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

“Productivity” might sound a nerdy word to many, but improving it is vital for a more affluent life for Australians in coming years. At the moment it is languishing.

Investigating ways in which our national productivity can be improved is at the heart of the work of the Productivity Commission, headed by Danielle Wood.

Wood is an economist and former CEO of the Grattan Institute. Picked by Treasurer Jim Chalmers for the PC job, she has already acquired a reputation for being willing to express forthright views, even when they don’t suit the government. She joins us today to talk about the tasks ahead, the commission’s work and some of the current big issues.

On Australia’s weak productivity numbers, Wood highlights what steps the government can and can’t take:

There’s a lot in productivity that’s outside of government’s control. So we sometimes talk about it like it’s something that government does to the economy. There’s a lot around technology, the pace of change and diffusion of change that are critically important for productivity that’s largely outside of government’s hands.

There’s no sort of single lever that you pull that makes all the difference. And, you know, if you looked at the Productivity Commission’s last big review of productivity released at the start of last year, you definitely get that sense.

If I was to pick just a small number […] of what I think are critically important areas. Sensible, durable, long-term market-based approach to climate policy that’s going to allow us to make the huge transition, including the energy transition that we need in the lowest possible cost way. That’s hugely important for long-run productivity. Housing: fixing the housing challenge and that’s got to go to some pretty serious work being done on planning policy, which I think is really important.

Then I would point to policies that support the rollout of new technologies. As I said before technological change is critical for productivity growth. So policies that build the right environment, particularly for big changes in technology like AI. So there you’re looking at the regulatory environment, your data policies, your IP policies. They all need to be working together.

If I can sneak in one more, I would put the government’s announcement that it will revitalise national competition policy, and I think that’s a really exciting one. And if it’s done well, if they can actually get the states to come to the table and agree on areas where we can reduce regulatory and other barriers to competition across the country, that’s a really important lever for getting economic dynamism moving again.

How has working from home has affected productivity?

Look, it’s a very big change, and you don’t often get these kinds of really sharp structural shifts in behaviour and in labour markets, and we’re still learning about it.

The research tends to suggest that hybrid work, so working at home sometimes and in the office sometimes, […] doesn’t seem to have negative productivity impacts If anything, slightly positive productivity benefits, and it has big benefits to individuals in terms of giving them flexibility, avoiding the commute and particularly for things like women’s workforce participation. I think it’s been really helpful and positively influential.

On the other hand, fully remote work, which is rarer – there is some evidence if you’re not ever coming into the office, you miss out on some of the spill-over benefits of sharing ideas, the kind of water-cooler effects, training and development.

I work from home one day a week, on Monday, and I do no meetings or calls on that day. And I do all my deep, deep work on Monday, and then the rest of the week I’m in the office and back to back.

With housing policy front and centre and a debate about whether changes to negative gearing and the capital gains discount should be made, Wood hoses down how much difference that would make:

It’s not a silver bullet on the house price front. There may be other reasons that you make those changes, particularly if you were doing a kind of broader base tax reform exercise. I would say that you’d want to have those on the table. But when it comes to housing challenges, there’s probably some bigger ones there. The ones […] around planning, around construction productivity, around workforce, are going to be more important in the long term to getting the housing challenge right.

Wood was initially had concerns about the Future Made in Australia policy. Now she says she now is pleased with where the government has landed:

Look, I’m certainly very pleased with the guardrails that the government have put in place. I think the publishing of the national interest framework, which puts a lot more economic rigour around the assessments of particular sectors looking for support, was a really important development.

Certainly puts my mind at ease that there is a lot of rigour around who gets support. Because as you said there is always a risk with these types of policies that we end up wasting money for supporting industries that don’t have a good case for economic support from the taxpayer.

— Transcript —

Michelle Grattan: Danielle Wood is almost a year into her post as head of the Productivity Commission. A leading economist and formerly chief of the think tank the Grattan Institute, Wood has taken the Commission’s message out into the public arena. She’s been refreshingly forthright in her willingness to critique government policies, most notably the Future Made in Australia industry policy, for which legislation is due to pass Parliament soon. Languishing productivity is one of Australia’s major economic challenges. In this podcast, Danielle Wood joins us to discuss this and other issues.

Danielle Wood in your relatively brief time as head of the Productivity Commission, you’ve been out and about and publicly vocal a good deal more, I think, than your predecessors, sometimes criticising government policies. Did you decide on this strategy when you accepted the job? And how important do you think it is for the head of key institutions like the Commission and indeed the Reserve Bank to be willing to use their voices even when that might make the Government squirm a bit?

Danielle Wood: A very interesting question, Michelle. Look, I mean, I have been out and about a lot, and I certainly did make that a deliberate strategy. And that’s largely because I think organisations like the Productivity Commission have a really important role in informing and shaping debate and making the case for difficult policy reform. I think it’s true to say that any time I say something that might be seen as politically inconvenient for the government the media get excited. And there’s probably a lot more reporting on those comments than perhaps a lot of the other commentary I’ve been making. Making those sort of criticisms is definitely not something I do lightly. But I think there are circumstances where the PC has deep expertise and research in areas. And I think if the policy’s not as well designed as it could be that there can be a case for independent agencies like the PC to speak up. And in doing so I really hope that makes the debate stronger. I think it makes the policy responses stronger. And I think we’re fortunate to have a system with the degree of political maturity that allows that to happen. You know, there are actually not that many countries with an independent, broad ranging policy institution like the Productivity Commission. The fact that governments of various stripes have supported that role over several decades now – I think it makes it a really important and unique part of the policy landscape.

Michelle Grattan: Now productivity in Australia is languishing. What are the reasons, do you think, for this? And what are the top performing countries when it comes to productivity and how are they performing better?

Danielle Wood: This is a complicated one and I think it’s really important to differentiate, as I’ll do, Michelle, between what’s happened since COVID and the more business as usual world pre-COVID, because we’ve been on this crazy rollercoaster ride when it comes to productivity in the post-COVID period. It shot up very rapidly early on in COVID as we shut down parts of the economy because they were the lower productivity services sectors that mechanically made it go up. We then came down that hump as things reopened.

On the other side of COVID we’ve also had a very strong labour market just because of the very fast increase in working hours we’ve seen as unemployment’s come down, as borders have reopened, as people are working more hours. Our capital stock hasn’t kept up and that’s kept productivity really subdued in the post-COVID period. So we’re running at only about half a percent in the year to June.

In that period, most countries have been going through similar challenges. The US actually stands out as a very strong performer in this post-COVID period and we’re doing some work with the RBA at the moment looking at that and trying to understand that – it may be because of their COVID policies or because they’ve got a fairly substantial investment boom underway. It can be about differences in the labour market. But we’re looking at that question.

The more substantive piece, given that a lot of that is about the macro environment, is really the question of what are we recovering to? You’ll recall that that decade sandwiched between COVID and the GFC leading up to 2020 saw really weak productivity growth. We were running about 1.1% a year on average – the lowest level in 60 years. That was not just an Australian phenomenon. At that point, if you looked around the industrialised world, we saw that same sluggish productivity growth basically everywhere.

There’s a number of structural factors at play that we think contributed to that. One is the expansion of services sectors– they tend to be lower productivity. We’ve seen fewer gains from technological advancements – at least up to that point technology hadn’t played the same role in driving productivity improvements as it had in the past. A reduction in economic dynamism, so fewer new businesses being started, fewer people changing jobs. And just more generally lower levels of investment – it looked like businesses were scarred in a post-GFC world and were not investing in the way they had in the past. So there’s a lot of common factors across countries. The real question going forward is can we break free of some of those constraints and see productivity moving again?

Michelle Grattan: So what would you say would be the three most productivity enhancing measures that Australia could take in the short term?

Danielle Wood: You’re really going to try and pin my colours to the mast Michelle! So two things I think are really important to say at the outset of this conversation. First, there’s a lot in productivity that’s outside of government’s control. So we sometimes talk about it like it’s something that government does to the economy. There’s a lot around technology, the pace of change and diffusion of change that are critically important for productivity, largely outside of government’s hands.

The other thing to say is it’s a game of inches. You actually need governments to move across a range of different policy fronts at once. There’s no single lever that you pull that makes all the difference. And if you look at the Productivity Commission’s last big review of productivity released at the start of last year, you definitely get that sense. There were 70 recommendations, five big areas for reform.

But if I was to pick just a small number of critically important areas, and we will take some political constraints off the table here maybe for the purposes of this conversation… a sensible, durable, long-term market-based approach to climate policy that’s going to allow us to make the huge transition, including the energy transition that we need in the lowest possible cost way. That’s hugely important for long-run productivity.

Housing. Fixing the housing challenge. And that’s got to go to some pretty serious work being done on planning policy, which I think is really important. But there are a lot of other barriers to housing supply around the regulatory environment and workforce. And that matters because if you can’t build houses where people live close to jobs, if people can’t get into housing, they have reduced capacity to start their own businesses and take risks in the economy. That is a big drag on productivity over time.

Then I would point to policies that support the rollout of new technologies. As I said before, technological change is critical for productivity growth. So policies that build the right environment, particularly for big changes in technology like AI. There you’re looking at the regulatory environment, your data policies, your IP policies. They all need to be working together, of course we need to manage the risks associated with these new technologies, but we don’t want to be putting unnecessary impediments that would slow down technological change across the economy.

So those are three big areas. Actually, if I can sneak in one more… the Government has announced that it will revitalise national competition policy, and I think that’s a really exciting one. And if it’s done well, if they can actually get the states to come to the table and agree on areas where we can reduce regulatory and other barriers to competition across the country, that’s a really important lever for getting economic dynamism moving again.

Michelle Grattan: Just on housing, there’s been a lot of controversy lately, of course, around negative gearing and the discount. Do you think that it would be useful to change negative gearing arrangements and the capital gains discount? The Grattan Institute, where you came from, was a supporter of change. Do you agree with that?

Danielle Wood: You know, it’s not something that the Productivity Commission has done work on so I can’t talk about it from a PC perspective.

Michelle Grattan: But you are, beyond tax, you’re a tax expert.

Danielle Wood: Yes, indeed. But look, what we said in that Grattan work, which I think is important, is it’s not a silver bullet on the house price front. There might be other reasons that you make those changes, particularly if you were doing a kind of broader base tax reform exercise I would see that you’d want to have those on the table. But when it comes to housing challenges, there’s probably some bigger ones there. You know, the ones I was talking about before around planning, around construction productivity, around workforce, that are going to be more important in the long term to getting the housing challenge right.

Michelle Grattan: So you would say it is a second-order issue in terms of housing policy?

Danielle Wood: In terms of housing affordability that’s right. But there may be other reasons that you would look at it if you were looking at the tax system more broadly.

Michelle Grattan: Now, you mentioned services before, and they’re obviously an increasingly large part of our economy, and yet it’s hard to define productivity in this sector. For example, if you have a carer spending a longer time with a person in a nursing home, is that actually increasing productivity? Probably not, but it has other obvious benefits. So how do you deal with this non-market part of the economy?

Danielle Wood: It’s an incredibly important question and it’s a very difficult one, and I think there are two parts to it. So the thing you’re picking up with your aged care example is essentially the challenge of trying to measure service quality. Across the national accounts when we work out productivity we try and adjust for quality, and I think the ABS does that really well in some areas like housing and technology, there are ways that they control for quality change over time, but that is very hard to do in services.

The PC did some recent work where we looked at this question for health and we tried to control for improvements in health outcomes across a range of chronic diseases. And what we found is productivity is much higher than what would be measured using traditional techniques because we’ve seen these really big improvements in outcomes for treating chronic diseases that don’t get captured in the statistics. And that gets even harder, as you say, in areas like aged care. How do you measure the warmth of care or the quality of care? I think we just have to recognise that there will always be gaps in the statistics and they are not perfect when it comes to measuring quality of services.

The other big challenge when it comes to services is that historically we haven’t seen the same productivity gains in services as we’ve seen in areas like manufacturing or agriculture. Going forward, I think we can look at new technologies like AI and see potential for gains in some areas of government-provided services like health and perhaps education. But there are going to be other sectors, particularly those care sectors, where it is irreducibly human. You know, I say labour is the product, that spending time with people is what you are providing. And that means it’s just going to be harder to get productivity gains in those sectors. So none of that is to say that we shouldn’t provide these services and continue to support them and expand them where there is a good economic or social policy case to do so. But we need to recognise that the productivity gains will not be there in those areas as they are in other parts of the economy.

Michelle Grattan: Now you have a long-term interest in childcare and the Commission has just recommended a major expansion in government spending on early childhood education and care, but it does not envisage that this will in fact lift women’s participation in the workforce to any great degree. So is expanding childcare now mainly about educational equity rather than participation and productivity?

Danielle Wood: Well, I think the first thing to say is that childcare has been transformative for women’s workforce participation. And even in the last few years, Michelle, as you would know, as it’s become more affordable, we have seen big gains in workforce participation. Women’s workforce participation is now at record levels.

But it is true that you expect some of those gains to start to slow down as participation rises. And what we found in our report is not that there aren’t barriers to access and affordability that constrain women’s choices, but that childcare is a smaller part of that now. And things like the tax and transfer system, withdrawal of family tax benefits play a bigger role in the sort of workforce disincentives that we’ve been worried about for a long time. Critically, though, as you say, it’s the education benefits that really loom large here. And we found that kids that are going to get the most out of childcare in terms of their development and education are the ones that are accessing it least. So children from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to use care a lot less than other children. Helping those children get the benefits of care for development, for being school ready, is a critical social and economic opportunity.

Michelle Grattan: The pandemic saw a big shift to many people working from home, and this has continued to a considerable degree. Workers want it and indeed, in some companies, are demanding it. What are the productivity implications of this shift?

Danielle Wood: Yeah, look, it’s a very big change and you don’t often get these really sharp structural shifts in behaviour and in labour markets. And we’re still learning about it, you need to be modest about these things, but from the research and data we’ve seen to date, I’m much less concerned that it’s going to have a big negative impact as we might have been earlier on. And by that, I mean the research tends to suggest that hybrid work, so working at home sometimes and in the office sometimes, particularly well-managed hybrid work, doesn’t seem to have negative productivity impacts. If anything, it has slightly positive productivity benefits. And it has big benefits to individuals in terms of giving them flexibility, avoiding the commute. And particularly for things like women’s workforce participation I think it’s been really helpful and positively influential.

On the other hand, fully remote work, which is rarer… there is some evidence, again, the data is mixed, but some studies suggest that it may negatively affect productivity. If you’re not ever coming into the office, you miss out on some of the spill-over benefits of sharing ideas, the kind of watercooler effects, training, development. So, if we were in a world where everyone was working fully remotely I think I would be more concerned. But I think broadly, when it comes to hybrid work, the best evidence we have suggests it’s unlikely to be a drag on productivity.

Michelle Grattan: What about your own work? Do you work from home at all?

Danielle Wood: I work from home one day a week on Monday, and I do no meetings or calls on that day. And I do all my deep work on Monday. Then the rest of the week I’m in the office and back-to-back.

Michelle Grattan: Now, the government has made a number of important changes in the industrial relations area. It’s been a priority for it. How important are workplace arrangements to productivity and have the recent changes been positive or negative or mixed for our productivity challenge?

Danielle Wood: Look, it’s definitely fair to say that workplace relations policies matter for productivity. This is not an area that the Commission has been asked to look into for some time. I think the last time we did a serious review into workplace relations was a decade or so ago, Michelle. And in that review, we really talked about the balancing act that exists – the need to balance the need for good standards in the workplace and protections for workers, against the benefits that come with flexibility and the advantages of that for business. And at that time, we had suggestions for improvements, but we found that the system was working relatively well. There have been a number of changes since then, including in recent years. But without reviewing those in any detail, it’s difficult for me to comment on the broader impact of those particular changes.

Michelle Grattan: Treasurer Jim Chalmers indicated some time ago when he was talking about the reform of the PC that he wanted it to be active in the sphere of the energy transition. How have you responded to this?

Danielle Wood: Something that I’ve done since taking on the role of Chair is to recognise the need to build expertise in some key policy areas that aren’t going away. So we’ve developed a number of research streams, energy and climate being one of those. We are really building up a team that will continue to work on those issues and put out research on those issues over time. We have a new Commissioner, Barry Sterland, who has deep expertise in climate policy, so that’s an important part of building that internal expertise. So you will see us putting out a whole series of pieces on energy and climate and I think we’re really well-placed to make a constructive contribution in that sphere. So watch this space.

Michelle Grattan: Could you give us any detail of time or topic?

Danielle Wood: I am not able to do that at the moment for various complicated reasons, but there will certainly be material coming out next year.

Michelle Grattan: One thing that you made a media splash on was the Government’s Future Made in Australia program, its industry program aimed at supporting Australian industry in the transition to the green economy. You expressed some concern about it at the time. Are you now convinced that there are enough guardrails around this policy that it doesn’t become a waste of taxpayer money and that money won’t be going to rent seekers who don’t deserve or need it?

Danielle Wood: Look, I’m certainly very pleased with the guardrails that the Government has put in place. I think the publishing of the National Interest Framework, which puts a lot more economic rigour around the assessments of particular sectors looking for support, was a really important development. We think that it’s really important that those sector assessments be done before the government offers support to new areas. And we’ve encouraged things like the sort of public release of those assessments, which I believe will occur. So, I think provided that process gets used, it certainly puts my mind at ease that there is a lot of rigour around who gets support. Because as you said, you know, there is always a risk with these types of policies that we end up wasting money supporting industries that don’t have a good case for economic support from the taxpayer.

Michelle Grattan: So would the Commission be doing its own assessment of how this program is working after some time?

Danielle Wood: We are putting in a submission to the Treasury consultation process on the frameworks that might underpin the national interest assessments and the legislation, if it passes, I think requires ongoing consultation with the Commissioners as Treasury does these assessments. So we will continue to play an active role in this process going forward.

Michelle Grattan: Now, just finally, in a speech recently, you defended the role of economists in assessing government policies and programs. You were saying that they were able to tell, in your words, inconvenient truths, but you also had a go at your profession saying that many have been willfully blind to questions of distribution, arguing that it’s not their job to consider economic inequality. Can you just say what you’re getting at here and perhaps give some examples of this failing? And why do you think this blind spot is there?

Danielle Wood: Well let me let me give the plug for economists, Michelle, before we talk about all our failures. As I was trying to say in that speech, economists bring something really important to the table in policy discussions, and that is, you know, rigorous frame frameworks for thinking about trade-offs. And that’s really important in the policy world because you’ve got a million good ideas out there, as you know, but you’ve got scarce resources. Scarce time, scarce money. You need to prioritise and you need to make trade-offs. So economists can and should play a really important role in policy for that reason.

The blind spots I was talking about, as I said, there had been a sort of strain in the economics profession, I think, for a long time that basically said we’re focussed on questions of efficiency, we don’t do distribution. And I think that came from the fact that that was seen to involve value judgements that we don’t want to contend with. We’ve since learned a lot more about the way in which inequality can feed into growth, around the importance of issues like economic mobility. I think most economists would now understand that these are actually really important economic as well as social questions. In terms of where that played out – probably the place where it was most evident, and I think this is probably more squarely in the US and Australia, was around fallout to trade policy and trade liberalization. It was all about increasing the size of the pie, which it did very effectively. But it certainly never said that, you know, there wouldn’t be any losers from that. I think the learning was that you really have to care about the transition, that you have to work with the communities and workers that are affected if you’re doing a policy that’s broadly in the public good, but sees some people go backwards. I think we did that better in Australia than the US, but there are probably still some lessons to learn there.

The other area I was pointing out where I think economists haven’t always covered themselves with glory, more in the Australian context, was around opening up human services markets to competition. I think there were a number of areas where we were too enamoured with the idea that competition and consumer choice would drive good outcomes, and we just didn’t give enough thought to questions of provider incentives, the regulatory frameworks we would need in place. I think employment services and vocational education and training are key examples of that, and probably some of the challenges we face with the NDIS at the moment as well. So I think they were areas where some economists were a bit naive and certainly I think the thinking and the profession has progressed a lot about how we could do better in those types of markets.

Michelle Grattan: Danielle Wood, thank you so much for joining us today. We hope to hear continued bold words from you in the months and years ahead. That’s all for today’s Conversation Politics podcast. Thank you to my producer, Ben Roper. We’ll be back with another interview soon, but goodbye for now.

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. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Danielle Wood on the keys to growing Australia’s weak productivity – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-danielle-wood-on-the-keys-to-growing-australias-weak-productivity-240793

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

Federal parliament has split on partisan lines over the Middle East crisis, just a day after the anniversary of the Hamas atrocities against Israelis.

After discussions between Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton failed to reach agreement, the government’s wide-ranging motion passed the House of Representatives with the Coalition voting against it.

The Greens abstained from voting. Almost all the crossbench voted with the government, although “teal” MP Allegra Spender said “I wish that we as a parliament could come together and lead unitedly”.

The division between Labor and Coalition over the escalating war has increasingly widened over recent months, with Dutton giving unqualified backing to Israel’s strategy and using the issue to paint the prime minister as a “weak” leader.

The government, while backing Israel’s right to defend itself, has had a more qualified position, including supporting calls for a ceasefire.

The long motion reiterated “unequivocal condemnation” of the Hamas’ terror attacks, and called for the immediate release of the remaining hostages.

It condemned antisemitism “in all its forms and stands with Jewish Australians who have felt the cold shadows of antisemitism reaching into the present day”.

