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

As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan now includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversation politics team.

This week Michelle and politics + society editor Amanda Dunn talk about the government’s proposal for a new east coast submarine base and the politics of that in an election Scott Morrison wants to frame around national security.

They also discuss the blame fall-out from the devastating floods, and the latest Essential poll finding that nearly half the electorate (48%) think it’s “time to give someone else a go” at governing federally.

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. Word from The Hill: Subs, floods and people saying it’s ‘time to give someone else a go’ – https://theconversation.com/word-from-the-hill-subs-floods-and-people-saying-its-time-to-give-someone-else-a-go-178779

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicky Morrison, Professor of Planning, Western Sydney University

Thousands of people in south-western Sydney have been ordered to evacuate as extreme rain pummels the region and floodwaters rise rapidly. The downpour is expected to continue for days.

This region, particularly Western Sydney, is no stranger to climate-related disasters. Rain is falling on catchments already sodden from severe floods in March last year. Western Sydney is also vulnerable to extreme heat, and is 8-10℃ hotter than east Sydney during heatwaves.

Local councils are the level of government closest to communities and help determine how well regions withstand disasters like floods. But are councils prepared for the more frequent and intense disasters that climate change brings?

According to our new research on eight Western Sydney councils, the answer is no. We find it’s not easy to deliver action on the ground as these councils try to balance competing priorities in urban development, with limited resources and stretched budgets.

Balancing responsibilities

When disasters such as floods strike, state and territory governments can declare a state of emergency and create evacuation orders.

But local councils are in a central position to increase community resilience and communicate directly with locals. This includes flood mapping, restricting certain developments near high-risk areas, and making evacuation routes known to residents.

Clearly distinguishing these responsibilities [is crucial for] Western Sydney, which is one of Australia’s fastest growing regionsand feels the destructive impacts of climate change intensely.

Read more:
Western Sydney will swelter through 46 days per year over 35°C by 2090, unless emissions drop significantly

Western Sydney councils are currently dealing with back-to-back disasters in a continual crisis management cycle. At the same time, they’re tasked with pushing forward the NSW government’s housing and infrastructure development targets, which includes building almost 185,000 houses between 2016 and 2036.

Coupled with a lack of staff and funding, do they really have the capacity to cope with all this?

What we found

We analysed 150 local government policies and planning documents, as well as local health district strategies. We also conducted 22 stakeholder interviews across the eight Western Sydney councils.

The good news is each council recognises the importance of addressing climate risk, and demonstrates a strong commitment to implementing sustainability, climate and resilience strategies. While action to mitigate climate change impacts on health and well-being is happening, the strategies are at very early stages.

According to our interviews, there’s a strong desire to do more, and all councils agree emergency preparedness and recovery work must take priority. While a NSW resilience program aims to address this, it doesn’t necessarily align with the unique risks each local community faces.

Read more:
The east coast rain seems endless. Where on Earth is all the water coming from?

Acting quickly to move from planning to implementing strategies – such as redesigning buildings to match climate predictions – just isn’t in their capacity. And indeed, councils could not achieve this in time to mitigate the next climate crisis event.

Despite councils receiving money from the NSW government’s disaster assistance funding, they can struggle to pay for recovery from events like flooding. It can take weeks, months, or even years to get local communities back on their feet.

As the councils explained to us, this means already limited funds get pulled away from other work, such as long-term sustainability goals, or simply important day-to-day provisions.

Hawkesbury, Fairfield and Penrith city councils are especially challenged. They experienced the worst flooding in 50 years last March and now face even greater flood alert warnings at Hawkesbury-Nepean River.

State government undermines local decisions

Despite these difficulties, councils consistently told us that the biggest barrier to delivering sustainable, resilient, climate-ready development across Western Sydney was NSW state planning directives.

In the planning system, state policies override local plans and policies. This means local councils often struggle to implement their own strategies.

The result is that pressure from the state government to build more housing developments can undermine local councils’ policies to, for instance, preserve agricultural land and open spaces – measures that protect against flooding.

Read more:
‘The sad reality is many don’t survive’: how floods affect wildlife, and how you can help them

Indeed, this year’s floods have once again shown how problematic pro-growth agendas and “development for development’s sake” can be.

The recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it clear flooding will increase in scale and frequency, and over-development (part of a problem termed “maladaptation”) will exacerbate the damage it inflicts.

So what needs to change? Our research presents a clear roadmap for local and state government agencies to better prepare.

This includes greater leadership and consistency from the state government, more collaboration between councils and in different levels of government, more capacity-building and more targeted funding.

What’s planned and built today must guarantee the safety, health and well-being of existing and new communities. Giving councils proper resources will help more of us survive in an uncertain future.

Nicky Morrison undertook the study for Western Sydney Health Alliance, with funding from NSW Government and Local Government NSW ‘Increasing resilience to climate change’ grants. She is on the Executive Committee of Healthy Urban Collaboratory, part of Sydney Partnership for Health Education, Research and Enterprise, and the Strategic Advisory Committee of James Martin Institute for Public Policy. Nicky gratefully acknowledges the contributions of Erica McIntyre and Nathan Reynolds, WSU research assistants, on this research project.

Patrick Harris receives funding from NHMRC, ARC, and NSW Government. His position is jointly funded by UNSW and South Western Sydney Local Health District. He is the president of the NSW Branch of the Public Health Association of Australia.

– ref. Under-resourced and undermined: as floods hit south-west Sydney, our research shows councils aren’t prepared – https://theconversation.com/under-resourced-and-undermined-as-floods-hit-south-west-sydney-our-research-shows-councils-arent-prepared-178293

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

The West is arraying financial weapons never deployed before against a country of Russia’s size, forsaking some of the principles that have defined it.

Part of what has defined the West – and most of what has been the world’s engine of prosperity for the past century and a half – has been the free flow of goods across borders, a working banking system, and property rights.

There’s been an implicit understanding that no sizeable nation (Russia’s economy is about the size of Australia’s) would be denied access to these things. Otherwise the financial system wouldn’t be the financial system.

That seems to have been the understanding of Russian President Vladimir Putin. But ten days ago, the West did the unthinkable, and the global financial system may never be the same again.

Russia’s vast war chest

Over the seven years since Putin last invaded Ukraine (and annexed Crimea) in 2014, Russia’s central bank has almost doubled its holdings of foreign currency and foreign bonds and gold, building up a reserve of US$630 billion at a considerable cost to the living standards of ordinary Russians.

It was a war chest that would enable Russia to continue to buy things that could only be bought in foreign currency, even if customers overseas refused to trade with it and supply it with that currency. It was Russia’s insurance policy.

Read more:
‘Just short of nuclear’: these sanctions will cripple Russia’s economy

And although it could have been stored in Russia, much of it was kept in banks in the UK, Western Europe and the US, for easy access when it was needed to buy things on those markets.

Whatever his other suspicions of the West, Putin seemed to think its financial system wouldn’t be turned off – not to a nation of Russia’s size.

China will learn from Russia’s mistake

On February 27 the West froze the assets and travel of named oligarchs and Russian officials, as was expected.

Also, and less expected, it stopped named Russian banks from accessing the messaging system used to transfer money across borders, ensuring they were “disconnected from the international financial system”.

And, much less expected, it froze the reserves of Russia’s central bank stored in France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the US – the hundreds of billions of savings legitimately placed in foreign banks for safekeeping.

Read more:
US-EU sanctions will pummel the Russian economy – two experts explain why they are likely to stick and sting

That action broke the bond of trust that makes a bank a bank. And while effective – Russia can’t get access to hundreds of billions of foreign dollars it has painstakingly built up to buy supplies and support the ruble on currency markets – it can only be done at this scale once.

China will have taken note and won’t be entrusting any more foreign assets to banks in France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US than it can afford to lose.

Freezing foreign reserves has been done before – but only to the less powerful nations like Iran, Afghanistan and Venezuela. This is the first time it’s ever been done to a member of the G20 or the UN Security Council.

The battle of the fridge vs the TV

The ruble has collapsed 40%. Denied access to the foreign currency it would need to support the ruble in the market, Russia’s central bank has attempted to stem the tide by more than doubling its key interest rate, lifting it from 9.5% to 20%.

The ruble falls off a cliff

Russia has blocked Russians from sending money abroad, stopped paying foreigners interest payments on government debt and required every Russian firm earning dollars to hand over 80% of them in exchange for rubles.

For ordinary Russians, there’s a “battle of the fridge versus the television”: the stark contrast between the reality of daily life against the claims of state media.

Until recently, Russian TV wasn’t even using the word “war” (although it has started). The television has been telling Russians things are normal.

But Russians’ fridges, ATMs, and their blocked Visa, Mastercard and ApplePay accounts are all telling them something else.

From buying a washing machine to getting a mortgage, an awful lot is suddenly expensive or unavailable. But official polls (for what they are worth) show public support for the “special military operation”. Television has been using the realities of shortages and price increases to attack the West for becoming anti-Russian.

Hitting Russia’s elite and military where it hurts

Whatever ordinary Russians actually think about the war, the impact of the West’s unprecedented sanctions on the Russian elite is likely to matter more. No longer able to travel aboard, access their offshore savings or pay the school fees of their children abroad, the oligarchs have at least the potential to exert influence.

The final way in which the financial embargo might succeed is by starving Russia of foreign exchange to the point where it can’t buy spare parts for its military or the computer chips and other materials needed to make those parts.

Read more:
US-EU sanctions will pummel the Russian economy – two experts explain why they are likely to stick and sting

There’s every chance none of these will work quickly, every chance they will further impoverish Russians, and every chance that, if Russia subjugates Ukraine, the West will find the sanctions impossible withdraw without losing face.

The global financial system changed when the West did the barely thinkable on February 27. It’s hard to see a way back.

Peter Martin 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. Putin’s biggest mistake of the Ukraine war? Trusting the Western financial system – https://theconversation.com/putins-biggest-mistake-of-the-ukraine-war-trusting-the-western-financial-system-178635

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Maguire, Associate Professor in Human Rights and International Law, University of Newcastle

As Ukraine scrambles to defend itself from Russia’s illegal invasion, men aged 18 to 60 have been banned from leaving the country.

The declaration of martial law in Ukraine gives the government power to enact this ban, but it is not in keeping with human rights or humanitarian norms.

So, what is actually happening in Ukraine and what does the law say?

What the Ukrainian government says

When Russia invaded last month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on Ukrainian civilians to defend their country.

As the Ukrainian interior ministry also posted on Telegram:

Today is the moment when every Ukrainian who can protect his home must take up arms. Not just to help our soldiers, but to cleanse Ukraine of the enemy once and for all.

But if you are a man between 18 and 60, this call to arms may seem more like a compulsory requirement. As Ukraine’s border guard service explains, the ban on adult men leaving is aimed at guaranteeing “Ukraine’s defence and the organisation of timely mobilisation’”.

What does self-defence look like?

Given the illegality of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is entitled to defend itself under the United Nations Charter. Of course, a country will rely on all available military resources to exercise this right of self-defence.

Ukraine already has a sizeable army, with 200,000 active personnel and 300,000 reservists, as well as paramilitary forces who are now being mobilised under the general mobilisation decree.

But Ukraine’s military resources pale in comparison to Russia’s modern, professional army built up through massive investment over the past decade. It has about 900,000 active personnel and about two million reservists.

Given the obvious imbalance, it is not surprising Ukraine is now desperate to mobilise every eligible individual. But there is an important distinction between people who are conscripted into military service and people who are banned from leaving, but not then formally mobilised or equipped to fight.

Conscientious objection

With their country facing armed attack by a major military power with the aim of overthrowing their government, some Ukrainians have felt compelled to stay and potentially fight.

Read more:
How the Russian military remade itself into a modern, efficient and deadly fighting machine

Some have enlisted in the wake of Russia’s invasion. These brand new soldiers have been called both conscripts and volunteers.

Others have felt compelled to leave. The very nature of the conflict puts civilians at risk – it is playing out in densely populated cities, through shelling and aerial bombardment. Already more than one million people have fled.

However, for men aged 18 to 60, the ban on leaving Ukraine means they have no choice to flee the attack and the risks they face as civilians in the theatre of war.

A New York Times podcast tells the story of an animator named Tyhran, who unsuccessfully tried to cross the border into Poland.

I can’t imagine myself doing military stuff […] I have no experience in it. I’m afraid of holding a gun […] I cannot imagine myself holding a gun.

Tyhran says he was shamed at the border by guards and others seeking to cross, but may try again to cross illegally.

They are bombing and people are dying. Everyone is running […] They are not going to stop. They just want to destroy.

Meanwhile, there are reports LGBTQI+ Ukrainians are terrified of being targeted, given Russia’s program of discrimination against gay and transgender people in Russia.

What international law says

The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion or belief. Although it does not specifically guarantee a right to conscientious objection to military service, the UN Human Rights Committee has confirmed this right derives from the protection under the convention.

This means that if a person’s conscience, religion or beliefs conflict with an obligation to use lethal force against other people, their right to conscientious objection to military service must be protected.

Some human rights can be suspended or limited during a public emergency. But the right to freedom of conscience is specifically excluded from this category.

What should Ukraine do?

The government of Ukraine should cancel its ban on men leaving the country. To maintain it will violate the freedom of conscience of any man who wishes to flee due to a conscientious objection to killing others.

In relation to LGBTQI+ people, the ban could also be regarded as preventing people with a well founded fear of persecution from fleeing to seek refuge outside Ukraine.

Read more:
Civilians are being killed in Ukraine. So, why is investigating war crimes so difficult?

More broadly, repealing the departure ban would protect Ukraine from allegations it is failing to protect civilians, as required by international humanitarian law. It is one thing to conscript men into military service, providing training and appropriate equipment (although, even in that case, a right to conscientious objection must be respected).

It is another thing entirely to prevent civilians from escaping a war zone.

The international context

Ukraine must also consider how its actions reflect on parallel efforts to hold Russia accountable for its illegal aggression and potential violations of human rights.

For example, Ukraine has requested the International Court of Justice to intervene with the international law equivalent of an injunction against Russia. Ukraine alleges Russia is using false accusations of genocide to justify an illegal invasion that is, in turn, inflicting human rights violations on the people of Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor has initiated an investigation of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The prosecutor has identified a reasonable basis to believe that alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity are underway in Ukraine.

In this context, Ukraine must remain mindful of the legality of its own practice. The ban on men leaving Ukraine ought to be lifted, because it is legally and ethically wrong to force civilians to stay in harm’s way when they have the opportunity and desire to escape.

Amy Maguire 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 banning men from leaving Ukraine violates their human rights – https://theconversation.com/why-banning-men-from-leaving-ukraine-violates-their-human-rights-178411

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Serena Yu, Associate Professor, University of Technology Sydney

Women in Australia are more likely to have an unplanned caesarean birth if they give birth in a private hospital rather than a public hospital – independent of their health status during pregnancy or their birth plans. Our recent study showed an unplanned caesarean birth was 4.2% more likely in a private hospital compared with a public hospital. For first-time mums, it was 7.7% more likely.

Many studies have pointed to a link between private obstetric care and higher rates of caesarean births. But it’s been difficult to tease out the effects of women who may need or want a caesarean birth. We can’t look to the gold standard of evidence in the form of a randomised trial, because it would be unfeasible and unethical to randomly assign women to public and private care.

Instead, in this study we focused on a large data set of over 289,000 births in NSW between 2007 and 2012, and used a method developed to approximate a randomised trial. Two-thirds of women received public care, while 27% gave birth in a private hospital (7% had a private obstetrician in a public hospital). Women in our study had low risk pregnancies right up to the start of labour and did not plan to have a caesarean. This approach took out the effect of maternal choice and health needs, leaving only the impact of care received: private or public.

Read more:
How to manage pain during childbirth: what the research says

Two different health systems

Caesarean birth is a necessary and life-saving surgery when a clinical need exists. However, caesarean birth has also been linked with a range of short and long term adverse child health outcomes, such as respiratory infection, eczema and metabolic disorder. So unnecessary caesarean births may involve increased risk without clear benefit.

In Australia, 35% of all babies were born via caesarean birth in 2017. Of the surgeries performed before the pregnancy was full term, over 40% were without a medical reason. Some of this is due to maternal choice, but international studies have shown that convenience and payment to the doctor or hospital also matter.

In Australia, the way hospitals and providers are paid could be an important factor in birth outcomes. Private doctors and hospitals are employed and paid differently from their public counterparts, so they face different incentives to intervene during labour and childbirth.

Private obstetricians are paid on a fee-for-service basis to attend the birth. By contrast, publicly appointed obstetric and midwifery staff are paid on a salary basis for agreed hours. This means private obstetricians receive more income, the more births they can attend. In some cases, caesarean birth may also be seen as a method of risk management given the uncertainty of prolonged labour.

Hospitals also receive different payment based on whether a birth was caesarean or vaginal, reflecting the relative complexity of caesarean birth. Caesarean birth is a high-cost procedure: an average A$11,782 charge for caesarean birth, compared to A$8,388 for a vaginal birth in a private hospital. In our study, there were more than 3,200 “extra” caesarean births in private hospitals, that is, births that would have been vaginal births in the public system.

Private choices, caesarean outcomes

In Australia, women who give birth in a public hospital have care provided by appointed midwives and obstetricians. If they have the resources, some women may decide to pay for care from a private obstetrician of their choice, either at a private or a public hospital (with reimbursement from their private health insurer). For women who wish to schedule a caesarean birth without health reasons – as a matter of convenience or because they are nervous about vaginal birth – private care is often the only option.

Our research is the first to measure the impact on the type of birth of having a private obstetrician in a public hospital, as well as the impact of giving birth in a private hospital.

We found a smaller effect of having a private obstetrician in a public hospital, which raised the probability of caesarean birth by 2.1%. This could be due to the influence of both the culture in a less-interventionist birth unit led by midwives, as well as the dominance of appointed staff, in public hospitals.

