Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samuel Cairnduff, PhD candidate in cultural leadership, Deakin University

When the date of the referendum was announced, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO) quietly cancelled its Last Night of the Proms concert scheduled for the night before.

The reason, given by the orchestra to the media some weeks after the decision to cancel, was that:

to press ahead with a musical celebration of British pageantry on this night felt insensitive given its proximity to the Voice referendum the following day.

Yet, at the time of the decision there was no public statement. The orchestra informed ticket buyers individually. The fact that the cancellation was effected quietly raises questions about why the orchestra did not make any meaningful statement with the cancellation.

The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra states it aspires to “serve our sector as cultural leaders”.

Indeed, many Australian arts organisations say they want to be “cultural leaders” – but they must be careful to match their words and actions.

Read more:
The Voice to Parliament explained

A case of cultural leadership

The expectation of cultural institutions to go beyond their primary function of creating art, and take an active role in important social conversations has become widespread.

The upcoming Voice referendum has prompted many arts organisations to publicly declare their support for a “yes” vote.

But engaging in social discourse and understanding and enacting a leadership role can be challenging.

The term “cultural leadership” has been used frequently by arts organisations and their funding bodies since the 1990s, linked to an increased expectation that subsidised organisations should contribute to society by creating public value.

When outlining goals and articulating purpose, arts organisations today regularly commit to contributing to their communities by providing cultural leadership. This commitment is usually linked to activities such as outreach, education and collaboration.

The notion of cultural leadership has been subjected to scrutiny. In 2014 theatre maker and festival director Wesley Enoch questioned whether true cultural leadership existed in our major institutions.

He highlighted a lack of willingness for both individuals and their organisations to stand for something – to be bold and courageous, particularly when it came to challenging or divisive issues of social change.

Enoch called on cultural organisations to engage with burning social issues, embrace diversity of thought and contribute to the national conversation through their art-making and public engagement.

The TSO’s cancellation of a problematic program without including its stakeholders in discussion, context or explanation does not represent the vision of cultural leadership Enoch evokes.

Post-colonial reckoning

There is another important conversation in classical music around decolonisation and the canon.

The core programs of Australia’s orchestras are drawn from works by deceased European composers. These works can seem culturally remote and irrelevant in our relatively young country.

It is the role of orchestras to reinforce not just the transformational enrichment classical music can bring, but its relevance in our lives.

Today’s audiences are demanding examination of the origins and contemporary meaning of the works regularly performed in our concert halls. At the same time, questions of diversity, privilege and access are reshaping the organisations that make and present classical music.

In Australia, debates around cultural appropriation and representation have arisen around events like Opera Australia’s accusations of “yellowface” in its production of Turandot, and a cancelled event at Dark Mofo where a British flag would have been soaked in Aboriginal blood.

Read more:
Dark Mofo doesn’t deserve our blood. Australia must invest in First Nations curators and artists

How institutions engage with these discussions is at the heart of their cultural leadership role.

Orchestras are the custodians of the canon, responsible for pushing their art forms forward and vibrant hubs of collective talent, knowledge and experience.

They can choose to harness these resources, positioning themselves at the forefront of difficult conversations – rather than backing away from them without properly developing or communicating their rationales.

Cultural paternalism

The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra made a decision based on the moral judgement it would be insensitive to perform the Last Night of the Proms the night before the referendum, given the overtly British patriotism associated with the program.

This may be a worthy contention. But by just cancelling the concert, the orchestra took away the opportunity for important conversations.

This is reflected in the ambiguous statement by the orchestra:

The TSO believes strongly that art and music should transcend political debate, but we also strive to be sensitive and mindful of community expectations.

As an alternative to the cancellation, the orchestra could have managed this series of events. They could have hosted a discussion about the history of the proms, exploring the tension between the themes of the concert and current conversations.

The program could have been reshaped, reflecting a dialogue with the orchestra’s community.

Instead, the cancellation raises questions. Will the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra ever perform the Last Night of the Proms program again? Were the themes considered when it was originally scheduled? What decision-making processes guided the call to cancel, and who was involved?

State orchestras were divested from the ABC in the late 1990s and left to redefine their purpose and place in society. The tension between artistic and non-artistic endeavours remains a source of friction.

In evolving a leadership role, orchestras and other cultural institutions could recognise that discourse brings us together as a society, and engage with difficult conversations – rather than backing away.

This could be the key to espousing a type of cultural leadership that adds real value to society, on and off stage.

Read more:
Behind the scenes of the Voice referendum, Australia’s museums are already collecting the history of tomorrow

Samuel Cairnduff worked for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra from 2017 to 2022.

– ref. Arts organisations say they want to be ‘cultural leaders’ – but are they living up to their goals? – https://theconversation.com/arts-organisations-say-they-want-to-be-cultural-leaders-but-are-they-living-up-to-their-goals-215445

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirk Dodd, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney

Shakespeare wrote his famous narrative poem Venus and Adonis in a lockdown era when, in 1593, the bubonic plague closed the theatres in London for 18 months.

In Shakespeare’s poem Venus, the Roman goddess of love, continuously tries to seduce the human Adonis, who would rather go hunting with the lads than be caught kissing a goddess.

Shakespeare’s poem liberates female desire by having Venus lament that Adonis won’t gratify her sexually. Shakespeare makes Venus physically larger than Adonis, who struggles to defuse her lust. At one stage, Venus rips Adonis off his horse to carry him under her arm.

Although Adonis resists Venus, the sensuous eros in the verse of Shakespeare’s clever treatment certainly helped to drive its popularity:

“Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemmed thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Shakespeare’s poem has been called the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day – a trite comparison in literary terms, but a fair comparison for its commercial popularity and erotic content.

Educated young men – and Queen Elizabeth I, according to Damien Ryan’s new play – kept a copy of the narrative poem under their pillow.

Ryan touts his Venus and Adonis as a “play within a plague”, yet it is more daring and ambitious than a mere adaptation of the poem. Here we have a speculative history play that culminates in Shakespeare (Anthony Gooley) and his actors performing his famous erotic poem before the queen (Belinda Giblin).

Ryan’s company Sport for Jove was initially forced to shoot the play as a film during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, so a “play within a plague” seems very apt.

À lire aussi :
Friday essay: 50 shades of Shakespeare – how the Bard sexed things up

Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral

With super-dynamic set design and costumes by Damien Ryan and Bernadette Ryan, Venus and Adonis is largely comical, but also tragic; wildly romantic, yet erotic and colourful.

We jump from the rooms of an Elizabethan doctor, who earns his bread-and-butter treating sexually transmitted diseases, to Shakespeare’s bedroom in London and his entanglements with his mistress Aemilia Lanyer (Adele Querol), a proto-feminist poet who became the first English woman to publish her own poetry in her own name in 1611.

Shakespeare helps Lanyer with her quest to publish (at the same time stealing her ideas for his own verse), but tragedy strikes home in Stratford with the loss of Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet. But soon Shakespeare’s company is called to perform his popular poem before the queen.

The editors of the First Folio might ask if this play is a comedy, history or tragedy. Perhaps Ryan would call on Hamlet’s Polonius to declare this play a very fine “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”.

Ryan’s bawdy realism renders Shakespeare with many endearing quirks: his syphilis, his nakedness, his sexual affairs, his bi-curiosity, his laconic demeanour, his bewilderment at his own abilities, and the neglect of his family in Stratford.

But Ryan also consciously aims to liberate three women who influenced Shakespeare, often eclipsed by the shadow of Shakespeare’s monolithic achievements.

Clearly attracted to verse, Aemilia Lanyer is construed as the “Dark Lady” mistress of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Querol drives the energy of the play to become its co-protagonist.

Bernadette Ryan plays a searing Agnes Hathaway, Shakespeare’s neglected wife, too jaded by his absence to relish the sweetness of their romantic youth.

Giblin’s Queen Elizabeth is a cantankerous, yet savvy, f-Bomb-dropping patron of the arts. In one breath she pontificates as an elderly virgin queen; in the next she orders two athletic performers to her bedroom.

A vivid telling

The second act, concerning the rehearsal and performance of Shakespeare’s poem before the queen, rollicks forward like a rollercoaster that has, until then, climbed incrementally through the first act.

The second half intertwines multiple strands of drama and intrigue. The queen sits amid the audience and comments on the action (hilariously) in ways we wouldn’t dare. Her attending ladies swoon for handsome Adonis, who wishes he was Venus kissing the boys.

The performance goes off the rails, but the poetry shines, and the queen compares it to the brilliant work of a female poet she has just read – not realising the poet, Lanyer, has been playing Venus. Then enters the ghost of young Hamnet…

The action is admirably supported by Shakespeare’s leading man, Richard Burbage (Christopher Tomkinson), his leading clown Robert Armin (Kevin MacIsaac) and Shakespeare’s grown up “boy player” Nathaniel Field (Jerome Meyer), utterly appalled he must play the male Adonis instead of Venus.

Ryan capably navigates the diverse space of the cross-dressing rehearsal room and the queered space of poetic patronage and sonnet sequence circulation.

If Polonius never quite envisioned what he meant by a “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”, Ryan’s Venus and Adonis delivers this hybrid form vividly in spades.

Venus and Adonis from Sport for Jove is at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, until October 21.

À lire aussi :
Hamlet: a play that speaks to pandemics past and present

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

– ref. Venus and Adonis: this ‘play within a plague’ about Shakespeare is wildly romantic, erotic and colourful – https://theconversation.com/venus-and-adonis-this-play-within-a-plague-about-shakespeare-is-wildly-romantic-erotic-and-colourful-212705

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Graves, Distinguished Professor of Genetics and Vice Chancellor’s Fellow, La Trobe University

Since gay couples have fewer children, the high frequency of same-sex relationships in humans is puzzling from an evolutionary point of view. Perhaps there are social advantages such relationships confer on a group, or perhaps “gay genes” are selected for other reasons.

A group of Spanish researchers have studied same-sex sexual behaviour and social relationships in more than 250 species of mammals – and in a recent paper in Nature Communications, they conclude it arose independently many times, and is related to other kinds of social behaviour.

Darwin’s paradox

Research has shown the basis of male homosexuality in humans is at least partially genetic. I know of no work on a genetic basis for female–female sexual behaviour.

Why then is male–male sexual behaviour so common? You’d think, because gay couples have fewer children, these gene variants would be passed on rarely, and their frequency would decline over time.

Geneticists, sociologists and psychologists have advanced many possible explanations for this conundrum.

One is that gay genes are really “male-loving genes”. In this case, though gay males have fewer children, their female relatives who share these gene variants may be more inclined to mate earlier and have more children, making up the deficit.

Read more:
Born this way? An evolutionary view of ‘gay genes’

Other hypotheses referenced in the new paper propose that same-sex behaviour has beneficial effects for human groups. One idea is that same-sex relationships are important for forming and maintaining bonds and alliances within the group. This predicts same-sex behaviour should be more frequent in social species than in non-social species.

Alternatively, same-sex behaviour may help to diminish conflict between members of the same sex, and contribute to establishing social hierarchies. If this is so, we would expect same-sex behaviour to be more common in species where aggression and killing among members is also common.

The big picture of same-sex relationships

Human aren’t the only mammals to show a high frequency of same-sex relationships. There are reports of same-sex behaviour (courtship, mounting, genital contact and copulation, pair bonding) in 261 (out of 5,747) mammal species.

Mostly this behaviour is frequent and overt, occurs in the wild, and in half the species is displayed by both sexes. It is very widespread. These species represent about half of all mammal families.

Primates are strongly represented. Fifty-one species, from lemurs to great apes, show same-sex sexual behaviour.

The even bigger picture is given by studies on many other animals, which reveal same-sex behaviour in birds, reptiles, frogs and fish, as well as many invertebrates.

Most studies of same-sex relationships focus on a particular species, which makes it hard to test these competing hypotheses.

The new research explores same-sex relationships across a wide range of mammals. It asks whether this behaviour was ancestral to all mammals, or whether it evolved independently in response to the establishment of different social systems.

Same-sex sexual behaviour evolved many times and quite recently

It has been proposed that the common ancestor of mammals indulged in indiscriminate sexual behaviour, which manifested as a mix of same-sex and heterosexual relationships. The new study contradicts this.

Using a tree of relationships of mammals to each other – confirmed with DNA sequence comparisons – the patterns of same-sex sexual behaviour were mapped onto the relationships between species. The distribution of same-sex behaviour over all mammals didn’t fit the pattern we would expect if it were present in the common ancestor of all mammals, and was retained in some lineages but not others.

Read more:
Homosexuality may have evolved for social, not sexual reasons

A better explanation for the evidence is that same-sex sexual behaviour was rare in mammalian ancestors overall, but evolved independently many times in many different families. Species exhibiting same-sex sexual behaviour had shared ancestors much more recently than species not showing the behaviour. This suggests same-sex sexual behaviour has been gained and lost many times, and quite recently, during mammalian evolution.

Different lineages showed different times at which same-sex sexual behaviour evolved. It became more frequent in Old World monkeys (those found in Africa and Asia today) and increased again during the evolution of the great apes.

Same-sex sexual behaviour and social organisation

Next, the researchers examined the correlation of same-sex sexual behaviour to different measures of social organisation in different mammal species. They compiled information about sociality (how the animals live together) and aggression between members of the same species, and tested for correlations with male or female same-sex sexual behaviour.

The study found same-sex sexual behaviour, both male and female, was more common in more social species. This suggests same-sex sexual behaviour was selected for in social species.

The frequency of male, but not female, same-sex sexual behaviour was also correlated with the frequency with which animals of the same sex attacked and killed each other. This supports the hypothesis that homosexuality evolved to mitigate male–male aggression in mammals.

We conclude from this study that same-sex sexual behaviour in both males and females evolved as species shifted from solitary living to sociality. It helps to establish and maintain social relationships and alliances, resolve conflicts and avoid aggression.

The high frequency of same-sex sexual behaviour in ape and monkey species suggests it was present in a social great ape ancestor, and maintained in present day social species, including humans.

Everybody might be right

Establishing that homosexuality confers selective advantages in social species such as humans and other great apes does not rule out other explanations.

There may still be fertility advantages accruing to the other sex who inherit “male-loving” or “female-loving” gene variants, for example. These benefits are not necessarily the same in different mammal lineages, and may include others that have not yet been investigated.

In any case, the ubiquity and frequency of same-sex sexual behaviour in mammals means homosexuality cannot be considered aberrant or maladaptive in humans, or any other species. It was selected because it confers different and overlapping social and fertility benefits.

Jenny Graves receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. How – and why – did homosexual behaviour evolve in humans and other animals? – https://theconversation.com/how-and-why-did-homosexual-behaviour-evolve-in-humans-and-other-animals-215331

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lewis Ingram, Lecturer in Physiotherapy, University of South Australia

Cardio, short for cardiovascular exercise, refers to any form of rhythmic physical activity that increases your heart rate and breathing so the heart and lungs can deliver oxygen to the working muscles. Essentially, it’s the type of exercise that gets you huffing and puffing – and fills many people with dread.

People often do cardio to lose weight, but it’s associated with a variety of health benefits including reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke and falls. Research shows cardio also improves cognitive function and mental health.

The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity cardio per week.

There are many ways to do cardio, from playing a team sport, to riding your bike to work, to going for a jog. If you’re willing and able to invest in a piece of equipment, you can also do cardio at home.

The treadmill, stationary bike and rowing machine are the most popular pieces of cardio equipment you’ll find in a typical gym, and you can buy any of these for your home too. Here’s how to know which one is best for you.

The treadmill

In terms of effectiveness of exercise, it’s hard to look past the treadmill. Running uses most of your major muscle groups and therefore leads to greater increases in heart rate and energy expenditure compared to other activities, such as cycling.

As a bonus, since running on a treadmill requires you to support your own body weight, it also helps to build and maintain your bones, keeping them strong. This becomes even more important as you get older as the risk of developing medical conditions such as osteopenia and osteoporosis – where the density of your bones is reduced – increases.

But the treadmill may not be for everyone. The weight-bearing nature of running may exacerbate pain and cause swelling in people with common joint conditions such as osteoarthritis.

Also, a treadmill is likely to require greater maintenance (since most treadmills are motorised), and can take up a lot of space.

Stationary bike

The stationary bike provides another convenient means to hit your cardio goals. Setting the bike up correctly is crucial to ensure you are comfortable and to reduce the risk of injury. A general rule of thumb is that you want a slight bend in your knee, as in the picture below, when your leg is at the bottom of the pedal stroke.

While cycling has significant benefits for cardiovascular and metabolic health, since it’s non-weight-bearing it doesn’t benefit your bones to the same extent as walking and running. On the flipside, it offers a great cardio workout without stressing your joints.

Read more:
Can’t afford a gym membership or fitness class? 3 things to include in a DIY exercise program

Rowing machine

If you’re looking to the get the best cardio workout in the least amount of time, the rowing machine might be for you. Because rowing requires you to use all of your major muscle groups including the upper body, your heart and lungs have to work even harder than they do when running and cycling to deliver oxygen to those working muscles. This means the energy expended while rowing is comparable to running and greater than cycling.

But before you rush off to buy a new rower, there are two issues to consider. First, the technical challenge of rowing is arguably greater than that of running or cycling, as the skill of rowing is often less familiar to the average person. While a coach or trainer can help with this, just remember a good rowing technique should be felt primarily in your legs, not your arms and back.

Second, the non-weight-bearing nature of rowing means it misses out on the same bone health benefits offered by the treadmill – although there is some evidence it still can increase bone density to a smaller degree. Nevertheless, like cycling, this drawback of rowing may be negated by offering a more joint-friendly option, providing a great alternative for those with joint pain who still want to keep their heart and lungs healthy.

Read more:
How often should you change up your exercise routine?

So, what’s the best option?

It depends on your goals, what your current health status is, and, most importantly, what you enjoy the most. The best exercise is the one that gets done. So, choose whichever piece of equipment you find the most enjoyable, as this will increase the likelihood you’ll stick to it in the long term.

Saravana Kumar Is a member of Australian Physiotherapy Association, Services for Australian Rural and Remote Allied Health and Health Services Research Association of Australia & New Zealand.

Hunter Bennett and Lewis Ingram do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Treadmill, exercise bike, rowing machine: what’s the best option for cardio at home? – https://theconversation.com/treadmill-exercise-bike-rowing-machine-whats-the-best-option-for-cardio-at-home-213352

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirk Dodd, Lecturer in English and Writing, University of Sydney

Shakespeare wrote his famous narrative poem Venus and Adonis in a lockdown era when, in 1593, the bubonic plague closed the theatres in London for 18 months.

In Shakespeare’s poem Venus, the Roman goddess of love, continuously tries to seduce the human Adonis, who would rather go hunting with the lads than be caught kissing a goddess.

Shakespeare’s poem liberates female desire by having Venus lament that Adonis won’t gratify her sexually. Shakespeare makes Venus physically larger than Adonis, who struggles to defuse her lust. At one stage, Venus rips Adonis off his horse to carry him under her arm.

Although Adonis resists Venus, the sensuous eros in the verse of Shakespeare’s clever treatment certainly helped to drive its popularity:

“Fondling,” she saith, “since I have hemmed thee here
Within the circuit of this ivory pale,
I’ll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale:
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry,
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.

Shakespeare’s poem has been called the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day – a trite comparison in literary terms, but a fair comparison for its commercial popularity and erotic content.

Educated young men – and Queen Elizabeth I, according to Damien Ryan’s new play – kept a copy of the narrative poem under their pillow.

Ryan touts his Venus and Adonis as a “play within a plague”, yet it is more daring and ambitious than a mere adaptation of the poem. Here we have a speculative history play that culminates in Shakespeare (Anthony Gooley) and his actors performing his famous erotic poem before the queen (Belinda Giblin).