It also recognised the number of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza, and supported international efforts to provide humanitarian assistance in Gaza and Lebanon.

It condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel and recognised Israel’s right to defend itself.

Backing international efforts for a ceasefire in Gaza and in Lebanon, the motion reaffirmed “support for a two-state solution, a Palestinian State alongside Israel, so that Israelis and Palestinians can live securely within internationally recognised borders, as the only option to ensuring a just and enduring peace”.

As well, the motion recognised the deep distress the Middle East situation was causing many in Australia.

Albanese told parliament the government would continue to call for de-escalating the violence and conflict in the region. “Tragically, we are seeing the situation worsening.”

“Further hostilities put civilians at risk. We cannot accept the callous arithmetic of so-called acceptable casualties.”

Dutton said the motion was supposed to be about what had happened on October 7.

“The prime minister is trying to speak out of both sides of his mouth.”

“There has been a position of bipartisanship on these issues, and your predecessors would have had the decency to respect the Jewish community in a way that you have not done today. And for that, prime minister, you should stand condemned.”

He accused Albanese of rejecting the opposition’s position “for his own political domestic advancement”.

A later attempt by Dutton to move his alternative motion was shut down by the government.

In the Senate Greens senators held up placards with the words “SANCTIONS NOW”. Some Greens wore keffiyehs.

Crossbencher Lidia Thorpe accused Foreign Minister Penny Wong of being “complicit in genocide”.

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. Partisanship dominates as federal parliament fights over Middle East war – https://theconversation.com/partisanship-dominates-as-federal-parliament-fights-over-middle-east-war-240791

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elvis Okoffo, PhD candidate in Environmental Science, The University of Queensland

When it rains heavily, plastic waste is washed off our streets into rivers, flowing out to the ocean. Most plastic is trapped in estuaries and coastal ecosystems, with a small fraction ending up offshore in the high seas.

In the coastal ocean, waves and tides break down plastic waste into smaller and smaller bits. These micro and nanoplastics linger in the environment indefinitely, impacting the health of marine creatures from microorganisms all the way up to seabirds and whales, which mistake them for food.

When we look at the scale of the problem of microplastics (smaller than 5mm) and nanoplastics (defined as 1 micrometer or less), we find something alarming. Our new research shows the shallow embayment of Moreton Bay, off Brisbane in Southeast Queensland now has roughly 7,000 tonnes of accumulated microplastics, the same as 700 million half-litre plastic bottles.

This bay accumulates plastics fast, as the Brisbane River funnels the city’s waste into it, along with several other urban rivers. The research hasn’t yet been done, but we would expect similar rates of microplastics in Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay and Sydney Harbour.

Our research shows how much plastic waste from a big city makes it into its oceans.

Plastic buildup in Moreton Bay

What volume of microplastics does a large city accumulate offshore? It’s hard to measure this for cities built on open coastlines. That’s because sediments and microplastics are rapidly washed away from the original source by waves and currents.

But Moreton Bay is different. The large sand islands, Moreton (Mugulpin) and North Stradbroke (Minjerribah) Islands largely protect the bay from the open ocean. This is why the bay is better described as an enclosed embayment. These restricted bays act as a trap for sediments and pollutants, as waves and currents have limited ability to wash them out. These bays make it possible to accurately measure a city’s microplastic build-up.

The bay supports a range of marine habitats from mangroves, seagrass and coral reefs, as well as an internationally recognised wetland for migrating seabirds. Dugong and turtles have long grazed the seagrass in Moreton Bay’s shallow protected waters, while dolphins and whales are also present. But microplastic buildup may threaten their existence.

Most types of plastic are denser than water, which means most microplastics in coastal seas will eventually sink to the seafloor and accumulate in sediment. Mangroves and seagrass ecosystems are particularly good at trapping sediment, which means they trap more microplastics.

We wanted to determine whether Moreton Bay’s varying ecosystems had accumulated different amounts of plastics in the sediment.

We measured the plastic stored in 50 samples of surface sediment (the top 10cm) from a range of different ecosystems across Moreton Bay, including mangroves, seagrass meadows and mud from the main tidal channels.

The result? Microplastics were present in all our samples, but their concentrations varied hugely. We found no clear pattern in how plastics had built up. This suggests plastics were entering the bay from many sources.

We tested for seven common plastics: polycarbonate (PC), polyethylene (PE), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), and polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

Of these, the most abundant microplastic was polyethylene (PE). This plastic is widely used for single-use plastic items such as chip packets, plastic bags and plastic bottles. It’s the most commonly produced and used plastic in Australia and globally.

In total, we estimate the bay now holds about 7,000 tonnes of microplastic in its surface sediments.

In our follow-up paper we explored how rapidly these plastics had built up over time. We took two sediment cores from the central part of the bay, where sediment is accumulating. Cores like this act as an archive of sediment and environmental changes over time.

The trend was clear. Before the 1970s, there were no microplastics in Moreton Bay. They began appearing over the next three decades. But from the early 2000s onwards, the rate rose exponentially. This is in line with the soaring rate of plastic production and use globally. Our analysis shows a direct link between microplastic concentration and population growth in Southeast Queensland.

The challenge of measuring microplastics

To date, we have had limited knowledge of how much plastic is piling up on shallow ocean floors. This is because measuring microplastics is challenging. Traditionally, we’ve used observation by microscope and a technique called absorption spectroscopy, in which we shine infrared light on samples to determine what it’s made up of. But these methods are time-consuming and can only spot plastic particles larger than 20 micrometres, meaning nanoplastics weren’t being measured.

Our research team has been working to get better estimates of microplastic and nanoplastic using a different technique: pyrolysis-gas chromatography mass spectrometry. Here, a sample is dissolved in a solvent and then heated until it vaporises. Once in vapour form, we can determine the concentration of plastic and what types of plastics are present.

This method can be used to estimate how much plastic pollution is present in everything from water to seafood to biosolids and wastewater.

What’s next?

It’s very likely microplastics are building up rapidly in other restricted bays and harbours near large cities, both in Australia and globally.

While we might think microplastics are safe once buried in sediment, they can be consumed by organisms that live in the sediments. Currents, tides and storms can also wash them out again, where marine creatures can eat them.

This is not a problem that will solve itself. We’ll need clear management strategies and policies to cut plastic consumption and improve waste disposal. Doing nothing means microplastics will keep building up, and up, and up.

Elvis Okoffo receives funding from the Goodman Foundation, The Australian Academy of Science and The Australian Research Council (ARC) Training Centre for Hyphenated Analytical Separation Technologies (HyTECH).

Alistair Grinham has received funding from state and federal government, industry and NGOs. He has an honorary role at the University and works for environmental monitoring company Fluvio.

Ben Tscharke receives funding from the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the Australian Research Council.

Helen Bostock receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Kevin Thomas receives funding from the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Australian Research Council, Goodman Foundation, Minderoo Foundation, National Health and Medical, Research Council, Queensland Corrective Services, Queensland Health and Research Council of Norway.

– ref. 700 million plastic bottles: we worked out how much microplastic is in Queensland’s Moreton Bay – https://theconversation.com/700-million-plastic-bottles-we-worked-out-how-much-microplastic-is-in-queenslands-moreton-bay-238892

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew J Constable, Adviser, Antarctica and Marine Systems, Science & Policy, University of Tasmania

The Albanese government has today declared stronger protections for the waters around Heard Island and McDonald Islands, one of Australia’s wildest, most remote areas. The marine park surrounding the islands will be extended by 310,000 square kilometres, quadrupling its size.

Announcing the decision, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said Heard Island and McDonald Islands – about 4,000 kilometres southwest of Perth – are a “unique and extraordinary part of our planet. We are doing everything we can to protect it.”

But the announcement, while welcome, is a missed opportunity on several fronts.

Important areas around the islands remain unprotected, despite a wealth of scientific evidence pointing to the need for safeguards. On this measure, the government could have done far more to protect this unique wildlife haven.

A special place

Heard Island and McDonald Islands are a crucial sanctuary for marine life in the Southern Ocean. The land and surrounding waters support a food chain ranging from tiny plankton to fish, invertebrates, seabirds and marine mammals such as elephant seals and sperm whales.

Both the marine and land environments of the islands are globally recognised for their ecological significance, and include species not found elsewhere in Australia.

In 2002, a marine reserve was declared over the islands and parts of the surrounding waters. The reserve was extended in 2014.

The expansion announced today means most waters around the islands have protection. The new safeguards primarily extend to foraging areas for seals, penguins and flying birds such as albatrosses.

The expansion covers some deep water areas but excludes important deeper water locations including underwater canyons and seamounts, and a feature known as Williams Ridge.

This is an important oversight that compromises the strength of the expanded protections.

The science is clear

In March this year, my colleagues and I released a report showing existing protections for Heard Island and McDonald Islands were no longer adequate and should urgently be expanded.

The report drew on more than two decades’ of research and new scientific understanding. In particular, we found climate change was warming the waters around the islands, posing risks to marine life such as the mackerel icefish.

The icefish lives in shallow water and is an important food source for other animals. To maintain the islands’ biodiversity as the climate warms, we recommended extending the existing marine reserve to cover more shallow waters in the east, and protecting currently unprotected deeper waters.

Today’s announcement does not protect these deeper waters. This is a major shortcoming. Our report showed deeper water areas to the east of Heard Island are significant to the region’s biodiversity, and to its ability to cope with warmer seas under climate change.

The government says its decision came after extensive consultation with a range of parties – including the fishing industry and conservation groups.

Heard Island and McDonald Islands host valuable fisheries for Patagonian toothfish and mackerel icefish. The footprint of fishing operations has expanded over the past 30 years.

The fishery for mackerel icefish uses a range of methods including bottom trawling. This is the only fishery in the Southern Ocean to use bottom trawling methods. This is a damaging fishing technique that uses towed nets to catch fish and other marine species on or near the seabed.

Read more:
These extraordinary Australian islands are teeming with life – and we must protect them before it’s too late

A range of non-target fish species, especially skates, are accidentally caught by the fisheries around Heard Island and McDonald Islands. Skates are a vulnerable species because they are slow to grow and mature. Indicators suggest skate bycatch is too high.

The new measures should have prevented fishing in some deeper waters to reduce pressure on this and other vulnerable species. In particular, bottom trawling should have been prohibited.

As climate change worsens and fishing activity continues, the area must be managed to take account of these dual pressures. The management should also maximise the resilience of species imperilled by climate change, such as mackerel icefish – a cold-adapted species not found anywhere else in Australia’s marine zone.

My colleagues and I proposed deep-sea protections over about 30% of the existing fishing grounds around Heard Island and McDonald Islands. Catch limits would not have been adjusted, and the fisheries were not likely to have been substantially affected.

The decision to allow fishing, including bottom-trawling, in some areas of high conservation value means other measures will be needed to protect marine life in deep areas under pressure from climate change.

An opportunity missed

Today’s announcement follows a decision by the government last year to triple the size of Macquarie Island Marine Park. The move was largely in keeping with the science, and both protected important biodiversity regions and provided for fisheries.

The protection awarded to Heard Island and McDonald Islands falls short of this standard. It fails to protect vulnerable marine species from climate change and fishing, and squanders a chance for Australia to show international leadership.

Andrew J Constable received part funding from Pew Charitable Trusts and Australian Marine Conservation Society to produce the independent report on “Understanding the marine ecosystems surrounding Heard Island and McDonald Islands (HIMI) and their conservation status”.

– ref. Australia will protect a vast swathe of the Southern Ocean, but squanders the chance to show global leadership – https://theconversation.com/australia-will-protect-a-vast-swathe-of-the-southern-ocean-but-squanders-the-chance-to-show-global-leadership-240789

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Yi, Course coordinator, University of South Australia

This article is part of The Conversation’s “Business Basics” series where we ask experts to discuss key concepts in business, economics and finance.

Nuclear power is expensive, but it remains a cornerstone of the Coalition’s plan to get Australia to net-zero emissions.

The federal opposition is yet to release its own costings for the proposal.

Nonetheless, federal Opposition Leader Peter Dutton caused something of a stir when in a recent speech, he said the costs of Australia’s nuclear plants could be “amortised” over their 80-year lifespan.

If hearing a word like “amortised” immediately makes your eyes glaze over, you’re probably not alone.

To make things even more confusing, Dutton may have confused the term with the closely related concept of “depreciation”. We’ll discuss why later.

But amortisation and depreciation are both important concepts in any corporate decision making.

So what exactly was the opposition leader talking about here, and what does it mean to write off the cost of an asset over time?

What is amortisation?

Amortisation has a wide range of applications across finance, including credit, loans and investment planning.

Here, though, we’ll focus on what amortisation means in the accounting context.

You might notice amortisation looks a bit like the more familiar term “mortgage”. This is because both are derived from the same root in Latin.

Amortise comes from “ad” – Latin for “to” – and “mortus” – which means “dead”.

Obviously, we usually don’t mean dead in a literal sense – rather, the more abstract process of bringing something to an end.

Spreading costs over time

In corporate accounting, amortisation is a technique used to gradually write down the cost or value of an intangible asset over its expected period of use.

It helps to think of intangible assets as things that don’t have a “grabbable” physical presence. Companies can operate using all kinds of intangible assets, such as copyrights, trademarks and patents.

In contrast, tangible assets are physical things like land, machinery, buildings and vehicles.

Companies can purchase intangible assets, but they can also generate them internally.

Finite or infinite

Intangible assets can also have a “finite” or “infinite” useful life. If deemed infinitely useful, an asset does not need to be amortised.

If only finitely useful, however, its economic benefit to a company will be systematically reduced over the span of its useful life.

To account for this, we list some of its consumption as an expense on the company’s balance sheet each year. This process helps spread the cost of an asset evenly over its life.

It’s important to note that amortisation is a “non-cash” expense. It appears on a company’s balance sheet as an expense and can lower profit, but it doesn’t affect a company’s cash flows.

How is it calculated?

There are a few different ways to calculate how costs should be spread over an asset’s useful life. For amortisation, one of the most common is the straight-line method.

Using the straight-line method, amortisation can be calculated by dividing an asset’s “depreciable amount” by its useful life.

The depreciable amount is the cost or value of an asset minus its “residual value” – what it is worth at the end of its useful life.

The residual value of an intangible asset will usually be zero, unless a third party has committed to purchase it at the end of its life, or its value can be determined on some active market.

What’s depreciation then?

You might be more familiar with the related term “depreciation”. Both accounting concepts refer to spreading the costs of long-life assets over their finite useful life.

The main difference is that amortisation is used to expense intangible assets while depreciation expenses tangible assets – physical things such as buildings, machinery and plant.

This leads to another key difference. Often, it is much easier to estimate the residual value of a tangible asset at the end of its useful life, because it or its component parts can be more easily sold.

Wait, how are nuclear reactors ‘intangible’?

Reading this, you may have spotted something. As explained above, the main difference between the “amortisation” and the “depreciation” is the type of depreciable assets.

If we go back to how Dutton used the concept of amortisation in his speech, we can reasonably conclude the term depreciation would have been more technically correct.

He was speaking specifically about the useful life of nuclear plants, which clearly have tangible, physical forms.

You could argue he was referring to one of amortisation’s other meanings: the amortisation of a loan or other liability in finance. Amortisation in this sense refers to spreading out loan payments over time.

This is unlikely, however, given he was specifically speaking about the useful life of the nuclear plants and the cost of depreciable assets.

Careful with your calculations

It should be noted that just because an asset has a long useful life, that doesn’t mean its amortisation or depreciation costs will be small.

Let’s look at some of the examples employed by Dutton: nuclear plants, touted to have 80 years of useful life, and renewables, such as wind turbines with 20 to 30 years.

It might be tempting to assume nuclear plants would have a lower depreciation expense, with a significantly longer useful life, but that risks ignoring their enormous initial upfront costs and continuous restructure costs that need to be capitalised.

If the initial and capitalised cost or value of nuclear plants are significantly greater than those of renewables, the annual depreciation expense of nuclear plants could end up being significantly greater.

It all depends on what goes into the equation. Depreciating costs can’t give us anything for free.

Jessica Yi 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 is amortisation, and what does it have to do with Peter Dutton’s nuclear proposal? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-amortisation-and-what-does-it-have-to-do-with-peter-duttons-nuclear-proposal-240321

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Peetz, Laurie Carmichael Distinguished Research Fellow at the Centre for Future Work, and Professor Emeritus, Griffith Business School, Griffith University

Australia’s productivity growth has reverted to the same stagnant pattern as before the pandemic, according to the Productivity Commission’s latest quarterly report.

Productivity is complex and often misunderstood in media and policy debates. So before we read too much into this latest data, here are six key things to understand about productivity.

1. It’s about quantities, not costs

Productivity “measures the rate at which output of goods and services are produced per unit of input”. So it’s about how many workers does it take to make how many widgets?

Most Australian workplace managers don’t know how to measure productivity correctly.

If someone says “higher wages mean lower productivity”, they don’t know what they’re talking about. Wages aren’t part of the productivity equation. People often cite “productivity” as a reason for a policy they like because they can’t say “we like higher profits”.

In fact, high wages can encourage firms to introduce new technology that improves productivity. If labour becomes more expensive, it may be more profitable for firms to invest in labour-saving technology.

But lower productivity isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes higher selling prices can lower productivity. It seems odd, but works like this: if prices for commodities such as iron ore or coal are high, it becomes profitable for mining companies to dig through more rock to get to it.

This takes more time. But it’s now worth extracting these small quantities, because they’re so valuable. For this reason, with high commodity prices, mining labour productivity fell by 13% between 2019-20 and 2022-23. Mining productivity had the largest negative impact on national productivity growth in 2022-23.

2. Productivity is directed by management, not workers

The biggest single factor that shapes productivity is technology. Who’s responsible for what technology a business introduces? Management. Workers often don’t have much of a say.

OECD research suggests new technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) meets lower resistance from employees when they are consulted over its introduction. That’s because new technology makes their firms more competitive and they want to keep their jobs.

Not surprisingly, there’s lots of research showing management that engages and consults workers gets greater output.

Output will also be better with an educated and skilled workforce. If people can do more things with their brains, they’ll be more productive.

3. Measuring productivity is dodgier the more complex it gets

Measuring labour productivity – output per unit of labour input – is fairly straightforward if you’ve got a single output that is sold in a free market, and you’re looking at a single input (labour). It’s not hard to measure, or describe, the number of cars produced per worker in a week.

It gets very tricky when you’re looking at multi-factor productivity (output per unit of, say, labour-and-capital input). Economists can’t even describe the denominator. (What even is a unit of “labour-and-capital”?) So they express what they measure as an index (giving it a value of 100 in some base year). All sorts of bold assumptions get made.

Estimates are highly creative. In its report, the Productivity Commission looked at revisions to quarterly growth figures and found productivity estimates are “constantly being revised”.

On almost a third of occasions, initial estimates are out by 0.5 percentage points or more. When your estimate is that productivity increased by 0.5% – the number for the year to this June quarter – the potential for error is huge.

Even more creative assumptions are made when you try to measure productivity in the public sector, when the market is not the aim.

Productivity is higher in classrooms when there are fewer teachers per student. At least, the bean-counters will tell you that, but the students will tell you the opposite.

So you should be very wary when someone says the “productivity challenge is […] greater and more pressing in the non-market sector”, when the meaning is so contested.

4. It is best measured over long periods

Productivity growth is so erratic, that you can tell very little from one quarter’s figures. “Revise, revise, revise again”, as the PC report said.

Often the best thing to do, as the Australian Bureau of Statistics recognised long ago is to average it over the whole of a “growth cycle”, that is, between one peak of growth and the next.

Trouble is, growth cycles vary in length, and the end point is not easy to pick when it happens, only later.

Growth averaged over a long period is a lot more meaningful than growth measured over a short period. At least the Productivity Commission showed five-year averages alongside it’s latest quarterly estimates. But chances are your start date will be at a different stage in the growth cycle to your end date, so it’s not that good a measure.

5. Productivity is falling here and overseas

In Australia, productivity growth has been on a long-term decline since the 1960s, with a brief, unsustained upturn in the mid 1990s.

That pattern gives pause for thought: if big reforms to competition policy, industrial relations and wage fixing were aimed at improving productivity growth, why was that unsustainable, and why did it then continue to decline? It pays to remember that a lot of reforms people advocate in the name of productivity growth have quite different aims and effects anyway.

Internationally, the picture is not much different.

Productivity growth across industrialised countries has unevenly but gradually declined since the 1950s and 1960s. The world-wide adoption of what were often called neoliberal reforms from the 1980s failed to improve productivity growth.

6. Productivity growth once drove living standards. Not any more

In theory, higher labour productivity enables higher living standards. In practice, that is driven by the ability of workers to negotiate for higher wages.

It depends on how you measure it and what years you focus on, but from at least the early 2010s, productivity growth was much faster than hourly compensation per employee.

Again, it’s not just Australia. The OECD calls this the “decoupling” of wages and productivity.

Just because something can increase potential earnings growth, it does not follow that it will.

As a university employee and since then, David Peetz has undertaken research over many years with occasional financial support from governments from both sides of politics, employers and unions. He has been and is involved in several Australian Research Council-funded and approved projects, some of which included contributions from an employer body, a superannuation fund, and two unions. The projects do not concern the subject matter of this article.

