Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alister McKeich, Lecturer and Researcher in Law, Criminology and Indigenous Studies, Victoria University, Victoria University

The onslaught in the Middle East has brought to the world’s attention once again the “crime of crimes”, genocide.

Both the the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court (ICC) have brought allegations of genocide against Israel as a state and Israeli and Hamas leaders as individuals.

The Australian government’s response to the Gaza crisis has included temporarily freezing of A$6 million of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine. Though funding has been flowing again since March, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been referred to the ICC by a law firm for being “an accessory to genocide”.

Against this backdrop, Australia’s own genocide legislation is under parliamentary scrutiny. A bill tabled by independent Senator Lidia Thorpe (for whom I work as a casual legal researcher) seeks to change the way Australia deals with genocide.

So what do our current laws say and what’s the case for changing them?

What do our laws say?

Australia ratified the Genocide Convention in 1949.

Yet it was not until 2002, once the ICC was established, that the Commonwealth Criminal Code was amended to create a new division of atrocity crimes.

Through this legislation, Australia may prosecute any person accused of a Rome Statute crime (such as genocide) under Australian law.

At the moment, written consent from the attorney-general is required before legal proceedings about genocide and other atrocity crimes can commence. This is called the “attorney-general’s fiat”.

Further, the attorney-general’s decision is final. It “must not be challenged, appealed against, reviewed, quashed or called into question”.

Thorpe’s bill seeks to overturn these two measures.

The explanatory memorandum in the 2002 amendment did not say why the attorney-general’s consent was necessary.

Consent from an attorney-general (or similar position) is not an international requirement.

Australia is only one of a handful of other countries (including the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada) where the fiat also exists.

Why is it a problem?

The Australian government has justified the rule on the basis that prosecutions for atrocity crimes against individuals could affect Australia’s international relations and national security.

However, submissions from legal experts and community groups to a senate inquiry looking at the issue point out flaws.

They say this rule prevents access to justice for victims and survivors of atrocity crimes. It can also create the potential for government bias.

Submissions also say the lack of explanation or appeal process ignores fundamental principles of jurisprudence.

Has the rule been used?

The attorney-general’s fiat has been used in a limited number of cases.

In 2009, Palestinian rights groups Australians for Palestine issued a request for consent for the prosecution of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who was visiting at the time.

The Australian Centre for International Justice states in its submission how then-attorney-general Robert McClellend denied the request. He cited matters of international state sovereignty and the difficulties of pursuing such a case in an overseas jurisdiction.

Then, in 2011, Arunchalam Jegastheeswaran, an Australian citizen of Tamil
background, sought the attorney-general’s consent for the prosecution of then Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was due to visit Australia.

McClellend again denied the request, saying Rajapaska was protected under “head of state immunity”. This concept is controversial in international law, given it’s often heads of state who commit atrocity crimes.

Head of state protection was also offered to former Myanmar (Burma) leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was in government when the 2017 genocide against the Rohingya was committed.

With Suu Kyi due to be in Australia for an ASEAN conference in 2018, the Australian Rohingya community sought a prosecution. It was denied by then attorney-general Christian Porter.

And in 2019, retired Sri Lankan General Jagath Jayasuriya visited Australia. Despite concerted efforts to raise evidence to prosecute Jayasuriya of war crimes, delays with the Australian Federal Police meant the case never reached the point of attorney-general consent.

First Nations plaintiffs such as Paul Coe and Robert Thorpe have also sought to bring cases of genocide before the domestic courts, with no success.

What would changing the laws mean?

As it’s unlikely an attorney-general would consent to prosecutions against its own government, submissions to the inquiry argue the rule creates a direct conflict of interest.

For First Nations people seeking justice for crimes of “ongoing genocide” perpetuated by the Commonwealth, any government is hardly going to rule in their favour.

Some Indigenous community groups argue the high rates of First Nations children in protection, deaths in custody, hyper-incarceration and cultural, land and environmental damage amount to genocide crimes.

Submissions to the inquiry recommend instead of requiring the consent of the attorney-general, claims of genocide should be directed to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions. This would ensure greater independence from government.

The director has a mandate for this sort of work. It already investigates similar crimes such as people smuggling, human trafficking, slavery and child exploitation.

Internationally, the implications of this bill, if passed, will be consequential. The Australian Centre for International Justice estimates up to 1,000 Australian citizens have returned to Israel to fight as part of the Israel Defense Forces. Israel has been accused of serious atrocity crimes in Gaza.

Should any of those citizens return, there could be attempts to mount a case. The government would then have to consider Australia’s political and economic ties with Israel.

Whether the bill is passed will depend on parliament. But the situation highlights a paradox: the state itself will be deciding whether to remove its own inbuilt protections against charges of genocide.

Alister McKeich is a casual legal researcher with the office of Senator Lidia Thorpe.

– ref. Can Australia prosecute foreigners for genocide overseas? Here’s how our atrocity laws work – https://theconversation.com/can-australia-prosecute-foreigners-for-genocide-overseas-heres-how-our-atrocity-laws-work-236394

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Keogh, Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University

The development of “superhuman” strength and power has long been admired in many cultures across the world.

This may reflect the importance of these physical fitness characteristics in many facets of our lives from pre-history to today: hunting and gathering, the construction of large buildings and monuments, war, and more recently, sport.

Potentially, the current peak of human strength and power is demonstrated in the sport of strongman.

What is strongman?

Strongman is becoming more common, with competitions now available at regional, national and international levels for men and women of different ages and sizes.

Read more:
Strongman used to be seen as a super-human novelty sport. Now more women and novices are turning to it

Strongman training and competitions typically involve a host of traditional barbell-based exercises including squats, deadlifts and presses but also specific strongman events.

The specific strongman events – such as the vehicle pull, farmer’s walk, sandbag/keg toss or stones lift – often require competitors to move a range of awkward, heavy implements either higher, faster or with more repetitions in a given time period than their competitors.

Researching one of the greats

Strongman has enjoyed substantial growth and development since the introduction of the World’s Strongest Man competition in the late 1970s.

However, from a scientific perspective, there are few published studies focusing on athletes at the elite level.

In particular, very little is currently known about the overall amount of muscle mass these athletes possess, how their mass is distributed across individual muscles and to what extent their tendon characteristics differ to people who are not training.

However a recent study sought to shed some light on these extreme athletes. It examined the muscle and tendon morphology (structure) of one of the world’s strongest ever men – England’s Eddie Hall.

Measuring an exceptionally strong person such as Hall – who produced a 500kg world record deadlift and won the “World’s Strongest Man” competition in 2017 – provided the opportunity to understand what specific muscle and tendon characteristics may have contributed to his incredible strength.

What can we learn from a single case study?

A limited number of athletes reach the truly elite level of strongman and even fewer set world records or win premier events.

Because it’s so difficult to recruit even a small group of such rare athletes, conducting a case study with one elite strongman provided a unique opportunity to understand more about his muscle and tendon characteristics.

Case studies have many limitations, including an inability to determine cause and effect or generalise findings to other individuals from the same group.

However, the study of Hall was insightful, as his muscle and tendon results could be compared directly with various groups from the authors’ earlier published research.

These groups included untrained people, people who have regularly resistance trained for several years, and competitive track sprinters.

The inclusion of these comparative populations allowed meaningful interpretation of what makes Hall’s muscle and tendon characteristics so special.

What they found

Hall’s lower body muscle size was almost twice that of an untrained group of healthy active young men.

And the manner in which his muscle mass was distributed across his lower body exhibited a very specific pattern.

Three long thin muscles, referred to as “guy ropes”, were particularly large (some 2.5 to three times bigger) compared to untrained people.

The guy rope muscles connect to the shin bone via a shared tendon and provide stability to the thigh and hips by fanning out and attaching to the pelvis at diverse locations.

Highly developed guy rope muscles would be expected to offer enhanced stability with heavy lifting, carrying and pulling.

Hall’s thigh (quadriceps) muscle structure was more than twice that of untrained people, yet the tendon at the knee that is connected to this muscle group was only 30% larger than an untrained population.

This finding indicates muscle and tendon growth, within this case of extreme quadriceps muscle development, do not occur to the same extent.

What do the results mean?

The obvious implication is, the larger the relevant muscles, the greater the potential for strength and power.

However, sports like strongman and even everyday activities like climbing stairs, carrying groceries and lifting objects off the ground require the coordinated activity of many stabilising muscles as well as major propulsive muscles such as the quadriceps.

While Hall’s quadriceps were substantially bigger than untrained people, the largest relative differences occurred in the calves and the long thin “guy rope” muscles that help stabilise the hip and knee.

These results pose a question about whether additional or more specific training for these smaller muscles may further enhance strength and power.

This could benefit strongman athletes as well as everyday people.

Also, the relatively small differences in tendon size between Hall and untrained populations suggests tendons do not grow to the same extent as muscles do.

As muscular forces are transmitted through tendons to the bones, the substantially greater growth of muscle than tendon may mean athletes such as Hall have a greater relative risk of tendon than muscle injury.

This view is somewhat consistent with the high proportion of tendinitis and strains reported in strength sport athletes, including strongman and weightlifters.

Justin Keogh is the Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Health Sciences and Medicine, Bond University, an exercise scientist and a former strongman competitor.

Tom Balshaw is a Lecturer in Kinesiology, Strength and Conditioning employed by Loughborough University

– ref. Scientists recently studied the body of one of the world’s strongest men. This is what they found – https://theconversation.com/scientists-recently-studied-the-body-of-one-of-the-worlds-strongest-men-this-is-what-they-found-238873

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martie-Louise Verreynne, Professor in Innovation and Associate Dean (Research), The University of Queensland

Humans are increasingly engaging with wearable technology as it becomes more adaptable and interactive. One of the most intimate ways gaining acceptance is through augmented reality (AR) glasses.

Last week, Meta debuted a prototype of the most recent version of their AR glasses – Orion. They look like reading glasses and use holographic projection to allow users to see graphics projected through transparent lenses into their field of view.

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg called Orion “the most advanced glasses the world has ever seen”. He said they offer a “glimpse of the future” in which smart glasses will replace smartphones as the main mode of communication.

But is this true or just corporate hype? And will AR glasses actually benefit us in new ways?

Old technology, made new

The technology used to develop Orion glasses is not new.

In the 1960s, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland introduced the first augmented reality head-mounted display. Two decades later, Canadian engineer and inventor Stephen Mann developed the first glasses-like prototype.

Throughout the 1990s, researchers and technology companies developed the capability of this technology through head-worn displays and wearable computing devices. Like many technological developments, these were often initially focused on military and industry applications.

In 2013, after smartphone technology emerged, Google entered the AR glasses market. But consumers were disinterested, citing concerns about privacy, high cost, limited functionality and a lack of a clear purpose.

This did not discourage other companies – such as Microsoft, Apple and Meta – from developing similar technologies.

Looking inside

Meta cites a range of reasons for why Orion are the world’s most advanced glasses, such as their miniaturised technology with large fields of view and holographic displays. It said these displays provide:

compelling AR experiences, creating new human-computer interaction paradigms […] one of the most difficult challenges our industry has ever faced.

Orion also has an inbuilt smart assistant (Meta AI) to help with tasks through voice commands, eye and hand tracking, and a wristband for swiping, clicking and scrolling.

With these features, it is not difficult to agree that AR glasses are becoming more user-friendly for mass consumption. But gaining widespread consumer acceptance will be challenging.

A set of challenges

Meta will have to address four types of challenges:

1. ease of wearing, using and integrating AR glasses with other glasses
2. physiological aspects such as the heat the glasses generate, comfort and potential vertigo
3. operational factors such as battery life, data security and display quality
4. psychological factors such as social acceptance, trust in privacy and accessibility.

These factors are not unlike what we saw in the 2000s when smartphones gained acceptance. Just like then, there are early adopters who will see more benefits than risks in adopting AR glasses, creating a niche market that will gradually expand.

Similar to what Apple did with the iPhone, Meta will have to build a digital platform and ecosystem around Orion.

This will allow for broader applications in education (for example, virtual classrooms), remote work and enhanced collaboration tools. Already, Orion’s holographic display allows users to overlay digital content and the real world, and because it is hands-free, communication will be more natural.

Creative destruction

Smart glasses are already being used in many industrial settings, such as logistics and healthcare. Meta plans to launch Orion for the general public in 2027.

By that time, AI will have likely advanced to the point where virtual assistants will be able to see what we see and the physical, virtual and artificial will co-exist. At this point, it is easy to see that the need for bulky smartphones may diminish and that through creative destruction, one industry may replace another.

This is supported by research indicating the virtual and augmented reality headset industry will be worth US$370 billion by 2034.

The remaining question is whether this will actually benefit us.

There is already much debate about the effect of smartphone technology on productivity and wellbeing. Some argue that it has benefited us, mainly through increased connectivity, access to information, and productivity applications.

But others say it has just created more work, distractions and mental fatigue.

If Meta has its way, AR glasses will solve this by enhancing productivity. Consulting firm Deloitte agrees, saying the technology will provide hands-free access to data, faster communication and collaboration through data-sharing.

It also claims smart glasses will reduce human errors, enable data visualisation, and monitor the wearer’s health and wellbeing. This will ensure a quality experience, social acceptance, and seamless integration with physical processes.

But whether or not that all comes true will depend on how well companies such as Meta address the many challenges associated with AR glasses.

Martie-Louise Verreynne receives funding from the ARC and NHMRC.

– ref. Meta has launched the world’s ‘most advanced’ glasses. Will they replace smartphones? – https://theconversation.com/meta-has-launched-the-worlds-most-advanced-glasses-will-they-replace-smartphones-240023

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dennis Del Favero, ARC Laureate Fellow and executive director, iCinema Research Centre, UNSW Sydney

As summer approaches, the threat of bushfires looms. Earlier this month, an out-of-control blaze in Sydney’s northern beaches burnt more than 100 hectares of bushland, threatening nearby homes.

Climate change is making bushfires larger, hotter and faster. Previously unthinkable catastrophes, such as the “Black Summer” megafires in Australia in 2019/2020 and the ones that ravaged Maui, Hawaii, in August 2023, are becoming more common.

Firefighters put their lives on the line to battle these fires. Yet many are not meaningfully and comprehensively prepared to respond to erratic and extreme conflagrations. This increases their chances of being injured, or worse. It may also hinder their ability to make the best decisions.

To help address this, the University of New South Wales’ iCinema Research Centre has created iFire. This cutting-edge training system allows firefighters and emergency responders to virtually teleport into a burning landscape and train for the real thing. It could revolutionise the way we prepare for other natural disasters as well.

Megafires are becoming more common

The rate of extreme fire events has doubled over the past decade. These fires can combine with the atmosphere to produce their own weather systems, generating multiple fire fronts. As the planet continues to warm, this situation will only get worse.

Much current research is focused on understanding these worsening fire threats. This is vital. But data and charts don’t meaningfully prepare firefighters for how to respond to such extreme, unanticipated fires.

“Experiential preparedness” is the missing element.

It helps firefighters prepare by virtually experiencing and rehearsing how to respond to real and future extreme fires through immersive scenarios. This can be done in a large-scale, three-dimensional cinema or on a smart tablet or phone.

Simulating the fireground

The iFire collaboration builds on iCinema’s award-winning iCasts immersive training system for mine workers.

Since it was developed in 2008, iCasts has exposed and trained thousands of miners and planners in simulations of known threats before they go underground. This has resulted in a dramatic reduction in serious injuries at Australian mine sites and many lives saved.

iFire takes a similar approach. It uses a combination of mathematical modelling of actual fires provided by CSIRO’s Data61 research institute, advanced visualisation and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to recreate immersive simulations of three real case studies: a pine plantation fire, a grass fire and the 2020 Bridger-Foothills fire in the United States.

The system puts fire crews in the centre of these simulated firegrounds using immersive cinematic scenarios. The crews feel as though they are physically present. They can experience the fire from any point of view – aerial or on the ground – at any point in time, and interactively engage with it.

Importantly, the scenarios are not static reproductions of past events. Fire crews and incident commanders can adjust variables to experience the influence of changes in conditions. For example, they can change the air temperature or wind direction and see how this affects the dynamic behaviour of the fire in real time.

This allows them to better perceive risks and practise making key decisions in preparation for when they are on the actual firegrounds and under enormous pressure to act fast.

A more advanced system

iFire is already in the hands of those who need it. It has recently been installed at the Fire and Rescue NSW Emergency Services Academy in Sydney using a 130‑degree, three-dimensional, cinematic theatre.

The UNSW iCinema Centre and Fire and Rescue NSW will use iFire to develop training modules for frontline response. These modules will provide simulations where fire crews practise how to be situationally aware in the face of an unpredictable fire situation. They learn how to make the best decisions in managing the unfolding fire.

But the iFire team is working towards building a more advanced AI system that learns the underlying and unforeseen patterns of fire behaviour to create more precise and detailed simulations of these unpredictable fires.

This will enable incident commanders and firefighters to engage with unanticipated fireground threats and better prepare to protect people and property under threat from flames.

The longer-term goal is that the iFire system will ultimately enable firefighters on a tablet or any other smart screen device in any location to experience the look and feel of a possible future fire scenario in real time. This won’t be as immersive, but it will be effective for use in the field when managing a fire and will improve tactical and strategic responses.

Although iFire has been specially designed for firefighters, the technology behind it can be tweaked for many purposes. For example, it can be used to help better train and prepare emergency service workers for other natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes.

Dennis Del Favero receives funding from Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship

Michael J. Ostwald receives funding from the ARC.

Yang Song 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. A new immersive cinema is helping firefighters to better prepare for megafires – https://theconversation.com/a-new-immersive-cinema-is-helping-firefighters-to-better-prepare-for-megafires-235892

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Esperanza Martinez, Professor of Practice and Head of Health and Human Security, College of Health and Medicine, Australian National University

The head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has warned attacks on health-care workers, patients and facilities “must not become the norm”.