By contrast, we found a larger increase of 4.2% for women who gave birth in private hospitals. Aside from possible payment and convenience incentives, this could also be due to the more interventionist culture in private hospitals. Again, these increases in the likelihood of a caesarean birth were independent of health need at the onset of labour or prior birthing intention. While many caesarean births may occur due to complications during labour, there is no evidence to suggest these complications are more common in private hospitals.

Read more:
Vaginal birth after caesarean increases the risk of serious perineal tear by 20%, our large-scale review shows

Valuing autonomy

Our results have meaningful implications for women choosing their antenatal and birth care, as well as the health system supporting them. Women value their autonomy and participation in the decision-making process when it comes to labour and childbirth.

Women may choose a private obstetrician for reasons of continuity of care or because of a recommendation. They may prefer the amenities in a private hospital. Our study adds to a body of evidence about the likelihood of surgical intervention in different settings. Women should seek information about their care choices and advocate for their preferences around intervention with their midwife or doctor.

Unnecessary caesarean births mean we are not using scarce health system resources in the best way. This research calls for a rethink of the Australian private health insurance system, which supports this diversion of funding and specialists towards unnecessary care that could carry increased risks for birthing mother and child.

Serena Yu receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council which supported this research. She also currently receives funding from the Medical Research Future Fund.

Caroline Homer receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council which supported this research. She is a Life Member of the Australian College of Midwives and the immediate Past President.

Denzil G Fiebig receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council which supported this research. He also currently receives funding from the Medical Research Future Fund.

Rosalie Viney receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council that supported this research.

Vanessa Scarf receives National Health and Medical Research Council which supported this research. She works as a midwife in a hospital on a casual basis. She also worked on the NHMRC funded Birthplace in Australia Study as the Project Coordinator.

– ref. Private obstetric care increases the chance of caesarean birth, regardless of health needs and wishes – https://theconversation.com/private-obstetric-care-increases-the-chance-of-caesarean-birth-regardless-of-health-needs-and-wishes-178032

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacob C. Blokland, Vertebrate Palaeontology PhD Candidate and Casual Academic, Flinders University

What is the largest penguin that ever lived? – Casey, age 6, Perth

Hi Casey, thanks for this great question!

Today the largest living penguin is the emperor penguin, which lives in Antarctica and is about one metre tall. The appropriately named little penguin is the smallest, standing only about as high as a ruler.

But penguins have swum in Earth’s oceans for more than 62 million years – and they were not always these sizes. Long before humans walked the Earth, some penguins would have stood as tall as a grown-up person.

Diving in

To understand how penguins once got so big, we need to go back to the very first ones.

The closest relatives of penguins today can actually fly through the air. These include petrels and the soaring albatrosses.

While waddling penguins might seem quite different to these seabirds, they’re quite alike in a number of ways. They share similarities in their skeletons, and both share distant relatives (great, great grandparents going back millions of years) that flew in the air.

Penguins can’t fly in the air anymore. Instead, they “fly” through the water — and doing both well isn’t an option.

For birds, water is a lot harder to fly through than air. But penguins have certain qualities that allow them to do this.

The wings of penguins are flippers. These are great for moving underwater, but not very helpful for flying above it. Their heavy bodies help them dive further and deeper so they can hunt for food. But being heavier makes flying in the air difficult.

Read more:
Curious Kids: do penguins fly underwater?

While penguins’ distant relatives were small seabirds, over many years they gave up flight to become professional swimmers. The bigger they were, and the stronger their bones, the better they could dive.

Because penguins have heavier and stronger bones than air-flying birds, this means their bones are less likely to break. It also means we are more likely to find them as fossils (what’s left behind from ancient life) long after they die.

In fact, the bones of one kind of giant penguin (Kairuku waewaeroa) were discovered by school children.

Room to grow

The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs (except birds!) 66 million years ago gave the distant relatives of penguins the perfect chance to go swimming.

Many of the animals that would have eaten them in the sea were gone, which meant they could go underwater without worrying about being eaten.

The oldest penguin bones we have belonged to birds that lived only a few million years after the asteroid hit, and come from Aotearoa, or New Zealand. These are similar to the bones of today’s penguins, so we think penguins probably stopped flying in the air some time soon after the asteroid event.

Read more:
Happy 6ft: ancient penguins were as tall as people. We’ve discovered the species that started the downsizing trend

Some of these first penguins were enormous. One was the gigantic Kumimanu biceae, which was probably 1.7 metres tall (the same size as many human adults).

Kumimanu may have been one of the largest penguins ever. It probably weighed 100kg, whereas the emperor penguin weighs less than half of that.

While many giant penguins lived in the millions of years after Kumimanu, the only penguin that may have been larger was the huge Palaeeudyptes klekowskii, which swam off the coast of Antarctica more than 34 million years ago. This penguin may have been two metres tall and weighed 115kg!.

As for what happened to giant penguins, they vanished about 15 million years ago and no one really knows why. There are still many questions, but with more fossil discoveries, we might find some answers!

Jacob C. Blokland receives funding from The Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

– ref. Curious Kids: what is the largest penguin that ever lived? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-what-is-the-largest-penguin-that-ever-lived-178036

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan L. Zecher, Research fellow, Australian Catholic University

There is a famous tale within Russian Orthodox Christianity that goes like this:

In the 16th century, Ivan IV – the Terrible, arguably the first Tsar of Russia – sought to extend his power and sent men to ravage those towns that had not submitted to him. At that time, Basil, a “fool for Christ”, came and offered him a gift of raw meat. It was Great Lent, the time when Christians fast from meat and dairy foods in preparation for Good Friday and Easter, and Ivan said that as an Orthodox Christian he would not eat meat. Basil responded: you drink the blood of humans, why not eat meat?

Ivan was shocked and repented his violence, and called off those attacks.

A house divided

When it comes to Russian ambitions, not much has changed since Ivan’s days, except the range and power of the weapons. But the current war has an important religious dimension, because both sides of the conflict are not merely Christian, they are members of the same church, sharing a thousand years of religious history.

Today, 71% of Russians and 78% of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox Christians. In fact, until 2019, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was part of the Moscow Patriarchate (MP), and many parishes remain there (UOC-MP), in conflict with a self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine (UCO).

Moreover, on both sides, Orthodox Christianity is deeply woven into political life. Priests bless Kalashnikovs and tanks, and Russian cathedrals are monuments to imperial ambition.

Likewise, a majority of both Ukrainians and Russians believe that being Orthodox is necessary to being Ukrainian or Russian, and both populations expect their religious leaders to play a role in political, even military, actions. In this world, the statements and actions of Orthodox leaders will have a profound effect on the war.

So how have Orthodox leaders responded to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?

A fractured and fractious response

Unlike the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church is divided into 17 self-governing jurisdictions, which together care for a global population in the hundreds of millions.

In this complicated situation, churches’ responses have ranged from justification to condemnation of the war, and are all marked by prayers for peace and mercy.

Patriarch Kirill of Moscow confined his official remarks to asking both sides to “avoid civilian casualties” while later preaching the war in sermons. His official request seems not to have influenced Russian tactics.

Epifaniy and Onufriy, rival leaders of Orthodox Christians in Ukraine, issued statements condemning the invasion. The latter, normally loyal to the Moscow patriarchate, called this a “fratricidal war”“. He even likened it to the biblical story of Cain, who killed his brother Abel: the subtext is that Ukraine is the innocent Abel. It is quite possible UOC-MP parishes, alienated by Russia’s invasion and already refusing to commemorate their patriarch, Kyrill, will leave Moscow and join the self- determining Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

The strongest condemnation comes from the Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew, in Constantinople (Istanbul), a long-time opponent of the Moscow patriarchate. He not only condemns the war as an unprovoked invasion, but calls it a “violation of human rights and the brutal violence against our fellow human beings”.

Georgia and Finland, which have experienced Russian aggression, both military and ecclesiastical, have condemned the invasion. Antioch (in Damascus, Syria) offers only its hopes for peace and unity. Serbia and Bulgaria remain supportive of the Russian advance.

Church leaders’ statements reflect their existing loyalty, fear, or dislike of Moscow – as both military and ecclesiastical power. Amid these varied responses, this war will likely redraw maps of Church jurisdictions, foster greater sympathy for Ukrainian self-determination, and lead to a global loss of respect for the MP.
But Orthodox tradition itself offers resources for a more profound response.

A voice of conscience

Orthodox Churches recently celebrated Forgiveness Sunday. The day begins Great Lent, a time when the Church’s hymns call not just for dietary fasting, but for an end to injustice, the release of the oppressed and, above all, repentance. Orthodox Christianity can, and should, be the voice of conscience calling Russian leaders to repentance, which amounts to an end to the invasion.

Patriarch Kirill used Forgiveness Sunday to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a defence against anti-Christian values. The mental acrobatics required for his sermon are difficult to fathom.

On the other hand, hundreds of Russian Orthodox clerics, some of them war veterans themselves, have signed an open letter calling for an immediate end to Russia’s war. These clerics speak from within Russian orthodoxy as both organisation and spiritual tradition.

Their rejection of war shows orthodoxy’s key tenets of repentance and sacrificial love. These virtues constitute the core of Orthodox Christian ethics, and are particularly emphasised during this time of Great Lent.

Of course, they’re dangerous virtues when exercised against authoritarian rulers like Putin, but it is incumbent on church leaders and all Orthodox Christians to demand, and exemplify, both.

And what of Ivan the Terrible?

His repentance was fleeting, and he continued waging war throughout his life. To commemorate his military victories in Kazan, he commissioned the Pokrovsky Cathedral in Moscow. It was intended as another monument to Russian imperial glory.

But we know it by the name of that Russian Orthodox saint who demanded repentance of Ivan: St Basil’s.

Jonathan L. Zecher is a member of the Antiochian Orthodox Church.

– ref. How the Ukraine war is dividing Orthodox Christians – https://theconversation.com/how-the-ukraine-war-is-dividing-orthodox-christians-178319

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Peterson, Associate Professor, Auckland University of Technology

Review: The Photo Box, directed by Mish Grigor, Vitalstatitix and Brink Productions for Adelaide Festival

Emma Beech’s The Photo Box reminds us why we gather in small theatres to listen to a single performer tell us stories about their life.

In The Photo Box, Beech mines the personal, bringing the audience along for a ride that is delightful, moving and, at times, hilarious.

Beech is quite a presence: charming, open, disarming, and a fluid mover with a self-deprecating sense of humour.

The starting point for the work, she tells us early on, was when her father “started preparing for death” 24 years ago and curated family photos into nine boxes.

Aided by clever production and projection design (Meg Wilson and Chris Petridis), Beech brings these photographs to life, weaving stories of family, motherhood and what it feels like to come from a place many would regard as a backwater.

Read more:
‘Theatre of the real’: how artists at Perth Fringe World are stripping down to reveal their vulnerabilities

Rough and real

Six screens of various height and sizes suggest family photo frames. Sitting on overhead tracks, Beech moves them into various positions as the projections on the screens flow fluidly and masterfully with the narrative.

Her hometown, Barmera on Lake Bonney in South Australia’s Riverlands is character in the story: the land on which her family’s stories are written.

“I always had the feeling that Barmera was a bit more shit than most places and that you were a bit shit for coming from there”, she says.

The youngest of nine children in a Catholic family, Beech pulls no punches when in comes to the town, her family or her personal life. Far from celebrating the folksy friendliness of small-town life, Beech’s Barmera is as rough and real as her storytelling.

By the time she came along as number nine, her mother Betty had spent virtually all her 20s and 30s producing children.

Answering the question of why, Betty’s response is simply: “We were Catholic of course. That’s what we did.”

Emotional logic

Originally, the autobiography unfolds in a chronological fashion, with photos of the young Emma moving through life’s milestones. The pattern is quickly upended.

Chronology is replaced by an emotional and psychological logic that moves and slices across time, capturing moments of revelation.

Beech’s stories are not just about herself: they are also about family members and partners. One story focuses on her brother Pete, the one who “stayed behind”, details of Pete’s life peppered throughout the larger storytelling arc.

We learn Pete runs the local hardware store; he can be short and gruff; he loves music and his mates; he’s not good at being alone.

Later, Beech tells us a story of walking down North Terrace one day and seeing a “sad looking man” outside the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Pete’s wife was in hospital following a life-threatening brain aneurysm. As Beech approaches the sad man, she realises it is her brother, attended by his mates who stayed in the city for the 17 days his wife was in a coma.

Another story tells of the year she brought her Danish boyfriend to Barmera for a raucous and heavy-drinking family Christmas. The brothers-in-law, “the least respected members of the family”, are put in charge of cooking the meat, which they burn.

The relationship with the Dane didn’t survive Christmas.

Intimate and honest

Woven into The Photo Box are three intimate short films (filmmaker Shalom Almond with cinematographer Helen Carter), looking at Beech’s brother Pete in his home bar, her father in his comfy chair listening to André Rieu on his headphones, and her mother Betty, a devoted member of the Catholic Women’s League, cleaning the local church.

These films add a deeply textured experiential dimension to the story telling.

In her early 40s, Betty was a mother of nine. In her early 40s, Beech is the mother of triplets. This bond of motherhood brings the show toward its conclusion.

Earlier in the production, we learnt Betty has been secretly learning Italian and long dreamt of travelling to Italy. Now Betty looks into the camera toward the audience and says, “Ciao sono Betty” (I am Betty).

It is a beautiful, intimate moment that lingers.

For a solo autobiographical piece to fully engage that audience, it requires the intimate, honest qualities found in The Photo Box. Under the direction of Mish Grigor with dramaturgical contributions from Anne Thompson, this is a supremely local, intricately crafted and beautifully shaped work of theatre.

Season closed.

William Peterson 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. Emma Beech’s The Photo Box is an intimate and honest view of a life – https://theconversation.com/emma-beechs-the-photo-box-is-an-intimate-and-honest-view-of-a-life-175329

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul X. McCarthy, Adjunct Professor, UNSW Sydney

Big data analysis has long supported major feats in physics and astronomy. But more recently we’ve seen it underpin breakthroughs in the social sciences and humanities.

Since the landmark paper Computational Social Science was published in 2009, a new generation of data analytics tools has given researchers insight into fundamental questions about how we communicate, who we are and what we value.

For instance, by analysing the relative frequency of certain words in historical texts, researchers can identify important changes in our use of language over time.

In some cases these shifts will be obvious, such as the use of archaic words being replaced by more contemporary words. But in other cases, they may reflect more subtle but widespread social and cultural changes. Below are some of the most influential data-centric discoveries from the past 10 years.

How we communicate

Over the past decade, a growing number of global open data sources have helped researchers reveal patterns in what we read, write and pay attention to. Google Books, Worldcat and Project Gutenberg are just some examples.

The release of the Google Books n-gram viewer in the early 2010s was a game changer on this front. Using the entire Google Books database, this tool shows you the relative frequency of a specific term or phrase as it has been used over hundreds of years. Researchers have used this data to explore the systematic suppression of the mention of Jewish painters, such as Marc Chagall, in German books during World War II.

Data analysis can also reveal patterns in the expression of human emotions over time. CSIRO’s We Feel tracks emotions in communities around the world. It does this by analysing the language people are using on social media in real time and mapping it out.

The tool can be used to determine the general mood over time (hour by hour, day by day) within particular cities and countries. Patterns in these data can then be explored in association with other information, such as weather, holidays and economic fluctuations.

Some research findings even claim to represent fundamental changes in humans’ social values, community sentiment and how we think (for example, the rise and fall of words associated with rationality such as “method”, “analysis” and “determine”).

Here are some key findings in this space:

• Cultural turnover is accelerating

  A Harvard University-led analysis of more than a century of data from millions of books provides evidence that society’s attention span for historical events is declining, as appetite for new material grows.

  In other words, we are forgetting the past faster. You can see this in the graph below, which tracks how often three specific years are mentioned across a vast range of literature through time. As time passes, the “half-life” of each year (the point at which it receives just half the attention it had at its peak) comes quicker.

  

• Human language diversity and biodiversity are correlated

  By mapping linguistic diversity and the diversity of animal species, researchers have shown these two worlds are correlated geographically – both increasing with temperature and proximity to the equator. So the closer to the equator you get, the more variation there is in spoken language and the greater the variety of species there is.

  The authors propose this is due to heat near the equator producing greater productivity and variety in plant life, which in turn provides more complex and interactive environments for both animals and humans alike – feeding into a cycle whereby “diversity begets more diversity”.

  

• There have been society-wide shifts in language use over the past century

  In an article published in December researchers used machine learning to show long-term, consistent changes in our use of language. Specifically, they reveal an inflection point in the 1980s where there is a shift towards more egocentric, emotional and supposedly less rational language.

  The authors suggest (although not without contest) this could signal the beginning of a “post-truth era”.

Who we are

In the field of psychology, the same data analytics tools have shown that people’s personalities can be measured using the “Big 5” traits, which largely become stable in adulthood.

This was possible thanks to extensive data sets such as HILDA in Australia, the German Socio-Economic Panel in Germany and the British Household Panel Survey in the UK.

Robust studies have also demonstrated that personality traits can be reliably and accurately predicted from a variety of data sources including voice recordings, mobile phone usage patterns and even portrait photographs.

In turn, there have been some remarkable associations found at scale between personality and:

• Elevation

  A study published in 2020, and based on more than three million people’s data, shows mountain-dwelling people tend to have different personality traits than those who live at sea level. They are generally more open to new experiences and more emotionally stable.

• Location

  Another earlier study shows people who live in the United States can be divided into three clear and measurable clusters of personality types, linked with associated geographic footprints. New Yorkers and Texans (who are in the same cluster) are more likely to be temperamental and uninhibited.

• Occupation

  In our own research published with colleagues in 2019, we analysed the personality features of people in more than 1,000 different occupations. We found people in the same role share similar traits. Scientists are more open to new ideas yet ready to argue, whereas tennis professionals tend to be friendly and outgoing.

  The research used machine learning to infer the personality features of more than 100,000 people, based on language used on social media.