– ref. Productivity is often mistaken for wages. What does it really mean? How does it work? – https://theconversation.com/productivity-is-often-mistaken-for-wages-what-does-it-really-mean-how-does-it-work-240113

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deryn Thompson, Eczema and Allergy Nurse; Lecturer, University of South Australia

Hay fever (also called allergic rhinitis) affects 24% of Australians. Symptoms include sneezing, a runny nose (which may feel blocked or stuffy) and itchy eyes. People can also experience an itchy nose, throat or ears.

But COVID is still spreading, and other viruses can cause cold-like symptoms. So how do you know which one you’ve got?

Remind me, how does hay fever cause symptoms?

Hay fever happens when a person has become “sensitised” to an allergen trigger. This means a person’s body is always primed to react to this trigger.

Triggers can include allergens in the air (such as pollen from trees, grasses and flowers), mould spores, animals or house dust mites which mostly live in people’s mattresses and bedding, and feed on shed skin.

When the body is exposed to the trigger, it produces IgE (immunoglobulin E) antibodies. These cause the release of many of the body’s own chemicals, including histamine, which result in hay fever symptoms.

People who have asthma may find their asthma symptoms (cough, wheeze, tight chest or trouble breathing) worsen when exposed to airborne allergens. Spring and sometimes into summer can be the worst time for people with grass, tree or flower allergies.

However, animal and house dust mite symptoms usually happen year-round.

What else might be causing my symptoms?

Hay fever does not cause a fever, sore throat, muscle aches and pains, weakness, loss of taste or smell, nor does it cause you to cough up mucus.

These symptoms are likely to be caused by a virus, such as COVID, influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) or a “cold” (often caused by rhinoviruses). These conditions can occur all year round, with some overlap of symptoms:

COVID still surrounds us. RSV and influenza rates appear higher than before the COVID pandemic, but it may be due to more testing.

So if you have a fever, sore throat, muscle aches/pains, weakness, fatigue, or are coughing up mucus, stay home and avoid mixing with others to limit transmission.

People with COVID symptoms can take a rapid antigen test (RAT), ideally when symptoms start, then isolate until symptoms disappear. One negative RAT alone can’t rule out COVID if symptoms are still present, so test again 24–48 hours after your initial test if symptoms persist.

You can now test yourself for COVID, RSV and influenza in a combined RAT. But again, a negative test doesn’t rule out the virus. If your symptoms continue, test again 24–48 hours after the previous test.

If it’s hay fever, how do I treat it?

Treatment involves blocking the body’s histamine release, by taking antihistamine medication which helps reduce the symptoms.

Doctors, nurse practitioners and pharmacists can develop a hay fever care plan. This may include using a nasal spray containing a topical corticosteroid to help reduce the swelling inside the nose, which causes stuffiness or blockage.

Nasal sprays need to delivered using correct technique and used over several weeks to work properly. Often these sprays can also help lessen the itchy eyes of hay fever.

Drying bed linen and pyjamas inside during spring can lessen symptoms, as can putting a smear of Vaseline in the nostrils when going outside. Pollen sticks to the Vaseline, and gently blowing your nose later removes it.

People with asthma should also have an asthma plan, created by their doctor or nurse practitioner, explaining how to adjust their asthma reliever and preventer medications in hay fever seasons or on allergen exposure.

People with asthma also need to be alert for thunderstorms, where pollens can burst into tinier particles, be inhaled deeper in the lungs and cause a severe asthma attack, and even death.

What if it’s COVID, RSV or the flu?

Australians aged 70 and over and others with underlying health conditions who test positive for COVID are eligible for antivirals to reduce their chance of severe illness.

Most other people with COVID, RSV and influenza will recover at home with rest, fluids and paracetamol to relieve symptoms. However some groups are at greater risk of serious illness and may require additional treatment or hospitalisation.

For RSV, this includes premature infants, babies 12 months and younger, children under two who have other medical conditions, adults over 75, people with heart and lung conditions, or health conditions that lessens the immune system response.

For influenza, people at higher risk of severe illness are pregnant women, Aboriginal people, people under five or over 65 years, or people with long-term medical conditions, such as kidney, heart, lung or liver disease, diabetes and decreased immunity.

If you’re concerned about severe symptoms of COVID, RSV or influenza, consult your doctor or call 000 in an emergency.

If your symptoms are mild but persist, and you’re not sure what’s causing them, book an appointment with your doctor or nurse practitioner. Although hay fever season is here, we need to avoid spreading other serious infectious.

For more information, you can call the healthdirect helpline on 1800 022 222 (known as NURSE-ON-CALL in Victoria); use the online Symptom Checker; or visit healthdirect.gov.au or the Australian Society of Clinical Immunology and Allergy.

Deryn Thompson is affiliated with Loreal, Ego Pharmaceuticals and Quality Use of Medicines Alliance having received honorariums for educational talks or advisory work.

– ref. I have a stuffy nose, how can I tell if it’s hay fever, COVID or something else? – https://theconversation.com/i-have-a-stuffy-nose-how-can-i-tell-if-its-hay-fever-covid-or-something-else-240453

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Edith Jennifer Hill, Associate Lecturer, Learning & Teaching Innovation, Flinders University

Cleaning the graves of strangers is the latest content trend taking over TikTok. But as millions tune in to watch the videos, it’s becoming clear not all of them are created equal. Two grave-cleaning creators in particular seem to reside at opposite ends of the trend.

One of the first accounts to gain popularity for grave cleaning was @ladytaphos. This account is run by Alicia Williams, a Virginia resident who treats the graves with great dignity. Williams will often share the story of the person residing within, and acts with grace and kindness as she restores beauty to the graves.

On the other end of the spectrum is Kaeli Mae McEwen, or @the_clean_girl, who leans into more clickbait-y tactics. McEwen is known for throwing a pink spiky ball through a graveyard and cleaning the grave it lands on. She also uses her videos to promote her own pink foamy cleaner (which at one point could be purchased via a link in her bio).

Cleaning and death

While Williams’ and McEwen’s videos may seem novel to some, death and cleaning have a long and varied relationship that spans time and cultures.

Washing a loved one’s body before burial or cremation isn’t just practical – it’s a significant ritual that provides meaning during a period of grief. In certain cultures and religions it’s also a process of purification, or preparation for the afterlife.

Much has been written about cleaning and clearing out the homes of deceased people. Family members often won’t agree on how to approach such a task. In his essay on death and objects, author Tony Birch writes about his mother clearing out his grandmother’s house.

“My mother decided that our first task after her death was to empty out her Housing Commission flat and scrub it clean,” Birch writes.

He first laments the move, but later recognises the value of cleaning together before sorting – and treasuring – the items his grandmother left behind.

Margaretta Magnuson’s 2017 book, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, is a humorous and thoughtful introduction to the Swedish movement of döstädning. The book (and subsequent reality TV series) has sparked various conversations on death and cleaning, and especially on cleaning before you yourself pass away so you don’t leave a mess for your loved ones.

Grave cleaning can be seen as another continuation of caring for the deceased. People who decide to clean the graves of strangers may do so out of respect, or in an attempt to give them “their name back” (as names on graves become visible following the removal of debris).

Two very different approaches

Williams and McEwen are received quite differently by viewers. Anecdotally, viewers respond more positively to the calmer and more respectful cleaning videos by Williams, who takes time to explain the process while ensuring the correct products are used.

Meanwhile, many find McEwen’s videos problematic and criticise her for not adhering to proper graveyard decorum. McEwen makes a spectacle of sites of mourning, such as by pretending to vacuum graves, replacing flowers placed by others and making jokes. Viewers also speculate the products she uses may cause damage to the graves.

Perceived intent plays a role in how each creator’s content is received. While Williams focuses on respectfully restoring graves to their former glory, McEwen positions herself as the focus and merely uses the graves for content.

A complex emotional object

Similar to other funerary objects such as coffins and urns, graves are associated with both the person who died and the fact of their death. As such, they are emotionally complex objects that bring both strength and sadness to those left behind.

But graves are unique also in that they are private objects of grief exposed in a public context. Anyone visiting the graveyard can view and interact with them. Does that make them “fair game” for content creators?

Graves don’t just represent deceased loves ones. They can also act as stand-ins in their absence, becoming stone bodies of sorts. As sociologist Margaret Gibson describes in her book Objects of the Dead: Mourning and Memory in Everyday Life, “death reconstructs our experience of objects”.

“There is the strangeness of realising that things have outlived persons, and, in this regard, the materiality of things is shown to be more permanent than the materiality of the body,” she says.

Caring for and cleaning graves can therefore be interpreted as caring for the deceased, by extending their existence through the materiality of their resting place.

Psychological researcher Svend Brinkmann asserts artefacts such as graves are “culturally sanctioned”, gaining “significance from a collective system of meaning”.

In other words, we as a community create and uphold reverence for such items. This is partly why the desecration of graves is viewed as abhorrent. It is societally understood to be a desecration of the person themselves. It’s also why content creators must tread lightly.

A reason for haunting?

There are ways to interact with gravestones (and even create content) which acknowledge their complexity and connection to their owners.

TikTok creator Rosie Grant (@ghostlyarchive) bakes recipes found on headstones and records the process. She has even met with the families of the deceased to make the recipes together and learn more about the people behind the engraving-worthy food.

However, randomly cleaning the graves of strangers is fraught territory – and rife with potential privacy issues. It isn’t clear whether McEwen seeks permission from loved ones before cleaning graves, but contextually this seems unlikely.

Recent discussions have also uncovered questionable editing in her videos. Some graves in her before-and-after videos have been edited to appear cleaner and to have their structure altered. McEwen’s pink foaming cleaner also appears to be a blue cleaner edited to appear pink, raising even more questions about intent and responsibility.

While McEwen claims to be “honouring” lives by cleaning “final resting places”, the consensus from viewers is her actions are dishonourable. As one host commented on a in podcast discussing McEwen cleaning a baby’s grave while speaking in a kiddish voice: “Fuck you, you’re going to get haunted.”

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. Grave cleaning videos are going viral on TikTok. Are they honouring the dead, or exploiting them? – https://theconversation.com/grave-cleaning-videos-are-going-viral-on-tiktok-are-they-honouring-the-dead-or-exploiting-them-240553

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maria O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Law, Member of Law as Protection Centre, Deakin Law School, Deakin University

Australians’ ability to protest has again been in the news this week. Against the background of an armed conflict in the Middle East and rallies nationwide, the government has suggested Australia should establish a permit system for all protests.

Minister for the NDIS and Government Services Bill Shorten made the suggestion on television this week:

how the permit system works is it doesn’t stop people protesting, but the purpose of is to look at the circumstances […] I don’t necessarily think it should apply to industrial relations, but for some of these protests we’ve seen week in, week out, I do think that having a permit system would at least straighten it up.

So what are protest laws like around the country? Do any states or territories have this permit system, and should they? And importantly, what effect to these laws have on the right to protest?

What are the laws like nationally?

A permit system to allow protest organisers to hold an “authorised public assembly” operates in most states and territories in Australia. These systems allow police to “authorise” a particular protest and require a written application to police and/or the relevant local council.

For instance, in New South Wales, people who wish to hold an authorised protest must lodge a “notice of intention to hold a public assembly” with the NSW Police Commissioner.

Similar provisions also exist in Queensland, where organisers wishing to obtain authorisation for a protest must send a “Notice of Intention to Hold a Public Assembly” form to Queensland Police Service and the local council.

In Western Australia, organisers may apply for a permit to hold a public meeting and/or procession under the Public Order in Streets Act.

However, there a significant differences in the detail of these laws. In most states, the permit system simply allows the protest to be “authorised”. This means that while it is not a criminal offence to hold a protest without a permit, it provides a level of protection to protesters from certain criminal charges such as obstructing traffic.

Victoria does not have a permit system like NSW. Instead, it has laws that enable police to move people on, or to arrest someone for violent or anti-social behaviour.

However, in Tasmania, a section of the Police Offences Act makes it an offence for a person to organise or conduct a demonstration without a permit if it is to be held, wholly or partly, on a public street. It’s punishable by a fine.

The period of notification also varies widely. In most states and territories, the lead time is anywhere from five days to two weeks.

However, in Tasmania, protest organisers are advised to lodge an application with police 12 weeks before the demonstration.

Finally, the grounds for rejection of a permit can be overly broad. For instance, in South Australia, police and other authorities may reject a permit on the ground that “it would, if effectuated, unduly prejudice any public interest”. The legislation does not set out any criteria for that test.

Which laws are the best?

In terms of how these laws compare with one another and which approach is the most preferable, we need to consider two factors: the practicalities of a permit system, and whether allowing government authorities to control protests is advisable.

In terms of practicalities, the paperwork burden, cost and uncertainty of a mandatory permit system may be unworkable. There could also be ensuing litigation to consider.

This was starkly demonstrated in 2020 when planned protests against Indigenous deaths in custody were litigated in the NSW Supreme Court.

In NSW, which has a permit system, the “Stop All Black Deaths in Custody” protest was initially rejected by the NSW Supreme Court but was then declared an authorised public assembly by the NSW Court of Appeal only minutes before the protest was scheduled to start.

In deciding on the best approach to permits, we must also consider whether it is wise to allow government agencies to give the green light to some protests and disallow others. Will this put too much power into the hands of police and individual judges?

The human right of protesting

Here it is relevant to consider Australia’s international human rights treaty obligations, which protect the right to assemble peacefully. United Nations guidance on this right recognises that states can set up notification provisions for protests, but they cannot establish authorisation requirements.

This means Australia can set up a notification system to allow police to facilitate the smooth conduct of a protest in advance (such as by organising road closures).

However, this cannot require people to get permission from the police before undertaking a protest. In fact, this international human rights guidance states that having to apply for permission to protest undermines its status as a basic human right.

More generally, it should be remembered that protests can be spontaneous and should be allowed to be so.

This is best illustrated by one of the most important acts of protest in Australian history: the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. This was set up spontaneously on January 26 1972 when four Indigenous men set up a beach umbrella on the lawns opposite Parliament House in Canberra as a protest against the government’s approach to Indigenous land rights.

It stands to this day and is a visual reminder of the power of spontaneous protest, carried out without police permission, and a sober reminder of the importance of protest in our democratic system.

Maria O’Sullivan is part of a Public Intoxication Reform Evaluation which is funded by the Victorian Department of Justice.

– ref. Should you need a permit to protest? Here’s why that’s a bad idea (and might be unlawful) – https://theconversation.com/should-you-need-a-permit-to-protest-heres-why-thats-a-bad-idea-and-might-be-unlawful-240671

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Reynolds, Associate Professor in Clinical Sleep Health, Flinders University

What do you imagine a good night’s sleep to be?

Often when people come into our sleep clinic seeking treatment, they share ideas about healthy sleep.

Many think when their head hits the pillow, they should fall into a deep and restorative sleep, and emerge after about eight hours feeling refreshed. They’re in good company – many Australians hold the same belief.

In reality, healthy sleep is cyclic across the night, as you move in and out of the different stages of sleep, often waking up several times. Some people remember one or more of these awakenings, others do not. Let’s consider what a healthy night’s sleep looks like.

Sleep cycles are a roller-coaster

As an adult, our sleep moves through different cycles and brief awakenings during the night. Sleep cycles last roughly 90 minutes each.

We typically start the night with lighter sleep, before moving into deeper sleep stages, and rising again into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep – the stage of sleep often linked to vivid dreaming.

If sleeping well, we get most of our deep sleep in the first half of the night, with REM sleep more common in the second half of the night.

Adults usually move through five or six sleep cycles in a night, and it is entirely normal to wake up briefly at the end of each one. That means we might be waking up five times during the night. This can increase with older age and still be healthy. If you’re not remembering these awakenings that’s OK – they can be quite brief.

What does getting a ‘good’ sleep actually mean?

You’ll often hear that adults need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. But good sleep is about more than the number of hours – it’s also about the quality.

For most people, sleeping well means being able to fall asleep soon after getting into bed (within around 30 minutes), sleeping without waking up for long periods, and waking feeling rested and ready for the day.

You shouldn’t be feeling excessively sleepy during the day, especially if you’re regularly getting at least seven hours of refreshing sleep a night (this is a rough rule of thumb).

But are you noticing you’re feeling physically tired, needing to nap regularly and still not feeling refreshed? It may be worthwhile touching base with your general practitioner, as there a range of possible reasons.

Common issues

Sleep disorders are common. Up to 25% of adults have insomnia, a sleep disorder where it may be hard to fall or stay asleep, or you may wake earlier in the morning than you’d like.

Rates of common sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnoea – where your breathing can partially or completely stop many times during the night – also increase with age, affecting 20% of early adults and 40% of people in middle age. There are effective treatments, so asking for help is important.

Beyond sleep disorders, our sleep can also be disrupted by chronic health conditions – such as pain – and by certain medications.

There can also be other reasons we’re not sleeping well. Some of us are woken by children, pets or traffic noise during the night. These “forced awakenings” mean we may find it harder to get up in the morning, take longer to leave bed and feel less satisfied with our sleep. For some people, night awakenings may have no clear cause.

A good way to tell if these awakenings are a problem for you is by thinking about how they affect you. When they cause feelings of frustration or worry, or are impacting how we feel and function during the day, it might be a sign to seek some help.

We also may struggle to get up in the morning. This could be for a range of reasons, including not sleeping long enough, going to bed or waking up at irregular times – or even your own internal clock, which can influence the time your body prefers to sleep.

If you’re regularly struggling to get up for work or family needs, it can be an indication you may need to seek help. Some of these factors can be explored with a sleep psychologist if they are causing concern.

Can my smart watch help?

It is important to remember sleep-tracking devices can vary in accuracy for looking at the different sleep stages. While they can give a rough estimate, they are not a perfect measure.

In-laboratory polysomnography, or PSG, is the best standard measure to examine your sleep stages. A PSG examines breathing, oxygen saturation, brain waves and heart rate during sleep.

Rather than closely examining nightly data (including sleep stages) from a sleep tracker, it may be more helpful to look at the patterns of your sleep (bed and wake times) over time.

Understanding your sleep patterns may help identify and adjust behaviours that negatively impact your sleep, such as your bedtime routine and sleeping environment.

And if you find viewing your sleep data is making you feel worried about your sleep, this may not be useful for you. Most importantly, if you are concerned it is important to discuss it with your GP who can refer you to the appropriate specialist sleep health provider.

Amy Reynolds receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, the Australian Research Council, the Lifetime Support Authority, and has received consulting and/or speaker fees from industry-funded sources including Compumedics, Teva Pharmaceuticals and Sydney Trains.

Claire Dunbar received funding from The Hospital Research Foundation for their PhD Scholarship and previously from Flinders University development grants.

Hannah Scott receives research funding from Re-Time Pty Ltd, Compumedics Ltd, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine Foundation, and Flinders University.

Nicole Lovato receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Medical Research Future Fund, the Hospital Research Foundation, the Lifetime Support Authority, and industry including ResMed, Phillips, and ReTime.

Gorica Micic 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. An unbroken night’s sleep is a myth. Here’s what good sleep looks like – https://theconversation.com/an-unbroken-nights-sleep-is-a-myth-heres-what-good-sleep-looks-like-238069

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Battershill, Professor in Coastal Science, University of Waikato

Speed will be of the essence as salvage crews attempt to stop fuel leaking from the sunken New Zealand naval ship off the coast of Samoa.

The HMNZS Manawanui ran aground last weekend on a reef about one nautical mile off the south coast of Upolu, Samoa’s most populated island. The specialist dive and hydrographic vessel was on its third deployment, conducting a reef survey, when it caught fire and sank.

The ship has come to rest at a depth of up to 150 metres, which means it may be relatively undisturbed even during storms. Any hull cracks from the impact should not be exacerbated.

But depth makes the salvage operation challenging. Crew may need decompression chambers, and there’s only a narrow window of time to seal any fuel leaks – and, ideally, pipe out more than 900 tonnes of marine diesel the ship carries.

Fuel leaks the first priority

The Manawanui’s sinking is a marine disaster. But it arguably poses a lesser risk than the oil spill caused by the container ship MV Rena, which ran aground near the Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga in 2011.

The Rena was loaded with 1,368 containers, some of which contained hazardous materials, as well as 1,700 tonnes of heavy fuel oil. It also carried thousands of tonnes of dairy products, which effectively fertilised the ocean and caused massive algal blooms, visible from space.

The fuel oil on board the Manawanui is lighter. Its most toxic short-chain hydrocarbons will likely evaporate with wave action. But if the remaining slick washes up on beaches, it will be harder to remove. During low tides, it will be running onto the reef, likely killing off corals and fish in a swath moving inshore or driven by wind and currents.

The salvage crew’s first focus will probably be on mitigating fuel leaks. But they will also need to clean up any crushed coral and contaminated sediment around the reef and wreck as quickly as possible, as it may have been exposed to the ship’s anti-fouling paint. In calm weather this would be possible as it’s shallow on the reef crest.

Ships in the past have been painted with the anti-fouling paint Tributylin. It has now been banned because of its toxicity, but many ships simply painted over it with modern paints. Any damage to the hull could expose old layers. Without a thorough cleanup, this could preclude coral recovery.

My experience, and that of colleague’s both in New Zealand and in tropical Australia, shows a speedy cleanup can make all the difference for the environmental recovery after ships ground on reefs and sometimes sink.