Yet reports from wars across the world frequently show hospitals being bombed and health workers being attacked.

The increased use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas makes the problem worse as they cause widespread harm to civilians and critical infrastructure, including health facilities. Whether these attacks are targeted or seen as “collateral damage”, there is growing concern they are becoming an accepted part of armed conflict – although they violate protections granted under international law.

But are these attacks on health care truly increasing, or are we just getting better at documenting them? More importantly, is the world beginning to see them as normal?

What does the data show?

Collecting accurate data in war zones is challenging. Many attacks on health care go unreported due to fear of reprisals or the dangers involved in gathering information. In some cases, releasing data can be sensitive, as conflicting parties may use it to sway public opinion or escalate tensions.

Despite these challenges, organisations have been tracking attacks on health care for years, including the WHO, the Safeguarding Health in Conflict Coalition (SHCC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Their reports show an increase in both the frequency and systematic targeting of health care in certain regions.

The latest SHCC report shows last year was the deadliest for health-care workers since reporting began a decade ago. In 2023, 480 health-care workers were killed during armed conflict – nearly double the previous year.

Between January and September 2024, the WHO has confirmed almost 700 attacks against healthcare facilities and staff in Ukraine and the Occupied Palestinian Territory alone. This has led to more than 500 injuries and nearly 200 deaths among patients and health workers.

In Sudan and Myanmar, hospitals and clinics continue to be targeted, leaving millions without access to basic care.

This violence can lead to near collapse of health-care systems. For example, by January 2024, 84% of health facilities in Gaza had been damaged or destroyed. This leaves people without essential care, worsens chronic conditions and allows diseases to spread unchecked.

The laws that protect health care

The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols form the backbone of International Humanitarian Law, protecting health workers, hospitals and patients during armed conflict. These laws were established after the second world war to ensure that, even in times of war, people can access medical care without fear of attack. Any deliberate targeting of medical services is a violation of international law and, in some cases, a war crime.

Today, every recognised state in the world has committed to complying with these laws. In 2016, the United Nations Security Council also adopted a resolution which condemns attacks on health care and calls for stronger action to ensure compliance.

Yet attacks on health care continue. Some of the most serious examples have occurred in recent armed conflicts, where hospitals and clinics have been directly targeted, often without consequences for the attackers. Earlier this year, Ukraine asked the International Criminal Court to investigate attacks against a children’s hospital in Kyiv.

The persistence of these attacks raises concerns about whether the issue is weak enforcement of the laws or whether the laws themselves need updating for modern warfare.

Some legal and medical experts argue the laws aren’t strong enough, especially with the rise of non-state armed groups such as militias. Others believe the laws are adequate but are not properly enforced.

There are growing calls from humanitarian and human rights organisations for stronger accountability, including the involvement of the International Criminal Court and national courts. Others propose a broader, more systematic approach that treats attacks on health care as a public health issue, not just a legal one.

Are attacks on health care becoming normalised?

One of the most concerning aspects of this trend is the potential normalisation of such attacks, meaning people might begin to see them as an inevitable part of war.

When hospitals are bombed or ambulances are destroyed without any punishment for the perpetrators, it sends the message health-care workers and patients are acceptable targets. This creates an environment where entire populations may feel there is no safe place to seek care when they need it the most.

Modern conflicts, involving non-state armed groups such as militias – as we’ve seen in Haiti and the Central African Republic – contribute significantly to this issue. These groups often do not adhere to international law.

However, even governments have been accused of attacking health-care facilities despite being parties to the Geneva conventions, including attacks on hospitals by Israel in Gaza, Saudi Arabia in Yemen and the United States in Afghanistan.

When these incidents are not met with strong consequences, it sets a dangerous precedent.

Immediate and long-term impacts

The immediate impact of these attacks is clear and devastating: people injured in conflict or suffering from illnesses can’t get the care they need. Health workers, who are often first responders, are directly targeted, reducing the availability of essential care.

The destruction of hospitals also disrupts routine services such as childbirth and vaccinations, leading to preventable deaths and increasing the risk of disease outbreaks. Outbreaks of mpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo and polio in Gaza have worsened because health workers can’t safely reach affected areas, and necessary supplies have been destroyed.

In the longer term, these attacks gravely affect individuals with chronic conditions such as diabetes, cancer or heart disease, which become life-threatening without treatment. Additionally, people are more likely to leave places without health-care services, which contributes to displacement.

Finally, such attacks erode trust in hospitals and clinics, causing fear around seeking medical help. Over time, this can discourage people from getting care, creating ripple effects that harm entire communities and set back global health progress.

Esperanza Martinez is an advisor to the WHO Foundation and the Global Health Center of the Geneva Graduate Institute. She worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross in various senior roles from 2015 to 2023.

– ref. Attacks on health care during war are becoming more common, creating devastating ripple effects – https://theconversation.com/attacks-on-health-care-during-war-are-becoming-more-common-creating-devastating-ripple-effects-237484

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brianna Chesser, Associate Professor in Criminology and Justice, RMIT University

In October 2023, a Victorian woman, Elodie Aldridge, was driving home from a midwife appointment when her car was hit by a four-wheel drive. Aldridge was 34 weeks pregnant with her son, Remi. She suffered significant injuries including a broken wrist, hip and pelvis. Her son Remi died in utero.

Under current laws in most states and territories, the life of an unborn child is legally indistinguishable from that of the mother. In Victoria, the only criminal charge available for such an offence is “serious injury to the mother”.

If this crash had occurred 50 minutes north in New South Wales, Remi would have been recognised as a legal person and there would have been a separate criminal charge for his death.

Attempts to change these laws in Victoria were recently rejected by parliament. Here’s why these laws should be changed across the country.

When are you legally a person?

Under Australian law, a life is recognised at the point when there is independence from the mother. This means the child becomes a legal person when the child can take its first independent breath, otherwise known as the “born alive rule”. Therefore, unless the child can take an independent breath, the child is not recognised as a legal person and therefore cannot be deemed a victim of the crime of murder or manslaughter.

This legal position is reflected in most jurisdictions in Australia. Victoria, the ACT, the Northern Territory, South Australia, Tasmania and Western Australia do not recognise the life of an unborn child as being separate from that of its pregnant mother.

As a result, any harm done to an unborn child in any of the above jurisdictions could only result in the charge of causing serious harm to the mother.

But it’s a different situation under administrative law. The parents can legally be granted a birth and death certificate for the child. So while there are records of a life created and lost, the criminal law doesn’t see the unborn child as a person.

Legislators and legal scholars in these jurisdictions appear reluctant to recognise the life of the unborn child in utero.

There are fears that doing so will negatively impact reproductive rights or could result in liability for a pregnant mother.

Legal and medical professionals have argued that such laws could have unintended consequences (particularly in jurisdictions where abortions are not legalised) by creating a tension between the rights of the woman to autonomy and self-determination and the rights of the unborn child.

This, in turn, could lead to further marginalisation of vulnerable and disadvantaged women, as has been seen internationally.

While the philosophical issues are unavoidable, the recognition of the legal personhood of an unborn child in particular circumstances need not be in conflict with existing women’s rights and reproductive laws.

The proposed law in Victoria, for example, should only be applied in narrow circumstances: involving the criminal (unlawful) intervention by a third party (not the mother) that results in the death of an unborn child where the child was above 20 weeks gestational age or more than 400 grams in weight.

Exceptions to the rule

There are some states that have made changes.

In 2021, some 12 years after the laws were first introduced to parliament, NSW passed laws that imposed tougher penalties for crimes that result in the loss of an unborn child.

“Zoe’s law” was proposed after Brodie Donegan, then 32 weeks pregnant with Zoe, was hit by a drunk driver on Christmas Day in 2009. The then Attorney-General Mark Speakman said:

these laws give recognition to the unborn children that are lost due to third party criminal acts.

Two offences were subsequently added the NSW Crimes Act: causing the loss of a fetus and causing the death of a pregnant woman.

The death of an unborn child adds an additional charge and penalty of three years more than the maximum penalty under the first offence.

The recognition of the unborn child as a legal person also means the woman or her family members can give victim impact statements in court, and the name of the unborn child can be included on the indictment.

Queensland has also enacted similar laws, although they don’t go quite as far.

Sarah Milosevic was 39 weeks pregnant with Sophie when her car was hit by a driver under the influence in 2014. Sophie died a few days later as a result of injuries sustained in the crash.

The driver was charged and found guilty, but the penalty was a $950 fine. Sophie’s mother campaigned tirelessly for legal change and in September 2023 “Sophie’s law” was passed.

Courts in Queensland are now required to treat the death of an unborn child as an aggravating factor during the sentencing of offenders. The aim is to ensure harsher sentences.

This is in addition to the Queensland Criminal Code, which makes it a crime to unlawfully assault a pregnant woman causing her to lose the child.

While this amendment stops short of recognising unborn children as legal people, it’s at least a step in the right direction.

Call for change

Before the crash, Aldridge had just learned that her son had fully formed lungs. He could arrive healthily any time. She described the heartbreak of discovering Remi wasn’t considered a human being in the eyes of the criminal law.

Failing to recognise the legal status of a unborn child who is killed this way creates significant hardship for families. They’re often already lost in layers of contradictory legal bureaucracy at a very difficult time.

If there can be recognition of legal personhood under administrate law but not under the criminal law, then the legal balance is off and requires readjusting.

NSW faced the same philosophical and moral debates and has been able to pass legislation that successfully addresses concerns. Other states and territories should take note and follow suit.

Legal personhood in Australia should not be determined by postcode.

Brianna Chesser 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. In parts of Australia, unborn babies aren’t legally seen as people. Here’s why that needs to change – https://theconversation.com/in-parts-of-australia-unborn-babies-arent-legally-seen-as-people-heres-why-that-needs-to-change-239591

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick Finnerty, Postdoctoral research fellow in conservation, University of Sydney

When dead animals are left lying around in nature, who takes advantage of the free feed – carnivores or herbivores? The answer may surprise you.

In Australia, people tend to think carnivores – such as dingoes, ravens, foxes and wedge-tailed eagles – lead the clean-up crew.

But our new research shows common brushtail possums – often thought to be herbivores – also dine on animal carcasses.

Understanding when and where brushtail possums scavenge is important. It can improve our knowledge of how carcasses are disposed of in nature, and how nutrients cycle through ecosystems.

Seeking a nutritious meal

Scavenging may provide specific essential nutrients otherwise lacking in herbivore diets.

Carcasses often contain much greater levels of crude protein than leafy greens do. Similarly, chewing on bones, may increase the intake of calcium and phosphorus, two key minerals essential for growth.

Scavenging on carrion may also help herbivores meet nutritional requirements in regions where typical food resources may be restricted during some seasons. Similarly, in times of drought, thirst may also drive herbivores to scavenge in an attempt to extract fluids from carcasses.

Though it may seem gruesome, scavenging is crucial to healthy ecosystems. Clearing carcasses from the landscape by feeding them back into food chains recycles nutrients into living systems.

Our previous research has found native marsupial herbivores feasting on the dead.

In alpine Australia, possums accounted for 61% of all recorded carcass scavenging – a proportion far surpassing species more typically considered carcass consumers.

In our latest research, we wanted to understand the factors that influence carrion consumption by brushtail possums in different ecosystems.

What we did

We monitored fresh eastern grey kangaroo carcasses across both alpine (Kosciuszko National Park) and temperate (Wolgan Valley, Greater Blue Mountains National Park) regions in New South Wales. We also compared sites in both open (grassland with no canopy cover) and closed (woodland) habitats, in cool and warm seasons.

At each carcass, we used a remote camera “trap” to record scavenging behaviours.

We found possums were one of the main scavengers, often feeding from carrion more than typical scavengers such as dingoes and ravens.

Possum scavenging rates varied by habitat and season. Regardless of region, possums scavenged exclusively in closed canopy habitats under the trees, probably for protection from predators and other scavengers such as dingoes, red foxes, and wedge-tailed eagles.

Out in the cold

Possum scavenging activity varied according to the season.

In temperate regions, possums scavenged only in winter when other food resources were limited.

In alpine areas, where food is scarce even in summer, possums scavenged year-round. But they still ate more from carcasses in cooler months. This may be necessary for possums to get the nutrition they need when other normal food resources — such as leaves, flowers and fruit — are limited.

Competition between scavengers may also change with the seasons. For example, in alpine regions, we saw fewer large scavengers such as dingoes in winter, possibly reducing competition and making it easier for possums to access carrion.

During warmer months, insect activity increases. These tiny scavengers often start eating a carcass within minutes of its death, accelerating its decomposition. It means animals such as possums have less time to feed on the carrion.

Flexible ‘herbivores’ around the world

Previous research has shown many herbivore diets are more flexible than previously thought. All over the world, certain plant-eaters have been found scavenging on animal remains – especially when other food sources are limited, such as during drought or after fire.

In Africa, hippopotamuses were found to have consumed flesh from the carcasses of other animals. In the United States, white-tailed deer fed on discarded fish.

Similarly, on a small island off Cape Town, introduced European fallow deer ate dead rabbits. On the Eurasian tundra (treeless plains), reindeer devoured lemming carcasses. In Italy, crested porcupine ate dead pigeons.

These are all still primarily herbivorous animals, they just happen to dip into carcass resources when they need to.

Improving our understanding of ‘bloody hungry’ herbivores

Our study found brushtail possums are an important scavenging species across several Australian ecosystems. It also highlights how scavenging can vary with a region, season and habitat.

Understanding the unusual foraging behaviour of the common brushtail possum could also help inform more effective wildlife management. Specifically, understanding how carcasses can support possum populations during cooler months in places like New Zealand, where they are considered an invasive pest, may lead to more effective control measures.

Our methods could also help scientists understand herbivore scavenging in other environments. This may provide valuable insights into complexities of food webs and how nutrients move through ecosystems.

This research was funded by the Australian Alps Co-Operative Management Program, Australia and Pacific Science Foundation, Australian Geographic, and the Ecological Society of Australia Holsworth Wildlife Endowment Fund. This research also received support from the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program through the Threatened Species Recovery Hub and the Australian Academy of Science Margaret Middleton Fund for Endangered Species.

Thomas Newsome receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is immediate past-president of the Australasian Wildlife Management Society and President of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales.

– ref. ‘Vegetarian’ possums eat meat when the weather’s cold – https://theconversation.com/vegetarian-possums-eat-meat-when-the-weathers-cold-231825

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Breunig, Professor of Economics and Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Australia’s tax system is needlessly complex, and that’s making it costly in ways that aren’t obvious.

New research from our team at the Australian National University’s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, in the Journal of Public Economics, has identified one of the unexpected ways it is wasting our time, and found pretty clear evidence of tax evasion along the way – evidence the Tax Office will be able to use.

Here’s what we did.

Examining 27 years of de-identified individual tax files, we noticed a striking number of returns generating “round number” refunds.

By “round number”, I mean refunds whose last digit is zero.

Zeros are exceptionally popular

We found, for instance, far more refunds of exactly $1,000 than of $999 or $995, or even $1,005 or $1,015.

This phenomenon was particularly striking at zero (many fewer people got refunds of slightly less than zero, which would have meant they owed money) and also apparent at tens and hundreds as well as thousands.

Zeros matter: the number of taxpayers getting each refund

Analysing what the returns with round numbers had in common, we found they were more likely than other returns to be

• driven by efforts to evade and minimise tax rather than simply earn income

• driven by things that are costly for the Tax Office to audit (such as work-related expense deductions).

• prepared by agents (zeros were twice as common in agent-prepared returns)

Next, we matched our data about zeros with data from the Tax Office’s random audit program. We found that, when audited, returns with round number refunds were significantly more likely to be wrong. Specifically, they were more likely to overstate the refund that was owed.

More than a quirky preference

This suggests round number refunds are not just a quirky preference – they signal something going on, most likely something going wrong.

That “something” seems to be the manipulation of claims that are costly to verify, principally work-related expense deductions and business income.

Expense deductions and business income are significantly larger in returns with round number refunds than in those without.

It is important to note we found some tax agents got round number returns a lot while others did it very little or not at all.

More like evasion than planning

When taxpayers switch from “low-rounding” to “high-rounding” agents, we see a one-off hike in the returns those people receive, with no further increases thereafter.

This is likely to mean that agents who specialise in round-number returns are not working with their clients over time to rearrange their affairs to minimise tax or to better document legitimate deductions.

Were that the case, we would see the value of these returns increase over time.

This makes the behaviour of these agents more consistent with tax evasion than tax planning.

We can fight it, or use it as a tool

One simple response to this abuse would be to remove many of the deductions and lower tax rates for everyone.

Another would be to copy the United States and offer all taxpayers a large “standard deduction”, inviting only those that want a larger one to go to the effort of itemising their claims. (The US standard deduction is currently US$14,600 for singles and US$29,200 for couples filing jointly.)

In the meantime, the Tax Office might be able to put our findings to good use.

It could identify the clients the agents who get round number returns as targets for audits. They are more likely than others to be improperly claiming.

In the longer term, this strategy won’t work as well. The agents who have been delivering round number returns will become aware that their clients are being targeted and change their behaviour.

This means that after a while nothing will work as well as tax reform. It would save taxpayers time and make the system more fair for everyone.

Nathan Deutscher and Steve Hamilton coauthored the study on which this article is based.

Robert Breunig receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Treasury and the Australian Taxation Office.

– ref. Rounding up: how our research used round numbers to zero in on tax evasion – https://theconversation.com/rounding-up-how-our-research-used-round-numbers-to-zero-in-on-tax-evasion-239927

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heather L. Robinson, Research Associate in Cultural Studies, Flinders University. "Beyond the Books: Culture, value, and why libraries matter" will be published late 2024 through Wakefield Press., Flinders University

The past few months has seen the sudden departure of leadership from some of the country’s most prestigious artistic companies: the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Queensland Ballet, Queensland Theatre, Opera Australia and the Adelaide Festival.