Ryan’s company Sport for Jove was initially forced to shoot the play as a film during COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, so a “play within a plague” seems very apt.

Read more:
Friday essay: 50 shades of Shakespeare – how the Bard sexed things up

Tragical-comical-historical-pastoral

With super-dynamic set design and costumes by Damien Ryan and Bernadette Ryan, Venus and Adonis is largely comical, but also tragic; wildly romantic, yet erotic and colourful.

We jump from the rooms of an Elizabethan doctor, who earns his bread-and-butter treating sexually transmitted diseases, to Shakespeare’s bedroom in London and his entanglements with his mistress Aemilia Lanyer (Adele Querol), a proto-feminist poet who became the first English woman to publish her own poetry in her own name in 1611.

Shakespeare helps Lanyer with her quest to publish (at the same time stealing her ideas for his own verse), but tragedy strikes home in Stratford with the loss of Shakespeare’s only son Hamnet. But soon Shakespeare’s company is called to perform his popular poem before the queen.

The editors of the First Folio might ask if this play is a comedy, history or tragedy. Perhaps Ryan would call on Hamlet’s Polonius to declare this play a very fine “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”.

Ryan’s bawdy realism renders Shakespeare with many endearing quirks: his syphilis, his nakedness, his sexual affairs, his bi-curiosity, his laconic demeanour, his bewilderment at his own abilities, and the neglect of his family in Stratford.

But Ryan also consciously aims to liberate three women who influenced Shakespeare, often eclipsed by the shadow of Shakespeare’s monolithic achievements.

Clearly attracted to verse, Aemilia Lanyer is construed as the “Dark Lady” mistress of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Querol drives the energy of the play to become its co-protagonist.

Bernadette Ryan plays a searing Agnes Hathaway, Shakespeare’s neglected wife, too jaded by his absence to relish the sweetness of their romantic youth.

Giblin’s Queen Elizabeth is a cantankerous, yet savvy, f-Bomb-dropping patron of the arts. In one breath she pontificates as an elderly virgin queen; in the next she orders two athletic performers to her bedroom.

A vivid telling

The second act, concerning the rehearsal and performance of Shakespeare’s poem before the queen, rollicks forward like a rollercoaster that has, until then, climbed incrementally through the first act.

The second half intertwines multiple strands of drama and intrigue. The queen sits amid the audience and comments on the action (hilariously) in ways we wouldn’t dare. Her attending ladies swoon for handsome Adonis, who wishes he was Venus kissing the boys.

The performance goes off the rails, but the poetry shines, and the queen compares it to the brilliant work of a female poet she has just read – not realising the poet, Lanyer, has been playing Venus. Then enters the ghost of young Hamnet…

The action is admirably supported by Shakespeare’s leading man, Richard Burbage (Christopher Tomkinson), his leading clown Robert Armin (Kevin MacIsaac) and Shakespeare’s grown up “boy player” Nathaniel Field (Jerome Meyer), utterly appalled he must play the male Adonis instead of Venus.

Ryan capably navigates the diverse space of the cross-dressing rehearsal room and the queered space of poetic patronage and sonnet sequence circulation.

If Polonius never quite envisioned what he meant by a “tragical-comical-historical-pastoral”, Ryan’s Venus and Adonis delivers this hybrid form vividly in spades.

Venus and Adonis from Sport for Jove is at the Seymour Centre, Sydney, until October 21.

Read more:
Hamlet: a play that speaks to pandemics past and present

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

– ref. Venus and Adonis: this ‘plague within a play’ about Shakespeare is wildly romantic, erotic and colourful – https://theconversation.com/venus-and-adonis-this-plague-within-a-play-about-shakespeare-is-wildly-romantic-erotic-and-colourful-212705

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Isabella Reeves, PhD Candidate, Flinders University

For generations, the Thaua people worked with killer whales to hunt large whales in the water of Twofold Bay, on the southern coast of New South Wales. Killer whales – commonly known as orcas – would herd their giant prey into shallower waters where hunters could spear them. Humans would get the meat, but the killer whales wanted a delicacy – the tongue.

After colonists dispossessed the Thaua, Europeans began capitalising on this longstanding partnership. From around 1844, commercial whalers worked with employed Thaua and killer whales to hunt these giants. The pods of killer whales would find a prized baleen whale, herd it closer to shore and signal the whalers, who lived in the town of Eden.

The partnership has no parallel anywhere in the world: the top predator of the oceans working with the top predator on land.

One killer whale, Old Tom, became legendary due to his active role in the hunts for at least three decades. He was seven metres long and weighed six tonnes.

In 1930, he was found dead at a local beach – the last of his group in Eden. You can see his body preserved in Eden’s Killer Whale Museum. But questions have lingered. Do Old Tom’s descendants still roam the oceans, or did they die out?

Our new research suggests these famous killer whales are likely to be extinct.

Old Tom’s origins

Adaptability, cultural traditions and female-led societies have made killer whales the ultimate ocean predator. These intelligent marine mammals are the world’s largest dolphin, and the only species known to successfully hunt adult great white sharks and the world’s largest living animal – blue whales.

But different groups can live very different lives. Some are constantly on the move, while others stay living in a particular region. Some feed exclusively on one type of prey, while others feed on many. Across the globe, killer whale vocalisations differ greatly, with different dialects and languages unique to families and regions.

To find out where these killer whales of Eden came from, we drilled into one of Old Tom’s teeth and analysed the resulting powder to sequence his DNA. We used the same methods used to extract DNA from Neanderthal remains and million-year-old mammoths.

When we compared Old Tom’s DNA to a global data set of killer whales, his genome was most similar to those of modern New Zealand killer whales. He shared a most recent common ancestor with killer whales from the northern Pacific, northern Atlantic, and Australasia.

But there was no sign of any recent descendants in our modern killer whales data set. Old Tom’s DNA is mostly distinct from modern populations. That suggests the famous killers of Eden may have died out.

Whale brothers

The ancestors of Steven Holmes, a Thaua Traditional Owner, had close ties to both the killer whales and to the colonist whalers. Steven has worked with us to give the Thaua perspective. His advocacy helped change the name of Eden’s Ben Boyd National Park to Beowa, which is Thaua for killer whale. Ben Boyd was a whaler as well as a notorious slaver, forcing Pacific people onto boats and into indentured labour.

Steven told us:

In Twofold Bay, the coastal Thaua people, part of the Yuin nation, had a connection with the killer whales through the Dreaming. Their long relationship was highly valued by the Thaua, who depended on the ocean for food and other resources. They considered the killer whales their brothers. When a Thaua died, they were believed to be reincarnated as killer whales. That way, the Thaua always remained one mob – whether whale or man.

Thaua people used specialised hunting strategies that encouraged killer whales to herd baleen whales, such as humpbacks, closer to shore for them to kill. After a successful kill, the killer whales were rewarded with the tongue while the Thaua got the rest of the carcass. This became known as the “Law of the Tongue”.

After colonisation, white whalers capitalised on this relationship. They hired many skilled First Nations whalers.

When killer whales found a whale, some would slap their tails in front of the whaling station to alert the whalers. Some killer whales would herd the target into shallower water, while others would harry and tire it out. Eventually, the whalers would harpoon the exhausted whale, following it with the killing lance to pierce vital organs.

Old Tom was active in these hunts, reported to grab the lines of the boat to pull the whalers out faster, or tug on the line to drive the harpoon deeper and speed up the whale’s death.

The whalers left the carcass on a buoy for up to two days to allow the killer whales to eat the tongue and lips.

Where did they go?

Eden’s whaling station did not process any whales after 1928, as whale numbers had plummeted. The killer whales had already begun to vanish.

Why did they leave? We don’t know for sure, but hypotheses include a lack of other food or even a breach of the Law of the Tongue by whalers.

What we do know is the group has never returned, and our new DNA evidence suggests, that Old Tom’s group does not have any descendants in our oceans today.

Since they left, there have been only a handful of killer whale sightings off Eden.

While they are gone, they are not forgotten. The legacy of the killer whales of Eden lives on among Thaua people and local communities.

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

– ref. For generations, killer whales and First Nations hunted whales together. Now we suspect the orca group has gone extinct – https://theconversation.com/for-generations-killer-whales-and-first-nations-hunted-whales-together-now-we-suspect-the-orca-group-has-gone-extinct-213556

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mati Keynes, McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, The University of Melbourne

I never learned about this in school!

This is an all-too familiar response from those learning Indigenous histories in Australia.

The recent take-up of false claims – such as that a Voice to Parliament would result in “special privileges” — suggests large gaps in public understanding of the Indigenous political movements that preceded the Voice.

Considering what children have learnt in our schools in the past, this should not surprise us.

Our research, soon to be published in the Nordic Journal of Educational History, shows that for over 100 years, the Victorian school curriculum has failed to give generations of students the chance to learn about Indigenous political movements.

What we did

Given Australia didn’t have a national curriculum until 2010, we looked at Victorian curriculum documents from the past 120 years to get a sense of what children have been taught over this time. We compared this with what Indigenous political campaigns were expressing at the time.

We found Indigenous political movements were largely missing from Victorian curriculum materials.

When they were included, it was in very limited ways that did not accurately reflect the diversity and depth of Indigenous standpoints, methods, and objectives.

We found the Victorian curriculum had routinely failed to grapple with Indigenous sovereignty.

In particular, we noticed there were three key moments in Indigenous political history that were missing.

Read more:
The 1881 Maloga petition: a call for self-determination and a key moment on the path to the Voice

1. 1880s Coranderrk Campaign

Coranderrk was an Aboriginal reserve established by the colony of Port Philip in 1863 on Wurundjeri land.

The Wurundjeri community at Coranderrk, which also included people from other Kulin nations, cultivated a highly successful farm. Because this farm was coveted by settlers, they pressured the colonial government to shut down the reserve and sell the land.

The Coranderrk community staged a sustained public campaign to protect their land. They wrote letters and petitions to ministers and newspapers and sent deputations to Melbourne.

Their efforts culminated in the 1881 Parliamentary Coranderrk Inquiry.

The inquiry drew sustained attention to Aboriginal peoples’ aspirations for land and for the end of policies of “protection”. While ultimately unsuccessful, the inquiry and campaign created a lasting public record of Aboriginal activism and testimony. The Coranderrk campaign is crucial for understanding Aboriginal experiences of political processes.

Yet we found the Coranderrk campaign was not included at all in the historical Victorian curriculum documents we examined.

Instead, curriculum documents from this period tended to depict Aboriginal people as a “dying race”. They tended to justify settler violence as a “natural” response to adverse conditions on the colonial frontier.

2. 1960s-ending assimilation

The momentum of Aboriginal political movements grew in the post-war era.

There was the 1965 Freedom Ride (modelled on those in the US) through New South Wales, and the fight to retain the sole remaining Aboriginal reserve at Lake Tyers in Victoria in the same year. These exposed how assimilation legislation that claimed to enable Aboriginal people’s access to economic and social “equality” in fact only denied them those rights.

The modern land rights movement was born when in 1966, Vincent Lingiari – a Gurindji man upon whose lands the Wave Hill cattle station was located – led a strike in protest of the poor working conditions the Gurindji people endured. This came to be known as the Wave Hill Walkoff.

It became a struggle for control over the land. The Gurindji people who were strikers remained for seven years as illegal “occupiers” of their own Country.

We found these growing aspirations for rights and land were not reflected in the curriculum. Through the mid-20th century until the late 1960s, the curriculum focused mainly on British history.

We found celebratory narratives of figures like Captain Cook, William Dampier and Major Mitchell, and the growth of industry and the Australian “nation”.

Where Indigenous people were present in the curriculum, they were presented as relics of the past rather than political agents in their own right.

3. 1988 Treaty campaign

On January 26 1988, as Australia celebrated the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the first fleet into Kamay (now Botany Bay), over 40,000 people marched through the streets of Sydney with red, black and yellow protest banners and chants of “White Australia has a black history”.

A few months later, on Jawoyn country east of Katherine in the Northern Territory, the Northern and Central Land Councils presented the Barunga Statement to then-prime minister Bob Hawke. It called for a treaty between the Commonwealth and Indigenous nations, and for the recognition of sovereignty.

Hawke committed to work towards a treaty, but recognising prior Indigenous sovereignty proved a major stumbling block.

A later Senate Standing Committee tasked with investigating the feasibility of a treaty recommended focusing on education and attitudinal change first.

Unfortunately this history was not well represented in the curriculum material we studied. This history is crucial for understanding how national representation and treaty have long been a part of Indigenous demands for political change. After the bicentenary protests, curriculum shifted to include more Indigenous perspectives, but this was followed by backlash known as the “history wars” (a divisive public debate about whether or not acknowledging past violence against Aboriginal people represented a “black armband view” of history).

Is Australia’s curriculum changing?

A new version of the Australian curriculum (which is used by the states to guide their own curricula), was released in 2022 and will be implemented in coming years.

It includes a focus on “truth-telling” within the broader history of Australia. This could signal an important shift from past practices. (Unfortunately, this shift will occur after the Voice referendum).

But it may address some of the failings our research identified.

The new Year 10 course in the national curriculum suggests class discussion of the Day of Mourning, the Pilbara strike, the Wave Hill walk off, the 1972 Tent Embassy, and more.

The revised content also lists for discussion key historical individuals, organisations, and the methods used to campaign for change.

While highlighting Indigenous political movements can help build understanding of Indigenous aspirations, the curriculum still does not directly grapple with Indigenous sovereignty as a concept.

This is why organisations such as the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition, through the Learn Our Truth campaign, have called for schools to reflect on what Indigenous sovereignty means and to teach the history of colonisation.

Mati Keynes receives funding from the Australian Centre.

Archie Thomas receives funding from the Australian Centre.

Beth Marsden receives funding from the Australian Centre.

Samara Hand receives funding from the Australian Centre and is also a co-founder and director at the National Indigenous Youth Education Coalition.

– ref. 3 key moments in Indigenous political history Victorian school students didn’t learn about – https://theconversation.com/3-key-moments-in-indigenous-political-history-victorian-school-students-didnt-learn-about-213756

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoffrey Robinson, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University

The academic study of public opinion is a well-developed area. One foundational finding is that while the views of voters often seem contradictory and incoherent, these apparent inconsistencies have a pattern.

The views that voters express in opinion polls reveal that many voters, especially those disengaged from politics, understand key concepts such as “equality” and “disadvantage” in a very different way from political elites of both left and right.

The fact that public opinion does not align with traditional “left” and “right” viewpoints means that both progressives and conservatives have opportunities to gain majority support. The marriage equality plebiscite dashed conservatives’ dreams of a suburban “silent majority”. The Voice referendum seems likely to be disappointing for the left. The dynamics of both ballots are similar.

One key finding from the study of popular ideology is that voters often express loyalty to general principles while also supporting policies that contradict those principles.

Often these general principles are conservative. For example, Americans worry about government being too large, but when questioned about specific government programs, will support their extension.

Read more:
New polling shows ‘no’ voters more likely to see Australia as already divided

Australians have very high levels of patriotism, but most are not aggressive nationalists. There are some left-wing general principles that attract strong majority support, such as equal opportunity and that immigration contributes to cultural enrichment. However, voters’ interpretation of these principles is not a left-wing one: affirmative action for women is very unpopular, and although voters support multiculturalism as an aspiration, they are much more doubtful about immigrant communities receiving government assistance to maintain culture and traditions.

Many aspects of the history of public opinion about Indigenous affairs, as chronicled in Murray Goot and Tim Rowse’s 2007 book Divided Nation, are consistent with this pattern. The political right is often more divided on policy than the left, but it has been successful in maintaining a coalition based on an appeal to abstract principles. The success of the “no” campaign is a case in point.

In a liberal democracy, “equality” is a powerful idea, but its meaning is contested. From the 19th century, conservatives found to their surprise that formal political equality did not mean the disappearance of the social and economic inequalities they cherished. Conservatives have mostly championed formal political equality.

The campaign against the Voice has centred themes of equality against the special treatment of Indigenous people. The theme is almost 50 years old, going back to mining industry campaigns against land rights in the 1970s.

However, the idea of equality is also a tool against institutionalised racism. At the 1967 referendum, voters supported the idea of equality, even though the same voters rejected social closeness to Indigenous people and had a low opinion of their character and abilities.

Supporters of “yes” have complained of the invocation of racist themes by some “no” campaigners.

However, since the 1990s, public attitudes to Indigenous claims have shifted from hostility to mild support. But in an Australia less racist than it has ever been, the Voice now seems destined for defeat.

The question is why were progressives unable to propose a convincing counter-narrative? The fact that initially the Voice attracted strong support suggests this was not inevitable.

Although “equality” is a deeply popular idea, voters do not understand equality as simple sameness. In other words, they do not support a narrowly libertarian view that past history and current cultural differences have no bearing on the entitlements of contemporary Australians.

Australian society is no longer, if it ever was, dominated by a culture of sameness. Voters recognise the claims of identity and difference, but only to a limited extent. As Goot and Rowse show, settlers have recognised the distinctiveness of Indigenous people, but they tend to understand it as applying only to some groups: those defined as “tribal”, remote, distinctive in appearance and so on.

They show that public support for land rights was higher when beneficiaries were defined in this sense. Both left and right have cited the disadvantaged position of Indigenous people in arguments for and against the Voice. But voters’ support for Indigenous specific programs is based less of perceptions of disadvantage than Indigenous distinctiveness.

Voters are sympathetic to identity claims when they are understood as something innate about individuals. However, they are less sympathetic when they are understood as the assertion of a collective political project.

Read more:
What kind of Australia will we wake up to if the Voice referendum is defeated on October 14?

Scott Morrison’s personal religiosity initially contributed to an image of authenticity that voters found attractive. But his attempt to grant legal privileges to religious schools in the form of exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation were unpopular.

The campaign for marriage equality appealed powerfully to ideas about the right to love.

Conservatives deviate from a libertarian script when they argue that the high number of Indigenous MPs means that that First Nations peoples are already represented, but this expresses the view of Indigeneity as a personal attribute rather than a political force.

The settler majority has come to accept Indigenous people as equal individual citizens of the nation-state. In some cases, they have supported special entitlements for some Indigenous people, rejecting a purely libertarian approach.

Early support for the Voice reflected this, but the decline in support for the Voice demonstrates settlers are resistant to the idea of Indigenous peoples as a collective subject entitled to a unified Voice. Australian democracy is not colour-blind, but it defines difference within a limited framework.

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

– ref. When it comes to Indigenous affairs, Australian voters’ opinions are complicated – https://theconversation.com/when-it-comes-to-indigenous-affairs-australian-voters-opinions-are-complicated-215426

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bartholomew Stanford, Lecturer (Indigenous Knowledges) , Charles Darwin University

This weekend, Australia will vote on the enshrinement in the Constitution of the Voice to Parliament.

The “no” campaign has expressed many concerns about how the Voice to Parliament will operate as a First Nations advisory body.

But Indigenous advisory bodies are not new in Australia. Some state governments in Australia already have Indigenous-led bodies informing policy and decision-making affecting their respective communities.

Seeing how an already existing First Nations advisory body works – the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria – has led one “no” campaigner to change her vote to yes. Meriki Onus, a Gunnai and Gunditjmara supporter of the “Blak Sovereignty” movement stated:

We’ve seen an example in Australia where a body similar to the Voice to Parliament already functions, and I think that they do really good work.

Read more:
The Voice to Parliament explained

What advisory bodies already exist?

ACT – the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body:

The ACT was the first state or territory to create an Indigenous voice to government, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body. Its main purpose is to represent the interests of Indigenous people living in Canberra in government decisions. It makes the claim, “We take your ideas and concerns straight to the changemakers”.

