Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Reid, Professor Emeritus of Education, University of South Australia

The education debate in Australia has, for some time now, been marred by the presence of a simple binary: explicit teaching, or direct instruction, versus inquiry-based learning.

Simply put, explicit teaching is a structured sequence of learning led by the teacher, who demonstrates and explains a new concept or technique, and kids practise it. Inquiry-based learning is student-centred and involves the students, guided by the teacher, creating essential questions, exploring and investigating these, and sharing ideas to arrive at new understanding.

A recent article in The Weekend Australian by Noel Pearson has breathed new life into this dichotomy.

It lays the blame for Australia’s declining Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) scores on the fact most teachers are using inquiry-based approaches — although the evidence for this is not presented.

And it says explicit teaching is the answer.

Pearson’s argument leans on a recent Centre for Independent Studies paper by Emeritus Professor John Sweller. In that paper, Sweller outlines his research on “cognitive load theory” – the idea we need to finesse a new concept until it enters our long-term memory and becomes almost second nature – to demonstrate that explicit teaching produces better learning outcomes than inquiry-based learning.

Read more:
I had an idea in the 1980s and to my surprise, it changed education around the world

Pearson urges teachers, politicians and policymakers to forget inquiry-based learning and adopt explicit teaching as their educational guiding star. In my view they should be very wary of doing so because the case is based on at least three serious flaws.

1. Teachers use more than one approach

First, the argument against inquiry-based learning assumes teachers use only one approach to teaching – either explicit or inquiry-based.

In my experience of teaching and working with teachers in schools, most educators move up and down a teacher-centred and student-centred continuum on a daily basis. They select, from a toolkit of teaching approaches, one that best suits the purposes of the topic or program, the context of the study, and their students’ interests and needs.

In other words, teachers sometimes employ explicit teaching and sometimes inquiry-based approaches. Indeed, they might draw on explicit teaching at a specific moment during a guided inquiry.

The idea teachers are straitjacketed to one approach is an affront to their professionalism.

2. Not all inquiry-based methods are the same

Second, the argument is based on a misguided view about what constitutes inquiry-based learning.

Sweller and Pearson maintain inquiry learning began six decades ago with the work of American cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner and his concept of “discovery learning” in the 1960s.

With discovery learning, instead of students being given the information to learn, they are given (or choose themselves) questions or problems and use their prior knowledge and experiences to test new understandings. Bruner argued that, as well as gaining new knowledge, students would develop crucial skills such as questioning and critical thinking, along with curiosity and a love of learning.

Pearson writes: “The great majority of Australian schools follow Bruner, even today, with only a minority of teachers and schools delivering teacher-led instruction.”

Apart from the fact he doesn’t cite any evidence to support this assertion, the implication here is that the development of inquiry-based learning stopped in the 1960s with Bruner. It didn’t.

When Bruner’s work first gained prominence it was adapted to the teaching of science, and then slowly spread to other areas of the curriculum. Over the next 50 years, through practice and research, a number of different models of inquiry learning have developed – each with different emphases – such as problem-based and project-based inquiry.

More than this, inquiry-based approaches differ in such matters as purpose and method. Thus they can vary in approach such as inductive and deductive inquiry, and in the extent to which teachers are in control of topic choice and process. There can be strong teacher guidance (structured inquiry, controlled inquiry), or students can have greater freedom to discover and investigate (modified free inquiry).

Read more:
Explainer: what is inquiry-based learning and how does it help prepare children for the real world?

In other words, there is no homogenous model of inquiry-based learning. If people want to criticise inquiry-based approaches they need to be explicit about which model they are judging.

3. Flawed data used to justify the argument

The third flaw in the argument is that much of the research used to show explicit teaching produces better learning outcomes is based on data that are contaminated by the confusion about what constitutes inquiry-based learning.

Take the research published by McKinsey and Company in 2017, which Pearson cites as exposing the “detrimental effects of inquiry learning”. That research uses student interviews conducted by the OECD in the 2015 PISA tests to find out about the extent to which some students experienced inquiry learning in their science classes.

The questions were based on the understanding that inquiry in science involves students in practical experiments and class debates, with the teacher giving them time to explain ideas and use the scientific method. But, for all the reasons explained above, this is a very narrow view of inquiry-based learning.

Read more:
Explainer: what is explicit instruction and how does it help children learn?

Notwithstanding these limitations, the OECD aggregated the students’ responses and correlated them with the PISA scores in science to arrive at an index of inquiry-based instruction. This purported to show that, for many countries, there was a negative correlation between inquiry-based learning and success in the science tests.

Despite the warped view of inquiry and the inadequate methodology on which the OECD report was based, once the report hit the public domain its findings were further distorted. The results based on interviews with 15-year-old students about their science teaching classes were turned into generalisations about teaching in all subjects across all year levels.

Such research tells us very little about inquiry-based learning itself. And yet it is used to demonstrate the superior outcomes produced by explicit teaching.

There’s a variety of useful teaching models — and this includes explicit instruction — which have been designed for different purposes. It is the educator’s task to select the most appropriate given the context.

Creating simplistic binaries in a field as complex and nuanced as education impoverishes the debate.

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

– ref. Teachers use many teaching approaches to impart knowledge. Pitting one against another harms education – https://theconversation.com/teachers-use-many-teaching-approaches-to-impart-knowledge-pitting-one-against-another-harms-education-166178

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Howard, Deputy Section Editor: Arts + Culture

Freud and Nietzsche may not be what you have in mind when thinking of pool-side reads, but they are among the books flipped through in The White Lotus — the tense, new TV drama about the lives of the rich and privileged as they overlap at a Hawaiian resort.

Are Paula and Olivia truly delving into the mind of the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, or indeed, into Camille Paglia’s deconstruction of the Western literary canon? Or are they just books for show: an intellectual performance to hide secret glances and gossip?

Either way, frequent book covers speak loudly in the show. So here, then, is what the experts think you should know about these props and the stories they tell.

Maybe you will find one to pick up the next time you fly off for your island holiday. Just try to avoid the White Lotus resort.

The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud

“If I cannot bend the heavens above, I will move Hell.” Sigmund Freud quotes the poet Virgil to describe his aim in this book of explaining the meaning of dreams — by recourse to his theory of the unconscious mind.

Freud always considered Interpretation of Dreams his masterpiece, and ensured it would be published in 1900 to mark its significance.

Dreams had traditionally been viewed as either senseless or vehicles of communication with the divine. Freud instead contended all dreams involve the fulfilment of a wish.

In adults, he wrote, many of the wishes we have are of such an “edgy” nature their fulfilment would wake us up if staged too directly.

So, in order to at once fulfil these unconscious wishes and stay asleep, the “dream work” of the sleeping mind distorts the wish, using mechanisms of displacement (making insignificant things seem important, and the other way around), condensation (bringing together multiple ideas in single images), and transforming words into the seemingly random images.

Packed with striking dream analyses, and containing perhaps the best systematic statement of Freud’s theory of the mind, this book is an influential classic.

—Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy

Read more:
Unravelling the mysteries of sleep: how the brain ‘sees’ dreams

The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

Psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in the French colony of Martinique. After the second world war, he studied in France. Later, in 1953, he moved to Algeria, joining the Algerian National Liberation Front.

The Wretched of the Earth (originally published as Les damnés de la terre in 1961) was written at the height of the Algerian War of Independence. Based on Fanon’s first-hand experience of working in colonial Algeria, it is a classic text of postcolonial studies, examining the physical and psychological violence colonised people experience.

Fanon’s book is a lucid and damning account of the impact of colonialism: the ways it irrevocably changes people, their societies and their culture.

A passionate call to resist colonisation and oppression, The Wretched of the Earth was seen as dangerous by colonial powers at the time of its publication. It is still an important anti-colonial work today.

—Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English

Read more:
Why Fanon continues to resonate more than half a century after Algeria’s independence

Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) is a provocative survey of Western canonical art and culture.

On its publication, Sexual Personae was considered iconoclastic, groundbreaking and subversive for, as Paglia wrote, its focus on “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism and pornography in great art”.

The book was both lauded for its insights into sex, violence and power; and labelled anti-feminist and sinister in its views about gender and sexuality.

Sexual Personae discusses the decadence and enduring influence of paganism in Western culture. Paglia connects sexual freedom to sadomasochism and argues that our self-destructive and lustful Dionysian impulses are in tension with our Apollonian instincts for order.

Named after Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Paglia’s book charts recurrent types in the Western imagination, such as the “beautiful boy”, the “femme fatale” and the “female vampire”. Through these personae, she discusses works such as the Mona Lisa, Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Particularly famous is the chapter on Emily Dickinson and Paglia’s analysis of the brutal and sadistic metaphors in Dickinson’s poetry.

Paglia’s Sexual Personae is both electrifying and divisive; still one of the most important texts in 1990s sexual politics.

—Cassandra Atherton, Professor of Writing and Literature

My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante

Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2011), the first volume of her Neapolitan Series, is a feminist coming-of-age story that begins with a mystery.

In the first few pages, a distinguished writer, Elena (known as Lenù), learns an old friend, Raffaella (or Lila), has disappeared without a trace. Lila’s disappearance prompts Lenù to begin writing the story of her life, focusing particularly on the pair’s complicated friendship.

Focusing on their childhood in 1950s Naples, she writes unsentimentally of poverty, violence, familial conflicts and organised crime.

The novel is densely plotted and written with unsparing accuracy about the characters of Naples, but Lenù’s candid narration makes for an utterly engrossing reading experience. In plain, fast-paced prose she describes a grim childhood full of misogyny and domestic violence, but enlivened by her friendship with Lila.

Ferrante gives us a moving portrait of friendship. Over the course of the novel, both girls begin to see glimpses of how they might move beyond the limitations of the world they have inherited.

—Lucas Thompson, Lecturer in English

Read more:
Elena Ferrante: a vanishing author and the question of posthuman identity

The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann

For Nietzsche, to write philosophy was to render one’s experience into life-affirming art — even if that art rocked the very foundations of culture itself.

Walter Kaufmann’s translations in The Portable Nietzsche (1954) showcase much of the power and beauty of one of the finest minds in Western culture.

Here is Nietzsche’s devastating psychological portrait of St Paul; here is the infamous announcement of the death of God. They sit together with his complex notion of cheerfulness practised in the face of the terrifying collapse of certainties.

Despite his reputation in some quarters as a malevolent destroyer, Nietzsche’s actual aim of avoiding nihilism is well-captured here.

His cavorting and richly subversive “fifth gospel”, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is reproduced in full, as is Twilight of the Idols, one of his last works and a fine condensation of his mature project.

Kaufmann’s translations are now dated and his selection of Nietzsche’s works is occasionally eccentric, but The Portable Nietzsche goes an admirable way to presenting Nietzsche’s many aspects: the shy recluse, the loather of anti-Semites, the brilliant transfigurer of pain into texts of depth and beauty, and the lover of life, come what may.

—Jamie Parr, Lecturer in Philosophy

Read more:
Explainer: Nietzsche, nihilism and reasons to be cheerful

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Galdwell’s Blink (2005) opens with an anecdote about a kouros: an ancient Greek statue bought by the Getty Museum in 1985 for just under $10 million. Despite months of due diligence to check the authenticity of the statue, the Getty was duped – the statue had been made in the 1980s.

The discovery of the fake was attributed to an art historian who, according to Gladwell, knew as soon as he clapped eyes on it that it was not the real deal.

This instant of recognition (a “blink”) is what Gladwell describes as the “power of thinking without thinking”. Gladwell argues going with your gut can often lead to far superior decisions than thinking things over.

Blink is an entertaining collection of anecdotes, from art-historians to “marriage-whisperers” who can tell if a relationship is going to last from watching split-second videos of partners interacting. But, as the saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data.

—Ben Newell, Professor of Cognitive Psychology

None of these strike your fancy? The characters also pick up Judith Butler, Aimé Césaire and Jacques Lacan — just more light reads on feminism, colonialism and psychoanalysis.

White Lotus is now streaming on Binge.

– ref. Freud, Nietzsche, Paglia, Fanon: our expert guide to the books of The White Lotus – https://theconversation.com/freud-nietzsche-paglia-fanon-our-expert-guide-to-the-books-of-the-white-lotus-166187

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Higgins, Senior Research Fellow, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW

Just hours after the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, Australia joined the international community in calling for the “safe and orderly departure of foreign nationals and Afghans who wish to leave the country”.

The scenes at Kabul airport yesterday were far from orderly, though US forces are now reportedly working to secure the airport so evacuation flights can resume.

If safe departure for Afghans can be coordinated, then it must be a transparent and flexible process — one that is additional to other pathways. And it must begin now.

Canada has already moved quickly, announcing it will resettle up to 20,000 women leaders, journalists and human rights activists who have fled Afghanistan, in addition to the evacuation of former locally-engaged staff.

A “path to protection”, as the Canadian government has called it, has been long overdue for many in Afghanistan who were associated with Australia or other foreign governments, such as interpreters and embassy staff.

Some have waited for years, stymied by overly strict eligibility criteria (a previous Canadian program was only open to those employed for 12 consecutive months).

Bureaucratic hurdles and long delays

Australia, Canada, the US and many European nations have decades of experience in offering special visa schemes for asylum seekers in circumstances such as this.

These processes allow people who are at risk of persecution or other serious harm – but are still in their home countries – to enter another country for the purpose of accessing protection under international refugee and human rights law.

The US, for example, settled more than half a million Vietnamese this way following the Vietnam War, as well as thousands of locally engaged staff from northern Iraq in the mid 1990s. In recent years, Australia has used this visa model – known as “in-country processing” – to settle Yazidi refugees from Iraq.

Australia’s “in-country” visa process has rarely been quick, but applications from some former employees in Afghanistan have dragged on despite dedicated lobbying from Australian Defence Force veterans.