These women cited various reasons for leaving, from job opportunities in government, to funding issues, to disagreements with artists and the board.

It certainly seems like a difficult time for arts organisations and their boards.

Australia’s arts and cultural sector has suffered decades of ongoing funding cuts and, until recently, lack of policy direction. Now, the cost of living crisis means participation in arts and culture is seen as a luxury.

Boards and companies become more risk-averse within these tightened financial constraints.

This may be behind the departure of Leanne Benjamin from Queensland Ballet in July. Her appointment as artistic director only six months prior was celebrated as a “perfect fit”.

She described her reasons for her shock exit as:

Ultimately, as we have worked together to design a vibrant season for 2025, it has become very clear that my artistic aspirations for our company […] is not immediately possible within the funding constraints faced by the company.

Jo Davies was Opera Australia’s first female artistic director, coming on board in December 2022. By August 2024, she described:

a real difference of opinion on how [Opera Australia] should balance its artistic ambitions with its commercial imperative.

Opera Australia chair Rod Sims put it more bluntly:

Obviously any artistic director wants free rein to spend whatever they want and do whatever they want, and that must also always go through a financial filter, in any arts company.

A volunteer board

Emotions can run high in arts companies, where (underpaid) staff and (unpaid) volunteers donate their time, expertise and passion to deliver experiences for their audiences.

While some arts boards in Australia are paid an honorarium, most arts organisations are headed by volunteer-run boards. The makeup of boards has also been changing. Recent decades have seen an increase of leaders from the corporate sector on arts boards, especially on those that are government-appointed.

Research shows most board members enjoy their association with arts companies. However, arts consultant Kate Larsen has found that 58% of members of Australian arts boards “do not understand what their organisations need from them at all”.

Board members tend to come from very different socioeconomic and professional backgrounds than paid members of staff, and have limited exposure to the day-to-day running of an arts company.

They do, however, carry the weight of responsibility for the company’s big-picture strategic and financial directions.

Perhaps this is the mismatch we’re seeing between boards and arts leaders such as Benjamin and Davies.

Capturing what we value

There are three different facets to what we know as “cultural value”: intrinsic value, instrumental value and institutional value. I believe we are currently seeing an imbalance between these three types of value.

Intrinsic value is the intellectual, emotional and spiritual value of experiencing culture for audiences and artists.

Instrumental values are the coincidental impacts or effects, usually recorded in numbers, such as an increase in tourist visits or mental health outcomes. Often embedded in cultural policy, instrumental impacts are given greater weight than artistic outcomes in evaluation and acquittals for government funds.

Institutional value reflects how cultural institutions and organisations relate to and engage with their public over the long term, becoming active agents in the creation or destruction of what the public values.

We are currently witnessing a clashing of priorities.

At Queensland Ballet and Opera Australia, we’ve seen a mismatch between the financial priorities of the board and the artistic priorities of leadership. The storm at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra can be seen as a risk-averse team, sensitive to current political concerns, overreacting in the absence of board support.

I believe we are seeing a diminishing of institutional value in many corners of the sector. Decades of funding cuts means arts companies and cultural institutions understandably step away from perceived risks to their relationships with audiences and sponsors, and make more conservative programming decisions.

This response limits the public’s opportunities to experience new works, and puts the core creative business of an arts company or institution at risk. Economic performance, rather than artistic endeavour, takes centre stage. If that is the whole company’s priority, all well and good. But at Opera Australia and Queensland Ballet, it seems this priority could have come at the expense of their artistic directors.

Uniting strong governance and artistic risk

No one wants our cultural sector hamstrung by instrumentality and shifting government policy flips. Arts companies and cultural institutions require ongoing support and public understanding of their role so they can be confident to take risks – artistically and financially – and provide the public with opportunities to learn, grow and embrace a diversity of cultures, people and experiences, within the safety of a theatre, gallery, concert hall or festival.

To fulfil their role as mediators and generators of knowledge and understanding for the public, companies must be equipped and backed up by their boards to deal with these responsibilities.

A job position description for the role of artistic director for Queensland Theatre describes the board as “an enabling force of strong governance”.

Arts companies and cultural institutions need the participation and support of an army of advocates, audiences and ambassadors across the community to survive. There are promising steps being made at the federal level to enable artistic vision and courageous leadership for the Australian cultural sector – but there is still a long way to go.

This is both the challenge and opportunity facing everyone across all levels of the Australian cultural sector, and they have to face it together.

Heather L. 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. What’s behind the spate of arts leadership departures in Australia? Perhaps a mismatch of values – https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-the-spate-of-arts-leadership-departures-in-australia-perhaps-a-mismatch-of-values-238583

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amanda Niland, Lecturer in Early Childhood, University of Sydney

Good girl! Good boy!

Parents, relatives and teachers say these phrases all the time and mean them positively.

They may use it when a child puts on their shoes when asked, when they draw something interesting, or get a maths question correct.

But this kind of language may not always be healthy or helpful. One issue is it doesn’t actually give children clear feedback on what they just did or said.

What could you say instead?

Praise and parenting

Praise has been seen as a key part of raising children for decades. In the 1950s, influential US psychologist B.F. Skinner believed rewards, including praise, positively reinforce desired behaviours.

In the 1970s, amid rising interest in self-esteem, psychologists and other child development experts emphasised the importance of praising children.

But since the 2000s, psychology research has moved away from seeing self-esteem, and hence praise, as central to a child’s wellbeing.

Early childhood education has similarly shifted towards children having a positive sense of identity instead. This means children having a sense of safety, belonging and capability, rather than a strong opinion of themselves.

Nevertheless, praise is still frequently mentioned in popular advice to parents.

Different kinds of praise

Some psychology researchers have defined praise as either informational (telling children about their strengths and actions) or evaluative (telling children whether or not they are good enough).

In a similar vein, US psychologist Carol Dweck categorises praise as “person praise” or “process praise”.

Person praise focuses on stable characteristics such as personality or appearance. Process praise focuses on behaviours or effort directed towards achieving an outcome, such as learning to ride a bike or a baby taking first steps.

Research has found person praise can decrease young children’s motivation to challenge themselves and lead to feelings of helplessness if they fail.

In contrast, a long-term study of children whose mothers used process praise showed these children were more likely to be confident in preschool and later in primary school.

Process praise is informational, giving children feedback on their efforts and strategies in achieving an outcome (“I can see by your puffing how hard you ran in that race”). Person praise tends to be evaluative, often where there is little possibility for change, or only after success (“What a winner!”).

Seeking approval or seeking improvement?

More broadly, constant praise may mean children unconsciously feel they are doing things for adult approval, rather than for themselves.

This can work against the development of self-regulation and a healthy sense of identity.

Adults who over-praise (particularly evaluative or person-focused praise) may assume children need external rewards to do the right thing. This doesn’t enable children to make good choices on their own.

Recent research suggests inflated praise, using words such as “incredible”, “amazing” and “wonderful”, can foster narcissistic traits by causing children to have an unrealistic sense of their own competence.

This can lead children to become upset or angry at failure, partly because they perceive their worth to be conditional on meeting adults’ standards. So, counterintuitively, inflated praise can lower self-esteem.

The gender question

“Good girl/boy” also raises other issues around gender identity and self-esteem.

Research involving adults found men are more likely to see praise as informational (reflecting their competence) whereas women are more likely to see praise as evaluative (implying their need to conform to set ways of behaving).

Studies of children that compared boys’ and girls’ responses to praise also found girls tended to respond more negatively to evaluative praise.

While some of this research is decades old and done in the United States, it is interesting to think about why this might be, and whether it relates to how we socialise children into gender roles. What kind of unconscious messages are we communicating through our praise?

What should parents be doing instead?

Three principles can support a healthy approach to praising kids.

1. Give children realistic feedback about their behaviour or actions. For example, “Well done. I can see you’re trying there with your kicks” as opposed to “Amazing kicking! You’re a superstar!”

2. Focus on children’s own learning or improvement rather than on competing with others For example, “Next time, when you play that piece, how about trying it faster?” rather than “That wasn’t as quick as Sophia can play it”.

3. Use praise that shows children they are valued regardless of what they may or may not do. For example, “Well done! I know you studied every day for this test” as opposed to “You’re Dad’s straight-A angel!”

These approaches all support confidence, empathy and resilience in children – qualities we all need in our complex world.

Amanda Niland 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. Parents say ‘good girl’ and ‘good boy’ all the time. Here’s why you should try and say something else – https://theconversation.com/parents-say-good-girl-and-good-boy-all-the-time-heres-why-you-should-try-and-say-something-else-238893

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

The budget surplus for last financial year has come in at $15.8 billion, well exceeding the $9.3 billion that was forecast in the May budget.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers, just back from talks in Beijing on China’s economic outlook, will announce the result on Monday.

The government says the better-than-forecast outcome has been driven entirely by lower spending. Revenue was also lower than the budget anticipated. Areas of savings included the National Disability Insurance Scheme, payments to the states, and various grant programs that don’t exist anymore.

This is the government’s second consecutive surplus. The May budget has predicted deficits for the coming years.

Across 2022-23 and 2023-24 the budget position has improved by a cumulative $172.3 billion, compared with what was forecast in the official Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook, released immediately before the 2022 election.

The government says it has made $77.4 billion in savings, including $12.2 billion in 2023-24.

Payments were 25.2% of GDP in 2023-24. This compared to the PEFO forecast of 27.1%

Chalmers said this was the “first government to post back-to-back surpluses in nearly two decades”. The surpluses hadn’t come at the expense of cost-of-living relief, he said in a statement.

Speaking in Beijing on Friday Chalmers said it remained to be seen whether China’s just-announced stimulus measures would work.

“But we’ve seen on earlier occasions when the authorities here, the administration here, steps in to support activity in the economy that is typically a good thing for Australia – good for our businesses and workers, our industries, our investors, and good for the global economy as well.

“Like a lot of people around the world, we have been concerned about the softer conditions here in the Chinese economy. Subject to the details [of measures] that will be made public in good time, any efforts to boost growth and support activity here is a welcome one around the world and especially at home in Australia.”

Chalmers on Monday is likely to face further questions on the Treasury’s work on negative gearing, news of which leaked out last week.

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. Final budget outcome shows 2023-24 surplus of $15.8 billion – https://theconversation.com/final-budget-outcome-shows-2023-24-surplus-of-15-8-billion-240093

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Misha Ketchell, Editor, The Conversation

Today we removed an article titled “Should we ditch big exam halls? Our research shows how high ceilings are associated with a lower score”, because the original research has been found to contain errors and has been retracted by the academic journal that published it.

The Conversation’s article, published on July 3, 2024, was based on a study published online by The Journal of Environmental Psychology on June 26, 2024. It looked at the impact of ceiling heights on the exam performance of Australian students, and found that even after accounting for other factors such as age or past exam experience, higher ceiling heights were statistically correlated with poorer exam results.

After the study was published, a query from a reader of the journal article led the authors to review their calculations.

The authors discovered some honest errors in their work, leading them to conclude that the relationship between ceiling heights and exam score was “more nuanced” than presented in the paper.

The revised research manuscript was reviewed by the same anonymous peer-reviewers who looked at the original research. One reviewer did not feel comfortable assessing the statistical corrections, one advised against publishing the corrected manuscript, and a third recommended revisions.

On this basis, the Journal of Environmental Psychology rejected the amended version. The journal’s response can be found here.

The authors, lead by Isabella Bower, apologise for the error, and are working to resubmit their updated research to another journal.

The Conversation has decided that, in light of the current status of the research, the most appropriate option is to retract our coverage of the study. We are committed to providing accurate and reliable information, and to acknowledging errors in an open and transparent way when they occur.

– ref. Retraction: why we removed an article about a link between exam results and ceiling height – https://theconversation.com/retraction-why-we-removed-an-article-about-a-link-between-exam-results-and-ceiling-height-239930

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Parmeter, Research Scholar, Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, Australian National University

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed a major victory following the assassination of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, saying it would change “the balance of power in the region for years to come”.

This may be going further than the circumstances warrant, however. Certainly, the killing of Nasrallah is a remarkable personal victory for Netanyahu, who ordered the strike so he could claim direct responsibility for the action. And it goes a long way towards restoring the Israeli public’s faith in Netanyahu as a security guarantor for Israel.

But there are many questions that now follow this action. Will Israel, for example, launch a ground invasion against Hezbollah in Lebanon?

If it does, it would certainly find Hezbollah at its weakest point because of the destruction of its communications network in the Israeli attack on its pagers and walkie-talkies earlier this month.

Israel has also killed eight of Hezbollah’s nine most senior military commanders and about half of its leadership council.

To ensure this is a lasting victory, Israel really needs to follow up somehow. It needs to take the opportunity of Hezbollah’s disarray to destroy as much of the organisation and its arsenal of 150,000 missiles, rockets and drones as it can.

By the same token, Hezbollah would certainly be able to inflict serious losses on Israeli ground forces if they go into southern Lebanon, not least because Hezbollah is reported to have an extensive tunnel network in the border area.

And Hezbollah is a large organisation that claims to have as many as 100,000 fighters, though US intelligence believes it’s probably somewhere closer to 40,000–50,000. Even so, that is a formidable number of militants.

Hezbollah, however, does not want to get involved in further fighting with Israel at this stage, if it can avoid it. It’s significant that, even after Israel’s most recent attacks, Hezbollah has not been firing thousands of missiles, rockets and drones daily into Israel, which it is believed to be capable of doing.

Can Hezbollah regroup?

There is no doubt this is an unprecedented blow to Hezbollah’s leadership and to the organisation itself.

The first thing the group needs to do is re-establish its leadership. There are two names that have already been suggested: Hashem Safieddine, Nasrallah’s cousin, and Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary-general.

Then, the new leadership needs to investigate how deeply Hezbollah has been penetrated by Israeli intelligence. The killing of Nasrallah and the explosion of the pagers and walkie-talkies illustrate that Israel has extraordinarily good intelligence on the internal workings of Hezbollah.

Lastly, Hezbollah has lost a lot of face in the eyes of the Lebanese public. Those in Lebanon who are against Hezbollah’s standing as a state within a state will oppose it even more now because they’ll say it’s simply not doing what it claims to do, which is protecting Lebanon from Israel.

Hezbollah has never faced a critical situation like this before. That’s why whoever takes over is going to have a massive job to re-establish its credibility as a fighting force.

But that said, it does have the capacity to re-establish itself because Hezbollah is a major organisation and very much a part of the Lebanese political scene. The Hezbollah-led coalition has a bloc of more than 60 seats in the Lebanese parliament – not a majority but significant nonetheless. It also provides social services for poor Shi’a residents in southern Beirut and southern Lebanon.

The other major question is whether Iran, Hezbollah’s military backer, will react to the killing of Nasrallah.

When Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in July, Iran promised retaliation, but has not taken it yet.

After the US assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, in Baghdad in 2020, Iran fired more than a dozen missiles at two bases in Iraq housing US troops, and that was it.

In April, its reaction to the Israeli killing of some Islamic Revolutionary Guard personnel in the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, was more intense. Tehran launched about 300 missiles, drones and rockets at Israel. But it also telegraphed its retaliation well in advance, and Israel’s Iron Dome, with the help of US defensive support, was able to prevent any significant damage.

These recent reactions show it is clearly not in Iran’s interest to have a wider war take place at this time.

Read more:
Is Iran’s anti-Israel and American rhetoric all bark and no bite?

Where does the region go from here?

Hezbollah doesn’t have many friends in the Middle East, mainly because it is a militant group from the minority Shi’a sect of Islam, which has been seen as opposed to the interests of more moderate Sunni Arab states, including Egypt, Jordan and the Gulf states.

Essentially, there will be some quiet satisfaction among Sunni Arab leaders that Nasrallah has gone because he was seen as someone who could cause a great deal of trouble for the region.

Briefly, following the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, Nasrallah was the most popular leader in the Arab world, according to opinion polls. That didn’t last very long, but he remained influential across the region.

The other aspect that would make Sunni Arab states and leaders quietly comfortable with the removal of Nasrallah and the disarray (if only temporary) of Hezbollah is that all the fighting in the Middle East – the war in Gaza and now the conflict in Lebanon – is causing anger at street level in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and others in the region. This makes the region more unstable – and Sunni leaders nervous.

At this stage, the elements that would be prepared to support Hezbollah are limited to the Houthi rebels in Yemen and Shi’a militia groups based in Iraq. But they’re both some distance away and aren’t able to materially affect the conflict in the region.

With Iran not wanting an all-out war in the region, it’s not likely its leaders will be encouraging these proxy groups to get involved in a situation that could get further out of hand.

So there are a lot of players who want to restore some sort of normality to the region. That includes the Biden administration, which fears the ongoing conflicts will divide the Democratic vote in the November US presidential election.

This plays into Netanyahyu’s hands, as he is able to act independently of US attempts to rein him in. Whatever he does, he will continue to receive US military support.

Read more:
Does Hezbollah represent Lebanon? And what impact will the death of longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah have?

Ian Parmeter 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. Benjamin Netanyahu is triumphant after Hassan Nasrallah’s assassination. But will it change anything? – https://theconversation.com/benjamin-netanyahu-is-triumphant-after-hassan-nasrallahs-assassination-but-will-it-change-anything-240090

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

Is the government seriously interested in changing arrangements on negative gearing? After days of questions to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who would know?

They’ve engaged in obfuscation at every turn.

Today, Chalmers was asked, at a news conference in Beijing, whether he had told treasury to model reforms of the tax break for property investors.

He replied:

It is not unusual at all for governments or for treasurers to get advice on contentious issues which are in the public domain, including in the parliament. It is not unusual for treasurers to do that. But we have made it very clear through the course of this week that we have a broad and ambitious housing policy already and those changes aren’t part of it.

Not unreasonably, the Australian Financial Review took this as Chalmers owning the request to treasury. But his office contested the interpretation, insisting he’d said nothing he hadn’t said before – taking us back to the position that the request formally remains an orphan.

