An interview with former University of the South Pacific (USP) development studies professor Dr Vijay Naidu, a founding president of the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG), has produced fresh insights into the legacy of Pacific nuclear-free and anti-colonialism activism.
The community storytelling group Talanoa TV, an affiliate of the Whānau Community Centre and Hub and linked to the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), has embarked on producing a series of short educational videos as oral histories of people involved in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) Movement to document and preserve this activist mahi and history.
The series, dubbed “Legends of NFIP”, are being timed for screening in 2025 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing in Auckland harbour on 10 July 1985 and also with the 40th anniversary of the Rarotonga Treaty for a Nuclear-Free Pacific.
Legends of NFIP – Professor Vijay Naidu. Video: Talanoa TV
These videos are planned to “bring alive” the experiences and commitment of people involved in a Pacific-wide movement and will be suitable for schools as video podcasts and could be stored on open access platforms.
“This project is also expected to become an extremely useful resource for students and researchers,” says project convenor Nikhil Naidu, himself a former FANG and Coalition for Democracy (CDF) activist.
In this 14-minute interview, Professor Naidu talks about the origins of the NFIP Movement.
“At this time [1970s], there were the French nuclear tests that were actually atmospheric nuclear tests and people like Suliana Siwatibau and Graeme Bain started the ATOM movement (Against Nuclear Tests on Moruroa) in Tahiti in the 1970s at USP,” he says.
“And we began to understand the issues around nuclear testing and how it affected people — you know, the radiation. And drop-outs and pollution from it.”
When Melbourne-born Helen Hill, an outstanding social activist, scholar and academic, died on 7 May 2024 at the age of 79, the Timorese government sent its Education Minister, Dulce de Jesus Soares, to deliver a moving eulogy at the funeral service at Church of All Nations in Carlton.
Helen will be remembered for many things, but above all for her 50 years of dedication to friendship with the people of Timor-Leste and solidarity in their struggle for independence.
At the funeral, Steve Bracks, chancellor of Victoria University and former premier of Victoria, also paid tribute to Helen’s lifetime commitment to social justice and to the independence and flourishing of Timor-Leste in particular.
Further testimonies were presented by Jean McLean (formerly a member of the Victorian Legislative Council), the Australia-East Timor Association, representatives of local Timorese groups and Helen’s family. Helen’s long-time friend, the Reverend Barbara Gayler, preached on the theme of solidarity.
Helen was born on 22 February 1945, the eldest of four children of Robert Hill and Jessie Scovell. Her sister Alison predeceased her, and she is survived by her sister Margaret and her brother Ian and their children and grandchildren.
Her father fought with the Australian army in New Guinea before working for the Commonwealth Bank and becoming a branch manager. Her mother was a social worker at the repatriation hospital.
The family were members of the Presbyterian Church in Blackburn, which fostered an attitude of caring for others.
Studied political science Helen’s secondary schooling was at Presbyterian Ladies College, where she enjoyed communal activities such as choir. She began a science course at the University of Melbourne but transferred to Monash University to study sociology and political science, graduating with a BA (Hons) in 1970.
At Monash, Helen was an enthusiastic member of the Labor Club and the Student Christian Movement (SCM), where issues of social justice were regularly debated.
Opposition to the war in Vietnam was the main focus of concern during her time at Monash. In 1970, Helen was a member of the organising committee for the first moratorium demonstration in Melbourne and also a member of the executive committee of the Australian SCM (ASCM, the national body) which was based in Melbourne.
She edited Political Concern, an alternative information service, for ASCM. In 1971, Helen was a founding member of International Development Action. Helen was a great networker, always ready to see what she could learn from others.
Perhaps the most formative moment in Helen’s career was her appointment as a frontier intern, to work on the Southern Africa section of the Europe/Africa Project of the World Student Christian Federation, based in London (1971-1973). This project aimed to document how colonial powers had exploited the resources of their colonies, as well as the impact of apartheid in South Africa.
In those years, she also studied at the Institute d’Action Culturelle in Geneva, which was established by Paulo Freire, arguably her most significant teacher. The insights and contacts from this time of engagement with global issues of justice and education provided a strong foundation for Helen’s subsequent career.
In 1974, Helen embarked on a Master of Arts course supervised by the late Professor Herb Feith. Helen had met student leaders from the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola in the Europe/Africa project, who asked her about East Timor (“so close to Australia”).
East Timor thesis topic Recognising that she, along with most Australians, knew very little about East Timor, Helen proposed East Timor as the focus of her master’s thesis. She began to learn Portuguese for this purpose.
Following the overthrow of the authoritarian regime in Portugal in April 1974 and the consequent opportunities for independence in the Portuguese colonies, she visited East Timor for three months in early 1975, where she was impressed by the programme and leadership of Fretilin, the main independence party.
Her plans were thwarted by the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in December 1975, and she was unable to revisit East Timor until after the achievement of independence in 2000. Her 1978 Master of Arts thesis included an account of the Fretilin plans rather than the Fretilin achievements.
Her 1976 book, The Timor Story, was a significant document of the desire of East Timorese people for independence and influenced the keeping of East Timor on the UN decolonisation list. She was a co-founder of the Australia-East Timor Association, which was founded in the initial days of the Indonesian invasion.
Helen was a founding member of the organisation Campaign Against Racial Exploitation in 1975. She was prolific in writing and speaking for these causes, not simply as an advocate, but also as a capable analyst of many situations of decolonisation. She was published regularly in Nation Review and also appeared in many other publications concerned with international affairs and development.
Helen was awarded a rare diploma of education (tertiary education method) from the University of Melbourne in 1980. From 1980 to 1983, she was a full-time doctoral student at Australian National University, culminating in a thesis about non-formal education and development in Fiji, New Caledonia and the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (the islands of the north Pacific).
Helen participated in significant international conferences on education and development in these years and was involved in occasional teaching in the nations and territories of her thesis.
Teaching development studies In 1991, she was appointed lecturer at Victoria University to teach development studies, which, among other things, attracted a steady stream of students from Timor-Leste. In 2000, she was able to return to Timor-Leste as part of her work for Victoria University.
An immediate fruit of her work in 2001 was a memorandum of understanding between Victoria University and the Dili Institute of Technology, followed in 2005 with another between Victoria University and the National University of Timor-Leste.
One outcome of this latter relationship has been biennial conferences on development, held in Dili. Also in 2005, she was a co-founder of the Timor-Leste Studies Association.
Helen stood for quality education and for high academic standards that can empower all students. In 2014, Helen was honoured by the government of Timor-Leste with the award of the Order of Timor-Leste (OT-L).
Retiring from Victoria University in 2014, Helen chose to live in Timor-Leste, while returning to Melbourne regularly. She continued to teach in Dili and was employed by the Timor-Leste Ministry of Education in 2014 and from 2018 until her death.
Helen came to Melbourne in late 2023, planning to return to Timor-Leste early in 2024, where further work awaited her.
A routine medical check-up unexpectedly found significant but symptom-free cancer, which developed rapidly, though it did not prevent her from attending public events days before her death on May 7. Friends and family are fulsome in their praise of Helen’s brother Ian, who took time off work to give her daily care during her last weeks.
Helen had a distinguished academic career, with significant teaching and research focusing on the links between development and education, particularly in the Pacific context, though with a fully global perspective.
Helen had an ever-expanding network of contacts and friends around the world, on whom she relied for critical enlightenment on issues of concern.
From Blackburn to Dili, inspired by sharp intelligence, compassion, Christian faith and a careful reading of the signs of the times, Helen lived by a vision of the common good and strove mightily to build a world of peace and justice.
Sandy Yule was general secretary of the Australian Student Christian Movement from 1970-75, where he first met Helen Hill, and is a minister of the Uniting Church in Australia. He wrote this tribute with help from Helen Hill’s family and friends. Itwas first published by The Age newspaper and is republished from the DevPolicy Blog at Australian National University.
Social media is a problem for economists. They don’t know how to value it.
It has long been argued that it ought to be in the national accounts as part of gross domestic product. One 2019 study estimated Facebook alone is worth US$40 to US$50 per month for consumers in the United States.
But that’s not what we pay. Social media isn’t charged for, and the national accounts measure only the things we pay for, no matter how significant they are in our lives and how many hours per day we spend using them.
As the Australian Senate prepares to hold an inquiry into the impact of social media, economists meeting in Adelaide at the annual conference of the Economic Society of Australia have been presented with new findings about the value of social media that point in a shocking direction. They suggest it is negative.
That’s right: the findings suggest social media is worth less to us than the zero we pay for it. That suggests we would be better off without it.
Better off without social media?
Leonardo Bursztyn of the University of Chicago presented the findings in the keynote address to the conference.
The findings are shocking because they upend one of the tenets of modern economics – that we value the things we do. Put differently, it’s that our behaviour is the best indication of our preferences. The man who developed this theory of revealed preference went on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Here’s what Bursztyn and his colleagues did.
They surveyed more than 1,000 US university students, asking a series of questions about TikTok, Instagram and Google Maps (more about maps later).
The first set of questions was designed to ascertain how much they would need to be paid (or would be prepared to pay) to be off TikTok and Instagram for a month.
What’s it worth to disconnect for a month?
The questions get at the answer by repeatedly offering different prices until one is accepted. The students are told one of them will be chosen at random to actually get (or pay) the money and be monitored to ensure they stick to the deal.
The answers suggest users value these platforms a lot, on average by US$59 per month for TikTok and $47 for Instagram. An overwhelming 93% of TikTok users and 86% of Instagram users would be prepared to pay something to stay on them.
Encouragingly, these figures are in the ballpark of those found by otherstudies.
Then Bursztyn and colleagues asked a second set of questions:
If two-thirds of the students on your campus sign up to deactivate, how much would you need to be paid (or be prepared to pay) to sign up too?
Here the answers – obtained by the same sort of repeated offers and an assurance that that previous studies had found nearly all of those who signed up would comply – were in the opposite direction.
Most of the TikTok users (64%) and almost half of the Instagram users (48%) were prepared to pay to be off them, so long as others were off them, resulting in average valuations across all users of minus US$28 for TikTok and minus $10 for Instagram.
Many users would prefer TikTok didn’t exist
The finding is a measure of the extent to which many, many users hate TikTok and Instagram, even though they feel compelled to use them.
How many users of home fridges would prefer they didn’t exist? Shutterstock
To make clear the bizarre nature of his finding, Bursztyn drew the the conference’s attention to another product, a refrigerator.
Could you imagine, he asked, 60% of refrigerator owners saying they wished fridges didn’t exist?
The relationship he has uncovered is more like the co-dependence seen in a destructive relationship, or the way we relate to addictive products such as tobacco that we know are doing us harm.
Bursztyn and his colleagues wanted to make sure it wasn’t repugnance towards technology and big tech that was driving their findings. So they asked questions about digital maps.
Whereas 57% of Instagram users would prefer a world without Instagram, only 4% of maps users would prefer a world without digital maps.
Fear of missing out drives staying in
Asked why those users who would prefer a world without their platform continued to use it, three-quarters of Instagram users and one-third of TikTok users gave an answer that was coded as fear of missing out, or FOMO.
The phrases used included “if I stop using it, I will be completely out of the loop”.
Other important reasons were classified as “entertainment” (37% for TikTok, 21% for Instagram) and “addiction” (34% and 10%).
To test for these product market traps outside of social media, Bursztyn and colleagues surveyed owners of luxury brands such as Gucci, Versace, Rolex and found 44% would prefer to live in a world without them.
That non-users would like to wipe these brands from the face of the earth isn’t new. What seems to be new is the finding that actual users feel the same way.
iPhone users want fewer new models
In the case of iPhones, users would simply like fewer new models. Bursztyn and colleagues found an astonishing 91% of iPhone owners would prefer Apple to release a new model only every second year, instead of every year.
It’s advice Apple doesn’t need to heed. Many of these customers will keep buying the new models because they don’t want to miss out, even though they would rather not be placed in that situation.
For economists, the findings suggest there’s an unusual class of products that are worth less than people are prepared to pay for them, even when that price is zero.
For the Australian Senate, about to begin an inquiry, the findings suggest that it’s okay to crack down hard on social media, even though a lot of people use it. Many of them would be grateful.
Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation and serves on the central council of the Economic Society of Australia.
New Zealand should join others in calling New Caledonia’s third independence referendum invalid, one of the founders of the Kanaky Aotearoa Solidarity Network says.
In December 2021, the Kanak population boycotted the referendum to mourn their dead during the covid-19 pandemic, after their calls for the referendum to be delayed was ignored.
As a result, Peters said the referendum saw voter turnout collapse and almost 97 percent of voters who cast a ballot voted “No” to independence.
“Delegitimising the result, in the eyes of pro-independence forces and some neutral observers at least, was the low turnout of only 44 percent.”
Kanaky Aotearoa Solidarity group’s David Small said Peters should have aligned with the Melanesian Spearhead Group which has called for a UN mission to New Caledonia.
‘Referendum delegitimised’ “He said that the third referendum was delegitimised in the eyes of some, and did not include New Zealand in that,” Small said.
“It would have been better if he had because that third referendum was indefensible.”
The group said Peters had mentioned the need for dialogue but failed to provide a clear pathway or goal.
“The Kanaky Aotearoa Solidarity Group is deeply disappointed by Peters’ insufficient support for the Kanak people’s struggle.
“His statement at PALM10 represents a missed opportunity for New Zealand to assert its commitment to justice and self-determination for all Pacific peoples.”
Foreign Minister Winston Peters . . . “missed opportunity for New Zealand to assert its commitment to justice and self-determination for all Pacific peoples,” says Kanaky Aotearoa Solidarity. Image: RNZ/Nick Monro
‘Fed by disinformation’, claims envoy However, the top French diplomat in the Pacific, Véronique Roger-Lacan, said she had reassured Pacific Islands Forum Leaders (PIF) that attended PALM10 that France’s actions during the third and final independence referendum were fair.
Roger-Lacan spoke to RNZ Pacific from Tokyo following talks with the leaders of Papua New Guinea and Tonga.
She said there was “so much disinformation” surrounding issues in New Caledonia and that Pacific leaders had only heard one side of the story.
“For example, Mark Brown sent a letter to President [Louis] Mapou but he did not try and contact France, kind of ignoring that New Caledonia until further notice is France,” she said.
“We tried to call them, but Mark Brown would not be there to pick up the phone.
“But luckily, the Prime Minister of Tonga, the incoming chair of the PIF and everyone else was there, so that everyone was very happy to hear the information that we were providing.
“We are going to provide full information in writing because it seems that everybody ignores . . . the substance of the matter, and everybody is totally fed by disinformation and propaganda” surrounding issues in New Caledonia.
Delegation to New Caledonia ‘decision has been made’ According to PIF’s outgoing chair and Cook Islands Prime Minister, Mark Brown, work is already in progress to send a high-level Pacific delegation to investigate the ongoing political crisis, which has resulted in 10 deaths and the economic costs totalling 2.2 billion euros (NZ$4 billion).
“We will now go through the process of how we will put this into practice. Of course, it will require the support of the government of France for the mission to proceed,” Brown said at a news conference at the PALM10 meeting in Tokyo.
A spokesperson for the New Caledonia President’s office, Charles Wea, has told RNZ Pacific that the high-level group was expected to be made up of the leaders of Fiji, Cook Islands, Tonga and Solomon Islands.
“The decision that has been made by the leaders during the meeting in Japan to send a mission to New Caledonia before the annual meeting over the of PIF around the second or third week of August,” he said.
“The objectives of the mission will be to come and listen and discuss with all parties in New Caledonia in order to [prepare] a report [for] the leaders meeting in Tonga.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
An interview with former University of the South Pacific (USP) development studies professor Dr Vijay Naidu, a founding president of the Fiji Anti-Nuclear Group (FANG), has produced fresh insights into the legacy of Pacific nuclear-free and anti-colonialism activism.
The community storytelling group Talanoa TV, an affiliate of the Whānau Community Centre and Hub and linked to the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN), has embarked on producing a series of short educational videos as oral histories of people involved in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific (NFIP) Movement to document and preserve this activist mahi and history.
The series, dubbed “Legends of NFIP”, are being timed for screening in 2025 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Rainbow Warrior bombing in Auckland harbour on 10 July 1985 and also with the 40th anniversary of the Rarotonga Treaty for a Nuclear-Free Pacific.
Legends of NFIP – Professor Vijay Naidu. Video: Talanoa TV
These videos are planned to “bring alive” the experiences and commitment of people involved in a Pacific-wide movement and will be suitable for schools as video podcasts and could be stored on open access platforms.
“This project is also expected to become an extremely useful resource for students and researchers,” says project convenor Nikhil Naidu, himself a former FANG and Coalition for Democracy (CDF) activist.
In this 14-minute interview, Professor Naidu talks about the origins of the NFIP Movement.
“At this time [1970s], there were the French nuclear tests that were actually atmospheric nuclear tests and people like Suliana Siwatibau and Graeme Bain started the ATOM movement (Against Nuclear Tests on Moruroa) in Tahiti in the 1970s at USP,” he says.
“And we began to understand the issues around nuclear testing and how it affected people — you know, the radiation. And drop-outs and pollution from it.”
The 2024 US election took another dramatic turn when President Joe Biden withdrew his re-election bid, endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to take his place.
The quick switch from Biden to Harris has reinvigorated the Democratic Party and their donors behind a younger candidate. It has thrown up a new challenge for Donald Trump who, however, is still election favorite. It’ll be up to Harris to define her campaign before Trump is able to define her.
To discuss the fast-changing play, we’re joined by Lester Munson, a fellow with the United States Studies Centre.
Munson is a long-time Washington insider, having worked with George W. Bush’s administration, been chief of staff for a Republican senator, and serving as Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He now works at BGR Group, a leading government relations firm in Washington, DC, and he joined from there on the podcast.
On Kamala Harris having locked in the nomination, set to be ratified at the Democratic convention next month:
There’s no real opposition to her candidacy at this point. She has earned the endorsement of scores of senior Democratic officials if not hundreds. She has raised a significant amount of money and appears to be really dominating the political landscape for Democrats right now. It seems like she’s going to become the nominee by acclamation and with almost unanimous support behind her.
On what kind of candidate Harris might be:
She’s certainly younger than the previous Democratic candidate. She’s substantially younger than Donald Trump. She’s a fresher face. She has a different way of conducting herself in public. That is a radical departure from both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
And as a Republican, I will just tell you, I think she’s a relatively attractive persona in that she’s got some charisma, she’s got some magnetism, she can light up a room, there’s no doubt about it. And I think people are going to give her a chance to earn their vote. Whether she’s able to do that is a separate question.
Some people have said the failed assassination attempt has changed Trump and Munson agrees:
I think he is changed. […] If you just watch the acceptance speech at the [Republican] convention, you can see like kind of a different look on his face. He seems more at peace with the universe, he seems grateful to be alive. I think that seems genuine to me.
In the event of a second Trump term, Munson gives his advice on what Anthony Albanese should do,
My advice to the Prime Minister would be, work on the relationship part, work on your personal face-to-face time with President Trump. Find the things that he cares about and find a way to deliver some sort of win for him, if that’s useful to you.
If he comes back into office, he’s not going to rely on international law or written agreements or treaties or trade deals. He is going to make decisions based on looking someone in the eye, their body language, the way they shake hands, how attractive they are on TV, how tall they are – very superficial things, but you know that going in, so use that to your advantage and be in the right place at the right time to try to get the the result you want out of the relationship.
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.
Headlines are again warning of a new COVID variant in Australia. This time it’s LB.1, or as some experts have dubbed it, “D-FLiRT”.
Emerging evidence suggests LB.1 could be more transmissible than earlier Omicron subvariants, though there’s nothing to suggest it will cause more severe disease.
But before we look more closely at LB.1, how did we get here in the first place? The COVID virus is a crafty thing, continuing to evolve so it can keep infecting us.
From XBB to JN.1 to FLiRT to FLuQE
Our current COVID vaccines are based on XBB.1.5, a subvariant of Omicron. Along with other XBB subvariants, XBB.1.5 caused a wave of COVID cases around the world in 2023.
In August 2023, a new subvariant called JN.1 was discovered in Luxembourg. Until that point, new Omicron subvariants only had small genetic changes from their predecessors (called genetic drift).
However, JN.1 was unusual in that it was 41 mutations away from XBB.1.5 (big changes like this are called genetic shifts). Because of these changes, it was expected that JN.1 would take off, and indeed, JN.1 caused another wave of infections in Australia and around the world at the end of 2023 and the beginning of this year.
JN.1 then mutated further, giving us the “FLiRT” subvariants such as KP.1.1, JN.1.7 and KP.2.
Proteins including the spike protein (a protein on the surface of the virus which allows it to attach to our cells) are made up of amino acids, essentially molecular building blocks. When scientists “sequence” new variants, they work out the exact order of amino acids in the spike protein, as this can change the behaviour of the virus.
Each amino acid has its own letter abbreviation. The FLiRT variants were named for two genetic mutations to the spike protein. The sequence changed from phenylalanine (F) to leucine (L) at position 456 (genetic mutation F456L), and from arginine (R) to threonine (T) at position 346 (R346T).
Research yet to be peer-reviewed suggests these genetic changes gave the FLiRT subvariants better capacity to evade our immune responses, but slightly poorer ability to establish an infection once they get into our cells (sometimes called binding efficiency).
The FLiRT subvariants have themselves now mutated. Some of these new subvariants are called FLuQE, and include KP.3, which along with KP.2 is currently dominating around the world.
These are similar to the FLiRT subvariants with additional genetic mutations. One is called Q493E – hence the name FLuQE. Along with another mutation, F456L, these changes appear to have helped the virus regain some of its reduced ability to infect cells compared to FLiRT by increasing binding efficiency.
From FLiRT to LB.1
Reports suggest LB.1 was first detected in March 2024. LB.1 is similar to the FLiRT subvariants but with an additional mutation in the spike protein called S:S31del. The “del” refers to a deletion – a genetic change where a part of the virus’ genetic sequence is removed or lost during replication. In this case, the 31st amino acid (serine) in the spike protein is removed.