Read more:
Robot career advisor: AI may soon be able to analyse your tweets to match you to a job

What we value

In economics, we’re seeing major research frontiers being opened up thanks to data analysis, including in:

• Network science

  When it comes to success, we’ve learnt that performance matters most when it can be measured (like in sport). But in other fields where it can’t be measured easily (like in the art world), networks matter most.

• Behavioural economics

  We can now see how we behave as individuals en masse, unveiling valuable clues for effective policy interventions around employment, taxation and education. For instance, one large-scale study revealed those quickest to re-enter the workforce displayed certain key behaviours. These included being an early riser and being geographically mobile (perhaps meaning they’re more willing to travel further, or relocate, for work).

Post-theory science?

Some have argued data science poses a fundamental challenge to the traditional sciences, with the emergence of “post-theory science”. This is the concept that machines are better at understanding the relationship between data and reality than the traditional scientific method of hypothesise, predict and test.

However, reports of the death of theory are perhaps greatly exaggerated. Data are not perfect. And data science based on incomplete or biased data has the potential to miss, or mask, important patterns in human activity. This can only be addressed by critical thinking and theory.

Read more:
Nobel economics prize winners showed economists how to turn the real world into their laboratory

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 we communicate, what we value – even who we are: 8 surprising things data science has revealed about us over the past decade – https://theconversation.com/how-we-communicate-what-we-value-even-who-we-are-8-surprising-things-data-science-has-revealed-about-us-over-the-past-decade-176891

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

Most of what we know about how COVID can affect the brain has come from studies of severe infection. In people with severe COVID, inflammatory cells from outside the brain can enter brain tissue and spread inflammation. There may be changes to blood vessels. Brain cells can even have changes similar to those seen in people with Alzheimer’s disease.

For the first time, a new study has investigated the effects of mild COVID (that is, infection that doesn’t lead to a hospital admission) on the brain. The findings may further explain some of the brain changes contributing to long COVID.

Read more:
We calculated the impact of ‘long COVID’ as Australia opens up. Even without Omicron, we’re worried

Brain scans and tests show changes

Many people who have had COVID report feelings of “brain fog”, fatigue and problems with concentration and memory long after their initial symptoms resolve. These problems, collectively referred to as “long COVID”, may last for months even after mild infection.

Long COVID is very common, and may affect more than half of the people who catch COVID, even if they have a mild case.

Scientists collected data as part of the massive UK Biobank database. They looked at brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and tests of brain function in 785 volunteers who were assessed before the pandemic. They then compared this to the same data collected three years later, when about half of those participants had mild COVID infection, and the other half had not caught COVID. This allowed the scientists to determine the specific effects of mild COVID infection on brain structure and function.

The group who had mild COVID an average of five months beforehand had thinning of brain tissue in several brain regions, ranging from 0.2% to around 2% compared to their pre-COVID scan. This is equivalent to between one and six years of normal brain ageing. Affected brain regions included the parahippocampal gyrus (an area related to memory) and the orbitofrontal cortex, which is located at the front of the brain and is important for smell and taste.

The post-COVID group also showed a reduction in overall brain size between their MRI scans that wasn’t seen in the non-COVID group, and had altered connections between different brain regions in the olfactory cortex, an area related to smell.

They performed worse in a test for attention and mental flexibility, a finding that was associated with volume reductions within a part of the cerebellum related to smell and social relationships.

Read more:
How does COVID affect the brain? Two neuroscientists explain

Comparing to other illnesses

To show these changes were specific to COVID and not just related to having a respiratory illness, the scientists also looked at a group of people who had pneumonia. They did not see the same changes, confirming they are related to COVID.

Decreases in brain volume are common to many brain diseases and disorders associated with degeneration, and have been found in people with mild cognitive impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, depression and traumatic brain injury, among others.

Problems with memory and attention are also frequent for people with these diseases and disorders, indicating mild COVID infection may accelerate brain degeneration. These changes could explain the reported symptoms of long COVID, such as brain fog.

The study did not look at the mechanisms of mild COVID in the brain. However, the authors suggest this could be due to inflammation, degeneration which spreads through the brain pathways associated with smell, or sensory deprivation due to loss of smell.

Read more:
Isolated, confused and depressed: the pandemic’s toll on people with dementia and their carers

The same for everyone?

So does this study prove all people who have had mild COVID infections will have these same brain changes and long-term brain degeneration? Not necessarily.

There are several important things we still do not know. This includes whether these brain changes will get worse over time, or whether they will go back to normal or previous levels of function. More research over a long time would help us understand the trajectory of brain changes.

This study also only included people aged 51–81, so we do not know whether these findings are relevant for younger people or children.

The brain changes found in this study were more pronounced in the older participants, so it could be that older people are more susceptible. Another study is needed to determine whether the same brain alterations would occur in younger people, or whether these findings are common only to older people.

There were some differences between the groups before COVID, with smaller volumes of areas deep within the brain. However, these were in different brain areas to those affected after COVID.

The scientists also found slightly reduced scores for brain functions of thinking and remembering in the group that went on to have COVID. This study did not specifically exclude people with degenerative brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases, but the scientists do not think these would explain the changes they found.

Effects of different variants and vaccination unknown

Because of the nature of the study, information about the strain of COVID people were infected with was not available. So we can’t assume the findings would be the same for people with the now more prevalent Omicron strain.

We also can’t determine the effect vaccination may have in lessening brain changes. Given the timing of the study, it is likely most of the people in the post-COVID group were infected in 2020, so may not have been vaccinated.

This study provides the first important information about brain changes in people with mild COVID infection. Until we have all the information, we should be alert but not alarmed at emerging findings.

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

– ref. Even mild COVID can cause brain shrinkage and affect mental function, new study shows – https://theconversation.com/even-mild-covid-can-cause-brain-shrinkage-and-affect-mental-function-new-study-shows-178530

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Euan Ritchie, Professor in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Centre for Integrative Ecology, School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University

For over two decades, bull sharks have called a Brisbane golf course home after, it’s believed, a flood washed them into the course’s lake in 1996. Now, after severe floods connected their landlocked home back to the river system, these sharks have gone missing, perhaps attempting to seek larger water bodies.

This bizarre tale is one of many accounts illustrating how Australia’s wildlife respond to flooding. But the sad reality is many don’t survive. Those that do may find their homes destroyed or, like those bull sharks and others, find themselves displaced far from their original homes or suitable habitat.

The RSPCA and other wildlife care organisations have received hundreds of calls to help rescue and care for stranded animals. But the true toll on wildlife will remain unknown, in part because we know surprisingly little about the impacts of floods on wildlife.

Still, as many animals have amazing abilities to survive fire, so too do many possess the means to survive or even profit from floods. After all, Australia’s wildlife has evolved over millions of years to survive in this land of extremes.

How wildlife responds to floods

Floods rapidly turn land habitats into underwater habitats, allowing aquatic animals to venture into places you wouldn’t expect. Flooding during northern Australia’s annual wet season, for example, sees crocodiles occasionally turn up in people’s backyard pools.

Land-dwelling animals typically don’t fair as well in floods. Some may be able to detect imminent inundation and head for higher, drier ground. Others simply don’t have the ability or opportunity to take evasive action in time. This can include animals with dependent young in burrows, such as wombats, platypus and echidnas.

The extent to which flooding affects animals will depend on their ability to sense what’s coming and how they’re able to respond. Unlike humans who must learn to swim, most animals are born with the ability.

Echidnas, for example, have been known to cover large areas of open water, but fast flowing, powerful floods pose a very different proposition.

Animals that can fly – such as many insects, bats and birds – may be able to escape. But their success will also partly depend on the scale and severity of weather systems causing floods.

Many birds, for example, couldn’t get away from the heavy rain and seek shelter, ending up waterlogged. If birds are exhausted and can’t fly, they may suffer from exposure and also be more vulnerable to predators, such as feral cats and foxes.

During floods, age old predator-prey relationships, forged through evolution, can break down. Animals are more focused on self preservation, rather than their next meal. This can result in strange, ceasefire congregations.

For example, a venomous eastern brown snake was filmed being an unintentional life raft for frogs and mice. Likewise, many snakes, lizards and frogs are expert climbers, and will seek safety in trees – with or without company.

Some spiders have ingenious ways of finding safety, including spinning balloon-like webs to initiate wind-driven lift-off: destination dry land. This is what happened when Victoria’s Gippsland region flooded last year.

One of the challenges of extreme events is it can make food hard to find. Some animals – including microbats, pygmy possums, and many reptiles – may reduce their energy requirements by essentially going to “sleep” for extended periods, commonly referred to as torpor. This includes echidnas and Antechinus (insect-eating marsupials), in response to bushfire.

Might they do the same during floods? We really don’t know, and it largely depends on an animal’s physiology. In general, invertebrates, frogs, fish and reptiles are far better at dealing with reduced access to food than birds and mammals.

What happens when floods recede?

Flooding may provide a bounty for some species. Some predators such as cats, foxes, and birds of prey, may have access to exhausted prey with fewer places to hide. These same predators may scavenge the windfall of dead animals.

Fish, waterbirds, turtles and other aquatic or semi-aquatic life may benefit from an influx of nutrients, increasing foraging opportunities and even stimulating breeding events.

Other wildlife may face harsher realities. Some may become trapped far from their homes. Those that attempt to return home will have to run the gauntlet of different habitats, roads, cats, dogs and foxes, and other threats.

Read more:
‘One of the most extreme disasters in colonial Australian history’: climate scientists on the floods and our future risk

Even if they make it home, will their habitats be the same or destroyed? Fast and large volumes of water can destroy vegetation and other habitat structures (soils, rock piles) in minutes, but they may take many years or decades to return, if ever.

Floodwaters can also carry extremely high levels of pollution, leading to further tragic events such as fish kills and the poisoning of animals throughout food chains.

How can you help?

Seeing wildlife in distress is confronting, and many of us may feel compelled to want to rescue animals in floodwaters. However, great caution is required.

Wading into floodwaters can put yourself at significant risk. Currents can be swift. Water can carry submerged and dangerous obstacles, as well as chemicals, sewerage and pathogens. And distressed animals may panic when approached, putting them and yourself at further risk.

For example, adult male eastern grey kangaroos regularly exceed 70 kilograms with long, razor sharp claws and toe nails, and powerful arms and legs. They’ve been known to deftly use these tools to drown hostile farm dogs in dams and other water bodies.

Read more:
10 million animals are hit on our roads each year. Here’s how you can help them (and steer clear of them) these holidays

So unless you’re a trained wildlife expert or animal carer, we don’t recommend you try to save animals yourself. There is more advice online, such as here and here.

If you’d like to support the care and recovery of wildlife following the floods, a number of organisations are taking donations, including WWF Australia, WIRES and the RSPCA.

What does the future hold?

While many Australian wildlife species are well adapted to dealing with periodic natural disasters, including floods, we and wildlife will face even more intense events in the future under climate change. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions can lessen this impact.

For common, widespread species such as kangaroos, the loss of individuals to infrequent, albeit severe, events is tragic but overall doesn’t pose a great problem. But if floods, fires and other extreme events become more regular, we could see some populations or species at increased risk of local or even total extinction.

This highlights how Earth’s two existential crises – climate change and biodiversity loss – are inextricably linked. We must combat them swiftly and substantially, together, if we’re to avoid a bleak future.

Read more:
Mass starvation, extinctions, disasters: the new IPCC report’s grim predictions, and why adaptation efforts are falling behind

Euan G. Ritchie is the Chair of the Media Working Group of the Ecological Society of Australia, Deputy Convenor (Communication and Outreach) for the Deakin Science and Society Network, and a member of the Australian Mammal Society.

Chris J Jolly receives funding from the Nature Foundation and Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program (Threatened Species Recovery Hub).

– ref. ‘The sad reality is many don’t survive’: how floods affect wildlife, and how you can help them – https://theconversation.com/the-sad-reality-is-many-dont-survive-how-floods-affect-wildlife-and-how-you-can-help-them-178310

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathy Tangalakis, Associate Professor of Physiology, Victoria University

Gender bias against female academics increased in student evaluations of teaching during remote learning, particularly among male students, our research published today shows. This bias could have impacts on female academics’ leadership and career opportunities, and on their confidence and well-being. Based on our research, we make four recommendations to counter gender bias in teaching evaluations and its impacts.

In early 2020, universities across Australia moved all teaching online due to the spread of COVID-19 and subsequent lockdowns. Academics had to learn very quickly how to teach online and assist their students with online learning. The shift meant teaching moved from the neutral territory of the university classroom into the more private space of the home.

This has had many consequences for academics, particularly women who were also caring for children.

Read more:
‘Lose some weight’, ‘stupid old hag’: universities should no longer ask students for anonymous feedback on their teachers

Academics regularly have their teaching performance monitored. This is most often done through student evaluation of teaching. The surveys used for this purpose continued during 2020.

The surveys record student judgement of teacher quality, resources and subject design. Many problems have been identified with institutional reliance on this evaluation measure. These problems include relatively low response rates – often 30% or less – and the subjective nature of student perceptions of teaching quality. These perceptions are influenced by teachers’ gender and race, with some comments in an Australian study qualifying as “hate speech”.

Yet universities continue to rely heavily on student evaluations in monitoring teaching quality. They also use them for individual academic performance management, including promotion.

What did the study find?

Our research, published in a special Women & Leadership issue of the Journal of University Learning & Teaching Practice, analysed more than 22,000 de-identified scores from student evaluations of teaching and over 8,000 de-identified student comments. The data came from surveys in 2019 (face-to-face teaching) and 2020 (remote teaching) that evaluated teaching staff in a multidisciplinary college at Victoria University, Melbourne. All surveys were from first-year students across all disciplines and courses.

There were no differences in student evaluation scores between male and female lecturers or between in-person and remote teaching. But our analysis found a difference in the comments.

Most comments from both male and female students were positive about both male and female teachers. These comments mostly emphasised that students recognised and appreciated their teachers’ efforts during the massive and rapid shift to online learning in 2020.

Negative comments were in the minority (7% for each year). However, the students making these comments disproportionately targeted female academics for negative commentary about attitude, irrespective of students’ gender or the mode of delivery.

During remote learning, there were more negative comments about female academics’ teaching style, particularly from male students with a 30 percentage point increase in comments by male students from 2019. Typical examples of such comments by male students about female teachers included:

“She had no idea.”

“Concepts were not fully explained and key concepts were left out.”

Female academics were also more often the targets of negative comments on teachers’ ease with the video conferencing software, such as:

“She struggled more than my other teachers on Zoom.”

Comments about the domestic environment while teaching online were in a minority. But these comments were directed at female academics only, such as this one by a female student.

“It was distracting when her child would interrupt her.”

Why does this gender bias matter?

During COVID-19 lockdowns, the burden of caring for children fell disproportionately to women throughout Australia, as the Australian Institute of Family Studies has shown. It was no different for academic women. Should they be penalised for it?

Academic women are also more likely than their male peers to suffer from imposter syndrom. The negative gendered comments in student evaluations of their teaching could reinforce these anxieties.

Read more:
Our uni teachers were already among the world’s most stressed. COVID and student feedback have just made things worse

In a year when women’s research outputs decreased while men’s research outputs increased, an added concern is there may be an over-reliance on student evaluations for women academics who seek promotion.

What can universities do to counter this bias?

Given that universities still use these surveys for teacher promotion and performance evaluations, ways must be found to counter the effect of poor feedback from students that is so gendered and subjective. We recommend that:

• an amnesty applies to negative comments in data from student evaluations of teaching in 2020 and 2021 (due to COVID)

• a guide is created and workshops run for people (line managers and members of promotions panels) reading student evaluation data to highlight their known gendered bias

• implicit gender bias training for students be developed and cautionary information be added in the survey instructions to students

• female academics who have encountered such negative feedback are given strategies on how to deal with it. These may include mental health training, sharing the purpose of the evaluation surveys and the feedback with students, focusing on the positive comments rather than the few negative ones, and citing the published research on bias in promotion applications.

Read more:
Yes, uni students say some awful things in teaching surveys, so how can we use them to improve?

Kathy is a lecturer within the First Year College at Victoria University.

Dianne Hall is employed by Victoria University. She has recieved funding from the Australian Research Council.

Kate Kelly and Natalie Kon-yu 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. Gender bias in student surveys on teaching increased with remote learning. What can unis do to ensure a fair go for female staff? – https://theconversation.com/gender-bias-in-student-surveys-on-teaching-increased-with-remote-learning-what-can-unis-do-to-ensure-a-fair-go-for-female-staff-178418

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Abul Rizvi, PhD candidate, The University of Melbourne

Since late last year, various business lobby groups, the NSW government, management consultant KPMG, the Business Council and now a number of economists have been throwing numbers around, talking up the need for higher levels of immigration.

I have written previously on the facile nature of the immigration debate in Australia, on the part of both the groups calling for “immigration to be cut wherever possible” and the groups calling for a bigger Australia.

The problem is the debate focuses on targets and numbers for permanent migration, often confusing this permanent migration program with what matters for population which is net migration. At the same time, too little attention is paid to how migration targets would be delivered, the risks involved, and how the risks would be managed.

So let’s start with basics.

What matters is net migration

The official migration program reflects the number of permanent resident visas issued in any one year, irrespective of whether the person is already in Australia (perhaps for a long time on a different sort of visa) or has been living overseas.

Over the past 15 years, more than half of these permanent resident visas have been issued to people who have already been living long-term in Australia.

Net migration as calculated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics is a measure of long-term and permanent arrivals, including new people issued these visas, less departures of people who have been living long-term in Australia and intend to remain overseas for 12 out of the next 16 months.

It is blind to visa status or citizenship.

Read more:
A myth that won’t die: stopping migration did not kickstart the economy

Net migration can fall sharply even when the migration program is large, as happened in 2014-15 when we had one of the largest permanent migration programs in Australia’s history, yet net migration fell to 180,000.