Read more:
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Just days before the Taliban victory, for example, former employees of the Australian embassy in Kabul sent a letter to the Australian government, describing the persistent bureaucratic hurdles and long delays they have faced in applying for Australian visas.

And in recent years, some former employees of foreign governments were forced to flee Afghanistan rather than wait for formal protection visas, leaving them in limbo abroad and at risk of deportation home.

These processes should be transparent from the start. Would-be refugees need to know how the application process will work — and how long it will take — to decide if it is the best option for their circumstances.

Australia must expand its humanitarian uptake

The Australian government has said it will evacuate some Afghans from the country when “the situation allows”.

But any visa process must be flexible enough to include Afghan graduates of Australian universities who returned home – and have since received death threats – as well as family members of staff who have already left the country.

Former interpreters in the United States and Australia have struggled to obtain visas for their loved ones.

The Asia Pacific Network of Refugees and the Refugee Council of Australia have both called on the Australian government to offer asylum to others in Afghanistan, especially “women and children at risk as well as other human rights defenders in grave danger”.

This would mean expanding Australia’s resettlement program to admit more Afghans beyond the humanitarian intake of 13,750 people already planned for 2021-22. Canberra has done this before.

As Sitarah Mohammadi and Sajjad Askary, Melbourne-based deputy chairs within the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network and members of the Hazara ethic minority from Afghanistan, have recently argued, Australia offered 12,000 places for Syrians in 2015. They said,

A similar scheme can be established for the most persecuted and high risk groups, such as the Hazaras, who are already at risk of mass atrocities.

Helping Afghans who flee across borders

Of course, a dedicated safe and orderly departure program may depend on the tacit consent of the Taliban. In the current context, safe departure will be extremely difficult for applicants who are not already in Kabul, or who are on the run or in hiding from the Taliban.

To be meaningful, then, efforts to secure safe and orderly exit must never replace other avenues through which people fleeing Afghanistan may seek international protection.

Read more:
As the Taliban returns, 20 years of progress for women looks set to disappear overnight

This includes the right of individuals to make their own way out of Afghanistan to apply for protection in another country. And in cases when people have been rejected from the “in-country” application process, this must not prejudice their ability to apply for protection through other pathways.

Australia’s refugee program should also be opened to the thousands of Afghans currently stuck in Indonesia. Young people and families have been waiting there for years for a resettlement place abroad. Many are in desperate circumstances, as one family told the BBC:

We registered ourselves with the [UN High Commissioner for Refugees] in 2015. But we’ve not been contacted since then. We have been forgotten.

Some have even contemplated trying to reach Australia again by boat, according to a report today.

Permanent protection for Afghans already here

In Australia, the Asia Pacific Network of Refugees has also called on the government to protect Afghan nationals already living in this country.

This would include granting permanent protection to the more than 4,000 people who have already sought asylum in Australia and are living on temporary visas. This prevents refugees from reuniting with family members and forces them to live with the threat of deportation hanging over their lives.

According to Zaki Haidari, an ambassador for the Refugee Advice and Casework Service in Sydney and a temporary visa holder, the Taliban takeover proves

once again that it is not safe for us to go back and not safe for our families.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne said today all Afghan citizens who were in Australia on a temporary basis would be supported by the government, adding

no Afghan visa holder will be asked to return to Afghanistan at this stage.

The words “at this stage” fall well short of Australia’s moral and legal obligations to Afghan refugees, and provide little comfort to temporary visa holders. With a range of options to expand protection for people at risk both within and outside Afghanistan, the Australian government must stop attaching qualifiers to its response, and start acting decisively and with humanity.

Claire Higgins receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Afghan refugees can no longer wait — Australia must offer permanent protection now – https://theconversation.com/afghan-refugees-can-no-longer-wait-australia-must-offer-permanent-protection-now-166180

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

Buried within the prime minister’s response to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is just about everything we’re at risk of getting wrong at the Glasgow climate talks in October.

After slamming China — whose emissions per person are half of Australia’s — for not doing more to cut emissions, Scott Morrison said the Glasgow talks were the “biggest multilateral global negotiation the world has ever known”.

If he treats the talks as just another (big) negotiation, we’re in trouble.

The way the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade usually treats negotiations is hold something back, hold out the prospect of “giving it up,” and then only make the concession if the other side gives something in return. Even if holding back damages Australia.

Cars are a case in point. From an economic point of view, there is no reason whatsoever to continue to impose tariffs (special taxes) on the import of cars — none, not even in the eyes of those who support the use of tariffs to protect Australian jobs. Australia no longer makes cars.

Yet the tariff remains, at 5%, making it perhaps A$1 billion harder than it should be for Australians to buy new cars (although nowhere near as hard as it was in the days when the tariff was 57.5%).

The tariff seems to be in place largely to give the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade something to negotiate away in trade agreements: for use as what the Productivity Commission calls “negotiating coin”.

Here’s how it worked in the 2014 Australia-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Australia agreed to remove the remaining 5% tariff on Korean cars, “with consumers and businesses to benefit from downward pressure on import prices”.

But Australia didn’t remove the tariff on car imports altogether, which would have given us a much bigger benefit but denied the department negotiating coin.

The next year the department did it again, agreeing to give up the tariff on imported Japanese cars in the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement (but not on other cars) so Australians could “benefit from lower prices and/or greater availability of Japanese products”.

Two years later, it did it again, with cars from China.

When the UK and European agreements are negotiated, it’ll do it there too.

Australia holds back reforms

Eventually Australians will get what they are entitled to. But the point is that rather than advancing the cause of free trade, the department has held back, treating a win for the other side as a loss for us, when it wasn’t.

The Centre for International Economics believes the much bigger earlier set of tariff cuts lifted the living standard of the average Australian family by A$8,448.

Had our trade negotiators been in charge, we would still be waiting. Instead the Hawke and then the Keating governments pushed through unilateral reductions, asking for nothing in return.

Read more:
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As former Trade Minister Craig Emerson put it, this gave Australia “credibility in international trade negotiations way beyond the relative size of our economy”.

Does that sound like the sort of thing Australia might need at Glasgow, to have enough credibility to urge even bigger emitters to deliver the kind of cuts on which our futures and future temperatures depend?

It won’t work with China

The prime minister is right to say that China is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, even though its emissions per person are low. Its high population means it accounts for 28% of all the greenhouse gases pumped out each year. The next biggest emitter, the United States, accounts for 15%

But China’s status is new. Until 2006 it pumped out less per year than the United States. Because the US has had mega-factories and heating and so on for so much longer, it is responsible for by far the biggest chunk of the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere: 25%, followed by the European Union with 22%.

China might reasonably feel that countries like the US that have done the most to create the problem should do the most to fix it.

Like Australia, the US pumps out twice as much per person as China and has much more room to cut back.

On the bright side, China knows that being big means it is in a position to make a difference to global emissions in a way that other countries cannot on their own. And that’s a position that can benefit its citizens.

China’s latest five-year plan, adopted in March, commits it to cut its “carbon intensity” (emissions per unit of GDP) by 18%. If it beats that five-year target by just a bit (and it has beaten its previous five-year targets) its emissions will turn down from 2025.