For this reason, it’s been given the nickname “D-FLiRT” or “DeFLiRT”. This also covers other variants carrying the same mutations as FLiRT but with this deletion, such as KP.2.3.
Preliminary results from a research group at the University of Tokyo, who conducted modelling and lab experiments with these emerging subvariants, indicate the transmissibility of LB.1 and KP.2.3 may be higher than both KP.2 and KP.3.
LB.1 has been detected in multiple countries, including Australia, and is being monitored closely by bodies like the World Health Organization and the CDC.
In the United States, as of July 15, KP.3 accounted for about 37% of cases, KP.2 for 24% and LB.1 for another 15%, having been steadily rising over recent weeks.
KP.3 and its descendants such as KP.3.2 and KP.3.2.1 (FLuQE subvariants) are similarly dominating in Australia, accounting for at least 50% of cases. We don’t know what proportion of cases LB.1 is making up in Australia at present. It’s possible LB.1 infections are still negligible, but they may well grow over time.
While COVID cases appear to be declining after a recent wave in Australia, LB.1 may eventually out-compete KP.3, and between them, cause another wave of cases.
We are already seeing a bad season for respiratory viruses with both RSV and influenza cases higher than last year. So a variant with increased transmissibility could add to our winter woes.
The good news is there’s no evidence to suggest LB.1 causes any different symptoms or more severe illness than previous Omicron subvariants.
The current vaccines based on XBB.1.5 should still give some cross immunity against LB.1, and oral antivirals such as Paxlovid and Lagevrio should still work. We will likely be getting an updated vaccinebased on KP.2, probably towards the end of the year. That should provide better protection against these new subvariants since genetically, they’re very similar to KP.2.
Adrian Esterman receives funding from the MRFF, NHMRC and ARC.
In May, a multibillion-dollar UK-based multinational called Informa announced in a trading update that it had signed a deal with Microsoft involving “access to advanced learning content and data, and a partnership to explore AI expert applications”. Informa is the parent company of Taylor & Francis, which publishes a wide range of academic and technical books and journals, so the data in question may include the content of these books and journals.
According to reports published last week, the authors of the content do not appear to have been asked or even informed about the deal. What’s more, they say they had no opportunity to opt out of the deal, and will not see any money from it.
Academics are only the latest of several groups of what we might call content creators to take umbrage at having their work ingested by the generative AI models currently racing to hoover up the products of human culture. Newspapers, visual artists and record labels are already taking AI companies to court.
While it’s unclear how Informa will react to the rumblings of discontent, the deal is a reminder to authors to be aware of the contractual terms of the publishing agreements they sign.
What’s in the Informa deal?
Informa’s update stated four focus areas of the Microsoft deal:
increasing Informa’s own productivity
developing an automated citation tool
developing AI-powered research assistant software (perhaps like a system being tested by online academic library JSTOR)
giving Microsoft data access to “help improve relevance and performance of AI systems”.
Informa will be paid more than £8 million (A$15.5 million) for initial access to the data, followed by recurring payments of an unspecified amount for the next three years.
We don’t know exactly what Microsoft plans to do with its data access, but a likely scenario is that the content of academic books and articles would be added to the training data of ChatGPT-like generative AI models. In principle this should make the output of the AI systems more accurate, though existing AI models have faced heavy criticism, not only for regurgitating training data without citation (which can be viewed as a kind of plagiarism), but also for inventing false information and attributing it to real sources.
However, the update also says “the agreement protects intellectual property rights, including limits on verbatim text extracts and alignment on the importance of detailed citation references”.
The “limits on verbatim text extracts” mentioned likely pertains to the US doctrine of fair use, which permits certain uses of copyright-protected material.
Many generative AI companies are currently facing copyright infringement lawsuits over their use of training data, and their defences are likely to rely on claiming fair use.
The “importance of detailed citation references” may pertain to the concept of attribution in copyright. This is a moral right possessed by authors. It provides that the creator of the work should be known and attributed as the author when their work is reproduced.
How does scholarly publishing usually work?
Most academics do not receive payment or make any profit from most of their scholarly publishing. Rather, writing journal and conference papers is usually considered part of the scope of work within a full-time, tenured position. Publication builds an academic’s credibility and promotes their research.
The basic process often goes like this: an author researches and writes an original article and submits it to a journal publisher for peer review. Most peer reviewers and editorial board members also receive no payment for their work.
In fact, some journals may require authors to pay an “article processing charge” to cover editing and other costs. This can be thousands of dollars for an open access publication. Generally speaking, the more prestigious the publication, the higher the charge.
If an article passes peer review, the author will be asked to sign a publishing agreement. The terms may cover logistical arrangements such as when the article will be published, the format (print, online or both), and the division of royalties (if applicable). There will also be arrangements regarding copyright and ownership of the article.
An author usually must also grant exclusive rights to the publisher to distribute and publish the article. This may mean the author cannot publish the article elsewhere, and the publisher may also be able to sub-licence the article to a third party, such as an AI company.
Sometimes publishers require an author to assign copyright in the article to them via a permanent copyright transfer agreement.
Essentially, this means the author grants all of their authorial rights as copyright holder in the work to the publisher. The publisher can then reproduce, communicate, distribute or license the work to others as they wish.
It is possible to only assign limited rights, rather than all rights, and this is something authors should consider.
Content mining
It is vital that authors understand the implications of licensing and assignment and to contemplate precisely what they are agreeing to when they sign a contract. In light of the recent trend of publishers entering into agreements with generative AI companies, publishers’ AI policies should also be closely scrutinised.
In the US, a standard collective licensing solution for content use in internal AI systems has recently been released, which sets out rights and remuneration for copyright holders. Similar licences for the use of content for AI systems will likely enter the Australian market very soon.
The types of agreements being reached between academic publishers and AI companies have sparked bigger-picture concerns for many academics. Do we want scholarly research to be reduced to content for AI knowledge mining? There are no clear answers about the ethics and morals of such practices.
Wellett Potter 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Adams, Professor of Corporate Law & Academic Director of UNE Sydney campus, University of New England
Until last Friday, many businesses hadn’t really dealt with anything quite like the speed and severity of the CrowdStrike IT outage.
Being forced to stop operations is costly. Some estimates put the damage bill from the outage at more than A$1 billion in Australia alone.
As they continue to tally the losses, it’s only natural that affected businesses will be asking who is legally responsible, and whether there’ll be any compensation.
These are great questions, but from a legal point of view the answers will be complex.
Both CrowdStrike and various government cybersecurity authorities were quick to declare that the event was not the result of any criminal behaviour such as a cyberattack or other hacking.
This means the laws relating to these matters fall within the jurisdiction of civil law – in particular, the law of contracts and the law of torts.
Exclusion clauses
CrowdStrike’s security software is used by a wide range of companies and other large organisations. Microsoft, whose tech ecosystem was impacted, estimated the CrowdStrike update affected 8.5 million Windows devices globally.
But as with many other technology products, there is a clear contractual relationship between the consumer (the end user of the product) and the manufacturer (CrowdStrike).
This contract – the sometimes overlooked “terms and conditions” – has to be “signed” electronically by organisations using the software. Signing binds them to these terms – regardless of whether they’ve actually read them or not.
Deep in the fine print of many software product terms and conditions are a series of exclusion clauses. Tech companies often rely on these to protect themselves from litigation for any damage that arises if their software malfunctions.
In the case of CrowdStrike’s Falcon security software, the relevant terms limit liability to “fees paid”. Put more plainly, customers are entitled to no more than a simple refund.
As you can see, businesses’ options for seeking redress under contract law may be severely limited. This has led some law firms to raise the possibility of pursuing class action under other claims, such as negligence. In a note to clients about the outage, New Zealand-based law firm Russell McVeagh said:
Further, if any lack of readiness on the part of affected organisations exacerbated the scale or duration of the impact that the outage had on them, shareholder claims against those organisations, or their directors, are also a possibility.
To understand how such a class action might be framed, you need to understand some important legal basics surrounding what’s called “tort law” in common law.
Australia and New Zealand follow the legal system known as common law, which was developed in Britain in the 11th century. At a high level, it simply means that courts follow precedents set by the highest court in the jurisdiction.
And the word “tort” simply means a civil wrong. Many legal actions – such as allegations of defamation, trespass, nuisance or negligence – fall under the umbrella of torts.
‘Snail in the bottle’
In 1932, the UK House of Lords heard a case that would forever change the landscape of the common law world – “Donoghue v Stevenson”.
This case is known by its nickname: “the snail in the bottle” case. The simple facts of it involved two friends having an ice cream float made with ginger beer in a Scottish cafe. After one of them had already consumed some of the dessert, they discovered a dead snail in the ginger beer bottle.
The cafe owner could not have known that inside the commercially produced brown bottle of ginger beer was a dead snail. So a tort of negligence was brought by the consumer against the manufacturer of the bottle of ginger beer, Stevenson & Co.
The plaintiff, the bringer of the civil case, had to prove three things for Stevenson, the defendant, to be found liable. First, that a duty of care was owed between the manufacturer and the final consumer. Second, that there was a breach of the duty of care. And finally, that it was reasonably foreseeable that harm would occur from that negligence, resulting in actual damage.
The House of Lords decided in favour of Mrs Donoghue, which extended the notion of duty of care outside of contracts.
Over the next 50 years these tests were refined, and “remoteness of damage” was added to the requirements for proving the case. This meant that in some instances, entities couldn’t be found liable if they were found to be too remote from any harm that occurred.
So could there be a class action?
In Australia, most consumers are protected by legislation known as the Australian Consumer Law.
This legislation provides different remedies and requirements of proof than the common law tortious requirements. But the common law principles of the tort of negligence still apply in tandem.
Many users encountered the dreaded ‘blue screen of death’ during the outage. QINQIE99/Shutterstock
However, any businesses and organisations looking to pursue class action against CrowdStrike on the tort grounds of negligence would face an extremely complex situation. The outage affected customers in a wide variety of countries, and CrowdStrike itself is headquartered in the United States.
This means such class actions would likely have to be filed in a variety of US states and other countries.
Class action lawyers would charge a percentage of the final settlement, which could be between 30% and 80% of any payout. But they would also take on the risk and pay all the costs, such as for expert witnesses and lawyer preparation.
The scope and scale of the outage means that if any class actions are eventually launched, it could become one of the largest litigation matters in the world and drag on for many years.
Whatever happens, major insurance companies will continue watching the situation closely, with many businesses now looking closely at what they are covered for under any cyber insurance policies they’d taken out.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman.
We end today’s show in The Hague, where the International Court of Justice ruled last Friday that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is illegal, should come to an end — “as rapidly as possible”.
Israel’s illegal military occupation of the Palestinian Territories began in 1967, has since forcefully expanded, killing and displacing thousands of Palestinians. ICJ Presiding Judge Nawaf Salam read the nonbinding legal opinion, deeming Israel’s presence in the territories illegal.
JUDGE NAWAF SALAM: [translated] “Israel must immediately cease all new settlement activity. Israel also has an obligation to repeal all legislation and measures creating or maintaining the unlawful situation, including those which discriminate against the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as all measures aimed at modifying the demographic composition of any parts of the territory.
“Israel is also under an obligation to provide full reparations for the damage caused by its internationally wrongful acts to all natural or legal persons concerned.”
AMY GOODMAN: The court also said other nations are obligated not to legally recognise Israel’s decades-long occupation of the territories and, “not to render aid or assistance,” to the occupation.
The 15-judge panel said Israel had no right to sovereignty of the territories and pointed to a number of Israeli actions, such as the construction and violent expansion of illegal Israeli settlements across West Bank and East Jerusalem, the forced permanent control over Palestinian lands, and discriminatory policies against Palestinians — all violations of international law.
The Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riyad al-Maliki, praised Friday’s ruling.
RIYAD AL-MALIKI: “All states and the UN are now under obligation not to recognise the legality of Israel’s presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and to do nothing to assist Israel in maintaining this illegal situation. “They are directed by the court to bring Israel’s illegal occupation to an end.
“This means all states and the UN must immediately review their bilateral relations with Israel to ensure their policies do not aid in Israel’s continued aggression against the Palestinian people, whether directly or indirectly. … “[translated] All states must now fulfill their clear obligations: no aid, no collusion, no money, no weapons, no trade, nothing with Israel.”
Democracy Now! on the ICJ Palestine ruling. Video: Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: In 2022, the UN General Assembly issued a resolution tasking the International Court of Justice with determining whether the Israeli occupation amounted to annexation. This all comes as the ICJ is also overseeing a [separate and] ongoing genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa and as the International Criminal Court (ICC) is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant.
Despite mounting outcry over Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed some 39,000 Palestinians — more than 16,000 of them children — Netanyahu is set to travel to Washington, DC, to address a joint session of Congress this Wednesday.
For more, we go to Brussels, Belgium, where we’re joined by Diana Buttu, Palestinian human rights attorney and former adviser to the negotiating team of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).
Thank you so much for being with us. Diana, first respond to this court ruling. Since it is non-binding, what is the significance of it?
DIANA BUTTU: Even though it’s nonbinding, Amy, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have any weight. It simply means that Israel is going to ignore it. But what it does, is it sets out the legal precedent for other countries, and those other countries [that] do have to respect the opinion of the highest court, the highest international court.
And so, what we see with this decision is that it’s a very important and a very necessary one, because we see the court makes it clear not only that Israel’s occupation is illegal, but it also says that all countries around the world have an obligation to make sure that Israel doesn’t get away with it, that they have an obligation to make sure that this occupation comes to an end.
This is very important, because over the years, and in particular over the past 30 years, we’ve seen a shift in international diplomacy to try to push Palestinians to somehow give up their rights. And here we have the highest international court saying that that isn’t the case and that, in fact, it’s up to Israel to end its military occupation, and it’s up to the international community to make sure that Israel does that.
AMY GOODMAN: And exactly what is the extended decision when it comes to how other countries should deal with Israel at this point?
DIANA BUTTU: Well, there are some very interesting elements to this case. The first is that the court comes out very clearly and not just says that the occupation is illegal, but they also say that the settlements have to go and the settlers have to go.
They also say that Palestinians have a right to return. Now, we’re talking about over 300,000 Palestinians who were expelled in 1967, and now there are probably about 200,000 Palestinians who have never been able to return back — we’re just talking about the West Bank and Gaza Strip — because of Israel’s discriminatory measures.
The other thing that the court says is that it’s not just the West Bank and East Jerusalem that are occupied, but also Gaza, as well.And this is a very important ruling, because for so many years Israel has tried to blur the lines and make it seem as though they’re not in occupation of Gaza, which they are.
And so, what this requires is that the international community not only not recognise the occupation, but that they take into account measures or they take measures to make sure that Israel stops its occupation.
That means everything from arms embargo to sanctions on Israel — anything that is necessary that can be done to make sure that Israel’s occupation finally comes to an end. And this is where we now see that instead of the world telling Palestinians that they just have to negotiate a resolution with their occupier, with their abuser, that the ball is now in their court.
It’s up to the international community now to put sanctions on Israel to end this military occupation.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about what’s happening right now in Gaza. You’ve got the deaths at — it’s expected to be well over 39,000. But you also have this new report by Oxfam that finds Israel has used water as a weapon of war, with Gaza’s water supplies plummeting 94 percent since October 7 and the nonstop Israeli bombardment.
Even before, their access was extremely limited. And then you have this catastrophic situation where you have, because of the destruction of Gaza’s water treatment plants, forcing people to resort to sewage-contaminated water containing pathogens that lead to diarrhoea, especially deadly for kids, diseases like cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army has started to vaccinate the Israeli soldiers after Palestinian health authorities said a high concentration of the poliovirus has been found in sewage samples from Gaza. It’s taking place, the vaccination programme of soldiers, across Israel in the coming weeks. The significance of this, Diana?
DIANA BUTTU: This is precisely what we’ve been talking about, which is that Israel is carrying out genocide, they know that they’re carrying out genocide, and we don’t see that anybody is stopping Israel in carrying out this genocide.
So, here now we have yet another International Court of Justice ruling. This one — the previous ones are actually binding, saying that Israel has to take all measures to stop this genocide. And yet we just simply don’t see that the world has put into place measures to sanction Israel, to isolate Israel, to punish Israel.
Instead, it gets to do whatever it wants.
But there is something very important, as well, which is that Israel somehow believes that it’s going to be immune, that somehow this polio or all of these diseases aren’t going to boomerang back into Israeli society. They will.
And the issue here now is whether we are going to see some very robust action on the part of the international community, now that we have a number of decisions from the ICJ saying to Israel that it’s got to stop and that this genocide must come to end. Israel must pay a price for continuing this genocide.
🚨Before @netanyahu lands in DC, we demand @TheJusticeDept investigate him for genocide, war crimes & torture in Gaza. Nearly 40k killed, including more than 14k children, 90k injured, 2 million displaced, & an entire population subject to starvation. This cannot go unanswered. pic.twitter.com/2id5cpOa58
AMY GOODMAN: Diana Buttu, I wanted to end by asking you about Benjamin Netanyahu coming here to the US. The Center for Constitutional Rights tweeted, “Before @netanyahu lands in DC, we demand @TheJusticeDept investigate him for genocide, war crimes & torture in Gaza. Nearly 40k killed, including more than 14k children, 90k injured, 2 million displaced, & an entire population subject to starvation. This cannot go unanswered.”
If you can talk about the significance of Netanyahu addressing a joint session of Congress?
Also, it’s expected that the person who President Joe Biden has said he is supporting, as he steps aside, to run for president, Vice-President Kamala Harris, is expected to be meeting with Netanyahu. And what you would like to see happen here?
DIANA BUTTU: You know, it’s repugnant to me to be hearing that a war criminal, a person who has flattened Gaza, who said that he was going to flatten Gaza, who has issued orders to kill more than 40,000, upwards of 190,000 Palestinians — we still don’t know the numbers — who has made life in Gaza unlivable, who’s using Palestinians as human pinballs, telling them to move from one area to the next, who’s presiding over a genocide, and unabashedly so — it’s going to be shocking to see the number of applause and rounds of applause and the standing ovations that this man is going to be receiving.
It very much signals exactly where the United States is, which is complicit in this genocide.
And Palestinians know this. If anything, he should have not had received an invitation. He should simply be getting a warrant for his arrest, not be receiving applause and accolades in Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: Diana Buttu, I want to thank you so much for being with us, Palestinian human rights attorney, joining us from Brussels, Belgium.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Prudence Flowers, Senior Lecturer in US History, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Flinders University
Vice President Kamala Harris had only just been endorsed by Joe Biden to take his spot as the Democratic nominee for president when she forcefully reminded Americans “what’s at stake in November” in a post on X:
Let’s be clear: Donald Trump would sign a national abortion ban and restrict access to contraception if given the chance.
Abortion has long been a hot-button election issue in the United States, but in the first presidential election since Roe v Wade was overturned, it could be the defining issue.
With Harris now the presumptive Democratic nominee, former President Donald Trump could be more vulnerable on the issue, particularly given his selection of J.D. Vance as his Republican running mate.
What Americans think about abortion
In June 2022, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, finding there was no constitutional right to abortion and returning regulation to the states.
Since then, public anger has resulted in Democratic successes in multiple state elections. Every time reproductive rights have been on the ballot, abortion opponents have lost, even in conservative states like Kansas and Kentucky.
According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 63% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, which is up four percentage points from 2021. Notably, two-thirds of moderate Republicans also say they support abortion rights.
In another poll by Gallup, nearly a third of registered voters said they would “only vote for a candidate who shares their views on abortion”. This is the highest percentage since Gallup began tracking voter sentiment on abortion in 1992. Back then, only 13% of voters agreed with the statement.
And in key battleground states for this year’s presidential election, 64% of residents agreed abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Harris’s stance on abortion
Democrats are keenly aware abortion matters. In the presidential debate last month, however, Biden floundered on the issue. Trump set the terms of the discussion, and Biden failed to convincingly defend reproductive rights or rebut falsehoods about later abortion care that Trump has been recycling since 2016.
Harris, by contrast, is far more assertive and confident when talking about abortion.
After she was elected to the US Senate in 2017 – the same year Trump entered the White House – she was the only senator who had a reproductive rights lawyer on staff, according to one activist.
Harris was central to the Biden administration’s response after the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v Wade – both as the public face speaking to Americans, and as the leader in policy discussions about how to claw back protections.
And she was the point person on abortion in Biden’s re-election campaign. On January 22, the anniversary of the 1973 Roe decision, Harris embarked on a “fight for reproductive freedom” tour, giving stump speeches on abortion in multiple battleground states.
Then, in March, she toured a Minnesota abortion clinic, the first US president or vice president to do so.
Republicans’ shifting tone
Republicans, meanwhile, have radically revamped their usual electoral strategies.
At the 2020 Republican National Convention, abortion was a prominent theme in Trump’s speech and right-to-life leaders were given coveted speaking slots.
But at this year’s convention, almost no one mentioned the topic. That included Trump and Vance, who has been outspoken in his opposition to abortion.
The Republican Party platform has also significantly trimmed back its language on the issue, abandoning a more than 40-year-old promise to support national restrictions on abortion. (The platform instead contains language about the 14th Amendment, which is a veiled nod to the argument that fetuses have personhood rights).
Trump is manoeuvring awkwardly on the issue, as well. He has claimed to be the “MOST pro-life President in history,” taking sole credit for the end of Roe.
Yet, simultaneously, he has eschewed responsibility for the abortion bans now in place in almost half the country.
Trump has spent the last year casting himself as an abortion “moderate”, arguing that regulation should be left to the states. But he has angered some anti-abortion groups by refusing to endorse a national ban and by describing Florida’s six-week ban as “a terrible thing and a terrible mistake.”
Contrasting views on the Trump-Vance ticket
Trump’s selection of Vance as his running mate has made things more complicated. Vance’s stances on reproductive health care are extreme even for a Republican.