The story started earlier in the week with a report in the Nine papers that the government had asked treasury for work on options “to scale back negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions”. The report did not specify who’d done the asking, although Albanese later said it wasn’t him, and told reporters to quiz Chalmers instead.

That treasury is working on options has inevitably raised the suggestion that reforms to negative gearing is on the agenda, perhaps as an election commitment.

Given the government’s reaction, the story may have been a genuine “leak” rather than a deliberate balloon (although it’s often hard to be sure who’s holding the sting of balloons).

Anyway, it put Albanese in a very grumpy mood in his television interviews. Fancy journalists trying to insist on a straight answer when he kept dodging and coming up with, in today’s much-used term, “word salads”.

He stressed the government had no plans to change negative gearing. Then he got cross when it was pointed out it had had “no plans” to change the stage 3 tax cuts, until it did suddenly have a plan.

Does the history of the stage 3 change give us any clue to what’s going on here?

In that instance, Chalmers was the one wanting change as far back as soon after the 2022 election. Albanese held out, worried about what a broken promise would do to his reputation for integrity.

In the end, under the pressure of a looming byelection, change came this year. Although the shift was well received, we’re now seeing it did damage him on the integrity front – his word is not automatically believed, and his phrases are carefully parsed.

Thus when he was asked, “are you considering taking negative gearing reform and capital gains tax reform to the next election?” and he replied “No, we’re not”, this was not regarded as a definite “no”.

Could it be that Chalmers is again putting himself at the forefront of seeking to alter policy, while Albanese is equivocal or resisting?

If that is so, it reprises an old story that crosses governments: differences between a treasurer with strong views (Paul Keating, Peter Costello) and a leader (Bob Hawke, John Howard) who is politically more cautious.

If there is any substance to the theory of a difference between Chalmers and Albanese, the treasurer would be very frustrated with his boss for hosing down a change to negative gearing, to the extent he has. And Albanese would be very annoyed if he thought the treasurer was responsible, by seeking options, for landing him in this pickle.

There are strong views among experts about whether negative gearing should be scrapped or capped.

But given that making the change would not significantly add to the total supply of housing, it’s really about the politics.

The Greens are taking skin off Labor on the housing issue, as well as holding up two government housing bills in the Senate. The government is worried the Greens could successfully milk the issue at the election, especially with younger voters, many of whom see house prices rising further out of reach and rents badly stretching their budgets.

Labor is pouring billions into housing but the results are set to fall well short of the numbers needed.

Tackling negative gearing might be a “look over here” policy to undermine the Greens and attract the young. But it would be ripe for a fear campaign from the Coalition and, as Albanese says, it wouldn’t solve the problem of the inadequate supply of homes.

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. View from the Hill: Albanese and Chalmers play cat-and-mouse on negative gearing with the public – and possibly with each other – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-albanese-and-chalmers-play-cat-and-mouse-on-negative-gearing-with-the-public-and-possibly-with-each-other-240020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Pryke, Honorary Research Associate, University of Sydney

Gilgamesh, a new opera from Opera Australia, Sydney Chamber Orchestra and Carriageworks, gives a visceral retelling of a story from a forgotten age, exploring ideas of love, tyranny and what it means to be human.

This new production reimagines the legend for 21st century audiences, while engaging cleverly with the epic’s timeless themes.

The young king, Gilgamesh (Jeremy Kleeman), starts out as a tyrant and goes on a journey to find the wisdom needed to become a just ruler.

Along the way, he meets his companion, Enkidu (a remarkable Mitchell Riley), a man born in the wilderness and civilised through two weeks of sex with the wise priestess Shamhat (Jessica O’Donoghue).

Together, Gilgamesh and Enkidu fight the monstrous forest guardian Humbaba (Daniel Szeisong Todd) and the mighty Bull of Heaven. They also unwisely provoke the beauteous goddess of love and war Ishtar (Jane Sheldon).

The heroes’ rash actions anger the gods, leading to Enkidu’s untimely death. Gilgamesh seeks eternal life and renewed youth, before finally returning home.

Read more:
Guide to the classics: the Epic of Gilgamesh

A rediscovered story

This production is the first English language opera of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a literary masterpiece from ancient Mesopotamia.

The story was first written down on clay tablets in the cuneiform script more than 4,000 years ago. Although Gilgamesh was famous in the ancient world, his story disappeared from cultural awareness along with the ability to read cuneiform around the 1st century CE.

In a feat of scholarly virtuosity, 19th century scholars deciphered the rediscovered cuneiform script, using a kind of Persian Rosetta Stone known as the Behistun monument.

In 1857, the Royal Asiatic Society held a kind of “cuneiform competition”, where scholars completed secret translations of a previously unseen inscription.

When their translations were found to be very similar, it was clear the secrets of the complex script had finally been unlocked.

Music and myth

In the 150 years since the Epic of Gilgamesh was rediscovered, the legend has inspired music spanning numerous genres, from hip hop, to Australian indie pop, to metal.

As with this new opera, many of these modern adaptations have focused on the loving relationship between the story’s two heroes, Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Their connection has been viewed as the world’s first bromance, or one of the oldest known love stories.

The opera leans into the transformative nature of heroes’ epic love: Enkidu’s wildman innocence is corrupted by Gilgamesh; Gilgamesh is emboldened by the presence of his lover.

There is much to admire in the approach to the text taken by composer Jack Symonds and librettist Louis Garrick.

At times, excerpts of text from an English translation of the epic are incorporated into the score. This use of ancient prose is particularly effective in the scene where Gilgamesh rudely rejects Ishtar’s marriage proposal; it would be difficult to create a more brutal polemic than that employed by Gilgamesh against the goddess in the ancient narrative.

At other times, new scenes and dialogue are crafted to draw deeper from the rich well of narrative ideas. This can be seen where Ishtar and Shamhat plan to civilise Enkidu (engineered by Gilgamesh in the original story), and a scene where Gilgamesh and Enkidu become lovers in the Cedar Forest.

The production

Kleeman gives a heroic turn as a man struggling to comprehend his mortality and his growing love for Enkidu.

Sheldon is divine as Ishtar the vengeful goddess of love, seamlessly blending the deity’s power and unpredictability.

As Utanapishti, the legendary flood survivor often compared with biblical Noah, Jessica O’Donoghue gives a haunting performance suited to one who has witnessed the destruction of most of humanity.

The set (design by Elizabeth Gadsby) uses as its centrepiece a Chinese elm tree with 1,000 gold fabric leaves, mirroring the combination of scale and simplicity seen in the narrative.

This reflects the creative team’s engagement with the epic’s ecological themes. The Cedar Forest is recognised in the original epic for its aesthetic and commercial value. Its destruction by the heroes is an act of sacrilege.

Directed by Kip Williams, Gilgamesh emphasises the violence of environmental destruction through the bloody death of the forest guardian Humbaba in a stomach-turning scene slippery with gore.

The love story between Gilgamesh and Enkidu is at the opera’s heart. Building on the intimate connection between the heroes in the ancient story, the two heroes sing songs of love together. Their vocal performances are matched with a dynamic physicality as they wrestle, embrace and cradle one another.

Those familiar with Gilgamesh will enjoy discovering where new creative directions have been taken in the opera. For those new to the story, the opera gives a vibrant introduction into the power and drama of one of the world’s most ancient masterpieces.

In the Babylonian legend, Gilgamesh finally abandons his quest for immortality. With this exciting new production of the epic, his ancient song of love and loss will continue to live on long into the future.

Gilgamesh,by Opera Australia, Sydney Chamber Orchestra and Carriageworks, is at Carriageworks, Sydney, until October 5.

Louise Pryke was a guest of the Gilgamesh production.

– ref. New Australian opera Gilgamesh captures the power of one of the world’s most ancient masterpieces – https://theconversation.com/new-australian-opera-gilgamesh-captures-the-power-of-one-of-the-worlds-most-ancient-masterpieces-237765

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sara Oscar, Senior Lecturer, Visual Communication, School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

In The Substance, the career of former actor Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is diminished to daytime aerobics instructor on a television network. On her 50th birthday, she is made redundant by a network executive, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), who tells her “renewal is inevitable”.

There is no future for ageing women.

In her redundancy, Elisabeth has an accident. At the hospital, she is passed a note from a handsome young doctor for a black-market drug known as “the substance” that promises to generate a younger version of a person with a single injection. Desperate for youthful relevance, Elisabeth takes the substance and gives birth to a stronger version of herself, Sue (Margaret Qualley).

There are strict rules for taking “the substance”. One rule is that Elisabeth and Sue must share time, taking it in turns to live in the world every seven days. While one lives, the other sleeps so their cells may regenerate.

Another rule is they must remember they “are one”, despite being two separate bodies who can never spend time together.

Elisabeth does not re-experience youth through Sue – even though they share the same DNA and are, according to the rules, “one”.

This is where things start to go horribly wrong for Elisabeth/Sue.

Taking aim at the male gaze

The Substance is a satirical body-horror and science fiction film underpinned by feminist critique. The film examines the obsession with female beauty and youth, the invisibility of ageing women, and the voracious consumption of women’s bodies in Hollywood’s star system.

In interviews, director Coralie Fargeat takes aim at both the beauty myth – the belief that a woman’s value is tied to her appearance – and the male gaze – a way of visualising the female body as an object to be looked at for and by men.

Many of the scenes in the film reflect this critique using hammed-up, hyper-sexualised slow pans across female body parts: wet lips, pert breasts, toned butts. Such scenes mimic the male gaze familiar in popular culture, from Hollywood films to twerking arses in music videos.

Yet Fargeat moves beyond mimicry. Throughout the film, she uses mirrors, photographs, cameras and television to draw our attention to the male gaze and to show the trouble – and horror – that ensues when appearances and reality do not align.

The film depicts injecting, vomiting, bleeding, eating, self-harm and violent and grotesque transformations of the body to create psychological tension and disgust.

The uncanny culture of the copy

The Substance has an acute awareness of the motif of the double, through archetypes and psychoanalytic concepts such as the split psyche, mirroring and the evil twin.

In the opening scene, an egg yolk is injected with a syringe and split into two. This doubling recurs quite literally when Elisabeth takes the substance and “gives birth” to the so-called “better version of herself”.

Sigmund Freud’s unheimlich, or the uncanny, haunts the premise of the film.

The uncanny refers to the unsettling feeling that arises when something familiar becomes eerily unfamiliar, often revealing repressed fears or hidden aspects of the self.

Elisabeth, seeing a billboard image of Sue, has a complex response. It exacerbates her self-loathing and envy. Sue triggers Elisabeth’s deepest fears.

As Sue gains increasing fame, Elisabeth’s invisibility and irrelevance only increases – undermining the whole point of taking “the substance”.

Neither woman can reckon with the uncanny spectre of the other in photographs and television footage.

Mother–daughter nexus

For Sue, seeing photographs of Elisabeth triggers disgust — so much so that the mural-sized photograph of Elisabeth in the apartment they share gets hidden, like Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.

We see further feminist archetypes such as the “old hag” and the “unruly daughter”. The mother–daughter nexus is prevalent. The dynamic of love and conflict, attraction and disgust cannot be underplayed.

Sue is both Elisabeth’s salvation and her doom. Sue represents the younger self to which Elisabeth can never return. Sue also threatens to erase Elisabeth’s life by repeatedly breaking the seven-day rule. This has devastating effects on Elisabeth’s sleeping body, which instantly ages.

Over time, this inflicts the worst kinds of physical horrors on Elisabeth’s body.

The more Elisabeth becomes consumed by Sue’s perfection, the more grotesque her own body becomes, until, in the end, she is a sci-fi mash-up of The Lord of the Rings’ Golem, Star Wars’ Palpatine, and David Lynch’s Elephant Man.

The film pulls from these iconic figures of deformity and monstrosity to underscore how society views ageing women’s bodies: the derision of menopause, the so-called “change” not as a natural part of life, but as something to be feared and reviled.

The scenes of Elisabeth gorging and cooking over a cauldron with wiry grey hair, and fisting a raw chicken carcass accompany scenes of the body’s mutilation.

The film also questions how we consume the female body and how women are conditioned to mutilate themselves for youth and beauty. The false economy of appearances reminds us that beneath the make-up, injectables, botox and fillers, there is always going to be an imperfect body in a process of natural decay.

The Substance offers no redemption for Elisabeth. Her pursuit of a younger, more beautiful self is the horror. Her final realisation is that the more she tries to escape her body, the more she is trapped by 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. There is no future for ageing women: how The Substance uses body-horror in a feminist critique – https://theconversation.com/there-is-no-future-for-ageing-women-how-the-substance-uses-body-horror-in-a-feminist-critique-239729

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Allen Cheng, Professor of Infectious Diseases, Monash University

Before the COVID pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) had made a list of priority infectious diseases. These were felt to pose a threat to international public health, but where research was still needed to improve their surveillance and diagnosis. In 2018, “disease X” was included, which signified that a pathogen previously not on our radar could cause a pandemic.

While it’s one thing to acknowledge the limits to our knowledge of the microbial soup we live in, more recent attention has focused on how we might systematically approach future pandemic risks.

Former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously talked about “known knowns” (things we know we know), “known unknowns” (things we know we don’t know), and “unknown unknowns” (the things we don’t know we don’t know).

Although this may have been controversial in its original context of weapons of mass destruction, it provides a way to think about how we might approach future pandemic threats.

Influenza: a ‘known known’

Influenza is largely a known entity; we essentially have a minor pandemic every winter with small changes in the virus each year. But more major changes can also occur, resulting in spread through populations with little pre-existing immunity. We saw this most recently in 2009 with the swine flu pandemic.

However, there’s a lot we don’t understand about what drives influenza mutations, how these interact with population-level immunity, and how best to make predictions about transmission, severity and impact each year.

The current H5N1 subtype of avian influenza (“bird flu”) has spread widely around the world. It has led to the deaths of many millions of birds and spread to several mammalian species including cows in the United States and marine mammals in South America.

Human cases have been reported in people who have had close contact with infected animals, but fortunately there’s currently no sustained spread between people.

While detecting influenza in animals is a huge task in a large country such as Australia, there are systems in place to detect and respond to bird flu in wildlife and production animals.

It’s inevitable there will be more influenza pandemics in the future. But it isn’t always the one we are worried about.

Attention had been focused on avian influenza since 1997, when an outbreak in birds in Hong Kong caused severe disease in humans. But the subsequent pandemic in 2009 originated in pigs in central Mexico.

Coronaviruses: an ‘unknown known’

Although Rumsfeld didn’t talk about “unknown knowns”, coronaviruses would be appropriate for this category. We knew more about coronaviruses than most people might have thought before the COVID pandemic.

We’d had experience with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) causing large outbreaks. Both are caused by viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID. While these might have faded from public consciousness before COVID, coronaviruses were listed in the 2015 WHO list of diseases with pandemic potential.

Previous research into the earlier coronaviruses proved vital in allowing COVID vaccines to be developed rapidly. For example, the Oxford group’s initial work on a MERS vaccine was key to the development of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine.

Similarly, previous research into the structure of the spike protein – a protein on the surface of coronaviruses that allows it to attach to our cells – was helpful in developing mRNA vaccines for COVID.

It would seem likely there will be further coronavirus pandemics in the future. And even if they don’t occur at the scale of COVID, the impacts can be significant. For example, when MERS spread to South Korea in 2015, it only caused 186 cases over two months, but the cost of controlling it was estimated at US$8 billion (A$11.6 billion).

The 25 viral families: an approach to ‘known unknowns’

Attention has now turned to the known unknowns. There are about 120 viruses from 25 families that are known to cause human disease. Members of each viral family share common properties and our immune systems respond to them in similar ways.

An example is the flavivirus family, of which the best-known members are yellow fever virus and dengue fever virus. This family also includes several other important viruses, such as Zika virus (which can cause birth defects when pregnant women are infected) and West Nile virus (which causes encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain).

The WHO’s blueprint for epidemics aims to consider threats from different classes of viruses and bacteria. It looks at individual pathogens as examples from each category to expand our understanding systematically.

The US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has taken this a step further, preparing vaccines and therapies for a list of prototype pathogens from key virus families. The goal is to be able to adapt this knowledge to new vaccines and treatments if a pandemic were to arise from a closely related virus.

Pathogen X, the ‘unknown unknown’

There are also the unknown unknowns, or “disease X” – an unknown pathogen with the potential to trigger a severe global epidemic. To prepare for this, we need to adopt new forms of surveillance specifically looking at where new pathogens could emerge.

In recent years, there’s been an increasing recognition that we need to take a broader view of health beyond only thinking about human health, but also animals and the environment. This concept is known as “One Health” and considers issues such as climate change, intensive agricultural practices, trade in exotic animals, increased human encroachment into wildlife habitats, changing international travel, and urbanisation.

This has implications not only for where to look for new infectious diseases, but also how we can reduce the risk of “spillover” from animals to humans. This might include targeted testing of animals and people who work closely with animals. Currently, testing is mainly directed towards known viruses, but new technologies can look for as yet unknown viruses in patients with symptoms consistent with new infections.

We live in a vast world of potential microbiological threats. While influenza and coronaviruses have a track record of causing past pandemics, a longer list of new pathogens could still cause outbreaks with significant consequences.

Continued surveillance for new pathogens, improving our understanding of important virus families, and developing policies to reduce the risk of spillover will all be important for reducing the risk of future pandemics.

This article is part of a series on the next pandemic.

Allen Cheng receives funding from the Australian government for respiratory virus surveillance, and from the National Health and Medical Research Council. He is a member of the Communicable Diseases Network of Australia and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation. He is an investigator on the REMAP-CAP trial.

– ref. What pathogen might spark the next pandemic? How scientists are preparing for ‘disease X’ – https://theconversation.com/what-pathogen-might-spark-the-next-pandemic-how-scientists-are-preparing-for-disease-x-223193

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Legge, Professor of Wildlife Conservation, Australian National University

As animals move across the desert, they leave tracks, diggings and droppings. For skilled trackers, reading these signs is like watching a movie. A story of who was there and what they were doing unfolds in front of them.