It is aiming for net-zero emissions by 2060.

Australia needs China’s help

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds that Australia is especially susceptible to global warming. We’re facing less rain in winter, longer heatwaves, drier rivers, more arid soil and worse droughts.

We are right to want China to do more, but the worst way to achieve it is to say “we won’t lift our ambition until you lift yours”.

Hardly ever a worthwhile strategy, it is particularly ineffective when we don’t have bargaining power.

Read more:
Climate change has already hit Australia. Unless we act now, a hotter, drier and more dangerous future awaits, IPCC warns

The only power we’ve got is to set an example, unilaterally, as we did with tariffs. And to ramp up our ambition.

If Australia said it would do more, and didn’t quibble, it might just count for something.

It’s all we can do, and it’s the very best we can do.

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

– ref. Australia is at risk of taking the wrong tack at the Glasgow climate talks, and slamming China is only part of it – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-at-risk-of-taking-the-wrong-tack-at-the-glasgow-climate-talks-and-slamming-china-is-only-part-of-it-166154

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rick Sarre, Emeritus Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, University of South Australia

Prince Andrew is making headlines again for all the wrong reasons.

In November 2019 he stood down from royal duties “for the foreseeable future” over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal (and a disastrous TV interview to try and tell his side of the story).

His public image and royal career is already all but ruined. But with fresh legal action in the United States, is he now in trouble legally?

The story so far

The prince had a friendship with the late paedophile Epstein that dated back more than 20 years. He was first named in the Epstein scandal in 2015, when Virginia Giuffre claimed she had been forced to have sex with the prince, which he denies.

Allegations re-emerged in 2019 that Prince Andrew had been a willing participant in sexual liaisons organised by Epstein’s then-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell (whose affairs continue to be probed by US prosecutors).

Guiffre said she had been a victim of Epstein’s sex trafficking and abuse from 2000 to 2002, starting when she was 16. The prince says he has “no recollection” of ever meeting her. In November 2019 Scotland Yard reviewed the matter and announced it was not going to open a formal criminal investigation, as it “would be largely focused on activities and relationships outside the UK”.

A new, civil claim

Matters took another turn last week when Giuffre (now living in Australia) filed a civil claim in a New York court under its Child Victims Act, accusing Prince Andrew of the torts of battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

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New laws give victims more time to report rape or sexual assault – even Jeffrey Epstein’s

The legal suit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. It has been made possible because the act gives claimants a generous time frame in which to commence new claims on the basis of historical allegations.

A consequence of the civil action will be that Prince Andrew will be called, formally, to answer questions under oath. As Giuffre’s lawyer, David Boies says:

It’s one thing to ignore me. It’s another thing to ignore the judicial process of the state of New York and the United States […] If Prince Andrew does not take seriously the rule of law in this country, he is being very ill-advised.

Legal trouble?

Clearly, the headlines are very bad PR. But is there legal trouble for the prince? To examine this, we need to look at three associated questions.

• how does Giuffre’s claim differ from Scotland Yard’s suspended review of the allegations of criminal behaviour?

• can the royal family be sued?

• is a legal judgement in the United States enforceable against a British citizen living in England?

What’s different this time?

The key issue here is that the standard of proof required for a civil claim is not as high as the requirement of proof “beyond reasonable doubt” that would guarantee a criminal conviction.

One can succeed in a claim alleging battery and emotional distress if a court determines that it was “more likely than not” the prince had a sexual liaison with Giuffre.

The most notorious example of the difference between criminal and civil proceedings is found in the case against former actor and football star OJ Simpson.

In 1997, a year after Simpson had been acquitted of the murders of his wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, their families filed a civil suit alleging wrongful death. A civil jury awarded them US$33.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages, by implication finding Simpson responsible for the crimes.

Suing the royal family

While the queen enjoys what is referred to as “sovereign immunity”, members of the royal family are not above the law when it comes to matters such as these.

Typically a formal letter of request would be issued by the New York court, asking the prince to give evidence under a mechanism called “mutual legal assistance”. Because it’s a civil case, not a criminal one, the prince cannot be extradited to the US.

The High Court of Justice in England would then appoint a master of their court to oversee a private hearing. Prince Andrew could seek to have the mutual legal assistance request stopped as an abuse of process if he were able to establish that it was being undertaken vexaciously.

If the hearing proceeds, Prince Andrew would be entitled to legal representation as anyone else would. Questions would be put to him by lawyers representing Giuffre. He could refuse to answer these questions — and would not be in contempt if he remained silent.

The New York court would then make a determination according to the evidence presented. That could add months to the process.

US judgments in England

Do American rulings apply to citizens living in England? The answer is yes, but it’s complicated. This field of law is governed by the international rules regarding the enforcement of foreign judgments.

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Prince Andrew: the monarchy has a long history of dismissing women’s suffering

Interestingly, there is no treaty between the United States and the United Kingdom facilitating the enforcement of successful civil judgements across the Atlantic. So, if Giuffre’s suit is decided in her favour (which becomes more likely if the prince refuses to be involved) the judgement would form the basis of a completely new debt recovery legal action in England.

That could add another significant delay to the entire episode, as this new proceeding would be defended by the prince’s legal team. The legal costs to both sides would be eye-watering, although it is possible the Giuffre lawyers are being retained on a “contingency” basis (no-win, no-fee).

According to media reports, the prince has been staying at Balmoral with the queen, while talking with his lawyers.

We can only assume these calls will become more frequent in the weeks to come.

Rick Sarre is the President of the SA Council for Civil Liberties

– ref. The PR disaster around Prince Andrew has taken a legal twist — what does this mean for the Duke of York? – https://theconversation.com/the-pr-disaster-around-prince-andrew-has-taken-a-legal-twist-what-does-this-mean-for-the-duke-of-york-166108

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharine Kemp, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW, UNSW

I spent last week studying the 26,000 words of privacy terms published by eBay and Amazon, trying to extract some straight answers, and comparing them to the privacy terms of other online marketplaces such as Kogan and Catch (my full summary is here).

There’s bad news and good news.

The bad news is that none of the privacy terms analysed are good. Based on their published policies, there is no major online marketplace operating in Australia that sets a commendable standard for respecting consumers’ data privacy.

All the policies contain vague, confusing terms and give consumers no real choice about how their data are collected, used and disclosed when they shop on these websites. Online retailers that operate in both Australia and the European Union give their customers in the EU better privacy terms and defaults than us, because the EU has stronger privacy laws.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is currently collecting submissions as part of an inquiry into online marketplaces in Australia. You can have your say here by August 19.

The good news is that, as a first step, there is a clear and simple “anti-snooping” rule we could introduce to cut out one unfair and unnecessary, but very common, data practice.

Deep in the fine print of the privacy terms of all the above-named websites, you’ll find an unsettling term.

It says these retailers can obtain extra data about you from other companies, for example, data brokers, advertising companies, or suppliers from whom you have previously purchased.