Vance voted against a law protecting in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) rights. He also called on the attorney general’s office to enforce a 151-year-old “zombie law” that would criminalise the delivery of medication abortion through the mail.
Trump, meanwhile, has said he “strongly supports” IVF, and has promised he would “not block” medication abortion.
Vance now claims to share Trump’s approach to abortion but given both of them have such shifting views, it’s impossible to gauge what this means in practice. As Trump has repeatedly told his right-to-life supporters, “you got to win elections”.
If he does win, however, it seems almost certain he will attempt to advance the anti-abortion agenda outlined in Project 2025. Central to this is a multi-pronged attack on medication abortion.
Harris has the capacity to bring the abortion fight to Trump and wage it with a prosecutor’s zeal. It will likely be a crucial part of her arsenal if she becomes the Democratic presidential nominee.
Prudence Flowers has received funding from the South Australian Department of Human Services. She is a member of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition.
We’ve taken data from every modern summer Olympics to see which sports have stood the test of time, the changing age of athletes, and whether hosting really gives your team an advantage.
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics had the largest number of sports of any games, with 33 sports (and 339 medal events), while the first modern games in Athens in 1896 only had nine.
Some sports that are no longer in the Olympics include ballooning, fishing, firefighting, alpinism (mountain climbing, judged by the mountains climbed in the four years between games), kaatsen (a type of handball) and bicycle polo.
New sports that entered recently are surfing, sports climbing and, in the 2024 Paris games, breaking (known by some as breakdancing).
Olympics are a young person’s game
On average, since the start of the modern Olympics in 1896, about two-thirds of athletes who competed were 20–30 years old. Most athletes compete in their first games between the ages of 20–25. Very few athletes compete over the age of 40: fewer than 4% of all athletes.
Age, and death, didn’t stop John Quincy Ward, however. Though he died in 1910 at the age of 79, his artwork competed at the 1928 Olympics in the (now defunct) sculpture event – he didn’t win. Ward is one of only 24 other athletes who have competed posthumously, mostly in the arts though a few were part of the alpinism event and died while climbing mountains.
While the vast majority of athletes only compete in one or two Olympics, almost 900 people attended five or more games. Incredibly, three athletes have competed in nine games and one athlete, equestrian athlete Ian Millar, has competed in 10 Olympics.
The most competitive events
Athletics events attract the most competitors through the history of the modern Olympics.
However, digging deeper into the data reveals some countries have cumulatively sent more athletes in different sports:
Argentina, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Malaysia and New Zealand sent more hockey players than any other sport
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iran, Mongolia, Syria and Türkiye mostly send wrestling athletes
around 9,385 footballers from around the world have competed at the games – but almost 20% (1,632) of those came from just 18 nations, including Brazil (341), Korea (209) and Egypt (195).
Australia’s medal tally is on the rise
Australia has hosted two Olympic Games – Melbourne in 1956 and Sydney in 2000 – and its medal numbers shot up in the games before and after. However, Australia had its best gold medal run in the 2020 Tokyo and 2004 Athens games.
Medals can bring big money to the athletes who win them. Since 2019, the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) pays A$20,000, $15,000 and $10,000 for gold, silver and bronze medals, respectively. This is likely to go up as Australia prepares to host the 2032 games.
Home team advantage
Hosting the Olympics seems to deliver a hometown advantage an edge.
The chart below shows the top 12 countries by medal tally and how they stacked up when they hosted the Olympics. Almost all of them have a meaningful boost, either making or breaking their top tallies during a home games.
There is one unique standout, though. Hungary has become a powerhouse in picking up medals – astounding considering it hasn’t hosted an Olympics.
France is about to embark on its third Olympic games, sharing the silver medal for number of games hosted with the UK – gold goes to the US, which has hosted four times. It remains to be seen if France can live up to their incredible medal success in the 1900 Paris games but the data shows that 2024 is their best hope.
Recent survey results show 25% of Australians agree that women who do not leave abusive relationships are partly responsible for the abuse continuing. This stubbornly common attitude demonstrates that victim-survivors are still being held responsible for the abuse they experience and for keeping themselves safe.
However, this is starting to change. Against the backdrop of what has been a horror year for violence against women and children, conversations have pivoted sharply to focus on making men accountable for their use of violence.
This is reflected in a new campaign by the Daily Telegraph. The masthead recently published the photos and names of 18 men charged with or accused of domestic or family violence offences in New South Wales. The media outlet has also started using the term “coward’s attack” in lieu of domestic violence.
On the face of it, this campaign appears to be an innovative approach to holding men accountable. But will it make women and children safer?
Public shaming doesn’t work
Publicly naming and shaming perpetrators and calling them “cowards” will not reduce domestic and family violence.
We have learned this after numerous reviews of public sex offenders registries, which similarly make people convicted of terrible crimes visible to the public. Instead, these strategies can make future abuse more likely.
This is because name-and-shame campaigns stigmatise, ostracise and demonise their targets, effectively “othering” them within the community. However, community reintegration – where someone becomes an active member of and is accepted back into the community – is an important part of preventing reoffending.
Being part of a community can help address structural factors that may contribute to some men’s use of violence, such as unemployment and social isolation.
Also, men who use violence need to be surrounded by people who believe they’re capable of change. Investment in the community and relationships can increase men’s motivation to stop using violence because they don’t want to disappoint their community. How people see us is also important for how we see ourselves: if our community says we are capable of change, then maybe we are.
But are these men likely to see community reintegration as possible when they have been shamed in such a public way? Probably not.
Who can I be?
Believing in the potential for change is not enough on its own. Men who use violence also need an alternative self that they can aim for: a clear vision of the version of themselves they’d like to be.
Name-and-shame campaigns do a great job of condemning behaviours, but they don’t provide an alternative self to work towards. It is this piece of the puzzle – who can I be if I don’t use violence anymore? – that is needed for behaviour change to occur.
This is the point made by some commentators who have said that, rather than condemnation, we need to provide men who use violence with alternative models of positive masculinity that provide them with an alternative to which to aspire.
Men need to be able to see a future version of themselves in which they’re not violent. Shutterstock
The power of language
The move towards the term “coward attacks” has been justified on the basis that “domestic” minimises the abuse and makes it everyday.
However, the term “coward” is also problematic as it perpetuates traditional gender norms. Men who use violence are “lesser” because they are not strong or brave.
Men who feel like they are not living up to their own ideal version of manhood, for example if they feel like they are a coward, may use violence to deal with the emotional distress they feel because of this disconnect, which we call “gender role strain”. As one man who participated in a men’s behaviour change program reflected:
I think that my violence […] sustained an inflated version of myself. Otherwise I would feel worthless […] where I’m rotten to the core.
By calling men cowards, we reinforce their own views of themselves as weak, pathetic and lesser, making it more likely they will continue to use violence.
When shaming can help
Pivoting to focusing on perpetrators reflects our increasing frustration that victim-survivors are being held responsible for reducing their risk of domestic and family violence. It also recognises that perpetrator accountability could be a crucial piece of the puzzle for keeping women and children safe. By increasing the negative consequences, we can deter people from using violence.
We need to hold men who use violence accountable for their behaviours, but there are ways we can do this that aren’t stigmatising. This would provide them with a pathway back into the community and to a non-violent future. Reintegrative shaming, which underpins most models of restorative justice in Australia and internationally, encourages us to condemn the behaviour, not the person.
Shame can be a powerful tool in our arsenal for responding to domestic and family violence in Australia, but only if we provide men who use violence with alternative visions of masculinity and believe they are capable of change. Shame for shame’s sake is counterproductive.
Hayley Boxall has received funding to undertake domestic and family violence research from the Australian National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety and the Queensland and ACT Governments.
Many people living with diabetes use continuous glucose monitors (CGMs) to track their blood sugar levels. These small devices, often attached to the back of your upper arm or abdomen, send data to an app on your phone. This allows you to see, in near real-time, how your blood sugar levels spike or drop depending on what you eat or how active you have been.
The benefits for people living with diabetes are obvious, as failing to keep abreast of blood sugar levels can be dangerous. But these devices are increasingly being advertised as health aids to the broader community, including health-conscious non-diabetics and elite athletes.
But our own research has found using these pricey devices provides little benefit for healthy athletes without diabetes. And there’s very little research to support their use in healthy active people with normal glucose control.
That said, there are several areas which warrant further research.
Do these devices benefit athletes without diabetes?
If your blood sugar levels drop below normal range (known as hypoglycaemia) during endurance exercise, your athletic performance suffers.
So it’s easy to see why it might seem logical to track blood glucose in real time during endurance exercise. Many assume this data could signal when it’s time to consume more carbohydrates during or after exercise. Carbs help maintain your blood sugar levels, fuelling your body to ensure it has enough energy to complete the session.
However, glucose regulation during exercise is incredibly complex. It is influenced by a range of factors such as how much and what you eat or drink, recovery and stress. Even exercise can sometimes make your blood sugar readings go up. Results from current studies have reportedmixedfindings when exploring fuelling practices (meaning what or how they eat and drink).
Despite enthusiastic marketing and athlete testimonials about the use of continuous glucose monitors, our research concluded there’s not enough clear evidence to support the use of continuous glucose monitors as a tool to improve an athlete’s fuelling practices
We need more research before we can promote these devices as a useful addition to the athlete toolbox.
What are the possible downsides of using continuous glucose monitors?
Using continuous glucose monitors presents several practical limitations.
First, they’re expensive. These monitors may cost around A$90-$100 per fortnight (as monitors last a maximum of 14 days) and may require costly subscriptions to certain mobile apps.
They can also be knocked out of place if you’re training, in competition, sweating, or even doing everyday tasks such as showering.
It’s also easy to misinterpret the data, which can cause unnecessary anxiety. Our initial studies stress the importance of working with a sports nutrition professional when wearing a continuous glucose monitor to ensure you’re not misinterpreting the data.
Elite athletes may also find their sport’s governing body has restrictions around these devices. For instance, the world governing body for sports cycling, Union Cycliste International, has banned the use of continuous glucose monitors during sanctioned races.
Healthy people obsessing over blood sugar readings
As these devices make glucose readings available 24 hours a day, it’s also easy to end up obsessing over the data.
This can cause people to make unnecessary and overly strict changes to eating behaviours, leading to what some doctors have termed “glucorexia”.
It’s quite natural for your blood glucose to go up in response to eating carbohydrate-rich foods and fluids.
Alarmingly, there are influencers suggesting glucose should never “spike” and should always remain within a very tight range, even during the window immediately after meals.
In fact, it is prolonged increases in glucose levels outside of normal range that are the concern to health and wellbeing.
This underscores the danger of people without robust nutrition and physiology knowledge misinterpreting data from continuous glucose monitors.
If you’re active and plan to trial a continuous glucose monitoring device, you should consider consulting an accredited sports dietition so you’re properly informed about what’s a normal response.
More research is needed
Given the utility of continuous glucose monitors and the fact they can be worn by athletes while training and resting, we have started to explore whether data from these monitors can help elite athletes adjust their diet in response to exercise.
In our studies, we have been particularly interested in tracking how data from continuous glucose monitors changes in response to a day of training and eating. They may also be useful for exercise scientists trying to understand whether an athlete has been overtraining.
But the fact is, most people are not elite athletes.
Ordinary people who have the cash to splash on these devices should understand there’s not much research showing a benefit to healthy individuals using continuous glucose monitors.
If you are particularly concerned about your own blood sugar levels, we recommend seeing a GP and/or a dietitian. That’s better than stressing about and scrutinising yet another data set that isn’t yet particularly useful.
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.
Avian influenza viruses have infected the world’s birds for millennia. We first became aware of them in the 19th century, when mass deaths of poultry triggered interest in what was then called “fowl plague”.
But in 2021, something fundamental changed. As the world grappled with COVID lockdowns and economic chaos, the birds of the world were encountering a new strain, known formally as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 2.3.3.4.b. It spread easily and was capable of causing disease and death in a far wider number of bird species than previously seen before.
So far, it has triggered the culling of half a billion farmed birds and killed millions of wild birds. (This is a different strain to the HPAI H7 strains which have infected poultry farms in Australia).
If this new strain gets to Australia, carried on a migratory wild bird, it could pose similar risks to our unique wildlife. But we haven’t been sitting still. Australian researchers, governments, veterinarians and wildlife rehabilitators have been urgently preparing for its arrival.
Why is this strain so bad?
This strain has now made it to every part of the world bar Australia, New Zealand and Pacific nations. The virus killed many birds in the northern hemisphere before crossing to the Americas. In South America it proved particularly lethal, infecting and killing massive numbers of birds and marine mammals such as sea lions.
Many strains of bird flu are “low pathogenicity”, meaning they tend not to cause severe disease. But these strains can evolve into highly pathogenic strains if they spill over from wild birds into poultry, as we’re seeing with the current outbreaks in poultry farms in Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT.
Prior to 2024, Australia had experienced eight previous outbreaks of H7 HPAI in poultry, all of which were eradicated by culling poultry and isolating farms.
This new H5N1 2.3.3.4.b strain is much more worrying for our wildlife, because it transmits very easily between wild birds. It has proven it can kill mammals, including marine mammals, predators and scavenger species that eat birds.
It also poses a real threat to our poultry industries. If H5N1 2.3.4.4b were to enter Australia, we could see more outbreaks in domestic poultry, which in turn could affect the supply of chicken and eggs – both very popular sources of animal protein in Australia.
Given the virus is present worldwide, including in Antarctica, you might wonder why it hasn’t made it to Australia yet.
Avian influenza travels most easily in waterfowl such as ducks. Australia’s waterfowl are not migratory and only travel short distances between Australia and countries to the north.
But Australia is on the path of several flyways from Asia, along which millions of shorebirds migrate every year in spring. Some seabirds also migrate from the Atlantic.
How are we preparing?
The devastation the virus has caused overseas has given Australia time to prepare.
We can’t stop wild birds from migrating here. But we can slow the spread and protect at-risk wildlife from other threats such as invasive predators, giving them the best chance to survive the virus if it arrives.
Around Australia and on our sub-Antarctic islands, a network of veterinarians, researchers, government officials, rangers and wildlife rehabilitators is on alert looking for sick birds with signs, such as respiratory illness.
Shorebirds such as the common sandpiper migrate long distances, offering a potential avenue for the virus. selim kaya photography/Shutterstock
If a bird showing these signs is spotted, they will call the Emergency Animal Disease Hotline (1800 675 888). Members of the public are also encouraged to report sightings.
Other plans for the virus include:
restricting human movements in and out of virus-affected areas, where appropriate
surveillance to see how the virus is moving with wildlife
triage and clinical responses to the virus, including euthanasia for dying birds.
We have created information toolboxes to help wildlife managers and carers to manage risk and reduce transmission if the virus is confirmed here. These include improving baseline biosecurity, clearing away carcasses, restricting human movement to reduce spread, and euthanasing dying birds.
For threatened species, we can explore the merits of vaccination trials for captive birds. New Zealand authorities are trialling this method.
But such vaccination must ultimately serve the welfare interests of wildlife. There are many complexities to consider.
Globally, vaccination of free-ranging wild birds has occurred for just one species – the endangered Californian condor, considered particularly at risk because of its low numbers.
Black swan event?
Overseas, waterfowl, shorebirds and seabirds have proven especially susceptible to the virus. Avian predators are also at risk if they eat sick birds or their carcasses.
Specific data on Australian species are limited, but at least one local species, the black swan, has been found to be highly vulnerable to the virus because they lack some protective genes.
The sheer variation of our ecosystems might offer some protection. We have many transient bodies of water, such as Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre. If the virus arrived during a period of drought, it could have a different impact than if it arrived during flooding rains, which fill lakes and encourage movement of wild waterfowl.
Because this strain is very new, we don’t know yet what the long term outcome will be.
It’s possible birds which survive an infection will become immune and survive to breed. But some species and populations may not be able to survive this first assault.
This threat is new territory for Australia. Many of the other animal diseases we worry about and prepare for only attack one species, such as African swine fever, or only affect non-native wildlife (such as foot and mouth disease). But this strain of bird flu has attacked over 500 bird species and is infecting a growing number of mammal species.
Tiggy Grillo receives funding from the Australia Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry as well as all Australian state and territory governments.
Simone Vitali receives funding from the Australia Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry as well as all Australian state and territory governments.
Pacific Journalism Review founder Dr David Robie says PJR has published more than 1100 research articles over its three decades of existence and is the largest single Pacific media research repository.
But it has always been “far more than a research journal”, he added at the launch of the 30th anniversary edition at the Pacific International Media Conference in Fiji yesterday.
Speaking in response to The University of the South Pacific’s adjunct professor in development studies and governance Vijay Naidu who launched the edition, he spoke of the innovative and cutting edge style of PJR.
APMN’s Dr David Robie talks about Pacific Journalism Review at the launch of the 30th anniversary edition in Suva. Image: NBC News/APMN screenshot
“As an independent publication, it has given strong support to investigative journalism, sociopolitical journalism, political economy of the media, photojournalism and political cartooning — they have all been strongly reflected in the character of the journal,” he said.
“It has also been a champion of journalism practice-as-research methodologies and strategies, as reflected especially in its Frontline section, pioneered by retired Australian professor and investigative journalist Wendy Bacon.
He thanked current editor Philip Cass for his efforts — “he was among the earliest contributors when we began in Papua New Guinea” — and the current team, assistant editor Khairiah A. Rahman, Nicole Gooch, “extraordinary mentors” Wendy Bacon and Dr Chris Nash, APMN chair Dr Heather Devere, Dr Adam Brown, Nik Naidu and Dr Gavin Ellis.
Fiji’s Deputy Prime Minister Professor Biman Prasad, PNG Information and Communcations Technology Minister Timothy Masiu, USP’s Associate Professor Shailendra Singh and Dr Amil Sarwal at the PJR launch – the new Pacific media book “Waves of Change” was also launched. Image: NBC News/APMN screenshot
Paid tribute to many He also paid tribute to many who have contributed to the journal through peer reviewing and the editorial board over many years — such as Dr Lee Duffield and Professor Mark Pearson of Griffith University, who was also editor of Australian Journalism Review for many years and was an inspiration to PJR — “and he is right here with us at the conference.”
Among others have been the Fiji conference convenor, USP’s associate professor Shailendra Singh, and professor Trevor Cullen of Edith Cowan University, who is chair of next year’s World Journalism Education Association conference in Perth.
Dr Robie also singled out designer Del Abcede for special tribute for her hard work carrying the load of producing the journal for many years “and keeping me sane — the question is am I keeping her sane? Anyway, neither I nor Philip would be standing here without her input.”
Meanwhile, New Zealand media analyst and commentator Dr Gavin Ellis mentioned the Pacific Journalism Review milestone in his weekly Knightly Views column:
This month marks the 30th anniversary of Pacific Journalism Review, the journal founded and championed by journalist and university professor David Robie. PJR has provided a unique bridge between academics and practitioners in the study of media and journalism in our part of the world.
The journal is now edited by Dr Philip Cass, although Robie continues to be directly involved as associate editor and editorial manager. The latest edition (which they co-edited) explores links between journalists in the South Pacific with the conflict in Gaza, together with analysis of the wider role of media in coverage of the plight of Palestinians.
A special 30th anniversary printed double issue is being launched at the Pacific International Media Conference in Fiji. The online edition of PJR is now available here.
Sustaining a publication like Pacific Journalism Review is no easy feat, and it is a tribute to Robie, Cass and others associated with the journal that it is entering its fourth decade strongly and with challenging content.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Murray, Associate Professor of Cybersecurity, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne
On Friday, the world suffered what many have described as the largest IT outage in history, when 8.5 million Windows computers crashed and wouldn’t restart.
The cause was a bug triggered by an automatic update for a piece of software that until Friday nobody beyond cyber security nerds had heard of: CrowdStrike’s Falcon.
Falcon is a type of software known as “endpoint detection and response”, or EDR for short. It’s somewhat like an anti-virus on steroids. When installed, Falcon monitors a computer for signs of cyber attacks.
It can collect data about what files you open, what programs you run, what websites you visit, and so on. This makes it highly privileged software. When an employee accidentally opens a malicious email attachment, Falcon is watching – eternally vigilant.
EDR programs are considered best practice, recommended by the Australian government’s chief cyber defence agency.
Which means that in 2024, the best strategy that cyber security experts recommend involves software that spies on everything that happens on our computers.
How did we get here, and is there a better way forward?
The case for EDR
CrowdStrike is a market leader in EDR, hence why so many systems went down late last week. And there are good reasons for recommending EDR technologies like Falcon. For individual organisations, they are invaluable for alerting IT security teams to signs of cyber intrusion.
This helps IT teams to thwart an attacker before they can cause significant damage. In the case of more stealthy attacks, it helps flag suspicious behaviour that could point to a long-standing intrusion. The Medibank hack of 2022 is a good example. After initially gaining access, the hacker spent weeks inside Medibank’s networks undetected.
Technologies like CrowdStrike’s Falcon also provide valuable intelligence about emerging cyber threats globally. Because its software is deployed in so many organisations around the world, CrowdStrike has a bird’s eye view that – at least in theory – allows it to identify patterns of malicious behaviour beyond what any individual organisation can see.
For this reason, it’s also a leader in cyber threat intelligence, providing information to IT teams about what to look out for. If an organisation detects a cyber attack, data collected by EDR tools like Falcon can also help figure out exactly how the intrusion occurred.
Again, the Medibank hack serves as a good example. Federal Court filings contain detailed information about the timeline of events that led to the hack, including how the initial intrusion occurred and what the attacker did once they gained access to Medibank’s networks.
Without the omniscient view provided by surveillance tools like EDR, assembling this kind of information would be incredibly challenging.
What are the downsides?
In the wake of Friday’s outage, it’s worth questioning the downsides of EDR technologies. Many have already raised the obvious questions about our society’s dependence on too few global tech giants, and the risks of tech monocoltures.
But we’ve known of these risks for over two decades. We likely can’t expect this incident to undo the monopolies that pervade technology markets.
