacturing and design.

That’s where standards can come in. The European Union has used standards and legislation to nudge the plastics industry towards a true circular economy. This means minimising the use of plastic where possible, while ensuring old plastics can be turned into new products rather than turning into waste which could end up in our seas. We can do the same, harnessing standards to reduce plastic waste. How? By requiring companies to minimise plastic packaging and setting guidelines for products to be made of specific polymers while avoiding others.

Our new research found a total of 95 standards. Nine of these are Australian. This means there is a great opportunity for Australian experts to get involved in the national and international standards development process.

plastic fish — Plastic waste in our oceans is now a major environmental problem.
Naja Bertolt Jensen/Unsplash, CC BY

Why do standards matter?

Think of standards as guidelines and codes of practice. Standards give product manufacturers a framework for the minimum quality and safety required to be able to sell them in Australia. They also help to provide a common language and enhance compatibility and efficiency across markets.

Globally, standards affect an estimated 80% of the world trade. They have real impact. If a product cannot meet the applicable standard in the country or jurisdiction it is intended for, it won’t be accepted.

Plastic recyclers can use standards to ensure their products meet specific requirements, and so provide quality assurance for manufacturers who buy the recycled plastics to make other products.

Standards for plastic reuse can ensure certain products can be used over and over. Labelling standards can also help us as consumers know which items we can and can’t recycle.

Both industry and government may choose to introduce standards. Standards can also increase consumer confidence, promote social acceptance of recycled products and maintain or increase the value of recycled plastics – a vital step towards a circular economy.

By bringing in new standards for other stages of the plastics supply chain, we could leverage this powerful tool and help standardise parts of the emerging international circular economy in plastics.

Standards could help us reduce waste at all stages of a product’s lifecycle, from design to manufacture to recycling to reuse.

plastic pellets — Standards can help ensure plastics can actually be broken down and recycled into new products.
Planet Ark/IQ Renew, CC BY

What did we find?

We worked with Standards Australia to map existing plastics standards around the world. We also went looking for missing links which, if filled, could help to better manage plastic waste.

The majority of existing plastic standards – both Australian and international – are focused on recycling and recovery or waste disposal parts of plastic’s lifecycle.

To create a true circular economy for plastics, we’ll need to update existing standards and develop more which specifically focus on the early stages of plastic production, such as design or creation of the basic building blocks of plastics.

Think of nurdles, the pea-sized plastic beads produced in their trillions as a key first step to making many plastics. When nurdles spill into the sea, they’re very bad news for wildlife. If we create standards focused on these steps, we can help reduce their impact.

Nurdles on beach — Tiny plastic nurdles – pre-production plastics – cause real damage to the environment.
Wikimedia, CC BY

Adding more standards could also help us tackle the challenges around making products reusable and recyclable, as well as cutting how much packaging is needed for products.

We can also use them to help assess biodegradable products, to ensure they don’t make existing waste or recycling streams harder to process.

And importantly, standardising the labelling of products could help us as consumers. Imagine if labels on plastic products included the amount of recycled plastics, as well as a rating of how recyclable or compostable the product was.

This would give manufacturers incentives to make simpler products better able to be recycled. It would also avoid specific problems such as multi-layer plastics which are not cost effective to recycle.

In short, plastic standards are an often overlooked way for us to improve how we use and reuse these extraordinarily versatile modern materials.

Plastics don’t have to become environmentally destructive waste. They can be almost endlessly useful – if we require it.

Qamar Schuyler does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. With better standards, we could make plastics endlessly useful – and slash waste. Here’s how – https://theconversation.com/with-better-standards-we-could-make-plastics-endlessly-useful-and-slash-waste-heres-how-189985

Have you heard soy is linked to cancer risk or can ‘feminise’ men? Here’s what the science really says

By The Conversation -

September 7, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen Murphy, Associate Professor of Nutrition & Dietetics and Accredited Practicing Dietitian, University of South Australia

Image by Peter Chou from Pixabay., CC BY

Soy is common in many Asian cuisines, and is growing more popular in Western countries as many people aim for predominantly plant-based diets. It offers many potential health benefits and is generally cheaper than meat.