Indigenous representatives are elected every three years by Indigenous voters in the ACT. This body has advised on policy across key areas such as health and wellbeing, economic participation and justice. Recently, it has worked with housing and community services on housing solutions for older Indigenous people in the ACT.

Victoria – the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria:

The First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria is an independent, democratically elected body overseeing the Treaty process between Traditional Owners and the Victorian government.

Thirty-two Indigenous representatives are elected to this body, which is organised into regional groupings, with 11 dedicated seats for Traditional Owners. To be eligible to vote in assembly elections, First Nations people need to be at least 16 years old and to have lived in Victoria for at least three of the last five years.

The assembly’s call to the Victorian government for a truth-telling process led to the establishment of the Yoorrook Justice Commission, which is the body overseeing and recording the historical injustices experienced by Indigenous Victorians.

South Australia – First Nations Voice to Parliament:

In March, South Australia became the first Australian government to pass legislation to establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. The first election for this body will be held next March and Indigenous people who reside in the state will be able to vote.

The Voice will be structured into local and state-based regional groups, and Indigenous representatives will be asked to present their views and priorities to the South Australian parliament, ministers and chief executives.

Queensland – Torres Strait Regional Authority:

The Torres Strait Regional Authority (TSRA) is responsible for many social, economic and environmental programs in the Torres Strait. Twenty Indigenous representatives are elected to the TSRA board by their respective communities every four years and make decisions on the “strategic vision, policies and budget allocations” of the TSRA.

The TSRA has been vital in helping to manage the environment in the Torres Strait and the local fishing industry, as well as health and cultural programs.

Read more:
The Voice: how do other countries represent Indigenous voices in government?

Past national advisory bodies have not lasted

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC)

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission operated from 1990-2005. The commission was the main national voice for Indigenous people. It was an independent authority responsible for Indigenous program delivery and reported to the minister for Aboriginal (Indigenous) Affairs.

Indigenous representatives were elected to the commission’s 35 regional councils every three years. A review of ATSIC was conducted in 2002, which recommended reform of its functions, governance and representational model. It also recommended giving greater control of the organisation to Indigenous people, who felt their powers were limited. But then-Prime Minister John Howard’s government led a push to abolish the commission instead.

The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples

The National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples was established in 2009 as a representative member-based organisation. The congress advocated for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at a national level.

It had over 10,000 members who were responsible for electing representatives. The congress’s model ensured an equal number of male and female representatives.

The congress ceased operating in 2019 because the federal government stopped providing funding.

The congress was a strong advocate for the Uluru Statement and helped pave the way for the Voice to Parliament referendum.

How would the proposed Voice be different?

The Voice to Parliament borrows elements from the bodies discussed above. It would be independent, based on local and regional representation, have equal gender representation and include younger voices. It would also call for greater Indigenous democratic participation.

The main difference between the Voice and other bodies is it would be constitutionally enshrined. Past national bodies have not had this type of safeguard built in and have been removed at the whims of government.

What Indigenous Australians are calling for is certainty. Certainty would allow Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to develop, plan and implement policy that is responsive to the challenges facing their communities.

Ken Wyatt, former minister for Indigenous Affairs said last week, “I know Canberra politicians don’t have all the answers”.

This is why a Voice is so important now. With no current national Indigenous body in place, all policymakers need a direct channel to Indigenous voices to ensure their policies are appropriate and relevant.

But for the Voice to Parliament to succeed, it must be given the assurance it can operate without existential uncertainty – which is what constitutional recognition provides.

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

– ref. Some states already have Indigenous advisory bodies. What are they, and how would the Voice be different? – https://theconversation.com/some-states-already-have-indigenous-advisory-bodies-what-are-they-and-how-would-the-voice-be-different-214726

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Thomas, Lecturer in Middle East Studies, Deakin University

Hamas’ attack on the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War was the deadliest single day in Israeli history. Showers of rockets, kidnappings and indiscriminate killings have led to a death toll already over 1,200 Israelis, leading many to describe the event as “Israel’s 9/11”.

Israel has wasted no time in its response – declaring “war” and heavily bombarding Gaza. More than 1,000 Gazans have been killed, with the death toll certain to rise. Israel’s defence minister has ordered a “complete siege” of the territory, cutting off food, fuel and electricity.

The horror of the last few days (and the horror still to come) reminds us of the importance of understanding legitimacy in this context.

What is political legitimacy and why does it matter?

Legitimacy is an essential part of comprehending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its intractable nature – in particular, the legitimacy of statehood, violence, political speech and governing authority.

While legitimacy is often subjective, having it is what makes political action successful. If others perceive you as powerful, you are powerful. If others perceive you as moral, you are moral.

There are many ways political movements and leaders can obtain, lose or keep their legitimacy, but it depends very much on the political entity in question as to how they claim and use it.

For example, since 1948, Israel has derived much of its legitimacy from its status as a sovereign state. As a state, it has a recognised right to protect its borders, hold legitimate elections, make its own laws and use force to defend itself.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, have no such authority or rights. They have spent the bulk of their political history trying to achieve self-determination.

In principle, the vast majority of the international community supports the self-determination of the Palestinian people, but in practice has done little to uphold it.

Without self-determination, Palestinians derive their political legitimacy from their struggle against the Israeli occupation in both the West Bank and Gaza.

Hamas has squandered whatever legitimacy it had left

Hamas’ legitimacy within Gaza is complicated. The strip has been under a heavy blockade for over 15 years. Unemployment is at 45%, and 60% of Gazans require humanitarian assistance. Some of this is provided by the United Nations, but much comes from Hamas.

Hamas also argues that violence against Israel is the only form of resistance at its disposal because the blockade and Israel’s opposition to other political movements have reduced options for peaceful resistance. In the absence of a recognised security force, Hamas does command some real political legitimacy inside Gaza.

Hamas has long had little political legitimacy outside Gaza, however. The group has not held elections in 17 years and has been labelled a terrorist organisation by the US, Australia, the European Union and others. Hamas’ military wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, has routinely targeted civilian populations in Israel, while also putting Palestinian civilians in harm’s way by encouraging the use of human shields.

Even the Palestinian National Authority, the governing body in the West Bank, does not recognise the political legitimacy of Hamas.

Last weekend’s attacks will now have a catastrophic effect on the perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian self-determination movement as a whole.

It will be near impossible for powerful allies of Israel to put meaningful pressure on the government to address the very real political concerns of Gazans in the long term. The success of Palestinian self-determination hinges on international support and Hamas’ actions have set the movement back decades.

What’s at stake for Israel

Israel has its own serious questions of legitimacy – some of which are decades old, some that have arisen from the weekend’s attack.

Yes, Israel enjoys the external legitimacy of statehood and governing authority, and it has never lost the right to defend itself.

But its decades of occupation and settlement in the Palestinian territories have brought into question its moral authority. If Israel claims to be a liberal democracy and respect international law, how can the government legitimise its policies towards the West Bank and Gaza?

Over the years, this question has faded into the background as the Oslo Accords
have fallen apart and several Arab states have normalised relations with Israel. This new era of external legitimacy has effectively led Israel to abandon negotiations with the Palestinians, accelerate settlements in the West Bank and tighten its blockade of Gaza.

Read more:
Israel-Palestine: the legacy of Oslo and the future of a two-state solution – podcast

But the Hamas attacks show how complacent the Israeli government has become about its own political and moral legitimacy. In neglecting its obligation to find a equitable solution to the conflict, the government has put both Israeli and Palestinian lives in danger. Kicking the can down the road is no longer an option and will only lead to more lives lost.

Now Israel needs to make a choice. Will it recognise that withholding political legitimacy from Palestinians does not keep its people safe? Or will it squander its own legitimacy by destroying Gaza?

Undoubtedly, the government will consolidate its moral legitimacy in the short term as the massacre of Israeli civilians reverberates around the world. But in the long term, this is not a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, the most nationalist government in Israel’s history is unlikely to exercise restraint in its response.

Israel has squandered its political legitimacy through conflict before. The indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon in Operation Litani and Operation Peace for Gallileewhich resulted in the siege of Beirut in 1982 brought significant condemnation from normally staunch allies, including the United States.

More importantly, the destruction of Gaza is not a solution to this conflict and only puts the lives of civilians – both Israeli and Palestinian – at risk. The closest this conflict has ever gotten to peace was when the Palestine Liberation Organisation was given political legitimacy through the Oslo Accords.

Hamas’s acts of terror cannot and should not be legitimised, but the broader call for Palestinian self-determination is something Israel must now meaningfully acknowledge. Its own legitimacy as a democratic, cosmopolitan and secure society is at stake.

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

– ref. What’s at stake now for legitimacy in both Israel and the push for Palestinian self-determination? – https://theconversation.com/whats-at-stake-now-for-legitimacy-in-both-israel-and-the-push-for-palestinian-self-determination-215341

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Election Analyst (Psephologist) at The Conversation; and Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

After political polls between March and August showed a clear trend towards the right, polls since late August have shown the reverse. Remove a resurgent NZ First from the mix, and the left and right blocs are now polling closely.

The emergence of NZ First as potential kingmaker has seen warnings, particularly from the National Party, of an indecisive result and even the possible need for a second election if coalition negotiations broke down.

We’ll only have a clearer picture once polling booths close at 7pm (5pm AEDT) on Saturday, when all ordinary votes cast at early voting centres or on election day will begin to be counted.

There are also “special votes”, usually cast by voters outside their home electorate (similar to absent votes in Australia). In the past, these have benefited parties on the left, which can take another one or two seats over the preliminary results.

If past practice is a guide, however, there will be no updates to the published results after election night until the official results (which include special votes) are released on November 3.

If NZ First is just above or just below the 5% threshold on election night, we’ll have to wait three weeks to know if it has made it into parliament – and what that means for the balance of power.

Left and NZ First gain in final polls

For the purposes of this analysis, the right coalition is defined as National and ACT, and the left as Labour, the Greens and Te Pāti Māori/the Māori party. NZ First has sided with both left and right in the past, and supported the left from 2017 to 2020, so it is not counted with either left or right.

Although Te Pāti Māori is well under the 5% threshold normally required to enter parliament, it is expected to win single-member seats on the Māori electoral roll. In fact, the party could benefit from an “overhang” (see below).

Since my previous analysis two weeks ago, there have been two 1News-Verian polls, a Newshub-Reid Research poll, a Guardian-Essential poll, a Curia poll for the Taxpayers’ Union, and a Talbot Mills poll.

Read more:
NZ Election 2023: from one-way polls to threats of coalition ‘chaos’, it’s been a campaign of two halves

Other than the Talbot Mills poll (which appeared to have been a leftward outlier last time), there has been a clear trend of a fall in the right’s lead over the left. Essential and Reid Research now have the left just ahead.

But with NZ First between 6% and 8% in all recent polls – above the 5% threshold – neither right nor left are likely to have a majority, and so NZ First will be the kingmaker.

Two graphs illustrate these poll trends. The first, as before, shows all polls conducted since March. As the right made gains in July and August, the trends still suggest it is gaining.

The second graph only covers polls conducted since late August, showing a clear trend to the left in all except the Talbot Mills poll.

Fieldwork for the Verian and Reid Research polls ended Tuesday, four days from the election. Voting intentions can still change in these final days.

In international elections, there have sometimes been large poll errors. Where they have occurred, the right is often understated – such as at the Greek election in May. But at the 2020 New Zealand election, the left was understated. The left parties in 2023 will hope the results are more favourable than polls imply.

Read more:
How to read the political polls: 10 things you need to know ahead of the NZ election

Te Pāti Māori could benefit from an ‘overhang’

In New Zealand’s mixed member proportional (MMP) system, an “overhang” occurs when a party wins more single-member seats than its total seat entitlement would be on the party vote alone. If this occurs, that party is allowed to keep its extra seats and the size of parliament is increased.

There are seven Māori-roll single-member seats. At the 2020 election, Labour won six and Te Pāti Māori one. But Labour’s vote has crashed since 2020, so it’s plausible Te Pāti Māori could win more single-member seats.

In 2020 the party won 1.2% of the party vote, but its one electorate victory entitled it to two of parliament’s 120 total seats. But if it picked up five single-member electorates and less than 2% of the party vote, for example, it would result in a three-seat overhang: parliament would be expanded to 123 seats, with Te Pāti Māori holding five.

Read more:
After the election, Christopher Luxon’s real test could come from his right – not the left

Candidate’s death will help National

To add to the uncertainty, there will be a November 25 by-election in Port Waikato after the death on Monday of an ACT candidate.

According to the electoral rules, only the party vote in that seat will be counted on election night. The by-election will determine the electorate candidate, meaning parliament will be expanded to 121 seats (ignoring any other overhangs).

Saturday’s election will only allocate seats in proportion to the 120 total seats that will be elected at that time. The winner of the Port Waikato by-election will take the additional 121st seat.

Although the 2020 election was a Labour landslide, National held Port Waikato, so it will almost certainly win the by-election, giving the party one seat more than it should be entitled to on the party vote. But current polls indicate this one seat won’t be enough for a National-ACT majority.

Read more:
What makes a good political leader – and how can we tell before voting?

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

– ref. NZ Election 2023: final polls suggest NZ First likely kingmaker as the left makes late gains – https://theconversation.com/nz-election-2023-final-polls-suggest-nz-first-likely-kingmaker-as-the-left-makes-late-gains-214462

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Walter, Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Monash University

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains the names and images of deceased people.

We have had compelling accounts from Indigenous activists of “the long road to Uluru”. But another perspective on the Voice debate can also be gleaned from the political insiders – especially Coalition leaders – who engaged with Indigenous communities, learned from them, sought to develop consultative and policy solutions, yet failed to “close the gap”.

The furious opposition of the current Coalition parties to the Voice disowns their own history and an initiative that was arguably their own creation. So it is illuminating to explore their divergence from some of their former leaders who were passionate about trying to fix Indigenous disadvantage.

Paul Hasluck, journalist, historian, and diplomat was elected for the Liberals to parliament in 1949. Growing up in country Western Australia with Indigenous friends, he empathised with their connection to Country.

Curiosity stimulated his masters thesis, Black Australians, an account of 19th century relations between Indigenous people and colonists in Western Australia, published in 1942. He was appointed minister for territories in 1951.

He sought first to work with the states but faced resistance: they insisted they were already doing everything possible for “native welfare” and that it was a minor problem. Hasluck tried to bring change to the Northern Territory, hoping success would induce states to follow his lead. The difficulties were considerable: a department whose efforts were desultory, an administration that dragged its feet, a lack of bureaucratic and economic infrastructure in the Territory.

Hasluck persisted, aware of key factors driving policy failure in settler-Indigenous relations: racism, inequality, disparity in administration across states, inability to ameliorate Indigenous disadvantage, denial of agency. He sought to address this through cooperative federalism.

But his was a vision of assimilation, limited by inherited patterns of thought. It discounted the affiliations that tied Indigenous people to social and group identity.

Hasluck eventually understood that he had been captured by tunnel vision.

My outlook on aboriginal welfare […] influenced by the evangelism of mid and late Victorian England […] placed emphasis on the individual. The individual made the choice and made the effort and as a result was changed. This influence […] meant that we did not see clearly the ways in which the individual is bound by membership of a family or a group.

Success in 1967 – but deep division remains

In the 1950s and 1960s, widespread recognition of the need for change led to bipartisan support for and success in the 1967 constitutional referendum.

Prime Minister Harold Holt then established the Council for Aboriginal Affairs. His successor, Billy McMahon, signalled policy change. McMahon said Indigenous peoples

should be encouraged and assisted to preserve and develop their culture, their languages, their traditions and arts so that these can become living elements in the diverse culture of Australian society.

McMahon tried to bridge divisions in his Coalition by offering a Northern Territory Land Board that could grant 50-year leases to Indigenous groups that could prove a long and continuing connection with land, rather than the land rights Indigenous groups were demanding. The fallout was such that it sparked the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent embassy in 1972.

So it was that Gough Whitlam picked up the baton, making land rights a centrepiece of Labor policy. Among his initiatives were the Racial Discrimination Act (1975) expunging state laws restricting the rights of Indigenous people. He also established a royal commission into land rights in the Northern Territory. The Whitlam government’s Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Bill (1975) was drawn from its recommendations.

Fraser picks up where Whitlam left off

However, it was Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser who, in 1976, passed the Land Rights legislation that Whitlam had developed, but had been unable to progress in the Senate before his 1975 dismissal. He also passed the Aboriginal Councils and Association Act, allowing Indigenous bodies to register as corporations for community purposes.

This was the foundation for hundreds of Indigenous corporations, a springboard for community development that stimulated the emergence of Indigenous social entrepreneurs. Once a staunch assimilationist, Fraser had visited remote communities, met with impressive Indigenous leaders such as Galarrway Yunupingu, and now Indigenous policy reform became part of his broader Human Rights Agenda.

Fraser established an Aboriginal Development Commission, directed by Charlie Perkins, and a National Aboriginal Conference, (NAC) chaired by Lowitja O’Donoghue. His Administrative Appeals Tribunal (1977) and Human Rights Commission (1981) provided additional avenues for Indigenous scrutiny and appeal against decisions affecting them.

All of these were opposed from within the Coalition parties themselves. Their carriage required resolute action. They were radical initiatives in conservative circles. Yet, reflecting later, Fraser rued that he was too timid, that he should have acted on an idea raised by the NAC: to negotiate a treaty.

Command and control rather than community engagement

John Howard’s policy initiatives were the next significant Coalition incursion into Indigenous conditions. He provoked Indigenous leaders by refusing to apologise for the actions of past governments. He abolished Bob Hawke’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Commission (ATSIC) – the first legislated attempt to combine consultation and program management under Indigenous leadership – announcing the “experiment” in self-determination had failed.

His legislative response to the Wik High Court decision enabled him to amend the Keating government’s landmark Native Title Act, itself a response to the High Court’s Mabo decision.

Finally, he endorsed the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), a remarkable attempt to address dysfunction and restore order in remote communities by mobilising army and police intervention where Indigenous responsibility had failed. Significantly, it was also Howard who first raised the prospect of Constitutional recognition.

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Howard had a clear rationale for each of these steps. Apology, Howard argued, could only be offered by the perpetrator of wrongs. ATSIC, despite research now confirming the extent of its achievement under the indomitable Indigenous public servants Lowitja O’Donoghue and Pat Turner, had later fallen under heavy scrutiny before being abolished in 2005. It was also subject to incandescent critique by Indigenous leaders and lost the faith of the Labor Party which had created it.

The Wik decision, like Mabo, demanded legislative address. The NTER was a response to a devastating report of domestic violence and child abuse, and had followed advice, and was supported, by influential Indigenous public intellectuals such as Marcia Langton and Noel Pearson.

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It was these Indigenous advisers, too, who persuaded Howard to support Constitutional recognition. Nonetheless, major initiatives proceeded hurriedly, without explanation or consultation with the Indigenous communities affected.

The Coalition’s reconciliation agenda leads to Uluru

It is striking, if one leaves aside the inadequacy of Tony Abbott’s Indigenous Advancement Strategy (which again ignored the necessity of community engagement), or the Coalition’s outsourcing or offloading to states of Closing the Gap arrangements, that the next significant initiative was fostered by a bipartisan meeting on advancing reconciliation between Abbott (with Bill Shorten) and Indigenous leaders.

There followed a Referendum Council established by Abbott’s successor, Malcolm Turnbull, with a sub-committee of the same Indigenous leaders tasked with creating a dialogue on reconciliation with Indigenous communities nationwide. It led directly to the National Constitutional Convention that delivered the Uluru Statement in 2017.

The Uluru Statement then, responding to years of lobbying by those most closely engaged with Indigenous disadvantage, was developed by Indigenous representatives with the encouragement of successive Coalition administrations.