When the Malaysian-flagged container ship Bunga Teratai Satu ran into the Sudbury Reef in the Great Barrier Reef in 2001, the vessel was refloated without losing any cargo or fuel. But it had scraped against the reef, spreading tributyltin-coated fragments. The salvage operation cleaned up the toxic material and the coral was on a recovery trajectory within four years.

In contrast, the sinking of the Shen Neng 1 in 2010 flattened 8,000 square metres of reef east of Great Keppel Island on Queensland’s Capricorn coast. While the ship was also refloated and removed, there was no cleanup and no signs of coral recovery a decade after the disaster.

Should oil dispersants be used?

All 75 crew and passengers have been taken off the Manawanui by life rafts and other boats that came to the rescue. A Court of Inquiry is under way to establish exactly what caused the sinking.

The focus is now on mitigating environmental impacts.

At this point, there are no signs of oil on the beaches where the vessel sank, but locals are reporting an oil-like substance in the water around the wreck.

Should fuel oil spill ashore, locals will have to find ways of harnessing the public for the beach cleanup. When the oil slick from the Rena contaminated local beaches, thousands of volunteers helped with the recovery operation.

Locals will likely also face decisions about using oil dispersants, which break up oil into smaller droplets into the water column.

At the time of the Rena operation, there was a public outcry against the use of dispersants because they spread the pollution further into the marine environment, and the chemical combination of oil and dispersant can be more toxic than either alone.

The use of dispersants makes sense however, if an oil spill threatens turtle nesting areas for example, as it did when the cargo ship Pacific Adventurer was caught in a cyclone off Queensland in 2009 and 270 tonnes of oil created a 5.5 kilometre long slick.

The reef where the Manawanui struck is well known for its large population of sea turtles, which come to feed in the area. They are likely to sense the pollution and eventually stay away, as will pelagic fish.

Given the area is the local villagers’ food basket and a tourist destination, any deleterious effects on the coastal environment and coral reefs will be keenly felt. As in Aotearoa, the intimate bond between people and the sea is profound. Drawing on past experiences will empower speedy action and hasten ecological restoration.

Christopher Battershill received funding from the Ministry for the Environment to examine the environmental effects of the MV Rena ship wreck. He is affiliated with the Oil Pollution Advisory Committee and has previously worked with the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

– ref. Manawanui sinking: an expert explains why a speedy cleanup will be crucial – and the main challenges ahead – https://theconversation.com/manawanui-sinking-an-expert-explains-why-a-speedy-cleanup-will-be-crucial-and-the-main-challenges-ahead-240775

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Carol Johnson, Emerita Professor, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Adelaide

It wasn’t meant to be like this.

In her 2022 study of Anthony Albanese, Katharine Murphy describes a prime minister who thought he’d be successfully managing an idealistic, collaborative and positive “new politics” that would favour the Teal independents rather than Dutton’s Liberals. Albanese seemed confident that Labor was destined for an extended period in office. Given he later appointed Murphy to his communications team, he apparently approved of her analysis.

However, even at the time Murphy’s Lone Wolf: Albanese and the New Politics was published, various commentators, including myself, queried the “new politics” scenario. While the Teals may represent a new politics, it is clear that the old Liberal politics — of culture wars and denouncing Labor’s economic and climate change policies — is also still very much with us.

Labor and the Liberals are now neck-and-neck in some polls, with minority government (or worse) potentially looming for Labor. Meanwhile, Gareth Evans and Bill Kelty, key figures from the Hawke/Keating period, have excoriated the Albanese government’s allegedly lacklustre performance.

How did it all go so wrong?

Great expectations; modest reality

Some of the reasons can be traced back to difficulties addressing unrealistic expectations in Labor’s 2022 election strategy. Albanese went to the 2022 election with a “new politics”, collaborative style agenda that sought to bring all Australians, including business, labour, Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians together. It was a small target strategy based on assumed common interests, kindness and compassion rather than divisiveness.

As a result, Labor successfully countered Scott Morrison’s populist, “us versus them” campaign strategy. However, Labor’s approach was to prove easier to implement as an election strategy than in government, as three examples show.

First, Albanese was channelling Bob Hawke when it came to bringing business and labour together. Yet, the Hawke government’s rapprochement with business was based on business being able to pay lower wages, because workers would be compensated by a government-funded “social wage” in the form of benefits and entitlements.

By contrast, the Albanese government pledged to end the wage stagnation of the Liberal years and generally increase wages. A major emphasis was placed on improving the wages of low-paid women workers. In the process, Labor tackled issues that arose from Keating’s flawed, neoliberal-influenced, enterprise bargaining model.

However, key business groups criticised Labor’s resulting industrial relations measures, including multi-employer bargaining, increases in the minimum wage, and measures designed to address precarious and contract work. The Liberals have largely sided with business critiques.

Second, Labor’s attempts to bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians together, via the Voice referendum, fell victim to a divisive, populist campaign by Dutton and others. Dutton depicted the Voice proposal not as arising from a major national meeting of Indigenous representatives but as being an elite “Canberra voice” that would give special rights to Indigenous Australians that were denied to others. Furthermore, he argued that government was so focused on elite “woke” issues such as the Voice, it was neglecting Australian workers’ cost-of-living crisis. Labor’s strategy for countering right-wing populism was in disarray.

Albanese’s response to the Voice loss was to go even more “small target” in ways that alienated progressive supporters. He abandoned key commitments ranging from the Indigenous Makarrata commission process of Treaty and Truth-telling, to protecting LGBTQI+ teachers and students from being sacked by religious schools. The debacle over including gender identity questions in the census was another result.

Third, international events, and other parties’ politicisation of them, have impeded the government’s attempts at social cohesion. Australian political debate has become so polarised over developments in the Middle East that the Albanese government is accused of abandoning support for Israel by the Liberals and the Murdoch press, while simultaneously being accused of being “complicit in Israel’s genocide” by the Greens and pro-Palestinian groups.

Narrative failure

As its original story of bringing Australians together has been increasingly undermined, the government has floundered when it comes to telling a clear narrative about itself. By contrast, Dutton’s relentless, focused and simply expressed negativity has been cutting through.

Part of Labor’s problem in countering Dutton is that he is targeting them for things that are often beyond their control.

For example, Dutton’s claim the government has been too distracted by so-called “woke” issues to address the cost-of-living crisis has been particularly electorally damaging for Labor. So have his claims that Labor’s renewable energy policies are fuelling inflation and pushing up the cost of living still further.

The government argues it has been providing extensive cost-of-living relief in the form of tax cuts, energy bill relief, rental assistance, wage increases, cheaper medicines and reduced child care costs. However, the problem is that such government measures are being continually undercut by inflation, price increases, high interest rates, and the housing affordability and supply crisis.

Yet, the housing affordability and supply crisis has been aggravated by decades of poor housing policy that long predate the Albanese government. Furthermore, Labor’s attempts to address it are currently being stymied by a combination of Coalition and Greens opposition, once again sandwiching Labor.

Meanwhile, the Coalition argues that government spending is exacerbating inflation and high interest rates. However, even the independent Reserve Bank, which sets cash interest rates and is also critical of government spending, has drawn attention to multiple international factors playing a role in inflation. Price increase gouging by some businesses to augment their profits has exacerbated the problem.

Furthermore, Treasurer Jim Chalmers argues that existing government spending levels have been essential to preventing Australia sliding into recession, while still enabling a budget surplus.

Chalmers has struggled to cut through in the way that Keating’s messages did. However, Keating benefited from the Coalition largely agreeing with his neoliberal-influenced “reform” agenda, despite arguing it wasn’t going far enough. By contrast, Chalmers has been facing a fundamentally hostile opposition, unsympathetic to key influences on his thought, such as Mariana Mazzucato.

Labor has also had trouble selling the government’s achievements because, as I argue in a recent book, some of the Albanese government’s most successful reform measures have been in gender equality (although much more still needs to be done). Despite women making up more than half of the population, reforms that affect women tend to be undervalued in what is still a male defined political culture. Furthermore, the working class is often conceived in terms of blue collar male employment, so benefits for women workers are not being adequately recognised. This is particularly the case in Dutton’s hyper-masculine, strongman discourse.

Mobilising gendered leadership stereotypes has been central to Dutton’s populist “us” versus “them” politics. Dutton consistently depicts Albanese as an emasculated “weak” leader on issues ranging from addressing the cost of living crisis to detaining asylum seekers freed by a High Court decision, and supporting Israel. By contrast, Dutton is depicted as the strong leader who will stand up for everyday Australians allegedly abandoned by Labor and the so-called elites.

This does not look like a “new politics” at all and it is a divisive, populist terrain that Labor is finding very difficult to negotiate.

Carol Johnson has received past funding from the Australian Research Council for work on Labor governments and on gender equality policy. .

– ref. Failure to launch: why the Albanese government is in trouble – https://theconversation.com/failure-to-launch-why-the-albanese-government-is-in-trouble-239730

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Griffin, Professor, Infectious Diseases and Microbiology, The University of Queensland

Since COVID was first reported in December 2019, there have been more than 775 million recorded infections and more than 7 million deaths from the disease. This makes COVID the seventh-deadliest pandemic in recorded history.

Factors including climate change, disruption of animal habitats, poverty and global travel mean we’re only likely to see more pandemics in the future.

It’s impossible to predict exactly when the next pandemic will happen, or what it will be. But experts around the world are working to prepare for this inevitable “disease X”.

One of the cornerstones of being prepared for the next pandemic is being in the best possible position to design and deploy a suitable vaccine. To this end, scientists and researchers can learn a lot from COVID vaccine development.

A look back

After SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) was discovered, vaccine development moved very quickly. In February 2020 the first batch of vaccines was completed (from Moderna) and the first clinical trials began in March.

An mRNA vaccine from Pfizer/BioNTech was the first to be approved, on December 2 2020 in the United Kingdom. Approvals for this and other vaccines, including shots developed by Moderna (another mRNA vaccine) and Oxford/AstraZeneca (a viral vector vaccine), followed elsewhere soon afterwards.

Previously the fastest vaccine developed took around four years (for mumps in the 1960s). Had COVID vaccines taken this long it would mean we would only just be rolling them out this year.

An estimated 13.72 billion COVID vaccine doses have now been administered, with more than 70% of the world’s population having received at least one dose.

The rapid development and rollout of COVID vaccines is likely to be one of the greatest achievements of medical science ever. It also means we are in a much better position to respond to future emerging pathogens.

New vaccine technology

A lot of work over many years prepared us to develop COVID vaccines as quickly as we did. This included developing new platforms such as viral vector and mRNA vaccines that can be adapted quickly to new pathogens.

While scientists had been working on mRNA vaccines for decades before the COVID pandemic, the COVID shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna were the first mRNA vaccines to be approved for human use.

These vaccines work by giving our body instructions (the “m” in mRNA stands for messenger) to make SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. These are proteins on the surface of the virus which it uses to attach to our cells. This means when we encounter SARS-CoV-2, our immune system is poised to respond.

This technology will almost certainly be used to protect against other diseases, and could potentially help with a future pandemic.

In the meantime, scientists are working to improve mRNA technology even further. For example, “self-amplifying RNA” has the potential to enhance immune responses at lower doses compared with conventional mRNA.

While our current COVID vaccines are safe and very effective at protecting against severe disease, they’re not perfect. We may never be able to achieve a “perfect” vaccine, but some additional properties we’d like to see in future COVID vaccines include being better at reducing transmission, lasting longer, and needing to be updated less often as new variants emerge.

Even now there are many COVID vaccines in clinical trials. So hopefully, COVID vaccines that improve on the initial shots will be available relatively soon.

Other desirable attributes include vaccines we can administer by alternate routes to needles. For COVID and other diseases such as influenza, we’re seeing significant developments locally and internationally on vaccines than can be administered via skin patches, through the nose, and even orally.

Some challenges

Developing vaccines for COVID was a huge challenge, but one that can mostly be judged a success. Research has estimated COVID vaccines saved 14.4 million lives across 185 countries in just their first year.

However, the story of COVID vaccination has also had many other challenges, and arguably a number of failures.

First, the distribution of vaccines was not equitable. Analysis of the initial rollout suggested nearly 80% of eligible people in high-income countries were vaccinated, compared with just over 10% in low-income nations.

Supply of vaccines was an issue in many parts of the world, so expanding local capacity to enable more rapid production and distribution of vaccines will be important for the next pandemic.

Further, adverse events linked to COVID vaccines, such as rare blood clots after the AstraZeneca vaccine, affected perceptions of vaccine safety. While every serious adverse event is significant, these incidents were very rare.

However, these issues exacerbated other challenges that hampered vaccine uptake, including the spread of misinformation.

Misinformation remains a problem now and will probably still be prevalent whenever we face the next pandemic. Addressing this challenge involves understanding what’s deterring people from getting vaccinated, then informing and educating, addressing misinformation both about vaccination and the risks of the disease itself.

Restoring and building trust in public health authorities also needs to continue to be a focus. Trust in governments and health authorities declined during the COVID pandemic, and evidence shows lower trust is associated with lower vaccine uptake.

Ongoing preparation

There’s no doubt our recent experience with COVID, particularly the rapid development of multiple safe and effective vaccines, has put us in a better position for the next pandemic.

This didn’t happen by accident. There was a lot of preparation even before COVID was first discovered that facilitated this. Organisations like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) have been supporting research to develop vaccines rapidly to respond to a new threat for some time.

CEPI has an ongoing program that aims to be able to develop a vaccine against a new threat, or disease X, in just 100 days. While COVID vaccines have been a huge achievement, work continues in the hope we will be able to develop a vaccine even faster next time.

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

Paul Griffin is a director and scientific advisory board member of the immunisation coalition. He has served on Medical Advisory Boards including for AstraZeneca, GSK, MSD, Moderna, Biocelect/Novavax, Seqirus and Pfizer and has received speaker honoraria including from Seqirus, Novartis, Gilead, Sanofi, MSD and Janssen.

– ref. One of science’s greatest achievements: how the rapid development of COVID vaccines prepares us for future pandemics – https://theconversation.com/one-of-sciences-greatest-achievements-how-the-rapid-development-of-covid-vaccines-prepares-us-for-future-pandemics-228787

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Cinner, Professor & ARC Laureate Fellow, Thriving Oceans Research Hub, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney

Ocean fish populations have fallen dramatically in the past half-century, and climate change is expected to make the problem worse. Governments have designated “marine protected areas”, where where human activity is constrained to protect ocean life. But have these efforts worked?

About 8% of Earth’s oceans are protected, including about 3% where fishing is banned altogether. Our new study of nearly 2,600 tropical coral reefs around the world is the first to examine whether these areas have helped fish populations.

We found about one in ten kilograms of fish on coral reefs is the result of efforts such as marine protected areas and other restrictions on fishing. This is promising news. But our study also reveals great room for improvement.

Getting to grips with marine protection

Maintaining healthy fish populations is important. Many communities depend on fishing for their food and livelihoods. And fish play a vital role in ocean ecosystems.

Marine protected areas are a key policy tool used to increase fish populations. They cover a range of ocean areas including lagoons, coastal waters, deep seabed waters and coral reefs.

The areas go by several names, including marine parks and conservation zones. Some, where fishing is prohibited, are known as no-take zones.

Governments often quote figures on the area of ocean protected when seeking to tout their conservation policies. For example in Australia, we are told the federal, state and territory governments have established marine parks covering 4.3 million square kilometres or 48% of our oceans.

But the extent to which marine protected areas actually conserve marine life varies enormously from place to place. So simply counting up the protected ocean area doesn’t tell you much about what has actually been achieved.

Measuring success

We and our colleagues wanted to assess the extent to which marine protection efforts have increased the amount of fish on coral reefs.

We developed a computer model based on about 2,600 reefs across the global tropics, which includes reefs in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceans. From that, we estimated the amount of fish currently on each reef – measured in the kilograms of fish per hectare, or “biomass”.

The estimations were based on information such as:

• environmental conditions such as ocean temperature and the type of habitat where the reef is located

• the intensity of fishing activity, known as “fishing pressure”

• how strong the protection is – for example whether it bans fishing, or just restricts it

• the level of compliance with no-take zones.

We then simulated what would happen if we changed the type of protection strategy in each location while keeping everything else the same.

We ran a few scenarios:

• no coral reef conservation existed anywhere and all reefs could be fished without constraint

• sites currently fished without constraint (which amounted to over half of our sites) had restrictions in place

• fishing was prohibited on 30% of all reefs.

And the results?

We found both marine protected areas and other fishing restrictions account for about 10% of the fish “biomass” on reefs. In other words, about one in ten kilograms of fish on coral reefs is due to protection efforts.

No-take zones punch above their weight. Of the fish biomass attributable to protection efforts, about 20% comes from just 3% of sites in no-take zones. This proportion would be even higher if illegal fishing in no-take zones was stamped out.

But we found any type of fishing restriction was useful. If everywhere currently fished without constraint was subject to some level of protection – such as banning nets or spear guns – the biomass of fish globally would be another 10.5% higher, our study found. This essentially matches all conservation efforts to date.

Our modelling also showed fish on coral reefs could be increased by up to 28% globally if the area of no-take zones rose to 30%.

But these reefs must be chosen strategically. That’s because protection strategies can lead to wildly different results, depending on local conditions. For example, sites with lower fishing pressure in the surrounding seascape got a bigger boost from protection than places surrounded by intensive fishing effort.

This may be because at heavily fished locations, algae often overtakes coral as the dominant feature. Algae is less fish-friendly than coral, so fish populations may not bounce back quickly even when fishing pressure is reduced.

Grounds for optimism

Our study tested the mettle of global coral reef conservation. On one hand, we found conservation efforts have made a contribution to the amount of fish on global coral reefs, which provides grounds for cautious optimism.

But on the other hand, this contribution is quite modest. Our study shows much greater gains could be made not only by expanding protected marine areas, but also by improving compliance in existing ones.

Most nations have signed a global agreement to protect 30% of Earth’s land and waters by 2030. That means the amount of ocean in marine protected areas globally will increase nearly fourfold in just six years.

As governments continue this task, we hope our results help identify ocean sites that will benefit most from protection.

Joshua Cinner receives funding from the Australian Research Council and National Geographic Society. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the International Coral Reef Society.

Iain R. Caldwell is affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society

– ref. Ocean protection accounts for 10% of fish in the world’s coral reefs – but we could save so much more – https://theconversation.com/ocean-protection-accounts-for-10-of-fish-in-the-worlds-coral-reefs-but-we-could-save-so-much-more-239188

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew White, Lecturer and Researcher Australian Catholic University, Australian Catholic University

School tutoring is a huge business. Australian estimates suggest it was worth more than of A$1.5 billion as of 2021.

In Australia, we see frequent media reports of parents using tutors to help their children through school.

How can you tell if tutoring is right for your child?

What is tutoring?

Private tutoring can be take many forms, but involves parents paying for additional lessons outside of schools hours. These are either one-to-one or in small groups.

There are services available for students in primary school through to senior high school.

Some tutoring services target specific skills, such as literacy or numeracy. Others offer support for young people with organisation skills and homework or preparation for certain exams.

Tutoring can go for a short burst over a few weeks to prepare for an exam or it may be regular and ongoing to maintain learning.

Why do people get tutoring?

Families can get tutoring for a student for a wide range of reasons.

A child may be struggling with certain elements of schooling – such as reading, writing, or maths. Tutoring can provide an opportunity to catch-up with tailored support.

Tutoring can also help children prepare for tests and exams, such as NAPLAN or Year 12.

Tutoring is used to prepare students for government selective school programs or private school scholarship exams.

Researchers have highlighted some cultural backgrounds see investing in tutoring as an essential part of educating their children and helping them reach their full potential.

The tutoring debate

Tutoring can be expensive and time consuming for families. Families may pay between $30 and $200 a session, depending on the subject and qualifications of the tutor.

Some argue this gives some children an unfair advantage and students should instead rely on their natural ability.

Despite the criticism, there are benefits to tutoring. This includes giving students extra opportunities to consolidate their knowledge – we know this can help students learn.

It can also help build their confidence if a tutor can step through learning in a less pressured environment. As my research has shown, academic progress relies heavily on a students’ belief in their capacity to succeed.

Does my child need a tutor?

All students can benefit from personalised support and coaching in whatever they wish to peruse. However, all students do not need a tutor. The choice to engage a tutor should be attached to a goal that you and your child agree on.

If the young person does not want to engage in tutoring having a tutor is not going to help. Rather, it is more likely to lead to stress and arguments.

It may help to talk to your child’s teacher and review school reports before starting with a tutor to work out which particular areas need extra attention.

If your shared goal is to catch up or help with certain academic skills, it is important to find a tutor who is experienced and can explain the approach they take and what evidence it is based on.

If the goal is organisation, homework or even just to improve confidence, you could at first try a university student who has past success themselves or with other students. For more specialised goals, seek out tutors who are open about their qualifications, experience and past success.

Child safety should also be a consideration. The Australian Tutoring Association provides practical advice for parents choosing a tutor and a code of conduct for tutors.

There is no requirement for tutors to be a member of the association. So parents should make sure any tutor has a current Working with Children check. You can of course also talk to other parents and teachers for recommendations.

Matthew White 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. I think my child might need a tutor. What do I need to consider first? – https://theconversation.com/i-think-my-child-might-need-a-tutor-what-do-i-need-to-consider-first-240091

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander H. Beare, Lecturer in Media, University of Adelaide

HBO’s latest crime drama The Penguin came with a flood of memes on TikTok, X and Instagram. They compare actor Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobblepot to James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano.