However, you might have heard soy is linked to cancer risk, or that it can have a “feminising” effect on men.

But what does the research actually say on this?

In fact, most research finds eating a moderate amount of soy is unlikely to cause problems and may even provide benefits. All said, you can safely include moderate amounts of soy foods in your daily diet.

Does soy ‘feminise’ men? Not likely

Soy is rich in high quality protein, and contains B vitamins, fibre, minerals and the isoflavones daidzein, genistein and glycitein.

Isoflavones have a similar structure to natural estrogen and are sometimes called “phytoestrogens” (phyto means plant). Soy isoflavones can bind to estrogen receptors in the body. They can act in a way similar to natural estrogen but with a much, much weaker effect.

Some studies have flagged concerns but these tend to be related to people consuming extremely high amounts of soy – such as one unusual case report about a man with gynecomastia (enlarged breast tissue in men) who, it turned out, was drinking almost three litres of soy milk a day.

As one literature review noted, many of the other studies highlighting concerns in this area are are based on animals trials or rare one-off cases (case reports).

The same literature review noted that while more long term data in Western countries is needed, moderate amounts of soy in “traditional soy preparations offer modest health benefits with very limited risk for potential adverse health effects.”

Edamame beans sit in a bowl. — Soy is rich in high quality protein, and contains B vitamins, fibre, minerals and powerful antioxidants.
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay., CC BY

What about soy and cancer risk?

One study of 73,223 Chinese women over more than seven years found:

Women who consumed a high amount of soy foods consistently during adolescence and adulthood had a substantially reduced risk of breast cancer. No significant association with soy food consumption was found for postmenopausal breast cancer.

This could be due to different types and amounts of soy eaten (as well as genetics).

Some animal trials and studies in cells show very high doses of isoflavones or isolated soy protein may stimulate breast cancer growth, but this is not evident in human trials.

A study in Japanese males reported high intake of miso soup (1-5 cups per day), might increase the risk of gastric cancer.

But the authors also said:

We thought that some other ingredients in miso soup might also play a role […] For example, high concentrations of salt in miso soup could also increase the risk of gastric cancer.

Miso soup contains fermented soybeans.
Image by likesilkto from Pixabay., CC BY

What about heart health?

Soy contains isoflavones, healthy fats like polyunsaturated fats, fibre, vitamins and minerals, and is also low in saturated fat.

Swapping meat in the diet with soy products is going to reduce the amount of saturated fat you eat while also boosting intake of important nutrients.

A study with nearly half a million Chinese adults free of cardiovascular disease, showed those who consumed soy four or more days a week had significantly lower risk of death from a heart attack compared with those who never ate soy.

Replacing red meat with plant proteins including soy products has been associated with a lower risk of developing heart disease.

A moderate intake is fine

If you want to include soy in your diet, choose whole soy foods like calcium-enriched soy beverages, tempeh, soy bread, tofu and soybeans over highly processed options high in salt and saturated fat.

Research on soy is ongoing and we still need more long-term data on intakes in Australia and health benefits.

Overall, however, moderate amounts of soy foods can be consumed as part of a healthy diet and may even help with some symptoms of menopause.

According to the Victorian government’s Better Health Channel:

one or two daily serves of soy products can be beneficial to our health.

Harvard University’s School of Public Health says soy:

can safely be consumed several times a week, and probably more often, and is likely to provide health benefits – especially when eaten as an alternative to red and processed meat.

So don’t stress too much about the soy milk in your coffee and tea or the tofu burger for lunch.

Karen Murphy receives funding and/or support from the National Health Medical Research Council. In the last 10 years she has had funding from Dairy Australia and the Pork CRC.

– ref. Have you heard soy is linked to cancer risk or can ‘feminise’ men? Here’s what the science really says – https://theconversation.com/have-you-heard-soy-is-linked-to-cancer-risk-or-can-feminise-men-heres-what-the-science-really-says-186813

We asked Australian children what they needed from their communities. Here’s what they said

By The Conversation -

September 7, 2022

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sharon Bessell, Professor of Public Policy, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

What does a “fair go” look like for Australian children? We asked 130 children aged between seven and 13 years what makes communities strong, supportive, and fair.