Yet it was Turnbull who declared that its proposal for a Voice referendum was not politically feasible. Turnbull has since endorsed the current referendum, arguing “a lot has changed since then […] the Indigenous community has backed this in for six years […] we should be listening to how they want to be recognised”.

A Coalition trapped by ‘settler liberalism’

Some of these engaged politicians looked back with remorse and saw how they had been constrained by their own political frameworks (Hasluck), hobbled by their colleagues’ policy priorities (McMahon, Turnbull), or too cautious (Fraser).

Above all, they recognised that their failure lay in not having heard what Indigenous communities told them. One might have expected the cumulative knowledge of these policy leaders to have influenced their peers. Yet what they had learned was rarely understood by their successors.

Partly it was a symptom of endemic short-termism. More significant, however, was another strand, exemplified by Hasluck’s rueful recollection: a “settler liberalism” that takes its own commitment to a particular form of individualistic liberal freedom so much for granted that it is blind to collective forms of social relations, and to the structural and institutional consequences of colonisation.

Howard and Mal Brough, the minister who so energetically drove the NTER, were undoubtedly committed to better outcomes for remote communities. They were, unlike Hasluck and Fraser, not remorseful about the trauma and dismay that is still evident as a consequence of the intervention. Instead, they were frustrated that successors had not seen it fully developed to address dysfunction in the manner proposed. Their conviction is a manifestation of the persistence of settler liberalism, now so much embedded in the contemporary Coalition’s engagement in the Voice debate.

So here we are, cycling back decades while the remorse of Liberal innovators about the limitations on what they could achieve is forgotten. With it, settler liberalism is reincarnated as a salve that Hasluck, Fraser and others would have thought discredited in their day.

James Walter has received funding from the Australian Research Council in the past for research on which this article is based.

– ref. ‘We should be listening’: the long history of Liberal innovation – and failure – on Indigenous policy – https://theconversation.com/we-should-be-listening-the-long-history-of-liberal-innovation-and-failure-on-indigenous-policy-214960

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Suze Wilson, Senior Lecturer, School of Management, Massey University

For many people, voting is not just a right, it’s an act of civic duty. Even more than that, some voters base their decisions on what they believe best serves society as a whole, not what might personally advantage them.

The trick, of course, is how to exercise that vote in a responsible, informed and considered manner. Understanding the policies of different parties is obviously a key part of that, in which case resources such as Policy.nz and Vote Compass can be helpful.

But what of the individual characteristics of candidates and would-be leaders? What can the research tell us about what to look for? Given they are “actors” on the political “stage”, how do we evaluate their performance?

Of course, leadership isn’t a solo act. Many things determine what leaders can and can’t do. But what makes them tick – how their personality or character informs their actions – is enduringly fascinating. In fact, we know a lot about the beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that can help distinguish between good and bad leaders.

Confusing confidence with competence

Given “good” leadership is generally accepted as being both ethical and effective, it stands to reason “bad” leaders tend to fail on one or both counts. They either breach accepted principles of ethical or moral conduct, or they act in ways that detract from achieving desired results.

This distinction helps demystify leadership by highlighting that the qualities we least admire in others are also what scholars have long flagged as danger signs in leaders: arrogance, vanity, dishonesty, manipulation, abuse of power, lack of care for others, cowardice and recklessness.

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Notably, though, bad leaders can appear charming, confident and driven to achieve, despite seeking power for selfish reasons.

Numerous studies have identified the ways in which narcissists and what are sometimes called corporate psychopaths can be highly skilled at manipulating people into believing they’ve got what it takes, but will typically lead in destructive and dysfunctional ways. Other studies have shown the negative effects of “Machiavellian” leadership styles.

There is also a tendency to confuse competence – the actual knowledge and skills needed to perform a leadership role – with confidence. Good leaders tend to be relatively humble about their abilities and knowledge. This means they’re better listeners, more sensitive to others’ needs, and better able to collaborate effectively.

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Practical wisdom

None of this fascination with leadership is new. The Classical Greek
philosopher Aristotle argued good leaders possess a range of character virtues in the “middle ground” between what he called the “vices” of excess or deficiency. Courage, for example, is the virtuous mid-point between the vices of recklessness and cowardice.

The modern character virtues leadership researchers emphasise include humanity, humility, integrity, temperance, justice, accountability, courage, transcendence, drive and collaboration.

Each attribute helps a leader deal more effectively with some aspect of their role. Humanity, for instance, enables a leader to be considerate, empathetic and compassionate. Temperance helps them remain calm, composed, patient and prudent, even in testing circumstances.

Deployed together, these character virtues help foster sound judgment, insight, decisiveness – allowing a leader to calmly handle complex, unfolding challenges.

For Aristotle, the ideal leader could demonstrate what he called “phronesis”, or practical wisdom. This wasn’t necessarily about delivering perfect, painless solutions. Indeed, phronesis might mean adopting the least-worst option – which is often the case when dealing with the complex task of running a country.

There is also no single personality “type” most suited to good leadership. But studies indicate those who are proactive, optimistic, believe in themselves and can manage their anxieties stand a better chance. Empathy, a sense of duty and a commitment to upholding positive social values also underpin the attributes of good leaders.

Evaluating political leadership

No leader will be perfect. But each character or personality flaw impedes their capacity for wise judgment and dealing with the demands of their role. A wise leader, therefore, is one who has deep and accurate insight into their personal foibles and has strategies to mitigate for those tendencies.

Political leaders will obviously seek to present their policies, parties and themselves in a positive light, something known as “impression management”. This is where critical questioning and fact checking by journalists and experts can play a vital role.

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But gauging a leader’s “true” personality or character is more difficult. And we first need to be aware that our impressions and evaluations of leaders are not entirely driven by reason or logic.

Secondly, we can look for recurring patterns of behaviour in different situations over time. We should pay particular heed to behaviour under pressure, when it becomes more difficult to “mask” true feelings and motives.

Thirdly, we can consider the values that underpin a leader’s policies, who benefits from them, and what messages these convey to the community at large.

In the long run, a leader’s results bear consideration. But we need to assess these fairly, accounting for what was beyond their control. We should be mindful to avoid “hindsight bias” – the tendency to imagine events were predictable because we know they’ve occurred.

It should be no surprise that what constitutes good leadership has been studied and debated for thousands of years. Leaders have power and we’ve always wanted them to use it wisely. An informed voting choice makes that more likely.

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

– ref. What makes a good political leader – and how can we tell before voting? – https://theconversation.com/what-makes-a-good-political-leader-and-how-can-we-tell-before-voting-214351

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sam Bennett, Disability Program Director, Grattan Institute

The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability has shared its final report. In this series, we unpack what the commission’s 222 recommendations could mean for a more inclusive Australia.

The disability royal commission’s final report included an expansive range of recommendations including the introduction of an Australian disability rights act, a minister for disability inclusion and a department of disability equality and inclusion.

The government says it will establish a taskforce and a staged response to dismantle barriers to inclusive education, open employment, and accessible, appropriate and safe housing.

But in three critical areas, the report barely scratches the surface of what is needed to make life more inclusive and equitable for Australians with disability.

1. Preventive health

The commission said a disability rights act would ensure equitable access to health services. But the report fails to provide a comprehensive analysis of the overall health and wellbeing of disabled Australians, or to set a reform agenda for health policy.

The commission received promising proposals early on to reform health care for people with disability. Options for strengthening preventive care, such as extending Medicare to cover dental and oral health for people with disability, and funding longer consultations for GPs and patients with disability are practical, systemic changes that could improve the health of Australians with disability.

Similarly, proposals to redesign physical environments so people with cognitive disabilities feel calm and safe did not feature (though there was mention of the value of co-design and collaborative care planning).

International examples of good practice also fell off the agenda. Last year the World Health Organization identified 40 actions to improve health outcomes for people with disability. They span policy, funding, models of care, physical infrastructure and digital technologies to improve access, participation and outcomes.

The United Kingdom’s National Health Service has acted to address the poorer physical and mental health of people with intellectual disabilities through annual health checks.

Read more:
Here’s why we need a disability rights act – not just a disability discrimination one

2. Urgent transport reforms

Transport is crucial to inclusion. In countless hearings and witness statements the commissioners heard disturbing accounts of inaccessible transport, and harassment and abuse on buses, trains and aeroplanes. But the report offers little in the way of practical reforms or recommendations for improvement.

The commissioners acknowledge deficiencies in the Disability Standards for Accessible Public Transport, which are linked to Australia’s anti-discrimination laws and human rights obligations. But their interest in reform stopped short of recommending ways to improve transport for people with disability through either legislation or policy.

Beefing up legislation, urging education for providers about the difficulties disabled passengers face and quantifying the wastage created by inaccessible transport would have been practical steps.

It’s important to note transport and health care are both areas where state and territory governments are not meeting their commitments to make reasonable adjustments for people with disability. Their failure to do so only adds to pressure on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which is forced to fund supports to cover the gaps. We can only hope the upcoming NDIS Review makes recommendations for managing these boundaries better.

Read more:
The disability royal commission recommendations could fix some of the worst living conditions – but that’s just the start

3. Meaningful day services

Another glaring omission in the final report is the absence of specific recommendations about the role of day programs, in which people with disability are grouped together – often behind closed doors.

The commission heard evidence of violence suffered by people with disability in these settings, including accounts of NDIS participants being subjected to sexual abuse and assault.

Testimony made it clear many day programs are essentially segregated services that offer little by way of meaningful pursuits or skills development. One witness said the day program her son attended was nothing more than “glorified babysitting”.

The commissioners missed a golden opportunity to clarify what a meaningful, inclusive experience might mean in these settings. Recommendations for reform could help people with disability lead full and purposeful lives in the community, with a range of friendships, activities and relationships – a human right they share with the rest of society.

Read more:
The disability royal commission heard horrific stories of harm – now we must move towards repair

What’s next?

Decades in the making, the disability royal commission was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to investigate the realities of life for disabled Australians. It showed current policy settings are not up to the mark. Many of its recommendations stand to improve the lives of Australians with disability.

However, when it comes to reforming the health system disabled Australians depend on, making transport more accessible and creating meaningful social and recreational opportunities, the commissioners’ report seems to have handed government a free pass.

Grattan Institute’s Disability Program has support from the Summer Foundation.

– ref. 3 things the disability royal commission missed: health, transport, day programs – https://theconversation.com/3-things-the-disability-royal-commission-missed-health-transport-day-programs-215251

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Briggs, Research Director, Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney

Energy security concerns are mounting as renewable projects and transmission lines are delayed.

In New South Wales, for instance, the government has flagged it may defer the closure of Eraring coal power station beyond 2025.

NSW has other new policies to “get the energy transition back on track”. These include expanding “customer energy resources”, such as solar panels and batteries, and increasing “demand flexibility” (broadly, using smart technology to shift the times when businesses and homes use power).

With more variable supply from solar and wind energy, demand flexibility is a cheaper and cleaner way to keep the electricity grid stable.

Modelling for the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) shows this approach could save consumers up to A$18 billion to 2040. Shifting demand can avoid:

• higher-priced power use at the end of the day
• building new poles and wires to increase network capacity to meet peak demand
• paying coal plants to stay open.

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What does flexible demand involve?

Examples of flexible demand include:

• shifting water heating from night-time (mostly coal-powered) to daytime (using solar)

• reducing temperatures in commercial coolrooms using solar power in the middle of the day, then switching chillers off in the late afternoon until they return to standard refrigeration temperatures

• remotely controlling air conditioners to turn them down when the grid is under stress. Households get paid and don’t notice if the aircon is briefly turned down, but across many homes it can make a big difference.

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The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) estimates NSW needs an extra 191 megawatts (MW) of capacity to maintain reliability when Eraring closes.

Another way to cover that capacity shortfall is more flexible demand. Queensland already has almost 150MW of remote-controlled air conditioning. Other types of demand management that Queensland grid operators can call on total about 900MW.

In Western Australia, a newly signed contract will provide 120MW of demand flexibility.

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So what are the obstacles to more flexible demand?

ARENA commissioned the Institute for Sustainable Futures to review the pilot demand flexibility projects it has funded. Many didn’t deliver as much as hoped.

Sometimes, this was because businesses were too busy with day-to-day operations or payments for households were too low to catch their interest. But often it’s a matter of putting policies, technical standards and regulations in place to make demand management seamless and efficient.

ARENA has spent about $180 million on 55 projects with at least some focus on flexible demand. They include air conditioning, pool pumps and hot water systems in homes, commercial building air conditioning and electric vehicle charging.

4 ways to increase demand flexibility

What do these projects tell us about how to increase demand flexibility?

1. Better technical standards

The technical standards required of manufacturers often don’t ensure devices can be used to shape demand. Many air-conditioners couldn’t be controlled in ARENA pilots.

There is also no technical standard for “inter-operability” of devices within homes. Batteries, hot water systems and other devices with different companies’ technologies don’t always work well together.

Vehicle-to-grid charging for electric vehicles will be the largest opportunity for demand flexibility, but there is no common technical standard. It’s vital to have one before the mass uptake of electric vehicles.

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Outside Victoria, smart meters that provide real-time information on home energy use are rare. The Australian Energy Market Commission has recommended governments accelerate roll-out of smart meters to 100% by 2030.

2. Simpler measurement systems

The measurement systems to calculate payments for demand flexibility are a barrier to expansion. It’s tricky as you need to measure how much electricity was used relative to what would otherwise have occurred.

ARENA pilots that tried to precisely measure residential demand flexibility found it was financially unviable at the smaller scale.

The system used for AEMO’s Wholesale Demand Response Mechanism (WDRM) effectively limits participation to businesses with predictable, flat consumption profiles. This excludes as much as 80–90% of sites. International measurement models could be trialled here to open up participation.

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3. More certainty about payments

Earnings from providing demand flexibility depend on weather, market prices and so on. This uncertainty makes it hard to get businesses to sign up.

Overseas, some energy markets guarantee payment for making demand flexibility available. These have the highest participation.

The federal government is consulting on a capacity investment scheme. Because it will have the same measurement system as the current mechanism, participation is likely to be limited.

4. Fresh policy approaches

Businesses that sign up under the Wholesale Demand Response Mechanism make bids in the National Electricity Market to be paid for reducing their power use when demand and prices are high. This should reduce prices for all consumers and improve energy security when the grid is under stress. However, it has attracted only one participant – mainly due to the complex measurement system – and isn’t open to households.

Another incentive scheme for electricity networks to invest in demand management is chronically under-used.

There are simpler alternatives that have worked before. The national Renewable Energy Target and state energy efficiency certificate schemes fund rooftop solar or energy retrofits based on average output or energy savings from past experience. These simple calculations offer a relatively stable incentive, which could work for demand flexibility.

NSW’s Peak Demand Reduction Scheme, launched last year, could provide a model for using certificate schemes to boost demand flexibility.

Get serious about demand flexibility

The focus of NSW’s development of a customer energy resources policy appears to be on “virtual power plants”. These co-ordinate household solar and battery systems to store solar power and export to the grid when it’s most needed.

Batteries are part of the solution, but cheaper options exist. An electric water heater with a 300-litre tank can store as much energy as a second-generation Tesla battery at much less cost.

Modelling for ARENA finds hot water systems could store as much energy as more than 2 million household batteries. Retrofitting these systems will spread savings more widely to include low-income households as well as those that can afford a battery.

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It’s time we got serious about developing a holistic demand flexibility strategy. It will be cheaper and cleaner than paying coal plants to stay open.

The Institute for Sustainable Futures is the knowledge sharing agent for the Australiran Renewable Energy Agency’s demand flexibility portfolio. ARENA provided funding for the review of its demand flexibility pilots referred to in the article. The views in this article are those of the author and should not be considered the views of ARENA.

– ref. A successful energy transition depends on managing when people use power. So how do we make demand more flexible? – https://theconversation.com/a-successful-energy-transition-depends-on-managing-when-people-use-power-so-how-do-we-make-demand-more-flexible-213079

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Crotty, Associate Professor in Australian History, The University of Queensland

The Australian Catholic University has recently announced it will abolish academic positions in history as part of broader cuts in the humanities. Staff are understandably shocked and dismayed by the news.

Regrettably, the plight of these academics is part of a broader decline in the study of history in Australian universities over the past few decades.

As our yet-to-be-published research shows, the ACU cuts are dramatic and extreme, but not inconsistent with the way Australian universities have treated one of their foundational disciplines for some time.

What is happening to academic historians?

In 1989, there were about 450 full-time equivalent paid positions in history disciplines in Australian universities.
In 2016, we did a detailed survey showing they had fallen to 347 – a 23% drop. This is despite a huge increase in size of the overall university sector during the same period.

At the time of our study, we attributed this drop to the effects of the commercialisation of Australian higher education, through the increasing reliance on industry funding, overseas students and fee-based courses.

There was also a misguided belief on the part of some potential students – and parents and others advising them – that humanities degrees do not lead to meaningful jobs. Political hostility from conservative governments and some sections of the media would not have helped.

We repeated the survey in 2022 to gauge the impact of COVID cost-cutting by universities and the Morrison government’s Job-ready Graduates program.

This program was introduced in 2021 and made humanities subjects, including history, 113% more expensive in a bid to steer students towards other fields such as nursing and teaching.

We asked all heads of history programs to provide us with student and staff data. We also collected the same figures from New Zealand universities for comparison.

Our findings

The results were alarming and point to a crisis in the study of history in Australian universities.

We found student enrolments (anyone studying a history course) had declined by roughly 23% since 2016.

Teaching and research staff numbers had also continued to slide, down another 8% to 319 full-time equivalent positions. This takes the overall drop in staff numbers to 31% since 1989.

However, it does not factor in the staff who are set to lose their jobs at ACU. A draft document circulated by ACU in September suggested up to ten positions in history could go. On Tuesday, ACU Deputy Vice-Chancellor Abid Khan told The Conversation the university’s plans had not been been finalised, “therefore proposed or perceived numbers about roles are not accurate”.

There are also fewer staff and students in history in New Zealand than there were in 2016. But the decline there has been half that in Australia – a 4.6% decline in staff and 10.1% reduction in student numbers.

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Why are we seeing this decline?

The recent decline may owe something to the Job-ready Graduates package discouraging humanities study.

But other factors are also likely to be at play here. The massive size of the international student market in Australia – and its role in cross-subsidising research – distorts university decision-making about investment and resources even in good times.

This means resources are diverted away from disciplines such as history and into areas such as management, information technology and engineering (where there are far more international student enrolments).

On top of the political and commercial hostility towards the humanities, there is also a belief arts degrees do not lead to meaningful jobs. This is misguided.

A 2021 Workplace Gender Equality Agency study revealed earnings of those with undergraduate humanities degrees are comparable to positions in the science and maths sector.

In the tougher COVID era, when combined with explicit messages from the government that students should stay away from the humanities if they want well-paid and rewarding work, the effects are predictably pernicious.

Why is this a problem?

Historical perspectives are key to understanding the present. So if people are not studying, teaching and researching history, this is an enormous problem for Australia.

Consider any major issue affecting Australian society, from Indigenous affairs, to housing policy, bushfire readiness and domestic violence. Historians have produced research, informed public policy, and educated students.

Jobs today and in the future will not just need technical skills but skills taught by the humanities, including
critical thinking, creativity and expression. The rise of artificial intelligence and robotics only serves to underline this reality. The very skills taught in humanities and social sciences, including history, will be needed to discern what can and cannot be automated with advantage to society.

There is also a civic dimension. A healthy democracy relies on a large population of citizens who can discern the difference between evidence-based knowledge and wild conspiracy theories.

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What can we do about this?

If we want to protect and promote history (and other humanities disciplines), we need the support of governments and university managers. The fixes themselves are not difficult.

One immediate fix is to reverse the fee changes introduced by the Morrison government in 2021. The Universities Accord interim report has all but confirmed Job-ready Graduates will be scrapped, but we don’t yet know what will replace it.