It’s true, there are undeniable similarities between the two portrayals and shows. HBO’s official TikTok account went so far as to upload an edit of The Penguin trailer cut to the rhythm of Alabama 3’s Woke Up This Morning – the title theme for The Sopranos.

Running for six seasons from 1999 to 2007, The Sopranos is enjoying a sustained cultural relevancy in 2024 – something other prestige dramas of the same era such as Six Feet Under and The Shield have not achieved. A new two-part documentary about the making of the The Sopranos just premiered on HBO, 25 years after the show made its debut.

For the last couple of years, fans have been discovering the show and making it their own. But how does it fit the present moment?

The Sopranos as catharsis

My research and upcoming book is based on in-depth interviews with a group of new Sopranos fans all aged between 19–26. In other words, not old enough to have watched the show when it first aired.

During the pandemic, The Sopranos saw a surge in viewership and interest that outstripped its contemporaries like Deadwood.

Superficially, the show is visually comparable to COVID lockdown. Tony and his kids are regularly shown sleeping in, dressed in baggy clothes, and shuffling around the kitchen picking at cold cuts.

For those I spoke with, viewing The Sopranos wasn’t a way to escape from lockdown: it was a way to purge pent-up emotion.

For Darcy, the show became:

Like a cathartic tool, like, I can relate, this is how life feels right now […] A bit of relief, and a sense of relatability, you know? It was always comforting when things are not good.

Tom shared this feeling:

One of the cool things about The Sopranos is that a lot of the stuff is really mundane […] It’s about drudgery more than anything […] That’s what lockdown feels like – and it definitely is what a lot of daily life feels like […] it’s those moments of opening up the fridge and just eating like 20 slices of gabagool because you can’t be fucked making something to eat.

The Sopranos as nostalgia

The Sopranos is a profoundly negative show and yet it was being viewed by the young people I spoke to through quite an optimistic lens.

Alannah said:

It makes me feel nostalgic for a time when things felt a little bit like […] simpler, even though they have complications. It just seemed like a good stage of history to be in.

In a similar vein, Callum positively characterised this feeling as an “added bonus” that “drew him into watching the show”. Selina fondly remembered the fashion and music of the show.

Watching with a new lens

During its original run, The Sopranos was often lauded by scholars for its deconstruction of patriarchal masculinity. This was not so much the case for the people I spoke to.

Alannah worried The Sopranos could easily be placed in the toxic online “manosphere”:

[The Sopranos is] like Fight Club and American Psycho. White dudes will watch it and be like, ‘Yeah, this is fucking sick – that’s me man’. And it’s like, you don’t want to be these people! You have to criticise it yourself because it is not overt in my opinion.

Stuart expressed a similar concern about The Sopranos’ ability to be a dangerous power fantasy.

In his experience with online Sopranos content, he observed:

[There are fans] who see Tony Soprano as the ideal man and don’t notice that the show is supposed to be critiquing his behaviour.

These concerns about “misunderstanding” the show very much reflect current anxieties. The reporting about how the 2019 Joker film might incite violence from white men provides a salient reference point for these worries.

For the new viewers I spoke to, there was a real concern The Sopranos could combine dangerously with today’s toxic misogynistic online content. They were worried Tony Soprano could be interpreted as a celebration of patriarchal masculinity rather than a critique.

Born under a bad sign

In 2024, The Sopranos is still managing to click with new audiences. But these fans interpret the show differently and take new meaning from it. When we look at their responses, we can see how The Sopranos intersects with the attitudes and anxieties of modern audiences.

Next time you see a meme about Tony Soprano, consider what context today’s viewers place him in – and whether an audience from 20 years ago would have done the same. Today, he might be considered even more dangerous.

Alexander H. Beare 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. Still with the Tony Soprano memes? Young audiences are watching the series with fresh eyes – https://theconversation.com/still-with-the-tony-soprano-memes-young-audiences-are-watching-the-series-with-fresh-eyes-237982

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Vonasch, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Canterbury

If you’re offered a free cookie, you might say yes. But if you’re paid to eat a free cookie, would your response be the same?

In our new research, twice as many people were willing to eat a cookie when they weren’t offered payment compared with when they were.

From a purely economic perspective, our findings reflect irrational decision making. Objectively, a cookie plus money is better than just a cookie.

But people aren’t purely economic. They’re social animals with a tendency to look for hidden reasons behind other people’s behaviours.

In the case of overly generous deals, people are expecting a “phantom cost” – one hidden in the initial offer. And this expectation influences their decision to accept something or not.

Research participants who were offered a free cookie plus payment thought maybe the cookies were poisoned. Or maybe someone spat on them. Or they expected they would then owe a favour to the person handing out the treats once the cookie was eaten.

Too good to be true

Our cookies study was just one of ten experiments involving 4,205 participants in the United States and Iran.

We tested how phantom costs influenced people’s choices to accept or reject overly generous economic offers.

Each study gave people an offer. They had to decide whether to accept or not, and then explain why.

One study asked participants to imagine they were a truck driver and looking online for a job. All the jobs were described the same way, but we varied the wage. People offered the normal US$15 per hour were perfectly willing to take the job.

Others were offered more than the normal wage. The participants in this group imagined phantom costs. And the higher the wage they were offered, the worse the costs they imagined.

When offered $20 or $25 per hour, participants imagined the role involved more responsibilities or harder work. But they considered this to be worth it. Most people preferred a job that paid a bit more than normal, despite the expectation of phantom costs.

However, when we offered way too much money – more than $900 per hour – most people rejected the job they were willing to do for $15.

Why? They imagined far worse phantom costs: driving for the mob, carrying dangerous radioactive waste or smuggling drugs across the border. A suspiciously high hourly rate or wage can end up putting people off.

Suspicion is global

We repeated this experiment with different jobs, different normal wages, and in different countries.

In both the US and Iran, despite very different types of economy, people showed the same pattern of suspicion and rejected very high wages. The only difference was that in Iran the expected wages were lower, so the wages didn’t have to be high by US standards to become suspicious.

Another experiment tested how phantom costs could affect purchases of plane tickets involving a hypothetical choice between three flights.

One cost $235, another $275. When the third option was $205, most people chose that. However, if the third option was $15, hardly anyone chose the cheapest flight. They rejected it because they imagined horrible phantom costs such as terrorists and plane crashes.

However, when we provided a reason for the low price – very uncomfortable seats – most people preferred the $15 flight. Uncomfortable seats are not usually a selling point. But they explained the cheap price, so people didn’t search for other, dangerous explanations.

Sufficient explanations for something being a great deal remove people’s tendency to imagine phantom costs.

A good offer, not a suspicious one

Businesses face a balancing act when it comes to offering customers a good deal.

On the one hand, the expectation of phantom costs decreases interest in the offer. On the other hand, price-sensitive consumers are often looking for ways to get the best deal.

To avoid the pitfalls of phantom costs, businesses need to communicate their reasons for offering a particularly good deal. A “holiday sale” or “end-of-season sale”, for example, may explain why items are discounted.

In the job market, identifying “good performance” as a reason for an employee’s pay raise can sidestep the expectation of hidden downsides – such as an increased workload.

It’s clear people are not merely self-interested economic beings. We’re savvy, psychological beings capable of reading into the motivations of others to protect ourselves from offers that seem too good to be true.

Andrew Vonasch 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. Too good to be true? New study shows people reject freebies and cheap deals for fear of hidden costs – https://theconversation.com/too-good-to-be-true-new-study-shows-people-reject-freebies-and-cheap-deals-for-fear-of-hidden-costs-238869

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sukhmani Khorana, Associate Professor, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW Sydney

SBS’s new romantic drama Four Years Later comes in the middle of an eventful week for cultural diversity in the Australian media.

On one hand, there was a scathing review that revealed systemic racism across the ABC. On the other, there was the release of Media Diversity Australia’s Race Reporting Toolkit, intended to give journalists tools to report without resorting to racial stereotyping.

Four Years Later, an eight-part series commissioned by Screen Australia and SBS, epitomises the tension of making and watching racialised media in the current climate. The series follows an Indian couple, Sri (Shahana Goswami) and Yash (Akshay Ajit Singh), as they reunite in Australia after being forced to spend four years apart so Yash can complete his medical traineeship.

The series comes 14 years after writer and producer Mithila Gupta first introduced an Indian family to the long-running soap Neighbours. But is an Australian audience ready for content that doesn’t translate the non-white parts for a white audience?

This question may be redundant because the Australian audience itself is changing.

The changing face of Australian content

My and my colleagues’ interviews with intergenerational migrant audiences have revealed it’s largely the children of migrants who wish for more onscreen diversity to reflect their own lives. We also found young people of colour were turning away from Australian broadcasters to find said diversity on streaming platforms.

Four Years Later comes at a time when South Asian-Australian stories are finally creating ripples in Australia’s art sector, led in no small part by the success of the epic 2019 play Counting and Cracking.

Following the success of Netflix’s diverse Heartbreak High reboot, it’s heartening to see a public broadcaster take the “risk” of producing a series led by two Indian-Australian characters.

As a scholar of migrants’ screen media, and someone who has been part of the Indian-Australian community for more than two decades, I’ve been party to countless conversations about how to authentically tell stories of Indian diaspora onscreen. This felt even more pressing in an Australian context as South Asian creatives in the United States and United Kingdom began gaining recognition for their outputs.

Having said that, it would be remiss to describe Four Years Later as just an Indian-Australian love story. Although it’s about migrants experiencing great precariousness while establishing themselves in Australia (and while still facing pressures from back home), the series has many universal elements.

It would appeal to most millennials trying to find themselves amid global crises and ticking clocks.

Countering stereotypes

While watching the show, I found the scenes set in India especially refreshing. The father’s typical patriarchal attitudes notwithstanding, the young characters display a kind of nuance that helps to counter common stereotypes about Indian people and culture.

For instance, Sri uses dating apps and attends meetings unchaperoned. And while she and Yash meet through a matchmaker arranged by their parents, their romance blossoms despite their families – not because of them. Also, despite being a stoic and dutiful son, Yash chooses Sri against his father’s wishes.

Both characters make mistakes and evolve during the four years between their wedding in India and reconvening in Sydney. However, Sri’s character stands out as being particularly flawed, making it an authentic and groundbreaking representation of a woman of colour onscreen.

The freedom Sri always craved – but only begins to inhabit in beach-side Australian settings in her late 30s – isn’t what you would expect from a kurta-clad Indian woman who has just arrived in a new country. You’re more likely to encounter images of such women behind a stove or a pram, rather than having a dip in the ocean.

Four Years Later is perhaps better described as a closeted feminist coming-of-age tale, rather than an immigrant love story. While there’s no dearth of feisty female leads in English-language literature coming out of India, seeing this narrative on Australian screens will be incredibly legitimising for local diaspora.

The series also signals how personal agency can and does exist within “collectivist cultures” that are viewed as highly patriarchal and hierarchical.

Opportunities for change

Four Years Later features a range of diverse peripheral characters. These include the second-generation brown anaesthetist who supervises Yash, a Syrian woman who works as a cleaner in the hospital (and doubles as Yash’s friend and love interest), and Sri’s white Australian friend who runs a café.

A second season could explore these relationships and story arcs in more depth. It could, for instance, investigate how many migrants of colour are vested in gaining social capital in new environments – and aren’t just chasing economic aspirations. It could also explore migrant stigmas around mental health, which are alluded to in Yash’s panic attacks.

Such shows have an opportunity to present nuanced narratives that both challenge and enrich viewers’ perspectives. They can also strike a balance between community-specific issues and universal themes in a way that Australia’s news media – grappling as it is with racism and bias – could learn from.

Four Years Later is available on SBS On Demand.

Sukhmani Khorana receives funding from the Australia Research Council, and has previously received funding from Diversity Arts Australia.

– ref. SBS’s Four Years Later is an immigrant love story that pushes the boundaries of onscreen representation – https://theconversation.com/sbss-four-years-later-is-an-immigrant-love-story-that-pushes-the-boundaries-of-onscreen-representation-240219

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yvonne Middlewick, Nurse, Lecturer & Director of Post-graduate Studies in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Edith Cowan University

Menopause is having a bit of a moment, with less stigma and more awareness about the changes it can bring.

A recent senate inquiry recommended public education about perimenopause and menopause, more affordable treatments and flexible work arrangements.

But like many things in life the experiences of menopause are on a continuum. While some women find it challenging and require support, others experience some physical and emotional benefits. These are rarely reported – but we can learn from the research available and, importantly, from people’s lived experiences.

Here are four changes to look forward to once you reach menopause.

1. No more periods or related issues

Menopause is considered “complete” 12 months after the final period of a woman (or person assigned female at birth) who previously menstruated.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the benefit at the top of the list is no more periods (unless you are taking hormone therapy and still have your womb). This can be particularly beneficial for women who have had to manage erratic, unpredictable and heavy bleeding.

At last, you don’t need to keep sanitary protection in every bag “just in case”. No more planning where the bathroom is or having to take extra clothes. And you’ll save money by not purchasing sanitary products.

There is also good news for women who have had heavy bleeding due to uterine fibroids – common benign gynaecological tumours that affect up to 80% of women. The evidence suggests hormonal changes (for women not taking hormone therapy) can lead to a reduction in the size of fibroids and relieve symptoms.

Women who suffer from menstrual migraine may experience an improvement in migraines post-menopause as their hormonal fluctuations begin to settle – but the timeframe for this remains unclear.

For some women, no more periods also means more participation in social activities from which they may have been excluded due to periods. For example, religious activities or food preparation in some cultures.

2. Getting your body and your groove back

Throughout their reproductive lives, women in heterosexual relationships are usually the ones expected to be proactive about preventing pregnancy.

Some post-menopausal women describe a re-emergence of their sexuality and a sense of sexual freedom that they had not previously experienced (despite contraceptive availability) as there is no longer a risk of pregnancy.

A participant in my research into women’s experiences of menopause described the joy of no longer being child-bearing age:

I’ve got a body back for me, you know, coz I can’t get pregnant, not that I haven’t enjoyed having [children] and things like that and it was a decision to get pregnant but I feel like, ooh my body isn’t for anybody now but me, people, you know?

For women who have chosen to be child-free there may also be a sense of freedom from social expectations. People will likely stop asking them when they are planning to have children.

3. A new chapter and a time to focus on yourself

Another participant described menopause as an unexpected “acceleration point” for change.

Women told us they were more accepting of themselves and their needs rather than being focused on the needs of other people. Researchers have previously tracked this shift from “living for others” to “a life of one’s own”.

Some women find the strength of emotions at this time a challenge, whereas others find their potency can facilitate liberation – enabling them to speak their minds or be more assertive than at any other time in their lives.

4. Increased self-confidence

A new sense of liberation can fuel increased self-confidence at menopause. This has been reported in studies based on in-depth interviews with women.

Confidence boosts can coincide with changes in career and sometimes in relationships as priorities and self-advocacy transform.

Life on the other side

It can be hard to think about what is good about menopause, particularly if you are having challenges during perimenopause – but these can get better with time.

In cultures where women are valued as they become older, women describe themselves as positively contributing to the community. They find they gain power and respect as they age.

We need to work towards more positive societal attitudes on this front. Our bodies change across the lifespan and are remarkable at every stage, including menopause.

Yvonne’s research was a completed as a PhD student at the University of Southampton.

– ref. Is there anything good about menopause? Yep, here are 4 things to look forward to – https://theconversation.com/is-there-anything-good-about-menopause-yep-here-are-4-things-to-look-forward-to-239725

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Hoffmann, Professor of Economics, Tasmanian Behavioural Lab, University of Tasmania

Efforts to redress global inequality are facing an unexpected adversary: the white saviour. It’s the idea that people of colour, whether in the Global South or North, need “saving” by a white Western person or aid worker.

An eclectic mix of white activists have been publicly accused of being white saviours for trying to help different causes in the Global South. They include celebrities who adopted orphaned children, organised benefit concerts such as Live Aid, or called out rights abuses.

Others include professional and volunteer charity workers and journalists reporting on poverty in Africa. Even activism at home can earn the white saviour label, like efforts to refine the proposal for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in Australia.

We conducted a series of studies with 1,991 representative Australians to find out what people thought made a white saviour, how charity appeal photographs create this impression, and how it affected donations.

White saviourism and charities

The concern is that white people’s overseas charity, even when well-meaning, can inadvertently hurt rather than help the cause. It could perpetuate harmful stereotypes of white superiority, disempower local people, or misdirect resources to make helpers feel good rather than alleviating genuine need.

The fear of being labelled a white saviour could make people think twice about giving time or money to worthy causes. It might stop aid organisations using proven appeals to raise donations they need.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), for instance, released a video apologising for using photos depicting white people in aid settings and which aren’t representative of the majority local staff they employ.

Therein lies the dilemma: white donors can relate to photos of white helpers, but this is easily interpreted as white savourism.

What makes someone a white saviour?

Very little research exists into exactly what white saviourism means. Broadly, it seems to describe people in the Global North who support international causes for selfish reasons, to satisfy their own sentimentality and need for a positive image. We wanted to go deeper.

In the first of our studies, we showed our participants 26 photographs depicting different Global South aid settings with a white helper.

The helpers that participants thought of as highly “white saviour” typically had these characteristics:

• they appeared to be privileged and superior

• they gave help sentimentally and tokenistically

• they conformed to the colonial stereotype of the helpless local and powerful foreigner.

Further analysis showed these characteristics boil down to two essential features: ineffectiveness of the help and entitlement of the helpers.

These two perceptions of the white saviour explain the problem for charity. Behavioural economics research has identified two main reasons for donating, and these perceptions undermine both.

Why do people donate at all?

So to see how much white saviourism affects charities, we need to know why people donate in the first place.

One reason for giving is pure altruism, the desire to help others with no direct benefit to oneself. The effective altruism movement encourages people to make every donated dollar count – getting the maximum bang for the buck in terms of measurable outcomes for those in need.

The difficulty for effective altruists is in assessing the impact of different charities vying for their donations. There are now websites that list charities by lives saved per dollar donated.

Read more:
How white saviourism harms international development

Alternatively, donors might look at a charity’s appeal images for clues of how effectively it will use their dollars.

Depicting white people as saviours can create the impression of tokenistic aid that only serves the helper’s sentimental needs. Evidence shows people resent impure motives in others (including organisations) and might try to penalise them.

Behavioural economics research also shows, as you might expect, that some people are more concerned about themselves than others when giving. This is known as “warm glow” giving.

Warm glow givers have several self-serving motivations. They include giving to gain self-respect or social status.

People also have a desire to meet their social obligations. For richer folks this could include charitable giving. And giving can reduce guilt they might feel about their privilege.

Just like the effective altruist, the warm glow giver could be put off by any sign of white saviourism. They don’t want to be seen to be endorsing it.

Do people still donate?

All this suggests that seeing a white saviour depiction in a charitable appeal will make people donate less.

We examined this in another study, in which participants were shown each of the previous photos. This time they were asked, for every photo, if they were willing to donate to a charity that uses it.

And as we thought, the photos previously rated as high in white saviourism had low intentions to donate.

But intentions do not always equal actions, as psychologist have demonstrated for many years.

To overcome this, we measured real donations in another study. Again participants saw the same photos, but this time they had the chance to donate part of their participation fee to a real charity when seeing them.

What we found surprised us: the white saviour effect disappeared. How high a photo was on the white saviour scale had no impact on how much participants donated when seeing it.

Does the end justify the motivation?

Our results summarise the dilemma. Donors might object to white saviourism by charities, but in the end feel that it’s the help that counts, not the motivation behind it.

We found some evidence for this when we asked participants about their general views of white saviourism.

Almost 70% agreed that white saviour motives are common in Western help and that this was problematic for recipients. But interestingly, only 42% thought helpers with these motives deserved criticism.

Together, this might suggest that people feel white saviour help is better than no help. There are voices in the charity community who echo this sentiment: imposing conditions on charitable giving will serve to reduce it.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Elise Westhoff, president of the Philanthropy Roundtable in the United States, said “by imposing those ‘musts’ and ‘shoulds’, you really limit human generosity”.

But this doesn’t mean there are no legitimate concerns. There are, but it’s not hard for charities to address them.

Our results show that white saviour perceptions do not affect actual donations, so read another way, suggests charities can safely replace highly white saviour images without losing donations for their causes.

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. People don’t like a ‘white saviour’, but does it affect how they donate to charity? – https://theconversation.com/people-dont-like-a-white-saviour-but-does-it-affect-how-they-donate-to-charity-239307

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

The United States presidential election will be held on November 5. In analyst Nate Silver’s aggregate of national polls, Democrat Kamala Harris leads Republican Donald Trump by 49.3–46.2, a slight gain for Trump since last Monday, when Harris led Trump by 49.3–46.0.

Joe Biden’s final position before his withdrawal as Democratic candidate on July 21 was a national poll deficit against Trump of 45.2–41.2.

In economic data, the US added 254,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate slid 0.1% to 4.1%. The unemployment rate had peaked at 4.3% in July.

The US president isn’t elected by the national popular vote, but by the Electoral College, in which each state receives electoral votes equal to its federal House seats (population based) and senators (always two). Almost all states award their electoral votes as winner-takes-all, and it takes 270 electoral votes to win (out of 538 total).

Relative to the national popular vote, the Electoral College is biased to Trump, with Harris needing at least a two-point popular vote win to be the Electoral College favourite in Silver’s model.