Read more:
It’s time for third-party data brokers to emerge from the shadows

eBay, for example, can take the data about you from a data broker and combine it with the data eBay already has about you, to form a detailed profile of your interests, purchases, behaviour and characteristics.

The problem is the online marketplaces give you no choice in this. There’s no privacy setting that lets you opt out of this data collection, and you can’t escape by switching to another major marketplace, because they all do it.

An online bookseller doesn’t need to collect data about your fast-food preferences to sell you a book. It wants these extra data for its own advertising and business purposes.

You might well be comfortable giving retailers information about yourself, so as to receive targeted ads and aid the retailer’s other business purposes. But this preference should not be assumed. If you want retailers to collect data about you from third parties, it should be done only on your explicit instructions, rather than automatically for everyone.

The “bundling” of these uses of a consumer’s data is potentially unlawful even under our existing privacy laws, but this needs to be made clear.

Time for an ‘anti-snooping’ rule

Here’s my suggestion, which forms the basis of my own submission to the ACCC inquiry.

Online retailers should be barred from collecting data about a consumer from another company, unless the consumer has clearly and actively requested this.

For example, this could involve clicking on a check-box next to a plainly worded instruction such as:

Please obtain information about my interests, needs, behaviours and/or characteristics from the following data brokers, advertising companies and/or other suppliers.

The third parties should be specifically named. And the default setting should be that third-party data are not collected without the customer’s express request.

This rule would be consistent with what we know from consumer surveys: most Australian consumers are not comfortable with companies unnecessarily sharing their personal information.

There could be reasonable exceptions to this rule, such as for fraud detection, address verification or credit checks. But data obtained for these purposes should not be used for marketing, advertising or generalised “market research”.

Can’t we already opt out of targeted ads?

Online marketplaces do claim to allow choices about “personalised advertising” or marketing communications. Unfortunately, these are worth little in terms of privacy protection.

Amazon says you can opt out of seeing targeted advertising. It does not say you can opt out of all data collection for advertising and marketing purposes.

Similarly, eBay lets you opt out of being shown targeted ads. But the later passages of its Cookie Notice state:

your data may still be collected as described in our User Privacy Notice.

This gives eBay the right to continue to collect data about you from data brokers, and to share them with a range of third parties.

Many retailers and large digital platforms operating in Australia justify their collection of consumer data from third parties on the basis you’ve already given your implied consent to the third parties disclosing it.

That is, there’s some obscure term buried in the thousands of words of privacy policies that supposedly apply to you, which says that Bunnings, for instance, can share data about you with various “related companies”.

Of course, Bunnings didn’t highlight this term, let alone give you a choice in the matter, when you ordered your hedge cutter last year. It only included a “Policies” link at the foot of its website; the term was on another web page, buried in the detail of its Privacy Policy.

Such terms should ideally be eradicated entirely. But in the meantime, we can turn the tap off on this unfair flow of data, by stipulating that online retailers cannot obtain such data about you from a third party without your express, active and unequivocal request.

Who should be bound by an ‘anti-snooping’ rule?

While the focus of this article is on online marketplaces covered by the ACCC inquiry, many other companies have similar third-party data collection terms, including Woolworths, Coles, major banks, and digital platforms such as Google and Facebook.

Read more:
Here’s how tech giants profit from invading our privacy, and how we can start taking it back

While some argue users of “free” services like Google and Facebook should expect some surveillance as part of the deal, this should not extend to asking other companies about you without your active consent.

The anti-snooping rule should clearly apply to any website selling a product or service.

With lockdowns barring many of us from visiting physical shops, we should be able to make purchases online without being unwittingly roped into a company’s advertising side hustle.

Katharine Kemp receives funding from The Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation. She is a Member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Finance Initiative in India, the Centre for Law, Markets & Regulation and the Australian Privacy Foundation.

– ref. How one simple rule change could curb online retailers’ snooping on you – https://theconversation.com/how-one-simple-rule-change-could-curb-online-retailers-snooping-on-you-166174

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Welch, Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning, University of Auckland

In light of last week’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report confirming human activity is “unequivocally” driving global warming, here’s a striking statistic: in Auckland, road transport modes are responsible for 35% of the city’s climate-altering emissions.

Overall, road transport accounts for nearly 43% of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, an increase of over 100% since 1990. Given the nation’s streets are still clogged with conventionally powered vehicles, what can we collectively do about it — as citizens and in our cities?

According to the hyperbolic mantra of the #bancars movement, it’s time to get drastic. Of course, the slogan makes a catchier hashtag than the more rational policy objective: reduce the number of vehicles people own and the kilometres they are driven each year.

It’s also catchier than the policy prescription: invest in alternative modes and infrastructure that would charge drivers the full social cost of driving; and restrict the number of vehicles that can enter dense urban centres through congestion pricing schemes.

But part of the problem with convincing people to get out of their cars is that we rarely examine the true costs of our dependence on them: the personal costs, the financial costs, the cost to health and the cost of investment in road infrastructure — and that’s before we get to the cost to the planet.

Driving is still too cheap

You could walk into a friendly room and quickly have the mood turn hostile by arguing the so-called “ute tax” doesn’t go far enough. The fact is, however, we already pay in numerous ways for our addiction to cars.

A portion of that cost is paid directly by the driver — buying, insuring and fuelling the car. To some degree (though probably less than many believe) drivers also pay for building and maintaining roads through the fuel tax or road user charges.

Read more:
Aggressive marketing has driven the rise of the double-cab ute on New Zealand streets — time to hit the brakes?

These are all labelled private costs because they are paid for directly from the driver’s wallet. To which we can add the less tangible costs to personal and collective productivity of those wasted hours stuck in traffic.

What few of us factor into our own car ownership calculations, though, is the cost we must bear as a society. It’s the pollution from a car’s tailpipe that causes an
increased risk of asthma. It’s the carbon dioxide that flows from that same tailpipe and contributes to a warming climate. It’s the NZ$5 billion cost of road crashes across the country each year.

Paying the real price

These are a massive uncharged bundle of expenses everyone in New Zealand must pay in some way, caused by each driver but not directly paid by the driver.

These “externalities” — the costs beyond the immediate expense of choosing to drive — are social costs. Some argue these are in fact higher than the private costs of driving, and orders of magnitude greater than the social cost of cycling or walking.

Read more:
Can the city cycling boom survive the end of the Covid-19 pandemic?

Basic economics tells us that when only the private cost of an activity is charged it appears cheaper than it really is, thereby encouraging that activity. But when the social costs are charged, the activity is more expensive — and less attractive.

Logically, then, to reduce pressure on our roads and environment, drivers should face a charge that more closely reflects the actual cost of driving. That is, the cost of clogged roads, air pollution, climate change, injury and death.

Congestion charges work

One solution has already been pursued by other cities. Although some predicted the end of life as we know it when London introduced charges for inner city driving, in practice the congestion charge significantly improved the quality of life and business.

It also created a significant new stream of revenue for the public transportation system, and for cycling and walking infrastructure. Other cities take a similar approach with good results, including Singapore, Oslo and Milan. Even in the car-loving US, New York is moving closer to a congestion charge.