Governments could also fund and insist universities fund foundational disciplines such as history, science and maths properly.

Another possibility might be to provide stronger incentives for study across different realms of knowledge. Why shouldn’t architects understand something of Ancient Rome, or medical students learn more about the minorities they will be working with? By the same token why shouldn’t arts students be required to grapple with commerce and science, or the latest digital technologies that might extend their reach?

If we don’t find solutions soon, we will, as the aphorism has it, not know ourselves.

Martin Crotty has in the past received funding from the Australian Research Council and is an historian at the University of Queensland. He has friends and former colleagues at ACU who may lose their jobs.

Frank Bongiorno is President of the Australian Historical Association

Paul Sendziuk receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Our research shows the number of history academics in Australia has dropped by at least 31% since 1989 – https://theconversation.com/our-research-shows-the-number-of-history-academics-in-australia-has-dropped-by-at-least-31-since-1989-213544

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gui Lohmann, Professor in Air Transport and Tourism Management, Griffith University

Weeks after Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce brought forward his resignation to help Qantas “accelerate its renewal”, the company’s chairman Richard Goyder today announced he too is retiring early, to “support restoration of trust”.

But the early retirement will take place “prior to the company’s annual general meeting in late 2024” – meaning Goyder will be in the chair for a while yet.

This will give him time to (among other things) help Qantas respond to the Senate inquiry into air services, which reported on Monday.

If acted on, some of the report’s recommendations would shift power away from Qantas – such as by giving travellers automatic cash compensation for delayed or cancelled flights.

But the inquiry arguably still didn’t go far enough, shying away from bolder action already taken in Europe.

What did the Senate inquiry recommend?

The Senate inquiry was set up to investigate the Albanese government’s refusal to approve extra flights into Australia sought by Qatar Airways, but broadened its scope to examine the way Qantas has been treating its customers.

Among its recommendations are that:

• the government immediately review its decision not to increase capacity under Australia’s bilateral air services agreement with Qatar

• when making decisions relating to bilateral air service agreements, the government have regard to cost benefit analysis, consult widely with key stakeholders, and publish a statement of reasons for decisions taken

• the government review reform options to strengthen competition in the domestic aviation industry, including potential divestiture powers

• the government direct the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to conduct an inquiry into potential anti-competitive behaviour in the domestic aviation market

• the government develop and implement consumer protection reforms as soon as reasonably practicable to address significant delays, cancellations, lost baggage and devaluation of loyalty programs.

The committee also wanted to be reappointed so it would be able to reexamine witnesses who were unable to appear, including Alan Joyce and Transport Minister Catherine King.

Consumer cashback and action on Sydney Airport

Specific suggestions in the report would shift power away from Qantas.

One is automatic cash compensation for delayed or cancelled flights, of the kind Europeans have enjoyed for almost 20 years.

Another is for the government to respond to an independent review’s recommendations on improving Sydney Airport’s “slot management system” (how air traffic is managed), which reported back almost three years ago.

Yet another concerned “cabotage”: the ability for foreign airlines to pick up domestic passengers on a domestic leg of an international flight. The committee recommended the government consider limited cabotage.

The government hasn’t yet indicated which of the recommendations it plans to act on.

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Open skies, or tightly-controlled skies?

The committee could have, and perhaps should have, put forward bolder recommendations.

One would have been unrestricted open skies agreements, of the kind Australia already has with China, India, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore. This would see the government remove itself from decisions about landing slots and leave that to the airports.

An alternative approach – almost the opposite – would be retaining the power to decide who lands, but using it to achieve outcomes the government wants, such as commitments from countries including Qatar on things such as workers’ rights.

The European Union has shown what could be done. It extracted key concessions from Qatar over workers’ rights and environmental protection before signing off on an Open Skies agreement in 2021.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, a former transport minister who understands the detail of aviation policy, might be particularly keen on this idea, given Labor’s commitment to workers’ rights.

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Sweeping changes ahead

Next year, the government will release a white paper on aviation policy through to 2050, after obtaining feedback on a green paper it released last month.

Those next 30 years will be far from business-as-usual for airlines and airports, whatever decisions the government takes now, and however Qantas responds.

Ultra-long-haul aircraft are likely to link Paris with Perth, and even London with Sydney within a decade. They are likely to force new alliances between airlines that today seem unlikely bedfellows.

And the chorus against the excesses of long-haul travel is likely to become louder.

Prince William’s refusal to travel to Sydney for the Women’s World Cup Final because of the size of the carbon footprint might be a sign of things to come.

Justin Wastnage was previously director of aviation policy at Tourism & Transport Forum, that was funded by both Australian and international airlines and airports.

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

– ref. Qantas won’t like it, but Australian travellers could be about to get a better deal on flights – https://theconversation.com/qantas-wont-like-it-but-australian-travellers-could-be-about-to-get-a-better-deal-on-flights-214718

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Bartley, Postdoctoral Fellow, RMIT Centre for Cyber Security Research and Innovation, RMIT University

A 12-tonne fishing boat weighs anchor three kilometres off the port of Adelaide. A small crew huddles over a miniature submarine, activates the controls, primes the explosives, and releases it into the water. The underwater drone uses sensors and sonar to navigate towards its pre-programmed target: the single, narrow port channel responsible for the state’s core fuel supply …

You can guess the rest. A blockage, an accident, an explosion – any could be catastrophic for Australia, a country that conducts 99% of trade by sea and imports more than 90% of its fuel.

As drone submarines or “uncrewed underwater vehicles” (UUVs) become cheaper, more common and more sophisticated, Australia’s 34,000km of coastline will face a significant future threat.

What can be done? Our assessment – validated through workshops with experts from across Australia – shows the same technologies can aid our maritime security, if we build them into our planning from now on.

Seabed warfare

Australia is not alone in its rising concern for submarine security. In 2022, France launched its Seabed Warfare Strategy to address autonomous underwater maritime threats. In February 2023, NATO established an Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell in response to the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas line in September 2022.

The war in Ukraine has seen relatively small, cheap aerial drones play an outsized role. At a smaller scale, underwater drones have also enabled Ukraine to conduct asymmetric attacks on Russian forces.

Current drones can be used in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, mine countermeasures, antisubmarine warfare, electronic warfare, underwater sensor grid development and special operations, among other things.

However, their capabilities are likely to expand. China’s Haidou-1 project dived to a record depth of 10,908 metres.

A Chinese underwater glider, the Haiyan, holds the drone sub endurance record with a 3,600km voyage over 141 days across the South China Sea. Russia boasts of having a prototype nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed undersea drone, although some analysts doubt it really exists.

Nations are also developing broader programs to control underwater sea domains.

For instance, the United States’ proposed Advanced Undersea Warfare System envisions a network of fixed submarine stations able to deploy defensive and offensive drones. In the South China Sea, China is developing an “Underwater Great Wall” of ships, bases and drone (both at surface level and beneath) to monitor the area and make it difficult for foreign navies to operate in international waters.

A new age of war at sea?

Some analysts argue these developments amount to the dawn of a “new age of naval warfare”. Others suggest autonomous maritime systems, as they grow cheaper and more effective, may become preferred over crewed vehicles for national defence: by one estimate, uncrewed vessels may make up more than half of the US naval fleet by 2052.

The advent of sea drones may also encourage the further growth of hybrid or “grey zone” approaches to conflict, which avoid outright warfare, keep casualties low, and can inflict heavy costs on enemies. In this context, uncrewed marine vessels may offer states a deniable way to carry out aggressive actions to advance their aims without crossing the threshold of war.

Read more:
Ukraine: how uncrewed boats are changing the way wars are fought at sea

Put differently, drone submarines may lend themselves to creating apparent accidents and other actions that can’t be pinned on their instigators. It is worth quoting the French Seabed Warfare Strategy on this point:

an attack on the underwater part of submarine cables is a potential cause of action, with possibilities ranging from a “convenient” accident in a coastal area, to deliberate military action. In this regard, the intrinsic features of the seabed make it the ideal theatre for non-attributable actions in “grey zones”.

The road ahead for Australia

Our new research examined the threat to Australia’s trade posed by autonomous, uncrewed underwater vehicles.

With colleagues at the RMIT Centre for Cyber Security Research and Innovation, Charles Darwin University, and WiseLaw, we ran workshops with people from government, the Royal Australian Navy, Defence, industry and academia. We found a growing tension between efforts to protect ocean-borne trade and critical undersea infrastructure today, and more forward-looking strategies aimed at developing the next generation of maritime defence.

Under the AUKUS security pact, Australia has engaged the United Kingdom and the US to buy and build nuclear-powered submarines, and seeks to acquire and develop new systems “with additional undersea capabilities”. This is a good start, but the scale of the purchases has raised concerns they will become all-consuming for Australia’s military.

Australia also engages in exercises such as Autonomous Warrior to test new and emerging systems in maritime defence. However, these exercises under-examine threats to maritime trade that underwater drones are likely to produce in the future.

One result that emerged from our workshops is that mines are seen as an emerging challenge. Loitering drones with explosives – which could even be commercially available vessels carrying improvised explosives – could hold up commercial ports and traffic, bottle up naval assets, or disrupt maritime shipping routes. This would cause delays, loss of revenue, and increased insurance premiums.

As “set and forget” weapons, mines have an outsized impact as they can cause great damage for a low cost. And they are difficult and costly to find and neutralise.

For the time being, Australia is largely protected from the threat of underwater drones by distance. Current battery and communication technology mean drones would need to be deployed from relatively nearby, and Australia’s maritime environments would make operation difficult.

However, the technology is advancing quickly. The time available for the Australian Department of Defence to address the threat of underwater uncrewed vehicles is shrinking.

This article draws upon research funded under the Strategic Policy Grants Program run by the Department of Defence. The Strategic Policy Grants Program is an open and competitive mechanism for Defence to support independent research, events and activities. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Defence.

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

– ref. How drone submarines are turning the seabed into a future battlefield – https://theconversation.com/how-drone-submarines-are-turning-the-seabed-into-a-future-battlefield-215338

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David S G Goodman, Director, China Studies Centre, Professor of Chinese Politics, University of Sydney

The arrival of Cheng Lei back in Melbourne today is clearly a moment of celebration for the Chinese Australian journalist and her family from whom she has been separated for over three years.

But it would also seem to be a triumph for Australian diplomacy, as well as a signal of China’s serious intent to improve Australia-China relations. For some time, Cheng’s incarceration has remained a sticking point for Canberra in a more reasonable relationship emerging between the two sides.

Although born in China, Cheng has been an Australian citizen for years, having migrated to Melbourne with her parents at the age of 10. As a journalist, she found a degree of celebrity working within China’s state-owned English-language news networks. In recent years, she landed a job hosting the Global Business program on the China Global Television Network.

However, in August 2020, she was arrested and has been held since largely without access to Australian consular services.

Political pawn

Mystery surrounds the reasons for Cheng’s arrest, though shortly after she disappeared, a government official was reported as saying she had “endangered China’s national security”.

The obvious explanation was likely more political: she may have been a pawn in the megaphone diplomacy and increasingly tense relations between the two sides after then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison demanded explanations from China about the emergence of the COVID-19 virus. She was detained months later.

Effectively, Cheng had become a hostage in international relations, much as other foreign nationals living in China have in the past.

In December 2018, for instance, two Canadians, Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, were arrested in response to the arrest of Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in Canada. Shortly after Meng reached a deal for her release, the Canadians were released.

There can be little doubt that considerable Australian government effort has gone into negotiating Cheng’s return to China. Clearly, Australian diplomats have made the case to the Chinese leadership that if they desired better relations with Australia, releasing Cheng would be a good start.

And equally, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has shown he’s being very respectful of what’s required to reestablish an appropriate relationship with the Chinese authorities. In announcing Cheng’s return to Melbourne, he not only expressed great pleasure at the outcome, but also pointed out the legal proceedings in China are now at an end.

Read more:
Australia must continue to press for humane treatment of journalist Cheng Lei after her arrest in China

Why release Cheng now?

The Australian government has indicated it is willing to engage with China again. This means cooperating where it can and differing where it must. This is clearly a more sophisticated approach than many other governments might employ with China, including the former Morrison government.

More interesting, perhaps, is why the Chinese leadership would release Cheng now. It appears to be a goodwill gesture, with Albanese confirming he will accept an invitation to visit Beijing sometime before the end of the year. But there may be other calculations behind it.

One obvious explanation is the mutual benefit in a more open relationship between the two complementary economies. Australia may suffer from the trade barriers China has imposed on our exports, but those same restrictions add significant costs to segments of the Chinese economy, such as heavy industry and energy generation.

Another possible reason for the release is that it might be part of a charm offensive designed to mitigate the Australian government’s increasing closeness to the United States.

Read more:
Bring on the Year of the Rabbit: why there’s new hope and prosperity tipped for Australia-China relations

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

– ref. Why has China released detained Australian journalist Cheng Lei? – https://theconversation.com/why-has-china-released-detained-australian-journalist-cheng-lei-215461

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

Cheng Lei, the Australian journalist incarcerated in China since August 2020, has been freed – arriving in Melbourne to be reunited with her family.

She was met at the airport by Foreign Minister Penny Wong, with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announcing her release at a Melbourne news conference on Wednesday.

Albanese said he had spoken with Cheng, who has two young daughters, and she was “delighted” to be back in Melbourne. He said that in the call he had welcomed her home on behalf of all Australians.

“Her return brings an end to a very difficult few years for Ms Cheng and her family,” Albanese said. He described her as “a very strong and resilient person”.

Cheng, who was born in China, was a business journalist with China’s state-run English language television station CGTN when she was detained.

She was accused of “illegally supplying state secrets overseas”. Her trial took place in secret.

Her release comes after continued representations by Australia, including by Albanese himself. It appears to be timed as a gesture ahead of Albanese’s visit to Beijing later this year, and follows the lifting of most restrictions on Australian commodities. Those left cover wine and some seafoods.

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

– ref. Cheng Lei released by China and reunited with family in Melbourne – https://theconversation.com/cheng-lei-released-by-china-and-reunited-with-family-in-melbourne-215453

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Monika Janda, Professor in Behavioural Science, The University of Queensland

Sun exposure is the number one cause of skin cancer – including the most deadly form, melanoma. High levels of sun exposure cause an estimated 7,200 melanomas in Australia each year.

Too much sun exposure can also lead to premature ageing, resulting in wrinkles, fine lines and age spots.

Can a tweak to your skincare routine help prevent this?

Read more:
Sunscreen: here’s why it’s an anti-ageing skincare essential

When should I start wearing sunscreen?

In Australia, we are advised to wear sunscreen on days when the ultraviolet (UV) index reaches three or higher. That’s year-round for much of Australia. The weather forecast or the Cancer Council’s free SunSmart app are easy ways to check the UV Index.

Besides “primary sunscreens”, which are dedicated sun-protection products, a sun protection factor (SPF) is also found in many beauty products, such as foundations, powders and moisturisers. These are called “secondary sunscreens” because they have a primary purpose other than sun protection.

Primary sunscreens are regulated by the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the SPF must be determined by testing on human skin. SPF measures how quickly skin burns with and without the sunscreen under intense UV light. If the skin takes ten seconds to burn with no sunscreen, and 300 seconds to burn with the sunscreen, the SPF is 30 (300 divided by 10).

Is the SPF in makeup or moisturisers enough to protect me the whole day?

Simple answer? No. SPF 30 mixed into foundation is not going to be as effective as a primary SPF 30 sunscreen.

Also, when people use a moisturiser or makeup that includes SPF, they generally don’t do the three key steps that make sunscreens effective:

1. putting a thick enough amount on
2. covering all sun exposed areas
3. reapplying regularly when outdoors for a sustained amount of time.

One study had 39 participants apply their usual SPF makeup/moisturisers and photographed them with UV photography in the morning, then again in the afternoon, without reapplying during the day. The UV photography allowed the researchers to visualise how much protection these products were still providing.

They found participants missed some facial areas with the initial application and the SPF products provided less coverage by the afternoon.

Another consideration is the product type. Liquid foundation may be applied more thickly than powder makeup, which is generally lightly applied.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration tests primary sunscreens so they’re effective when applied at 2mg per 2 square centimetres of skin.

For the face, ears and neck, this is about one teaspoon (5mL) – are you applying that much powder?

It’s unlikely people will cake on their moisturiser thickly and reapply during the day, so these products aren’t effective sun protection if outdoors for a sustained amount of time when used alone.

If skin products with SPF aren’t giving me better protection, should I stop using them?

These products can still serve a protective purpose, as some research suggests layering sunscreen and makeup products may help to cover areas that were missed during a single application.

When layering, SPF factors are not additive. If wearing an SPF 30 sunscreen and makeup with SPF 15, that doesn’t equal SPF 45. You will be getting the protection from the highest product (in this scenario, it’s the SPF 30).

A good metaphor is SPF in makeup is like “icing on the cake”. Use it as an add-on and if areas were missed with the initial sunscreen application, then there is another chance to cover all areas with the SPF makeup.

Read more:
Explainer: how does sunscreen work, what is SPF and can I still tan with it on?

Should I apply sunscreen before or after makeup?

It depends on whether you’re using a chemical or physical sunscreen. Chemical sunscreens need to absorb into the skin to block and absorb the sun’s rays, whereas physical sunscreens sit on the surface of the skin and act as a shield.

When the main ingredient is zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, it’s a physical sunscreen – think the classic zinc sticks you used to apply to your nose and lips at the beach. Physical sunscreens are recommended for people with sensitive skin and although they used to be pretty thick and sticky, newer versions feel more like chemical sunscreens.

For maximum sun protection when using chemical sunscreens, apply sunscreen first, followed by moisturiser, then makeup. Give the sunscreen a few minutes to dry and sink into the skin before starting to put on other products. Chemical sunscreen should be applied 20 minutes before going outdoors.

When using a physical sunscreen, first apply moisturisers, followed by sunscreen, and then makeup.

When reapplying sunscreen, it’s recommended to wash off makeup and start fresh, but this isn’t going to be practical for many people, so gently patting sunscreen over makeup is another option. Physical sunscreens will be most effective for reapplication over makeup.

What type of sunscreen should I use?

The best sunscreen is the one you actually like to apply. Protecting your skin on a daily basis (and not just for trips to the beach!) is a must in Australia’s high UV climate, and should be done with a primary sunscreen.

Look for sunscreens that have the label “broad spectrum”, which means it covers for UVA and UVB, and has at least SPF30.

Then experiment with features like matte finish, milk texture or fragrance-free to find a sunscreen you like.

Read more:
How to pick the right sunscreen when you’re blinded by choice

No sunscreen provides 100% protection so you should also use other sun protection such as protective clothing, hats, sunglasses, using shade and avoiding the sun during peak UV hours.

Skin care and makeup products with SPF is better than nothing, but don’t rely solely on your morning makeup for sun protection the entire day.

Monika Janda receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council, Medical Research Future Fund and Australian Cancer Research Foundation.

Katie Lee receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

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

– ref. How should I add sunscreen to my skincare routine now it’s getting hotter? – https://theconversation.com/how-should-i-add-sunscreen-to-my-skincare-routine-now-its-getting-hotter-213453

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paula Lorgelly, Professor of Health Economics, University of Auckland

Never before has Pharmac – the government’s medicine procurement agency and decision maker – featured so prominently in an election.

Many parties are pledging more funding, but two are promising to overhaul the agency as we know it. One proposal would link funding for medicines with measures of their impact on overall productivity (such as keeping people working).

But linking funding with productivity could jeopardise efforts to ensure equitable access and health improvements for all. Equity is a focus of wider health reforms and also a key recommendation in a recent review of Pharmac.

With patients waiting and sometimes dying while waiting for new health technologies to be approved, there has been increasing media criticism of Pharmac’s various refusals and delays to medicines funding.