A sharp fall in net migration is usually associated with a weak labour market leading to large outflows of Australians, or Australians deciding not to return, as happened in 1975-76, 1982-83, 1991-92 and 2008-09.

On the other hand, even when the migration program is being cut, net migration can be forecast to rise. This is what happened in the 2019 budget, when Treasury forecast the highest sustained level of net migration in our history, after a year in which the migration program was cut from 190,000 to 160,000 per year.

How many migrants, and which ones?

Before discussing the various immigration targets that have recently been proposed, it’s useful to understand the government’s current forecasts and how it intends to deliver them – something surprisingly few do.

The 2021-22 program has been set at 160,000 per year. But Treasury’s 2021 Population Statement assumed to increase to 190,000 per year from 2023-24.

Read more:
When we open up, open up big: economists say we need more migrants

There is no official government commitment to this increase to 190,000 – and there probably won’t be ahead of the election. There has also been no indication of the composition of this larger program, or what might be needed to deliver it.

Planning documents say the 2021-22 migration program will be split evenly between the family stream and the skill stream. This is because the government is at last clearing the very large backlog of partner applications it (unlawfully in my view) allowed to build up.

If the planned 72,000 partner visas in 2021-22 are delivered, the government might only need to allocate around 50,000 places for partners in future years because it will have cleared much of the backlog it has allowed to build up, which will result in a future overall family stream of around 60,000.

This means that to deliver its total program of 160,000 from 2022-23, the government will need an extra 22,000 skilled migrants, and from 2023-24 when the total program increases to 190,000, an extra 52,000 skilled migrants.

The current skill stream planning level of 79,600 has four main components.

• Employer-sponsored migration: 23,503

There is scope to boost the number of these visas by processing them faster. However, even with a very strong labour market, it is highly unlikely that demand would rise much above 35,000 per year, especially if a more robust minimum salary requirement and strong monitoring of compliance with employer obligations are re-introduced to minimise the risk of wage theft.

• Business innovation and investment: 11,198

The passive investment subset of these visas, which provides visas to people who make a financial investment for a set period of time, is essentially a “buy a visa” scheme. It should be either abolished or modified to ensure active investment.

I resisted establishment of the passive investment component until I left the department of immigration in 2007. Long-term, removing it would cut the number of business innovation and investment visas to around 5,000 per year.

• Global talent independent 9,584

This visa is highly susceptible to cronyism and corruption and attracts few migrants who wouldn’t otherwise qualify for other more robust visa categories. It should either be abolished or pared back to a few hundred per year for highly exceptional candidates.

• State and government sponsored and regional 27,853

While the labour market is strong, there would be merit in increasing the allocation of places for these visas, as state governments are well placed to understand the needs of their jurisdictions. But it is unlikely they would be able to fill more than an additional 10,000 places per year, given the occupational targeting and employment criteria they have in place.

• Skilled independent 7,213

Once again, while the labour market is strong, there is scope to increase the size of this category, but there are also risks that would need to be managed.

As these migrants have no confirmed job and face a four year wait for access to social security, diluting criteria for this visa to increase the numbers would mean a rising portion would struggle to secure a skilled job.

Those with options may leave to another country where job prospects are stronger. Others would be forced to take whatever job they can, including at exploitative wages.

In my experience, increasing the size of this visa category to more than around 25,000 would involve substantial risks, especially if the labour market weakens once current stimulus measures are removed.

190,000 won’t be easy to deliver

In total, what I foresee gives us a skill stream of around 100,000. Together with a family stream of 60,000, that provides only enough to fill the existing program of 160,000 per year – not enough to increase it to the 190,000 proposed by Treasury or the 220,000 proposed by the Business Council of Australia.

Those proposing much higher levels of immigration need to demonstrate how they would be delivered and how the risks of what might be a weaker labour market would be managed.

And they need to acknowledge that the size of the migration program doesn’t determine net migration. That’s in large measure determined by the economy and how many Australians and migrants decide to leave, decide to stay overseas, or decide to return.

Abul Rizvi was a senior official in the Department of Immigration from the early 1990s to 2007 when he left as Deputy Secretary. He has recently published a book titled Population Shock.

– ref. The immigration numbers bidding war is pointless – there are limits to how many migrants Australia can accept – https://theconversation.com/the-immigration-numbers-bidding-war-is-pointless-there-are-limits-to-how-many-migrants-australia-can-accept-177626

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Oliver Eklund, PhD Candidate in Media and Communication, Queensland University of Technology

In early February, fans tuned in to Network 10 expecting to see the new season of South Park. Instead, they saw re-runs. Were South Park co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker trolling fans with a fake new season or was this yet another familiar experience of lagging release schedules for Australian viewers?

It was the latter.

Australian TV audiences are no strangers to the idea of having to wait for content. Researchers Ramon Lobato and James Meese, writing in 2016, found Australians were “second class media citizens” who had been “frustrated by the high cost and slow delivery of first-release TV and movies from the United States.”

Australians are yet to see the new seasons of American Dad or Family Guy on-demand, despite both airing in America in recent months. And while Peaky Blinders most recent season has been airing in the UK since February, there’s still no announced release for Australian Netflix.

Streaming was meant to simplify this landscape and allow for content to arrive quicker.

Licensing confusion

Rights for shows are broken down into different types. Airing a TV show by linear broadcast (traditional television) requires licensing the broadcast rights while making the show available for non-linear streaming requires licensing the streaming rights.

Often, broadcast rights include a window of exclusivity for the television broadcaster before the content can be made available on a streaming platform – otherwise why would anyone watch the broadcast?

Australians and many avid fans around the world are dealing with the fallout of complex licensing agreements across media conglomerates, streamers, and broadcasters that are delaying, and sometimes even removing, their favourite shows.

In 2020, after 23 years as the Australian broadcast home of South Park, SBS made the decision not to renew their first-run broadcast rights, with 10 Shake set to become the new Australian home of the show. South Park’s 2020 pandemic special was “fast-tracked” to 10 Shake, arriving only a few hours after the US broadcast.

The 25th Season of South Park, released in the US on February 2nd this year was expected to follow suit and air on 10 Shake in the first week of February, but re-runs played instead.

To try and clear up the confusion, Paramount+’s Australian Twitter account tweeted that, for streaming the new season, the first two episodes would come out February 25th on Australian Paramount+.

“Due to regional digital licensing restrictions, some content isn’t available in Australia at the same time it is in the USA,” said the tweet, something that most Australians need no reminding of. The Paramount+ airdate of the 25th for the first two episodes was some time after the February 2nd premiere in America. Episodes 3 and 4 followed on March 4. 10 Shake eventually broadcast new episodes from February 24 onwards.

As the Australian streaming rights to the new season of South Park are held by Paramount+ and 10 holds the broadcast rights (and as, anyway, both companies are owned by ViacomCBS) Australians are left wondering – why the delay?

The arrival of streaming platforms hasn’t been the silver bullet to solve timely release of content, as licensing deals and the oddities of broadcast and streaming rights agreements have seen confusing consequences for Australian audiences.

We’ve been here before

South Park’s 25th season isn’t the first time that a gulf between streaming and broadcast rights has left Australians in a lurch – it’s a common occurrence in the an industry where rights are constantly renegotiated around legacy and new media providers. Australians were thrown a similar curve ball with the fifth season of Netflix original Arrested Development in 2018.

Netflix’s fourth season of the show had released in 2013, before Netflix was available in Australia. As a result, Netflix had sold off first-run broadcast rights to Fox. Yet come 2018, with Netflix now available in Australia, Australians were forced to go to Foxtel for the release of a high-profile Netflix Original. The strange licensing agreement had allowed Foxtel broadcast rights and a short on-demand window for future seasons, and kept the Netflix show off Netflix for some time.

Disney’s purchase of Fox in 2019 later saw the ownership of the first three seasons transfer to Disney, arriving on Disney+ in 2021. Later that year Arrested Development’s last two seasons left Netflix and are no longer available for Australians on any platform.

The weird oddities of licensing and rights deals can come back to bite consumers. Much as Netflix’s own Arrested Development seasons suddenly vanished from Australian Netflix, an old licensing deal will see a number of Disney movies vanish from Disney+ and return to Netflix in 2026 despite those titles leaving Netflix in 2019.

What happens when we can’t watch our favourite content?

Before streaming kicked off in the country, Australians were used to delayed release times on their favourite content. In 2014, this frustration combined with Game of Thrones hype drove Australians to be world leaders in digital piracy. Conventional wisdom suggested this problem could be fixed by the arrival of the dozen streaming platforms in the years since and the ability they brought for instant content access. With so many platforms, how could you ever not find the content you wanted?

However, the confusing web of rights has allowed for just as much uncertainty. Despite Australians having so many streaming platforms, different types of rights and licensing deals mean Australians waited weeks for some new South Park, which is now finally broadcasting on 10Shake and streaming on Paramount+.

Oliver Eklund owns shares in Disney, Netflix, and Apple.

– ref. Second-class media citizens: why Australians still have to wait for new TV shows on streaming services – https://theconversation.com/second-class-media-citizens-why-australians-still-have-to-wait-for-new-tv-shows-on-streaming-services-176689

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ellie Paige, Senior Research Fellow, George Institute for Global Health

The news of Shane Warne’s untimely death of a suspected heart attack at the age of only 52 years has left many cricket fans reeling.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in Australia – and worldwide, including the United States, where two in ten people who die of heart disease are aged under 65.

Heart disease is highly preventable, so it’s never too early to consider what you can do to improve the health of your heart. Here are five evidence-based ways to do this.

1. Get a heart health check

When someone dies suddenly and unexpectedly of heart disease, people will often say “but they exercised regularly, didn’t smoke and ate well”.

But some of the main risk factors for heart disease – including high blood pressure and high LDL cholesterol – are things you need to have checked by a doctor.

If you’re aged 45 years or older and do not already have heart disease, Australia’s current guidelines recommend having a heart health check by your GP.

A heart health check combines information on your risk factors and estimates how likely you are to develop heart disease in the next five years.

Your GP can use this information to identify whether you need to make lifestyle changes, and whether you would benefit from preventive medications to lower your blood pressure and cholesterol.

Blood pressure– and cholesterol-lowering medications each lower the risk of developing heart disease by around 25%. So if they’re recommended for you, using them long-term is an effective way to reduce your risk.

However, a study using data from 2012 found around 76% of Australians aged 45 to 74 years at high risk of a first-time heart attack or stroke weren’t using these life-saving treatments.

Read more:
Cervical, breast, heart, bowel: here’s what women should be getting screened regularly

Diabetes is another important cause of heart disease. Your GP will be able to guide you about whether or not you need a check for diabetes.

If you have diabetes, your GP will help to ensure it’s managed well, to reduce your risk of heart disease.

2. Quit smoking

Although Australia has some of the lowest smoking rates in the world, around 11% of Australians still smoke daily.

Smoking damages blood vessels and contributes to the underlying processes that lead to heart disease.

People who are current smokers are around two times as likely to have a heart attack or stroke than people who have never smoked.

A landmark Australian study showed people who smoked died around ten years earlier than people who have never smoked, and up to two-thirds of ongoing smokers died from their habit.

But quitting smoking can reverse these effects. Quitting at any age was found to be beneficial – the earlier the better. In the long term, those who quit before the age of 45 had a similar life expectancy as people who had never smoked.

Read more:
Explainer: what happens during a heart attack and how is one diagnosed?

3. Improve your nutrition

In Australia, poor diet, excess weight and obesity are leading causes of heart disease.

However, many popular diets are not supported by science.

A healthy diet is important for heart health. For most people, small changes to your diet, such as increasing your intake of fruit, vegetable and wholegrains and reducing salt intake, can have large benefits.

For suggestions on healthier alternatives when you’re grocery shopping, try The George Institute’s FoodSwitch app.

4. Cut your salt

On average, Australians consume almost twice the World Health Organization’s recommended daily maximum of 5g salt.

Randomised trials of salt reduction show clear effects on reducing blood pressure, a leading contributor to heart disease.

To reduce your salt intake, you can try reducing the amount of processed foods you eat and cutting down on the amount of salt you add to your food.

Salt substitutes, although not widely available on supermarket shelves, can also play a role. Salt is made up of sodium chloride; salt substitutes involve replacing a portion of the sodium chloride with potassium chloride which acts to lower blood pressure.

5. Get moving

Physical activity, in addition to being good for the waistline, helps improve cardiac functioning. Studies have linked regular exercise with a lower risk of having a heart attack.

Australian guidelines recommend adults get at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise most days, but even smaller amounts are beneficial.

Any kind of movement is good, so if you are just starting out, choose an activity you like and get moving.

Read more:
Getting a heart check early can prevent heart attack and stroke in Indigenous Australians

Ellie Paige has received funding from the National Heart Foundation of Australia, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia and the Australian Government Department of Health.

Bruce Neal s the Executive Director of The George Institute Australia which advocates strongly for healthier diets. Through The George Institute he receives funding from health and medical research councils and philanthropy in support of work to optimize diets for human health. He is an inventor of the FoodSwitch smartphone application.

Through the Australian National University, Emily Banks has received research funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, the National Heart Foundation of Australia and the Australian Government Department of Health

Jason Wu 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. Concerned about your risk of a heart attack? Here are 5 ways to improve your heart health – https://theconversation.com/concerned-about-your-risk-of-a-heart-attack-here-are-5-ways-to-improve-your-heart-health-178631

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Saptarshi Mandal, Associate law professor, O.P. Jindal Global University

In late February, a court in Delhi finished hearing a case on married Indian women’s right to sexual autonomy, and now, a decision on the matter is awaited.

The Indian Penal Code, enacted by the British colonial state in 1860, exempts forcible sexual intercourse by husbands upon wives from the definition of rape. This means a man cannot be charged with rape if the victim is his wife. Although rape provisions in the penal code have undergone several changes since then, the husband’s immunity has been retained.

In the current case, which began in 2015, two non-government organisations (the RIT Foundation and All India Democratic Women’s Association) challenged the constitutional validity of the marital rape exemption. According to the petitioners, the distinction that Indian rape law makes among women based on their marital status is unreasonable, and hence, in violation of the equality guaranteed by the constitution of India.

Read more:
The shocking mythical tales that underlie attitudes to rape in India

Why does the marital rape exception exist?

The original rationale for the exemption was derived from 17th and 18th-century English jurists. For Mathew Hale (chief justice of England between 1671-1676), consent to marriage itself implied consent to sex, which once given could not be revoked.

Similarly, English judge and politician, Sir William Blackstone argued that if the husband and the wife became one legal entity upon marriage – as was the law at the time – then, logically speaking, the husband could not be charged with a crime against his own self. In short, these jurists stressed the conceptual impossibility of marital rape.

In England, where these ideas originated, and in Australia, where they travelled with colonialism, the exemption no longer exists. The courts in these countries have held the exemption was never part of the common law (unwritten body of laws based on judicial precedents), and that previous judges were mistaken in believing it was.

Why is the Indian government against criminalising rape within marriage?

However, the question before the Indian court is not about the historical validity of the husband’s immunity, but its compatibility with the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Indian constitution. Successive governments have avoided answering the question directly.

As opposed to the “impossibility of marital rape” thesis taken by the English jurists, the Indian state’s attitude can be described as the “inconvenience of marital rape” thesis.

The Indian state does not invoke theories of the wife’s implied consent to sex with the husband or the merger of her personhood with that of the husband’s upon marriage. Nor does it deny sexual violence takes place within marriage.

Read more:
How to tackle India’s sexual violence epidemic – it starts with sex education

Instead, it refuses to recognise marital rape, citing a range of factors that it claims pose practical difficulties in enforcing a criminal prohibition on non-consensual sex in marriage. In other words, the refusal to recognise marital rape is presented as a policy decision that seeks to balance competing considerations that are equally relevant.

In 2013, India had a reform of its rape laws. And while they broadened the definition of rape in a number of ways, including to acts other than penile-vaginal penetration, the then-government refused to criminalise marital rape on the grounds it would weaken the sanctity of marriage. As an alternative, a parliamentary committee suggested victim wives should opt for divorce or seek remedies for domestic violence.

In 2017, in its response to the NGOs’ petition, the coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stated that since it was not clear what evidence could be used to prove whether a sexual encounter between a husband and wife was consensual, marital rape should not be recognised.

It went on to argue that legally ending the husband’s immunity will not prevent the incidence of marital rape anyway, since legal changes were useless without “moral and social awareness”. Given differences between India and western countries, owing to its poverty, illiteracy, and social diversity, validating non-consensual sex within marriage will not have the desired effect, the government argued.

The current BJP-led government’s position is no different. In the course of the recently concluded hearing, it requested the court defer the hearing so it could consult the state governments on the issue.

Read more:
Gang rape exposes caste violence in India and the limits of Me Too

The government affirmed its commitment to protect the rights and dignity of all women, but asked the court to not decide on the matter based on constitutional principles or legal arguments alone, given its far-reaching social implications.

However, the judges refused to accede to that request and continued with the hearing. Meanwhile, in response to a question about the government’s stance on the issue, a minister told the parliament comprehensive reform of all criminal laws was being considered. This process begun during the COVID-19 pandemic and has been criticised by lawyers, legal scholars, and activists for its hurried and non-participatory nature.

Do married women have a legal right over their bodies?

The Indian state has never directly answered the question as to whether Indian women lose their rights to bodily integrity and sexual autonomy upon marriage. Instead, it has pointed to the inconveniences of recognising and enforcing these rights.

Read more:
Gang rape exposes caste violence in India and the limits of Me Too

But the long list of inconveniences cited by the state over the years are really not about the judges, the prosecutors, or the police. Concerns regarding the state’s intrusion into the private sphere, difficulties in proving rape, or, the potential misuse of the law are used to mask the fact the one person who will be inconvenienced the most if the marital rape exemption is struck down, is the husband.

We can only hope the Delhi High Court, in its much-awaited judgment, will put the spotlight on what the issue is really about – the husband’s unquestioned claim to the wife’s body.