Read more:
Four ways our cities can cut transport emissions in a hurry: avoid, shift, share and improve

This could be done in a city like Auckland, where the main CBD streets are often choked with traffic. This congestion increases the cost of delivering goods to businesses, adds to commute times, reduces the reliability of public transportation, and makes using active modes like walking and cycling much more dangerous.

Congestion pricing could, as in London, provide important additional revenue to Auckland’s transit network. Aucklanders currently face the third-highest public transport fare in the world. This cost reduces the viability of public transport. With lower fares, or even free fares, Aucklanders would rush to public transportation.

Read more:
Why calling ordinary Kiwi cyclists ‘elitist’ just doesn’t add up

Money to pay for better things

With the additional revenue, the city could also expand the fledgling network of cycleways, getting more people out of cars and e-scooters off footpaths. All of this would result in fewer cars on the road, faster travel times for everyone and less need for more expensive road building and maintenance.

No, we don’t have to #bancars altogether. But there is substantial room to inject a bit more rationality into our transport policy.

We could better share existing roads with other modes, reduce pressure on the climate and help those who rely on public transport to get more places more affordably.

Market forces got us to where we are today. If we want to address the climate emergency, we will need to harness the power of pricing and pay the real cost of our car addiction.

Timothy Welch 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. To get New Zealanders out of their cars we’ll need to start charging the true cost of driving – https://theconversation.com/to-get-new-zealanders-out-of-their-cars-well-need-to-start-charging-the-true-cost-of-driving-166167

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Toole, Professor of International Health, Burnet Institute

Cases of COVID-19 are surging around the world, but the course of the pandemic varies widely country to country. To provide you with a global view as we approach a year and a half since the official declaration of the pandemic, The Conversation editors from around the world commissioned articles looking at specific countries and where they are now in combating the pandemic.

Here, Mike Toole, Professor of International Health at the Burnet Institute, writes about how China went from pandemic epicentre with a dark history of silencing those who spoke out about the risks of the virus, to rapidly containing the virus in its latest outbreak. You can see the whole collection of articles here.

On January 5, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a statement that five days earlier, it was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province.

By January 3, 2020, a total of 44 cases had been detected. According to Chinese authorities, some patients were vendors and customers in the Huanan Seafood market.

And so it began

The outbreak was not widely reported at the time, although the BBC posted a piece two days before the WHO statement. I first learnt of it on January 8 from the New York Times. Having been involved in many epidemic responses and knowing that several viral pandemics – such as SARS and avian influenza – had originated in China, the story piqued my interest.

By then, the causative agent had been identified – a novel coronavirus named SARS-CoV-2. Investigators had not yet found evidence of person-to-person transmission.

And where did this virus come from? Well, we don’t really know. The WHO investigative team came to the following conclusion:

At this stage, it is not possible to determine precisely how humans in China were initially infected with SARS-CoV-2. However, all available evidence suggests that it has a natural animal origin and is not a manipulated or constructed virus. SARS-CoV-2 virus most probably has its ecological reservoir in bats.

Read more:
I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus

China’s response to the Wuhan outbreak

During early January 2020, a group of doctors in Wuhan who had been trying to alert colleagues to the risks of the outbreak were apprehended by security police and forced to sign statements denouncing their warnings. One of them, Dr Li Wenliang, later died of coronavirus infection.

On January 23, authorities sealed off Wuhan, a city of 11 million. However, the mayor estimated up to five million people were able to leave beforehand during Spring Festival and the virus spread to every province and region in the country.

By then, person-to-person transmission had been confirmed.

On January 30, the WHO declared a public health emergency of international concern. By this time, China had reported 9,692 cases and 213 deaths.

Among patients, about 20% had become seriously ill and the rest had a mild illness, the WHO said.

On February 11, the WHO announced the official name of the novel disease: COVID-19. While the virus had been detected in more than 20 countries, the majority of cases were in China.

By mid-February, the country had reported more than 66,000 cases and 1,600 deaths. The health system was quickly overwhelmed and measures were taken like building two large new hospitals in Wuhan with a combined 2,500 bed capacity in the space of two weeks.

And then it was over

The seven day rolling average of new daily cases reached a peak of 4,670 on February 13. Just 30 days later it was down to 19. However, it should be noted that China only reports cases that are symptomatic, which may underestimate total SARS-CoV-2 infections.

This remains one of the most rapidly contained outbreaks of COVID-19 in the world during the entire pandemic.

Since that first wave, China has been determined to maintain zero COVID with just an occasional cluster disturbing the peace. By almost every metric, China ranks highly in containing the coronavirus.

Since April 1, 2020, the country has reported just over 12,800 new cases in a population of 1.4 billion. That’s about the same number recorded in Timor-Leste with a population one thousandth the size of China.

Overall, China has reported 66 cases per million population compared to 112,362 per million in the United States. This low number has been due to a combination of quick, early lockdowns, widespread testing and sometimes harsh limitations on people’s movements. The latter have been criticised by human rights advocates.

The vaccine rollout has picked up pace and 1.8 billion doses of CoronaVac and Sinopharm, both manufactured in China, have been administered, enough to vaccinate 66% of the population.

Read more:
What are the Sinopharm and Sinovac vaccines? And how effective are they? Two experts explain

While there have been concerns about these vaccines, real world data in Chile indicate CoronaVac is 67% effective against infection and 85% effective against hospitalisation.

A study in Bahrain found Sinopharm is 90% effective against infection and higher against hospitalisation.

Since late July, China has faced its biggest challenge since the first wave in Wuhan. An outbreak of the Delta strain, which began at Nanjing airport, led to 526 cases in Jiangsu province in the first two weeks of August and has spread to 12 cities, including Wuhan.

This prompted the activation of epidemic containment protocols including mass testing, demarcating neighbourhoods deemed risky and restricting movement in affected cities.

The strategy seems to be working – by August 15, new daily cases declined for the fifth consecutive day.

What lessons can China offer the world?

It’s hard to compare China with any other country. Its mass urban testing strategy, for example, is not feasible in most countries.

But, what China has clearly demonstrated is that zero tolerance of COVID-19 reaps enormous health and economic benefits. While China’s economy shrank by 6.8% in the first quarter of 2020, it grew by a record 18.3% in the first quarter of 2021.

By contrast, the Eurozone economy shrunk by 0.6% and the UK economy shrunk by 1.5% in the same quarter.

That should be food for thought for those who agitate for “living with COVID-19”.

Michael Toole receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council

– ref. From ground zero to zero tolerance – how China learnt from its COVID response to quickly stamp out its latest outbreak – https://theconversation.com/from-ground-zero-to-zero-tolerance-how-china-learnt-from-its-covid-response-to-quickly-stamp-out-its-latest-outbreak-165963

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew King, ARC DECRA fellow, The University of Melbourne

A major new report published last week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained grave warnings on where Earth’s climate is headed. So what happens if humanity doesn’t get its act together? How bad could climate change actually get?