In this way, many Indigenous Australians know where the goannas (jalangardi in Yawuru) are fat and abundant, when bilby (jitartu in Karajarri) burrows are occupied, and whether the bush turkeys (parrkara in Karajarri) have arrived to take advantage of a freshly burnt patch.

For many years, scientists have been working with Indigenous people in the desert to record these observations in a systematic way. Taking a standard approach enables comparisons between data from different people, times and places, so trends can be detected.

Our new research collates almost 49,000 animal detections during 15,000 surveys at more than 5,300 sites, since 1982. This unique data set reveals new information about desert species. Monitoring animal numbers, locations and responses to environmental change is vital for guiding efforts to support their survival.

Monitoring desert wildlife is a skill

It’s not always easy to see animals in the desert. Most are nocturnal, secretive, and spend much of their time underground. Numbers can fluctuate widely, dwindling during droughts and booming after rain.

This means we need to collect a lot of data — over a long time and over a vast area — to tell what is going on.

Fortunately, Indigenous Australians continue to inhabit and look after desert landscapes using deep knowledge of their Country and exceptional observational skills. Our deserts contain one of the largest networks of Indigenous-managed land in the world.

The Arid Zone Monitoring Project
combines Traditional ecological knowledge and tracking skills with scientific analysis. Indigenous rangers and Traditional Owners from 33 different Indigenous desert groups are involved, along with government agencies, non-government organisations and independent scientists. It’s one of Australia’s largest wildlife monitoring endeavours, spanning nearly half of the country.

Fresh insights

The standard approach is to search a 2-hectare area for signs of animals with at least two people for 20 minutes.

One of us, Braedan Taylor, has performed many dozens of these sign-based surveys. He says: “Within these areas we look for scats (poo), burrows, tracks and record everything that we find.”

The observations are recorded on various apps or paper record sheets.

The method has been widely embraced by Indigenous ranger teams. But, until now, the data has generally stayed within those teams.

By bringing all of the data together for analysis, our research has revealed fresh insights into desert wildlife. We now know more about where species occur and their preferred habitats. We found some species in places where they were not thought to exist before.

For example, it turns out the range of the great desert skink (tjakura in Wiluna Martu Wangka) extends further southwest in Martu Country than previously thought. This chunky, group-living reptile is culturally important to Indigenous people. While local people knew of its presence, sharing that knowledge helps conserve this threatened species.

In the northwestern deserts, Yawuru Country managers and Karajarri rangers recorded many observations of spectacled-hare wallabies (manggaban in Yawuru). This species had not been detected in the region for more than a decade. One of us, Pius Gregory, worked with his countrymen, using careful observation of scats (poo) to distinguish this species from two other wallaby species of similar size (northern nailtail wallabies, agile wallabies; garrabulu, barrjaniny).

Analysing the data has also improved our knowledge of where pest species occur and how they may be affecting native wildlife. For example, we found bilbies have been lost from 70% of their former range, contracting to the northwest deserts where fox density is lowest. Feral cat numbers are also higher here, perhaps also due to fewer foxes.

Some species leave more tell-tale signs

Better monitoring can help ranger teams evaluate their programs to control fires and feral animals.

The data can also help determine the conservation status of threatened species, and whether it’s improving or declining.

Species detection rates, locations and habitat preferences can also inform future monitoring programs. This includes guiding where and how often to survey, to detect population changes for various species.

Overall, we found sign-based surveys are great for monitoring 28 species of mammals, reptiles and birds – including threatened, invasive and culturally significant species. This includes game species that are important to desert people such as kangaroo (mirtimarlu in Karajarri), emu (bijarda in Yawuru) and bush turkey (bustard, barrgara in Yawuru).

We found a national monitoring program for these 28 species would only require visiting 600 strategically located sites twice every five years. Each team involved in the monitoring would need to survey only 10–20 sites a year.

We identified a further 48 species in the records, but found sign-based surveys may not be the best way to monitor them. This is either because detections are too few, or their sign is hard to identify.

For some of those species, extra training by expert trackers may make a difference. For example, the tracks of red kangaroo, euro and grey kangaroo are hard to distinguish for inexperienced trackers, as are perentie, yellow-spotted and sand goanna tracks.

Potential for the future

The Arid Zone Monitoring Project was a proof of concept that showed how much monitoring is already being done by rangers. It also shows the potential for a desert-wide monitoring program, in which Indigenous-led data collection is paired with logistic, analytical and funding support.

Such a program could provide information on biodiversity trends over 40% of the country. This would help inform invasive animal control programs, as well as Indigenous-led recovery strategies for threatened species and culturally significant species.

Sign-based monitoring gives elders and senior rangers an opportunity to share information and skills. This extends beyond tracking, to language, stories, and all aspects of cultural and ecological knowledge. Pius and Braedan can’t overstate how important this is – sign-based surveys are a great way to get out on Country and learn.

The wellbeing of Indigenous Australians is inseparable from the wellbeing of Country: (“healthy Country, healthy people”). Effective monitoring, with strong Indigenous engagement, is a essential for looking after the plants, animals and people of Australia’s desert Country.

We sincerely acknowledge the many people who contributed to this research.

Sarah Legge received funding from the National Environmental Program’s Threatened Species Recovery Hub for the project described here. In related work, she receives funding from the Australian Research Council, and from the Australian Government’s Innovative Biodiversity Monitoring for biodiverisity monitoring with Indigenous organisations. She is a member of the Biodiversity Council.

Braedan Taylor worked for the Karajarri Rangers, Karajarri Traditional Lands Association during this project. He’s now studying Marine Science at the University of Western Australia.

Jaana Dielenberg was a collaborator on the Arid Zone Monitoring project, which was funded by the now-ended Threatened Species Recovery Hub of the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program. She is a Charles Darwin University Fellow and is employed by the University of Melbourne and the Biodiversity Council.

Pius Gregory is a Yawuru Traditional Owner. He worked previously for Nyamba Buru Yawuru as a Country Manager, looking after desert and sea country. He is now employed by WWF as the Biocultural Conservation Specialist based in Broome.

Rachel Paltridge was employed by various Indigenous organisations to assist rangers collect track plot data during the period 2000-2020. She now works as an ecologist with the Indigenous Desert Alliance, with support from the Resilient Landscapes Hub of the National Environmental Science Program and also receives funding from the Australian Government’s Saving Native Species program. She is an adjunct Senior Research Fellow with the University of Western Australia.

– ref. Reading desert sands – Indigenous wildlife tracking skills underpin vast monitoring project – https://theconversation.com/reading-desert-sands-indigenous-wildlife-tracking-skills-underpin-vast-monitoring-project-238978

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vitomir Kovanovic, Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L), Education Futures, University of South Australia

It’s almost two years since ChatGPT burst onto the scene in late 2022. Since then, educators worldwide have been grappling with what generative artificial intelligence might mean for classrooms and learning.

ChatGPT has been met with both anxiety and a sense of optimism. While there has been a lot of discussion about what is happening in universities, there has been less attention given to schools.

We have been looking at trials of AI in schools in South Australia. Here’s what we found.

What has happened so far in Australia?

Most Australian states initially banned ChatGPT and other generative AI tools in government schools (many private schools have been using the technology).

In a different approach, the SA government began a trial of AI in schools in 2023 with its own tool, EdChat.

Other jurisdictions have since reconsidered their stance. For example, at the start of 2024, New South Wales began trialling its own AI tool.

In November 2023, the federal government also published a framework for generative AI in schools, which said AI has “great potential” to help teachers and students, and to reduce administrative workloads.

Last month, a federal parliamentary inquiry recommended generative AI in schools should be a “national priority”, finding the benefits of AI outweigh its significant risks and challenges.

What happened in South Australia?

EdChat is a generative AI tool owned by the SA Department for Education, which was designed with Microsoft. It can be used in classrooms and at home. According to the department, it has “extra safety features” to protect students’ privacy and stop them accessing inappropriate content.

In the first phase of the trial, EdChat was used in eight SA government high schools for eight weeks. In the second phase, a further eight schools were included.

We have been evaluating the trial using survey data from about 90 teachers and 700 students. A journal article on this work is currently under review. In this article, we speak about our results from teachers.

‘It reduces time pressure’

Teachers told us they felt safer using EdChat than other tools such as ChatGPT, because student data is not being used to train generative AI models.

However, teachers still wanted to know more about how the student data is stored and who can access EdChat records.

Teachers also reported significant benefits of the tool. They said it helped save time developing lesson plans and learning materials – allowing for more time with students in the classroom.

One teacher told us how the tool had been adopted by the class.

We nicknamed it Eddy as a class and Eddy is now embedded as part of our class culture.

Teachers also used EdChat to provide personalised learning activities to students and “reduce time pressure and brain power required to create [teaching examples] and plan fun activities”. EdChat also allowed students to get personalised feedback or support when teachers were not around.

‘We need to be careful’

Teachers noted issues with hallucinations (when the AI comes up with nonsense) and incorrect information. This means students need to have the skills to recognise this.

As one teacher told us:

I think we need to be careful since students can treat AI like how they treat anything on the internet, without any critical thinking and taking it at face value.

They also said students need to learn to write better prompts and develop their critical thinking skills for working with AI.

They said content filters could also be challenging. While designed to keep students safe, they sometimes interfered with learning, especially for sensitive topics such as history, reproductive health or politics. For example, one history teacher said the “censorship was difficult to get around”.

Teachers also said it was more difficult to work out whether students’ work was plagiarised or not.

What happens now?

The SA government is looking at ways to expand the use of EdChat in schools.

Our research suggests we need to do more work in several areas.

The first is specific education for students around how to use AI critically and effectively.

We also need more research now about how AI is being used in different schools. There are no large-scale studies yet in Australia but there is growing evidence from other parts of the world, such as
Estonia, the United States and United Kingdom, which show AI is significantly changing the way teachers are teaching. This includes spending more time on students’ critical thinking skills and using AI to generate ideas.

We also need to make sure all students can gain access to AI (not just those who can afford the technology) and that the AI itself it not biased against minorities.

Meanwhile, teachers need more support and professional development, and schools need help to plan and make changes. This includes a wider community awareness of the profound effects these new technologies are having and will have on the teaching profession and student learning.

Vitomir Kovanovic receives funding from the Department for Education of South Australia.

Maarten de Laat receives funding from the Department for Education of South Australia.

Rebecca Marrone receives funding from the Department for Education of South Australia

– ref. ‘We nicknamed it Eddy’: what do schools and teachers think of AI in classrooms? – https://theconversation.com/we-nicknamed-it-eddy-what-do-schools-and-teachers-think-of-ai-in-classrooms-239396

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

P.J. Hogan’s classic Australian film Muriel’s Wedding is 30 and it plays as well today as it did when it had its world premiere. Muriel might have been “terrible” – but the film was a great success.

Australians love to laugh at themselves, and everyone loves an underdog. Muriel’s Wedding took more than A$15 million at the box office in Australia — making it one of the highest-grossing Australian feature films of all time.

As fun as the film is with its kitsch aesthetic, bold colour palette and garish costumes, it has a unique mix of comedy and serious drama. It slips from the absurd to painful realism, with more depth than your average comedy and a twist in the plot that made it an original take on the genre.

While Australians generally have received it as hilarious, audiences elsewhere were more attuned to the tragedy, such as Muriel’s mother Betty’s suicide following relentless bullying, and Rhonda’s illness and disability. But it worked for audiences everywhere who warmed to the representation of friendship, its emotional compassion and critique of the narrow mindedness of small-town communities.

‘We’re all Muriel’

Sometimes it is the stars who can bring in an audience and make a film successful. However, although there were a lot of experienced actors in Muriel’s Wedding, Toni Collette (Muriel) and Rachel Griffiths (Rhonda) – whose performances were exceptional – were both playing lead and supporting roles for the first time in a feature film.

It was also Hogan’s first feature, so it is unlikely star power drew in audiences (although all of them were to become stars, and Hogan later directed My Best Friend’s Wedding with Julia Roberts, one of the top romantic comedies of all time).

It did, however, have a wonderful trailer.

I asked Rachel Griffiths what she thought was the key to the film’s success and she identified its universality: it translated for an array of audiences and enabled broad identification.

She described the film as having one foot in the grotesque and the other in Ridley Scott’s 1991 getaway heist Thelma & Louise – another film about female friendship, independence and individual growth.

Griffiths gave the example of going with the film to New York on its release and discovering it was wildly meaningful to the LGBTQIA+ community. In conversation with a gay man in his late 20s, he described it as a parable for AIDS, which at that time was in full-blown crisis.

According to Griffiths, he said: “We’re all Muriel. We don’t fit in.”

Growing up in small towns where they are “the freak”, with closet musical tastes, he said:

We’re the outcasts in our family. Our fathers belittle us for being feminine. We escape to the big smoke with the promise of becoming ourselves and following our own journey. We replace our families who have rejected us with our chosen family who celebrate us.

And when one of their own is struck suddenly by this terrible affliction, like Rhonda, they are sent home in humiliation, to be looked after, which is their worst fear. The aspiration is to be rescued by the adopted family and taken back to the big city and shown unconditional love.

Griffiths says:

That’s the ending and the survival story of both Rhonda and Muriel, you go back to that kind of pride moment, to be proud of who you are.

For Griffiths, Rhonda and Muriel have “a kind of blood-sister friendship, a bond that can’t be broken”.

We all long for that deep acceptance. It is a parable of inclusion, where Muriel and Rhonda truly see and accept each other and themselves.

A feminist film

I asked Griffiths if Muriel’s Wedding was received as feminist when it was released. She replied it wasn’t at the time it was made, but more recently this has come up.

Her explanation of why this wasn’t considered 30 years ago is informative regarding film criticism. She elaborated that the critics at the time were 90% male and their take on feminism expected powerful female lead characters who pursue their goals and achieve in the face of competition.

In this story, there is a girl escaping patriarchal control. Muriel’s father, Bill Heslop (Bill Hunter), is a bully and narcissist who blames everyone else – especially the women – for his failures.

Griffiths aligns Muriel to the Cinderella myth because in the beginning she sees her value will only be ascribed to her once she marries. The film, Griffiths said, is “a fundamental kind of feminist journey”.

The central focus is Muriel’s personal growth in rejecting ideology that promotes romantic coupling as the pinnacle of happiness for women. Instead Muriel embraces her own worth and her friendship with Rhonda. Marriage is portrayed as a patriarchal structure that ideologically binds women – the marriages are variously fraudulent, starting with Tanya and Chook, then Muriel and, ultimately, her mother.

There are many elements that make Muriel’s Wedding an Australian classic, from the universal themes and relatability to how the story is able to extend beyond national borders. The film leaves us with admiration for resilience in the face of adversity, signalled by Muriel and Rhonda grinning assuredly at each other in the final scene.

It is a unique and very real comedy/drama with a highly engaging aesthetic and a feminist message. It is an opportunity to laugh at ourselves, despite quite a lot of tragedy and adversity — which is a very Australian thing to do!

The author wishes to thank Rachel Griffiths who was interviewed in Melbourne on August 17 2020.

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. ‘We’re all Muriel’: why we still love Muriel’s Wedding, 30 years on – https://theconversation.com/were-all-muriel-why-we-still-love-muriels-wedding-30-years-on-236793

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendon Hyndman, Associate Professor of Health & Physical Education (Adj.), Charles Sturt University

The Brisbane Lions are the underdogs for Saturday’s AFL grand final against Sydney.

After defeating Geelong in Victoria for the first time in 20 years, they have reached the grand final from fifth on the ladder, without a rest week or double-chance (as teams that finish in the top four enjoy).

Taking into account the VFL origins of both clubs, this will be the first Lions–Swans grand final for 125 years.

The Lions’ task against the Swans, who finished as minor premiers, is formidable but not impossible.

As history shows, upsets happen. But what have been the greatest shocks in men’s VFL/AFL grand final history?

Sports betting odds are one way to determine an upset, but that is a fairly modern phenomenon, so we delved beyond odds.

Other considerations include comparing the respective ladder positions of the opposing teams, the length of time since a team’s previous premiership, the age and experience of the playing group, or even the team’s record at the venue or against the other team.

We have given greatest weighting to ladder position going into the finals, which we believe is the fairest indicator of the magnitude of an upset, because it signifies a team’s performance and consistency during that season.

Below is our verdict on the biggest grand final upsets of all time, with reference to these various criteria.

Experience of playing group

#10 – 1993 Essendon defeated Carlton

The 1993 “Baby Bombers” premiership was a big surprise after they finished eighth in 1992 (the top five teams made finals).

They were 11th (out of 15 teams) after round seven in 1993 and had to come from 42 points down at half-time in the preliminary final.

The average age of the “Baby Bombers” was just 24 years and 105 days when they defeated Carlton. In comparison, the average age of Carlton’s playing group was 25.4 years.

The average age of premiership teams from the past 20 years has been 26.2 years.

What made this win even more remarkable was Essendon had six players with fewer than 25 AFL games. The average for premiership teams over the past two decades has been 126.7 games.

Track record between clubs or seasons

#9 – 2017 Richmond defeated Adelaide

Richmond completed the greatest one-year turnaround in VFL/AFL history when they won the 2017 decider.

The Tigers rose from 13th on the ladder in 2016 to secure their first premiership in 37 years in 2017.

Richmond upset Adelaide, who finished top of the ladder and were favourites to win the grand final. The Crows had also beaten Richmond by 76 points when they met earlier in 2017.

The relentless pressure of Richmond’s “mosquito fleet” (players shorter than 183cm) was a key to victory on grand final day.

#8 – 1972 Carlton defeated Richmond

Carlton had not beaten Richmond in a final since 1920 and their recent record was ten straight losses to Richmond.

The Blues had also lost all four games against the Tigers that year.

They surprised the highly favoured Richmond team with a “strategic triumph” that involved playing numerous players in different positions.