In the key states, Harris remains ahead in Silver’s poll aggregates by one to two points in Pennsylvania (19 electoral votes), Michigan (15), Wisconsin (ten) and Nevada (six). If Harris wins these four states, she probably wins the Electoral College by at least 276–262. Trump leads by 0.5 points in North Carolina (16 electoral votes), one point in Georgia (16) and 1.2 points in Arizona (11).

Read more:
Kamala Harris the slight favourite to win US election as she narrowly leads in key states

In Silver’s model, Harris has a 56% chance to win the Electoral College, unchanged since last Monday’s article. The FiveThirtyEight model was more favourable to Harris in September, but now gives her a 55% chance to win. It’s close to a 50–50 probability for either candidate, but Harris remains a slight favourite.

There are still more than four weeks to go until the election, so there’s time for the polls to change and for one candidate to have a decisive Electoral College advantage on election day. Or the polls could be understating either Harris or Trump, in which case the candidate that benefits from the poll error could have a decisive win.

Thumping lead for LNP in Queensland

The Queensland state election is on October 26. A Freshwater poll for The Financial Review, conducted September 26–29 from a sample of 1,067, gave the Liberal National Party (LNP) a 56–44 lead, a five-point gain for the LNP since the previous Freshwater poll in July 2023.

Primary votes were 43% LNP (up three), 30% Labor (down four), 12% Greens (up one), 8% One Nation (up one) and 7% for all Others (down one).

Labor Premier Steven Miles had a net approval of -5, while LNP leader David Crisafulli had a +15 net approval. Crisafulli led Miles by 46–38 as preferred premier.

The poll asked about the federal leaders’ Queensland ratings, with Anthony Albanese at net -17, while Peter Dutton was at net zero. Queensland is a Coalition-friendly state at federal elections relative to the national results.

Federal Newspoll quarterly data

On September 30, The Australian released aggregate data for the four Newspolls taken from July to September, which had a combined sample size of 5,035. The Poll Bludger said the Coalition led in New South Wales by 51–49, unchanged on the June quarter.

In Victoria, Labor led by 52–48, a two-point gain for the Coalition. In Queensland, the Coalition led by an unchanged 54–46. In Western Australia, Labor led by an unchanged 52–48. In South Australia, Labor led by 54–46, a one-point gain for Labor.

The Poll Bludger’s BludgerTrack data shows the results by educational attainment. In the September quarter, Labor led by 53–47 among university-educated people, a one-point gain for Labor. With TAFE-educated people, there was a 50–50 tie, a one-point gain for the Coalition. Those with no tertiary education favoured the Coalition by 51–49, a one-point gain for the Coalition.

Coalition gains lead in Morgan poll

A national Morgan poll, conducted September 23–29 from a sample of 1,668, gave the Coalition a 51–49 lead, a 1.5-point gain for the Coalition since the September 16–22 Morgan poll.

Primary votes were 38% Coalition (up 0.5), 30% Labor (down two), 13.5% Greens (up one), 4.5% One Nation (down 0.5), 9.5% independents (steady) and 4.5% others (up one).

The headline figure uses respondent preferences. But if preferences were assigned using the 2022 election flows, Labor led by 51.5–48.5, a 0.5-point gain for the Coalition. There was an unusually large gap last week between the two measures.

Resolve poll on Middle East conflict

Voting intentions have not yet been released from a national Resolve poll for Nine newspapers that was conducted October 1–5 from a sample of 1,606. Regarding the political response in Australia to the Middle East conflict, 22% thought Dutton and the Liberals had responded best, 18% Albanese and Labor and 6% Adam Bandt and the Greens, while 55% said none had responded best or were unsure.

On Australia’s actions, 23% thought we should voice in-principle support for Israel, 12% Gaza and 65% both or none. On accepting refugees, 52% don’t want any refugees accepted, 24% would accept refugees from either Israel or Gaza, 13% Gaza only and 11% Israel only.

Adrian Beaumont 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. Kamala Harris maintains narrow lead in key states in US presidential race – https://theconversation.com/kamala-harris-maintains-narrow-lead-in-key-states-in-us-presidential-race-240117

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Townsend, Research Fellow, UQ School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences, The University of Queensland

A new portrait of NRL legend Wally Lewis conveys a striking message about the consequences of brain trauma in sport.

The portrait, created by visual artist Jamie van Leeuwen in cooperation with Lewis, is currently entered in the 2024 Brisbane Portrait Prize.

It uses artificial intelligence (AI) and traditional photography to depict Lewis contemplating his own brain, prompting viewers to consider the consequences of athletes subjecting their bodies (and brains) to a lifetime of physical trauma in contact sports.

It further suggests that art has an important role to play in science communication.

Heavy lies the crown

Lewis is one of Queensland’s most beloved figures and one of Australia’s greatest rugby league players.

His intelligence was matched by a rugged playing style. He thrilled crowds by appearing to relish hard tackles and seeking confrontation.

Lewis’ State of Origin performances for Queensland, the Australian representative team, and multiple clubs earned him the nickname “The King” and the “Emperor of Lang Park,” where he is celebrated with a life-size statue.

In short, it is difficult to overstate the affection many Queenslanders have for Lewis and the magnitude of his reputation in the Australian rugby league community.

The King speaks

Although rugby league gave a lot to Lewis, it also took a heavy toll.

After retiring he moved into broadcasting, becoming the long-term sports anchor for Channel Nine in Queensland.

In late 2006, he had two successive epileptic episodes on live television.

Following the second episode, Lewis announced publicly that he had been diagnosed with epilepsy during his playing career but hid the condition for decades. He further revealed his epilepsy was caused by repeated concussions.

More recently, Lewis has become one of the most prominent figures in the broader conversation around brain trauma in sport, particularly following his 2023 diagnosis of traumatic encephalopathy syndrome (TES), the symptomatic precursor of the brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

This diagnosis is likely linked to his lifetime accumulation of brain trauma in rugby league.

Who is listening?

Many Australian sports and athletes are being impacted by concussion, with a cacophony of experts and advocates attempting to make themselves heard.

Scientists, researchers, doctors, athletes, parents, families, and politicians are all straining to communicate the potentially serious consequences of brain trauma to the sporting public.

This portrait of Lewis cuts through the noise and conveys a complex and sometimes controversial narrative: the neurological consequences of contact sport can outweigh its benefits.

This is a particularly fraught conversation in light of a recent study that argued the opposite.

The King’s Battle

The portrait conveys the duality of contact sport in an instant.

As the artist states, the meaning of the piece is “about legacy […] both sides of legacy.”

Lewis’ successes are evidenced by the 1987 Maroons jersey he wears and the crown atop his head.

The costs are equally visible.

His wearied expression, the blood and grime on his collar and the disembodied brain resting in his palms prompt the viewer to imagine Lewis’s thoughts.

Is he re-imagining past victories? Planning an uncertain future? Harbouring fears for his fellow athletes?

After viewing the image for the first time, Lewis said:

It pretty much tells the story straight away […] there is great hope in the future that I’m going to be able to deal with some of the difficulties.

The image is emotionally freighted in a way that researchers and medical practitioners usually try to avoid, particularly in discussions about sports concussion where advocates for player safety have been accused of being overly emotional or scare-mongering.

The King’s Battle reminds us brain trauma is an emotional issue as much as a scientific one.

As ANU science media researcher Matt Ventresca says, some of the most effective advocates for player welfare are former and current athletes who “in the absence of scientific certainty, express fear about the health of their brains.”

Art and the future of science

Arts and science are often viewed as contradictory, but creative expressions like The King’s Battle should play a role in science communication.

Think Susan Sontag’s brilliant essay Illness as Metaphor or the haunting lyrical description of cancer in Blood by Australian band The Middle East.

The concussion crisis is a potent space for artistic representation – the 2015 film Concussion starring Will Smith is a landmark in public perceptions of brain trauma in sport.

The upcoming ABC television program Plum also tells the story of a brain damaged former sports star.

A 2024 portrait of former Australian NFL player Colin Scotts shows the consequences of a life in contact sport.

Artistic representations such as The King’s Battle are important because they bring home the consequences of brain trauma in ways that traditional science communication struggles to achieve.

It reminds us that understanding the emotion of health is just as important as understanding its scientific and medical aspects.

For CTE researchers, van Leeuwen’s portrait also carries abstract echoes of another hope for the future.

His use of AI technology to disembody Lewis’ brain in the artwork is reminiscent of current methods of CTE diagnosis: post-mortem removal and dissection of the brain.

The difference in The King’s Battle is that Lewis can look on the damage done to his brain while still very much alive.

In much the same way, we hope in the near future that technological advances will allow us to see CTE in the brains of living athletes and help them to live better lives with the disease.

Alan Pearce is currently unfunded. Alan is a non-executive director for the Concussion Legacy Foundation (unpaid position) and Adjunct research manager for the Australian Sports Brain Bank (unpaid position). He has previously received funding from Erasmus+ strategic partnerships program (2019-1-IE01-KA202-051555), Sports Health Check Charity (Australia), Australian Football League, Impact Technologies Inc., and Samsung Corporation, and is remunerated for expert advice to medico-legal practices.

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

– ref. Why a portrait of a former NRL great could spark greater concussion awareness in Australia – https://theconversation.com/why-a-portrait-of-a-former-nrl-great-could-spark-greater-concussion-awareness-in-australia-238882

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert G. Patman, Professor of International Relations, University of Otago

One of the political ironies of the race for the White House is that the foreign policy interests of New Zealand’s centre-right government are probably best served by Democratic candidate Kamala Harris winning.

Since the end of World War II, all New Zealand governments have supported multilateralism and an international rules-based order enshrined in the institutions of the United Nations.

The relationship with the United States has reflected that, and tends to outlast the periodic fluctuations associated with changes in government and policy in Wellington or Washington.

New Zealand’s current National-led coalition inherited close relations with the US, too. American visitor numbers were second only to Australians last year. The US is our third largest export market. And the two countries remain strategically linked within the Five Eyes intelligence sharing arrangement.

Nevertheless, one of the key foreign policy goals of the coalition is to strengthen alignment with traditional allies such as the US. Given the very different worldviews of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the November 5 election will have a large bearing on how successful any push for closer relations with the US can be.

Closer relations in the balance

On the one hand, Republican candidate Trump is opposed to multilateral institutions, unless they explicitly serve US national interests. And he wants to reverse the impact of globalisation by constraining immigration, free trade and global governance.

Nationalist slogans like “America First” promise a return to a so-called golden era of patriotism and sovereignty: a top-down world where the greatest power of all is unencumbered and free to assert its dominance.

On the other hand, Harris would seem to support a more traditional US foreign policy agenda. This recognises the importance of international institutions and alliances in a world where “isolation is not insulation”.

Whoever occupies the White House next, then, is likely to have a significant impact on New Zealand foreign policy.

Power plays and the Pacific

First, Trump’s belief in an international system run by great powers would seem to be a recipe for depriving smaller states like New Zealand of a voice on international issues that affect them.

Second, New Zealand’s regional focus on ties with Pacific Island nations – underpinned by close people-to-people links and a significant proportion of the country’s overseas development aid programme – is more likely to be complemented by a Harris foreign policy.

Outgoing president Joe Biden reversed decades of US neglect of much of the Pacific, which had played to the advantage of other external powers – notably China.

The Biden team launched the annual US-Pacific Islands Summit in 2022. And Kamala Harris played an active role in delivering US$800 million in development and climate assistance to Pacific Island nations in 2022-23.

Whether Trump will maintain this enhanced diplomatic and economic engagement in the Pacific (and elsewhere) is questionable. Similarly, after Biden rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, Trump will probably quit it for a second time.

AUKUS and Ukraine

Third, the New Zealand government faces the delicate task of navigating relations with an increasingly assertive China – the country’s biggest trade partner – while pursuing its goal of moving closer to the US.

Since March 2023, successive New Zealand governments have been considering joining an arrangement to share advanced defence technologies under pillar two of the AUKUS security partnership that aims to deter a rising China in the Indo-Pacific region.

It remains to be seen how China would react if New Zealand did join. But Trump’s insistence on US primacy in any multilateral agreement could make it more difficult for the government to win domestic support for pillar two membership.

Even outside the AUKUS debate, Trump is more likely to insist allies spend more on defence than they did traditionally.

Fourth, New Zealand has a big stake in the failure of Russia’s attempted annexation of Ukraine. Wellington’s interests are clearly more in line with Harris’ pledge to maintain support for Ukraine to restore its territorial integrity.

Trump’s promise to end the war within 24 hours, on the other hand, could probably only be achieved by giving Vladimir Putin what he wants.

The Middle East and the UN

Finally, there do not seem to be substantive policy differences between Trump and Harris on the catastrophic situation in Gaza, and increasingly Lebanon.

There remains a slim possibility a Harris administration might recognise unconditional support for the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu is not sustainable for a superpower whose foreign policy is supposed to be driven by universal values and respect for international law.

But this would be near impossible for Trump. Indeed, he would probably provide Netanyahu with even greater support.

Overall, the foreign policy interests of the National-led coalition seem to align more with a Harris presidency than one led by Trump.

But even if Harris wins, the alignment of interests will not be perfect. US exceptionalism – an informal ideology that claims the nation is a political exemplar for the rest of the world – and Washington’s veto power in the UN security Council are likely to remain constraining factors on the New Zealand-US relationship.

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. Could NZ foreign policy be Trumped? Why the government will be hoping Kamala Harris wins the US election – https://theconversation.com/could-nz-foreign-policy-be-trumped-why-the-government-will-be-hoping-kamala-harris-wins-the-us-election-240538

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

Medical experts recommend antivirals for people aged 70 and older who get COVID, and for other groups at risk of severe illness and hospitalisation from COVID.

But many older Australians have missed out on antivirals after getting sick with COVID. It is yet another way the health system is failing the most vulnerable.

Who missed out?

We analysed COVID antiviral uptake between March 2022 and September 2023. We found some groups were more likely to miss out on antivirals including Indigenous people, people from disadvantaged areas, and people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

Some of the differences will be due to different rates of infection. But across this 18-month period, many older Australians were infected at least once, and rates of infection were higher in some disadvantaged communities.

How stark are the differences?

Compared to the national average, Indigenous Australians were nearly 25% less likely to get antivirals, older people living in disadvantaged areas were 20% less likely to get them, and people with a culturally or linguistically diverse background were 13% less likely to get a script.

People in remote areas were 37% less likely to get antivirals than people living in major cities. People in outer regional areas were 25% less likely.

Even within the same city, the differences are stark. In Sydney, people older than 70 in the affluent eastern suburbs (including Vaucluse, Point Piper and Bondi) were nearly twice as likely to have had an antiviral as those in Fairfield, in Sydney’s south-west.

Older people in leafy inner-eastern Melbourne (including Canterbury, Hawthorn and Kew) were 1.8 times more likely to have had an antiviral as those in Brimbank (which includes Sunshine) in the city’s west.

Why are people missing out?

COVID antivirals should be taken when symptoms first appear. While awareness of COVID antivirals is generally strong, people often don’t realise they would benefit from the medication. They wait until symptoms get worse and it is too late.

Frequent GP visits make a big difference. Our analysis found people 70 and older who see a GP more frequently were much more likely to be dispensed a COVID antiviral.

Regular visits give an opportunity for preventive care and patient education. For example, GPs can provide high-risk patients with “COVID treatment plans” as a reminder to get tested and seek treatment as soon as they are unwell.

Difficulty seeing a GP could help explain low antiviral use in rural areas. Compared to people in major cities, people in small rural towns have about 35% fewer GPs, see their GP about half as often, and are 30% more likely to report waiting too long for an appointment.

Just like for vaccination, a GP’s focus on antivirals probably matters, as does providing care that is accessible to people from different cultural backgrounds.

Care should go those who need it

Since the period we looked at, evidence has emerged that raises doubts about how effective antivirals are, particularly for people at lower risk of severe illness. That means getting vaccinated is more important than getting antivirals.

But all Australians who are eligible for antivirals should have the same chance of getting them.

These drugs have cost more than A$1.7 billion, with the vast majority of that money coming from the federal government. While dispensing rates have fallen, more than 30,000 packs of COVID antivirals were dispensed in August, costing about $35 million.

Such a huge investment shouldn’t be leaving so many people behind. Getting treatment shouldn’t depend on your income, cultural background or where you live. Instead, care should go to those who need it the most.

People born overseas have been 40% more likely to die from COVID than those born here. Indigenous Australians have been 60% more likely to die from COVID than non-Indigenous people. And the most disadvantaged people have been 2.8 times more likely to die from COVID than those in the wealthiest areas.

All those at-risk groups have been more likely to miss out on antivirals.

It’s not just a problem with antivirals. The same groups are also disproportionately missing out on COVID vaccination, compounding their risk of severe illness. The pattern is repeated for other important preventive health care, such as cancer screening.

A 3-step plan to meet patients’ needs

The federal government should do three things to close these gaps in preventive care.

First, the government should make Primary Health Networks (PHNs) responsible for reducing them. PHNs, the regional bodies responsible for improving primary care, should share data with GPs and step in to boost uptake in communities that are missing out.

Second, the government should extend its MyMedicare reforms. MyMedicare gives general practices flexible funding to care for patients who live in residential aged care or who visit hospital frequently. That approach should be expanded to all patients, with more funding for poorer and sicker patients. That will give GP clinics time to advise patients about preventive health, including COVID vaccines and antivirals, before they get sick.

Third, team-based pharmacist prescribing should be introduced. Then pharmacists could quickly dispense antivirals for patients if they have a prior agreement with the patient’s GP. It’s an approach that would also work for medications for chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular disease.

COVID antivirals, unlike vaccines, have been keeping up with new variants without the need for updates. If a new and more harmful variant emerges, or when a new pandemic hits, governments should have these systems in place to make sure everyone who needs treatment can get it fast.

In the meantime, fairer access to care will help close the big and persistent gaps in health between different groups of Australians.

Grattan Institute has been supported in its work by government, corporates, and philanthropic gifts.

A full list of supporting organisations is published at www.grattan.edu.au.

– ref. Getting antivirals for COVID too often depends on where you live and how wealthy you are – https://theconversation.com/getting-antivirals-for-covid-too-often-depends-on-where-you-live-and-how-wealthy-you-are-239497

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Lowe, Director, Environment Institute, University of Adelaide

This week, Australia hosts the inaugural Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney. It comes at a crucial time: biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse is one of the biggest risks the world faces in the next decade.

The event, which begins tomorrow, brings together leaders from government, business, academia, environment groups and Indigenous Peoples. Together, they will seek ways to drive investment in nature and improve its protection and repair.

More than half the world’s economy directly depends on nature. Biodiversity loss threatens global financial stability, putting at least US$44 trillion (A$64 trillion) of economic value at risk.

Industries such as agriculture, fishing, forestry, tourism, water and resources rely heavily on nature. But ultimately, all of humanity depends on the natural world – for clean air, water, food, and a liveable climate.

In Australia significant investment is needed to reverse the decline in our natural environment. It will require action from governments, landholders and the private sector.

That’s why this week’s summit is so important. Nature conservation and restoration is expensive and often difficult. The task is beyond the capacity of governments alone.

What’s going on at the summit?

According to the World Economic Forum, “nature positive” is an economic worldview that goes beyond limiting environmental damage and aims to actually improve ecosystems.

Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, to which almost 200 countries have signed up, at least 30% of land and waters must be protected or restored by 2030. The summit is exploring ways to realise this global commitment, which is also known as the 30×30 target.

The federal and New South Wales governments are co-hosting the event.

Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek will address the summit on day one, outlining her government’s Nature Positive Plan. It commits to the 30×30 target as well as “zero new extinctions”. Achieving these commitments involves environmental law reform, setting up a Nature Repair Market and establishing a national Environment Protection Agency.

Delegates are expected to demonstrate their commitment and progress towards the 30×30 goal. They will then turn to the main point of the summit: building consensus on the economic settings needed to increase private investment in nature.

Finance models and corporate partnerships are on the agenda, along with how to make this work, including how to measure, monitor and report on progress and manage risk.

Sessions will focus on specific sectors of the environment such as agriculture and farming, cities, oceans and forests. On Thursday, delegates will visit nature sites around Sydney.

Investing in a market for nature repair

Substantial co-investment from the private sector, including landholders, will be required to repair and protect nature at the scale required.

Market-based approaches can drive private investment in natural resources. But most existing environmental markets focus on water and carbon. A more holistic approach, including nature repair, is needed.

Australia’s Nature Positive Plan includes building a nature repair market. This world-first measure is a legislated, national, voluntary biodiversity market in which individuals and organisations undertake nature repair projects to generate a tradeable certificate. The certificate can be sold to generate income. Demand for certificates is expected to grow over time.

But the role the government will take remains unclear. For example, will the government both regulate market prices and decide what, in a scientific sense, amounts to repairing nature?

On day two, the summit explores how nature markets can unlock new sources of finance. We can expect this discussion to include ways carbon and biodiversity markets can work together: so-called “carbon-plus” outcomes.

For example, when landholders conserve vegetation, the plants can both draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and provide habitat for animals, preventing biodiversity loss. Markets could be designed so landholders are rewarded for achieving these dual results.

Significant economic returns

Under optimistic estimates, the global nature-positive transition will unlock business opportunities worth an estimated US$10 trillion (almost A$15 trillion) a year and create 395 million jobs by 2030.