Saptarshi Mandal 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. It’s still legal to rape your wife in India. That could be about to change – https://theconversation.com/its-still-legal-to-rape-your-wife-in-india-that-could-be-about-to-change-176797

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bina Fernandez, Associate professor, The University of Melbourne

Please be advised this article features accounts of racism and racist discourse, including mentions of Nazism.

The intensifying conflict in Ukraine has raised the issue of racism not only in Ukraine, but Europe. Three specific and related dimensions of racism are evident in this complex conflict.

Discrimination against African and Asian nationals fleeing Ukraine

Shocking reports emerged in the past week of discrimination faced by African and Asian nationals (mainly international students in Ukraine) who were among the over 1 million people seeking refuge in neighbouring Poland, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, and Moldova.

African and Asian people were forcibly prevented from boarding trains and buses leaving Ukrainian cities, as priority was given to white Ukrainians. Those who finally reached the Polish border (some even on foot) found that again white Ukrainians were prioritised entry. Some African, Asian, and Middle-Eastern nationals were met by verbal and physical abuse on arrival.

Many African, Asian, and Middle Eastern nationals spent two to three days at border check-points, and reported lack of food, water, accommodation or basic support in freezing winter conditions, while they waited to get through.

A statement issued by the African Union condemned reports about the treatment of Africans as “shockingly racist and in breach of international law” and observed:

all people have the right to cross international borders during conflict, and as such, should enjoy the same rights to cross to safety from the conflict in Ukraine, notwithstanding their nationality or racial identity.

Read more:
How we mourn the victims of tragedies depends on their citizenship status

Racist mainstream media portrayals

Equally disturbing is the unthinkingly racist mainstream media framing of Ukrainian refugees, in comparison to the framing of refugees from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan or Africa.

Below, a selection of such racist commentary from major news outlets:

• “This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan […] This is a relatively civilised, relatively European city” – Charlie D’Agata, CBS

• “War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations” – Daniel Hannan, The Telegraph

• “What’s compelling is looking at them, the way they are dressed. These are prosperous, middle-class people. These are not obviously refugees trying to get away from the Middle East […] or North Africa. They look like any European family that you’d live next door to” – Peter Dobbie, Al Jazeera

These descriptions of Ukrainian refugees invidiously position them as more “civilised” and “superior” to refugees from the Middle East, African or Asian nations. This seems to imply that Ukrainian lives are worth saving, while the lives of millions of others who seek refuge are more disposable because they are people who are not “well-dressed”, “middle-class”, don’t “look like us”, or live in more remote, supposedly less “civilised” locations.

Read more:
7 ways to spot polarizing language — how to choose responsibly what to amplify online or in-person

White-supremacist Ukrainian mobilisation

The third and more dangerous dimension of racism is the mobilisation of the neo-Facist, white supremacist Azov movement in Ukraine since 2014. Azov started as a volunteer battalion that was then officially integrated into the National Guard of Ukraine in November 2014. The current Ukrainian government has not made comment on this movement.

In the current crisis, Azov battalion is training Ukrainian civilians for guerrilla-style combat with the Russian military.

However, it is important to also note that similar white nationalist groups exist across Europe and North America. Therefore Putin’s claim of “de-Nazification” of Ukraine is a flimsy reason for invasion of Ukraine.

While the Azov battalion officially denies adhering to white supremacist ideologies, Azov’s street patrol called National Militia were responsible for attacks on Roma in Ukraine in 2018.

Azov also plays a pivotal role in the global network of far-right, white-nationalist extremism; it “participated in training and radicalising United States–based white supremacy organizations” (according to a 2018 FBI affidavit).

Closer to home, alongside other European far-right movements, Azov’s propaganda appears to have inspired Brenton Tarrant of Australia in his deadly terrorist attack on a mosque in Christchurch in 2019. This was evidenced by the sonnerad or black sun on his jacket, a symbol commonly used by the Azov Battalion and far-right brands in France.

Read more:
The US is boosting aid to Ukraine: 4 questions answered

What accounts for these three dimensions of racism in the Ukraine crisis, and how are they connected?

Research suggests racism and xenophobia varies with the relationship between hostile government policies and anti-migrant sentiments of the population. In short, the problem of racism is not just Ukrainian or eastern European, it is European.

More nuanced analysis argues there is insufficient evidence to show eastern Europeans are more xenophobic than western Europeans. Any analysis should consider the complex histories of migration from, and through eastern European countries.

Indeed, as the global news coverage of Ukrainan refugees demonstrates, everyday racism – or what Goorie author Melissa Lucashenko refers to as “white normal savagery” is not restricted to eastern Europe. All three dimensions of racism discussed here are the manifestation of global, systemic institutionalised racism and imperialism.

Acknowledgement of this institutionalised racism and imperialism would begin by first recognising the Ukraine crisis as a power struggle between the US/NATO and Russia, underwritten by interests of weapons manufacturers and oil companies. This crisis was long predicted by strategic observers of global politics.

Recognising the wider context of institutionalised racism would allow us to connect the current racist treatment of African and Asian migrants in the Ukraine crisis to deadly European border policies over the past decades. These policies have led to increasing numbers of migrants mostly from Africa and the Middle East, reported as missing in the Mediterranean since 2014.

Azov needs to be recognised as the belligerently violent face of a racialised political order that is potentially dangerous. However, this would require holding the US accountable for its suspected support of Azov, and its refusal (along with Ukraine) to condemn the glorification of Nazism in a UN Resolution in 2017.

Finally, we should recognise that any moves to dismantle institutionalised racism are unlikely to be undertaken voluntarily. As Professor of Sociology József Böröcz argues, the defining element of “whiteness” is a “claim, indeed demand, for unconditional global privilege” that is always being reconstituted.

Bina Fernandez 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. Refugees, reporting and the far right: how the Ukraine crisis reveals brutal ‘everyday racism’ in Europe and beyond – https://theconversation.com/refugees-reporting-and-the-far-right-how-the-ukraine-crisis-reveals-brutal-everyday-racism-in-europe-and-beyond-178410

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chiara Holgate, Hydroclimatologist, Australian National University

At any one time, Earth’s atmosphere holds only about a week’s worth of rain. But rainfall and floods have devastated Australia’s eastern regions for weeks and more heavy rain is forecast. So where’s all this water coming from?

We recently investigated the physical processes driving rainfall in eastern Australia. By following moisture from the oceans to the land, we worked out exactly how three oceans feed water to the atmosphere, conspiring to deliver deluges of rain similar to what we’re seeing now.

Such research is important. A better understanding of how water moves through the atmosphere is vital to more accurately forecast severe weather and help communities prepare.

The task takes on greater urgency under climate change, when heavy rainfall and other weather extremes are expected to become more frequent and violent.

Big actors delivering rain

The past few months in eastern Australia have been very wet, including the rainiest November on record.

Then in February, heavy rain fell on already saturated catchments. In fact, parts of Australia received more than triple the rain expected at this time of year.

So what’s going on?

In the theatre that is Australia’s rainfall, there are some big actors – the so-called climate oscillations. They’re officially known as:

• El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO): this cycle comprises El Niño and its opposite, La Niña. ENSO involves temperature changes across the tropical Pacific Ocean, affecting weather patterns around the world

• Southern Annular Mode (SAM): the north-south movement of strong westerly winds over the Southern Ocean

• Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD): changes in ocean temperatures and winds across the tropical Indian Ocean.

Like swings in a character’s mood, each climate mode has positive, negative and neutral phases. Each affect Australia’s weather in different ways.

ENSO’s negative phase, La Niña, brings wetter conditions to eastern Australia. The IOD’s negative phase, and SAM’s positive phase, can also bring more rain.

Read more:
Why water inundates a home during one flood but spares it the next

Going back in time

We studied what happens to the moisture supplying eastern Australian rainfall when these climate drivers are in their wet and dry phases.

We used a sophisticated model to trace moisture backwards in time: from where it fell as rain, back through the atmosphere to where it evaporated from.

We did this for every wet winter and spring day between 1979 and 2013.

This research was part of a broader study into where Australia’s rain comes from, and what changes moisture supply during both drought and heavy rain.

We found most rain that falls on eastern Australia comes from moisture evaporated from a nearby ocean. Typically, rain in eastern Australia comes from the Coral and Tasman seas. This is depicted in the strong blue colours in the figure below.

But interestingly, some water comes from as far as the Southern and Indian oceans, and some originates from nearby land areas, such as forests, bare soils, lakes and rivers.

Natural processes can alter the typical supply of moisture to the atmosphere, causing either droughts, or floods.

Our research shows of all possible combinations of climate oscillations, a La Niña and a positive SAM phase occurring together has the biggest effect on eastern Australian rainfall. That combination is happening right now.

During La Niña, more moisture is transported from the ocean to the atmosphere over land and is more easily converted to rainfall when it arrives.

During the positive SAM, the usual westerly winds shift southward, allowing moisture-laden winds from the east to flow into eastern Australia.

Our research focused on winter and spring. However, we expect the current rainfall is the result of the same combined effect of the two climate oscillations.

The Indian Ocean Dipole is not active at this time of the year. But it was in a weak negative phase last spring, which tends to bring wetter-than-normal conditions.

Read more:
Back so soon, La Niña? Here’s why we’re copping two soggy summers in a row

Looking to future floods

Under climate change, extreme La Niña and El Niño events, and weather systems like those causing the current floods, are expected to worsen. So reducing greenhouse gas emissions is crucial.

The current La Niña event is past its peak and is predicted to dissipate in autumn. But because our catchments are so full of water, we still need to be on alert for extreme weather.

The current devastating floods are a sobering lesson for the future. They show the urgent need to understand and predict extreme events, so communities can get ready for them.

Read more:
People could’ve prepared for the floods better if the impacts of weather forecasts were clearly communicated

Chiara Holgate receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

Agus Santoso receives funding from CSIRO. Agus Santoso is a CSIRO adjunct science leader, co-project leader at the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research, associate investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, and is affiliated with the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program.

Alex Sen Gupta receives funding from the Australian Research Council as part of the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and the Centre of Excellence in Antarctic Science

– ref. The east coast rain seems endless. Where on Earth is all the water coming from? – https://theconversation.com/the-east-coast-rain-seems-endless-where-on-earth-is-all-the-water-coming-from-178316

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

With the cabinet meeting today agreeing to targeted Russian sanctions legislation, New Zealand is preparing to circumvent its normal United Nations-based response to international crises.

The Russia Sanctions Bill will allow additional sanctions against Russia, including the ability to:

• freeze assets in NZ

• prevent people and companies from moving their money and assets to NZ to escape sanctions imposed by other countries

• stop super yachts, ships and aircraft from entering NZ waters or airspace.

Passing the law under urgency this week is justified due to Russia being one of the UN Security Council member states, allowing it to use its veto power to block any proposed UN sanctions.

But this is a sad development, and a break with 30 years of diplomatic history. Since 1991, New Zealand has worked within the UN framework and largely based its sanctions regimes around what the UN has mandated.

Over Ukraine, New Zealand has taken some small and supplementary steps against Russia, such as travel bans and export controls over technologies that may have military value. But this has been inadequate compared with the actions of its allies, and the rapidly worsening situation.

NZ must align with allies

To create a new sanctions regime outside the UN system, New Zealand will need to take into account various important factors, including the law’s scope and how it fits with the actions of its allies.

Above all, the legislation must recognise this is a unique situation and must not create a precedent that enables other actions outside the UN system. The new law must expressly state why the urgent actions are justified and the objectives it wants to achieve, and it should have a sunset clause whereby it will lapses on a set date unless expressly renewed.

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Ukraine crisis: how do small states like New Zealand respond in an increasingly lawless world?

The law must be effective, proportionate and targeted. Anti-Russian hysteria must be avoided. Due process, fairness to those involved, and compliance with existing international obligations, must be uppermost.

Detail must be applied to the creation of a cross-party sanctions committee and a monitoring group. The evidence used to justify sanctions should come from secure and robust sources, which should be as transparent as possible.

Coordination with friends and allies is uppermost. It’s not a question of how large New Zealand’s sanctions are, but rather that they are consistent with those of other countries. If there are inconsistencies, these risk being exploited both politically and economically.

Military aid an option

In a normal situation, a “laddering” process for sanctions is used: sanctions start softly (sporting or cultural events, for instance) and escalate (with some diplomatic restrictions) towards increasingly harsh trade restrictions prohibiting goods, from luxuries to near essentials.

Exclusion from airspace, maritime zones and even travel restrictions for ordinary citizens may be added to the mix, as Russia is increasingly isolated from the wider world. With events moving so fast already, New Zealand is already halfway up the ladder.

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As the Ukraine war drags on, how secure will Putin’s hold on power remain?

Military aid needs to be an option, too. The goal is to help the Ukrainians fight for their own freedom, without putting foreign “boots on the ground”. A distinction between lethal and non-lethal aid (such as body armour, communications equipment, food and medical kit) will need to be made.

Again, the question is not one of scale but consistency with friends and allies. The symbolism of such support is important. Supplementing the efforts of Australia, for example, would be useful.

The new law may also need to cover those New Zealanders who want to fight in Ukraine – on either side. New Zealanders without dual Ukrainian
citizenship are unlikely to be given prisoner of war status if they’re captured.

Such volunteers will be in a grey area of domestic law, too, as current legislation covering the activities of mercenaries, or those who seek to go overseas to fight for terrorist groups, is inadequate.

Fighting the Russian invasion of a sovereign country is not an act of terrorism, and some may be willing to fight without significant financial incentives. The government should make the rules clear – again, consistent with friends and allies.

Risk of unintended consequences

Despite what Vladimir Putin has suggested, sanctions are not an act of war. They are an unfortunate but sometimes necessary non-military strategy aimed at changing or ending a country’s harmful actions.

But even if New Zealand and other like-minded countries apply maximum pressure through sanctions, there is no guarantee Putin will change his policies.

À lire aussi :
Russian sanctions are biting harder than it could have imagined, and it’ll get worse

Sanctions have the best chances of success when a country’s leadership feels affected by the pressure of its own citizens – or in Russia’s case, its oligarch class, as the prime minister hinted today.

So, sanctions may work better with Russia than North Korea. But there is also a risk, if Putin starts to feel this pain, that he will respond in unexpected ways.

The only real certainty is significant collateral economic damage – for Russia and the world, including New Zealand. Everyone will see or feel the impact as economic and diplomatic relationships hit turbulence. Right now, however, there is no viable alternative.

Alexander Gillespie 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. How will NZ’s law targeting sanctions against Russia work – and what are the risks? – https://theconversation.com/how-will-nzs-law-targeting-sanctions-against-russia-work-and-what-are-the-risks-178634

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa French, Professor & Dean, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

Review: The Exhibitionists, ABC TV

What do you picture in your mind when you imagine an artist?

Is it a man in a beret? Do you think Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Van Gogh? Odds are it is unlikely to be a woman. Yet there are many famous and highly regarded women artists: Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, Cindy Sherman.

It is even less likely for the word “artist” to trigger the image of an Australian woman. There are however many of importance to Australia’s cultural life: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Tracey Moffatt, Patricia Piccinini and Margaret Preston among them.

Female artists are nowhere near as well known as their male counterparts.

A new docu-comedy, The Exhibitionists, explains why this dominant image of an artist is man, and describes many fascinating stories of the noteworthy place of women across the history of Australian art.

After a few too many drinks at an exhibition opening, four friends dare each other to get locked into the National Gallery of Australia (NGA).

Having a bit of a lark, they notice there aren’t many female artists on show, and set about rectifying that. This narrative is used as a framing device for fascinating profiles of Australian women artists and interviews with experts.

Shaping art practice: the female gaze

The Exhibitionists defines the male gaze as

the idea that everything we look at is created for a default viewer who is male. It is men’s ideas, men’s needs, that dominate the creation of art and visual media.

In contrast, this docu-comedy gives an insight into “the female gaze”, which I describe as “the individual way anyone who identifies as female inflects her own female experience or subjectivity” onto her artwork.

The female artists included in the program played a role in elevating female iconography and women’s culture. Through their work, they introduced crafts such as embroidery into the halls of fine art, and avoided exploitative representations of the female body.

Arguably, it was these things that led to their work being disregarded by gatekeepers and critics.

The Exhibitionists chronicles decades of misogynist critics whose point of view arguably worked to hold women out, an issue across most artforms.

In 1933, critic James Stuart MacDonald bemoaned the “tremendous intrusion of women painters since the war”.

As recently as 2008, Brian Sewell wrote in London’s Evening Standard that “only men are capable of aesthetic greatness”. He noted women are prevalent in art schools but tend to fade away – a fact that indicates systemic issues for female artists rather than a lack of talent.

Women artists are subjected to the same discrimination evident in many other fields, including a gender pay gap, under-representation in galleries, and unconscious bias — particularly by gatekeepers. For example, critics are still often white, heterosexual men over 40 with track records of lacking regard for women’s art.

Read more:
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#KnowMyName

The NGA, which assisted financing The Exhibitionists, has recognised that only 25% of works in its Australian art collection are by women. This situation is mirrored in galleries nationally and internationally.

To redress this, the NGA launched an initiative called “Know My Name” in 2019, aiming to increase representation in the collection while celebrating and recognising Australian female artists.

The initiative has been a call to action and also made visible the work of women across diverse creative practices, highlighting the systemic issues that have been barriers to their participation.

Read more:
Beauty and audacity: Know My Name presents a new, female story of Australian art

This example of leadership by a cultural institution comes on the back of a long history of women’s activism to attain recognition.

Often this has been achieved through humour, as it does in The Exhibitionists.

Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous activist group, fight sexism and racism with humour. In 1989 they printed posters asking “do women have to be naked to get into the Met museum?”, noting only 5% of the modern art collection was from female artists, but 85% of the nudes were of women.

Referring to that phenomena as “the male graze”, the Guerrilla Girls challenged people to count the nudes in other galleries and report back.

Brilliant artists

There are some shocking statistics in The Exhibitionists about how women have been held out of art world circuits, but of most interest are the stellar female artists across eras and styles.