It is clear from the Pharmac review that the agency’s success at negotiating some of the lowest medicine prices in the world has come at the expense of delivering equitable and timely access to medicines for New Zealanders.

Read more:
New Zealand needs urgent action to tackle the frightening rise and cost of type 2 diabetes

More funding or a new system?

Nearly every political party has a proposed solution. Given there are more than a hundred medicines on Pharmac’s Options for Investment waiting list – deemed to deliver value and be funded if the budget allowed – promised funding increases will be welcome. But questions remain over whether this will stretch beyond merely “keeping the lights on”.

Labour is promising to increase Pharmac’s funding by NZ$1 billion over four years, with an extra $50 million for new treatments, rising to $100 million after two financial years.

National is promising an additional $724 million over four years, plus $280 million ring-fenced to fund 13 cancer treatments. The party plans to fund these cancer drugs by reinstating the $5 prescription charge which the current government recently scrapped.

The Greens say they would increase funding for Pharmac but have not provided any dollar values. Likewise, Te Pāti Māori has promised more funding, but has not said by how much.

The Opportunities Party (TOP) has no stated policy, although it promises to fully fund contraceptives. No dollar value is given.

NZ First is promising a new medicines-buying agency and an additional $1.3 billion a year for life-saving medicines.

ACT has provided no specific funding promise, but has a policy it claims would ensure consistent and fair access to medicines. Essentially, the party proposes to overhaul regulatory approval processes and decision making.

Of all the party promises and offerings, however, it is ACT and NZ First that are promising something beyond funding increases – more akin to rewiring the whole house.

Linking access to medicines with productivity

ACT’s medicines strategy is the most detailed of any party. It is also the most radical – likely a result of candidate Todd Stephenson, number four on the party list, having spent 15 years working in the pharmaceutical industry in Australia.

It requires the Ministry of Health to publish and regularly update a medicines strategy (a recommendation of the Pharmac review), and New Zealand’s medicines regulator MedSafe to approve within one week any drug or device that has been approved by two comparable international regulatory agencies.

ACT’s strategy calls for analysis to understand New Zealanders’ unmet needs, what new medicines offer, how other countries are managing cost, and what drives price changes. Given the Ministry of Health’s revised remit under the health reforms as the kaitiaki (or steward) of the health system, this would fit well.

ACT then suggests performance bench-marking. This would require the ministry to publish evidence of the productivity gains from pharmaceutical funding decisions, and the productivity losses of waiting for treatments to be subsidised. The party also wants price performance to be compared with other countries.

ACT has expressed an interest in including productivity in healthcare evaluations, and, Stephenson has suggested productivity should feature in the decision framework.

Other countries consider productivity losses by taking a societal perspective and including both direct healthcare costs and indirect productivity costs in evaluations. But this remains a much debated topic in the field of economic evaluation.

Productivity can either be valued using the “human capital” approach (the amount of time lost due to illness, valued at the market wage) or the “friction cost” approach which takes into account unemployment and labour market reserves so workers can be replaced.

Irrespective of the approach, if a patient group happens not to be economically productive, then health technologies that target them may be deemed less cost-effective as there is no measurable productivity benefit of improving their health.

This became an issue in Sweden where the country’s societal perspective clashed with the principle of equal human value. If Pharmac were to consider productivity, it would be important to ensure it does not discriminate against the young, old, those with chronic conditions, and those on benefits. That would risk exacerbating inequities.

Outsourcing and bench-marking

NZ First recently released a seven-point plan for better healthcare. It expands on the party’s “performance not puffery” idea by replacing Pharmac “with a new agency focused on patients’ health and recovery – not cost savings and lack of essential medicines”.

The party suggests bench-marking funding against the OECD average, funding a rapid access scheme for innovative medicines, and putting in timelines for the completion of reviews and decisions. NZ First also has a policy to “end MedSafe waste” by committing New Zealand to mutual recognition agreements with peer regulators.

The issue of outsourcing approvals was raised during the COVID pandemic. Then director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield’s response was that evidence of safety and efficacy should be assessed in light of population demographics and healthcare delivery systems specific to Aotearoa New Zealand.

Read more:
Deciding what medicines to fund shouldn’t be a private affair

NZ First’s health spokesperson has suggested the evaluation and recommendation functions should be separated from the funding decision.

If Pharmac were not both the decision maker and funder (as is the case in England where the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence makes decisions and the National Health Service funds them), this may undermine the agency’s credibility. The lack of a fixed budget would also undermine New Zealand’s strong negotiating stance.

ACT and NZ First are suggesting a new approach to decision making and procurement that, despite more funding, may increase inefficiencies and further embed inequities.

Paula Lorgelly receives funding from the Ministry of Health.

– ref. With ACT and NZ First promising to overhaul Pharmac, what’s in store for publicly funded medicines? – https://theconversation.com/with-act-and-nz-first-promising-to-overhaul-pharmac-whats-in-store-for-publicly-funded-medicines-215060

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Carson, Professor of Political Communication, Department of Politics, Media and Philosophy, La Trobe University

With almost a third of votes cast already in postal and pre-poll voting for the Voice to Parliament referendum, the “yes” campaign is ramping up its advertising and media efforts. Both campaigns are in the home straight ahead of Saturday’s crucial ballot.

Recent polls indicate that in the closing weeks of the campaign, support for the “no” campaign has slowed somewhat, but “yes” still sits at around 42% nationally.

This week, Professor Simon Jackman’s average of public polling placed “yes” at 42.7% nationally, with a 1.7-point margin of error. The best recent polls for “yes” continue to be those fielded by Roy Morgan and Essential, with support in the mid-40s. Newspoll (now administered by Pyxis) and Redbridge, meanwhile, have “yes” support in the high-30s.

What’s happening in online advertising?

Consistent with what we have seen during the course of the campaign, the Yes23 campaign has outpaced other paid referendum campaign groups in its online advertising spending on Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram), the most-used platforms for online advertising during this campaign.

Four of the top five online advertisers are supporting the “yes” campaign, with A$364,000 in total advertising spending this past week. Yes23’s ad spend is distributed fairly evenly (relative to population) across the mainland states, reflecting its goal to attract national support.

The top “no” campaign advertisers on Meta spent just $46,000 this past week. This includes Fair Australia, supported by Advance Australia; Warren Mundine’s separate “Not My Voice” campaign, and Nationals MP Keith Pitt.

Read more:
The ‘no’ campaign is dominating the messaging on the Voice referendum on TikTok – here’s why

In comparison to Yes23’s blanket coverage, Fair Australia is chiefly targeting South Australia and to a lesser degree Tasmania. Assuming it will win sympathetic states like Western Australia and Queensland, the “no” campaign only needs to win one more state (either South Australia or Tasmania) to ensure the referendum fails.

Interestingly, Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is no longer spending on social media advertising. Perhaps this is because she already has a sizeable presence on Meta (with a quarter million followers) and is generating millions of likes for her “no” campaign videos on the free platform, TikTok.

What’s happening in the news and social media?

During the past week, which aligns with the commencement of pre-polling, our analysis of free media coverage – print, radio, TV and social media – shows that Voice coverage has unsurprisingly increased in volume since our last data report two weeks ago.

The Voice referendum made up 7.3% of total coverage during the week, up from 6.7% reported in our previous analysis.

Recent stories getting the most attention on X (formerly Twitter) were:

• an open letter from more than 100 health organisations advocating in favour of “yes”

• widespread discussion of the uncivil nature of the referendum debate

• the start of early voting

• and Garigarra Riley-Mundine, the daughter of leading “no” campaigner Warren Mundine, publicly supporting the Voice.

How we further analysed media content

But what can we see about the distinctiveness of the campaign coverage since the referendum was announced on August 30?

One way to answer that is to look at the supply side of the debates. Supply represents what (and how much) information is in the public domain – as opposed to the demand side, which reflects how Australians engage with or react to the coverage.

To better understand this, we analysed about half a million Twitter posts and mainstream news stories from Meltwater, a global media monitoring company, combined with 50,000 Facebook and Instagram (public) posts that have appeared since the announcement of the referendum date.

Read more:
The ‘yes’ Voice campaign is far outspending ‘no’ in online advertising, but is the message getting through?

We then used an algorithm to categorise this content into one of five distinctly relevant narratives. Put simply, think of a machine that can organise a collection of many different LEGO blocks (or in our case, media items) into a predetermined number of bins (in our case, topics), based on the LEGO blocks’ similarities (in our case, the key words that make up these narratives).

The algorithm gives us a quick – and rough – estimate of what’s being said in the public sphere across our screens, airwaves and newspapers during the campaign.

As seen below, about a quarter of the data we analysed – the largest distinct category – comes from general media commentary, constituting a complex mix of positive and negative coverage reflecting Australia’s increasingly polarised media landscape.

We estimate language supporting the two main “yes” campaigns comprised over 40% of the public debate, providing mostly affirmative messages about the referendum.

The algorithm categorised the “no” camp’s distinctly negative language at well under 20% of the overall debate. This included coverage from Sky News, which has been much more negative about the Voice.

General voter information coming from a range of sources, including the Australian Electoral Commission and the Australian government, made up another about 18% of the total media and social media content during the campaign.

All this data tells us a little about what’s been said during the campaign and the evolving nature of the debate as various narratives gain and lose popularity.

So, if the “yes” side has been contributing the lion’s share of Voice content over the past six weeks, why are the polls not closer?

That’s a complicated question because not all media and messaging are equal. Nor do we know how well campaigning actually changes voter behaviour.

We are also just looking at the supply side of free media only, not paid advertising or private messaging spaces. And we know the “no” side has had millions of people engaging with and sharing its content, which is not tracked here.

Rough estimates like these efforts, though, suggest there’s much more to be learned – both about our nation and, crucially, about ourselves.

Andrea Carson receives funding from La Trobe University Synergy grant pogram to undertake this research.

Justin Phillips receives funding from New Zealand’s Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment, Meta (in the form of a Facebook Research Award), and the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Max Grömping receives funding from the Australian Research Council (DP220100050; DP230101777). He is an affiliate of the International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE), and member of the Electoral Integrity Project‘s International Advisory Board.

Rebecca Strating receives funding from a La Trobe University Synergy grant for this project. She is a recipient of external grant funding, including from the governments of Australia, United States, United Kingdom, the Philippines and Taiwan.

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

– ref. The ‘yes’ campaign is generating the most media and social media content. Yet, it continues to trail in the polls – https://theconversation.com/the-yes-campaign-is-generating-the-most-media-and-social-media-content-yet-it-continues-to-trail-in-the-polls-215145

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alvise Dabalà, Research associate, The University of Queensland

Mangroves might not look like much. Yes, they can have strange aerial roots. Yes, they’re surrounded by oozing mud.

But looks can be deceiving. These remarkable shrubs and trees are nurseries for many species of fish, shellfish and crabs. They protect our coastlines from erosion, storm surges, wind and floods. And that mud? It’s one of the best biological ways we know of to store carbon.

These ecosystem services are extremely valuable – but people often don’t notice what they offer until they’re lost to aquaculture, firewood or settlement.

Conserving mangroves by declaring parks and other protected areas seems like a logical solution. But often, nations can see protected areas as a cost, walling them off from human use, and ignoring their benefits to people.

What our new research shows is that you don’t have to choose between nature and humans. Protecting mangroves offers a win-win, given how valuable they are to coastal communities, fishers and the fight against climate change.

As nations aim to conserve 30% of their lands and waters by decade’s end, those lucky enough to have mangroves should look to their coasts.

Why are mangroves so important?

Mangroves thrive on the coast, poised between land and sea. They first evolved between 100 million and 65 million years ago. Each of the 65 species of mangrove is a shrub or tree which has, over time, evolved to live in salt or brackish water.

These trees are extremely resilient, surviving in brackish water and low-oxygen conditions, which would kill other trees. To survive, they’ve acquired adaptations such as aerial roots that can take in oxygen. These tangled roots make excellent hiding places for the creatures of land and sea, including mudskipper fish able to survive out of water.

Their complex roots are ideal nurseries for juvenile fish, crabs and prawns by providing shelter and places to feed. In turn, these nurseries keep populations healthy, sustaining commercial fisheries as well as direct sources of protein for coastal people.

Their robust tangles of roots protect them from the force of waves, storm surges and wind. In turn, this helps people, who can shelter behind this green wall, protecting our homes.

Mangroves also act as a natural way to tackle climate change. Their roots trap sediment, burying inorganic and organic carbon in the process. They also store carbon in their biomass. Overall, these sea forests store carbon at almost three times the rate of tropical rainforests, twice that of peat swamps, and almost seven times the rate of seagrasses.

Protecting mangroves needs a different approach

While mangroves give us a host of benefits, many of these only become apparent when these ecosystems are gone.

Unfortunately, mangroves are often cleared to make way for aquaculture, farming and human settlements, or for firewood. An estimated 20–35% of the world’s mangroves have been lost since 1980. In better news, losses have declined significantly. We now lose around 0.13% per year.

Protected areas work well as a way to cut mangrove losses. When a government sets out to create these areas, the aim is usually to protect biodiversity while minimising conflict with human use.

In our research, we found the world’s network of protected areas isn’t doing a great job in protecting either mangrove biodiversity or the ecosystem benefits mangroves give us. In fact, it’s no better than just picking areas at random.

That means high-priority mangrove forests important for both biodiversity and ecosystem services are not being properly conserved. Clever expansion of the current network could solve the problem. At present, parks and other protected areas cover about 13% of the world’s mangrove forests, which are clustered around the tropics.

Boosting this to 30% – in line with the biodiversity conservation target agreed to by 196 nations last year – would reap benefits. Our research suggests it would safeguard houses and infrastructure worth A$25.6 billion, protect six million people against coastal flooding, and store over one billion extra tonnes of carbon. Also, fishers would gain an extra 50 million days of successful fishing a year.

Even better – we found optimising conservation of both biodiversity and ecosystem services needed only 3–9% more area protected compared to mangrove protection areas based on saving species alone.

Read more:
Protecting mangroves can prevent billions of dollars in global flooding damage every year

Protect mangroves in Asia and Oceania

Mangrove forests urgently needing protection are almost all in Asia (63% of the total) and Oceania (17%), where we find large biodiverse mangrove forests which support fishing industries and many coastal communities.

Indonesia is a particular hotspot, given its 17,000-odd islands are often ringed by mangroves. Mangroves in India, Vietnam and Papua New Guinea also need better protection.

Australia does reasonably well. Around 18% of our mangroves are protected, above the global average of 13.5%. Over 20% of the areas we have flagged are high-priority for mangrove conservation are already protected. Even so, expanding the protected area network would be a good move, as Australian mangroves are some of the world’s most biodiverse and carbon-rich.

Mangroves in parts of northern Queensland need better protection.
Some mangroves are already protected by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Reserve, but there are still large unprotected tracts.

Mangroves around Darwin and Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory need expanded protected areas, as do those on the coast between the Pilbara and the Kimberley in Western Australia.

Too often, protecting nature is seen as a cost to society. What our modelling shows is that we can have a win-win. By protecting the most precious areas of mangrove, we can protect human communities and wider biodiversity at a stroke.

Read more:
After decades of loss, the world’s largest mangrove forests are set for a comeback

Alvise Dabalà was supported by the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Tropical Biodiversity and Ecosystems – TROPIMUNDO.

Anthony Richardson receives funding for developing new tools for marine spatial planning from the Norwegian Government and the Waitt Foundation. He is affiliated with CSIRO Environment.

Daniel Dunn receives funding for developing new tools for marine spatial planning from the Norwegian Government, the Waitt Foundation, and the International Climate Initiative (IKI).

Jason Everett receives funding for developing new tools for marine spatial planning from the Norwegian Government and the Waitt Foundation. He is affiliated with CSIRO Environment and the University of New South Wales, Australia.

– ref. If we protect mangroves, we protect our fisheries, our towns and ourselves – https://theconversation.com/if-we-protect-mangroves-we-protect-our-fisheries-our-towns-and-ourselves-214390

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Fuller, Charles Perkins Centre Research Program Leader, University of Sydney

What do British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and singer Bruce Springsteen have in common?

They’re among an ever-growing group of public figures touting the benefits of eating just one meal a day.

As a result, the one meal a day (OMAD) diet is the latest attention-grabbing weight loss trend. Advocates claim it leads to fast, long-term weight loss success and better health, including delaying the ageing process.

Like most weight-loss programs, the OMAD diet makes big and bold promises. Here’s what you need to know about eating one meal a day and what it means for weight loss.

Read more:
What’s the ‘weight set point’, and why does it make it so hard to keep weight off?

The OMAD diet explained

Essentially, the OMAD diet is a type of intermittent fasting, where you fast for 23 hours and consume all your daily calories in one meal eaten within one hour.

The OMAD diet rules are presented as simple and easy to follow:

1. You can eat whatever you want, provided it fits on a standard dinner plate, with no calorie restrictions or nutritional guidelines to follow.

2. You can drink calorie-free drinks throughout the day (water, black tea and coffee).

3. You must follow a consistent meal schedule, eating your one meal around the same time each day.

Along with creating a calorie deficit, resulting in weight loss, advocates believe the OMAD diet’s extended fasting period leads to physiological changes in the body that promote better health, including boosting your metabolism by triggering a process called ketosis, where your body burns stored fat for energy instead of glucose.

What does the evidence say?

Unfortunately, research into the OMAD diet is limited. Most studies have examined its impact on animals, and the primary study with humans involved 11 lean, young people following the OMAD diet for a mere 11 days.

Claims about the OMAD diet typically rely on research into intermittent fasting, rather than on the OMAD diet itself. There is evidence backing the efficacy of intermittent fasting to achieve weight loss. However, most studies have focused on short-term results only, typically considering the results achieved across 12 weeks or less.

Read more:
Does it matter what time of day I eat? And can intermittent fasting improve my health? Here’s what the science says

One longer-term study from 2022 randomly assigned 139 patients with obesity to either a calorie-restricted diet with time-restricted eating between 8am and 4pm daily, or to a diet with daily calorie restriction alone for 12 months.

After 12 months, both groups had lost around the same weight and experienced similar changes in body fat, blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure. This indicates long-term weight loss achieved with intermittent fasting is not superior and on a par with that achieved by traditional dieting approaches (daily calorie restriction).

So what are the problems with the OMAD diet?

1. It can cause nutritional deficiencies and health issues.

The OMAD diet’s lack of nutritional guidance on what to eat for that one meal a day raises many red flags.

The meals we eat every day should include a source of protein balanced with wholegrain carbs, vegetables, fruits, protein and good fats to support optimum health, disease prevention and weight management.

Not eating a balanced diet will result in nutritional deficiencies that can result in poor immune function, fatigue and a decrease in bone density, leading to osteoporosis.

Fasting for 23 hours a day is also likely to lead to extreme feelings of hunger and uncontrollable cravings, which may mean you consistently eat foods that are not good for you when it’s time to eat.

2. It’s unlikely to be sustainable.

You might be able to stick with the OMAD diet initially, but it will wear thin over time.

Extreme diets – especially ones prescribing extended periods of fasting – aren’t enjoyable, leading to feelings of deprivation and social isolation during meal times. It’s hard enough to refuse a piece of office birthday cake at the best of times, imagine how this would feel when you haven’t eaten for 23 hours!

Restrictive eating can also lead to an unhealthy relationship with food, making it even harder to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

3. Quick fixes don’t work.

Like other popular intermittent fasting methods, the OMAD diet appeals because it’s easy to digest, and the results appear fast.

But the OMAD diet is just another fancy way of cutting calories to achieve a quick drop on the scales.

As your weight falls, things will quickly go downhill when your body activates its defence mechanisms to defend your weight loss. In fact, it will regain weight – a response that stems from our hunter-gatherer ancestors’ need to survive periods of deprivation when food was scarce.