Another downside is the sheer technical risk. EDR software like Falcon gains its omniscience by being tightly integrated into the core of Microsoft Windows: the fundamental software that controls most of our computers. This is why it could cause the crashes we saw in the first place.
As a maker of highly privileged software, CrowdStrike had a responsibility to ensure its updates were safe. It demonstrably failed and we should all demand much higher standards of accountability from the makers of critical software.
Privacy tradeoffs
All of these issues have been widely canvassed in the days following the incident. Less discussed have been the privacy tradeoffs.
If you ask a cyber security professional to name what type of software spies on everything you do on your computer, chances are they’ll name spyware before mentioning EDR.
Spyware is malicious software hackers install on victims’ computers to capture sensitive information, such as passwords, banking information, or nude photos, among other things.
As with other forms of corporate surveillance, there is a clear tension between the individual right to privacy and the organisational imperative to protect itself from cyber intrusions.
EDR technologies have been rolled out across major organisations with little debate about their impact on user privacy and trust. This outage may provide an opportunity to finally have those debates.
Is there a better way?
In the wake of this incident it’s worth considering whether the tradeoffs made by current EDR technology are the right ones.
Abandoning EDR would be a gift to cyber criminals. But cyber security technology can – and should – be done much better.
From a technical standpoint, Microsoft and CrowdStrike should work together to ensure tools like Falcon operate at arm’s length from the core of Microsoft Windows. That would greatly reduce the risk posed by future faulty updates. Some mechanisms already exist that may allow this. Competing technology to CrowdStrike’s Falcon already works this way.
To protect user privacy, EDR solutions should adopt privacy-preserving methods for data collection and analysis. Apple has shown how data can be collected at scale from iPhones without invading user privacy. To apply such methods to EDR, though, we’ll likely need new research.
More fundamentally, this incident raises questions about why society continues to rely on computer software that is so demonstrably unreliable. Especially in Australia where we are internationally recognisedworld leaders in engineering highly secure computer systems, such as those that protect highly classified information.
In the long term, we should reduce our dependence on invasive technologies like EDR by focusing our efforts on building software that’s reliable and secure in the first place.
Toby Murray receives funding from the Australian Department of Defence to support research on how to build software that is provably reliable and secure.
The final report of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care – to be tabled in parliament tomorrow – is a monumental achievement. It is a repository of immense tragedy and grief – and a storehouse of hope.
The product of nearly six years’ work, the report’s 16 volumes cover accounts of survivors’ suffering in state and faith-based care between 1950 and 1999. The volumes also detail the avoidance, obfuscation and delays by those responsible for enabling, concealing and minimising that abuse.
The report will indict successive governments for the prejudice, callousness and political calculation that rendered people in care largely invisible, and their lives dispensable.
It will also put it beyond doubt that New Zealand’s laws, public policies and state institutions enabled that abuse.
Reform cannot be delayed
Out of the resulting pain, the commission’s report will be an insistent demand for change.
While its focus is historical, the report also has a transformational purpose. Systemic abuse in out-of-home care continues, and we can see from its interim reporting that the commission is clear the responsibility for putting an end to it lies with the government.
The commission’s terms of reference asked it to analyse New Zealand’s histories of abuse to inform its recommendations. These will aim to ensure abuse that happened in the past, and which continues in the present, will cease in the future.
It will take years to implement all the commission’s recommendations. But some things should and can happen immediately, including monetary compensation. Transforming the country’s out-of-home care model, however, will require new institutions, new funding models, new accountability practices, and new staff recruitment and training methods.
There is no reason to delay starting these necessary reforms. Since 2019, the government has had 13 interim and auxiliary reports from the commission. It received draft versions of the final recommendations on November 30 last year, and the final full report nearly a month ago.
All this material has been analysed by the Crown Response Unit, which the government set up to coordinate its work with the royal commission.
Survivors deserve to see their struggles result in urgently needed reforms. For example, the government could (and should) commit to setting up the independent redress entity the commission prescribed in its December 2021 report.
That report also recommended a nationwide investigation into potential unmarked graves and urupā at residential care sites. And it asked the government to remove the statute of limitations on claims for abuse against children, as has happened in Australia.
The receipt of the final report would be an opportune moment to announce progress on those measures.
Ending the care-to-crime pipeline
Appropriate out-of-home care is a matter of fundamental human rights and an obligation under te Tiriti o Waitangi. It is also a crucial area for social investment.
At present, there are thousands of young New Zealanders in out-of-home care. Like all citizens, these human beings are of immense value to the country. But the trauma they have experienced can also make some of them a risk.
One of the most profound failures in Aotearoa New Zealand’s chequered history of social policy is the ongoing “care-to-crime” pipeline. New Zealand’s gang culture, for example, flowed in part from the horrors of residential care.
In short, as the commission argues, the state put children in care, and then the circumstances of care put those children on a path that led through prison into Black Power and the Mongrel Mob.
The final report is a singular opportunity for brave and transformative public policy that will block that pipeline at its source. Yes, it will cost money. But spending today may mean future generations reap the benefits tomorrow.
The cost of doing nothing is easy to see. Presently, the government is spending billions on the penal system, including a major expansion of Waikeria Prison. Continued failures in out-of-home care will add billions more to the future costs of healthcare, housing and social support.
Those monetary costs merely compound the human suffering caused by abuse in care. The government must accept the cost-benefit analysis and make the required investment in financial and human capital.
Audacious hope
On November 12, when Prime Minister Christopher Luxon finally offers the public apology for this “shameful part of our history”, survivors and the wider public will be hoping to hear how this government will lead change.
We will not want to hear more announcements about future announcements, or ongoing consultations and committees. That only condemns survivors to further delays and uncertainties.
New Zealand’s credit with survivors is in short supply. They have become familiar with obstruction and delay, with pledges for change followed by more of the same.
To hope for real leadership – inclusive, transformative and far-sighted – is perhaps audacious. But audacity is necessary. Survivors and future generations deserve no less.
Stephen Winter is affiliated with the Royal Commission Forum, which served as an advisory body for the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. The views in this article are his own.
In a world of alternative therapies and new-age spiritual practices, Tantra holds a special place. This concept is largely associated with techniques for improving your sex life – but there’s a lot more to Tantra than sex.
Modern Tantric sex practices, or so-called neotantra (which began at the turn of 20th century), sit alongside the ancient philosophical tradition of classical Tantra, for which written traditions go back to the 8th century and oral traditions even further. Practitioners from both sides, or Tantrikas, have tended to view each other with suspicion.
But they have much to learn from one another if only they tried to understand each other more deeply.
The standoff
The neotantrikas stand accused of neglecting the deep spiritual truths of the original Tantric movement. They have, it is supposed, replaced the three-course meal of Tantric philosophy with a bubblegum sex obsession that reflects Western culture.
The paradigm case for this is the Rajneeshee movement. Described by the popular 2018 Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, this movement was known for blending Eastern philosophy with American counterculture.
While its devotees followed a supposedly Tantric spiritual practice, it ultimately devolved, somewhat ironically, into a consumer culture that devoured its guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (also known as Osho).
Scholars of classical Tantra draw on examples like this to question the authenticity of neotantra. One such scholar is Hugh Urban, who has traced the complicated development of Tantric ideas in Western countries and their association with capitalism and sex.
One leading light in classical Tantra (at least in the English-speaking world) is US scholar-practitioner Christopher Wallis. In his most recent book, Near Enemies of the Truth (2023), Wallis analyses many of the trendiest terms used by alternative spiritualities. He convincingly shows these terms can be misleading if separated from their roots in Indian philosophy.
In his book Tantra Illuminated (2013), Wallis is more pointed. He specifically distances classical Tantric philosophy from neotantric sexual practices, saying:
the public perception of Tantra as primarily concerned with sex […] is manifestly untrue. Next to none of the scriptural sources of (Classical) Tantra teach a sexual ritual or sexual techniques of any kind.
This criticism goes both ways. The neotantrikas tend to avoid classical Tantric philosophy for being heady, abstract and obscure. When it comes to sex, the neotantrikas tend to view the classicists as downright squeamish.
shutterstock. Example of erotic carvings from the Laxman Temple in Khajuraho, India.
Not so different after all
While both sides have valid points to make, it strikes me there is a lot to gain from ending this standoff.
The neotantrikas rightly point out that classical Tantra is a difficult philosophy. Its writings are mostly untranslated from the original Sanskrit, and what has been translated into English is hard to understand unless you’re trained in philosophy and theology.
The classical Tantrikas are also right to point out that sexual rites are only obscurely and occasionally referred to in classical Tantra.
What really matters, however, is the underlying philosophy. And it’s clear to me the core of classical Tantric philosophy actually does provide a strong basis for neotantric practice.
For instance, the Kashmiri philosopher Abhinavagupta, who lived around the turn of the first millenium, is widely regarded as the greatest teacher in a long classical Tantric lineage.
He taught a philosophical theology that sanctifies human experience. In this theology, every human experience, at every place and at every time, is also an experience of the divine.
As Wallis explains in his book:
Quite simply, since reality is One, and everything is equally an expression of that one divine Light of Consciousness, every experience is by definition an experience of God.
Importantly, this is as true of sex as it is of washing the dishes, or of an ant crawling in your garden. Every experience of every thing is God experiencing herself.
At the heart of this teaching is a proposed underlying structure to the universe. In this structure there are two divine principles. One is masculine and the other is feminine. The ecstatic union of these principles creates everything that exists.
You don’t have to be neotantric to see this as a reference to divine sexuality. Abhinavagupta may not have invented metaphysical erotica, but he certainly wrote it. This is how the opening lines of his Tantrasara are interpreted for us by his translators:
the highest equilibrium (is a union) of both masculine and feminine […] this union is known as coitus. In the creative process, expanding from this union, all the principles of reality emerge […] the ‘emission of drops’ emerging from perfect sexual union. The drops reflect the colours of masculine and feminine: one is white and the other is red.
The Neotantrikas take the metaphysical logic of classical Tantra to its conclusion, by using it in embodied practice. Shutterstock
Reconnection and rediscovery
We can end the standoff between classical Tantra and neotantra by recognising that one can – and does – give rise to the other. In fact, I would go even further to say they would both benefit from rediscovering each other.
By drawing on this profound philosophical theology, the neotantrikas could enrich their experiments in sacred sexuality. Doing so might even help them avoid the trap of using Tantra to misguidedly chase peak sexual experiences.
It really should be the other way around. Sacred sexuality is one of many possibilities classical Tantra offers – not for the sake of your sex life, but to help you become more spiritual.
The classical Tantra scholars could also enrich themselves by learning from these brave souls who take the metaphysical logic of classical Tantra to its conclusion, not just in theory, but in an embodied practice.
Tantra goes far beyond the sexual. By refocusing our attention on what really matters – Tantric spirituality – we might discover any number of helpful practices. Who knows what awaits the devotee who pursues them to the end?
Neil Durrant 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.
Baseball NSW was quick to predict Bazzana’s achievement would “have a significant impact” on the popularity and growth of baseball in Australia.
Almost 100 years ago, baseball figures in Australia made similar claims, only to be undone by theft and fraud.
The crimes of a baseball official setback the growth of baseball in Australia.
Baseball’s long history in Australia
While baseball has a long history in Australia – the first recorded game was in Melbourne in 1855 – it has always been a niche sport here.
In 1888, sporting goods businessman Albert Goodwill Spalding included Australia in his world baseball tour.
Later, the MLB teams the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants visited Australia during their 1913-1914 world tour.
While Australians were intrigued, press coverage suggested a suspicion that baseball might challenge cricket for popularity and by the 1920s, cricket had established its position as Australia’s preeminent sport.
However, Australia’s press and public was willing to accept baseball as a novelty and winter sport for training summer cricketers.
There have been plenty of crossover between cricket and baseball over the years.
Australia’s baseball devotees worked tirelessly to promote the sport locally in the first quarter of the 20th century. It was in these circumstances that two tours of American amateur teams were arranged.
Both tours included fetes, parades, baseball tournaments and civic receptions, while local dignitaries celebrated the touring players.
Local businesses supported the tours, with motor vehicle manufacturer Studebaker offering a fleet of cars to take players on a motorcade procession through Sydney after arriving by ship.
Australian baseball authorities made efforts to entice American coaches to Australia to develop the game locally.
Plans were made for future tours to capitalise on the growing interest in the sport.
One reason baseball failed to continue this growth was because the tours had been funded by criminal fraud.
The crime that set baseball back
Cecil J. Asprey was honorary secretary of the Australian Baseball Council and chairman of the executive of the New South Wales Baseball Association. He was instrumental in arranging the tours by Stanford University and Multnomah Amateur Athletics Club.
He was referenced in the press following the tours, noting Australian interest in baseball, and American interest in Australian baseball, had risen significantly.
When the tours lost money, it became apparent Asprey had funded them with money stolen from clients of the solicitors he worked for.
By May 1931, after unsuccessful attempts to arrange subsequent tours, it all unravelled for Asprey. He was first charged in the Central Police Court on May 7 1931, and immediately revealed the money had been used to fund the activities of the baseball association.
Asprey’s lawyer told the court “he has not received a single penny of the funds himself – that the whole of the money was definitely paid into the account of the association”.
Eventually, Asprey was charged with 21 counts of forgery, embezzlement and larceny.
The story of his crimes and its impact on baseball in Australia was made all the worse due to the vulnerability of his victims.
One victim, Rosina Melit, a migrant from Italy, told the court how Asprey took her money to discharge her mortgage. He never paid the mortgage off.
This was a crime Asprey committed against more than one victim. A detective-sergeant at Asprey’s trial noted he had “a happy knack of getting on the soft side of widows and a widower”.
Asprey told the court he had used everything he stole to bring over international baseball players.
“I know I have done wrong. I am willing to hand over everything I possess,” Asprey advised the court.
He was sentenced to five years’ hard labour. He left a wife and two children when he went to jail.
The tours Asprey organised generated enormous interest. While participation increased in the local leagues in the seasons that followed, that momentum was not maintained. This was in part because further tours never materialised.
Asprey was still trying to arrange future tours up until his arrest.
Had Asprey and baseball authorities in Australia been able to fund tours legitimately, it is very likely the popularity of the sport would have continued to grow.
What may the future hold?
Baseball has always had a devoted, though relatively small, following in Australia. Despite successes, including a silver medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics, it has remained a minor sport.
In the 2000s and 2010s, baseball participation either increased or decreased, depending on the source.
In 2022 Baseball Australia released a national plan to increase participation at all levels.
Baseball’s governing body in Australia also hoped the country’s success in the 2023 World Baseball Classic would drive interest in the sport.
Bazzana’s pick as number one in the MLB draft will certainly contribute to interest in “the old ball game,” as it is sometimes nicknamed, in Australia.
Whether that translates into increased participation remains to be seen.
We can only imagine how many more Bazzana’s Australia might have produced but for the crimes that derailed baseball’s growth in Australia.
Ray Nickson 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.
If you ask someone where plastic ends up, they will usually say the ocean. It’s not a surprising answer because we have known since the 1970s that plastic is accumulating in the subtropical oceans, far from land.
Most people have heard of the “great garbage patch”, a region of the North Pacific between Hawaii and California, where plastic is accumulating. Images of remote plastic-covered beaches often appear in the media.
Most must be ending up elsewhere, and the most likely places are along coastlines – either in estuaries, where rivers meet the sea, or along the open coast, where waves can push floating debris ashore.
We set out to investigate just how much plastic is retained in an estuary. The results of our research astonished us.
Using the main harbour of Auckland, the Waitematā estuary, as our study site, we made floating plastic packets using GPS receivers inside mobile phone pouches and tracked where they went over several tidal cycles.
Most ended up on the shoreline and none were able to move the relatively short distance needed to exit the estuary.
Tracks of buoyant plastics as they drift during spring tides in the Waitematā estuary from starting points where fresher water enters. The connection between the estuary and the ocean is at the far right. The colours show their speed in metres per second. Zheng Chen
The speed of the drifters varied between tides, as shown in the animations above (spring tide) and below (neap tide).
The tracks of buoyant plastics drifting during neap tides in the Waitematā estuary, with speed (in metres per second) shown by the colours. Zheng Chen
Currents in estuaries trap plastic
When we repeated the experiment with computer simulations, trying a wide range of freshwater flows and tides, we found the same thing. Anywhere from 60% to 90% of buoyant material was retained in the estuary over ten tidal cycles.
Surprisingly, when we increased the river flow in the model, the percentage of plastic retained in the estuary was very similar. Although the buoyant material moved towards the ocean, it became trapped before it reached the mouth.
Currents within the estuary trapped the buoyant material by “pumping” it towards land when the tide was coming in and pushing it towards the sides when the tide was going out, leading to more plastic grounded along the shore.
This movement on the incoming tide leads to the long lines of foam and debris you often see along the channel of an estuary, sometimes extending over many kilometres. On the outgoing tides, floating debris is pushed towards the sides of the channel where it accumulates.
We know these types of flows are happening in many estuaries around the world. Studies measuring plastic waste in estuaries in France, Germany and Vietnam also suggest much of plastic entering estuaries is being retained.
These findings show that removing plastic waste from the shorelines of our estuaries and coasts (and the rivers and creeks that flow into them) is a very effective way to prevent it from entering the ocean.
The most recent international study found the numbers do agree if one takes into account that plastic waste is trapped and retained along coasts.
Changing perspectives about plastic
This shift in the way we think about where plastic ends up has many implications.
For most places in the world, much of the plastic waste emitted locally stays close by. Collecting this plastic waste will keep most of it out of the ocean, which means local community clean-ups can make a difference in controlling marine pollution.
Collecting plastic rubbish from beaches and river banks makes a difference. Getty Images
It also means, given the long lifetime of plastic, that shorelines have been accumulating this waste for many decades and are acting as plastic “reservoirs”. Much of the plastic pollution may be hidden from view as it degrades to micro- and nanometre-sized particles.
Efforts are underway in communities and within nations to reduce the use of plastic and remove it from the environment. An international treaty to mitigate plastic pollution is expected to be in place by the end of 2024.
The aim of the treaty will be to curb the emission of 53 million metric tonnes per year of new plastics that would otherwise enter the aquatic environment by 2030. But we will need to continue cleaning up plastic for many decades to undo the legacy of our consumption.
Melissa Bowen receives funding from the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour project AIM2 (Aoteoroa Impacts and Mitigation of Microplastics).
Gaoyang Li receives funding from the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour project AIM2 (Aoteoroa Impacts and Mitigation of Microplastics).
Giovanni Coco receives funding from the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment.
Zheng Chen receives funding from the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour project AIM2 (Aoteoroa Impacts and Mitigation of Microplastics).
Reports in The Australian suggesting Treasurer Jim Chalmers has shelved his budget wellbeing framework, known as Measuring What Matters, are incorrect.
The framework is alive and well, and making steady (if slow) progress.
Also reported was the Coalition’s intention to scrap the framework if it wins the next election, with its treasury spokesman Angus Taylor quoted as saying the government should instead focus on “lower inflation and lower interest rates”.
The idea that we shouldn’t be thinking about broader measures of progress because we need to concentrate on what’s in front of us impoverishes our view of what’s possible.
It’s important to measure what matters
The cost of living is certainly paramount. But if all we ever do is address the issue immediately in front of us, we will forever stumble from one crisis to the next.
Actually, if we had had a wellbeing framework in place before the current cost of living crisis, it might have been less likely to develop.
Most of us would agree that the things in the government’s Measuring What Matters framework matter, such as security, prosperity and cohesiveness.
But some of the information in last year’s statement was dated, some dating back to the years before COVID.
The framework has two parts: a measurement dashboard and a statement.
The dashboard presents data on 50 “key indicators” the treasury believes should supplement (although not replace) the standard measures of economic progress.
The statement is a report of the outcomes presented in the dashboard and of government progress toward embedding the framework in decision-making.
Last month Treasurer Chalmers announced responsibility for the dashboard would move from the treasury to the Bureau of Statistics and that the Bureau would get extra funding to run an expanded general social survey every year to improve the quality and timeliness of the data.
The statement would remain the responsibility of the treasury but would be released only every three years instead of annually. The next would be published in 2026 incorporating the first results from the bureau’s new survey.
Framework already kicking goals
Discovering we don’t collect regular and timely data on these important measures and then funding the Bureau of Statistics to do so is a demonstration that the framework is already having an impact.
The critical test will be how it is used to improve decision-making.
It hasn’t yet resulted in any radical change, but the ambition is substantial.
Shifting the way governments make decisions and allocate resources is hard, and it was was never going to be accomplished in a single year.
By handing over the data side of things to the Bureau of Statistics, the treasury will now, hopefully, be able to focus more on embedding the framework into decisions, including budget decisions.
Prioritising prevention
One of the things the treasury team is working on is how to better prioritise early intervention and prevention programs for Australians at risk. Such measures are hard to justify under the old budget rules, but can they can improve outcomes and save the government money in the long run.
International and Australian studies have identified four key ways of ensuring the government is working to deliver the kinds of outcomes we expect from it:
1. holistic thinking and breaking down silos between types of wellbeing
2. a long-term focus that includes consideration of future generations
3. emphasis on prevention to tackle the root causes of problems
4. including the people most likely to be affected by decisions in their design.
They are directed towards delivering the kind of society we want to live in and to do it smartly and efficiently within a budget context.
According to the framework, that’s a society that is healthy, secure, sustainable, prosperous and cohesive. The government remains on the case.
Warwick Smith is a Program Director at the Centre for Policy Development and the Chair of the Castlemaine Institute.
Iron ore is the key ingredient in steel production. One of the fundamental resources for the Australian economy, it contributes A$124 billion in national income each year.
This is not surprising, considering Western Australia is home to some of Earth’s largest iron ore deposits, and 96% of Australia’s iron ore comes from this state. Yet despite the metal’s significance, we still don’t know exactly how and when iron deposits formed within the continent.
We found that several of Western Australia’s richest iron deposits – such as Mt Tom Price and Mt Whaleback – are up to 1 billion years younger than previously understood. This redefines how we think about iron deposits at all scales: from the mining site to supercontinents. It also provides clues on how we might be able to find more iron.