Many felt communities are about care and connection. As one ten-year-old girl said, “a community is really just a group of people that help you and always look out for you”.

The children in our research identified five themes that matter in determining whether they have a fair go – or not.

1) Good relationships are essential to children’s experiences of community. An 11-year-old boy said “I love my community, because I know people and everyone is friendly”.

When children know their neighbours and are treated with respect by caring people, they feel included, safe, and supported. But too many children mentioned adults who are rude or dismissive towards them – and they usually felt it was because they were young.

2) Feeling safe is very important to children – but many described the frightening ways some adults behave in their communities, most often because of excessive alcohol or drug use. Aggressive and dangerous driving also makes children feel unsafe and vulnerable in their neighbourhoods.

3) Inclusive places ensure children can actively participate in their communities, but many described feeling unwelcome in public places. Some talked about places designed for very young children and places for teenagers to hang out – but said there was very little for those in middle childhood. Children wanted a say in how public places were designed. As one nine-year-old girl said, “We – us kids – should decide what playground we get, because the adults who design it don’t play on it. It’s our equipment”.

Often, children described parks that are littered with broken glass or dog poo, making them unpleasant places to play. A common concern for children is a lack of footpaths, making it hard for them to safely move around their neighbourhoods.

4) Household resources make an enormous difference to whether children can make the most of their communities. Some children said their family had to move regularly because rent is so expensive. As a result, they never feel part of any place they live. Many could not afford to take part in activities in their communities.

5) Children also spoke about public good and infrastructure – things that also matter to adults. Health care is high on children’s list of what is most important. This is not what we might expect young children to focus on, but many described long waits in emergency rooms when they or their families were ill or injured. Homelessness was also an issue that worried children.

A small number of those involved in the research had experienced homelessness directly – but many more observed it, and said it was deeply unfair. An eight-year-old boy said, when people are homeless “they don’t have stuff, and some people think they are not the same as us. But they are, and it’s not right”.

Children described the complexities of communities and the many factors that determine whether they have a fair go or not. Analysing the themes children identified, and the detail within each, was challenging – until a nine-year-old girl said “communities are like a jigsaw puzzle. You need to have all the pieces in place to make them work”.

And so, the community jigsaw was born. The jigsaw presents the five major themes children identified, and the most important pieces within each. When all the pieces are in place, communities are strong and supportive – not only for children, but for people of all ages. As the pieces fall away, communities become less fair and children feel more vulnerable.

Our research was across communities with different socioeconomic profiles. While children in all communities raised similar issues – chidlren’s experiences varied greatly and reflected inequalities in Australia. Those in more disadvantaged communities were far more likely to experience challenges.

Children living in less advantaged communities often talked about caring, friendly people who helped each other, but also described deep structural problems: a lack of public transport, poor services, few parks and playgrounds. Children from lower-income communities were more likely to describe not being able to participate in activities or visit places (such as movies or the local pool) due to the cost.

There are lessons from this research for how we can ensure every child, in every community really does have a fair go.

First, the way adults treat children, even in small, everyday encounters, matters. For many children, the words and gestures used by adults make them feel vulnerable and excluded.

Second, there are structural and systemic issues that mean some children do not get a fair go. From policies that fail to address poverty and disadvantage to planning that is not child inclusive, too many children are being left behind.

Two initiatives would begin to address this immediately: the adoption of child rights impact statements (already in place in some parts of Australia) and child-friendly planning.

Our research shows is it time for us to listen to children – and to act to ensure they are all safe and supported. In the process, we might make communities fairer for everyone.

Sharon Bessell receives funding from:
The Australian Research Council
The Norwegian Research Council
The Paul Ramsay Foundation
The Australian Government through the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade

– ref. We asked Australian children what they needed from their communities. Here’s what they said – https://theconversation.com/we-asked-australian-children-what-they-needed-from-their-communities-heres-what-they-said-189772