The IPCC report canvassed various scenarios, from the most terrifying to the best possible case. It’s increasingly unlikely Earth will follow the path of very high greenhouse gas emissions, represented in dark red on the graph below, which would very likely lead to global warming of 3.3℃ to 5.7℃ this century.

But given current policy settings, it’s plausible Earth will follow a mid-range emissions scenario such as that represented in orange. Such a pathway would lead to global warming of between 2℃ and 3.5℃, relative to pre-industrial levels.

So what will Earth look like under warming of that magnitude? And what will life on this planet be like? Academic research can shed light on those crucial questions. And a warning: the answers are confronting.

An angrier, less hospitable world

The IPCC report confirmed Earth has warmed 1.09℃ since pre-industrial times. This level of warming is already causing significant damage.

Around the world over the past few months, the damage has been strikingly evident. Record-shattering heatwaves have struck North America’s west and southern Europe, while extreme rain and flooding has hit central Europe and China.

At 3℃ global warming, heatwaves would be even more frequent, intense and longer, while extreme rain will be heavier. The relationship between average global temperature and heat extremes is very strong, although this varies across regions.

Over Australia, heatwaves are expected to be slightly hotter than the corresponding global warming threshold. So with 3℃ of global warming, the hottest day of a heatwave will be about 3.6℃ warmer than pre-industrial conditions.

What’s more, heatwaves in Australia are projected to become four to five days longer for each degree of global warming.

Read more:
Climate change has already hit Australia. Unless we act now, a hotter, drier and more dangerous future awaits, IPCC warns

The IPCC findings show in some parts of the world, there’s a clear relationship between future increases in global warming and a rise in extreme rainfall events. This includes the eastern part of the United States, Alaska and western Canada, Europe and parts of Russia and Africa. The projected increase applies to both daily rainfall events and those lasting five days.

Explore future projections of extreme rainfall and other climate variables with the IPCC’s interactive climate atlas.

Climate change has already damaged the world’s coral reefs. The Great Barrier Reef has bleached three times in the past five years, giving little time for the ecosystem to recover. In a 2018 report, the IPCC found coral reefs would decline by a further 70-90% under global warming of 1.5℃. Virtually all reefs would be lost with 2℃ warming.

Bushfire risk also increases the more we let the climate warm. As the Australian Academy of Science outlined in a report earlier this year, extreme fire days in Australia will increase with global temperatures.

Greater increases are projected for southern and eastern Australia. However, in much of Australia the frequency of extreme fire days increases by 100-300% once 3℃ global warming is reached.

And conditions conducive to mega-fires – such as those which occurred during the 2019-20 Black Summer – will occur more often over southeast Australia under continued climate change, especially during late spring.

Read more:
Seriously ugly: here’s how Australia will look if the world heats by 3°C this century

On thin ice

The more the planet warms, the more we risk triggering disastrous irreversible changes known as “tipping points”. Scientists have identified several potential tipping points which might occur – especially if the climate warms by more than 2℃, in line with the IPCC’s midway scenario.

For example, global warming may cause the West Antarctic ice sheet to collapse, resulting in several metres of sea level rise. The exact extent of global warming required to trigger such changes is very uncertain, and climate projections suggest we won’t hit any trigger points this century.

However, these irreversible changes remain a distinct possibility if greenhouse gas emissions continue their current trajectory.

Read more:
Rising seas and melting glaciers: these changes are now irreversible, but we have to act to slow them down

The choice is ours

Some climate changes we’ve described under the midway emissions scenario are awful for society and our environment.

And as CSIRO climate scientist Pep Canadell, a coordinating lead author of a chapter of the IPCC report, told the Guardian last week, if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated “there is no bottom end to how much damage we can create”.

Humanity is now at a crossroads. The IPCC says if we halve global greenhouse gas emissions within the next 15 years, and reach net-zero emissions before 2060, we have a more than 90% chance of keeping global warming below 2℃.

That means every action matters. Each fraction of a degree of global warming prevented will reduce the climate damage and increase the chance Earth avoids the most catastrophic impacts of global warming.

Read more:
IPCC says Earth will reach temperature rise of about 1.5℃ in around a decade. But limiting any global warming is what matters most

Andrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Nerilie Abram receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the international Climate Crisis Advisory Group.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a Future Fellow, and a chief investigator with the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

– ref. There’s no end to the damage humans can wreak on the climate. This is how bad it’s likely to get – https://theconversation.com/theres-no-end-to-the-damage-humans-can-wreak-on-the-climate-this-is-how-bad-its-likely-to-get-166031

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew J. Martin, Scientia Professor and Professor of Educational Psychology, UNSW

The speed and scale of the shift to remote online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has really tested students’ adaptability. Our study of more than 1,500 students at nine Australian high schools during 2020 found strong links between their level of adaptability and how they fared with online learning.

Students with higher adaptability were more confident about online learning in term 2. And they had made greater academic progress by term 4.

The important thing about these findings is that adaptability is a teachable skill. Later in this article we discuss how to teach students to be more adaptable.

What is adaptability and why does it matter?

We have been investigating adaptability for more than a decade. The term refers to adjustments to one’s behaviours, thoughts and feelings in response to disruption.

The pandemic certainly tested every student’s capacity to adjust to disruption. The switch to remote learning involved huge change and uncertainty.

Research has demonstrated positive links between adaptability and students’ engagement and achievement at school and university. As for online learning, the picture is complicated by the many factors identified as affecting its success. These include access to technology, academic ability, instructional quality, socioeconomic status, ethnicity and specific learning support needs.

The pandemic disruptions added to this complexity.

What did the study find?

Our latest study involved a survey of 1,548 students in nine schools in 2020. It covered a period of fully or partially remote online learning in maths (from the start of term 2).

We used the Adaptability Scale to assess how much students were able to respond to disruption in their lives. They were presented with nine statements, such as “To assist me in a new situation, I am able to change the way I do things.” Students were asked to respond on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

They also answered questions about:

• their confidence as online learners

• online learning barriers such as unreliable internet, inadequate computing/technology, and lack of a learning area to concentrate

• online learning support, such as satisfaction with the online learning platform

• home support, such as help from parents and others.

In the term 2 survey, we tested students’ maths achievement. In term 4, they did a second maths test.

We found students with higher adaptability were significantly more confident about online learning in term 2. These students also had higher gains in achievement in term 4. Online learning confidence in term 2 was linked to term 4 achievement gains.

After allowing for the many other factors affecting online learning, we found adaptability had a direct positive impact on student achievements.

Online learning support and online learning barriers also affected students’ online learning confidence. Support was linked to higher confidence, and barriers to lower confidence.

Thus, as well as focusing on increasing students’ adaptability, parents and schools should strive to minimise barriers to online learning and optimise supports.

So how do you teach students to be adaptable?