Punurrunha or Mt Bruce, part of the Hamersley Range in the Pilbara, Western Australia. Julie Burgher/Flickr, CC BY-NC
Where does iron ore come from?
Billions of years ago, Earth’s oceans were rich in iron. Then early bacteria started photosynthesising and rapidly introduced huge amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere and oceans. This oxygen combined with iron in the oceans, causing it to settle on the sea floor.
Today, these 2.45-billion-year-old sedimentary rock deposits are called banded iron formations. They represent a unique archive of the interactions between Earth’s continents, oceans and atmosphere through time. And, of course, banded iron formations are what we mine for iron ore.
These sedimentary deposits have distinctive, rhythmic bands of reddish iron and paler silica. They were alternately laid down on the sea floor seasonally. Such remarkable rocks can be visited today in Karijini National Park, WA.
The iron content of these banded iron formations is generally less than 30%. For the rock to become economically viable to mine, it must be naturally converted by later processes to around 60% iron.
The nature of this rock conversion is still debated. In simplest terms, a fluid – such as water – will both remove silica and introduce more iron during an “upgrading” process which transforms the rock’s original makeup.
The geochronology (age dating) of this chemical transformation and upgrading is not well understood, largely because the tools required to directly date the iron minerals have only recently become available.
Previous age estimates for the Pilbara iron deposits were indirect but suggested they were at least 2.2 billion years old.
What did we find out?
You may think of iron ore as rusty, red-coloured dust. However, it’s typically a hard, heavy, steely-blue material. When crushed into a fine powder, iron ore turns red. So the red landscape we see across the Pilbara today is a result of the weathering of iron minerals from beneath our feet.
1.3-billion-year-old steel blue iron ore extracted from Hamersley Province, Western Australia. Liam Courtney-Davies
We extracted microscopic scale “fresh” iron minerals from drill core samples at several of the most significant Western Australian iron deposits.
Leveraging recent advancements in radiometric dating, we measured naturally occurring radioactive elements in the rocks. In particular, the ratio of uranium to lead isotopes in a sample can reveal how long ago individual mineral grains crystallised.
Using the newly generated iron mineral age data, we constructed the first-ever timeline of the formation of Western Australia’s major iron deposits.
We discovered that all major iron ore deposits in the region formed between 1.4 and 1.1 billion years ago, making them up to 1 billion years younger than previous estimates.
These deposits formed in conjunction with major tectonic events, especially the breakup and reemergence of supercontinents. It shows just how dynamic our planet’s history is, and how complex the processes are that led to the formation of the iron ore we use today.
Now that we know that giant ore deposits are linked to changes in the supercontinent cycle, we can use this knowledge to better predict the places where we are more likely to discover more iron ore.
Liam Courtney-Davies completed this research while at John de Laeter Centre, Curtin University.
Liam Courtney-Davies received funding for this research through the MRIWA 557 Project and the Australian Research Council.
Humidity forecasts over North America and the northeast Pacific Ocean.Kochov et al. / Nature
A new system for forecasting weather and predicting future climate uses artificial intelligence (AI) to achieve results comparable with the best existing models while using much less computer power, according to its creators.
In a paper published in Nature today, a team of researchers from Google, MIT, Harvard and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts say their model offers enormous “computational savings” and can “enhance the large-scale physical simulations that are essential for understanding and predicting the Earth system”.
The NeuralGCM model is the latest in a steady stream of research models that use advances in machine learning to make weather and climate predictions faster and cheaper.
What is NeuralGCM?
The NeuralGCM model aims to combine the best features of traditional models with a machine-learning approach.
At its core, NeuralGCM is what is called a “general circulation model”. It contains a mathematical description of the physical state of Earth’s atmosphere, and it solves complicated equations to predict what will happen in the future.
However, NeuralGCM also uses machine learning – a process of searching out patterns and regularities in vast troves of data – for some less well-understood physical processes, such as cloud formation. The hybrid approach makes sure that the output of the machine learning modules will be consistent with the laws of physics.
Google researchers explain the NeuralGCM model.
The resulting model can then be used for making forecasts of weather days and weeks in advance, as well as looking months and years ahead for climate predictions.
The researchers compared NeuralGCM against other models using a standardised set of forecasting tests called WeatherBench 2. For three- and five-day forecasts, NeuralGCM did about as well as other machine-learning weather models such as Pangu and GraphCast. For longer-range forecasts, over ten and 15 days, NeuralGCM was about as accurate as the best existing traditional models.
NeuralGCM was also quite successful in forecasting less-common weather phenomena, such as tropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers.
Why machine learning?
Machine learning models are based on algorithms that learn patterns in the data they are fed with, then use this learning to make predictions. Because climate and weather systems are highly complex, machine learning models require vast amounts of historical observations and satellite data for training.
The training process is very expensive and requires a lot of computer power. However, after a model is trained, using it to make predictions is fast and cheap. This is a large part of their appeal for weather forecasting.
The high cost of training and low cost of use is similar to other kinds of machine learning models. GPT-4, for example, reportedly took several months to train at a cost of more than US$100 million, but can respond to a query in moments.
A comparison of how NeuralGCM compares with leading models (AMIP) and real data (ERA5) at capturing climate change between 1980 and 2020. Google Research
A weakness of machine learning models is that they often struggle in unfamiliar situations – or in this case, extreme or unprecedented weather conditions. To do this, a model needs to be able to generalise, or extrapolate beyond the data it was trained on.
NeuralGCM appears to be better at this than other machine learning models, because its physics-based core provides some grounding in reality. As Earth’s climate changes, unprecedented weather conditions will become more common, and we don’t know how well machine learning models will keep up.
Nobody is actually using machine learning-based weather models for day-to-day forecasting yet. However, it is a very active area of research – and one way or another, we can be confident that the forecasts of the future will involve machine learning.
Sanaa Hobeichi 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.
Reports in The Australian suggesting Treasurer Jim Chalmers has shelved his budget wellbeing framework, known as Measuring What Matters, are incorrect.
The framework is alive and well, and making steady (if slow) progress.
Also reported was the Coalition’s intention to scrap the framework if it wins the next election, with its treasury spokesman Angus Taylor quoted as saying the government should instead focus on “lower inflation and lower interest rates”.
The idea that we shouldn’t be thinking about broader measures of progress because we need to concentrate on what’s in front of us impoverishes our view of what’s possible.
It’s important to measure what matters
The cost of living is certainly paramount. But if all we ever do is address the issue immediately in front of us, we will forever stumble from one crisis to the next.
Actually, if we had had a wellbeing framework in place before the current cost of living crisis, it might have been less likely to develop.
Most of us would agree that the things in the government’s Measuring What Matters framework matter, such as security, prosperity and cohesiveness.
But some of the information in last year’s statement was dated, some dating back to the years before COVID.
The framework has two parts: a measurement dashboard and a statement.
The dashboard presents data on 50 “key indicators” the treasury believes should supplement (although not replace) the standard measures of economic progress.
The statement is a report of the outcomes presented in the dashboard and of government progress toward embedding the framework in decision-making.
Last month Treasurer Chalmers announced responsibility for the dashboard would move from the treasury to the Bureau of Statistics and that the Bureau would get extra funding to run an expanded general social survey every year to improve the quality and timeliness of the data.
The statement would remain the responsibility of the treasury but would be released only every three years instead of annually. The next would be published in 2026 incorporating the first results from the bureau’s new survey.
Framework already kicking goals
Discovering we don’t collect regular and timely data on these important measures and then funding the Bureau of Statistics to do so is a demonstration that the framework is already having an impact.
The critical test will be how it is used to improve decision-making.
It hasn’t yet resulted in any radical change, but the ambition is substantial.
Shifting the way governments make decisions and allocate resources is hard, and it was was never going to be accomplished in a single year.
By handing over the data side of things to the Bureau of Statistics, the treasury will now, hopefully, be able to focus more on embedding the framework into decisions, including budget decisions.
Prioritising prevention
One of the things the treasury team is working on is how to better prioritise early intervention and prevention programs for Australians at risk. Such measures are hard to justify under the old budget rules, but can they can improve outcomes and save the government money in the long run.
International and Australian studies have identified four key ways of ensuring the government is working to deliver the kinds of outcomes we expect from it:
1. holistic thinking and breaking down silos between types of wellbeing
2. a long-term focus that includes consideration of future generations
3. emphasis on prevention to tackle the root causes of problems
4. including the people most likely to be affected by decisions in their design.
They are directed towards delivering the kind of society we want to live in and to do it smartly and efficiently within a budget context.
According to the framework, that’s a society that is healthy, secure, sustainable, prosperous and cohesive. The government remains on the case.
Warwick Smith is a Program Director at the Centre for Policy Development and the Chair of the Castlemaine Institute.
Associate Health Minister David Seymour’s recent letter of expectations to drug buying agency Pharmac could fundamentally change the way the organisation makes decisions. Some of these changes could also make Pharmac’s job harder and its decisions more unpopular.
The letter has received considerable coverage due to the minister’s expectation that Pharmac pay less attention to embedding te Tiriti o Waitangi in the health sector. This has already seen the departure of one director.
But some of Seymour’s other expectations have received less scrutiny than they deserved.
Pharmac currently has one core job (its statutory objective): to secure the best health outcomes within the amount of funding provided.
Seymour’s letter calls for a reform of the funding model to account for “positive fiscal impacts”. This would require a change in Pharmac’s statutory objective and could end up hurting more than helping some New Zealanders.
Considering productivity
Pharmac evaluates new medicines by looking at their cost and any savings they might make to the rest of the health system. This is then compared with the additional health gains of the new medicine.
Currently, a medicine is funded when it delivers sufficient value and there is the budget for it. If the medicine doesn’t deliver enough value, or if Pharmac can’t currently afford it, it goes on their options for investment list.
In his letter, Seymour asked Pharmac to ensure it:
Updates its decision-making and evaluation models to include the wider fiscal impact of funding or not funding a medicine or medical device to the whole of government, and has tools to consider the wider societal impact.
Pharmac is being asked to consider a drug’s impact on economic productivity. This means assessments would consider whether a medicine helps people remain at work because they don’t get sick, or helps return them to work after an illness.
Globally, 60% of drug agencies consider the broader impacts of medicines to varying degrees, but there’s no clear agreement on the best approach. Some countries include the costs and health outcomes of caregivers or parents while others look at time away from work.
Time away from work – lost productivity – can be measured using a “friction cost” approach (which counts the hours not worked until another employee takes over a sick person’s work), or a “human capital” approach (where the indirect cost is the amount of time lost due to illness, valued at the market wage).
But there is a risk those who aren’t considered “productive” and those in low-wage jobs could be deemed less important to treat. This could include older people, those with disabilities and their carers, those with conditions that mean they might never work, and those facing discrimination in the workplace (women, Māori and Pasifika, for example).
If Pharmac is to consider productivity, then the government needs to acknowledge this could exacerbate existing inequities.
But in his letter of expectations, Seymour says he expects Pharmac to do more to involve patient groups and whānau participation in the decision-making process.
This sounds positive, but it could trigger more involvement from the pharmaceutical industry. Many patient advocacy groups receive funding from industry organisations. A recent Australian study found AU$34 million had been provided to patient organisations by pharmaceutical companies over a four-year period, often when the companies’ drugs were under review for public reimbursement.
These sorts of conflict of interest will need to be managed, particularly in a country with a very active lobbying sector and few safeguards, even at the highest levels of government.
Separation of roles
Pharmac is also asked to consider separating the roles of value assessment and procurement. According to the minister:
The organisation might […] benefit from a more functionally separate procurement process.
Having both roles allows Pharmac to negotiate more effectively with the pharmaceutical industry – something unique to New Zealand. Separating them potentially risks Pharmac’s ability to negotiate, by limiting how information about value can be used.
Currently, Pharmac actively manages the pharmaceutical schedule in their role as a purchaser. They use a range of pricing and negotiation strategies.
Many of the less cost-effective treatments go on the options for investment list in the hope that a deal can be worked out later. Pharmac negotiates deals to fund these slightly lower-value medicines by getting a better deal on other treatments.
This might involve bundling products from the same pharmaceutical company or negotiating a lower price for an upcoming tender for a more widely-used drug.
If assessment is separated from procurement, these sorts of deals are unlikely to happen. This means Pharmac will need to say “no” to funding a given item more often due to its limited budget, and each of these decisions risks causing more problems for the government.
The part of Pharmac (or another agency) doing the value assessment would no longer be able to ask if a treatment is affordable. Instead, it will have to decide how much each year of healthy life is worth, and use this in its decision making.
Companies will increase the price of new drugs to match this new figure, which makes even the better-value drugs more expensive, and increases pressure on the limited pharmaceutical budget.
Paula Lorgelly consults to Pharmac and has in the past consulted to the pharmaceutical industry. She receives funding from the Ministry of Health and the EuroQol Foundation. Paula is a member of the EuroQol Group which owns the EQ-5D instrument which is widely used in health technology assessments.
Richard Edlin consults to Pharmac and has in the past consulted to the pharmaceutical industry.
Vaping is in your news feed for its regulation, impact on public health and effects on young people.
So with growing awareness of the effects of vaping on health plus recent reforms to limit availability of vapes to pharmacies in Australia, many people will be thinking about quitting. They will also need support to do so.
That’s partly because so many vapes contain nicotine. Some 73% of Australians who currently vape said their last vape contained nicotine. This tends to be high-strengthnicotine.
Mental health is another factor closely linked to vaping – whether people with mental health symptoms are likely to start vaping in the first place, how they fare when vaping, and whether they need additional support when trying to quit.
Here’s what we know about how mental health is connected to vaping and where to go for support to quit.
How are mental health and vaping linked?
An estimated 4.3 million Australians reported a mental health problem in the past 12 months. This includes anxiety and mood disorders (such as depression), which typically begin in adolescence to early adulthood.
We know vaping and mental health (including anxiety and depression) are linked. People who vape frequently are twice as likely to have a depression diagnosis compared with people who have never vaped.
Australia’s National Drug Strategy Household Survey also shows people with more mental distress related to anxiety and depression were four times as likely to have vaped than were those with low distress.
And for those already with a mental health problem, vaping is related to worse depression symptoms and physical health.
The relationship between nicotine-containing vapes and mental health is complicated. People in mental distress can be more likely to start vaping and people who vape are more likely to have mental health problems. What this doesn’t tell us is which comes first. So we need longer-term studies to find out more.
What about self-medicating with vapes?
Some people link using nicotine-containing vapes with managing mental health or stress. For instance, in an Australian survey including questions about the expected benefits of vaping:
61% of young adults who vaped feel it helps people calm down when tense or stressed
57% said it cheers people up when in a bad mood
50% said it helps people feel better if they’ve been feeling down.
But rather than addressing these symptoms, vaping can increase them.
For instance, a study in the United States found vaping dependence was linked with increased symptoms of depression. We also know from smoking research that quitting can improve mental health.
But we know stigma plays a role in both experiences of mental health and addiction, which may make asking for help to quit even more difficult.
We also know having a mental health condition can increase the odds of relapsing after trying to quit vaping.
So what works to quit?
We have little evidence and guidance for the best way to support people who vape to quit, generally. There’s even less evidence on how to support people with mental health conditions to quit.
There are quit vaping programs for people with mental health conditions. And as receiving mental health support does boost the odds of success in quitting tobacco smoking, this may also hold promise for quitting vaping.
Although the evidence is still growing, experts recommend quit plans consider someone’s severity of mental illness, the impact of nicotine use and withdrawal, and whether medications for their mental illness interact with ones used to help them quit vaping.
Cognitive behavioural therapy is a type of psychological therapy that looks at how thoughts, behaviours and emotions are connected. This is an effective approach to support people to quit smoking and its principles can be combined with quit medications to help people quit vaping. People with a mental health condition who vape can be offered cognitive behavioural therapy to help them quit, though specific evidence is still needed to show how well this works.
Psychologists and counsellors can also use motivational interviewing to highlight discrepancies between someone’s actions and values. For instance, this might be used to highlight the discrepancy between someone who wants to be healthy for their family (their value) but who vapes regularly (their action). This, combined with education, may motivate people to act and see a future without vaping.
Health providers and counsellors can offer brief advice on how to quit, extrapolating from what works for quitting smoking. Services such as Quitline can also help mental health providers deliver quit support.
How do I find out more?
If you or someone you know wants to quit vaping, whether or not there are mental health concerns, resources include:
More reading on the impact of vaping on adolescent mental health is also available.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Joshua Trigg is supported by funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, and the Flinders Foundation. He has previously received funding support from The Australian Prevention Partnership, SA Health, Cancer Council SA and Cancer Council NT. No other funding sources or consultancy are declared, including from tobacco, e-cigarette or pharmaceutical companies.
Lavender Otieno is supported by funding from the Medical Research Future Fund and partially from the National Health and Medical Research Council. No other funding sources or consultancy are declared, including from tobacco, e-cigarette or pharmaceutical companies.
Anthony Venning 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.
If not the root of all evil, chemical pollution is surely responsible for a good chunk of it. At least, that’s how it feels sometimes when reading the news and the latest research.
So it’s not surprising many people feel chemicals are intrinsically bad, though that’s not the case. But how worried should we really be, and can we reduce the risks?
In the air we breathe
Globally, pollution is a serious problem – particularly air pollution.
Portable air monitors can measure air quality in real time. These readings were taken at Melbourne’s Southern Cross Station in July 2024. Oliver Jones
The burden of disease falls heavily on developing countries, but even in Australia air pollution causes significant harm.
Fortunately, we can monitor air pollution, even at home. We know what levels are dangerous, and how to reduce exposure. But what about things we can’t monitor, or know less about?
The water we drink
In June, the Sydney Morning Herald implied tap water throughout Australia was contaminated with alarming levels of PFAS. But the levels detected fall within Australia’s drinking water guidelines. They just happen to exceed the United States’ new safety thresholds, which don’t come in for five years.
Chemical structures of PFOS and PFOA, two types of PFAS. Oliver Jones
PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of highly persistent chemicals characterised by carbon-fluorine bonds.
Although PFAS in your water sounds awful, we don’t know if water is the main route of exposure or what the actual risks are.
What is generally missing from both research papers and news reports is context – details on the dose and duration of exposure needed to cause such effects.
The levels of PFAS needed to cause health effects tend to be orders of magnitude higher than those typically found in the environment. So while it’s not great that we’ve polluted the entire planet with these compounds, the health risks for most of us are likely to be low.
New technologies are being developed to reduce PFAS in water and soil.
Discarded pesticide container in Werribee, Victoria. Oliver Jones
The usual suspect, glyphosate, is usually claimed to cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But this is a catch-all term covering more than 60 different types of lymphoma, which can vary significantly.
Small amounts of pesticide residue are permitted on our food, but concentrations are in the parts per trillion (for reference, a trillion seconds is 31,710 years).
The evidence suggests parts per trillion of pesticides do not increase the risk of cancer in people. But if you want to reduce your exposure anyway, washing and cooking vegetables and washing fruit is a good way to go.
Microplastics are everywhere
Microplastics (plastic particles less than 5mm in diameter) are now found everywhere from the top to the bottom of the planet.
Again, it sounds scary – but several reports of microplastics in food and blood have been firmlycriticised by other scientists. The widely (mis)reported claim that we eat a credit card’s worth of microplastic each week was debunked by YouTuber Hank Green.
The World Health Organization recently concluded evidence of the health effects of microplastics is insufficient. However, they also make the point that this is not the same as saying microplastics are safe. We need more data to understand the risks.
We need new recycling technology to reduce plastic waste. Ultimately, we may need to wean ourselves off plastic entirely.
Where to from here?
I am not suggesting we should not worry about pollution – we should. But just because something is present does not automatically mean it is causing harm. To my mind, air pollution is the biggest worry so far, with more proven health effects than microplastics or PFAS.
We must understand relative exposure and the nuances of risk assessment. We need sensible debate, evidence-based approaches and new techniques for monitoring and assessing the impacts of, low (parts per trillion) pollutant concentrations.
This should help prevent and mitigate potentially harmful exposures in future.
Oliver A.H. Jones receives funding from the Australian Research Council, various water utilities, EPA Victoria and the Defence Science Institute for research into environmental pollution, including PFAS.
Art offers us different, and sometimes challenging, perspectives to consider in our lifelong relationship with the human form.
Since they were babes in arms I have taken my two children to museums and galleries. Because of this frequent exposure to art, seeing representations of nude bodies is normal for them.
But if this is not your experience with the little people in your life, you might be wondering where you might start to talk about nudity and art.
Nudity in art can stimulate meaningful and necessary conversations about all sorts of topics, from what different bodies look like, to body image, to what it means to be human.
Here are some questions your children might have about the bodies they’re seeing – and some tips and resources to help you answer them.
What are we going to see at the gallery?
Art galleries provide opportunities for parents, carers and educators to have deep discussions with children about history, politics, the environment – the list goes on.
As well as coming across new and sometimes challenging concepts, the art gallery can also be a place where children may be confronted with unclothed bodies in a public space for the first time. It’s understandable this might provoke a nervous giggle or gasp.
The Gallery of Greater Victoria suggests before you visit, show your child some of the works they will see to help them prepare and talk about the tradition of nudes in art and what they can symbolise, such as privacy, innocence, bravery and vulnerability.
Why is that giant pregnant lady not wearing any clothes?
Art can help us empathise with other people’s perspectives. As a high school art teacher I took a group of students for an excursion to the National Gallery of Australia.
The first artwork we stopped at was Ron Mueck’s monumental and hyper-real sculpture Pregnant Woman (2002). I was heavily pregnant at the time and noticed the students looking at me and then the sculpture and back to me again and then quickly looking away, maybe a little embarrassed (or maybe I was).
It was a funny moment and offered an excellent opportunity to talk about what being pregnant feels like and how art can express emotions and make us think about other people’s perspectives.