This was the highest-scoring grand final of all time, with 327 combined points. Carlton kicked 28 goals in their win.

#7 – 1970 Carlton defeated Collingwood

Collingwood was favourite for the grand final, as the Magpies finished top of the ladder and defeated Carlton three times in the 1970 season, including by 77 points in round 19.

This match was also recognised as the greatest grand final comeback in AFL/VFL history, and featured one of the greatest marks of the 20th century. It also had the biggest ever VFL/AFL crowd of 121,696 spectators.

After trailing by 44 points at half-time, Ron Barrassi’s instructions to play on and handball in the second half were credited for helping Carlton’s upset win.

#6 – 2008 Hawthorn defeated Geelong

Geelong won the 2007 premiership by 119 points and would eventually win the 2009 premiership.

Meeting the team with the youngest recorded average playing age in the competition was all that stood in the way for the highly favoured Cats in the 2008 grand final.

Geelong had finished four games clear on top of the ladder in 2008, only losing once all season.

Yet a combination of Geelong’s poor kicking for goal, Hawthorn’s hard running and clever coaching led to an unexpected victory for the team described as “resembling the baby bombers”.

#5 – 1958 Collingwood defeated Melbourne

Between 1955 and 1960, Melbourne blitzed the competition, winning five of the six premierships on offer, two of them over Collingwood.

In the middle of this Melbourne dominance, and having lost to the Demons in their semi-final, Collingwood achieved “the miracle of ‘58”.

Collingwood’s victory stopped Melbourne winning six premierships in a row. It would be the Magpies’ last flag for 32 years, and has been described as their “best ever”.

Ladder positioning

#4 – 1998 Adelaide defeated North Melbourne

Between 1902 and 1971, the VFL had a top four finals system, which expanded to include at least the top five teams from 1972, and evolved to become a top eight from 1994.

Described as imposters and up against the future 1999 premiers, Adelaide became the first team from outside the top four to win the premiership since 1900.

They did so despite facing a deficit of 24 points at half-time.

During the grand final, North Melbourne set the record for the most inaccurate kicking for goal in VFL/AFL grand final history, with eight goals and 22 behinds.

#3 – 1900 Melbourne defeated Fitzroy

During 1900, the regular season positions did not count when finals arrived, meaning all teams qualified to play finals.

Fitzroy was the dominant force in the league and were two games clear on top of the ladder with 11 wins and just three losses.

They were described by most spectators as being a “certainty” to secure their third consecutive premiership.

Yet Melbourne, which finished sixth (out of eight teams) during the regular season with five fewer victories, went on to win all of their finals games and toppled Fitzroy in the grand final.

It was such a surprise that an overhaul of the VFL finals system was made within just two seasons to limit the finals to the top four teams.

#2 – 1916 Fitzroy defeated Carlton

The impacts of war resulted in just four teams playing in 1916.

During the regular season, Fitzroy lost nine in a row and ended up with the wooden spoon.

Despite finishing last on the reduced ladder, Fitzroy won every finals match and overcame ladder leaders Carlton to take the 1916 premiership.

The upset was even more extraordinary considering Fitzroy was without league-leading goalkicker Jimmy Freake and forward Jim Toohey. Both had combined for almost half of Fitzroy’s goals over the preceeding four seasons.

Fitzroy defeated Carlton twice in the finals, having lost three consecutive in-season games to them and overcoming a half-time grand final deficit.

#1 – 2016 Western Bulldogs defeated Sydney

Ending a 62-year premiership drought, the Bulldogs came from seventh on the ladder to claim their first flag since 1954.

The Bulldogs’ journey to the grand final was nothing short of challenging.

After commencing their finals campaign with one of the longest trips in football to take on West Coast in Perth, they then downed the reigning premiers Hawthorn at the MCG, preventing a fourth consecutive premiership for the Hawks.

The next stage of the journey involved travelling to Sydney for an epic preliminary final clash against Greater Western Sydney, resulting in the Bulldogs holding on in a nailbiting finish.

In the grand final, the Bulldogs came up against the top-of-the-table Sydney Swans, who had won eight of their final nine matches of the season. After trailing at half-time, the Bulldogs surged in the second half to victory.

Given the AFL expansions, professional transformation of the modern competition and the journey of finals battles across Australia for the 2016 Western Bulldogs, this ranks as the greatest achievement in the history of grand final upsets.

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. What are the 10 greatest upsets in VFL/AFL grand final history? – https://theconversation.com/what-are-the-10-greatest-upsets-in-vfl-afl-grand-final-history-238976

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ross Lawrenson, Professor of Population Health, University of Waikato

Surviving lung cancer in Aotearoa New Zealand could depend on whether you can access a GP – raising questions about equity in the country’s health system.

Our new research examines the outcomes for patients who are diagnosed with lung cancer through their GP versus those who are diagnosed at the emergency department (ED).

Examining 2,400 lung cancer diagnoses in Waikato between 2011 and 2021, we found those who are diagnosed with lung cancer after ED visits tended to have later-stage disease and poorer outcomes compared to those diagnosed after a GP referral.

We also found diagnosis after ED attendance was 27% higher for Māori than non-Māori and 22% higher for men than women.

These results raise important questions about health inequity in New Zealand and highlight the need to ensure everyone is able to access an early cancer diagnosis.

Limited access to everyday health care

Currently half of all general practices have closed their books to new patients, leaving 290,000 patients unenrolled and reliant on emergency departments for their health care.

Some 80% of practices have closed their books to new patients at some point since 2019.

For those who are enrolled in a practice, the wait times for appointments are often such that the only option is to go to the ED for help.

This is especially true in rural areas where the hospital can become the default route to diagnosis.

Lung cancer is New Zealand’s single biggest cause of cancer deaths, with over 1,800 per year. Some 80% of those who are diagnosed with lung cancer present with advanced disease and very poor prospects of survival.

It’s also the cancer with the largest equity gap. The mortality rate for Māori with lung cancer is three to four times that of people of European descent.

While much of this disparity is due to differences in the rates of smoking among ethnic groups, there is also evidence delays in diagnosis and poorer access to surgery are also major influences on survival rates.

Identifying lung cancer

Lung cancer usually starts in the tissue lining the airways and symptoms can initially be relatively minor – some shortness of breath during exercise, a niggly cough or sharp pains while breathing.

Patients with these sorts of symptoms usually go to a GP to check whether this is something that needs further investigation.

But if someone cannot get an appointment, or does not recognise the symptoms as serious, then they are likely to delay taking action.

Advanced symptoms of lung cancer include coughing up blood or having lumps in the neck due to lymphatic spread of the cancer. People with these alarming symptoms tend to go to the hospital for treatment.

Our study confirms earlier findings that those diagnosed through the emergency department are:

• more likely to have advanced disease
• more likely to have a more aggressive type of cancer (called small cell cancer), and
• have substantially poorer likelihoods of survival.

The median survival for those who never went to the ED was 13.6 months, while the median survival for those with one ED visit was just three months.

That said, attending an emergency department has some advantages. These include being seen by a doctor within a few hours, immediate access to x-rays and, in our major hospitals, access to the definitive diagnostic tool for a lung cancer – a computed tomography (CT) machine.

Our study found 25% of cases went to the ED two or more times in the two weeks before their diagnosis. This was especially true for those going to one of the Waikato rural hospitals, where a second or third visit was more likely before being diagnosed.

Barriers to care

It is clear New Zealand still has several barriers to primary care. This has lead to an over-reliance on emergency departments for diagnosing cancer, despite the long-running faster cancer treatment targets.

The situation is unlikely to improve. Access to GPs is getting worse, in part due to increasing fees.

Māori and Pacific patients with lung cancer were less likely than other ethnic groups to have been enrolled with a primary health organisation when they were diagnosed. They were also less likely to have visited a GP in the three months prior to diagnosis.

Making it easier to see a GP

Making general practice care more accessible is the most effective way of addressing the inequities in our lung cancer statistics.

Currently, New Zealand has only 74 GPs per 100,000 people, compared to 110 in Australia.

It is clear we need to substantially increase the number of GPs. This is a long-term project but needs to be a strategic goal for the health sector.

In the meantime, we need to make primary care more accessible by increasing patient subsidies and reducing the direct patient costs to see a doctor. At the same time, we need to better equip GPs with access to diagnostic facilities, including in our rural hospitals.

Ross Lawrenson receives funding from NZ Health Research Council. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners.

Chunhuan Lao receives funding from NZ Health Research Council.

– ref. Access to a GP can make all the difference in surviving lung cancer – and that is a problem for Māori – https://theconversation.com/access-to-a-gp-can-make-all-the-difference-in-surviving-lung-cancer-and-that-is-a-problem-for-maori-239808

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

Last month, a delegation led by Brendan Crabb, head of the Burnet Institute, a prestigious medical research body, met Anthony Albanese in the prime minister’s parliament house office.

Its members, who included Lidia Morawska from Queensland University of Technology, a world-leading expert on air quality and health, also blitzed ministers and staffers. They were pitching for the federal government to spearhead a comprehensive policy on clean indoor air and for the issue to be put on the national cabinet’s agenda.

They pointed out to Albanese that indoor air is an outlier in our otherwise comprehensive public health framework. Despite people spending the majority of their time inside, indoor air quality is mostly unregulated, in contrast to the standards that apply to, for example, food and water.

There are multiple health and economic reasons to be concerned about this air quality but a major one is to limit the transmission of airborne diseases, such as COVID.

For many of us, COVID has become just a bad memory, despite its lasting and mixed legacies. For instance, without the pandemic, fewer people would now be working from home. More small businesses would be flourishing in our CBDs. Arguably, fewer children would be trying to catch up from inadequate schooling.

While the media have largely lost interest in COVID, and people are now rather blase about it, the disease is still taking a toll.

In 2023 there were about 4,600 deaths attributed to COVID, and almost certainly more in reality, given Australia that year had 8,400 “excess deaths” (defined as actual deaths above expected deaths).

Up to July this year there were 2,503 COVID deaths.

In nursing homes, whilst survival rates from COVID are much improved with vaccination and antivirals, as of September 19, there were 117 active outbreaks with 59 new outbreaks in that past week. There had been 900 deaths for the year so far.

Long COVID has become a serious issue, with varying respiratory, cardiac, cognitive and immunological symptoms. It is estimated between 200,000 and 900,000 people in Australia currently have long COVID.

The Albanese government is presently awaiting the report it commissioned into how the COVID pandemic was handled.

The inquiry has looked at the performance of the Morrison government, but its terms of reference didn’t include the states. That limits its usefulness, but there were politics involved, given high profile state Labor governments.

Not that the state and territory leaders of that time are around anymore (apart from the ACT’s Andrew Barr). Those faces that became so familiar from their daily news conference have disappeared into the never-never: Victoria’s Dan Andrews, Western Australia’s Mark McGowan, New South Wales’ Gladys Berejiklian, Queensland’s Annastacia Palaszczuk.

COVID variously made or tarnished leaders’ reputations. McGowan, in particular, reached stratospheric heights of popularity. Andrews deeply divided people.

In general, however, COVID boosted support for leaders and increased public trust in them and in government. In times of uncertainty, the public looked to known institutions and to authority figures. Since then, trust has eroded again.

Experts came into their own during the pandemic but then found themselves in the middle of the political bickering. In retrospect, some of them were wrong.

In the broad, especially in terms of the death rate and the economy, Australia navigated the crisis well. But drill down, and the story is more complex, as documented by two leading economists, Steven Hamilton (based in Washington and connected to the Australian National University) and Richard Holden (from UNSW).

In their just-published book, Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism, their bottom-line conclusion is that Australia was very impressive in its (vastly expensive) economic response but it was a mixed picture on the health side.

While Australia was quick out of the blocks in closing the national border and bringing in other measures, it fell down dramatically on two fronts. The Morrison government failed to order a wide variety of vaccines and it failed to buy enough Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs).

The “vaccine procurement strategy was an unmitigated disaster,” Hamilton and Holden write. This was not just “the greatest failure of the pandemic – it was arguably the greatest single public policy failure in Australian history”.

“We put all our vaccine eggs in just two baskets”, both of which failed to differing degrees. This was “a terrible risk to take. Pandemics are times for insurance, not gambling,” they write.

“And while our tax and statistical authorities marshalled their forces to operate much faster and more nimbly to serve the desperate needs of a government facing a once-in-a-century crisis, our medical regulatory complex repeatedly ignored international evidence and experience, and our political leaders capitulated to their advice. And then the prime minister told us that when it came to getting Australians vaccinated:‘it’s not a race’”.

The failure to order every vaccine on the horizon meant when production or supply problems arose for those that were hoped for or on order, the rollout was delayed.

After this bungle, “stunningly, we turned around and repeated these same mistakes all over again” by not obtaining and distributing freely massive numbers of RATs. In this failure, “our federal government showed the same lack of foresight, the same penny-wise but pound-foolish mindset that it had displayed in the vaccine rollout”.

The authors blame Scott Morrison, then-health minister Greg Hunt, then-chief medical officer Brendan Murphy, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) for the health failures, which prolonged the lockdowns, cost lives and delayed reopening.

Urging better preparation for the next pandemic, Hamilton and Holden have a list of suggestions. They stress we need to ensure we have mRNA vaccine manufacturing capability (on which there is fairly good progress). We must get vaccine procurement “right from the start” regardless of cost. Huge quantities of RATs should be procured as soon as they become available, ready to be used immediately.

A complete overhaul of the medical-regulatory complex should be undertaken. As well, Australia should continue to invest in “economic infrastructure”. In the pandemic, the economic effort was facilitated by having a single touch payroll system. “The first obvious candidate for improvement is a real-time GST turnover reporting capability.”

Perhaps a comprehensive indoor clean air policy could be added to the infrastructure list.

The government’s review will have its own recommendations. Crabb and his colleagues hope they include attention to indoor air quality, following advice from the Chief Scientist and the National Science and Technology Council.

Members of the delegation say they received an attentive hearing from the PM.

Anna-Maria Arabia, chief executive of the Australian Academy of Science, and a member of the delegation, says Albanese “understood that improving indoor air quality is a cornerstone requirement to preparing for future pandemics and [he] was attuned to the practical implications of having good indoor air quality systems, including schools and workplaces being able to stay open and functional, reduce absenteeism and boost productivity”.

What’s needed beyond awareness, however, is timely policy action. Pandemics don’t give much notice of their arrival.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Experts want Albanese to lead on indoor air quality as part of pandemic planning – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-experts-want-albanese-to-lead-on-indoor-air-quality-as-part-of-pandemic-planning-239829

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hallam Stevens, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, James Cook University

By now, many of us are probably familiar with artificial intelligence hype. AI will make artists redundant! AI can do lab experiments! AI will end grief!

Even by these standards, the latest proclamation from OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, published on his personal website this week, seems remarkably hyperbolic. We are on the verge of “The Intelligence Age”, he declares, powered by a “superintelligence” that may just be a “few thousand days” away. The new era will bring “astounding triumphs”, including “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics”.

Altman and his company – which is trying to raise billions from investors and pitching unprecedently huge datacentres to the US government, while shedding key staff and ditching its nonprofit roots to give Altman a share of ownership – have much to gain from hype.

However, even setting aside these motivations, it’s worth taking a look at some of the assumptions behind Altman’s predictions. On closer inspection, they reveal a lot about the worldview of AI’s biggest cheerleaders – and the blind spots in their thinking.

Steam engines for thought?

Altman grounds his marvellous predictions in a two-paragraph history of humanity:

People have become dramatically more capable over time; we can already accomplish things now that our predecessors would have believed impossible.

This is a story of unmitigated progress heading in a single direction, driven by human intelligence. The cumulative discoveries and inventions of science and technology – Altman reveals – have led us to the computer chip and, inexorably, to artificial intelligence which will take us the rest of the way to the future. This view owes much to the futuristic visions of the singularitarian movement.

Such a story is seductively simple. If human intelligence has driven us to ever-greater heights, it is hard not to conclude that better, faster, artificial intelligence will drive progress even farther and higher.

This is an old dream. In the 1820s, when Charles Babbage saw steam engines revolutionising human physical labour in England’s industrial revolution, he began to imagine constructing similar machines for automating mental labour. Babbage’s “analytical engine” was never built, but the notion that humanity’s ultimate achievement would entail mechanising thought itself has persisted.

According to Altman, we’re now (almost) at that mountaintop.

Deep learning worked – but for what?

The reason we are so close to the glorious future is simple, Altman says: “deep learning worked”.

Deep learning is a particular kind of machine learning that involves artificial neural networks, loosely inspired by biological nervous systems. It has certainly been surprisingly successful in a few domains: deep learning is behind models that have proven adept at stringing words together in more or less coherent ways, at generating pretty pictures and videos, and even contributing to the solutions of some scientific problems.

So the contributions of deep learning are not trivial. They are likely to have significant social and economic impacts (both positive and negative).

But deep learning “works” only for a limited set of problems. Altman knows this:

humanity discovered an algorithm that could really, truly learn any distribution of data (or really the underlying “rules” that produce any distribution of data).

That’s what deep learning does – that’s how it “works”. That’s important, and it’s a technique that can be applied to various domains, but it’s far from the only problem that exists.

Not every problem is reducible to pattern matching. Nor do all problems provide the massive amounts of data that deep learning requires to do its work. Nor is this how human intelligence works.

A big hammer looking for nails

What is interesting here is the fact that Altman thinks “rules from data” will go so far towards solving all humanity’s problems.

There is an adage that a person holding a hammer is likely to see everything as a nail. Altman is now holding a big and very expensive hammer.

Deep learning may be “working” but only because Altman and others are starting to reimagine (and build) a world composed of distributions of data. There’s a danger here that AI is starting to limit, rather than expand, the kinds of problem-solving we are doing.

What is barely visible in Altman’s celebration of AI are the expanding resources needed also for deep learning to “work”. We can acknowledge the great gains and remarkable achievements of modern medicine, transportation and communication (to name a few) without pretending these have not come at a significant cost.