Read more:
Is it true the faster you lose weight the quicker it comes back? Here’s what we know about slow and fast weight loss

The bottom line

Despite the hype, the OMAD diet is unsustainable, and it doesn’t result in better weight-loss outcomes than its predecessors. Our old habits creep back in and we find ourselves fighting a cascade of physiological changes to ensure we regain the weight we lost.

Successfully losing weight long-term comes down to:

• losing weight in small manageable chunks you can sustain, specifically periods of weight loss, followed by periods of weight maintenance, and so on, until you achieve your goal weight

• making gradual changes to your lifestyle to ensure you form habits that last a lifetime.

At the Boden Group, Charles Perkins Centre, we are studying the science of obesity and running clinical trials for weight loss. You can register here to express your interest.

Dr Nick Fuller works for the University of Sydney and has received external funding for projects relating to the treatment of overweight and obesity. He is the author and founder of the Interval Weight Loss program.

– ref. What is the OMAD diet? Is one meal a day actually good for weight loss? And is it safe? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-omad-diet-is-one-meal-a-day-actually-good-for-weight-loss-and-is-it-safe-207723

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caitlyn Forster, Associate Lecturer, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

Have you ever waited in a long queue only to find the ice cream flavour you wanted is gone? What did you choose instead?

In the field of behavioural economics, researchers have shown that people make very predictable second choices if the item they want is sold out. So much so, that it is possible to use unavailable items to nudge people into buying certain products.

These unavailable items are referred to as phantom decoys, because even though they are not available, they still influence peoples’ choices.

So much for humans. What about bees? In new research published in Insectes Sociaux, we tested whether honeybees could be influenced by the phantom decoy effect – with surprising results.

Phantom decoys in the animal world

Research has found phantom decoys influence animals including cats, Asian honey bees and monkeys.

However, it’s not all straightforward. Phantom decoys can apparently make wallabies spend more time investigating all the available food options, but the decoys don’t nudge their choices.

Testing phantom decoy effects can help us understand why animals make particular choices. This can have benefits for agriculture, conservation and even pest control.

Read more:
What bees don’t know can help them: measuring insect indecision

Western honey bees (Apis mellifera) are important pollinators of agricultural crops around the world. In Australia, the honeybee industry is worth A$14 billion a year in honey production and pollination services.

Bees visit flowers to collect nectar and pollen, which provides them with carbohydrates and protein. In this process, they also pollinate plants, which is essential for the plants to reproduce.

However, not all flowers provide bees with nectar: some are, in effect, phantom decoys. Flowers that were rich in nectar at one time may have none at others, either because other insects have already collected it or because of variation in nectar production throughout the day. Some flowers never contain much nectar at all, but attract pollinators by resembling other plants that have more nectar.

Artificial flowers, real choices

In our latest research, we tested whether Western honey bees fall for phantom decoys. Instead of real flowers, we used artificial flowers made from a laminated piece of paper with a tube containing nectar in the centre.

To create different “values” of flowers, we adjusted the nectar quality of the flowers by increasing the nectar’s sugar content. We also adjusted the accessibility of the nectar by forcing bees to crawl down tubes to get to it. Short tubes were “easy access”; longer tubes made flowers “difficult to access”.

We then trained bees to fly into a box where they had a choice of three flowers: one flower was easy to access, but had low nectar quality; a second flower had high-quality nectar, but was difficult to access; and a third flower had easy access and much higher-quality nectar than the other two flowers.

Not surprisingly, bees quickly preferred flower number three. To see whether bees were influenced by the phantom decoy effect, we then gave them the same choice between three flowers, except the easy-access, high-quality flower was empty of nectar.

Bees won’t accept second best

Unlike humans, who would likely have picked whatever available option was most similiar to the empty flower, bees did not make choices in any predictable fashion after encountering the “sold out” empty flower. This suggests that, at least in this case, they were not susceptible to phantom decoys.

Instead, when bees encountered an empty phantom decoy flower, they left all three flowers alone. This is in contrast to humans, for whom unavailable items often create a sense of urgency, making them more likely to spend money on other items.

The bees’ behaviour is like discovering your favourite ice cream flavour is sold out and, instead of buying the next-best flavour, you leave the shop with no ice cream at all.

Read more:
Bees are astonishingly good at making decisions – and our computer model explains how that’s possible

Bees also moved more between all three flowers in the presence of an empty flower, probably because the bees expected the empty flower would eventually refill.

The overall increase in movement between flowers, and eventual abandonment of patches due to phantom decoys, could have important ramifications for pollination in patches of flowers and related agricultural and conservation management practices.

Insect pollinated plants rely on insects to move pollen from flower to flower for reproduction, so empty flowers may benefit nearby flowers by increasing pollinator movement, which, in turn, increases the movement of pollen – but only if they hang around the flowers for long enough.

We would like to thank Anahi Castillo Angon and Cristian Gabriel Orlando for their contribution to this research and the writing of this article.

Caitlyn Forster received funding from The Australian Research Council. She is a volunteer for Invertebrates Australia.

Eliza Middleton received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is affiliated with Accounting for Nature, and is a forum member of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures.

Tanya Latty receives funding from The Australian Research Council and AgriFutures Australlia. She is affiliated with Invertebrates Australia (conservation organisation) and is president of the Australasian Society for the Study of Animal Behavoiur.

– ref. ‘Phantom decoys’ manipulate human shoppers – but bees may be immune to their charms – https://theconversation.com/phantom-decoys-manipulate-human-shoppers-but-bees-may-be-immune-to-their-charms-213769

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation; Scholar -In-Residence Asia Society Australia, Deakin University

We have a problem with the state of politics and public discourse in Australia. The appalling neo-Nazi video threat made against Senator Lidia Thorpe is a disturbing reminder of the dark undercurrents that are swirling through political discourse in Australia.

As the murder of British MP Jo Cox reminds us, threats against politicians and other public figures must not be dismissed lightly. And the threat comes not just from neo-Nazis, although the Christchurch massacre of 51 people by an Australian far-right terrorist means we can never again dismiss the threat posed by this kind of extremism.

Yet, the problem does not stop just with concerns about violence. As the ugly, all too often hateful, political conversations in the lead-up to the Voice referendum reveal, our public discourse has turned febrile and our civic climate is overheating.

Hateful extremism is both a symptom and a cause. White supremacist and other far-right extremists have been a violent, but often denied, presence in Australian society since European settlement began. This remains an ugly truth that we need to acknowledge and rise above.

But something has changed. And it is not just that COVID-19 lockdowns, climate-related disasters and cripplingly expensive housing has left the nation feeling more anxious. A very different kind of pandemic has laid siege to our body politic.

The virus that is threatening to cripple our political immune system goes by many names. But we can simply call it “Trumpification”, a name as usefully evocative as it is unscientific.

Read more:
The Trumpification of the US media: why chasing news values distorts politics

We don’t, of course, have a true Donald Trump analogue in Australian politics. For one thing, none of those politicians and political commentators who channel the angry rhetoric of Trump – and there are quite a few – have anything like the popular support and influence of the former president.

Indeed, Trump’s popularity is the reason why this populist authoritarianism is so dangerous.

Our Westminster parliamentary democracy is very different from America’s curious hybrid system of an executive and a bicameral Congress, a system that has often struggled, and in recent years has failed to function as intended.

However, the omnishambles of the past decade in Westminster should alert us to how quickly a parliamentary system can succumb to debilitating sickness. Boris Johnson, Brexit, a crippled UK Labour party, and a deeply reactionary and incompetent Conservative party speak to how quickly things can fall apart.

What America’s debilitating political malaise tells us (and it is even worse in many statehouses than it is in Congress) is that demagoguery that trades in hate and fear, and is enabled by systemic misinformation and disinformation, unleashes dark and destructive forces.

At its best, democracy struggles to enable the better angels of our nature. Demagoguery does the opposite. It corrodes not just civility but the very traditions and institutions that give substance to our values.

Extremism, whether murderously violent, or “just” hateful, grows in response to the opportunities afforded it by the breakdown of integrity, civility, respect, and kindness in our politics and public spaces. And as it grows, extremism symbiotically feeds back into the corruption of public discourse and the erosion of social cohesion.

America’s problems with white supremacist extremism did not begin with Trump, or even with the Tea Party movement before him. No sooner had the civil rights movement succeeded in overturning centuries of injustice born of slavery – a highwater mark for religious civil society – than the counter-offensive with the co-option and corruption of US Christianity began. The religious right became a powerful ally of the Republican Party, enabling the non-religious Ronald Reagan to defeat the deeply pious Jimmy Carter.

Read more:
Why government action to thwart neo-Nazi groups is far more difficult than it appears

But it also bore within itself the seeds of the destruction of conservative politics. When Trump, the billionaire and toxic narcissist, was proclaimed from the pulpits of America as a modern-day King Cyrus – as God’s instrument of salvation – the rot was well-advanced.

In the permissive environment of the Trump presidency, when hateful demagoguery from the highest office was the new normal, far-right extremist attacks dramatically increased in number and lethality.

Australia is fortunate to continue to be very different from America. But, on some fronts, the gap is closing. With so much of our broadcast media and, even more, our social media fed directly by the rivers of misinformation and disinformation that course through American society, we can not afford to kid ourselves about Australian exceptionalism.

We should be concerned about extremism. But let us not lose sight of the bigger picture. There are signs of sickness all around in our public discourse. “Trumpification”, as a term, might not catch on. But the viral pandemic that it describes has already commenced its assault on our body politic.

Greg Barton receives funding from the Australian Research Council. And he is engaged in a range of projects working to understand and counter violent extremism in Australia and in Southeast Asia and Africa that are funded by the Australian government.

– ref. Let’s not kid ourselves: ‘Trumpification’ is becoming our problem, too – https://theconversation.com/lets-not-kid-ourselves-trumpification-is-becoming-our-problem-too-215071

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Wright, Professor of History and Professor of Public Engagement, La Trobe University

“The envy of the world.”

That’s how one American journalist described Australia at the turn of the 20th century.

What was the object of global desire, the precious jewel that this very new nation at the bottom of the planet possessed and that the rest of the international community coveted?

Was it sporting prowess? Military valour? Sparkling beaches or a bounty of mineral resources?

It was democracy. In 1902, Australia had become the first country where (white) women were entitled to the same franchise as men: the right to vote and the right to stand for parliament. (Although women in New Zealand were granted the right to vote in 1893, they were not able to stand for parliament until 1920.)

There was a sting in the tail of Australia’s global democratic distinction: the same act of parliament that made Australian women the world’s most enfranchised also deliberately divested all Indigenous Australians, male and female, of their federal franchise rights. It would be another 60 years before First Nations’ people could vote in our national elections.

But it was its leading role in the women’s rights movement that made Australia the world’s “social laboratory”.

Read more:
Birth of a nation: how Australia empowering women taught the world a lesson

Australia led the way

For decades, women from Munich to Melbourne, from Westminster to Washington, had been campaigning for the same thing: a voice. The right to have a say in making the laws and policies that affected their daily lives.

What did the opponents of the idea that half the population might be consulted before legislation was drafted have to say about this wild idea?

It will be divisive.

It will be unfair, effectively giving men two votes.

Most women don’t actually want the vote. All this fuss, the nay-sayers proclaimed, was just the product of a few educated, elite women (“the shrieking sisterhood” they were branded by a febrile anti-suffrage press).

But Australia led the way in the global push for these human rights and the world watched on with curiosity, hope and admiration.

“A splendid object lesson”, President Theodore Roosevelt pronounced Australia’s achievement. (It would take America until 1920 to catch up.)

It wasn’t the first time Australia heeded the call for a voice

Remember the Eureka Stockade? “The birthplace of Australian democracy”, as we learned in school about the Ballarat gold miners of 1854.

The brief battle that came at the grisly end of a lawful community push for direct consultation with the people feeling the pinch of the Victorian colonial government’s tax and land policies.

These gold rush communities were structurally disadvantaged and discriminated against.

They decried the lack of health and other services on the goldfields, as well as the over-policing and incarceration rates of miners.

Some miners, shopkeepers and their families were looking to a “constitutional” solution: legal recognition of their existence and contribution.

The mining community was united in one thing: they wanted to be consulted in the laws that governed them.

After Eureka, Victoria became the first jurisdiction in the British empire to extend the vote to unpropertied men, rights the mother country would not fully implement until after the first world war. (Up until 1918, only two in four British men had the vote; women would not get the vote in Britain until 1928.)

1962 and 1967

It would not be until 1962, 60 years after Australia’s white women won the vote, that First Nations people in Australia got the vote federally. (It would take a few more years for Western Australia and Queensland to award state voting rights to its Indigenous population.)

Then, in 1967, a referendum was held to change the Australian Constitution so First Nations’ people could be counted in the census.

It was this act that structurally and symbolically recognised the original occupiers and traditional owners of the land on which the Australian nation was founded, without treaty.

Over 90% of Australians voted to change the Constitution to make this happen. Bipartisan political support ensured this watershed moment in Australia’s democratic history. The Liberal Party’s How to Vote Card imparts a clear direction: “yes”.

Like the paradigm-shifting women’s suffrage era, the global community watched with interest and alarm.

“The eyes of the world are on Australia and her handling of black Australians,” yes activist Faith Bandler noted.

Unlike the campaign for women’s right to vote, there were few cynics and trolls in 1967, spreading fear and spinning prophesies of doom.

Australians overwhelming understood – and their party-political leaders accepted, indeed instructed – that recognising the human rights of Australia’s Indigenous people was a positive, forward-looking move for the nation.

Australia did not want to be cast in the same light as apartheid South Africa and deep south America, embroiled in its own civil rights messes.

Today, over 80% of First Nations people still endorse the voice as the first step towards the measure of recognition and respect that will truly take Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians into account.

Australia’s Brexit moment?

National living treasure, Barry Jones, has argued the 2023 referendum to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to parliament in the Constitution will be Australia’s Brexit moment.

That, should the majority of voters (in the majority of states) return a regressive “no” vote, not only will Australians wake up on the morning after they go to the polls with “buyers’ remorse”, but the global community will also shake its head in disbelief.

How could a country that once promised so much deliver so little? A non-binding advisory body. It’s all they were asking for.

The world is still watching.

Read more:
Friday essay: 60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?

Clare Wright has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council. She has collaborated with the Uluru Dialogue on the Voice referendum campaign in a voluntary capacity.

– ref. From Eureka to suffrage to now: a Voice that was 169 years in the making – https://theconversation.com/from-eureka-to-suffrage-to-now-a-voice-that-was-169-years-in-the-making-215333

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aaron Schokman, PhD Candidate, University of Sydney

This article is part of The Conversation’s six-part series on insomnia, which charts the rise of insomnia during industrialisation to sleep apps today. Read the first article in the series here.

Hollywood appears fascinated by sleep’s impact on the mind and body.
Blockbuster movies featuring someone living with insomnia include Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Fight Club (1999) and Insomnia (2002).

But how well do these and other portrayals compare with what it’s really like to live with insomnia?

As we’ll see, most movies tend to either minimise or exaggerate symptoms. Insomnia is rarely depicted as a treatable illness. And these portrayals have implications for the estimated one in three of us with at least one insomnia symptom.

Read more:
A short history of insomnia and how we became obsessed with sleep

Back in the real world

Insomnia is a common sleep disorder where a person struggles to fall asleep, stay asleep, or wakes up too early – despite having adequate opportunity for sleep.

Around 5% of adults experience significant insomnia to the degree that it causes distress or impairs daily life.

It’s a common misconception that insomnia is only a night-time issue. Insomnia can impact your ability to stay awake and alert during the day. It can also affect your mental health.

At work, you might be more prone to accidents, more forgetful, or make poorer decisions. At home, you might be irritable or short with your friends and family.

So what is it like living with insomnia? Apart from the effects of poor sleep quality, many people experience anxiety or dread about the night ahead from the moment they wake up. From early in the day, people plan how they can improve their sleep that night.

A review found
people living with insomnia felt their sleep concerns were often trivialised or misunderstood by health-care professionals, and stigmatised by others.

Read more:
A memoir of sleeplessness posits making peace with our ruptured nights – but risks becoming an exhausting read

Movies can minimise symptoms …

Nicholas Galitzine’s character in the recent romcom Red, White and Royal Blue (2023) has insomnia. We’re briefly told he struggles to fall asleep at night. However, we never see any meaningful impact on his life or depiction of the difficulty living with insomnia entails.

That said, minimising the impact of insomnia can have benefits. It shows insomnia is an invisible illness, doesn’t have obvious visual symptoms and anyone can have it.

But this can perpetuate the expectation someone with insomnia should be able to function unencumbered. Or it can fuel the misconception having insomnia may be beneficial, as in Insomnia Is Good for You (1957).

Read more:
‘Gay guys can do missionary?’ – how Red, White & Royal Blue brings queer intimacy to mainstream audiences

… or exaggerate symptoms

But most Hollywood portrayals of insomnia tend to depict the most extreme cases. These usually feature insomnia as a symptom of another condition rather than a disorder itself, as is commonly experienced.

These movies tend to be psychological thrillers. Here, insomnia is often used as an enigma to keep the audience guessing about which events are real or figments of a character’s imagination.

Take The Machinist (2004), for example. The main character is emaciated, ostracised and plagued by paranoia, hallucinations and delusions. It’s only towards the end of the movie we learn his insomnia may be the result of a psychiatric disorder, such as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Hollywood’s focus on extreme cases of insomnia is a recurring pattern (for instance, Fight Club 1999, Lucid 2005).

It’s understandable why Hollywood latches onto these extreme portrayals – to entertain us. Yet these portrayals of insomnia as something more severe or threatening, like psychosis, can increase anxiety or stigma among people living with insomnia.

While it’s true other medical conditions including mental illnesses can lead to insomnia, insomnia often exists on its own. Insomnia is often caused by more mundane things like too much stress, lifestyle and habits, or longer daylight hours at higher latitudes (such as in Insomnia, 2002).

Something these exaggerated portrayals do well is highlight the impact sleep deprivation can have on safety, albeit extremely dramatised. Regardless of profession, not getting enough sleep at night can substantially impact cognitive function, increasing the chance of making a mistake.

Read more:
Counting the wrong sheep: why trouble sleeping is about more than just individual lifestyles and habits

Movies rarely depict treatment

It is rare to see insomnia depicted as a health condition requiring medical care. Very few characters struggling with insomnia seek or receive help for it.

An exception is the narrator in Fight Club (1999). But he has to pretend to have other illnesses to receive therapy, again suggesting insomnia is not a legitimate condition.

Read more:
Explainer: what is insomnia and what can you do about it?

Why does accurate representation matter?

Many people only learn about the symptoms and impact of sleep disorders through pop culture and film. These portrayals can affect how others think about these disorders and can impact how people living with these disorders think about themselves.

Uniform and stereotypical portrayals of insomnia can also impact people’s likelihood of seeking help.

Most of these films show young or middle-aged men experiencing insomnia. Yet women are more likely to have insomnia than men. Insomnia is also more common in older adults, people with a lower socioeconomic background and those living alone. People at higher risk of developing insomnia might not recognise their risk or symptoms if their experience doesn’t match what they’ve seen.

Read more:
Hallucinations in the movies tend to be about chaos, violence and mental distress. But they can be positive too

We can do better

While the reality of living with insomnia may not be particularly cinematic, filmmakers can surely do better than using it as a convenient plot point.

There are a number of main characters living with different health conditions across pop culture. For instance, the movie Manchester by the Sea (2016) features someone with prolonged grief disorder and the TV series Atypical (2017-2021) features someone’s experience living with autism.

But if you’re looking for an accurate portrayal of insomnia, Hollywood still has some way to go. It’s about time insomnia is depicted in a way that accurately reflects people’s experiences.