The program creates a potted female-centred history of Australian art. Included is landscape painter Jane Sutherland (1853-1928), the first professional Australian female artist. She was a member of Heidelberg School and one of a small number of women who accompanied Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts on painting trips.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910-1996) was one of Australia’s finest abstract expressionists, achieving the highest price for a painting by an Australian woman artist (A$2.1 million in 2017). She did this in sourcing her work from her clan country Alhalkere, and not from western art.

Dorrit Black (1891-1951) was the first Australian woman to run an art gallery and the first Australian cubist landscape painter.

It does appear that in order to make this contribution, many of these artists did not have families and devoted themselves to their art. This life choice led to them being regarded as unfeminine or unwomanly. However, along the way they made a substantive contribution to Australian art.

The Exhibitionists tells us women’s stories matter, and they attract audiences.

Art is for everyone, and it should mirror society.

The Exhibitionists screens on ABC TV on March 8.

Lisa French 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. From the ABC and the National Gallery of Australia, The Exhibitionists explores the unsung talent of Australian art – https://theconversation.com/from-the-abc-and-the-national-gallery-of-australia-the-exhibitionists-explores-the-unsung-talent-of-australian-art-176804

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hamid R. Jamali, Associate Professor and Associate Head, School of Information and Communication Studies, Charles Sturt University

At least 140 Australian journals ceased publication in the past decade. While there are still more than 650 Australian journals, 75% of the discontinued ones served the arts, social sciences and humanities disciplines. The loss of journals has significant implications for local scholarship.

Journal discontinuation damages research. Scholarly communities and the discourse that develops around a journal might be lost or damaged. The content of journals that are the result of the hard work of researchers – publicly funded work in most cases – is jeopardised.

Our recently published research shows establishing and maintaining journals has become increasingly challenging. Australian journals need more support from the higher education and publishing sectors and better strategies for sustainable editorial and publishing practices.

Read more:
Book publishing sidelined in the game of university measurement and rankings

Why do local journals matter?

Academics need suitable journals to publish in, especially as journal articles are the key output assessed in research evaluation exercises such as Excellence in Research for Australia. While large international commercial publishers publish plenty of journals in many fields, national or local journals are important.

Domestic journals better accommodate articles on local issues. This is not limited to social and cultural issues such as Indigenous matters. Australia is unique in many aspects, including ecology, economy, geology and so on.

Research communities and discourses form around these journals. Editors direct research in their field through their editorial practices.

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Local journals also support the national education system. They inform practices, especially in fields such as medicine where practices differ from country to country.

Why do journals discontinue?

Our study of discontinued journals and a survey of their editors showed several key factors were at work. These include:

• a lack of funding and support
• unsustainable reliance on voluntary work for editorial processes
• increasing workload pressures on academics who have less time to review and edit submitted articles
• a metric-driven culture that puts pressure on authors to publish in highly ranked journals, at the expense of local journals.

As one editor of a discontinued journal said:

“Potential replacement editors were unwilling to take on the workload of editorship and management given the pressure to focus on Q1 publication [in journals ranked in the top 25%].”

Australian journal publishing is characterised by journals belonging to non-profit organisations (364, 55.9%) and universities (168, 25.8%). As these journals are mostly self-published by their owners, the issues we identified are very likely to adversely impact more journals as economic conditions worsen.

Of the discontinued journals, 54% belonged to educational institutions and 34% to non-profit organisations. They had been operating for an average of 19 years.

Moreover, while humanities and social sciences are well represented in the disciplinary focus of Australian journals, a large proportion of the discontinued journals were from these fields. Yet local journals might be more needed in many of these fields where research issues are more likely to be of local significance.

Read more:
Indigenous scholars struggle to be heard in the mainstream. Here’s how journal editors and reviewers can help

It’s getting harder for journals to survive

Journal publishing has become a challenging task. It’s complicated by many different business models and a competitive market. Small publishers are disappearing as large international publishers acquire them.

Sometimes institutions fund the cost of publishing. Without such funding, journals have to charge either their readers (a subscription fee), or their authors (an author processing charge, APC), or both (hybrid).

A subscription-based journal published by a small publisher might struggle to find subscribers; libraries are less likely to subscribe to individual journals due to their reliance on vendor and publisher-curated packages, or “big deals”.

To publish open access with an APC, a journal has to compete with many other such journals. Some of these competitors (such as those published by Frontiers or MDPI) are well-resourced. They benefit from state-of-the-art technology for managing editorial and publishing processes.

Read more:
Making Australian research free for everyone to read sounds ideal. But the Chief Scientist’s open-access plan isn’t risk-free

Journals can, of course, outsource their publishing side to a commercial publisher, as 162 Australian journals have already done. These journals are mostly published as hybrid journals.

But such a decision might come at a cost as the direction of the journal might not be aligned with that of the new publisher. For instance, the editor in chief of the Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) was sacked over his opposition to outsourcing the journal’s sub-editing and production functions to Elsevier. All 19 members of the journal’s editorial advisory committee subsequently resigned.

Some local journals operate in niche areas that cater to a very small reader audience. These journals are simply not attractive for commercial publishers.

What can be done?

It is natural and inevitable that some journals will cease publication as fields evolve. And about 100 journals were established in Australia over the past decade. However, the overall decline in journal numbers is concerning – especially as the global trend is one of growth.

The already precarious financial condition of the higher education sector has been made worse by the pandemic. Many academic jobs have been lost. Some journals – Flinders Law Journal, for example – have discontinued because of COVID.

Enthusiasm alone is not enough to sustain journal publishing. Every journal needs to have a robust business strategy and have undertaken proper contingency planning.

Research is needed to develop strategies for sustainable editorial and publishing operations. Research policymakers must be mindful of the impact of their policies on local journals.

Finally, higher education as a whole needs to be more supportive of journal publishing and the activities associated with it.

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. Australia has lost 140 journals in a decade. That’s damaging for local research and education – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-lost-140-journals-in-a-decade-thats-damaging-for-local-research-and-education-177807

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Meribah Rose, Associate Lecturer in Criminology, La Trobe University

The retrial of Jason Roberts, accused of killing two Melbourne policemen in 1998, is expected to begin this week in Melbourne.

The retrial marks a significant milestone in Victoria’s criminal justice system – it’s the first to occur since Victoria passed a new law in 2019 allowing defendants in criminal cases to seek an additional appeal in their cases under specific circumstances.

What is the Roberts case about?

In the early hours of August 16 1998, Victoria police officers Sergeant Gary Silk and Senior Constable Rodney Miller were fatally shot while engaged in a surveillance operation. They were part of a team investigating a series of armed robberies in Melbourne’s eastern and south-eastern suburbs.

Silk died almost immediately, while Miller was still conscious when the first responders arrived. Multiple officers gave evidence that Miller’s dying declaration mentioned two offenders – crucial to the criminal investigation and proceedings that followed — and a dark blue Hyundai hatchback.

Two men were eventually charged and convicted of the murders: Bandali Debs and Jason Roberts, who was 17 at the time of the killings. They were sentenced to life in prison.

Debs and Roberts unsuccessfully appealed their convictions and were later refused an application for special leave to appeal. At the time, this meant their legal avenues for appeal had been exhausted.

Between 2016 and 2019, Roberts lodged three petitions for mercy with the attorney-general of Victoria. Each of these was accompanied by sworn statements in which he confessed to being involved in armed robberies with Debs, but denied any connection to the deaths of Silk and Miller.

The first petition for mercy was refused, while the second and third were overtaken by legal reforms which provided a new, albeit limited, possibility of appeal.

In 2015, allegations also arose about police misconduct in the investigation of the killings. This led the state’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) to establish Operation Gloucester to look into these issues.

In 2017, the investigation uncovered a second statement by one of the first responders at the murder scene. Significantly, this newly discovered statement – made within four hours of the killings – was inconsistent with evidence given at trial that Miller had mentioned two offenders.

In 2020, IBAC published its special report on Operation Gloucester, which identified a pattern of improper practices employed by Victoria police while investigating Debs and Roberts. This related primarily to the manipulation and altering of witness statements by police and the failure to disclose this to Roberts’ defence team.

Read more:
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The Court of Appeal held that this serious misconduct tainted Roberts’ original trial and quashed his conviction in November 2020.

Police have reportedly contacted 400 witnesses as prosecutors have prepared for the retrial. The central issue in the retrial is likely to be whether the prosecution can establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Roberts was present at the scene on the night of the shootings.

Roberts and his then-girlfriend (Debs’ daughter) claim he was with her that night and had an alibi.

How do the new appeal provisions work?

Until recently, a person convicted of a crime in Victoria was only entitled to a single appeal. If that appeal failed, there was no further legal avenue available to challenge a conviction, even if fresh evidence was discovered. The only option was for the convicted person to lodge a petition for mercy with the attorney-general who, in turn, could refer the case to the Court of Appeal.

This fundamentally changed in November 2019, when legislation was passed allowing a convicted person, in very limited circumstances, to launch a further appeal before the Court of Appeal, effectively bypassing the more political petition process.

The new law seeks to strike a difficult balance between two competing imperatives.

On the one hand, the principle of finality recognises it is essential for criminal proceedings to be brought to a conclusion and that convictions are not perpetually challenged. Challenges like this can be devastating for the victims of crimes and their families.

On the other hand, it is also important there be a transparent judicial pathway to correct miscarriages of justice, regardless of when they might be uncovered.

The new appeal provisions in Victoria have a high threshold for review to guard against unmeritorious or frivolous appeals. To be granted leave to appeal, the applicant must demonstrate there is “fresh and compelling evidence” in the case. A new appeal will be denied if the evidence could have been found with a reasonable amount of diligence, or if it isn’t reliable or substantial enough.

The Court of Appeal also retains discretion to determine whether it is in the interests of justice to allow further legal challenges.

Once another legal challenge is granted, the applicant must then satisfy the Court of Appeal that a substantial miscarriage has, in fact, occurred. This means there is very little prospect convictions will be quashed without basis or on minor legal technicalities.

The retrial of Roberts, more than 20 years after the killings, will no doubt cause anguish for the families of the victims. However, unless we are prepared to tolerate possible miscarriages of justice going uncorrected, we must allow cases to be reviewed under these very narrow circumstances.

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. A retrial is happening in a police murder case 20 years after the conviction. Two lawyers explain the case – https://theconversation.com/a-retrial-is-happening-in-a-police-murder-case-20-years-after-the-conviction-two-lawyers-explain-the-case-178521

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Professor, Bond University

In response to the Russian cyber attacks that have accompanied its invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government has begun recruiting what it calls an “IT army”.

Perhaps a more accurate term would be a “cyber militia”, given it will consist of civilian volunteers. In any case, it aims to repel Russian hackers’ attacks, and launching cyber counterstrikes of its own.

Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov, who is also the country’s digital transformation minister, has called “digital talents” to join the resistance effort.

Reports suggest more than 275,000 volunteers from around the world have already answered the call, although verifying an exact figure is impossible at the moment.

A will to help – but are we allowed?

Russia’s war on Ukraine is half a world away from Australia. But many Australians recognise the importance of helping Ukraine, on both humanitarian grounds and because of the wider geopolitical ramifications.

While countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Denmark have opened the door for their citizens to enlist in Ukraine’s international territorial defence legion, the Canberra government has so far advised Australians not to do so.

But in an interconnected world, volunteers who are unwilling or unable to physically help Ukraine could potentially join its cyber militia.

However, there’s one snag as far as Australians are concerned: Australia’s criminal law makes it illegal to engage in many of the activities that might be required of members of a foreign-organised cyber militia. Put simply, “hacking” is a crime.

Read more:
Russia is using an onslaught of cyber attacks to undermine Ukraine’s defence capabilities

A proposed ‘cyber militia bill’

The Australian government has not publicly expressed a view on whether Australians should be barred outright from joining Ukraine’s cyber fight.

One way the government could address this would be to introduce specific legislation aimed at creating legal safeguards for genuine members of a foreign state-run cyber militia, within a narrowly defined set of circumstances.

Such people would need protection from being held to have violated the hacking-related provisions of Australia’s criminal law. And they would also need legal safeguards against civil liability and against being extradited.

This protection should apply unless the person has acted in violation of international law.

Of course, such legislation would need to be carefully designed, and its implications rigorously considered.

Policing the cyber army

One problem with cyber attacks is the issue of attribution. It can be hard to identify who is responsible for the attack with the level of confidence required under international law. This means cyber attackers often have a crucial advantage over those seeking to defend against them.

“Non-state actors” such as hacker groups might be willing to attack targets that are off-limits for state agents, such as hospitals or other civilian infrastructure. This can cause conflicts to escalate dangerously.

Consequently, it is vital that any proposed legal protection for cyber combatants would be conditional on governmental oversight. In my proposal, this is achieved by the involvement of both the Australian government and that of the foreign power in direct control over the cyber militia.

More specifically, this means the Australian government should have the discretion to designate that a specific country’s cyber militia (and not those of other countries) as being governed by the new rules.

I suggest the government should consider exercising that discretion where:

1. a foreign state has established the cyber militia;
2. that foreign state has invited foreigners to join its cyber militia; and
3. that foreign state is under armed attack by another state.

Only members of such a designated cyber militia would be protected. That ensures Australia can prescribe the situations in which it deems it acceptable for Australian citizens to engage in cyber warfare as part of a foreign cyber militia.

Further to this, participants should only enjoy legal safeguards where they have acted on specific orders issued by the foreign state in control of the militia. This is the second method of ensuring state control, and in the current situation, that control would be exercised by the Ukraine.

Another important question is how to strike a balance between offensive and defensive activities. To minimise the risk of Australia being seen to violate international law, I propose that only “defensive activities” – such as measures safeguarding vital computer systems in Ukraine – would be legalised for Australian members of a foreign cyber militia, and these “defensive activities” should be defined very carefully.

A necessary step, but not the only one

Clearly, this proposal is a response to the current invasion of Ukraine, and the Russian cyber aggression that has accompanied it. But given future wars are also likely to be fought in cyber space, this proposal will also be more broadly relevant.

Sooner or later, Australia will have to reckon with the prospect of significant numbers of citizens becoming involved in foreign cyber warfare. And there’s truly no time like the present.

Read more:
Fake viral footage is spreading alongside the real horror in Ukraine. Here are 5 ways to spot it

A version of my proposal could usefully be adopted by any nation that wants to support the defence of Ukraine. But in the meantime, there are still things concerned Australians can do to help the Ukrainians.

Donations to carefully selected organisations is one option, but social media abounds with other possibilities too. One creative option is to counter Russian disinformation by posting verified information about the atrocities on any Russian site that allows user posts – such as restaurant reviews, for example. Such posts are very likely to be removed, but if posted in sufficient numbers they may reach some of the Russian people.

Dan Jerker B. Svantesson 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. Ukraine is recruiting an ‘IT army’ of cyber warriors. Here’s how Australia could make it legal to join – https://theconversation.com/ukraine-is-recruiting-an-it-army-of-cyber-warriors-heres-how-australia-could-make-it-legal-to-join-178414

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rob Nicholls, Associate professor in regulation and governance, UNSW Sydney

The world’s five leading tech companies – Google (now Alphabet), Apple, Facebook (now Meta), Amazon and Microsoft – have taken steps to impose significant and (mainly) voluntary sanctions on Russia, in response to its invasion of Ukraine.

But the decisions didn’t come unprompted. Ukraine has lobbied the major tech companies in the same way it sought assistance from the European Union, NATO and the US government.

Facing the largest military action in Europe since the second world war, Ukraine appealed directly to big tech companies as though they were nation states. It’s a reminder that in today’s world, these giants are major players on the geopolitical stage.

So what impact could the tech-related sanctions have?

The Big 5’s response

Google’s response to the crisis has come in two parts. The first has been finance-related. The company has limited the use of Google Pay in Russia for customers or merchants that use a sanctioned bank.

It has also stopped selling online advertising in Russia across its services, and has removed the ability for Russian state media outlets Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik to monetise content on YouTube (which is owned by Google). RT and Sputnik have also been blocked in Europe.

Foxtel has removed RT in Australia, but it’s still available on YouTube, with ads in the livestream. That means RT can earn direct revenue from advertising in Australia, but no advertising revenue from YouTube. Google Search and Maps both remain available in Russia.

Apple has gone several steps further than Google. The company has suspended all product sales in Russia, and Apple Pay and other services have been limited. It has also blocked RT and Sputnik from the Apple App Store everywhere outside of Russia.

Meta has removed access to RT and Sputnik on both Facebook and Instagram (which it owns), and has removed the option for state media to monetise content on any of its platforms. It is also demoting posts that contain links to Russian state-controlled media websites on Facebook.

Amazon has taken the path of supporting cybersecurity efforts in Ukraine and offering logistical support, as announced on Twitter by chief executive Andy Jassy. However, Amazon hasn’t yet taken any action to reduce the revenue it receives from Russia.

Microsoft has also helped on the cybersecurity front. It identified a potential Russian cyber attack in Ukraine on February 24, helping efforts to thwart it. In addition, it has banned all advertisements from RT and Sputnik across its ad network, and blocked access to both channels in the European Union.

(Almost) no chips for Russia

Two of the largest US semiconductor (microchip) manufacturers, Intel and AMD, have ceased supplies to Russia. Although the official US sanctions prohibit the export of “dual use” devices with both military and non-military purposes, Intel and AMD have gone a step further and halted all supplies at this stage.

Perhaps more importantly, the major Taiwanese supplier TMSC has stopped supplies. TMSC makes chips for Russian manufacturers such as the Russian Scientific and Technical Centre Module, Baikal Electronics and Marvel Computer Solutions. There are no alternative semiconductor fabrication plants in Russia.

Samsung Electronics, another major chip manufacturer, also announced on Saturday that it would suspend shipments. Samsung leads mobile phone supplies in Russia and, prior to the suspension on Saturday, would have stood to benefit from Apple’s decision to stop sales in the country.