Mueck’s Pregnant Woman is currently on display at the Maitland City Art Gallery, and throughout the year the work will interact with their collection and exhibitions, curated to foster “different conversations and ideas to emerge related to family (in all its diverse forms), motherhood, birth and the marvel of humanity”.
Exploring the history of nudes in art reveals how past societies have shaped our current self-perceptions. Galleries provide an excellent opportunity to see how different cultures and eras have viewed the human body.
Children might be curious as to why there are so many nudes in the gallery. Alex Segre/Shutterstock
Why did the artist choose to make a work like that?
Head of National Learning Georgia Close from the National Gallery of Australia told me:
It’s important to have conversations about nudity and representation in artwork. Bringing it back to the artist’s words is always a useful strategy to provide cultural or conceptual context, and seeing what students think about what the artist has said.
Model researching the artist’s intentions, read the label or artist statement, find the artist speaking about their work on the internet, show your child how finding out the story behind the artwork can help to understand it better.
My practice is focused on bodies and relationships; the relationships between people and other creatures, between people and our bodies, between creatures and the environment, between the artificial and the natural.
Viewing Piccinini’s work with this statement in mind brings an informed understanding of her artistic intentions.
What is that?!
Walking through the gallery can become a fun anatomy lesson.
When asked how is it best to respond to children when they are curious about bodies they see in the gallery, lecturer in educational psychology and clinical neuropsychologist Karen Oakley says:
the key thing I would discuss would be appropriate labelling of the parts of the human body, talking about bodies, how they look, how they change, and with whom and when it is OK to be naked.
The art gallery might be the first time children see naked bodies in public. Akimov Igor/Shutterstock
If this raises further questions about puberty, body image or more challenging topics, Raising Children has a range of resources and age-appropriate strategies that can help you talk to your children.
Visual arts can be challenging. Like other forms of art, such as writing or film, sometimes works are not intended or suitable for children. This is why it’s good to research your trip before you go, or talk to gallery staff for guidance on the collection.
Art can help us explore complex topics with our children and gain insights into what they are thinking, ourselves and the wider world.
Naomi Zouwer 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.
Today, Montgomery’s population is almost 60% Black. The poverty rate among Black residents is 30.8%, compared to 10.6% among white residents. The city’s infrastructure is deteriorating, and its tax base is shrinking.
Cities with histories of segregation tend to suffer more from systemic racism that remains in the veins of their planning laws and policies. As a scholar of urban design and planning, I wanted to know more about how Montgomery’s history affected access to parks and public spaces there. My research explains how the city’s history still influences modern planning and creates unequal access to parks.
Racial inequality is deeply embedded in Montgomery’s history. Today the city is working to revitalize itself without obscuring its past.
Separate and unequal parks
In the Jim Crow era, from the 1870s through the mid-20th century, Southern cities enforced segregation in schools, transportation, recreational facilities and parks to prevent racial mixing. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed such practices, but they had lingering effects.
In 1957, Montgomery adopted an ordinance that made it a misdemeanor for any person to use public parks or other places except those assigned to their race. Four of the city’s 14 parks were designated as Black-only and 10 as white-only, although the population was almost 44% black.
Parks for Black residents were in much worse condition than those for white residents. Some white-only parks, such as Oak Park, were located in Black neighborhoods, but Black residents were subject to arrest for entering them.
During the segregated era, Oak Park offered white visitors football fields, tennis courts, playgrounds, picnic areas, swimming and wading pools and a zoo. Following a federal court order to desegregate, the park was closed in 1959. It reopened in 1965 with universal access, but moved its recreational facilities and zoo elsewhere. Binita Mahato, CC BY-ND
Tacitly maintaining segregation
In 1958, Black Montgomery residents filed a class action lawsuit challenging the park segregation policy. Montgomery officials responded by closing all city parks, although they continued to maintain them.
After a federal court in Alabama ruled for the plaintiffs in 1959, the city reopened some parks, but gave private segregated schools exclusive use of certain sites. It also renamed the Parks and Recreation Department as the Recreation Department, which enabled it to steer funding toward recreational facilities such as swimming pools that restricted access by requiring paid memberships.
Plaintiffs reopened the desegregation case in 1970, and it reached the Supreme Court in 1974. There, Justice Harry Blackmun described the city’s response to the 1959 ruling as “an elaborate subterfuge to anticipate and circumvent the court’s order.”
In the following years, desegregation laws spurred white flight to the suburbs. As Montgomery lost white residents and their tax payments, it annexed surrounding areas. This left the central city and its existing parks mainly to Black residents, while white residents resettled in suburbs with new parks.
Urban renewal initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s demolished, privatized or repurposed some of Montgomery’s high-quality parks. For example, Interstate Highway 85 was routed through Oak Park, a Black middle-class neighborhood. Urban planning scholar Rebecca Retzlaff calls this a deliberate effort to displace civil rights leaders and middle-class Black households. Building highways through Black neighborhoods in Montgomery and elsewhere also exposed these areas to increased noise and air pollution.
Montgomery’s parks today
Today, Black residents of Montgomery have unrestricted access to the city’s 65 parks. However, in a 2019 report, Montgomery’s Recreation Department stated that while “overt and systemic regulatory structures based on race or ethnicity have been eliminated, the legacy of this framework can still be seen in many ways.”
To investigate current park resources in Montgomery, I surveyed 63 city parks using five criteria to measure access, quality and park conditions.
– Accessibility: the number of residents living within a half-mile walk of a park
– Recreational facilities: features like playing fields, playgrounds and swimming pools
– Other amenities: non-sporting facilities, such as picnic tables and rest rooms
– Natural features: landscaped areas, flower beds and ponds
– Incivility: the presence of trash, graffiti, noise or evidence of drug or alcohol use, such as empty liquor bottles and used needles
I found that 36 of the parks I assessed were within half a mile of majority-Black neighborhoods. This increased access partly reflects the growth of the city’s Black population as white residents moved to the suburbs.
However, my scoring ranked 83% of parks catering to Black residents as poor quality, with only 8% of mediocre quality and 9% of good quality. For parks catering to white residents, the comparable figures were 50% of poor quality, 31% of mediocre quality and 19% of good quality. The key factor behind this disparity was maintenance, as measured by the amount of trash, noise, vandalism and evidence of illegal activities.
Park size also matters. Most Black Montgomery residents live close to small neighborhood parks, which my survey found were in the most distressed condition. Larger community parks generate revenue from community and sports events, so city officials tend to steer more money to these sites.
Park access and environmental justice
Research shows that access to nature is important for people’s physical and mental health. This makes public parks vital resources, especially in urban areas. Poor people and people of color often have less access to parks, which tend to be in areas with high housing prices.
My research shows how systematic disinvestment can perpetuate unequal park access in cities with histories of segregation. With limited funding, cities such as Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia have tended to invest in large community parks. Many small neighborhood parks, which are crucial for equal access, need improvement.
Montgomery’s comprehensive plan, Envision Montgomery 2040, calls for upgrading parks and recreation facilities and maintaining them more effectively. Involving residents in setting priorities for park projects could help make these investments more equitable – especially if they target small parks in distressed neighborhoods, where the legacy of segregation still lingers.
Binita Mahato 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.
In the West Bank, one in three Palestinians has experienced one or more incarcerations during their life since 1967, or 35 percent of the population, while in Kanaky, the Nouméa prison, known as Camp Est, is populated by 95 percent Kanaks, while they represent only 39 to 43 percent of the Caledonian population.
SPECIAL REPORT:Samidoun
On Friday, July 5, France announced the continued provisional detention on mainland France of 5 Kanak defendants, out of seven pro-independence “leaders” who had been deported from Kanaky New Caledonia on June 23.
The subsequent announcements of the arrest of 11 pro-independence activists, including 9 provisional detentions (including Joël Tjibaou and Gilles Jorédié, incarcerated in Camp Est) and 7 incarcerations in mainland France (Christian Tein, Frédérique Muliava, Brenda Wanabo-Ipeze, Dimitri Tein Qenegei, Guillaume Vama, Steve Unë and Yewa Waethane), more than 17,000 kilometres from their homeland, revived the mobilisations that had begun a month earlier as part of the fight against the plan to “unfreeze” the Kanaky electoral body.
Suspended after President Emmanuel Macron announced the dissolution of the National Assembly, this project actually aims to reverse the achievements of the Nouméa Accords signed in 1998.
It is part of the strategy of strengthening French colonialism in Kanaky by extending the ability to vote on local matters, including independence referandums, to an even greater number of settlers, making the indigenous Kanaks a de facto minority at the ballot box.
On July 11, 10 Centaur armoured vehicles, 15 fire trucks, a dozen all-terrain military armoured vehicles and numerous army trucks were landed by ship in Kanaky, where the population remains under curfew.
This entire sequence bears witness to the manner in which France, through its colonial administration, deploys a repressive security arsenal that on the one hand protects the settlers on the land and their reactionary militias, and on the other, attempts to destroy the country’s Kanak independence movement.
Imprisonment and incarceration are a weapon of choice in this overall colonial strategy.
Imprisonment is one of the key weapons of choice in colonial strategies to try to stifle independence and national liberation struggles, from the Zionist regime in Palestine to allied imperialist countries and colonial empires such as France.
While the figures are incomparable due to differences between the populations and conditions, in the West Bank, according to Stéphanie Latte Abdallah, one in three Palestinians has experienced one or more incarcerations during their life since 1967, or 35 percent of the population, while in Kanaky, the Nouméa prison, known as Camp Est, is populated by 95 percent Kanaks, while they represent only 39 to 43 percent of the Caledonian population.
Camp Est Prison in Nouville, on the outskirts of Nouméa. Image: Samidoun
Nicknamed “the island of oblivion” by the prisoners, the Camp Est prison locks up many young Kanaks excluded from the economic, educational and health systems, and symbolises the French colonial continuum, especially as the building partly occupies the space of the former French penal colony imposed there.
Silence of sociologists Few studies exist of this over-incarceration of the Kanak population, and as Hamid Mokadem reminds us:
“The silence of sociologists and demographers on ethno-cultural inequalities is inversely proportional to the chatter of anthropologists on Kanak customs and culture.”
The incarceration rate is significantly higher than in mainland France, so much so that a new prison has been built.
The Koné detention center, and a project to replace Camp Est was announced in February 2024 by the Minister of Justice. He promised a 600-bed facility (compared to the 230 cells available at Camp Est) that would emerge after a construction project estimated at 500 million euros (NZ$908 million).
This is the largest investment by the French state on Kanak soil, a deadly promise that at the same time reaffirms France’s imperialist project in the Pacific, driven by its financial and geopolitical interests to retain its colonial properties there.
While waiting for this large-scale prison project, new cells have been fitted out in containers on which a double mesh roof has been installed, many without windows, and where the conditions of incarceration are even harsher than in the other sections of the prison, including those for men, women and minors, pre-trial detainees and those who have been convicted and sentenced.
The over-representation of the Kanak population has only increased, since incarceration has been one of the mechanisms through which the French government attempts to stem the movement against the plan to “unfreeze” and expand the electoral body, with 1139 arrests since mid-May.
The penalty of deportation Local detention was supplemented by another penalty directly inherited from the Code de l’Indigénat: the penalty of deportation.
On June 23, after the announcement of the arrest of 7 Kanak independence activists in metropolitan France, the population learned that they were going to be deported 17,000 km from their homes.
A plane was waiting to transfer them to metropolitan France during their pretrial detention, all seven of them dispersed across the prisons of Dijon, Mulhouse, Bourges, Blois, Nevers, Villefranche and Riom.
This deportation of activists in the context of pre-trial detention directly recalls the events of 1988, and more broadly the way in which prison and removal were used in a colonial context.
From the 19th century and the deportation of Toussaint Louverture of Haiti to France, thousands of Algerians arrested during the uprisings against the French colonisation of Algeria at the same time as the detention of the prisoners of the Paris Commune in 1871, the Vietnamese of Hanoi in 1913, were deported to Kanaky or other colonies such as Guyana.
More recently, the Algerian revolutionaries, were massively incarcerated in metropolitan colonial prisons. From a principle inherited from the indigénat, and although today we have moved from an administrative decision to a judicial decision, the practice of deportation remains the same.
Particularly used in the context of anti-colonial resistance movements, the deportation of Kanak prisoners to metropolitan colonial prisons has been used on this scale since 1988 in Kanaky.
Ouvéa cave massacre After the massacre of 19 Kanak independence fighters who had taken police officers prisoner in the Ouvéa cave, activists still alive were imprisoned, then deported, then released as part of the Matignon-Oudinot Accords.
Twenty six Kanak prisoners came to populate the prisons of the Paris region while they were still in preventive detention — while awaiting their trials and therefore presumed innocent, as is the case today for the CCAT activists currently incarcerated.
In the 1980s, French prisons were shaken by major revolts, particularly against the racism of the guards, who were mostly affiliated with the then-nascent Front National (FN), and more broadly against the penal policy of the Mitterrand left and the massively expanding length of sentences imposed at the time.
In 1988, as former prisoners wrote afterwards, some made a point of showing their solidarity with the Kanaks by sharing their clothes and food with them.
Because many of the activists were transferred in T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops, in trying conditions, with their hands cuffed during the 24-hour journey, underhand repression techniques of the Prison Administration that are still in force.
Similar deportation conditions were described by Christian Téin, spokesperson for the CCAT incarcerated in the isolation wing of the Mulhouse-Lutterbach Penitentiary Center. The shock of incarceration is all the more violent.
CCAT leader Christian Téin, organiser of a series of marches and protests, mainly peaceful . . . he was deported and transferred to prison in Mulhouse, north-eastern France, to await trial. Image: NZ La 1ère TV screenshot APR
Added to this is the pain of the forced separation of parents and children, which is found not only in the current situation in metropolitan France but also in Palestine. Also there is great difficulty in finding loved ones, in attempting to find out which prisons they are in, or even if they are currently detained, continually encountering administrative violence, with the absence of information and the cruelty of official figures.
Orchestrated psychological impact All this is orchestrated so that the psychological impact, in the long term, aims to induce the prisoners and also their families to stop fighting.
At the time of the events in Ouvéa, the uprooting of independence activists from their lands to lock them up in mainland France was commonplace, and the Kanak detainees joined those from the Caribbean Revolutionary Alliance such as Luc Reinette and Georges Faisans, incarcerated in Île-de-France during the 1980s alongside Corsican and Basque prisoners.
Since then, this had only happened once, in the context of the uprisings in Guadeloup in 2021, where several local figures, mostly community activists, had been deported and then incarcerated in mainland France and Martinique in an attempt to stifle the revolts in which a large number of Guadeloupean youth were mobilised.
Here again, we could draw a parallel with Palestine. As Assia Zaino points out, since the 2000s, the incarceration of Palestinians has systematically been synonymous with being torn away from their families and loved ones.
Zionist prisons, located within the Palestinian territories colonised in 1948, “are integrated into the civil prison system [. . . ] and entry bans on Israeli soil are frequently imposed on the families of detainees for security reasons,” which in fact aims to attack the relatives of detainees and destabilise the national liberation struggle.
Ahmad Saadat, Ahed Abu Ghoulmeh and their comrades in detention – date and location unknown. Image: Samidoun
From prison, the struggle continues This mass incarceration is confronted by the powerful presence of prisoners as symbols of courage and resistance.
We know that in Palestine, as during the Algerian war of national liberation, incarceration is an opportunity to learn from one’s people, to forge national revolutionary consciousness but also to continue the struggle, very concretely, by mobilising against incarceration.
Because the Palestinian prisoners’ movement has transformed the colonial prison into a school of revolution: each political party has a prison branch whose political bureau or leadership is made up of imprisoned leaders.
These branches have real weight in the decisions taken outside the walls, and they are the ones responsible for leading the struggle in the colonial prisons, in particular by declaring collective hunger strikes and developing alliances of struggle that can mobilise several thousand prisoners, but also for organising the daily life of revolutionaries in prison.
It was this movement of prisoners that played a major role in driving the Palestinian resistance groups to unite under a unified command with the total liberation of historic Palestine as their compass, and to overcome internal contradictions.
Historically, the prisoners also constituted a significant part the most radical elements of the Palestinian revolution, notably by massively refusing any negotiation with the Zionist state at the time when the disastrous Oslo Accords were being prepared.
Resistance in colonial prisons can also take cultural forms, as illustrated by the very rich Palestinian prison literature, composed of literary works written in secret and smuggled out by prisoners to bear witness to the outside world of the vitality of their ideals, their struggle and the conditions of detention.
Courage of the children An example is Walid Daqqah, a renowned writer and one of the longest-held Palestinian prisoners, who was martyred on 7 April 2024 during his 38th year of detention in colonial prisons.
In short, from the children and adolescents who wear courageous smiles as they leave their trials surrounded by soldiers, to the women of Damon prison who heroically stand up to their jailers, to the resistance of the prisoners who fight by putting their lives and health at risk while having a central role in the Resistance outside, it is the daily struggle of the prisoners’ movement that makes detention a place where resistance to the colonial regime is organised, continuing even inside detention.
As Charlotte Kates, Samidoun’s international coordinator, said:
“Despite the intention to use political imprisonment to suppress Palestinian resistance and derail the Palestinian liberation movement, Palestinian prisoners have remained political leaders and symbols of steadfastness for the struggle as a whole.”
In Kanaky, it was the announcement of the incarceration of CCAT activists on June 23 that relaunched the movement, who became the driving forces behind this new round of mobilisation.
On May 13, while the population was setting up roadblocks on the main roads of Nouméa, a mutiny broke out in the Camp Est prison in reaction to the plan to unfreeze the electoral body.
The prison was therefore directly part of the mobilisation, and three guards were taken hostage on this first day of struggle. They were quickly released after the RAID (French national police tactical unit) intervened.
But during the night of May 14-15, another revolt took place in the prison, rendering no fewer than 80 cells unusable.
It is therefore in this context of uprising and intifada throughout Kanaky, both in prisons and outside, that the announcement of the deportation of the 7 Kanak leaders took place.
In addition to these highly publicised deportations, there were also dozens of similar cases of transfers from Camp Est.
Completely ignored by the government, these took place both before May 23 and during the month of July, including participants in the prison uprisings as well as long-term prisoners transferred to relieve congestion in the Kanak prison.
Silence which masks the scale of these colonial deportations only intends to make the task of the families and political supporters of the Kanaks even more difficult in their attempt to show solidarity with the prisoners.
Furthermore, upon their arrival in mainland France, the CCAT activists were separated into 7 different prisons, directly recalling the policy of dispersion already at work in Spain at the end of the 1980s against ETA prisoners, in reaction to the effectiveness of their prison organising.
Today as yesterday, the colonial power dispatches prisoners throughout the mainland to prevent a collective counter-offensive. The prisoners’ connections with one another, but also with the outside, are consequently largely hampered.
This isolation directly aims to break the movement by tearing off its “head” and preventing any form of common struggle against this confinement. We therefore know that the momentum of struggle outside seems to respond to a hardening of detention conditions inside prisons, as evidenced by the isolation in which the CCAT activists are kept.
Likewise in Palestine, where since last October 7, mass arrests have escalated to the development of military concentration camps characterised by inhumane conditions of incarceration where severe torture is a daily, routine occurrence.
Currently, both for the more than 9300 Palestinian prisoners detained in the 19 Zionist colonial prisons, and for the thousands of prisoners from Gaza arrested during the genocidal offensive of the occupying forces on the Strip incarcerated in military camps, the conditions of detention have deteriorated significantly.
If in the colonial prisons Palestinian prisoners suffer hunger, collective isolation, overcrowding, violence and physical and psychological torture, conditions which have led to the martyrdom of at least 18 prisoners since October 7, in the military detention camps the situation is even more extreme.
The thousands of prisoners from Gaza held there are handcuffed and blindfolded 24 hours a day, forced to kneel on the ground, motionless for most of the day, raped and sexually assaulted and tortured daily, which leaves the released prisoners with enormous trauma.
Sick prisoners are crammed in naked, equipped with diapers, on beds without mattresses or blankets, in military airplane hangars and warehouses and without any medical care.
In all cases, isolation reigns, in prisons as in military detention centers, and the Zionist regime aims to cut off the Palestinian prisoners — and their collective movement — from the outside world.
A “Freedom Brigade” Palestinian prison escape poster. Image: Samidoun
Stories of prison escapes Beyond the heroic prison uprisings, many stories of escapes from colonial prisons also fuel resistance and demonstrate the resilience of prisoners.
In Palestine, to cite a recent example, we recall the “Freedom Tunnel” operation, where six Palestinian prisoners freed themselves from the Zionist-occupied Gilboa high-security prison by digging a tunnel using a spoon.
The six Palestinians — Mahmoud al-Ardah, Mohammed al-Ardah, Yaqoub Qadri, Ayham Kamamji, Munadil Nafa’at and Zakaria Zubaidi — became Palestinian, Arab and international symbols of Palestinian resistance and the will for freedom.
While they were all rearrested, their escape exposed the weaknesses under the colonial myth of “impenetrable Israeli security”, plunging the occupation’s prison system into an internal crisis.
In France, the CRAs (Administrative Detention Centres) represent an ultra-violent manifestation of racism and the management of exiles. People are locked up in terrible and therefore deadly conditions.
Thus, faced with colonial management of populations, particularly from former French colonies, resistance is being organised.
For example, on the night of Friday, June 21 to Saturday, June 22, 14 people held at the CRA in Vincennes managed to escape (only one person has been re-arrested since).
This follows the escape of 11 detainees in December from this same place of confinement. However, these detention centres are often recent and very well equipped.
From Palestine to the Hegaxone and the colonial prisons in Kanaky, the resistance fighters fight day by day within the prison system itself, and the escapes and uprisings in the prisons are events that weaken the colonial propaganda and its myth of invincibility and total superiority.
A “Freedom for the Kanaky CCAT comrades” banner. Image: Image: Samidoun
Resistance continues Despite the tightening of detention conditions and the security arsenal that is deployed against liberation movements, it is clear that the resistance is not stopping and that, on the contrary, organizing is becoming even more vigorous.