Aaron Schokman is a member of the Sleep Health Foundation’s Consumer Reference Council

Nick Glozier has received funding from the Australian Research Council and NHRMC for sleep health research, consults to organisations that provide digital and pharmacological insomnia treatments, and has IP in a sleep app.

– ref. What’s insomnia like for most people who can’t sleep? You’d never know from the movies – https://theconversation.com/whats-insomnia-like-for-most-people-who-cant-sleep-youd-never-know-from-the-movies-211823

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Wood, Program Director, Energy, Grattan Institute

Australia has a legislated target to reduce greenhouse emissions, a federal government with commitments to increase the share of renewable electricity and reduce power prices, and a globally important economic opportunity at its feet.

In the second half of the government’s current term, delivery looks hard across the board. All is not lost, but we must transform our economy to a timetable. The unprecedented scale and pace of the economic transformation, and the consequences of failure, demand an unprecedented response.

To get things on track requires the government to develop a plan with the right mix of political commitment, credible policies, coordination with industry, and support from communities. And, critically, the plan must be implemented. Too often targets have been set without being linked to policies to achieve them, or linked so poorly that the extra cost and delay sets back the climate transition.

By the middle of this year, Australia’s emissions were 25 per cent below the 2005 level. But the trend of steady reductions has stalled, and sectors such as transport and agriculture have moved in the wrong direction.

Such ups and downs will continue in response to external events, as we have seen with COVID, droughts, and war on the other side of the world. Policies must be flexible if they are to remain broadly on course in the face of such events.

Read more:
The road is long and time is short, but Australia’s pace towards net zero is quickening

Trouble in the power department

The detail matters: national emissions reductions have slowed, as has the growth in renewable generation towards the government’s 2030 target of 82 per cent.

At the same time, the government’s target of lower power bills by 2025 looks out of reach, and electricity reliability is threatened as coal-fired generation closes without adequate replacement.

The production and use of natural gas contributes around 20 per cent of Australia’s emissions. The use of gas in industry will be covered by the Safeguard Mechanism, a policy designed by the Coalition and now revised by Labor, to drive down emissions from the country’s 200 biggest emitters.

Emissions from gas-fired power generation will fall with the growth of renewables. But there are no constraints on fossil gas use in other sectors, such as our homes.

Industrial emissions are slowly growing. The huge amount of hype about green hydrogen has so far proven to be little more than that: Australia continues to have lots of potential green hydrogen projects, but virtually none are delivered.

Finally, we remain without constraints on vehicle emissions, and with a large herd of grazing cattle and sheep whose emissions are determined more by the weather than the actions of our best-meaning farmers.

The risk of swinging from naive to negative

So, we are in a hard place. Naïve optimism about an easy, cheap transition to net zero is at risk of giving way to brutal negativity that it’s all just too hard. The warnings of early spring fires and floods in Australia and extreme heat during the most recent northern hemisphere summer will feed this tension.

Read more:
Too hard basket: why climate change is defeating our political system

The federal government’s latest Intergenerational Report provides a deeply disturbing snapshot of the potential economic impacts if we fail to get climate change under control. Yet in a world 3 to 4 degrees hotter than pre-industrial levels, economic impacts could be the least of our worries.

The task is unparalleled outside wartime. Within 30 years we must manage the decline of fossil fuel extractive sectors, transform every aspect of our energy and transport sectors, reindustrialise much of manufacturing, and find solutions to difficult problems in agriculture.

What’s to be done?

The need for a Net Zero National Cabinet Committee

We should begin with leadership across the federal government, coordinated with the states and territories. The best structure might be a Net Zero National Cabinet Committee with two clear objectives – to develop and begin implementing a national net zero transformation plan by the end of 2024.

Modern governments are more than happy to set targets and announce plans to meet them. They seem to have lost the capacity or will to implement such plans. The Net Zero Economy Agency, created in July and chaired by former Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, could be charged with that task.

The first step is being taken – the Climate Change Authority is now advising on emissions reduction targets for 2035 and perhaps beyond. The government’s work to create pathways to reducing emissions in every economic sector must be used to build a comprehensive set of policies that are directly linked to meeting the targets.

How to get electricity moving in the right direction

The electricity sector can be put on track with three actions. One, drive emissions reduction towards net zero using a sector-focused policy such as the Renewable Energy Target or the Safeguard Mechanism.

Two, implement the Capacity Investment Scheme, a policy intended to deliver dispatchable electricity capacity to balance a system built on intermittent wind and solar supply.

Three, set up a National Transmission Agency to work with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to plan the national transmission grid and with authority to direct, fund, and possibly own that grid.

Read more:
Made in America: how Biden’s climate package is fuelling the global drive to net zero

For heavy industry, the scale and pace of change demands a 21st-century industry policy, in three parts. Activities such as coal mining will be essentially incompatible with a net-zero economy. Activities such as steel-making may be able to transform through economic, low-emissions technologies.

Finally, activities such as low-emissions extraction and processing of critical energy minerals, which are insignificant today but which in time could help Australia to capitalise on globally significant comparative advantages.

Create a plan – and stick to it

The government has made a good start by revising the Safeguard Mechanism and the Hydrogen Strategy and developing a Critical Minerals Strategy. These should be brought together in an overarching policy framework with consistent, targeted policies linked to clear goals, developed and executed in sustained collaboration with industry.

The Safeguard Mechanism will need to be extended beyond 2030 and its emissions threshold for the companies it covers lowered to 25,000 tonnes of emissions per year.

Industry funding will probably need to expand, and give priority to export-oriented industries that will grow in a net-zero global economy. And the federal and state governments should phase out all programs that encourage expansion of fossil fuel extraction or consumption.

In transport, long-delayed emissions standards should be set and implemented. Finally, government-funded research, some of it already underway, should focus on difficult areas such as early-stage emissions reduction technologies in specific heavy industries, transport subsectors, and emissions from grazing cattle and sheep.

There is little new or radical in the elements of this plan. What would be new is a commitment to its design and implementation. This is what government needs to do now. The consequences of failure are beyond our worst fears, the benefits of success beyond our best dreams.

Tony Wood may have a financial interest in companies relevant to the article through his superannuation fund.

– ref. Why Australia urgently needs a climate plan and a Net Zero National Cabinet Committee to implement it – https://theconversation.com/why-australia-urgently-needs-a-climate-plan-and-a-net-zero-national-cabinet-committee-to-implement-it-213866

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tilo Ziehn, Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO

There is growing consensus that our planet is likely to pass the 1.5℃ warming threshold. Research even suggests global warming will temporarily exceed the 2℃ threshold, if atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) peaks at levels beyond what was anticipated.

Exceeding our emissions targets is known as a climate overshoot. It may lead to changes that won’t be reversible in our lifetime.

These changes include sea-level rise, less functional ecosystems, higher risks of species extinction, and glacier and permafrost loss. We are already seeing many of these changes.

Our newly published research investigates the implications of a climate overshoot for the oceans. Across all climate overshoot experiments and all models, our analysis found associated changes in water temperatures and oxygen levels will decrease viable ocean habitats.

The decrease was observed for centuries. This means humanity will continue to feel its impacts long after atmospheric CO₂ levels have peaked and declined.

Read more:
Ocean heat is off the charts – here’s what that means for humans and ecosystems around the world

What did the study look at?

Our analysis is based on simulations with Earth system models as part of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6). The project underpins the latest assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

We looked at multi-model results from two different CMIP6-developed experiments that simulate a climate overshoot.

One corresponds to a climate scenario simulating an overshoot this century.

The other experiment is from the Carbon Dioxide Model Intercomparison Project (CDRMIP). It was designed to explore the reversibility of a climate overshoot and how this impacts the Earth system.

Read more:
How much will our oceans warm and cause sea levels to rise this century? We’ve just improved our estimate

We studied the combined effects of changes in ocean temperature and oxygen levels. These changes are linked because the warmer the water, the less dissolved oxygen it can hold.

In this study we explored what warmer oceans and deoxygenation mean for the long-term viability of marine ecosystems. These changes have already begun under climate change.

To quantify these impacts we used a metabolic index, which describes the (aerobic) energy balance of individual organisms. In viable ecosystems the supply of oxygen needs to exceed their demand. The closer supply is to demand, the more precarious ecosystems become, until demand exceeds supply and these ecosystems are no longer viable.

Under global warming in the ocean we are already seeing an increase in metabolic demand and reduction in supply due to deoxygenation.

The index gives us the ability to assess how changing ocean temperatures impact the long-term viability of different marine species and their habitats. This allows us to explore how ecosystems across the world’s oceans respond to a climate overshoot, and for how long these changes will persist.

As conditions changed under the scenarios, we followed the evolution of the global ocean volume that can or cannot support the metabolic demands of 72 marine species.

Read more:
The Southern Ocean absorbs more heat than any other ocean on Earth, and the impacts will be felt for generations

What did the study find?

Across all climate overshoot experiments and all models, our findings show the water volumes that can provide viable habitats will decrease. This decrease persisted on the scale of centuries – well after global average temperature recovers from the overshoot.

Our study findings raise concerns about shrinking habitats. For example, species like tuna live in well-oxygenated surface waters and are restricted by low oxygen in deeper waters. Their habitat will be compressed towards the surface for hundreds of years, according to our study.

Fisheries that rely on such species will need to understand how changes in their distribution will affect fishing grounds and productivity. What is clear is that ecosystems would need to adapt to these changes or risk collapsing with significant environmental, societal and economic implications.

Read more:
Managing fish stocks shared by nations must focus on the impacts of climate change

What are the implications of shrinking marine habitats?

To date, most research has focused on ocean warming. The combination of temperature and deoxygenation we studied shows warming may harm marine ecosystems for hundreds of years after global mean temperatures have peaked. We will have to think more about resource management to avoid compromising species abundance and food security.

Climate overshoots not only matter in terms of their peak value but also in terms of how long temperature remains above the target. It is better to return from an overshoot than staying at the higher level, but a lot worse than not overshooting in the first place.

If we significantly overshoot the temperature targets of the Paris Agreement, many climate change impacts will be irreversible. Therefore, every effort should be made to drastically reduce emissions now. We can then avoid a significant climate overshoot, reach net-zero emissions by mid-century and keep warming “well below” 2℃.

Our assessment of potential future changes relies heavily on Earth system models. To better answer key questions about climate overshoots and the reversibility of the climate system, we need to further improve our models.

This includes sustained observations to validate our models. We must also develop new experimental frameworks to explore what can be done in the event of a climate overshoot to minimise its long-term impact.

Tilo Ziehn receives funding from the Australian Government under the National Environmental Science Program.

Andrew Lenton and Yeray Santana-Falcón do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Even temporary global warming above 2℃ will affect life in the oceans for centuries – https://theconversation.com/even-temporary-global-warming-above-2-will-affect-life-in-the-oceans-for-centuries-214251

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Senior Research Associate, School of Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, The University of Melbourne

Have you noticed street trees looking oddly sad? You’re not alone. Normally, spring means fresh green leaves and flowers. But this year, the heat has come early, stressing some trees.

But there’s more going on – insects are on the march. Many eucalypts are showing signs of lerp or psyllid attack. These insects hide underneath leaves and build little waxy houses for themselves. But as they feed on the sap, they can give the leaves a stressed, pinkish look. When they appear in numbers – as they are this year – they can defoliate a whole tree with a serious infestation.

How did we get here? Milder, wetter summers during three successive La Niña years mean boomtime for insects. This year, we’ve had a warm winter and a warm spring, meaning insects are up and about early and in large numbers.

This summer will be an El Niño, which usually means drier and hotter weather for most of Australia. For those of us interested in urban trees, these conditions are troubling.

But it’s more than that. The fact our urban trees are in danger should tell us something – we need to value and protect them better. As the world heats up, our urban forests will be even more at risk.

What’s different this year?

In most years, insect infestations arrive later. That gives trees time to produce a flush of new growth. As a result, they’re rarely lethal. Trees can put out more leaves and recover.

But this year, they’re attacking early and in numbers. It also makes it more likely we’ll see more and more infestations over a long summer. End result: stressed trees, and even deaths from sap-sucking and other insect damage.

That’s not ideal for us either. In an El Niño summer, we’ll likely face hotter days. This year is unusually hot, due to unchecked climate change. The heatwaves to come could make us sick, hospitalise us, or even kill.

Urban trees are one of our best methods of protecting ourselves. Suburbs with greater tree canopy cover are significantly cooler. Trees shade the ground and their foliage emits water, which cools the air. Good canopy cover can cut temperatures by up to 6℃.

So, it’s not good news for us that our urban trees are looking stressed. Worse is the fact that our urban tree canopy is actually declining, due to bad urban planning of new suburbs with no space for canopy trees coupled with tree loss from subdivisions or apartment builds. Our state governments talk about this in their planning documents, but efforts to correct the problem don’t seem to be working.

What happens in hot summers with fewer trees? More air conditioner use, sending energy demand and electricity bills soaring.

We can hope this summer acts as a wake up call about the importance of healthy urban trees as we head into ever-hotter years.

Read more:
Here are 5 practical ways trees can help us survive climate change

What can you do for your trees?

It’s worth looking after your own trees in anticipation of the tough summer ahead.

As soils are already drying out, keep up the moisture and add quality mulch under trees to a good depth.

The longer you can keep them healthy and stress free, the more likely trees are to be able to cope with the summer stress and insect attacks.

If water restrictions are imposed in your town or city, it’s likely irrigating trees and gardens will be the first activity restricted.

If your plants have been kept stress free as long as possible, they are more likely to survive.

Read more:
We need urban trees more than ever – here’s how to save them from extreme heat

An irony here is that if trees are water-stressed, many species will start to defoliate by shedding leaves. That means we lose both shade and transpirational cooling when we could use them most.

Councils, state governments and water authorities face a dilemma in these situations. Save the water for human use? Or keep urban trees alive and reduce the risk of heat illness and death?

Time to value our urban trees

What this summer will show is the need for local and state governments to place greater value on their urban forests and canopy cover.

In many places, urban canopy cover is dropping by about 1-1.5% per year. Many tree removals are thoughtless and unnecessary.

Sometimes, these losses provoke outcry. Adelaide, for instance, has been losing an estimated 75,000 trees a year in recent years. That prompted a parliamentary inquiry into how to better protect urban forests.

For things to change for the better, our local governments need the ability to protect mature trees in the front and back yards of developed sites and to set out minimum areas of green space and numbers of canopy trees for new developments.

In most states, giving councils these powers would require changes to state planning laws. But without them, the urban forest and canopy cover of most major cities, regional centres and country towns will continue to decline.

With proper planning, we can have both new housing and canopy trees. If we simply aim to maximise housing, our towns and suburbs will be economically and environmentally unsustainable.

So when you see sick trees on our streets this spring, see them as a symptom. We need to value them. We would most certainly notice if they were gone.

Read more:
Urban patchwork is losing its green, making our cities and all who live in them vulnerable

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

– ref. Early heat and insect strike are stressing urban trees – even as canopy cover drops – https://theconversation.com/early-heat-and-insect-strike-are-stressing-urban-trees-even-as-canopy-cover-drops-215062

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Tapsell, Research Officer, University of Sydney

I can go to a hearing by Zoom or by phone, I absolutely love it – otherwise, I’d be travelling down to Sydney – Valerie, focus group

Overwhelmingly, Australian lawyers feel positive about the technological changes sweeping through their industry, and women more than men.

Whether it’s working from home or using artificial intelligence to automate routine taxes, the hundreds of lawyers we have surveyed for a new report on gender and the future of the law describe the changes as largely beneficial and in some ways liberating.

But there’s a downside too, and it might hit women more than men.

Our study, conducted as part of the University of Sydney’s Gender Equality in Working Life research initiative, was carried out through in-depth interviews with 33 senior lawyers, an online survey of 766 practising solicitors in NSW, and seven online focus groups with 30 early and mid-career lawyers.

Over the past ten years the number of women entering the profession as solicitors has climbed 67% and the number of men only 26%. Women now constitute a majority of solicitors in every Australian state and territory.

But they are underrepresented in senior leadership roles and in private practice where the dominant model of full-time work is characterised by ultra-long hours and disadvantages workers with caring responsibilities.

What lawyers told us about automation

The lawyers we spoke to talked about how technology was “bifurcating”, “segmenting” or “dividing” the industry into lower-value work that could be easily automated, and higher-value, tailored advice.

Some thought this would would be largely beneficial, liberating them from “grunt work” and allowing them to spend more time on meaningful, higher-value work.

Anything that can be repeated easily, if it’s what I call low-end repetitive work, it can be done essentially by technology, so lawyers have to move up the value chain – Lynne

But others expressed concern about the impact of automation and artificial intelligence on gender equality, noting the concentration of women in the specialisations most likely to be affected.

The legal profession is still very much about women being in the bottom end of the profession, so I think AI, if there is going to be a detrimental impact of AI, it’s going to be on the bottom end, and that’s where the majority of women are – Carrie

Several pointed to the emergence of new types of specialised legal services firms that offered greater flexibility over hours without the “harassment, bullying and ridiculous pressures and ridiculous hours” found in big firms.

Others were concerned about an “Uberisation” of legal careers.

“I guess it brings with it a precariousness,” said one. “Particularly if it means more and more firms shed full-time stable positions.”

Overall, respondents were positive about the automation of legal tasks, women more so than men (49% positive and 20% negative compared to 44% positive and 24% negative).

Promotion pathways at risk

Junior lawyers have traditionally engaged in a post-graduation “apprenticeship”, where basic legal skills are developed through the sort of high-volume, routine legal work now under threat.

This means automation presents two types of risks for female lawyers.

One is the automation of many of the lower-value legal services where women lawyers have historically been over-concentrated.

The other is a disruption to traditional training pathways, which may affect the progression of women into the senior, higher paying roles in which they are underrepresented.

Read more:
The High Court of Australia has a majority of women justices for the first time. Here’s why that matters

What lawyers told us about remote work

From online courts to hybrid and remote working arrangements, focus group participants told us that they have revelled in the “luxuries of technology” that have become available since the pandemic.

One of them valued working from home because

Not only does it reduce your overheads to nothing, but clients have been better trained now thanks to the pandemic, to accept legal advice over Zoom or Teams – Eleanor

But others said working from home had increased the intensity of their workload (62% of females compared to 49% of males), and increased their working hours (67% of females compared to 50% of males).

And there was concern that new working arrangements had created the expectation they had to be “constantly online”.

It would be a very common experience to have gotten an email at like 10 o’clock at night from somebody more senior than you, and then feeling that pressure that you’ve got to respond immediately – Melinda

Given that the home is often considered a “safe space” for lawyers due to the adversarial or distressing nature of their work, several talked of the struggle to draw a line between work and personal life.

I’m not doing this at home. You can’t call me after this hour. I’m taking emails off my phone because you’ve already taken my safe space. You can’t have all of me – Christina

In the absence of industry guidance in relation to how to handle tech-enabled work intensification, many in our focus groups reported needing to exercise “discipline”.

Those who found that hard identified it as an area for personal development or “something I need to work on”.

Several said boundaries had to come “from the top”, with senior colleagues leading by example and adopting reasonable work habits and working hours.

What lawyers want from their careers is changing, all the more so as the profession becomes majority female. Our focus groups told us they are increasingly seeing success as a career that’s sustainable, offering them meaning and work-life balance.

If technologies can be harnessed in ways that achieve that, they’re all for them.

Note: to preserve anonymity, pseudonyms were assigned to all interviewees and focus group participants in this research project.

Amy Tapsell receives funding from the Australian Research Council (LP190100966).

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

– ref. Technology is changing the lives of female lawyers, in ways that are bad as well as good – https://theconversation.com/technology-is-changing-the-lives-of-female-lawyers-in-ways-that-are-bad-as-well-as-good-213984