But not all tech companies have given in to political pressure. South Korean chip fabricator SK Hynix has not yet decided to limit supplies (as of when this article was written).

It seems the South Korean government wants to continue supplying semiconductors to Russia, as it has sought exemptions from the US in respect to actions that could negatively impact its semiconductor industry.

Other consequences

Apart from the more directly imposed restrictions, Some Meta and Google services were also blocked after users subverted them for political messaging. For example, social media users across the globe began using Google reviews of restaurants in Moscow and St Petersburg to send information to Russian citizens.

As a result, new reviews in Russia and Ukraine have now been restricted by Google. That is, Google has acted to avoid delivering potential disinformation from either side.

And both Meta and Google have restricted some of their location-based services in Ukraine to limit potential military use.

What’s the immediate impact?

The actions of Meta and Google, and any loss of ad revenue they previously afforded, will have an immediate but relatively small impact on the Russian state – much smaller than the impact from direct financial sanctions.

And not being able to use Google Pay or Apple Pay is still not as inconvenient for Russian citizens as being unable to use ATMs – many of which have run out of notes.

On the other hand, the loss of access to Apple hardware could have a much more lasting impact on Russian consumers.

The overall effect of the various sanctions will be a slowing down of the Russian economy – especially the digital economy which is reliant on semiconductors. However, this too will have a small immediate impact.

Read more:
Russian sanctions are biting harder than it could have imagined, and it’ll get worse

Corporate decisions

There was no legal or regulatory obligation for chip manufacturers and tech companies to limit the export of goods and services to Russia. Instead, the move seems to have been prompted by two key incidents.

First was the very public and direct appeal by Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov to the tech companies, asking them to take action.

Second was the need to meet stakeholders’ expectations. This can be characterised as “corporate social responsibility”, or as social licence.

Both Apple and Google responded to calls for help from members of the Ukrainian government. Google’s philanthropic arm and its employees are directly contributing US$15 million to relief efforts in Ukraine.

While the US sanctions didn’t demand for the tech companies to stop trading with Russia entirely, the signalling from both the US government and Ukrainian officials provided a persuasive context.

It has raised the spectre of multinational tech companies deciding which “side” to support based on a stakeholder perspective, rather than a legislated one. It seems in the end, stakeholder views are still the chief driver of Big Tech’s response to ethical dilemmas.

Read more:
Facebook is tilting the political playing field more than ever, and it’s no accident

Rob Nicholls is a member of the UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation from which he receives research funding. He is also the faculty lead for the UNSW Institute for Cyber Security (IFCYBER), which provides support. UNSW has received an untied gift from Facebook, which is used to fund some of Rob’s research.

– ref. The power of tech giants has made them as influential as nations. Here’s how they’re sanctioning Russia – https://theconversation.com/the-power-of-tech-giants-has-made-them-as-influential-as-nations-heres-how-theyre-sanctioning-russia-178424

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yolanda Vega, Lecturer and PhD Researcher, Swinburne University of Technology

We are about to mark another International Women’s Day.

But amid the breakfasts and uplifting speeches about girl power, we will also be reminded of the appalling rates of violence against women, the stubborn gender pay gap and pervasive sexism that is seemingly entrenched in our society. An imbalance remains: women do the vast bulk of unpaid work at home while men make the bulk of the laws and policies that affect us all.

Nothing seems to change – or change fast enough. But there are concrete things we can do to fix it. New research offers practical ideas to fix gender inequality in Australia from those at the very centre of federal government policy-making.

Talking direct to experts

As part of her PhD research, Yolanda Vega interviewed past and present MPs, senior bureaucrats, diplomats and political and public service advisers during 2018 and 2019. They were asked what works and what we need to do to eliminate sex-based discrimination in Australia.

In all, 25 interviews were conducted, and all were people who had direct experience of government policy-making and legislating around sex-based discrimination. Both sides of politics were involved and responses were kept anonymous so people could speak freely.

More women in power

Interviewees overwhelmingly believed we needed more women in the federal parliament to create a more equitable Australia (currently, 31% of lower house MPs and 52% of the Senate are women).

As one noted:

Australia has had an enviable track record of 27 years of economic growth, the best in the world, yet various cohorts of women have fared so badly, particularly over the last 20 years.

They pointed to other parliaments as evidence of the benefits of more women in power, such as Scandinavian parliaments with higher proportions of female MPs, where they have “very pro-women” policies.

As a way to address this, one interviewee suggested increasing the number of women in parliament using the “Irish model”, which uses financial incentives.

Every primary vote I received, at each election, returned to my party about A$3.00 per vote, paid from government revenue. In Ireland, which has the same system, a party can only access those payments if they have put up equal numbers of women. I think that is a great idea and would help drive change.

Others noted the importance of women being visible across the political spectrum – out proudly telling their stories.

People who go and talk about the importance of the rights of women [are] described by certain politicians as being ‘representatives of the green-left’ as if there is some political agenda involved in being in favour of women’s rights, which is really damaging.

More men prioritising equality

Interviewees also overwhelmingly wanted to see more male leaders within government prioritise gender equality. They said men needed to be encouraged to challenge the status quo and examine whether policy decisions (or a lack thereof) are based on prejudices and how these, in turn, affect women.

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Interviewees lamented that the attitude of male leaders has not changed over time. One structured way to ensure gender equality is incorporated into policy-making is to make it part of every aspect of the federal budget (and not just as a separate “women’s budget statement”).

What is the best way of doing macroeconomic reform that does not disadvantage women? […] What do investment strategies look like that are positive for women?

Another interviewee put it simply: “every policy needs to look at how it affects women”. This approach should be reinforced with measurements of success. As one person noted, “transparency” was needed if new policies were going to have a positive impact on women.

Another interviewees agreed, adding key performance indicators “have to be put in the job description”.

you have to have someone say, ‘I am going to measure your performance […] on this topic, off you trot!‘

Keeping the pressure on

Interviewees also wanted to see Australia take a cold, hard look at some of the infrastructure “upholding” gender equality.

The 1984 Sex Discrimination Act was a watershed moment for Australian law and women’s equality (a reform that was not coincidentally, led by women).

A 1992 review added elements to stop employers using pregnancy as a means of discriminating against women – but that was 30 years ago. Or as one interviewee said, “those legislative frameworks served us well, but they are not finished yet”.

As a starting point, it was noted there are no provisions for childcare in the Sex Discrimination Act. But interviewees also wanted to see other critical examinations of Australia’s legal and policy landscape.

Several interviewees said Australia’s award system further ingrained sex discrimination and as a legislative instrument, the Fair Work Act often functioned as a barrier. For example:

In my mind, that is where a lot of the economic disadvantage comes from – the award wage for a childcare worker versus a basic builder’s labourer are not equal. Some of them [awards] have been around and not amended for decades and decades and decades […].

Another interviewee said far more transparency when it came to pay negotiations – but this would be easy to fix if the federal government had the “political courage”.

A lot of it comes down to the fact that pay is negotiated behind closed doors and there is no visibility of what you are paid, and if you are not prepared to shine a light on it, then you are going to struggle to get there.

One expert had an even more striking idea, for a royal commission into the issue, or “what the hell is going on?”:

We will have an inquiry into our banks, but surely the bigger issue is what is happening every day in workplaces across Australia, where women are being paid differently, just because of their sex.

The benefits of equality

These are just some of the perspectives these experts at the heart of Australian government shared. Despite the serious nature of the discussions, the overriding theme was one of possibility and optimism with future governments. However, accountability, incentives and resources to include women in policy making are critical.

As a final thought, informants also spoke of the need to reframe the gender equality debate in more positive terms. And this needs to come not just from politicians, but the media and other community leaders, too:

I would turn the debate around. I would not be working for the elimination of discrimination against women in Australia or the elimination of barriers to equality, I would be celebrating the benefits of equality.

Vega received funding from the Victoria Women’s Trust (Fay Marles Equal Opportunity Sub-Fund grant) in September 2017. The grant covered the vast majority of the travel costs associated with executing the 25 interviews in Australia.

Vega is a member of the Reason Australia Party and is affiliated with Emily’s List Australia and various other women groups. Vega is the founder and former CEO of the Australian Women Chamber of Commerce & Industry. As CEO, Vega was appointed to several government boards and committees by Labor and Liberal federal governments.

Melissa Wheeler has engaged in paid and pro-bono consulting and research relating to issues of applied ethics and gender equality (e.g., Our Watch, Queen Victoria Women’s Centre, VicHealth). She has previously worked for research centres that receive funding from several partner organisations in the private and public sector, including from the Victorian Government.

– ref. New research asked government insiders how to fix gender discrimination in Australia – this is what they said – https://theconversation.com/new-research-asked-government-insiders-how-to-fix-gender-discrimination-in-australia-this-is-what-they-said-177539

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Director, Health and Aged Care Program, Grattan Institute

Nearly every Australian uses some part of the health system every year, whether it be going to the GP, getting a prescription filled, or seeing a specialist.

Despite having a universal health-care system, we often still pay for these services out of our own pockets.

Sadly, these out-of-pocket payments are unaffordable for many Australians – so they skip the trip to the doctor, or defer going to the chemist.

This is bad for those individuals, but also bad for taxpayers and the economy. It makes people sicker, widens inequities, and puts further strain on the health system down the track.

In the Grattan Institute’s latest report, we identify what governments should do to make health care more affordable for more Australians.

Who is missing health care because of cost?

In 2020-21, more than half a million people deferred or did not fill a prescription because of cost. Nearly half a million decided not to see a specialist because of cost.

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People with chronic conditions have much higher health-care costs, particularly if they have multiple chronic conditions; they spend between A$200-600 on average on health care each year.

But they are also less likely to be able to afford their ongoing care because their chronic condition can make it more difficult to keep or get a job.

Many of these people who are forgoing health care due to cost are younger, particularly younger women:

Younger people tend to have fewer savings, and can therefore find it harder to afford care. And women are more likely to have chronic health conditions. About 55% of people with two chronic conditions are women, and 60% of people with three or more chronic conditions are women.

Chronic conditions are becoming more common, so more and more Australians will be facing higher health-care costs and are at risk of missing needed care.

Over the past ten years, average out-of-pocket payments rose by 50%, and they will continue to rise unless governments act now.

What can be done?

The federal government can do much more to reduce out-of-pocket payments and avoid unnecessary costs down the line.

Cost of medicines

While Australia has a world-renowned Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) that helps keep many medications affordable, Australians are still spending nearly A$3 billion on PBS-listed prescriptions each year, including A$1.5 billion on mandatory co-payments and A$1.4 billion on PBS-listed prescriptions which cost less than the co-payment.

The federal government should lower the cost of prescriptions for people taking five or more medications for chronic conditions, after their GP conducts a medication review triggered by a computer-generated alert.

We estimate this could reduce inappropriate medication use for about 300,000 patients.

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The government should also extend the duration of prescriptions for some medications to reduce the number of Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme co-payments people have to make to pharmacies.

Tests and scans

The government should abolish the out-of-pocket burden from diagnostic services, such as blood tests and scans.

Australians spend about A$400 million on these services each year – even though patients aren’t the real users of these tests, doctors are.

With these services now frequently provided by large corporations, the federal government should fund them directly through a commercial tender instead.

Patient enrolment

The government should expand the voluntary patient enrolment scheme to people with two or more chronic conditions.

Patient enrolment is where a patient can enrol in a GP practice and nominate a GP to be their “usual doctor”. It can help make care more affordable for people with chronic conditions by reducing their exposure to out-of-pocket payments.

Greater GP stewardship over a person’s care could reduce inefficiencies in areas such as routine repeat prescriptions and routine renewal of specialist referrals.

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The government has already committed to this reform for people older than 70. If it was expanded to younger people, we estimate an additional 1.7 million people would be eligible for the program.

Bulk billing

The vast majority of health services people receive outside hospital are “bulk-billed” – meaning the patient pays nothing out of pocket. But bulk-billing rates for specialists and allied health are still far too low – at about 46% for specialists and 56% for allied health.

The federal and state governments should expand the number of health-care services provided free of charge, particularly in lower-income areas and areas where bulk-billing rates are especially low.

Our analysis shows that if state and federal governments invest an additional A$710 million a year on these reforms, they could save Australians about A$1 billion in out-of-pockets a year, and enable more people to get the care they need, when they need it. That’s a healthy return on investment.

Stephen Duckett is chair of the board of directors of the Eastern Melbourne Primary Health Network. Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment of $15 million from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments, $4 million from BHP Billiton, and $1 million from NAB. In order to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. The funds are invested and contribute to funding Grattan Institute’s activities. Grattan Institute also receives funding from corporates, foundations, and individuals to support its general activities, as disclosed on its website.

Linda Lin is currently on secondment to the Grattan Institute from the Victorian Department of Health.

Anika Stobart 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. Last year, half a million Australians couldn’t afford to fill a script. Here’s how to rein in rising health costs – https://theconversation.com/last-year-half-a-million-australians-couldnt-afford-to-fill-a-script-heres-how-to-rein-in-rising-health-costs-178301

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Seers, PhD Candidate, Charles Sturt University

Wellness is mainly marketed to women. We’re encouraged to eat clean, take personal responsibility for our well-being, happiness and life. These are the hallmarks of a strong, independent woman in 2022.

But on the eve of International Women’s Day, let’s look closer at this neoliberal feminist notion of wellness and personal responsibility – the idea women’s health and well-being depends on our individual choices.

We argue wellness is not concerned with actual well-being, whatever wellness “guru” and businesswoman Gwyneth Paltrow suggests, or influencers say on Instagram.

Wellness is an industry. It’s also a seductive distraction from what’s really impacting women’s lives. It glosses over the structural issues undermining women’s well-being. These issues cannot be fixed by drinking a turmeric latte or #livingyourbestlife.

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What is wellness?

Wellness is an unregulated US$4.4 trillion global industry due to reach almost $7 trillion by 2025. It promotes self-help, self-care, fitness, nutrition and spiritual practice. It encourages good choices, intentions and actions.

Wellness is alluring because it feels empowering. Women are left with a sense of control over their lives. It is particularly alluring in times of great uncertainty and limited personal control. These might be during a relationship break up, when facing financial instability, workplace discrimination or a global pandemic.

But wellness is not all it seems.

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Wellness blames women

Wellness implies women are flawed and need to be fixed. It demands women resolve their psychological distress, improve their lives and bounce back from adversity, regardless of personal circumstances.

Self-responsibility, self-empowerment and self-optimisation underpin how women are expected to think and behave.

As such, wellness patronises women and micro-manages their daily schedules with journaling, skin care routines, 30-day challenges, meditations, burning candles, yoga and lemon water.

Wellness encourages women to improve their appearance through diet and exercise, manage their surroundings, performance at work and their capacity to juggle the elusive work-life balance as well as their emotional responses to these pressures. They do this with support from costly life coaches, psychotherapists and self-help guides.

Wellness demands women focus on their body, with one’s body a measure of their commitment to the task of wellness. Yet this ignores how much these choices and actions cost.

Newsreader and journalist Tracey Spicer says she has spent more than A$100,000 over the past 35 years for her hair to “look acceptable” at work.

Wellness keeps women focused on their appearance and keeps them spending.

It’s also ableist, racist, sexist, ageist and classist. It’s aimed at an ideal of young women, thin, white, middle-class and able-bodied.

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But we can’t live up to these ideals

Wellness assumes women have equal access to time, energy and money to meet these ideals. If you don’t, “you’re just not trying hard enough”.

Wellness also implores women to be “adaptable and positive”.

If an individual’s #positivevibes and wellness are seen as morally good, then it becomes morally necessary for women to engage in behaviours framed as “investments” or “self-care”.

For those who do not achieve self-optimisation (hint: most of us) this is a personal, shameful failing.

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Wellness distracts us

When women believe they are to blame for their circumstances, it hides structural and cultural inequities. Rather than questioning the culture that marginalises women and produces feelings of doubt and inadequacy, wellness provides solutions in the form of superficial empowerment, confidence and resilience.

Women don’t need wellness. They are unsafe.

Women are more likely to be murdered by a current or former intimate partner, with reports of the pandemic increasing the risk and severity of domestic violence.

Women are more likely to be employed in unstable casualised labour, and experience economic hardship and poverty. Women are also bearing the brunt of the economic fallout from COVID. Women are more likely to be juggling a career with unpaid domestic duties and more likely to be homeless as they near retirement age.

In their book Confidence Culture UK scholars Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill argue hashtags such as #loveyourbody and #believeinyourself imply psychological blocks, rather than entrenched social injustices, are what hold women back.

What we should be doing instead

Wellness, with its self-help rhetoric, absolves the government of responsibility to provide transformative and effectual action that ensures women are safe, delivered justice, and treated with respect and dignity.

Structural inequity was not created by an individual, and it will not be solved by an individual.

So this International Women’s Day, try to resist the neoliberal requirement to take personal responsibility for your wellness. Lobby governments to address structural inequities instead.

Follow your anger, not your bliss, call out injustices when you can. And in the words of sexual assault survivor and advocate Grace Tame, “make some noise”.

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. Wellness is not women’s friend. It’s a distraction from what really ails us – https://theconversation.com/wellness-is-not-womens-friend-its-a-distraction-from-what-really-ails-us-177446

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Noel D Preece, Adjunct Asssociate Professor, James Cook University

At the time Australia was colonised by Europeans, an estimated 180 mammal species lived in the continent’s northern savannas. The landscape teemed with animals, from microbats to rock-wallabies and northern quolls. Many of these mammals were found nowhere else on Earth.

An unidentified account from the Normanton district of Northwest Queensland, dating back to 1897, told of the abundance:

“There were thousands of millions of those rats (Rattus villosissimus), and as most Gulf identities may remember, after them came a plague of native cats (the Northern Quoll).

These extended from 18 miles west of the Flinders (River) to within 40 miles of Normanton, and they cleaned up all our tucker.”

But tragically, in the years since, many of these mammals have disappeared. Four species have become extinct and nine face the same fate in the next two decades.