In Kanaky, new blockades in solidarity with the prisoners have spread well beyond Nouméa since June 23, demanding their immediate release and repatriation to Kanaky, since “touching one of them is touching everyone”.
In mainland France, numerous gatherings have also taken place since Monday at the call of the MKF (Kanak Movement in France), and among others led by the Collectif Solidarité Kanaky in front of the Ministry of Justice in Paris, and also in front of the prisons where the activists are still incarcerated.
Their prison numbers have been made public so that it is possible to write to them and so that broad and massive support can be communicated to them in order to provide them with the strength necessary for this fight from metropolitan France.
From now on, tributes to the Kanak martyrs who fell under the bullets of the colonial militias and the French State are joined by banners for the freedom of the prisoners.
Marah Bakir, a representative of Palestinian women prisoners, arrested at the age of 15 by the colonial army and imprisoned for 8 years, made these comments during her first interview given upon her release on 24 November 2023:
“It is very difficult to feel freedom and to be liberated in exchange for the blood of the martyrs of Gaza and the great sacrifices of our people in the Gaza Strip.”
The Kanaky ‘martyrs’: Stéphanie Nassaie Doouka, 17, and Chrétien Neregote, 36, shot in the head on May 20 by a business manager.
Djibril Saïko Salo, 19, shot in the back on May 15 by loyalist settlers at a roadblock.
Dany Tidjite, 48, killed by an off-duty police officer who tried to impose a roadblock.
Joseph Poulawa, 34, killed on May 28 by two bullets in the chest and shoulder by the GIGN (the elite police tactical unit of the National Gendarmerie of France)
Lionel Païta, 26, killed on June 3 by a bullet to the head by a police officer at a roadblock.
Victorin Rock Wamytan, known as “Banane”, 38 years old, father of two children, killed on July 10 by a shot in the chest by the GIGN on customary lands
In Kanaky, the names of these martyrs, just like the 19 of the Ouvéa cave, will remain forever in the memory of the activists and people, and as one could read on another banner in Noumea: “The fight must not cease for lack of a leader or fighters, this direction remains forever. Kanaky”
This article, by Samidoun Paris Banlieue, was published first in French at: https://samidoun.net/fr/2024/07/la-question-carcerale-dans-la-colonisation-de-la-kanaky-a-la-palestine/. During the protests in Kanaky in May and ongoing, French military forces targeted demonstrators, imposed a countrywide ban on TikTok, and have seized multiple political prisoners from the Kanak independence movement. This article is republished from Samidoun.
As war continues to devastate Gaza and its people, we learnt last week that a variant of poliovirus has been detected in the region. The virus was isolated in six sewage samples collected in late June from Khan Younis and Deir al Balah.
Most infections with poliovirus don’t cause symptoms, but a minority of those who contract the virus develop paralysis (paralytic polio).
No cases of paralytic polio have been reported in Gaza. But detecting the virus in wastewater is concerning nonetheless.
There are different types of polio
The cases of polio we’ve seen historically have generally been caused by “wild poliovirus”. For centuries, wild poliovirus affected both poor and wealthy countries, including Australia. The deployment of effective vaccines in the 1960s led to a dramatic decrease in cases in the following decades among those countries that could afford the vaccines.
The introduction of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988 enabled more equitable vaccination. There were only 12 cases of paralysis caused by wild poliovirus in 2023, in just two countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan.
However, as the number of wild poliovirus cases decreased there was an increase in cases of vaccine-derived poliovirus causing paralysis.
There are two types of polio vaccines: one is given orally, and the other by injection (the type used in Australia). The oral polio vaccine is based on a weakened virus – so it doesn’t cause disease, but can still reproduce. Vaccine-derived poliovirus emerges when people vaccinated with the oral polio vaccine excrete the vaccine virus in their stool and it spreads to other people.
Over time, it may mutate to become a virus that circulates and causes paralysis in populations with low levels of immunity. In 2023, there were 524 polio cases in 32 countries caused by vaccine-derived poliovirus.
It’s a strain of vaccine-derived poliovirus that has been detected in the wastewater in Gaza – type 2.
High vaccination coverage is key, but not always enough
The most important indicator of eradicating polio, both wild and vaccine-derived, is vaccine coverage. This is usually measured as the percentage of children under five who have received at least four vaccine doses, ideally 95%.
High vaccination coverage has been achieved by a combination of routine immunisation in early childhood plus national or local catch-up vaccination campaigns, particularly in areas where the virus pops up.
However, high vaccination coverage is not always enough to eliminate the virus.
Early in the 21st century, India and Nigeria were reporting the highest number of polio cases in the world. After an accelerated immunisation campaign in India, vaccine coverage rates were high by 2007 and cases were decreasing. But many cases continued to be reported in impoverished districts of western Uttar Pradesh (a state in northern India), where access to clean water and sanitation was poor.
Research shows a high level of pathogens in children’s intestines can make the absorption of the oral vaccine less effective, while unsanitary conditions make it easier for the virus to spread. After a sanitation and hygiene project began in 2007, the last case of polio in Uttar Pradesh occurred in 2010, and the entire country eradicated polio in 2014.
An Indian child receives polio vaccine drops on National Immunisation Day in Guwahati. Talukdar David/Shutterstock
Wild polio was eradicated from Gaza more than 25 years ago. But it’s possible the re-emergence of vaccine-derived poliovirus is due to a combination of poor hygiene and sanitation, as we saw in Uttar Pradesh, and reduced vaccine coverage.
Polio vaccination coverage in the Palestinian territories was 99% in 2022. By the end of 2023, coverage had dropped to 89%. However, the data were not separated by each of the territories (the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza), so coverage may be lower in Gaza.
Recent outbreaks
We saw the detection of a similar strain of poliovirus in wastewater in Jerusalem, London and New York in early 2022.
Parts of these cities have high concentrations of ultra-Orthodox Jews, which may have lower rates of vaccination than the overall population. In Rockland County, 65 kilometres north of New York City, a young, unimmunised Orthodox Jewish man became the first case of polio transmitted locally in the United States in 30 years.
There’s no evidence of vaccination hesitancy among Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Australia. However, there are other communities where vaccination rates are low, including some shires in the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales.
Communities with low vaccination rates, whatever the reason, are vulnerable to infectious diseases such as polio.
So where did this virus come from?
The oral vaccine used in Gaza has not contained type 2 since 2016, so it must have come from elsewhere.
In 2023, most outbreaks of type 2 vaccine-derived poliovirus were in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Nigeria, Sudan and Somalia. There was also one case in Egypt, which borders on Gaza. Egypt could be the source of this virus, but we’ll need further investigation.
It’s unlikely to have come from Israel as there have been no detections of poliovirus in wastewater there since 2022.
What can the world learn?
First, we must not forget that poliovirus can cross borders and maintaining high vaccination rates in Australia and elsewhere is the most effective protective strategy. It’s also crucial to contain the virus inside Gaza. UNICEF and partners are preparing for a vaccination campaign focusing on young children.
Second, it’s important to maintain wastewater surveillance for polio, which is an early warning mechanism that can initiate public health action before symptomatic cases occur.
In 2022, Victoria was the only Australian state conducting routine polio wastewater surveillance until NSW adopted the practice when the outbreaks in Jerusalem, New York and London occurred. Wastewater surveillance is worthwhile in all states and territories.
Third, but not least, this should be a wake-up call highlighting the need to cease hostilities and provide unrestricted access by aid agencies to improve the provision of clean water, sanitation and effective health services throughout Gaza. This is an urgent global health priority.
Michael Toole receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council.
Will his decision to step aside seal Joe Biden’s legacy as US president?
Three weeks ago, Biden suffered a political catastrophe. Biden’s team had been surprised that Donald Trump had agreed to an early presidential debate in late June, and under rules that favoured Biden: no studio audience, just the two candidates, and muted microphones.
Biden urgently needed to change the trajectory of the race. He was at best tied with Trump nationally, but slipping in the key swing states that determined the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. He wanted to show that Trump was extreme, unhinged and unfit for office – a profound threat, in his eyes, to America’s democracy.
Trump wanted to prove that Biden was physically and mentally infirm and unable to fulfill a second term in office, much less his existing one.
Then Biden froze, lapsed, drifted and muttered. Trump was able to execute his game plan perfectly.
The CNN presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
In the days that followed, Biden immediately began haemorrhaging support from Democrats more than worried – terrified – that Biden would be unable to defeat Trump, and could cause the Democrats to lose the House and Senate, as well. Democrats were peering into an abyss.
Until Sunday morning in the United States, the Biden team was consistently and fiercely pushing back against calls for him to drop out. They insisted he would not be dissuaded from his view that he was the strongest person to go after Trump and defeat him. Reports emerged that Biden was deeply hurt, angry and resentful of being challenged from within the party, and that he was not at all convinced by the polls showing him losing more key states than he won in 2020.
Biden saw no legitimacy in being denied the nomination when he won millions of votes in the Democratic primaries this year and virtually all the votes of the convention delegates. He vowed to resume campaigning after his bout of COVID.
It would take discussions with the most consequential leaders in the party to eventually persuade him to change course. These figures included former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Jim Clyburn, a senior Black member of the House, whose endorsement of Biden helped seal his nomination for the presidency in 2020.
By Sunday morning, it was becoming clear to most everyone in the political world – including Trump and his campaign team – that Biden was terminal, and that he would surely lose if he did not leave the field.
Hours later, Biden stood aside. He finally got it. He said:
And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interests of my party and the country to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.
A courageous, statesmanlike decision
Had Biden not retreated, and had he been defeated by Trump in the November election, he would have been excoriated for being so self-centred, hubristic and arrogant to believe he was more important than the cause of defeating Trump.
He would have been adjudged as a failed one-term president because Trump would be able to enter office and destroy all the Biden programs and initiatives that came into existence during his presidency.
Indeed, Biden was regarded – and loved – by so many across the Democratic Party and the country because of what they saw in his half century of public service: his profound decency, his love for the country, his reverence for the military, and his determination to stop Trump and his assault on democracy.
Obama captured Biden’s legacy as president in his letter to the country on Sunday.
Since taking office, President Biden has displayed that character again and again. He helped end the pandemic, created millions of jobs, lowered the cost of prescription drugs, passed the first major piece of gun safety legislation in 30 years, made the biggest investment to address climate change in history, and fought to ensure the rights of working people to organise for fair wages and benefits.
Internationally, he restored America’s standing in the world, revitalised NATO, and mobilised the world to stand up against Russian aggression in Ukraine.
If Vice President Kamala Harris now earns the Democratic nomination and then defeats Trump, Biden’s decision to step back at a most critical moment in US history will be seen as both courageous and statesmanlike.
No presidential candidate from any major party has withdrawn from a campaign so late in the election cycle. What Biden did was truly unprecedented.
History will be the final judge
When it comes to assessing Biden’s legacy, there will be much analysis and reflection on issues not cited by Obama. There will be criticism of the inflation that was unleashed post-COVID, and the ensuing interest rate rises that resulted in profound insecurity for tens of millions of Americans facing cost-of-living pressures.
The border between the US and Mexico was allowed, for much too long, to get out of control, fuelling sentiment towards Trump’s most explosive issue: immigration and crime.
There was also one profound crisis that hurt Biden’s standing as an effective leader in foreign affairs and protecting America’s national security.
In early 2021, Biden announced the US would withdraw its troops by September of that year. The ensuing collapse of the Afghanistan government and the takeover of the country by the Taliban forced a chaotic evacuation of American personnel and Afghans who worked on behalf of the US.
The deaths of 13 US service members and horrific scenes at Kabul’s airport shook public confidence in Biden and his foreign policy mastery.
Biden’s approval slipped to 43% – his lowest mark since taking office – and it has declined steadily ever since.
This event was a precursor to a very challenging environment for Biden’s re-election chances in 2024. This was only compounded further by the persistent questions about his age and viability to run for a second term, particularly after last month’s debate performance.
Historians judge great presidents by whether their ideals, policies and programs endure. The verdict on whether Biden has been a great president will begin to be written the day after the November 5 election.
Bruce Wolpe is affiliated with the United States Studies Centre. He worked on the Democratic staff of the US House of Representatives, most recently during President Obama’s first term.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael J. Davern, Professor of Accounting & Business Information Systems, The University of Melbourne
In the wake of the widespread chaos we saw on Friday, one old adage perhaps feels even truer now than when it was first coined in the 1960s:
To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.
As the world continues to assess the fallout of what has been called “the largest IT outage in history”, industry and government leaders will naturally be pondering how exactly this all could have happened.
Most tragically, the company at the heart of all this – cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike – is explicitly meant to protect the IT systems across our hyperconnected global economy. Is CrowdStrike to blame or were they just unlucky? Could this happen again?
For businesses, these are risk management questions as much as they are technical IT questions. Risk is unavoidable in business and life. We can never completely escape it, but we can proactively manage it.
Many big companies hate thinking about and preparing for so-called “black swan” events – major catastrophes that are hard to predict. Friday’s events have shown just how important it is that they do.
Risk isn’t a choice
Businesses face many different types of risks. Of these, Friday’s IT outage was an example of an operational risk event. Operational risk is broadly defined as:
the risk of loss as a result of ineffective or failed internal processes, people, systems, or external events.
In simpler terms, it’s the risk that something goes wrong in the way a business runs.
Friday’s outage instantly wrought havoc on a wide range of technology integrated businesses. It might feel like the kind of event that’s impossible to predict.
But was this operational risk event foreseeable? In general terms – yes! An event like this was inevitable. And it will happen again. Let’s explore some reasons why.
The networked economy
We benefit daily from our networked world, which enables our economy to function at a speed undreamed of decades ago. We depend now on technology for virtually every aspect of our lives.
But this network and speed of activity means when things go wrong, they can go wrong fast, and everywhere. It’s a trade-off decision. If we want the benefits of our data-driven, networked economy, we must accept some risk here.
The trade-off decision extends to the choices made by providers of the upstream software and services we rely upon. This painful lesson was learned by some businesses that had never heard of CrowdStrike last Friday but soon found out key software relied on it. Choosing upstream providers means accepting the risks of their trade-off decisions.
Competition is good, but so are network effects
A fundamental tenet of economics is that competition is good. Yet in technology markets, we often see only a few players dominate. This is in part due to what economists call network externalities.
Positive network externalities arise when increasing the number of users of a product or service increases its value.
Microsoft’s software underpins much of the digital infrastructure used by businesses around the world. David Irlweg/Shutterstock
Microsoft Windows, for example, is ubiquitous because it has a critical mass of users. Many people know how to use it, which attracts many developers to provide useful applications. Network externalities drive market dominance.
Friday’s events were so wide-reaching because Microsoft and CrowdStrike are dominant players in their respective markets.
Though it wasn’t a Microsoft incident, the company estimated that the outage affected about 8.5 million Windows devices around the world. This is less than 1% of all Windows machines. Microsoft said while this percentage may seem small:
the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.
We have benefited tremendously from the network externalities of these companies’ dominance, at the price of exposing ourselves to the risk of such narrow dependencies.
How to think about risk
Such vulnerabilities don’t mean we can’t still manage these risks. Effective risk management entails the interplay between three factors:
risk appetite – how much risk we are willing to accept
understanding the risks we face – keeping an organisational risk register
investing in risk treatments to keep risks within our appetite.
Risk appetite and understanding varies significantly across different businesses, so too does the extent of investment in treatments.
But the risk of an outage like Friday’s should have been on the risk register of the affected organisations. We can choose our risk appetite and accordingly invest in risk treatments to keep the identified risks within it.
For example, investing in fully redundant systems as a treatment could have limited some of the damage of Friday’s events. Many systems that weren’t using CrowdStrike weren’t directly impacted. Some organisations were able to revert to paper-based systems.
In the UK, some doctors managed the disruption by handwriting prescriptions. DC Studio/Shutterstock
But redundancy in systems is very expensive, and there is always the risk that multiple systems will fail at once.
Risk management is complex. CrowdStrike itself is a risk treatment – for the risk of cyberattacks. Friday’s outage resulted in part from fast patching – a rapid roll out of an update to treat a specific cyberattack risk. In treating one risk, we can expose ourselves to new risks.
Given the consequences of black swan events, effective risk management for such possibilities would seem essential. But businesses can’t prepare for every contingency and so are reluctant to invest now to protect against a future risk event of unknown impact.
It’s a matter of perspective: we need to take a systemic view as we evaluate the trade-offs in our networked economy. Or as Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan” aptly said: “let’s not be turkeys”.
Michael J. Davern has received research grant funding in the past from the Australian Research Council (LP130100106 & LP100100068) in conjunction with National Australia Bank and Great Southern Bank for research in operational risk management practices.
Giving is in a tough spot in Australia. A declining proportion of us donate to charities, and fewer of us are registering as formal volunteers than in 2018.
Charities Minister Andrew Leigh has deemed this a civic crisis and set a target of doubling philanthropic giving by 2030.
To achieve this, Leigh and Treasurer Jim Chalmers asked the Productivity Commission to conduct a once-in-a-generation 15-month review of philanthropy, which was published last Thursday.
Leigh said he would consider all of the recommendations but one – that donations to school building funds no longer be tax deductible.
Why allow tax deductions for school building donations?
The Productivity Commission is a big supporter of tax deductions as a means of encouraging giving, and recommended changes that would make more charities eligible for tax-deductible gift recipient status.
But it said there was currently “no coherent policy rationale” for why some charities got deductible gift recipient status and others missed out.
A rationale was needed because tax-deductible status effectively renders taxpayers co-investors with donors in the entities given such status.
The Commission wanted decisions about which activities were eligible to be guided by three principles:
Will the activity generate community-wide benefits and otherwise be undersupplied?
Is subsidising donations the best way to support this activity?
Could donations be unjustly converted into private benefits for donors?
Using these principles, the Commission recommended that while many more charities should receive access to deductible gift recipient status, some should have their status withdrawn, among them school building funds.
School buildings arguably met the first of the Commission’s tests. They might be said to generate community benefits that could otherwise be undersupplied.
There were better ways to support them with government funding, and there was a “material risk” that donors could convert tax‑deductible donations into private benefits, as donations may “substitute for fees”.
Backlash swift and fierce
When the Commission suggested this in its draft report, released in November, the backlash was swift and fierce.
The National Catholic Education Commission called it a “direct attack” on faith communities. Others said it would erode
“Judeo-Christian values”.
Although overblown, such reactions proved effective in threatening to drag a sober reform into a tiresome “culture war”.
Deductible contributions to school building funds were introduced in 1954 as a pragmatic response to rapid growth in enrolments.
A more regressive system ‘hard to imagine’
Leading tax scholar Professor Ann O’Connell observed that they enabled governments to indirectly support private schools without being perceived as propping them up at the expense of the public system.
This was pragmatic and sensible at the time. But 70 years later, Australia’s 3,500 private school building funds have become a key driver of shameful disparities in educational facilities.
The reasons are obvious enough. The typical donors are parents and alumni, and the wealthiest among them are the best-equipped to exploit the concession. This directs the biggest benefits to the highest-fee (usually most “elite”) schools.
The Commission finds the richest 1% of school building funds get 36% of total donations. The top 10% get 83%.
A more regressive mechanism is hard to imagine. Taxpayer subsidies for private school buildings now approach A$100 million per year.
Sydney Church of England Grammar School Shore Physical Education Centre. TTW Engineering
Tax concessions reflect what we value
In rejecting the Commission’s recommendation as soon as he released its report, Leigh said a “world-class education system is essential to tackling inequality”.
It’s a pity he didn’t decide to use the “once in a generation” opportunity to tackle inequality within education aided by distorted giving incentives.
For what it’s worth, Leigh is an excellent charities minister, genuinely committed to his portfolio. I also suspect he knows the status quo is both ethically and fiscally indefensible.
But that’s precisely what makes the response so disheartening.
It’s not simply about the waste inherent in directing public funds to places that don’t much need them. It’s also about the moral injury of witnessing something manifestly unfair.
Such injustices undermine the social solidarity Leigh says he wants to rebuild .
An opportunity squandered
If even such modest reforms are electorally “too hard”, what hope is there for more meaningful reforms?
Even ones as modest as taking away the tax exemptions granted to the Australian Football League and National Rugby League.
put evaluation evidence at the heart of policy design and decision-making, so the Australian government can have confidence its programs and policies are delivering better outcomes for Australians and achieving value for money.
It sounds great, but what’s the point if you disregard advice from an already-established evidence-evaluation body?
Leigh and colleagues have squandered an opportunity to fix a festering issue that will only worsen over time.
Matthew Wade 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.
Analysis by Keith Rankin. Interest Rates and Increasing Prices: The Facts
Chart by Keith Rankin.Chart by Keith Rankin.
The first chart above challenges the received view that inflation in New Zealand remains stubbornly high, and that it is therefore appropriate for the Reserve Bank’s official cash rate (OCR) to be held for at least a few more months at its damagingly high level of 5.5%.
The second chart suggests that inflation in New Zealand was already dead in 2023, and that – inasmuch as there was ever an argument for high interest rate monetary policies – those high interest rates should have come down sharply during 2023.
The first chart uses a measure of CPI inflation appropriate to the problem at hand. When the CPI data was released on 17 July, the only figure really mentioned was the 3.3% headline annual figure. This was calculated by comparing prices in April-June 2024 with prices in April-June 2023. The problem is that most of that 3.3% occurred in 2023, not 2024. The first chart above uses a CPI inflation measure that compares April-June 2024 to October-December 2023. (Then it annualises – ie scales up that measure – to make it fit the convention that both interest and inflation rates should be quoted in the form of annual rates.)
The actual increase in prices during 2024 so far is 1.0%, which annualises to 2.1%. The monetary policy target band for CPI inflation is between one percent and three percent, with a midpoint of two percent. The CPI inflation data now sits right in the centre-point of that target range. The CPI inflation rate is now precisely on target, so there should be no anti-inflation policy in place.
Further, in the first three months of 2024 – as the first chart shows – the CPI inflation rate was 2.25%. This means that the Reserve Bank, focussing on CPI inflation, should have reduced the OCR in April. Yet it still has not done so, despite this month reviewing its interest rate.