The potential benefits for Australia are also substantial. They include benefits to nature such as restoring habitat for wildlife, while storing carbon. It can also provide returns for agriculture, by improving land value, yield and quality.

A strong nature-positive stance from Australia will also help safeguard our access to global markets. For example, the European Union has already established trade barriers to imports that damage forests. This could have serious consequences for the Australian beef industry.

So the potential benefits have to be weighed against the risks of not doing anything. The summit is a chance to get a wide range of people on board, working towards a shared vision of a more positive future.

It’s time for a nature-positive mindset

The Albanese Labor government came to power promising to overhaul Australia’s national environment laws, following a scathing independent review.

When the summit was conceived, the government may have envisaged having cause for celebration by now. But some proposed reforms stalled in the Senate.

Nonetheless, the Nature Repair Market, a significant government win, is taking shape.

This week’s summit offers Australia an opportunity to show the world we have embraced the nature-positive mindset. There really is no time to waste.

Australia, the sixth most biodiverse country in the world, has listed 2,224 species and ecological communities as threatened with extinction. These losses are predicted to escalate if we continue business as usual and allow continued decline of ecosystems.

Despite having pledged to end deforestation by 2030, Australia is the only deforestation hotspot among developed nations. Land clearing continues apace in northern Australia, often without being assessed under national environmental laws.

We desperately need to reverse the decline in nature, once and for all.

Andrew Lowe receives funding from a range of national and international funding sources including the Australian Research Council, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, The International Tropical Timber Organization.

This article was crafted following conversations with the Advisory Committee of the Nature Positive Economy CRC bid, including Daisy Mallett – Lawyer / International Abitrator; Ian Overton – Principal, Natural Economy Consulting; Professor Hugh Possingham – University of Queensland; Nicki Hutley – Climate Council; Cheryl Hayman – Beston Global Food Company; Robert Waterworth – FLINTPro; Kate Andrews – NRM Regions Australia; Tim King – Melior Investment Management; Peter Boyd – Rozetta Institute; David Shelmerdine – ClimateWorks; Wendy Mackay – Pollination Group; Tim Jarvis – Fauna & Flora International; Jody Gunn – Australian Land Conservation Alliance; Joshua Bishop – University of Sydney; Phil Duncan – University of Canberra; Dr Paul Dalby – Rozetta Project Director.

– ref. Australia is hosting the world’s first ‘nature positive’ summit. What is it, and why does it matter? – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-hosting-the-worlds-first-nature-positive-summit-what-is-it-and-why-does-it-matter-236236

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lyndall Bryant, Lecturer in Property Economics, Queensland University of Technology

While there’s little relief in sight for Australia’s housing crisis, with new projects years away from completion, there appear to be as many as 13 million unused spare bedrooms across the country.

In a new briefing paper for the QUT Centre for Justice I suggest that, at least in the interim, these spare rooms ought to be part of the solution.

Here’s where you find them. The census says about 3.2 million Australian homes have one spare bedroom, another 3 million have two spare rooms and 1.2 million have three spare bedrooms or more.

They are more common in the homes of older than younger Australians.

A survey by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute found that more than three-quarters of homeowners aged 74 and older had spare rooms compared to less than two-thirds of homeowners aged 55 and younger.

These older owners are often “asset rich and income poor”. Most rely at least in part on the age pension and could do with the income that would come from renting out a room, so long as it didn’t cut into their pension or present them with a capital gains tax bill when their home is eventually sold.

My work suggests these fears are largely unfounded, even though it’s hard to convince many older Australians of that.

Rent needn’t mean income tax

The Tax Office has long provided for “domestic arrangements” and other arrangements where board and lodging provided at non-commercial rates is not considered assessable income for taxation purposes.

The downside is that expenses are not tax deductible.

These arrangements are said to occur when all residents including the owner bear an appropriate proportion of the costs actually incurred on food, electricity, heating and other costs of running the home.

“Homestay” for international students is an example. Homestay hosts can receive about $350 per week for providing a fully furnished room, main meals and utilities in an arrangement the Tax Office has ruled need not be taxable.

Rent needn’t cut off the pension

All pensioners are currently eligible for the work bonus scheme that allows additional earnings of up to $504 a fortnight for singles and $660 per fortnight for couples without loss of any pension.

It ought to be easy enough to apply the scheme to rent as well as income from work, as it arguably already does given that renting out spare bedrooms is a form of self-employment and hence “work”.

As important would be making pensioners aware of any changes or clarifications to the rules in a way that normalised “taking in boarders”.

Rent needn’t mean capital gains tax

Anecdotal evidence suggests homeowners fear that renting out a spare bedroom will make their home liable for the capital gains tax that applies to rented properties when they are eventually sold.

While this may be true in some situations, it is somewhat of an urban myth, and the amounts of tax involved can be small.

According to the Tax Office

• capital gains tax only applies to properties bought after September 20 1985

• any gain is taxed only at the marginal rate in the year the property is sold

• only half of each gain is taxed

• gains can be offset against capital losses

• only the net gain is taxed after costs.

And capital gains tax only applies for the portion of the home that is rented out, and for the portion of time it is rented out.

In my paper I explain how an apparent capital gain of $100,000 is taxed less where a room is only let for one year in five and is one of three bedrooms in the home, cutting the taxable capital gain to just $3,333.

If the very concept of the calculation remains a barrier, it might be possible to offer homeowners who let out rooms a short-term “capital gains tax holiday” for the next three to five years while new housing stock is being built.

Rules for safety and boarder matching essential

Another barrier is concern about safety, both personal and financial for older homeowners. Surprisingly, there are few rules governing boarding, with tenancy legislation saying little, forcing homeowners and tenants to rely on common law.

Australians letting out rooms need legislated protections from elder abuse and spurious claims of cohabitation and other rights.

Tenant matching and management systems could make the process simpler.

Imagine being able to walk into your local real estate agency and list your spare room to rent. If the agency offered boarder management services you could outline your preferences and ask it to put forward a list of candidates to interview.

Good matches would provide benefits for both older Australians and younger companions. Boarder management could become a new business model for real estate agents as well as non-profits.

Please note: This article does not provide tax or financial advice. It is general in nature and should not be relied on for taxation or financial purposes.

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

– ref. Australia has an extraordinary 13 million spare bedrooms. Here’s how to use at least some of them to ease the housing crisis – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-an-extraordinary-13-million-spare-bedrooms-heres-how-to-use-at-least-some-of-them-to-ease-the-housing-crisis-239490

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kerry Brown, Professor of Employment and Industry, School of Business and Law, Edith Cowan University

Should young people be paid less than their older counterparts, even if they’re working the same job? Whether you think it’s fair or not, it’s been standard practice in many industries for a long time.

The argument is that young people are not fully “work-ready” and require more intensive employer support to develop the right skills for their job.

But change could be on the horizon. Major unions and some politicians are pushing for reform – arguing “youth wages” should be scrapped entirely for adults.

Why? They say the need to be fairly paid for equal work effort, as well as economic considerations such as the high cost of living and ongoing housing crisis, mean paying young adults less based on their age is out of step with modern Australia.

So is there a problem with our current system, and if so, how might we go about fixing it?

What are youth wages?

In Australia, a youth wage or junior pay rate is paid as an increasing percentage of an award’s corresponding full adult wage until an employee reaches the age of 21.

This isn’t the case in every industry – some awards require all adults to be paid the same minimum rates.

But for those not covered by a specific award, as well as those working in industries including those covered by the General Retail Industry Award, Fast Food Industry Award and Pharmacy Industry Award, employees younger than 21 are not paid the full rate.

Why pay less?

Conventionally, junior rates have been thought of as a “training wage”. Younger people are typically less experienced, so as they gain more skills on the job over time, they are paid a higher hourly rate.

But there are a few key problems with this approach, which may not be relevant given many employers’ expectations for their workers to start “job-ready” and a lack of consistency in the training they provide.

Training up and developing skills is an important part of building any career. But it isn’t always provided by their employers.

Many young workers train themselves in job-related technical education and short courses, often at their own expense and prior to starting work.

Employers reap the benefit of this pre-employment training and so a “wage discount” for younger workers may be irrelevant in this instance.

None of this is to say employers aren’t offering something important when they take on young employees.

Younger workers coming into employment relatively early have access to more than just a paid job, but also become part of a team, with responsibilities and job requirements that support “bigger-picture” life skills.

Those who employ them may be contributing to their broader social and cultural engagement, something that could be considered part of a more inclusive training package. Whether that justifies a significant wage discount is less clear.

Read more:
Why real wages in Australia have fallen while they’ve risen in most other OECD countries

Calls for a rethink

There are growing calls for a rethink on the way we compensate young people for their efforts.

An application by the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association – the union for retail, fast food and warehousing workers – seeks to remove junior rates for adult employees on three key awards. This action will be heard by the Fair Work Commission next year.

Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, said the peak union body will lobby the government to legislate such changes if this application fails. The Greens have added their support.

That doesn’t have to mean abolishing youth wages altogether. But 21 years of age is a high threshold, especially given we get the right to major adult responsibilities such as voting and driving by 18.

A transition strategy could consider gradually lowering this threshold, or increasing the wage percentages over time.

Lessons from New Zealand

We wouldn’t be the first to make such a bold change if we did.

Our geographically and culturally close neighbour, New Zealand, has already removed the “youth wage” – replacing it with a “first job” rate and a training wage set at 80% of the full award rate in 2008.

A common argument against abolishing youth wages – and increasing the minimum wage in general – is that it will stop businesses hiring young people and thus increase unemployment.

But a 2021 study that examined the effects of New Zealand’s experience with increasing minimum wages – including this change – found little discernible difference in employment outcomes for young workers.

The authors did note, however, that New Zealand’s economic downturn post-2008 had a marked effect on the employment of young workers more generally.

What’s fair?

It’s easy to see how we arrived at the case for paying younger adults less. But younger workers should not bear the burden of intergenerational inequity by “losing out” on wages in the early part of their working life.

The debate we see now echoes the discussions about equal pay for equal work value run in the 1960s and ‘70s in relation to women’s unequal pay.

We were warned that paying women the same as men would cause huge economic dislocation. Such a catastrophe simply did not come to pass.

Kerry Brown is a member of the National Tertiary Education Union.

– ref. There’s a renewed push to scrap junior rates of pay for young adults. Do we need to rethink what’s fair? – https://theconversation.com/theres-a-renewed-push-to-scrap-junior-rates-of-pay-for-young-adults-do-we-need-to-rethink-whats-fair-240548

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeremy Day, PhD researcher, University of Newcastle

Long-spined sea urchins have emerged as an environmental issue off Australia’s far south coast. Native to temperate waters around New South Wales, the urchins have expanded their range south as oceans warm. There, they devour kelp and invertebrates, leaving barren habitats in their wake.

Lobsters are widely accepted as sea urchins’ key predator. In efforts to control urchin numbers, scientists have been researching this predator-prey relationship. And the latest research by my colleagues and I, released today, delivered an unexpected result.

We set up several cameras outside a lobster den and placed sea urchins in it. We filmed at night for almost a month. When we checked the footage, most sea urchins had been eaten – not by lobsters, but by sharks.

This suggests sharks have been overlooked as predators of sea urchins in NSW. Importantly, sharks seem to very easily consume these large, spiky creatures – sometimes in just a few gulps! Our findings suggest the diversity of predators eating large sea urchins is broader than we thought – and that could prove to be good news for protecting our kelp forests.

A puzzling picture

The waters off Australia’s south-east are warming at almost four times the global average. This has allowed long-spined sea urchins (Centrostephanus rodgersii) to extend their range from NSW into waters off Victoria and Tasmania.

Sea urchins feed on kelp and in their march south, have reduced kelp cover. This has added to pressure on kelp forests, which face many threats.

Scientists have been looking for ways to combat the spread of sea urchins. Ensuring healthy populations of predators is one suggested solution.

Overseas research on different urchin species has focused on predators such as lobsters and large fish. It found kelp cover can be improved by protecting or reinstating these predators.

In NSW, eastern rock lobsters are thought to be important urchin predators. The species has been over-fished in the past but stocks have significantly bounced back in recent years.

But despite this, no meaningful reduction in urchin populations, or increase in kelp growth, has been observed in NSW.

Why not? Could it be that lobsters are not eating urchins in great numbers after all? Certainly, there is little empirical evidence on how often predators eat urchins in the wild.

What’s more, recent research in NSW suggested the influence of lobsters on urchin populations was low, while fish could be more important.

Our project aimed to investigate the situation further.

What we did

We tied 100 urchins to blocks outside a lobster den off in Wollongong for 25 nights. This tethering meant the urchins were easily available to predators and stayed within view of our cameras.

Then we set multiple cameras to remotely turn on at sunset and turn after sunrise each day, to capture nocturnal feeding. We used a red-filtered light to film the experiments because invertebrates don’t like the white light spectrum.

We expected our cameras would capture lobsters eating the urchins. But in fact, the lobsters showed little interest in the urchins and ate just 4% of them. They were often filmed walking straight past urchins in search of other food.

Sharks, however, were very interested in the urchins. Both crested horn sharks (Heterodontus galeatus) and Port Jackson sharks (H. portusjacksonii) entered the den and ate 45% of the urchins.

As the footage below shows, sharks readily handled very large urchins (wider then 12 centimetres) with no hesitation.

Until now, it was thought few or no predators could handle urchins of this size. Larger urchins have longer spines, thicker shells and attach more strongly to the seafloor, making them harder to eat.

But the sharks attacked urchins from their spiny side, showing little regard for their sharp defences. This approach differs from other predators, such as lobsters and wrasses, which often turn urchins over and attack them methodically from their more vulnerable underside.

In fact, some sharks were so eager to eat urchins, they started feeding before the cameras turned on at sunset. This meant we had to film by hand.

A complex food web

Our experiment showed the effect of lobsters on urchins in the wild is less than previously thought.
This may explain why efforts to encourage lobster numbers have not helped control urchin numbers.

We also revealed a little-considered urchin predator: sharks.

Lobsters are capable but hesitant predators, whereas sharks seem eager to eat urchins. And crested horn sharks are an abundant, hardy species that is not actively fished.

When interpreting these findings, however, a few caveats must be noted.

First, sharks (and lobsters) are not the only animals to prey on urchins. Other predators include bony fishes, and more are likely to be identified in future.

Second, other factors can control urchin numbers, such as storm damage and the influx of fresh water.

And finally, it is unsurprising that we found a key predator when we intentionally searched for it by laying out food. Tethering urchins creates an artificial environment. We don’t know if the results would be replicated in the wild.

And even though we now know some shark species eat sea urchins, we don’t yet know if they can control urchins numbers.

But our research does confirm predators capable of handling large urchins may be more widespread than previously thought.

Jeremy Day received funding from University of Newcastle, Ecological Society of Australia, Royal Zoological Soceity of New South Wales and Fisheries Research and Development Corporation.

– ref. New video shows sharks making an easy meal of spiky sea urchins, shedding light on an undersea mystery – https://theconversation.com/new-video-shows-sharks-making-an-easy-meal-of-spiky-sea-urchins-shedding-light-on-an-undersea-mystery-240205

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brenton Prosser, Professor of Public Policy and Leadership, UNSW Sydney

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most diagnosed childhood neurological disorder in Australia.

Over the years, it has been the subject of controversy about potential misdiagnosis and overdiagnosis. There has also been variation in levels of diagnosis and drug prescription, depending on where you live and your socioeconomic status.

To address these concerns and improve consistency in ADHD diagnosis and prescribing, the Australasian ADHD Professionals Association has released a new prescribing guide. This will help the health-care workforce to consistently get the right treatment to the right people, with the right mix of medical and non-medical supports.

Here’s how ADHD prescribing has changed over time and what the new guidelines mean.

What is ADHD and how is it treated?

Up to one in ten young Australians experience ADHD. It is diagnosed due to inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity that has negative effects at home, school or work.

Psychostimulant medication is a central pillar of ADHD treatment.

However, the internationally recognised approach is to combine medicines with non-medical interventions in a multimodal approach. These non-medical interventions include cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), occupational therapy, educational strategies and other supports.

Medication use has changed over time

In Australia, Ritalin (methylphenidate) was originally the most prescribed ADHD medication. This changed in the 1990s after the introduction of dexamphetamine, along with the subsequent availability of Vyvance (lisdexamfetamine).

Perhaps the most significant change has come with “slow release” versions of the above medications that can last more than eight hours (longer than a school day).

When following clinical guidelines, prescribing medication for ADHD is safe practice. Yet the use of amphetamines to treat young people with ADHD has caused public concern. This highlights the importance of consistent guidelines for prescribing professionals.

Growth in diagnosis and prescribing

Starting from low levels, there was a dramatic rise in diagnosis and drug treatment in the 1990s. Much of this was overseen by a small number of psychiatrists and paediatricians in each state or territory. While this promised the potential of consistency in the early days, it also raised concerns about best practice.

This led to the development of the first ADHD clinical guidelines by the National Medical Health and Research Council in 1997.

It was followed by several refinements as prescription expanded due to changing diagnostic criteria (expanding to include a dual diagnosis with autism) and the need for best practice with the growing prescription by GPs. These guidelines enhanced the consistency of approaches nationally and reduced the likelihood of misdiagnosis or overdiagnosis.

However, a recent Senate inquiry found diagnosis and drug treatment continued to grow substantially in the five years to 2022. It emphasised the need for a more consistent approach to diagnosis and prescribing.

First the ingredients, then the recipe

The most recent clinical guidelines, released by the Australasian ADHD Professionals Association in 2022, outlined a roadmap for ADHD clinical practice, research and policy. They did so by drawing on the lived experience of those with ADHD. They also emphasised broader health questions, such as how to respond to ADHD as a holistic condition.

It remains difficult to predict individual responses to different medication. So the new prescribing guide offers practical advice about safe and responsible prescribing. This aims to reduce the potential for incorrect prescribing, dosing and adjusting of ADHD medication, across different age groups, settings and individuals.

To put this visually, the clinical guidelines describe what the ingredients of the cake should be, while the prescribing guidelines provide step-by-step recipes.

So what do they recommend?

An important principle in both these documents is that medication should not be the first and only treatment. Not every drug works the same way for every child. In some cases they do not work at all.

The possible side effects of medication vary and include poor appetite, sleep problems, headaches, stomach aches, moodiness and irritability. These guidelines assist in adapting medication to reduce these side effects.

Medication provides an important window of opportunity for many young people to gain maximum value from psychosocial and psychoeducational supports. These supports can, among others, include:

• cognitive training
• CBT
• neurofeedback
• occupational therapy
• educational strategies
• ADHD coaching.

Support for ADHD can also include parent training. This is not to suggest parents cause ADHD. Rather, they can support more effective treatment, especially since the rigours of ADHD can be a challenge to even the “perfect” parent.

Getting the right diagnosis

There have been reports of people seeking to use TikTok to self-diagnose, as well as a rise in people using ADHD stimulants without a prescription.

However, the message from these new guidelines is that ADHD diagnosis is a complex process that takes a specialist at least three hours. Online sources might be useful to prompt people to seek help, but diagnosis should come from a qualified health-care professional.

Finally, while we have moved beyond unhelpful past debate about whether ADHD is real to consolidate best diagnostic and prescribing practice, there is some way to go in reducing stigma and changing negative community attitudes to ADHD.

Hopefully in future we’ll be better able to cherish diversity and difference, and not just see it as a deficit.

Brenton Prosser is a Board Member of the Council of Academic Public Health Institutions Australasia and affiliated with the School of Population Health at UNSW.

– ref. ADHD prescribing has changed over the years – a new guide aims to bring doctors up to speed – https://theconversation.com/adhd-prescribing-has-changed-over-the-years-a-new-guide-aims-to-bring-doctors-up-to-speed-240313

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Westaway, Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Archaeology, School of Social Science, The University of Queensland

The NSW Education Standards Authority has announced that teaching of the Aboriginal past prior to European arrival will be excluded from the Year 7–10 syllabus as of 2027.

Since 2012, the topic “Ancient Australia” has been taught nationally in Year 7 as part of the Australian Curriculum. In 2022, a new topic called the “deep time history of Australia” was introduced to provide a more detailed study of 65,000 years of First Nations’ occupation of the continent.

However, New South Wales has surprisingly dropped this topic from its new syllabus, which will be rolled out in 2027. Instead, students will only learn First Nations’ history following European colonisation in 1788.

This directly undermines the Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration of 2020. This is a national agreement, signed by education ministers from all jurisdictions, which states:

We recognise the more than 60,000 years [sic] of continual connection by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as a key part of the nation’s history, present and future.

If the planned change to the syllabus goes through, the only Aboriginal history taught to NSW students would be that which reflects the destruction of traditional Aboriginal society. It also means Aboriginal students in NSW will be denied a chance to learn about their deep ancestral past.

The significance of Australia’s deep time past

Bruce Pascoe’s groundbreaking 2014 book Dark Emu (which sold more than 500,000 copies), and the associated documentary, have highlighted an enormous appetite for learning about Australia’s deep time past.

Hundreds of thousands of Australians engaged with Dark Emu. As anthropologist Paul Memmott notes, the book prompted a debate that encouraged a better understanding of Aboriginal society and its complexity.

It also generated research that investigated whether terms such as “hunter-gatherers” are appropriate for defining past Aboriginal society and economic systems.

Read more:
Farmers or foragers? Pre-colonial Aboriginal food production was hardly that simple

In schools, teachers have used Pascoe’s book Young Dark Emu to introduce students to sophisticated land and aquaculture systems used by First Peoples prior to colonisation.