And we know relatively little about this homegrown crisis. Monitoring of these species has been lacking for many decades – and as mammal numbers have declined, the knowledge gaps have become worse.

A precipitous decline

Northern Australia savanna comprises the top half of Queensland and the Northern Territory and the top quarter of Western Australia. It covers 1.9 million square kilometres, or 26% of the Australian landmass.

Species already extinct in Northern Australia are:

• burrowing bettong
• Victoria River district nabarlek (possibly extinct)

• Capricornian rabbit-rat
• Bramble Cay melomys.

The Northern Australia species identified at risk of becoming extinct within 20 years are:

• northern hopping-mouse
• Carpentarian rock-rat
• black-footed tree rat (Kimberley and Top End)
• Top End nabarlek
• Kimberley brush-tailed phascogale
• brush-tailed rabbit-rat (Kimberley and Top End)
• northern brush-tailed phascogale
• Tiwi Islands brush-tail rabbit-rat
• northern bettong.

Many other mammal species have been added to the endangered list in recent years, including koalas, the northern spotted-tailed quoll and spectacled flying foxes.

So what’s driving the decline? For some animals, we don’t know the exact reasons. But for others they include global warming, pest species, changed fire regimes, grazing by introduced herbivores and diseases.

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Monitoring is crucial

There’s no doubt some mammal species in Northern Australia are heading towards extinction. But information is limited because monitoring of these populations and their ecosystems is severely lacking.

Monitoring is crucial to species conservation. It enables scientists to protect an animal’s habitat, and understand the rate of decline and what processes are driving it.

Our research found most of Northern Australia lacks monitoring of species or ecosystems.

Monitoring mostly comprises long-term projects in three national parks in the Northern Territory. The trends for mammals across the region must be estimated from these few sites.

More recent monitoring sites have been established in Western Australia’s Kimberley. Very few fauna monitoring programs exist in Queensland savannas.

The lack of monitoring hampers conservation efforts. For example, researchers don’t know the status of the Queensland subspecies of black‐footed tree‐rat because the species is not monitored at all.

Research and monitoring efforts have declined significantly over the past couple of decades. Reasons for this include, but are not limited to:

• a massive reduction in federal environment funding since 2013 and substantial reductions in some state and territory environment funding

• reduced capacity of government-unded institutions devoted to ecosystem and species research

• the existence of only two universities in northern Australia with an ecological research focus

• a reliance on remote sensing and vegetation condition monitoring, which does not detect animal trends.

Read more:
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The lesson of the Bramble Cay Melomys

An avalanche of research shows increasing rates of decline in animal populations and extinctions. Australia has the worst mammal extinction rate of any country.

Yet governments in Australia have largely sat on their heels as the biodiversity crisis worsens.

A Senate committee was in 2018 charged with investigating Australia’s faunal extinctions. It has not yet produced its final report.

In September last year, the federal environment department announced 100 “priority species” would be selected to help focus recovery actions. But more than 1,800 species are listed as threatened in Australia. Prioritising just 100 is unlikely to help the rest.

The lack of threatened species monitoring in Australia creates a policy blindfold that prevents actions vital to preventing extinctions.

Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the Bramble Cay Melomys. The nocturnal rodent was confirmed extinct in 2016 due to flooding of its island home in the Torres Strait, caused by global warming.

The species had previously been acknowledged as one of the rarest mammals on Earth – yet a plan to recover its numbers was never properly implemented.

A crisis on our watch

Conservation scientists and recovery teams are working across Northern Australia to help species and ecosystems recover. But they need resources, policies and long-term commitment from governments.

Indigenous custodians who work on the land can provide significant skills and resources to save species. If Traditional Owners could combine forces with non‐Indigenous researchers and conservation managers – and with adequate support and incentives – we could make substantial ground.

Indigenous Protected Areas, national parks and private conservation areas provide some protection, but this network needs expansion.

We propose establishing a network of monitoring sites by prioritising particular bioregions – large, geographically distinct areas of land with common characteristics.

Building a network of monitoring sites would not just help prevent extinctions, it would also support livelihoods in remote Northern Australia.

Policies determining research and monitoring investment need to be reset, and new approaches implemented urgently. Crucially, funding must be adequate for the task.

Without these measures, more species will become extinct on our watch.

Noel D Preece received funding from The Nature Conservancy for work that led to this article. He is a member of the Spectacled Flying-fox Recovery Team. He has worked in northern Australia since the mid-1980s.

James Fitzsimons is affiliated with The Nature Conservancy Australia.

– ref. Extinction crisis: native mammals are disappearing in Northern Australia, but few people are watching – https://theconversation.com/extinction-crisis-native-mammals-are-disappearing-in-northern-australia-but-few-people-are-watching-178313

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jen Couch, Senior Lecturer – Youth Work and International Development, Australian Catholic University

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is dominating our screens and conversations. Children and young people are constantly being exposed to images and information about the devastation there.

This kind of exposure can lead to heightened stress and anxiety in both adults and young people. In such times, a classroom can provide a safe space for students to express their fears and concerns.

Teachers can inspire children and young people to feel hopeful and promote a sense of agency through thoughtful, honest discussion and developmentally appropriate activities.

What teachers need to think about

As with all difficult topics, educators should be keenly aware of the emotional impact these events have on students. Teachers should pay close attention to students who may have family members in the regions and who might be worried about how this crisis might impact them here.

Teachers should also be aware some of their students may have lived through war or have family in other active conflict zones. For children and young people with a trauma or refugee background, images and talk of war and violence can be triggering. Conversations about the conflict and constant media exposure can exacerbate this experience.

Previous experiences with major global crises such as the September 11 attacks in the United States and bushfires in Australia have provided insight into children’s possible reactions to an event such as this.

Students will come to teachers with concerns. Answering questions may be tricky but we can give them a safe place to discuss things.

The first you can do is acknowledge and validate the students’ concerns: wars are scary, and it’s OK to feel scared. Start by asking what they have heard and address any misinformation.

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Explain why it is important to pay attention to other parts of the world. Research shows that including discussion of global issues increases empathy and helps students develop more of an understanding for people around them who may have different backgrounds and experiences.

Listen and don’t avoid difficult conversations. Be prepared to answer the questions the student may have, and answer with facts which will provide context to aid their understanding.

Be aware of your class and monitor children at risk, as young people with a background of trauma or loss are at higher risk of experiencing distress.

While it is important to be honest, the level of detail needed for an eight-year-old will be very different to that of a 12-year-old.

Primary school children

Primary school children have active imaginations and might not understand the situation as well as their older peers. But they will still sense the mood of the adults around them, which can impact their behaviour.

As a result they could experience an increase in stress and anxiety, distress at being separated from parents, or experience nightmares, sleep disturbances, or behavioural disruptions (“acting out”).

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You can use picture and story books to help these children understand relevant concepts and to think about their treatment of others. For instance, “Paulie Pastrami Achieves World Peace” by Jaimes Proimos is about an a boy who plans to achieve world peace before his eighth birthday. He does this through acts of kindness such as reading to the trees and helping his little sister.

Books like this can help children understand altruism, and that even children can make the world better through kindness.

Use movies or cartoons to help children understand how they can make changes and improve their own community. Agency is a skill that can be taught from a young age, and can play a role in reducing feelings of helplessness, particularly during times of uncertainty.

Help students create artwork to express their feelings. We have seen even children in Ukraine doing this.

Instil hope. Show maps of locations and distances to help children understand their safety. You can remind children the war is very far away and they are safe here, while encouraging them to feel empathy for Ukrainian children.

Be prepared to answer student’s questions. If you do not know the answer, you should say so.

Children might ask you how you are feeling, such as “are you scared?” You should respond honestly, as this is an opportunity to encourage open and transparent conversations about tricky topics.

Secondary school children

Secondary school children have higher levels of emotional regulation than their primary school peers. While they may be more curious, they may also have visualisations of possible attacks, and concerns about the implications for their future – including being sent to war or being conscripted if the war in Ukraine becomes a larger conflict.

You can share stories of what regular people are doing and experiencing to humanise the event. Lead with a positive tone, offering stories of people persevering in Ukraine and people in Russia who are challenging their government’s actions. It is useful to point students to independent media in the Ukraine such as The Kyiv Independent and The New Voice of Ukraine. Radio Liberty in Russia is also a useful source of news.

Help older students build critical thinking skills and see the conflict in a wider historical and political context. The Netflix documentary “Winter on Fire” may be a useful discussion starter.

You could encourage students to start a fundraising project where funds will go directly to the Ukrainian community such as Ukranian Red Cross and Nova Ukraine.

You can encourage students to become global citizens and think about how they can start making changes in the world, both here and abroad. Provide information on how they can volunteer with local groups that focus on peace and community-building. Linking them to online platforms such as Global Citizen will help build feelings of solidarity with Ukraine.

Read more:
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Other ways to demonstrate solidarity would be to hold a vigil or an awareness-raising activity at school. You could also teach students how to write letters to a local MP.

Students want and need to talk about what they see, remember and are feeling now. They need the guidance and safety of adults in their schools to be able to navigate their own emotions and trauma in a healthy, safe and productive way.

Jen is a member of the Refugee Education Special Interest Group (www.refugee-education.org)

Joel Anderson works for Australian Catholic University and the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society at La Trobe University. He has previously received funding from the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education. Joel is a member of the Refugee Education Special Interest Group (www.refugee-education.org)

Kelda Robinson 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. Teachers can offer a safe space for students to talk about the war in Ukraine and help them take action – https://theconversation.com/teachers-can-offer-a-safe-space-for-students-to-talk-about-the-war-in-ukraine-and-help-them-take-action-178406

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Libby (Elizabeth) Sander, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour, Bond Business School, Bond University

The great enforced global experiment in working from home is coming to an end, as vaccines, the Omicron variant and new therapeutic drugs bring the COVID-19 crisis under control.

But a voluntary experiment has begun, as organisations navigate the new landscape of hybrid work, combining the best elements of remote work with time in the office.

Yes, there is some push for a “return to normal” and getting workers back into offices. But ideas such as food vouchers and parking discounts are mostly being proposed by city councils and CBD businesses keen to get their old customers back.

A wide range of surveys over the past 18 months show most employees and increasingly employers have no desire to return to commuting five days a week.

The seismic shift in employer attitudes is signalled by Google, long a fierce opponent of working from home.

Last week the company told employees they must return to the office from early April – but only for three days a week.

That’s still way more than tech companies such as Australia’s Atlassian, which expects workers to come into the office just four days a year, but it is a far cry from its pre-pandemic resistance to remote work.

Hybrid work is here to stay. Employers will either embrace the change or find themselves being left behind.

Gains in productivity

Google began – under pressure – to soften its opposition to remote work in 2020. In December of that year chief executive Sundar Pichai told employees:

We are testing a hypothesis that a flexible work model will lead to greater productivity, collaboration, and well-being.

Its chief concern has been protecting the social capital that springs from physical proximity – and also perhaps with keeping employers under surveillance.

But longstanding (and widespread) management concerns that employees working from home would lower productivity have proven unfounded.

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Even before the pandemic there was good research showing no productivity penalty from remote working – the opposite, in fact.

Fro example, a 2014 randomised trial involving about 250 Shanghai call centre workers found working from home associated with 13% more productivity. This comprised a 9% gain from working more minutes per shift – due perhaps to fewer interruptions – and a 4% gain from making more calls per minute – attributed to a quieter, more comfortable working environment.

Research in the past two years supports these findings.

Harvard Business School professor Raj Choudury and colleagues published research in October 2020 that found allowing employees to work wherever they like led to a 4.4% increase in output.

In April 2021, Stanford University economist Nick Bloom and colleagues calculated a the shift to remote working resulted in a 5% productivity boost. Though their working paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, was not peer reviewed, it was based on surveying 30,000 American workers, which is a decent sample size.

Our relationship with work has changed

There are good reasons most of us don’t want to go back to the old normal. It just wasn’t that great.

While working from home can brings challenges of other kinds, not least the ability to switch off and stop working when work is done, working in an office can increase stress, lower mood and reduce productivity.

My own research has measured the effects of typical open-plan office noises, finding a 25% increase in negative mood even after a short exposure time.

Then there’s the time spent commuting. Not having to go into the office every day frees up hours of time to do other things. Particularly in winter it’s nice to not have to leave and arrive home in the dark.

Preferred number of days working at home, by occupation

Changed expectations of work

The importance of these things should not be underestimated.

In a June 2021 study by McKinsey of 245 employees who had returned to the office, one-third said they felt their mental health had been harmed.

The experience of the pandemic has lowered our tolerance for this old world of work.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the growth of the “lie-flat” trend, which began in China and is now a global phenomenon. Increasing numbers of people are rejecting the idea of pursuing a career at all costs.

They don’t want to spend their life being a cog in the wheel of capitalism and are choosing to work less – even not at all.

No one size fits all

Rather than a bastion of meaning and fulfilment, the structures around how we have conducted work has for many people meant an existence of quiet desperation. The pandemic has brought an unforeseen opportunity to change this narrative and rethink both the way we work and the role of work in our lives

For some, no job is better than a bad job. The rest of us will settle for the flexibility we’ve had over the past two years.

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How many days a week in the office are enough? You shouldn’t need to ask

No one size fits all. The downsides of working from home include missing coworkers and losing the benefits of serendipitous conversations. The nuances of how much time we need to spend together in the office for outcomes like creativity, belonging, learning and relationship building varies between individuals, teams and job types.

But what is certain is we don’t need to be together five days a week to make these things happen. With a shrinking workforce and an increasing war for talent, employers who don’t provide flexibility will be the losers.

Libby (Elizabeth) Sander 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. Even Google agrees there’s no going back to the old office life – https://theconversation.com/even-google-agrees-theres-no-going-back-to-the-old-office-life-177808

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daryl Sparkes, Senior Lecturer (Media Studies and Production), University of Southern Queensland

When it was released 50 years ago, The Godfather won a swag of Oscars and hailed director Francis Ford Coppola as the voice of a new auteur. But timing is, as they say, everything.

The story of an ageing Mafia Don and his family in New York City from 1945 to 1955, The Godfather is a sweeping saga of the trials and tribulations of running a criminal organisation.

There are two timelines that need to be looked at when watching The Godfather: when it was set, and when it was made. They are inextricably linked, yet polar opposites of the moral, cultural and social fabric of the United States.

Post-war optimism

Coming out of the devastating destruction and loss of life of the second world war, Americans had a newfound sense of optimism that the worst was behind them.

After years of uncertainty and stress, people yearned for a “normality” in the mundane in their suburban houses, family life and nine-to-five job. People believed in governments and traditional institutions to look after their interests and well-being.

New opportunities and an even distribution of wealth created through low post-war unemployment incentivised growth and created “an advanced consumer economy” which drew both legitimate and illegitimate businesses.

With easy money to be made, Mafia groups flourished. This is the world where we find the Corleone family: Italian immigrants who sought a distorted vision of the American Dream through theft, extortion and violence.

Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) wants to continue with the old ways. He is suspicious of this new trade in drugs offered by the Tattaglia crime family. His son Michael (Al Pacino) has experienced life outside of the Mafia world and wants to change the whole structure of the organisation, vowing to make the family legitimate.

What happens next is as much a statement on the character arc of Michael as it is about a statement of when The Godfather was made.

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A new war for a new generation

By 1972, the social and cultural norms had shifted dramatically.

People, especially young people, had grown increasingly suspicious and disenchanted with both government and the institutions that had grown post war. While many saw the second world war as a “moral war”, they did not express the same feelings towards the Vietnam war. Many saw America as the immoral aggressor.

The 1960s had started out as a decade of hope, full of idealism. Young people were not happy with continuing the ways of the past and wanted change. They were leading the charge for the better.

But in the 1970s, it was dawning on the Woodstock generation the values they had fought for were not coming to fruition. The ongoing Vietnam War, the publishing of the Pentagon papers and the unravelling Watergate all added to the disillusionment.

Despite the cries of revolution, the old institutions kept a strong grasp on the mechanisms of society.

This all becomes a metaphor for The Godfather.

Growing into pragmatism

The Godfather argues the principles of a generation are often corrupted by the realities of the times.

As with the the lost ideals of the 1960s, Michael is confronted with the pragmatism of running a criminal organisation. The Corleone’s could never be legitimate: the institutions of the past are just too powerful.

Like a big Italian opera, the film sways between personal loyalties, betrayals and consequent ruthless murders.

At the end of it all, Michael – a man of morals who desperately wants to transform the world into something better – falls back down the rabbit hole of the past. He takes over the family “business” and is forced to be more cunning and ruthless than even his father was.

The one figure who stood for light turns out to be the darkest of them all. There will be no change from the past.

The film’s ending is powerful but pessimistic. Early in the film, Michael tells his then girlfriend Kay (Diane Keating) he is going to change the whole way the organisation operated.

Now, Michael tells his wife Kay “don’t ask me about my business”. He closes the door on her as he takes his father’s chair.

In a way, Coppola was predicting the path of the next generation, and perhaps every young generation.

They all start with good intentions but practicalities often change ideals. The 1980s started as the era of anti-apartheid and Live Aid, but soon changed to “greed is good”. The 1990s started with the fall of the Soviet Union and the confirmed belief in Western Democracy, but resulted in disillusioned grunge.

Will the youth movements of this era have any demonstrable impact in ten years time? Or, like Michael Corleone, will they have been turned by the power and authority of the traditional institutions?

Five decades later, The Godfather still remains an allegorical tale for the passing of power from one generation to the next. But perhaps the greatest lesson from the film is the old adage that unless you learn from the past you are doomed to repeat it. The past often makes an offer you can’t refuse.

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Daryl Sparkes no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.

– ref. The Godfather at 50: set among the American Mafia of the 40s, Coppola’s film is unmistakably a film of the disillusioned 70s – https://theconversation.com/the-godfather-at-50-set-among-the-american-mafia-of-the-40s-coppolas-film-is-unmistakably-a-film-of-the-disillusioned-70s-178030