The first chart shows a number of other things, as well. The bout of so-called inflation starting early in 2021 was in fact a cost-escalation arising from the pandemic disruption to global supply chains. By early 2022 those cost increases had been largely factored in by the world markets; there was no epidemic of inflation expectations, which was the pretext for the policy ratcheting-up of interest rates. Unfortunately, in 2022 there was another supply-cost shock, in the form of the Russia-Ukraine war. Again, no epidemic of inflationary expectations; just a second ‘spike’ in the CPI chart.
Looking at the whole of the twenty-first century, we see that CPI-inflation has been mainly a set of ‘spikes’, and not processes that ever needed the economic equivalent of chemotherapy. (The spike early in 2011 was the increase in the GST rate from 12.5% to 15%.) Further, and despite the alleged concerns of the monetary hawks during the 2010s, the historically low interest rates of that decade did not ignite an inflationary process.
The first chart reveals just one inflationary process, from 2004 to 2008 (albeit with a dip early in 2007, due to a sharp appreciation of the New Zealand dollar); a process that seems to have been exacerbated by rather than relieved by the then policy of raising interest rates.
The first chart also shows something that is very important to note. It shows a perceived norm, from 2000 to 2008, of interest rates being persistently three percentage points above the CPI inflation rate. Much needs to be said about that false normality, but not here. What should be noted here though is that this 2000-2008 pattern of substantial ‘real interest rates’ – a pattern also prevalent in other western capitalist countries – was the real cause of the 2008/09 Global Financial Crisis. The strong suggestion is that monetary-policy hawks favour high interest rates for reasons other than inflation suppression.
(We should also note that the 2000 to 2008 situation occurred under the watch of a ‘progressive’ Labour government. The Left, at least since 1984, has been particularly weak in critiquing interest rate policies most associated with Margaret Thatcher and her virulent battle against the working class in 1980s’ United Kingdom.)
The second chart uses two other measures of inflation – arguably better measures than the CPI – and also a slightly different version of the CPI measure used in the first chart.
The other two measures may be called ‘PPI inflation’, where PPI means ‘producers price index’. Probably the PPI Outputs index is the best measure of prices that we have; the inputs’ measure is probably too sensitive to movements in the New Zealand dollar exchange rate.
We note that the PPI Outputs’ measure shows clearly that the pandemic effects and the Ukraine war effects were nothing more than ‘cost spikes’; and were not at all indicative of inflation processes. We also note that the PPI inflation measures show that the 2004 to 2008 period was a more dramatic inflationary process than the CPI reveals. And we note that the period 2017 to 2019 was one of a degree of PPI inflation that didn’t feed into the CPI. From the first chart, it looks like the main reason that the CPI did not rise in those three years was because interest rates were cut to then record lows. The way to suppress inflation then was to reduce interest rates, not to raise them.
Technical Note
When \there is a new quarterly CPI or PPI release, there are five annualised measures of inflation that can be calculated.
One. The most up-to-date measure is to just take the increase over the previous three months, and then to annualise it (ie scale it up). For the CPI, in this measure, the result for the June 2024 quarter is 1.6% and for the March 2024 quarter it is 2.6%. The PPI outputs measure for March 2024, on this basis, is 3.5%; indeed the PPI shows that prices have bottomed out, and are now on the rise.
Two. The measure I used in the first table gives an annualised CPI inflation rate of 2.1% for June 2024 and 2.25% for March 2024. The PPI Outputs measure, on this calculation, is 3.2%.
Three. There is another six-monthly measure, which is the one used in the second chart. It’s a bit less sensitive to the most recent datapoint, but also less likely to be distorted by any ‘noisy’ or ‘rogue’ elements in any particular datapoint. This measure averages the two most recent datapoints (in this case the two 2024 data items) and compares with an average of the previous two datapoints. It yields CPI inflation measures of 2.16% (June) and 3.41% (March). This PPI Outputs measure for March 2024 is 3.14%. (Economic historians prefer less noisy measures, whereas financial markets and journalists should be focussing on the latest news.)
These measures, based on quarterly or six-monthly change, may be subject to ‘seasonal noise’. But generally the CPI is much less subject to substantial seasonal influences than is production, trade or employment data.
Four. There are also two annual measures. One, the noisier one, is the measure most commonly quoted in the media, and appears to be the measure most used by policymakers. It takes the most recent three-monthly datapoint (ie April to June 2024) and compares it with the data for the same three months of the previous year. This is ‘noisy’ because it is over-influenced by ‘one-off’ events in that part of either last year or this year. It is not subject to any averaging out.
For this ‘official measure’, the most recent CPI inflation rate is 3.3% and the March CPI rate was 4.0%. The PPI outputs rate for the March quarter was 2.6%, within the monetary policy target range of between 1% and 3%. Inflation was nothing like the problem in 2023 that it was presented as being; though the cost of living was (and still is) a problem, because the major cost problem that affects many people – directly or indirectly – is high interest rates (which are excluded from CPI or PPI inflation measures).
Five. The final measure of CPI or PPI inflation is the least noisy, and best for economic historians. Its disadvantage is that it’s the least current measure. It is the method that’s applied to production data to calculate the economic growth rate. This method averages the four most recent quarters of data, and compares that average with the average for the previous four quarters.
Under this historical final measure, the most recent CPI inflation rate is 4.4% and the previous rate was 5.1%. The most recent (March 2024) PPI Outputs inflation rate is 2.4%. This last figure is highly significant. It will tell discerning future historians that the supposed inflation problem of 2022 was already over early in 2023.
*******
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.
Will his decision to step aside seal Joe Biden’s legacy as US president?
Three weeks ago, Biden suffered a political catastrophe. Biden’s team had been surprised that Donald Trump had agreed to an early presidential debate in late June, and under rules that favoured Biden: no studio audience, just the two candidates, and muted microphones.
Biden urgently needed to change the trajectory of the race. He was at best tied with Trump nationally, but slipping in the key swing states that determined the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections. He wanted to show that Trump was extreme, unhinged and unfit for office – a profound threat, in his eyes, to America’s democracy.
Trump wanted to prove that Biden was physically and mentally infirm and unable to fulfill a second term in office, much less his existing one.
Then Biden froze, lapsed, drifted and muttered. Trump was able to execute his game plan perfectly.
The CNN presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
In the days that followed, Biden immediately began haemorrhaging support from Democrats more than worried – terrified – that Biden would be unable to defeat Trump, and could cause the Democrats to lose the House and Senate, as well. Democrats were peering into an abyss.
Until Sunday morning in the United States, the Biden team was consistently and fiercely pushing back against calls for him to drop out. They insisted he would not be dissuaded from his view that he was the strongest person to go after Trump and defeat him. Reports emerged that Biden was deeply hurt, angry and resentful of being challenged from within the party, and that he was not at all convinced by the polls showing him losing more key states than he won in 2020.
Biden saw no legitimacy in being denied the nomination when he won millions of votes in the Democratic primaries this year and virtually all the votes of the convention delegates. He vowed to resume campaigning after his bout of COVID.
It would take discussions with the most consequential leaders in the party to eventually persuade him to change course. These figures included former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Jim Clyburn, a senior Black member of the House, whose endorsement of Biden helped seal his nomination for the presidency in 2020.
By Sunday morning, it was becoming clear to most everyone in the political world – including Trump and his campaign team – that Biden was terminal, and that he would surely lose if he did not leave the field.
Hours later, Biden stood aside. He finally got it. He said:
And while it has been my intention to seek re-election, I believe it is in the best interests of my party and the country to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.
A courageous, statesmanlike decision
Had Biden not retreated, and had he been defeated by Trump in the November election, he would have been excoriated for being so self-centred, hubristic and arrogant to believe he was more important than the cause of defeating Trump.
He would have been adjudged as a failed one-term president because Trump would be able to enter office and destroy all the Biden programs and initiatives that came into existence during his presidency.
Indeed, Biden was regarded – and loved – by so many across the Democratic Party and the country because of what they saw in his half century of public service: his profound decency, his love for the country, his reverence for the military, and his determination to stop Trump and his assault on democracy.
Obama captured Biden’s legacy as president in his letter to the country on Sunday.
Since taking office, President Biden has displayed that character again and again. He helped end the pandemic, created millions of jobs, lowered the cost of prescription drugs, passed the first major piece of gun safety legislation in 30 years, made the biggest investment to address climate change in history, and fought to ensure the rights of working people to organise for fair wages and benefits.
Internationally, he restored America’s standing in the world, revitalised NATO, and mobilised the world to stand up against Russian aggression in Ukraine.
If Vice President Kamala Harris now earns the Democratic nomination and then defeats Trump, Biden’s decision to step back at a most critical moment in US history will be seen as both courageous and statesmanlike.
No presidential candidate from any major party has withdrawn from a campaign so late in the election cycle. What Biden did was truly unprecedented.
History will be the final judge
When it comes to assessing Biden’s legacy, there will be much analysis and reflection on issues not cited by Obama. There will be criticism of the inflation that was unleashed post-COVID, and the ensuing interest rate rises that resulted in profound insecurity for tens of millions of Americans facing cost-of-living pressures.
The border between the US and Mexico was allowed, for much too long, to get out of control, fuelling sentiment towards Trump’s most explosive issue: immigration and crime.
There was also one profound crisis that hurt Biden’s standing as an effective leader in foreign affairs and protecting America’s national security.
In early 2021, Biden announced the US would withdraw its troops by September of that year. The ensuing collapse of the Afghanistan government and the takeover of the country by the Taliban forced a chaotic evacuation of American personnel and Afghans who worked on behalf of the US.
The deaths of 13 US service members and horrific scenes at Kabul’s airport shook public confidence in Biden and his foreign policy mastery.
Biden’s approval slipped to 43% – his lowest mark since taking office – and it has declined steadily ever since.
This event was a precursor to a very challenging environment for Biden’s re-election chances in 2024. This was only compounded further by the persistent questions about his age and viability to run for a second term, particularly after last month’s debate performance.
Historians judge great presidents by whether their ideals, policies and programs endure. The verdict on whether Biden has been a great president will begin to be written the day after the November 5 election.
Bruce Wolpe is affiliated with the United States Studies Centre. He worked on the Democratic staff of the US House of Representatives, most recently during President Obama’s first term.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rodrigo Praino, Professor & Director, Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, Flinders University
Joe Biden has announced he will no longer contest the 2024 US presidential election. He has thrown his support instead behind his vice president, Kamala Harris.
In most countries, including Australia, such a decision would trigger a meeting of party number-crunchers behind closed doors, where the party would select a new candidate and announce the decision to the rest of the country.
Not in America.
How nominees are selected
American political parties arguably have the most transparent system to select candidates running for office in the world. This very transparency, which many cherish as an additional democratic feature of the American political system, makes the next steps a bit more complicated today than some may be acknowledging.
In brief, any party member who wants to run for president of the United States run for “primary” elections. Each party holds their own primaries — or caucuses — and whoever wins those becomes the party’s candidate at the general election.
The process, however, is indirect: when voters vote for a candidate during a primary election, their vote actually triggers the selection of a party delegate who is pledged to vote for that candidate during the party convention. The party’s nominee is then formally selected at the convention.
The Democratic party has around 4,700 delegates. Of these, around 3,800 delegates were pledged to nominate Biden for president and are now essentially free agents. Biden’s endorsement of Harris might convince some of them to support her bid, but they are under no obligation to do so.
This situation is unprecedented in modern US elections. The current presidential nominating system based on widespread primary elections took shape in the 1970s. Since then, it has worked virtually flawlessly, with candidates from both parties collecting pledged delegates during the primary season and receiving the nomination during each party’s convention.
The last time that any of the two major American parties held an “open convention” – that is, a convention where there is no individual with enough pledged delegates to be considered the presumptive party nominee and instead the delegates choose the candidate with a free vote – was the Democratic National Convention of 1968. Nothing like this has happened since.
So what happens now?
Harris is definitely running to secure the party’s nomination. Several prominent Democrats have also endorsed her candidacy. But she is not the official Democratic candidate yet, and has some way to go in order to secure the nomination.
According to the party rules, at this stage any member of the Democratic party can gather signatures from at least 300 delegates from a minimum of six states to run for the top spot on the Democratic ticket. This means, theoretically, that there could be up to 15 people seeking the Democratic nomination, including Harris, although it is highly unlikely that such a large number of contenders will enter the field now.
So far, no other potential candidate has expressed a clear intention to run. Should there be more than one candidate, the party rules state that each candidate has the right to give a 20-minute speech in front of the convention, before the delegates vote on the nominee. If a small number of contenders emerged, such a process could be managed effectively. If a large number of contenders were to emerge, however, then the process could quickly become messy, resulting in multiple ballots before a candidate is selected.
From August 19-22, Democrats will gather in Chicago for their national convention. Interestingly, Chicago was also the city where the Democrats gathered during the last properly contentious convention in 1968.
That year, President Lyndon Johnson announced on March 31 that he was not going to run for re-election. A few days later, on April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Then on June 6, right after winning the California primary election during his presidential bid, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.
When the Democratic delegates gathered in Chicago, they nominated the vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who had not run in any of the primary elections and caucuses that took place that season. Anti-Vietnam war protests also triggered a number of riots and protests around Chicago, so the process was extremely volatile.
We don’t know yet if 2024 is going to be an open convention or not. But we know that many have been arguing that, if Biden stepped down, there should not be a “coronation” of Harris, but rather a democratic process that selects the next candidate.
Harris has also stated that she wants to “earn and win” the nomination. Donations also appear to have been flowing in record numbers towards the Democratic cause since Biden’s announcement.
There is now a very delicate balancing act unfolding between keeping the democratic nature of the nominating process intact and ensuring that the Democratic party is quickly united if it has any chance of beating Donald Trump in November.
Rodrigo Praino receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Department of Defence, and SmartSat Collaborative Research Centre. He has also received funding in the past from the United Nations and the US Department of State.
At first glance, Netflix’s popular Japanese animation Delicious in Dungeon is a strangely food-obsessed dungeon-crawler fantasy tale.
Upon a closer look, however, it reveals itself as a striking parody of the popular “gourmet genre”. The series invites us to think critically about how food traditions are created and conformed to.
It also reminds us that food is highly political and that the “culinary nationalism” we see around the world – and particularly in Japan – is more complicated than most people realise.
Delicious in Dungeon is a ‘seinen’ anime. These productions are usually targeted at young Japanese men. Netflix
A culinary high fantasy
Delicious in Dungeon was initially released as a comic book in 2014, before being adapted for TV by Japanese animation studio Trigger. Its distribution by Netflix this year has given the seinen (meaning “youth”) anime a global audience.
Despite being a dungeon crawler, the series has an unusually explicit focus on food. Our group of heroes must keep themselves fed while on their epic quest. Specifically, they must embrace (with varying degrees of enthusiasm) danjon meshii: slaying monsters and eating them.
The show’s creators use a range of visual and narrative tropes borrowed from the Japanese “gourmet” genre. Typically, works in this genre (including books, movies, shows, comics and more) feature a careful discussion of ingredients, a demonstration of their preparation and an evaluation on the final product.
The order in which this happens can vary depending on the specific work. For example, the popular Netflix show Midnight Diner typically provides the full recipe at the end of each episode.
Although the ingredients and method of preparation shown in Delicious in Dungeon are … unusual … the show still follows this pattern to a T. Whether the characters are making a mandrake and bat meat kakiage, or a basilisk egg omelette, they discuss the ingredients, prepare the meal and react as they eat it.
Even the characters who are the most uncomfortable with having to eat monsters have moments of eye-watering happiness when they taste the delicious flavours.
The show falls within the ‘gourmet genre’, all the while dissecting and poking fun at it. Netflix
Conversations about food
By talking explicitly and consistently about food taboos (such as “must you eat the monsters you kill?”) and food values (such as “food should be shared with others”), Delicious in Dungeon draws our attention to a number of ideas that usually hide beneath the surface.
What is “natural” to eat? Why are some food practices considered taboo? And who gets to decide?
Our “foodways” – our cultural and social practices regarding the creation and consumption of food – are where community, connection and in-group/out-group dynamics are formed.
Food is constantly at the centre of battles of authenticity, tradition and values (never mind issues of scarcity and sustainability). As described by Japanese literature academic Tomoko Aoyama in her book Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature:
the seemingly simple and ordinary may turn out to be surprisingly complex, once we pay attention to it […] Food has been discovered, invented, classified, and scrutinised, as well as enjoyed, consumed and devoured.
Policing tradition and authenticity
Since the early 2000s, various arms of the Japanese government have been on a quest to define (and protect) “authentic” Japanese food.
Perhaps the most significant change in Japanese food tradition was the successful UNESCO Intangible Heritage bid of 2013, which saw washoku enshrined as a “traditional dietary culture”.
The term washoku (“wa” meaning Japanese and “shoku” meaning food) emerged during the modern Meiji period (1868–1912) to describe food from Japan alongside a sudden influx of European foods. But it was an everyday term of no special significance; there was no uniform opinion of what “Japanese” food was.
After the bid, a previously undefined range of food practices carried out by millions of people was reduced to a single meal which includes a serve of white rice with multiple side dishes.
Although washoku has been enshrined as ‘traditional Japanese food’, it wasn’t popularised until relatively recently. Nullumayulife/Flickr, CC BY
Washoku is essentially an “invented tradition” that was only recently awarded cultural significance and repackaged for an international audience. As Japanese culinary scholar Eric Rath explains:
Washoku is an idealised dietary lifestyle focusing on food popularised from the 1960s onwards, meant to impress audiences outside Japan and guide domestic eating habits.
In fact, many elements of modern Japanese cuisine didn’t become mainstream until the past 100 years. For instance, the vast majority of Japan’s population rarely ate pure white rice before the 1950s. It was the rice rationing of the wartime government that introduced white rice into people’s daily fare.
Before this period, there was massive variation in food practices and the types of food eaten depended on the region and climate. Generally speaking, however, a “traditional” Japanese diet from pre-modern times included single-pot meals combining millet and barley (sometimes mixed with rice) and local vegetables.
Another example of a dish considered purely Japanese, but which isn’t, is ramen.
Ramen is the result of immigration and cultural intermingling. Shutterstock
Ramen was developed in the early 1900s by Chinese immigrants in Japan, to serve to blue-collar workers. It underwent several changes and adjustments before it became the rich dish we know and love today.
Eating with your eyes
Regardless of the historical reality, our shared imagination of “Japanese food” continues to thrive in fictional worlds and the gourmet genre.
The first pre-Netflix Midnight Diner season premiered in 2009. The anthology was acquired by Netflix Japan in 2016. Netflix
A number of novels translated from Japenese to English such as The Kamogawa Food Detectives by Hisashi Kashiwai can also be understood as part of this trend.
When we see the characters in Delicious in Dungeon debate how to best prepare their dishes, or gasp in pleasure at the wonders on their palates, we’re actually seeing a parody of the gourmet genre and a critique of culinary nationalism.
So the next time you encounter the words “traditional” next to food, you might want to ask yourself: what is this person trying to sell me – and why?
Laura Emily Clark 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.
Foreign Minister Winston Peters has “hung . . . out to dry” Fiji’s suspended New Zealand Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) who wrote to him seeking assistance, a former Fiji government advisor-cum-critic says.
“The sudden cessation of my salary at the eleventh hour whilst I am in the middle of instructing legal counsel in Fiji to defend myself against charges brought by the Fijian government is a denial of natural justice that has left me with little choice but to seek your assistance,” Pryde said in a five-page letter to the minister.
A spokesperson from Peters’ office told RNZ Pacific today: “This is a matter between Mr Pryde and the government of Fiji. It is not a matter for the minister to comment on.”
However, according to the Fiji Sun, Peters — in an exclusive interview with the newspaper — said that “he was not happy” with the New Zealander’s “approach to seek assistance from him”.
“He (Pryde) wrote to everybody and sent me a copy,” he was quoted as saying in a frontpage news story with the headline ‘Winston slams Pryde’s email action for help’.
“He sent me a copy? He wrote me a letter and sent it to everyone else at the same time!. What do you think about somebody that wrote to you — asking for help and then sent it to everyone else at the same time? What would you think?,” the newspaper reported.
‘Bereft of principle’ The Deputy Prime Minsiter’s comments reported in the Fijian daily have been labelled by a former Fiji government communications advisor and Grubsheet blog publisher, Graham Davis, as “highhanded and bereft of principle”.
“Winston Peters has clearly hung Christopher Pryde out to dry,” Davis said.
“His dismissive attitude to suspended DPP Pryde now being unable to defend himself against a false charge of misbehaviour because his salary has been severed is . . . highhanded and bereft of principle.
“And it sends an ominous message to every New Zealander working in the Pacific or contemplating doing so that if they fall foul of their host governments, Winston [Peters] will cut them loose. They are on their own.”
NZ Foreign Minister Winston Peters . . . told the Fiji Sun he was “not happy” with Pryde’s letter to him appealing for NZ help. Image: RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka told local media that Pryde was entitled to receive all salaries until he was removed from office.
The Kiwi lawyer was suspended 15 months ago after he allegedly “spent about 30 to 45 minutes conversing alone” with former Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum at a public event hosted by the Japanese Embassy in the capital Suva.
In April last year, Rabuka said people in high office needed to be “very aware of who is watching what we do”.
‘Fraternising’ with person under investigation “For the DPP [Pryde] to be seen to be fraternising with high profile person under investigation would not be the right thing for the DPP to [have] done.”
Pryde, who has held the top prosecutor’s role since 2011, warned other New Zealand citizens who have taken up positions in Fiji’s criminal justice system “may potentially be adversely impacted if the Fijian government is permitted to ignore due process and the rule of law”.
“The NZ government provides substantial aid to Fiji in support of the rule of law which is being undermined,” he wrote to Peters.
The Fiji Law Society and the New Zealand Law Society (NZLS) have expressed concerns on the issue.
NZLS president Frazer Barton has encouraged “respect for and compliance . .. of the rule of law”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