They have come at a cost both to some humans – for whom the gains of global north have meant diminishing returns – and to animals, plants and ecosystems, ruthlessly exploited and destroyed by the extractive might of capitalism plus technology.

Although Altman and his booster friends might dismiss such views as nitpicking, the question of costs goes right to the heart of predictions and concerns about the future of AI.

Altman is certainly aware that AI is facing limits, noting “there are still a lot of details we have to figure out”. One of these is the rapidly expanding energy costs of training AI models.

Microsoft recently announced a US$30 billion fund to build AI data centres and generators to power them. The veteran tech giant, which has invested more than US$10 billion in OpenAI, has also signed a deal with owners of the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant (infamous for its 1979 meltdown) to supply power for AI. The frantic spending suggests there may be a hint of desperation in the air.

Magic or just magical thinking?

Given the magnitude of such challenges, even if we accept Altman’s rosy view of human progress up to now, we might have to acknowledge that the past may not be a reliable guide to the future. Resources are finite. Limits are reached. Exponential growth can end.

What’s most revealing about Altman’s post is not his rash predictions. Rather, what emerges is his sense of untrammelled optimism in science and progress.

This makes it hard to imagine that Altman or OpenAI takes seriously the “downsides” of technology. With so much to gain, why worry about a few niggling problems? When AI seems so close to triumph, why pause to think?

What is emerging around AI is less an “age of intelligence” and more an “age of inflation” – inflating resource consumption, inflating company valuations and, most of all, inflating the promises of AI.

It’s certainly true that some of us do things now that would have seemed magic a century and a half ago. That doesn’t mean all the changes between then and now have been for the better.

AI has remarkable potential in many domains, but imagining it holds the key to solving all of humanity’s problems – that’s magical thinking too.

Hallam Stevens has previously received funding from the Ministry of Education (Singapore), the National Heritage Board (Singapore), the National Science Foundation (USA) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

– ref. In a new manifesto, OpenAI’s Sam Altman envisions an AI utopia – and reveals glaring blind spots – https://theconversation.com/in-a-new-manifesto-openais-sam-altman-envisions-an-ai-utopia-and-reveals-glaring-blind-spots-239841

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Scott, Professor of Health Economics and Director, Centre for Health Economics, Monash Business School, Monash University

A battle between private hospitals and private health insurers is playing out in public.

At its heart is how much health insurers pay hospitals for their services, and whether that’s enough for private hospitals to remain viable.

Concerns over the viability of the private health system have caught the attention of the federal government, which has launched a review into private hospitals that has yet to be made public.

But are private hospitals really in trouble? And if so, is more public funding the answer?

Private hospitals vs private health insurers

Many private hospital operators have reported significant pressures since the start of the COVID pandemic, including staff shortages.

Inflationary pressures have increased the costs of supplies and equipment, pushing up the costs of providing hospital care.

Now, private hospitals have publicised their difficult contract negotiations with private health insurers in an attempt to gain support and help their case.

Healthscope, which runs 38 for-profit private hospitals in Australia, has been threatening to end agreements with private health insurers.

St Vincent’s, which operates ten not-for-profit private hospitals, announced it would end its contract with nib (one of Australia’s largest for-profit health insurers) but then reached an agreement.

UnitingCare Queensland, which operates four private hospitals, announced it would end its contract with the Australian Health Service Alliance, which represents more than 20 small and medium non-profit private health insurers. Since then, the two parties have also kissed and made up.

Why should we care?

There are three reasons why viability of the private health sector affects us all, regardless of whether we have private health insurance or use private hospitals.

1. Taxpayers subsidise the private health system

Australian taxpayers subsidised private health insurance premiums by A$6.3 billion
(in premium rebates) in 2021–22. Much of this makes its way to private hospitals. Medicare also subsidised fees for medical services delivered for private patients in private and public hospitals to the tune of $3.81 billion in 2023–24.

But when the going gets tough, the private health sector (both hospitals and health insurers) turns to the government for more handouts.

So we should be concerned about the value we currently get from our public investment into the private health system, and if more public investment is warranted.

2. Public hospitals may be affected if private hospitals close

Calls for greater government support for private health have long argued that a larger private hospital sector would help reduce pressures on the public system.

Indeed, this was the justification for a series of incentives introduced from the late 1990s to support private health insurance in Australia.

However, the extent of this is hotly debated. Recent evidence shows higher private health insurance coverage leads to only very small falls in waiting times in public hospitals.

While it is possible the closure of a few private hospitals might lead some patients to seek care in public hospitals, this shift might not be that large and will not increase waiting times too much.

3. Fewer private beds, but is that a bad thing?

If unviable private hospitals close or merge, we’d expect to see fewer
private hospital beds overall.

Fewer private hospital beds is not necessarily bad news. Mergers of small private day hospitals, in particular, might make them more efficient and lead to lower costs, which in turn lowers health insurance premiums.

We might also need fewer private beds. This is due to policies that try to shift health care out of hospitals into the community or the use of
hospital-in-the-home schemes (where patients receive hospital-type care at home with the support of visiting health staff and/or telehealth). The private health insurers are supporting both.

If a few small private hospitals close, this reflects the market adjusting to less demand for hospital care. Some of the closures have been for maternity wards but with falling birth rates, this also seems like an appropriate market adjustment.

What do we know?

Any objective data about what is happening in the private hospital sector is scarce. This is mainly because the Australian Bureau of Statistics has stopped a compulsory survey of all private hospitals. The latest data we have is from 2016–17.

Health insurers are the largest payer of private hospitals and hence wield a considerable amount of negotiating power. In 2016–17, almost 80% of private hospitals’ income came from private health insurers. Health insurers have also increasingly become “active” purchasers of health care – not just passively paying insurance claims, but wanting to strike a good deal with private hospitals for their members to keep premiums (and costs) down, and profits high.

Reports of hospitals closing ignore hospitals that are opening at the same time. But since 2016–17 there are no publicly reported data on the total number of private hospitals in Australia or changes over time.

The latest figures we have show about half of all hospitals in Australia are private, and of these 62% are for-profit with the rest run by not-for-profit organisations (such as St Vincent’s).

The main for-profit providers are Ramsay Health Care and Healthscope. Both have operations overseas and were in trouble before the COVID pandemic.

Fast-forward to 2024 and the recent issues with contract negotiations suggests the financial situation of for-profit private hospitals might not have improved. So this could reflect a long-term issue with the sustainability of the private hospital sector.

What are the options?

The private health system already receives large public subsidies. So the crux of the current debate is whether the government should intervene again to prop up the private sector. Here are some options:

• do nothing and let this stoush play out Closure and mergers of private hospitals might be good if smaller hospitals and wards are no longer needed and patients have other alternatives

• introduce more regulation Negotiations between small groups of private hospitals and very large dominant private health insurers may not be efficient. If the insurers have significant market power they can force small groups of private hospitals into submission. Some private hospital groups may be negotiating with many different health insurers at the same time, which can be costly. Regulation of exactly how these negotiations happen could make the process more efficient and create a more level playing field

• change how private hospitals are paid Public hospitals are essentially paid the same national price for each procedure they provide. This provides incentives for efficiency as the price is fixed and so if their costs are below the price, they can make a surplus. Private hospitals could also be funded this way, which could remove much of the costs of contract negotiations with private hospitals. Instead, private hospitals would be free to focus on other issues such as the number and quality of procedures, and providing high-value health care.

What next?

Revisiting the regulation of prices and contract negotiations between private hospitals and private health insurers could potentially help the private hospital sector to be more efficient.

Private health insurers are rightly trying to encourage such efficiencies but the tools they have to do this through contract negotiations are quite blunt.

As we wait for the results of the review into the private hospital sector, value for money for taxpayers is paramount. We are all subsidising the private hospital sector.

Anthony Scott has previously received funding from the Medibank Better Health Foundation.

Terence C. Cheng 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. Are private hospitals really in trouble? And is more public funding the answer? – https://theconversation.com/are-private-hospitals-really-in-trouble-and-is-more-public-funding-the-answer-238891

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rewi Newnham, Professor in Physical Geography, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

With about 90% of New Zealand’s natural wetlands drained or severely damaged during the past decades, we need to understand the role of native plants in the restoration of these important habitats.

Our new research details the history of raupō (bulrush) from the time before people arrived in Aotearoa. It shows this resilient, opportunistic plant – and taonga species – can play an important role restoring wetlands and freshwater quality.

An unexpected finding was that the decline of freshwater quality in many lakes did not really kick in until the mid-20th century with intensification of agriculture. Until then, lake water quality indicators generally showed these ecosystems remained healthy. The prolific expansion of raupō after Aotearoa was first settled may have helped.

Thriving on material washed from disturbed catchments, raupō acted as an ecological buffer, intercepting nutrients and sediments, and reducing potentially harmful effects on freshwater ecosystems.

From the mid-20th century, as water quality began to deteriorate, raupō populations – and any buffering effects – were generally in decline as wetlands and lake shallows were drained for grazing land and better access to water supply.

Lessons from this plant’s past can be put to good use today as we strive to bring back the mauri (life force) of our freshwater systems.

Survival strategies for hard times

Before settlement, when dense forest covered most of the country, raupō was surviving on the fringes. As a wetland plant, it likes its roots submerged, but needs light to grow.

Its preferred niche is the shallow margins of lakes, ponds and streams or nutrient-rich swamps. Before people, these places were much less common. Forests typically grew right up to the water’s edge and extended across some swamps.

Under these conditions, raupō evolved strategies for survival: aerated roots to cope with water logging; tiny, abundant seeds that spread far and wide on the wind; rhizomes (underground stems) that extend from the mother plant and store carbohydrates to keep the plant alive in lean times.

Raupō can even build floating root mats, from sediment trapped by its rhizomes, that extend out across open water and even detach from the shoreline to become mobile raupō islands.

With these survival strategies, raupō could wait for better times which, in Aotearoa’s dynamic environment, duly arrived.

Episodic agents of disruption – storms, floods, earthquakes, landslides, volcanic ashfall – created opportunities. Local forest damage allowed light to penetrate to ground level, and slips and floods brought nutrient-rich sediment from soils.

Raupō would seize these opportunities to expand. But they were typically short-lived as the inevitable process of forest succession returned the environment to stability – and raupō back to a state of patient hibernation.

Hitting the jackpot

Then people arrived, with fire and hungry mouths to feed. This time, the disturbances persisted. Forest clearances endured, sediments rich in nutrients flooded wetlands and lakes, and raupō, supremely equipped for just this scenario, spread across swamps and lake shores as wildfires spread on land.

Our tūpuna (ancestors) observed this behaviour, as well as what was happening around raupō. Insects and birds were feeding and nesting. Freshwater fish, crays, shellfish and eel spawned among its fertile beds.

This new-found abundance also offered a range of resource opportunities. Raupō’s flax-like leaves were woven into mats, rope and string. Leaves and stems were used like thatch to cloak the roofs and walls of whare.

Traditional poi were often made from raupō leaves. Some iwi, particularly in the south, used the stems to build lightweight boats for navigating rivers and lakes. Flower stalks, shoots and young leaves were eaten, and the rhizomes and roots, when cooked, provided edible carbohydrates. The most cherished raupō kai, however, were cakes baked using the copious raupō pollen.

Unsurprisingly, for many iwi raupō remains a taonga species today, treasured for this array of resources and for its ecological and even spiritual roles in maintaining the mauri of freshwater habitats, upon which so much depends.

For some iwi, raupō are seen as kaitiaki (guardians) watching over a lake or wetland, and signalling its health. In these ways, raupō also connects us with other Indigenous communities. Although raupō is native to this country, the same species is found in Australia and parts of East Asia, while relatives in the genus Typha (Greek for marsh) occur naturally on all continents, except Antarctica.

Similar practices occurred wherever raupō and its relatives are found.
This connection between cultural and ecological roles is one of the fascinating findings from our research. We describe raupō as a “human-associated species”, not just because of its taonga status, but because its fate seems so closely linked to people.

More work needs to be done, but history tells us raupō has an important role in restoring the health of our freshwater ecosystems. Not only can it soak up nutrients and contaminants, but as both a native and taonga species it can assist remediation solutions that are ecologically and culturally supportive and sustainable.

This research was funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment research programmes – Our lakes’ health; past, present, future (C05X1707) and Our lakes, Our future (CAWX2305).

– ref. The common raupō once kept NZ’s wetlands and lakes thriving – now it could help restore them – https://theconversation.com/the-common-raupo-once-kept-nzs-wetlands-and-lakes-thriving-now-it-could-help-restore-them-238887

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeff Bleich, Professorial fellow, Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, Flinders University

In countries with compulsory voting, such as Australia and many in Latin America, the system usually ensures an overwhelming majority of voters cast their ballots election after election.

In the United States, it’s a very different story. Two-thirds of eligible voters turned out to vote in the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate since 1900. Turnout in presidential elections before 2020 tended to hover between 50% and 65%.

Often, it’s the voters choosing to stay home on the couch who effectively decide an election’s outcome.

Under the United States’ unusual Electoral College presidential voting system, the candidate who wins the most votes nationally does not necessarily win the election. Twice in the past 25 years, Democrats have won the popular vote in the presidential race and still lost the election. That includes Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

As such, victory depends on getting more voters “off the couch” in key battleground states where the decisive Electoral College votes are up for grabs. In those states, it doesn’t matter what percentage of people show up to vote, or how much a candidate wins by, it is winner take all.

A voter who doesn’t vote, therefore, actually makes an active choice — they remove a vote from the candidate they would have likely chosen, and so give an important advantage to the person they would not have voted for.

The “couch” is effectively where Americans go to vote against their self-interest.

Who is more incentivised to vote?

As this year’s presidential election between Trump and Kamala Harris approaches, we ask a simple question: whose “couch” will decide one of the most consequential elections in living memory?

Recent research demonstrates that partisanship is an important driver of voter choice in presidential elections.

The fact that the US is deeply divided is not news to most, but current survey data show how evenly split along partisan lines it actually is. With about 30% of Americans identifying as a Republican and 30% identifying as a Democrat, there is virtually no difference in the total number of voters who support each major party.

The remaining 40% of Americans identify as “independent” – that is, not loyal to either major political party. Almost seven decades of research on the American voter shows, however, that independents heavily “lean” towards one party or the other, with about half leaning Republican and the other half leaning Democrat.

One possible insight into which group has greater incentive to vote is polling on people’s dissatisfaction with their party’s candidate.

According to the most recent Gallup Poll data, 9% of Republicans currently have an unfavourable opinion of Trump. In contrast, only 5% of Democrats have an unfavourable opinion of Harris.

Partisan voters who are dissatisfied with their party candidate have a massive incentive to “stay on the couch” and refrain from voting. They don’t really want to vote for “the other team”, but they can’t stand their own team anymore either.

For example, Republican women in the suburbs, veterans and traditional Republicans have started to abandon Trump over his stances on reproductive rights and national security, and his temperament. The Trump campaign clearly knows this. At a rally in New York a few days ago, he told attendees to “get your fat ass out of the couch” to go vote for him.

Should these disaffected Republican and Republican-leaning voters stay home on November 5, Harris may well have a decisive edge over Trump.

When the couch wins, America loses

In 2016, Trump defied the polls and traditional voter turn-out trends by convincing some disaffected, working-class Democrats to stay on the couch, vote for an unelectable third party candidate or, in some cases, vote for him.

Could this happen again? Or will Democrats be able to reverse this phenomenon by getting exhausted Republicans suffering Trump fatigue to stay home, while motivating everyone from Taylor Swift fans to “never Trumpers” to veterans of foreign wars to get out to vote.

Recent trends suggest overall turnout will be comparatively high, in line with the past three federal US elections.

Democrats have traditionally benefited from higher voter turn-out, but it is not as clear this is still the case in 2024. Recent research shows higher turnout rates seem to have favoured the Republican Party since 2016.

Yet both parties still have significant numbers of people who don’t vote. According to the Pew Research Center, 46% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents didn’t vote in the past three elections (2018, 2020 and 2022), compared to the 41% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

So again, who sits on the couch matters. Inevitably, many of those who stay home will get precisely what they don’t want. When the couch wins, America loses.

Jeff Bleich is a former US ambassador to Australia and a member of the National Security Leaders for America, a group of 700 former generals, admirals, service secretaries, ambassadors, and other national security professionals, that has endorsed Kamala Harris in the presidential election. He was also special counsel to President Barack Obama and served as chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board under President Donald Trump and as a member of President Joe Biden’s (non-partisan) National Security Education Board.

Rodrigo Praino receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Government Department of Defence, and SmartSat CRC.

– ref. In a US presidential election with razor-thin margins, will ‘couch-sitters’ decide who wins? – https://theconversation.com/in-a-us-presidential-election-with-razor-thin-margins-will-couch-sitters-decide-who-wins-239394

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

In January 2023, a new comet was discovered. Comets are found regularly, but astronomers quickly realised this one, called C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), had the potential to be quite bright.

Some hyperbolic reports have suggested it might be the “comet of the century”, but any astronomer will tell you the brightness of comets is notoriously hard to predict. As I explained last year, we’d have to wait until it arrived to be sure how bright it would become.

Now, the time has come. Comet C/2023 A3 is currently visible with the naked eye in the morning sky in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, with its best yet to come in the next few weeks. And it does look promising. It’s unlikely to be the comet of the decade (never mind the comet of the century), but it will almost certainly become the best comet of the year.

So where, and when, should you look to get your best views of this celestial visitor?

A show in the morning, before sunrise

At the moment, comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) is a morning object, rising around an hour and a half before sunrise. It is visible to the naked eye, but not yet spectacular. However, with binoculars you can easily see the comet’s dusty tail pointing away from the Sun.

The comet will remain at about the same altitude in the morning sky until around September 30. It will then get closer to the horizon on each consecutive morning until it’s lost in the glare of the approaching dawn by October 6 or 7.