The book raises an important question. If you lived in a country that invented bread and the edge-ground axe – a culture that independently developed early trade and social living – and did all of this without resorting to land war – wouldn’t you want your children to know about it?

For many students, the history they learn at school is knowledge they carry into their adult lives – and knowledge is the strongest antidote to ignorance. Rather than abandoning the Aboriginal deep time story, schools should be encouraging students to engage with it.

Learning on Country

One of the strengths of the current NSW history syllabus is the requirement for students to undertake a “site study” in Years 8 and 9. Currently, NSW is the only jurisdiction that has made this mandatory.

Site studies are an excellent opportunity for students to learn on Country. Many teachers organise excursions to Aboriginal cultural sites where students can directly engage with local Traditional Owners and Elders.

New South Wales is brimming with sites of cultural significance to Aboriginal people. The map below highlightssome of these, ranging from megafauna sites, to extensive fish traps, to the enigmatic rock art galleries and ceremonial engravings (petroglyphs).

How students will miss out

The Ngambaa people and archaeologists from the University of Queensland are currently investigating one of the largest midden complexes in Australia. This complex, located at Clybucca and Stuart’s Point on the north coast, spans some 14 kilometres and dates back to around 9,000 years ago.

Middens, or “living sites”, are accumulations of shell that were built over time through thousands of discarded seafood meals. Since the shells help reduce the acidic chemistry of the soil, animal bones and plant remains are more likely to be preserved in middens.

For instance, the Clybucca-Stuarts Point midden complex contains remains from seals and dugongs. Both of these animals were once part of the local ecosystem, but no longer are.

The middens also extend back to before the arrival of dingoes, so studying them could help us understand how biodiversity changed once dingoes replaced thylacines and Tasmanian devils on the mainland.

Local school students, especially Aboriginal students, will be actively participating in this cutting-edge research alongside the Ngambaa people, archaeologists and teachers. Among other things, the students will learn how the Ngambaa people sustainably managed land and sea Country over thousand of years during periods of dramatic environmental change.

But innovative programs like this will no longer be as relevant if Australia’s deep time history is removed from the NSW syllabus.

An opportunity for leadership

The study of First Nations archaeological sites, history and cultures tells us a broader human story of continuity and adaptability over deep time. Indigenising the curriculum – wherein Aboriginal knowledge is braided with historical and archaeological inquiry – is a powerful way to reconcile different approaches to understanding the past.

The NSW Education Standards Authority’s proposed changes risk sending young people the message that Australia’s “history” before colonisation is not an important part of the country’s historic narrative.

But there is still time to show leadership – by reversing the decisions and by connecting teachers and students to powerful stories from Australia’s deep time past.

Michael Westaway receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Humanities and Social Science at the University of Queensland .

Bruce Pascoe is the author of the texts mentioned in this article, Dark Emu and Young Dark Emu: A Truer History. He also has positions on the boards of Black Duck Foods, the Twofold Aboriginal Corporation and First Languages Australia.

Louise Zarmati receives research funding from the ARC Centre of Excellence of Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.

– ref. NSW will remove 65,000 years of Aboriginal history from its syllabus. It’s a step backwards for education – https://theconversation.com/nsw-will-remove-65-000-years-of-aboriginal-history-from-its-syllabus-its-a-step-backwards-for-education-240111

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Park Thaichon, Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Southern Queensland

Building a home can come with hidden costs. Unfortunately, many people don’t think about these costs until it’s too late.

Some buyers succumb to the tricks marketers use to attract them, with upgrades and add-ons blowing out the cost.

Other costs relate to risks of delay, changes in borrowing conditions, unexpected taxes and fees, insurance, compliance with local development standards and even exit fees in some cases.

So let’s explore the sales tactics buyers need to beware of, as well as the five hidden costs of building new homes.

How marketers persuade us to build a home

Marketers of home-building packages use various strategies to attract buyers.

Attractive pricing and promotions

Marketers often attract first-time home buyers and young families by advertising low prices and showing off modern designs.

They will then offer an upgrade or value package. The most common examples we see are deals with, for example, a $30,000 credit on upgrading, $45,000 cashback, or an amazingly cheap house and land package.

Our research found consumers are likely to feel more surprised by higher levels of discounts in the case of high-involvement products such as a buying a house.

The marketers make it seem like you’re getting a great deal, with options to customise the house just the way you like. What they don’t always tell you is the advertised prices usually apply to the most basic version of the home.

Any upgrades, such as granite countertops or hardwood floors, cost more. Often, the base price does not include essential features such as curtains, ceiling fans or air conditioning.

These upgrades quickly add up to more than that $30,000 credit for upgrading or that $45,000 cashback offer. Buyers can end up paying much more than they planned.

Keep in mind most home-building companies act as middlemen who buy and outsource products. They are likely to add charges for most upgrades or fixtures you order through them.

A $200 price tag for a kitchen light bought directly from a retailer such as Beacon Lighting can cost you $300 from the builder. Costs like this add up for a whole house.

What can you do? Note down the code or name of the item and buy it directly. See if the builders can install fittings for a lower cost if you supply them.

Social media and influencers

Influencers can make the process look easy and fun. Our research on influencer marketing and human influencers and virtual influencers shows trusting followers are more likely to follow influencers’ suggestions.

An influencer might, for example, share a video of their “perfect day” in their new home, focusing on the perks without mentioning the hidden costs.

Special deals and time-limited offers like cashbacks are used to make buyers feel they have to act fast, without taking the time to think about the financial commitment. This strategy exploits the fear of missing out, or FOMO.

The goal is to get customers to quickly sign up with a $1,000–$5,000 deposit. That increases customer commitment and stops them backing out.

Carefully check the conditions of the deposit, as you can most likely back out with a full refund if you are not happy with the final price before the final contract is signed, or during a cooling-off period after signing.

What are the 5 hidden costs?

1. Changing interest rates over 30 years

Many home buyers think about interest rates when they get a mortgage, but they often do not consider how rates can change over the years. Even a small increase can mean paying thousands more over the life of the loan.

When buying a home, people hope for lower interest rates, though they cannot predict future economic conditions. The theory of optimism bias could explain why many of us have expectations about a future that’s more favourable to us.

What should temper this optimism is the fact that even seemingly small interest rate changes make a big difference over time. For example, a $700,000 loan over 30 years at 3.5% interest has a monthly repayment of $3,143.31. At 4.5% interest, the repayment becomes $3,546.80. That’s an extra $4,841.88 a year.

Understanding this can help families budget for possible changes and avoid financial stress later on.

2. Delay costs

Delays can happen due to weather, problems getting materials, or other unexpected issues. Timber shortages have affected home building since 2020.

The costs of delay can include having to rent a place to live while waiting for the home to be finished. Renting for three months, for instance, at the national average of $600 a week will cost more than $7,000.

3. Unexpected costs

Apart from predictable costs, such as the down payment and tax or transfer (stamp) duty, other smaller, unexpected costs can add up.

These include bank fees, solicitor fees, building and pest inspections, moving costs, utility connections and home and contents insurance.

These are all essential to ensure the home is safe and secure. But the cost can easily top $5,000.

4. Standardised costs

Many new housing developments have rules about what owners can and cannot do with their property.

These rules might specify paint colours, fence types or landscaping choices, such as planting a set number of large trees.

A development might require home owners to use certain types of trees or materials for driveways, costing an extra $2,000.

More often than not, the land developer will require a refundable deposit of about $1,000–$5,000 when you buy the land for your home. It’s only refunded once the developer has confirmed you have met all the conditions. If you don’t, you won’t get your money back.

Before buying an apartment, first find out how much you have to pay in strata fees and other fixed or ongoing costs.

5. Exit costs

In rare cases, selling the property might attract exit fees. For example, if an owner sells their house within five years, they might face a $5,000 penalty fee for selling early.

This can be an unpleasant surprise and cause problems for families who need to move quickly due to a job change or other life events.

Make sure you read all the conditions of sale before signing.

A market in need of greater transparency

Knowing about these hidden costs of building a home helps avoid unexpected expenses and makes the process less stressful.

For policymakers and advocates, these costs highlight the need for fair marketing practices and rules that protect buyers from financial surprises.

Ensuring more transparency in this market can help make home ownership more affordable and accessible for everyone.

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. The hidden costs of building a home: what every family should know – https://theconversation.com/the-hidden-costs-of-building-a-home-what-every-family-should-know-237870

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Nicole Driessen, Postdoctoral researcher in radio astronomy, University of Sydney

The days are getting longer and in Australia, the switch to daylight saving time is almost upon us (for about 70% of the population, anyway).

But why do we have longer days in summer and shorter days in winter?

It’s all about the tilt

Earth goes around the Sun in an almost circular orbit. But not everything is lined up perfectly. Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.44 degrees relative to its orbit around the Sun.

Imagine Earth’s orbit as a flat frisbee with the Sun in the middle and Earth as a ball on a stick going around the edge.

If Earth’s axis wasn’t tilted (if its tilt was zero degrees) the stick would be exactly perpendicular to the frisbee. If you grab that perpendicular stick and tip it 23.44 degrees sideways, that’s what Earth’s tilt looks like now.

As Earth orbits the Sun, the tilt of the stick does not rotate relative to the Sun. If you were in outer space looking at the Sun and you watched from the exact same position for a whole year, you would see Earth go around the Sun while the stick stayed tilted the same direction.

In other words, if the top of the stick was pointing to the right when you started watching Earth go around the Sun, it would stay pointing to the right the whole way around.

This tilt gives us longer days in summer and shorter days in winter. Let’s set up the scenario so the Northern Hemisphere is the top of the planet and the Southern Hemisphere is the bottom of the planet.

When Earth is on one side of the Sun, the top of the stick is pointed towards the Sun. This is summer in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Six months later, when Earth is on the other side of the Sun, the bottom of the stick is pointed towards the Sun – and the seasons are reversed.

Solstices and equinoxes

Those two points, when the top of the stick is pointing directly towards the Sun or directly away from the Sun, are the solstices. They are the longest and shortest days of the year, depending on your hemisphere.

The shortest day of 2024 in Australia was June 21. Looking forward to sunnier times, the longest day of the year in 2024 will be December 21.

In between the summer and winter solstice, we have the equinoxes – when days and nights are almost exactly the same length. Those are the days when the stick through Earth is “side-on” to the Sun. The equinox is also the day when the Sun passes directly over Earth’s equator. In 2024 this happened on March 20 at 2:06pm AEDT and September 22 at 10:43pm AEST.

That means that since September 22, days have been getting longer than nights in the Southern Hemisphere.

What does daylight saving do?

Earth’s tilt means the Sun both rises earlier and sets later as we head towards summer. When the clocks (in some states) switch to daylight saving time, people in these states all get one hour less of sleep. However, the total length of the day doesn’t change just because we changed our clocks.

For me, daylight saving means I need an extra cup of coffee in the morning for about a week before I adjust to the daylight saving-lag (like jet lag, but without the fun of travel).

What it really gives us is more daylight in the evening, instead of more daylight in the morning. If you’re already a morning person, this isn’t the way to go. But if you prefer to have a long dinner in the summer sun it’s ideal.

Has it always been this way?

Earth’s axis hasn’t always been tilted at 23.44 degrees. It cycles from a minimum 22.1 degree tilt to a maximum 24.5 degree tilt and back again once every approximately 41,000 years.

Earth’s axis also “precesses”, where the stick through it draws a circle once every approximately 26,000 years. You can see this in the animation below.

The length of a day on Earth hasn’t always been the same, either.

At the moment, the length of a day is nearly exactly 24 hours. But it’s shifting all the time by tiny amounts. This is tracked very closely by a system of telescopes and satellites. These systems measure “Earth orientation parameters” that describe Earth’s exact orientation compared to the position of stars in the sky.

These are important to astronomers because the exact location of our telescopes is important for creating accurate maps of the sky. On top of all of this, the gravitational drag from the Moon causes days to become longer by around 2.3 milliseconds every 100 years. A few billion years ago, Earth’s day was a lot shorter – only 19 hours long.

Even though some of us are losing an hour of sleep this weekend, at least we get to enjoy 2.3 milliseconds longer every day than our great – and great-great – grandparents did.

Laura Nicole Driessen is a brand ambassador for the Rise & Shine Education Orbit Centre of Imagination.

– ref. Daylight saving is about to start. But why do the days get longer? – https://theconversation.com/daylight-saving-is-about-to-start-but-why-do-the-days-get-longer-240221

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Nicole Driessen, Postdoctoral researcher in radio astronomy, University of Sydney

The days are getting longer and in Australia, the switch to daylight saving time is almost upon us (for about 70% of the population, anyway).

But why do we have longer days in summer and shorter days in winter?

It’s all about the tilt

Earth goes around the Sun in an almost circular orbit. But not everything is lined up perfectly. Earth’s axis is tilted by 23.44 degrees relative to its orbit around the Sun.

Imagine Earth’s orbit as a flat frisbee with the Sun in the middle and Earth as a ball on a stick going around the edge.

If Earth’s axis wasn’t tilted (if its tilt was zero degrees) the stick would be exactly perpendicular to the frisbee. If you grab that perpendicular stick and tip it 23.44 degrees sideways, that’s what Earth’s tilt looks like now.

As Earth orbits the Sun, the tilt of the stick does not rotate relative to the Sun. If you were in outer space looking at the Sun and you watched from the exact same position for a whole year, you would see Earth go around the Sun while the stick stayed tilted the same direction.

In other words, if the top of the stick was pointing to the right when you started watching Earth go around the Sun, it would stay pointing to the right the whole way around.

This tilt gives us longer days in summer and shorter days in winter. Let’s set up the scenario so the Northern Hemisphere is the top of the planet and the Southern Hemisphere is the bottom of the planet.

When Earth is on one side of the Sun, the top of the stick is pointed towards the Sun. This is summer in the Northern Hemisphere and winter in the Southern Hemisphere. Six months later, when Earth is on the other side of the Sun, the bottom of the stick is pointed towards the Sun – and the seasons are reversed.

Solstices and equinoxes

Those two points, when the top of the stick is pointing directly towards the Sun or directly away from the Sun, are the solstices. They are the longest and shortest days of the year, depending on your hemisphere.

The shortest day of 2024 in Australia was June 21. Looking forward to sunnier times, the longest day of the year in 2024 will be December 21.

In between the summer and winter solstice, we have the equinoxes – when days and nights are almost exactly the same length. Those are the days when the stick through Earth is “side-on” to the Sun. The equinox is also the day when the Sun passes directly over Earth’s equator. In 2024 this happened on March 20 at 2:06pm AEDT and September 22 at 10:43pm AEST.

That means that since September 22, days have been getting longer than nights in the Southern Hemisphere.

What does daylight savings do?

Earth’s tilt means the Sun both rises earlier and sets later as we head towards summer. When the clocks (in some states) switch to daylight saving time, people in these states all get one hour less of sleep. However, the total length of the day doesn’t change just because we changed our clocks.

For me, daylight savings means I need an extra cup of coffee in the morning for about a week before I adjust to the daylight savings-lag (like jet lag, but without the fun of travel).

What it really gives us is more daylight in the evening, instead of more daylight in the morning. If you’re already a morning person, this isn’t the way to go. But if you prefer to have a long dinner in the summer sun it’s ideal.

Has it always been this way?

Earth’s axis hasn’t always been tilted at 23.44 degrees. It cycles from a minimum 22.1 degree tilt to a maximum 24.5 degree tilt and back again once every approximately 41,000 years.

Earth’s axis also “precesses”, where the stick through it draws a circle once every approximately 26,000 years. You can see this in the animation below.

The length of a day on Earth hasn’t always been the same, either.

At the moment, the length of a day is nearly exactly 24 hours. But it’s shifting all the time by tiny amounts. This is tracked very closely by a system of telescopes and satellites. These systems measure “Earth orientation parameters” that describe Earth’s exact orientation compared to the position of stars in the sky.

These are important to astronomers because the exact location of our telescopes is important for creating accurate maps of the sky. On top of all of this, the gravitational drag from the Moon causes days to become longer by around 2.3 milliseconds every 100 years. A few billion years ago, Earth’s day was a lot shorter – only 19 hours long.

Even though some of us are losing an hour of sleep this weekend, at least we get to enjoy 2.3 milliseconds longer every day than our great – and great-great – grandparents did.

Laura Nicole Driessen is a brand ambassador for the Rise & Shine Education Orbit Centre of Imagination.

– ref. Daylight savings is about to start. But why do the days get longer? – https://theconversation.com/daylight-savings-is-about-to-start-but-why-do-the-days-get-longer-240221

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason Harris, Professor of Corporate Law, University of Sydney

Capitalism without insolvency is like Christianity without Hell.

Those were the words of former Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, speaking as chairman of Eastern Airlines in the United States in the early 1980s.

That company later entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy itself, in an attempt to deal with a staggering amount of debt.

We all know what it means to run out of money, but what exactly is bankruptcy? It’s certainly been in the news a lot.

Tupperware filed for it last month. Two Australian airlines have become insolvent this year, and other Australian businesses have been going under at record rates.

So how do companies go bankrupt – and what is bankruptcy protection under the law? What’s the famous Chapter 11? And is bankruptcy the end of the road?

What exactly is bankruptcy?

Sometimes, a person or company can’t pay all of their debts as they arise. In legal terms, we call this being “insolvent”.

Receiving a large bill (such as a large tax bill) that you can’t pay on the day doesn’t necessarily make you insolvent. The law allows for a reasonable time to pay bills after receiving an invoice.

But if large numbers of bills remain unpaid weeks or months after their due dates, it begins to suggest a person or business isn’t paying them because they actually can’t.

Being unable to pay all of your debts makes you an insolvent debtor. Bankruptcy is the legal process that allows insolvent debtors to fairly resolve these debts.

In Australia, insolvent individuals can file a bankruptcy petition with the Official Receiver in bankruptcy, a statutory office that is part of the Australian Financial Security Authority.

A creditor who is owed at least $10,000 can also force another person into bankruptcy, by suing them in court and obtaining an order to make them bankrupt.

For companies that can’t pay their debts, there are several options, including liquidation, voluntary administration and restructuring. More on these later.

We let an expert take control

When a person or company goes bankrupt, an independent external expert (or team of experts) is appointed to manage their assets and debt.

For individuals, we call this person a registered bankruptcy trustee. In the case of corporate bankruptcies, we call them a registered liquidator.

In both cases, the expert will take control of the debtor’s assets and affairs. They’ll be looking closely at why the debtor needed to declare bankruptcy in the first place, and whether anything can be sold to generate cash so at least some of the debt can be repaid.

When a person goes bankrupt, not everything is up for grabs. The law allows them to retain some basic essentials, such as clothes, furniture, tools of their trade, and a car valued at less than $9,400.

Some categories of assets can also be exempt, such as superannuation and compensation for personal injuries.

There are no similar extensions for corporate insolvency. All of a company’s assets are on the table.

However, both types of debtor typically enter bankruptcy with few or no assets. In more than 80% of individual and corporate bankruptcy cases, there are no payments to the creditors they owe.

Why seek bankruptcy protection?

One key feature of formally filing for bankruptcy is that it imposes a “stay” on enforcement action against the debtor. This is a court order that gives the party owing money time to organise its affairs in an orderly way – such as by selling assets to raise cash.

In corporate insolvency, there are formal procedures under Australia’s Corporations Act that aim to give a company the opportunity to negotiate a deal with its creditors.

That might include formulating a plan to restructure, allowing it to exit insolvency and keep trading. But it could also include selling the business to a new owner so it can continue.

Some large Australian companies, including Virgin Australia and Channel Ten, have previously used “voluntary administration” to save their businesses.

Voluntary administration can give a company a chance to reduce its debts through a statutory compromise with creditors called a “deed of company arrangement”.

This involves the majority of a company’s creditors approving a deal – usually, to compromise on some of their debt in exchange for a promise of future payments.

The funds to make these payments might come from selling assets, or be a percentage of promised future profits.

If successful, this can allow a company to keep operating and minimise job losses that would otherwise occur if it were simply shut down and its assets sold off – known as being “liquidated”.

Once liquidated, a company will be deregistered by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – that is, it will cease to exist as a separate company.

What is Chapter 11 bankruptcy?

You’ll often hear or read about companies filing for “Chapter 11” bankruptcy. This is because in the US, there is one law – the Bankruptcy Code 1978 – that covers both individuals and companies.

Just like we’ve discussed in the Australian context, Chapter 11 of that law is specifically aimed at giving debtor companies a chance to enter into a deal with their creditors – to reduce their debts, sell some or all of the assets and hopefully allow at least part of the business to continue operating.

This is what Tupperware did last month, following years of financial pressure.

Where the law differs between Australia and the US is in the fact that Chapter 11 allows the debtor company’s management to remain in charge of the bankruptcy process. We call this “debtor-in-possession”.

In Australia, in contrast, the liquidator – which acts as the administrator in a voluntary administration – remains in control of the company.

Filing for bankruptcy can signal the end of a company’s operations, but not always. It may be possible for an external administrator to try to save the business or sell some or all of it to a new owner, paying down debt and preserving jobs.

This article is part of The Conversation’s “Business Basics” series where we ask experts to discuss key concepts in business, economics and finance.

Jason Harris is an academic member of the Australian Restructuring Insolvency and Turnaround Association.

– ref. What is bankruptcy? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-bankruptcy-239393