If you want to spot the comet in the morning sky, look east. The sliders below will help you orient yourself and choose the best time to look, depending on your latitude.

During this period, the comet should slowly brighten. It reaches its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) on September 27, when it will be 58 million kilometres from our star.

As it swings around the Sun, it will continue to approach Earth, and so should continue to brighten. The best show in the morning sky will likely be during the last couple of days of September and the first few days in October, before the comet is lost to view.

A potential daylight comet

Thanks to pure good fortune, comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) will then pass almost directly between Earth and the Sun on October 9 and 10.

This could cause a spectacular brightening of the comet, thanks to “forward scattering” caused by its dust. Imagine looking towards a bright light source through a cloud of dust grains. The grains nearest to the light source will scatter light from the source back towards you.

As the comet swings between Earth and the Sun, it will be perfectly placed for this forward scattering process to occur. If the comet is particularly dusty, this could cause its apparent brightness to increase by up to 100 times.

If it does, there’s a small chance the comet could briefly become visible in the daylight sky on October 9 and 10.

However, it will be very close to the Sun in the sky, and incredibly hard to spot. Only the most experienced observers may be able to detect the comet at this time, and it requires a special technique. Do not try to stare at the Sun to see it.

The best show could be after October 12

After swinging between Earth and the Sun, the comet will appear in the evening sky. It will rapidly climb in the western sky, and should be a bright, naked-eye object for a few days from October 12. The sliders below will give you a sense of where to look.

For the first few days of this period, the comet will still benefit from the forward scattering of sunlight, but this will decrease as it moves away.

What about the tail?

The positioning of the comet, Earth and the Sun in the Solar System means the comet’s tail will be streaming outwards, past our planet. This means it could grow to prodigious lengths in the night sky.

The bulk of that tail will likely be too dim to see easily with the naked eye, but it could be a fantastic spectacle for photographers. Expect to see a wealth of comet images flooding the internet around the middle of October.

As the days pass and the comet climbs higher, it will fade quite rapidly. It will likely become too faint to see with the naked eye, even for seasoned and experienced observers, before the end of October.

At that point, the show will be over. Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) will continue to flee the inner Solar System, moving into the icy depths of space, never to return.

How reliable are the predictions?

At the moment, the comet is already bright enough to consider it the “comet of the year”, outshining comet 12P/Pons-Brooks from earlier this year.

But remember the classic saying – comets are like cats. They have tails and will often surprise us. For now, comet C/2023 A3 is behaving itself. It’s brightening predictably, and putting on a good show.

But comets that approach this closely to the Sun often fragment. This is impossible to predict, and far from guaranteed. If the comet did break up, it could become even more spectacular because of all the dust and gas it would release.

The opposite could still happen, too. The comet could fail to brighten as much as we expect, although that seems unlikely at this stage.

Whatever happens, we’re in for a fascinating few weeks of comet watching. Hopefully, a real spectacle awaits us.

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

– ref. The ‘best comet of the year’ is finally here – here’s everything you need to know – https://theconversation.com/the-best-comet-of-the-year-is-finally-here-heres-everything-you-need-to-know-239300

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeff Bleich, Professorial fellow, Jeff Bleich Centre for Democracy and Disruptive Technologies, Flinders University

In countries with compulsory voting, such as Australia and many in Latin America, the system usually ensures an overwhelming majority of voters cast their ballots election after election.

In the United States, it’s a very different story. Two-thirds of eligible voters turned out to vote in the 2020 presidential election – the highest rate since 1900. Turnout in presidential elections before 2020 tended to hover between 50% and 65%.

Often, it’s the voters choosing to stay home on the couch who effectively decide an election’s outcome.

Under the United States’ unusual Electoral College presidential voting system, the candidate who wins the most votes nationally does not necessarily win the election. Twice in the past 25 years, Democrats have won the popular vote in the presidential race and still lost the election. That includes Donald Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in 2016.

As such, victory depends on getting more voters “off the couch” in key battleground states where the decisive Electoral College votes are up for grabs. In those states, it doesn’t matter what percentage of people show up to vote, or how much a candidate wins by, it is winner take all.

A voter who doesn’t vote, therefore, actually makes an active choice — they remove a vote from the candidate they would have likely chosen, and so give an important advantage to the person they would not have voted for.

The “couch” is effectively where Americans go to vote against their self-interest.

Who is more incentivised to vote?

As this year’s presidential election between Trump and Kamala Harris approaches, we ask a simple question: whose “couch” will decide one of the most consequential elections in living memory?

Recent research demonstrates that partisanship is an important driver of voter choice in presidential elections.

The fact that the US is deeply divided is not news to most, but current survey data show how evenly split along partisan lines it actually is. With about 30% of Americans identifying as a Republican and 30% identifying as a Democrat, there is virtually no difference in the total number of voters who support each major party.

The remaining 40% of Americans identify as “independent” – that is, not loyal to either major political party. Almost seven decades of research on the American voter shows, however, that independents heavily “lean” towards one party or the other, with about half leaning Republican and the other half leaning Democrat.

One possible insight into which group has greater incentive to vote is polling on people’s dissatisfaction with their party’s candidate.

According to the most recent Gallup Poll data, 9% of Republicans currently have an unfavourable opinion of Trump. In contrast, only 5% of Democrats have an unfavourable opinion of Harris.

Partisan voters who are dissatisfied with their party candidate have a massive incentive to “stay on the couch” and refrain from voting. They don’t really want to vote for “the other team”, but they can’t stand their own team anymore either.

For example, Republican women in the suburbs, veterans and traditional Republicans have started to abandon Trump over his stances on reproductive rights and national security, and his temperament. The Trump campaign clearly knows this. At a rally in New York a few days ago, he told attendees to “get your fat ass out of the couch” to go vote for him.

Should these disaffected Republican and Republican-leaning voters stay home on November 5, Harris may well have a decisive edge over Trump.

When the couch wins, America loses

In 2016, Trump defied the polls and traditional voter turn-out trends by convincing some disaffected, working-class Democrats to stay on the couch, vote for an unelectable third party candidate or, in some cases, vote for him.

Could this happen again? Or will Democrats be able to reverse this phenomenon by getting exhausted Republicans suffering Trump fatigue to stay home, while motivating everyone from Taylor Swift fans to “never Trumpers” to veterans of foreign wars to get out to vote.

Recent trends suggest overall turnout will be comparatively high, in line with the past three federal US elections.

Democrats have traditionally benefited from higher voter turn-out, but it is not as clear this is still the case in 2024. Recent research shows higher turnout rates seem to have favoured the Republican Party since 2016.

Yet both parties still have significant numbers of people who don’t vote. According to the Pew Research Center, 46% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents didn’t vote in the past three elections (2018, 2020 and 2022), compared to the 41% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents.

So again, who sits on the couch matters. Inevitably, many of those who stay home will get precisely what they don’t want. When the couch wins, America loses.

Jeff Bleich is a former US ambassador to Australia and a member of the National Security Leaders for America, a group of 700 former generals, admirals, service secretaries, ambassadors, and other national security professionals, that has endorsed Kamala Harris in the presidential election. He was also special counsel to President Barack Obama and served as chair of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board under President Donald Trump and as a member of President Joe Biden’s (non-partisan) National Security Education Board.

Rodrigo Praino receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Australian Government Department of Defence, and SmartSat CRC.

– ref. In a too-close-to-call US presidential election, will ‘couch-sitters’ decide who wins? – https://theconversation.com/in-a-too-close-to-call-us-presidential-election-will-couch-sitters-decide-who-wins-239394

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Olga Anikeeva, Research Fellow, School of Public Health, University of Adelaide

Pandemics – the global spread of infectious diseases – seem to be making a comeback. In the Middle Ages we had the Black Death (plague), and after the first world war we had the Spanish flu. Tens of millions of people died from these diseases.

Then science began to get the upper hand, with vaccination eradicating smallpox, and polio nearly so. Antibiotics became available to treat bacterial infections, and more recently antivirals as well.

But in recent years and decades pandemics seem to be returning. In the 1980s we had HIV/AIDS, then several flu pandemics, SARS, and now COVID (no, COVID isn’t over).

So why is this happening, and is there anything we can do to avert future pandemics?

Unbalanced ecosystems

Healthy, stable ecosystems provide services that keep us healthy, such as supplying food and clean water, producing oxygen, and making green spaces available for our recreation and wellbeing.

Another key service ecosystems provide is disease regulation. When nature is in balance – with predators controlling herbivore populations, and herbivores controlling plant growth – it’s more difficult for pathogens to emerge in a way that causes pandemics.

But when human activities disrupt and unbalance ecosystems – such as by way of climate change and biodiversity loss – things go wrong.

For example, climate change affects the number and distribution of plants and animals. Mosquitoes that carry diseases can move from the tropics into what used to be temperate climates as the planet warms, and may infect more people in the months that are normally disease free.

We’ve studied the relationship between weather and dengue fever transmission in China, and our findings support the same conclusion reached by many other studies: climate change is likely to put more people at risk of dengue.

Biodiversity loss can have similar effects by disrupting food chains. When ranchers cleared forests in South America for their cattle to graze in the first half of the 20th century, tiny forest-dwelling, blood-feeding vampire bats suddenly had a smörgåsbord of large sedentary animals to feed on.

While vampire bats had previously been kept in check by the limited availability of food and the presence of predators in the balanced forest ecosystem, numbers of this species exploded in South America.

These bats carry the rabies virus, which causes lethal brain infections in people who are bitten. Although the number of deaths from bat-borne rabies has now fallen dramatically due to vaccination programs in South America, rabies caused by bites from other animals still poses a global threat.

As urban and agricultural development impinges on natural ecosystems, there are increasing opportunities for humans and domestic animals to become infected with pathogens that would normally only be seen in wildlife – particularly when people hunt and eat animals from the wild.

The HIV virus, for example, first entered human populations from apes that were slaughtered for food in Africa, and then spread globally through travel and trade.

Meanwhile, bats are thought to be the original reservoir for the virus that caused the COVID pandemic, which has killed more than 7 million people to date.

Ultimately, until we effectively address the unsustainable impact we are having on our planet, pandemics will continue to occur.

Targeting the ultimate causes

Factors such as climate change, biodiversity loss and other global challenges are the ultimate (high level) cause of pandemics. Meanwhile, increased contact between humans, domestic animals and wildlife is the proximate (immediate) cause.

In the case of HIV, while direct contact with the infected blood of apes was the proximate cause, the apes were only being slaughtered because large numbers of very poor people were hungry – an ultimate cause.

The distinction between ultimate causes and proximate causes is important, because we often deal only with proximate causes. For example, people may smoke because of stress or social pressure (ultimate causes of getting lung cancer), but it’s the toxins in the smoke that cause cancer (proximate cause).

Generally, health services are only concerned with stopping people from smoking – and with treating the illness that results – not with removing the drivers that lead them to smoke in the first place.

Similarly, we address pandemics with lockdowns, mask wearing, social distancing and vaccinations – all measures which seek to stop the spread of the virus. But we pay less attention to addressing the ultimate causes of pandemics – until perhaps very recently.

A planetary health approach

There’s a growing awareness of the importance of adopting a “planetary health” approach to improve human health. This concept is based on the understanding that human health and human civilisation depend on flourishing natural systems, and the wise stewardship of those natural systems.

With this approach, ultimate drivers like climate change and biodiversity loss would be prioritised in preventing future pandemics, at the same time as working with experts from many different disciplines to deal with the proximate causes, thereby reducing the risk overall.

The planetary health approach has the benefit of improving both the health of the environment and human health concurrently. We are heartened by the increased uptake of teaching planetary health concepts across the environmental sciences, humanities and health sciences in many universities.

As climate change, biodiversity loss, population displacements, travel and trade continue to increase the risk of disease outbreaks, it’s vital that the planetary stewards of the future have a better understanding of how to tackle the ultimate causes that drive pandemics.

This article is the first in a series on the next pandemic.

Olga Anikeeva receives funding from Green Adelaide.

Jessica Stanhope receives funding from the Ecological Health Network and Green Adelaide. She is affiliated with the Environmental Physiotherapy Association.

Peng Bi receives funding from the Australian Research Council, National Health and Medical Research Council, National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, AusAID,

Philip Weinstein receives funding from competitive external granting bodies. He is affiliated with Nature Foundation, Australian Entomological Society, and the South Australian Museum.

– ref. Why are we seeing more pandemics? Our impact on the planet has a lot to do with it – https://theconversation.com/why-are-we-seeing-more-pandemics-our-impact-on-the-planet-has-a-lot-to-do-with-it-226827

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

The electricity workforce will need to double in five years to achieve Australia’s 2030 renewable energy target, our new report finds. More than 80% of these jobs will be in renewables. Jobs in energy storage alone will overtake domestic coal and gas jobs (not including the coal and gas export sector) in the next couple of years.

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) updates its Integrated System Plan every two years. It’s a blueprint for the energy transition from coal to renewable energy. The plan lays out scenarios for how the electricity system might change to help put in place all the elements needed to make the transition happen.

AEMO and the RACE for 2030 co-operative research centre commissioned the Institute for Sustainable Futures to undertake modelling on the workforce needed for this transition. The “step change” scenario in the Integrated System Plan is broadly aligned with the 2030 renewables target. Under this scenario, we found the electricity workforce would need to grow from 33,000 to peak at 66,000 by 2029.

Rooftop solar and batteries together are projected to account for over 40% of these jobs. Wind farms will employ around one-third and solar farms just under 10%. Jobs would also treble in transmission line construction to connect renewables in regional areas to cities and other states in the next few years.

Job growth would surge in a ‘renewable energy superpower’

In the “green energy export” scenario, Australia becomes a “renewable energy superpower”. The country uses renewable energy to export green hydrogen and power heavy industry. In this scenario, the electricity workforce would almost treble to 96,000 by the late 2020s.

By 2033, after construction peaks, more than half of electricity sector jobs will be in operations and maintenance. This applies to both the step change and green energy export scenarios.

A significant employment downturn is projected during the 2030s. But in the green energy export scenario jobs then climb steeply again to a peak of 120,000. This projection reflects AEMO’s expectations of when green export growth will occur.

New South Wales is projected to have the most renewable energy jobs in the 2020s. However, Queensland would become the largest state for renewable jobs (especially in wind farms) in the green energy export scenario.

What are the other possibilities?

“Progressive change” is another scenario in the Integrated System Plan. For this scenario, we modelled slower growth in renewable energy. It reflects constraints on the economy and supply chains (including labour and minerals) for renewables.

In an “enhanced manufacturing” scenario, local renewable energy manufacturing increases. Our modelling found it could create a peak of 5,000 extra jobs.

Importantly, these projections don’t include upstream jobs in supply chains for the sector (for example, increased mining to supply the resources that renewables need) or electrification of homes.

Creating this many jobs is very challenging

Our modelling shows the workforce needs to grow very rapidly to make Australia’s energy transition happen. Unfortunately, the challenges of building this workforce are daunting. They include:

• there’s a shortage of almost all key occupations in demand for the electricity sector – electricians, engineers, construction managers – according to Australia’s Skills Priority List

• “extraordinary growth” forecast by Infrastructure Australia in other major infrastructure projects, such as transport, which will compete for many of the same skilled workers

• under AEMO’s scenarios, employment will be subject to boom-bust cycles, which increases the risk of skill shortages and damaging impacts, such as housing shortages, in regional areas

• Australia has relied heavily on skilled migrants – and will look to do so again – but many parts of the world are chasing the same workers.

The International Energy Agency has noted:

Labour and skills shortages are already translating into project delays, raising concerns that clean energy solutions will be unable to keep pace with demand to meet net zero targets.

What can be done to avoid skill shortages?

Some action has been taken to increase the workforce. The federal government, for instance, is subsidising apprentices under the New Energy Apprenticeship program.

But action isn’t happening at the scale and pace required.

What else can be done?

Firstly, Jobs Skills Australia and Powering Skills Organisation (which oversees energy skills training) have outlined ways to increase the system’s capacity to train more skilled workers. This includes creating better pathways into renewable energy for students, especially in recognised Renewable Energy Zones.

Secondly, Jobs Skills Australia has noted the need for renewable energy businesses to increase their intakes of apprentices. It recommends expanding the Australian Skills Guarantee to include generation and transmission projects.

The guarantee has set mandatory targets for apprentices or trainees to complete 10% of labour hours on Commonwealth-funded major construction and information technology projects (A$10 million plus). It could also be applied to major government funding programs for renewable energy and transmission. These include:

• the Capacity Investment Scheme, a government tender program to support a large volume of new renewables and storage projects

• Rewiring the Nation, a $20 billion fund for transmission lines

• grants from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Thirdly, government tenders could moderate the peaks and troughs in employment by limiting the maximum and minimum volumes built each year.

Fourthly, including more women and First Nations Australians can increase labour supply and workforce diversity. Only one-in-two First Nations Australians are employed compared to around two in three in the wider population. Yet they account for around one-in-ten people in some major Renewable Energy Zones.

Government pre-employment programs, working with industry and First Nations groups, could also increase the supply of workers. These could have a dramatic social impact too.

It’s a challenging problem whichever way you look at it. We need rapid change to build renewable energy capacity before coal plants retire and to tackle climate change. But that depends on growing the workforce amid skill shortages.

There’s a range of ways to increase the supply of workers and improve local outcomes. But we are running out of time. Urgent action is needed.

The Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney received funding from the Australian Energy Market Operator and the RACE for 2030 CRC for the report upon which this article is based

The Institute for Sustainable Futures, University of Technology Sydney received funding from the Australian Energy Market Operator and the RACE for 2030 CRC for the report upon which this article is based.

– ref. Our electricity workforce must double to hit the 2030 renewables target. Energy storage jobs will soon overtake those in coal and gas – https://theconversation.com/our-electricity-workforce-must-double-to-hit-the-2030-renewables-target-energy-storage-jobs-will-soon-overtake-those-in-coal-and-gas-239718