Boosting adaptability involves teaching students how to adjust their behaviour, thinking and feelings to help them navigate disruption. For example, in the face of new online learning tasks and demands, we could explain to students how to:

1. adjust their behaviour by seeking out online information and resources, or asking for help — an example would be asking a teacher to help with an unfamiliar online learning management system such as Canvas or Moodle

2. adjust their attitude by thinking about the new online task in a different way — for instance, they might consider the new opportunities the task offers, such as developing new skills that can be helpful in other parts of their lives

3. adjust their emotion by minimising negative feelings, or shifting the focus to positive feelings, when engaged in unfamiliar activities — for example, they might try not to focus on their disappointment when the teacher’s approach to online learning doesn’t match the student’s preferences or skill set.

Adaptability is a skill for life

Of course, these adjustments are helpful for navigating all sorts of disruption. Teaching young people adaptability gives them a skill for life.

It can be helpful to let students know that the three adjustments are part of a broader adaptability process — and they have control over each point in the process. The process involves:

1. teaching students how to recognise important disruptions to their life so they know when to adjust their behaviour, thinking and feelings

2. explaining to students the various ways they can make these adjustments to navigate the disruption (using strategies like those described above)

3. encouraging students to take note of the positive effects of these adjustments so they realise the benefits of adaptability and are motivated to adapt in future

4. inspiring students to practise their adjustments to behaviour, thinking and feelings so adaptability becomes a routine part of their lives.

It is fair to say adaptability comes more easily to some students than others. However, our longitudinal research among high school students has shown adaptability can and does change over time. It is a modifiable personal attribute. This is great news.

In the face of massive disruptions by COVID-19, we are constantly advised to adjust to a “new normal”. Part of this new normal is the increasing presence of online learning. Our findings show adaptability is an important personal attribute that can help students in their online learning during the pandemic — and likely beyond.

Robin P. Nagy receives funding from the Research Training Program for his PhD.

Andrew J. Martin and Rebecca J Collie 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. Students who are more adaptable do best in remote learning – and it’s a skill we can teach – https://theconversation.com/students-who-are-more-adaptable-do-best-in-remote-learning-and-its-a-skill-we-can-teach-165003

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Costanza, Professor and VC’s Chair, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Coastal communities around the world are facing increasing threats from tropical cyclones. Climate change is causing rising sea levels and bigger, more frequent storms.

Many coastal communities are pondering what to do. Should they build massive seawalls in a bid to protect existing infrastructure? Do they give up on their current coastal locations and retreat inland? Or is there another way?

In the US, the US Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building a 20-foot high giant seawall to protect Miami, the third most populous metropolis on the US east coast. The US$6 billion proposal is tentative and at least five years off, but sure to be among many proposals in the coming years to protect coastal communities from storms.

Read more:
A 20-foot sea wall won’t save Miami – how living structures can help protect the coast and keep the paradise vibe

But seawalls are expensive to build, require constant maintenance and provide limited protection.

Consider China, which already has a huge number of seawalls built for storm protection. A 2019 study analysed the impact of 127 storms on China between 1989 and 2016.

Coastal wetlands were far more cost effective in preventing storm damages. They also provided many other ecosystem services that seawalls do not.

How wetlands reduce storm effects

Coastal wetlands reduce the damaging effects of tropical cyclones on coastal communities by absorbing storm energy in ways that neither solid land nor open water can.

The mechanisms involved include decreasing the area of open water (fetch) for wind to form waves, increasing drag on water motion and hence the amplitude of a storm surge, reducing direct wind effects on the water surface, and directly absorbing wave energy.

Wetland vegetation contributes by decreasing surges and waves and maintaining shallow water depths that have the same effect. Wetlands also reduce flood damages by absorbing flood waters caused by rain and moderating their effects on built-up areas.

In 2008 I and colleagues estimated coastal wetlands in the US provided storm protection services worth US$23 billion a year.

Our new study estimates the global value of coastal wetlands to storm protection services is US$450 billion a year (calculated at 2015 value) with 4,600 lives saved annually.

To make this calculation, we used the records of more than 1,000 tropical cyclones since 1902 that caused property damage and/or human casualties in 71 countries. Our study took advantage of improved storm tracking, better global land-use mapping and damage-assessment databases, along with improved computational capabilities to model the relationships between coastal wetlands and avoided damages and deaths from tropical cyclones.

The 40 million hectares of coastal wetlands in storm-prone areas provided an average of US$11,000 per hectare a year in avoided storm damages.

Read more:
Rising seas allow coastal wetlands to store more carbon

Pacific nations benefit most

The degree to which coastal wetlands provide storm protection varies between countries (and within countries). Key factors are storm probability, amount of built infrastructure in storm-prone areas, if wetlands are in storm-prone areas, and coastal conditions.

The top five countries in terms of annual avoided damages (all in 2015 US dollar values) are the United States (US$200 billion), China (US$157 billion), the Philippines (US$47 billion), Japan (US$24 billion) and Mexico (US$15 billion).

In terms of lives saved annually, the top five are: China (1,309); the Philippines (976); the United States (469)l India (414); and Bangladesh (360).

Other ecosystem services

Coastal wetlands also provide other valuable ecosystem services. They provide nursery habitat for many commercially important marine species, recreational opportunities, carbon sequestration, management of sediment and nutrient run-off, and many other valuable services.

In 2014 I and colleagues estimated the value of other ecosystem services provided by wetlands (over and above storm protection) at about $US 135,000 a hectare a year.

But land-use changes, including the loss of coastal wetlands, has been eroding both services. Since 1900 the world has lost up to 70% of its wetlands (Davidson, 2014).

Preserving and restoring coastal wetlands is a very cost-effective strategy for society, and can significantly increase well-being for humans and the rest of nature.

With the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones and other extreme weather events projected to further increase, the value of coastal wetlands will increase in the future. This justifies investing much more in their conservation and restoration.

Robert Costanza 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. Forget massive seawalls, coastal wetlands offer the best storm protection money can buy – https://theconversation.com/forget-massive-seawalls-coastal-wetlands-offer-the-best-storm-protection-money-can-buy-165872

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heidi Norman, Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

Review: Ablaze, directed by Alec Morgan and Tiriki Onus

Opera singer Tiriki Onus comes across a dusty, aged suitcase stowed away in the basement. It belonged to his grandfather, Bill Onus, and contains lots of still images — including young men painted up for Corroboree. Not long after, a reel of film surfaces from another archive. It has no notation or audio, but is believed to be linked to Bill Onus.

Tiriki’s interest is sparked, and he begins a quest to better understand his grandfather’s life: a man who had passed before he was born, but who loomed large.

The film Ablaze, directed by Tiriki with Alex Morgan, is the culmination of Tiriki’s quest to understand the history of the lost footage, the contents of this suitcase archive, and the grandfather he never knew.

Born in 1906, Bill Onus was a civil rights activist, artist, performer and entrepreneur. He was a leading figure in his Yorta Yorta and Cummeragunja community and later at the Aboriginal epicentre of Fitzroy, Melbourne, where he lived as an adult.

As a child, Onus and his people in south eastern Australia experienced the escalating power of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board to control everyday lives and movement. Having your children removed was a constant threat. Exercising culture was prohibited. The government appointed mission managers exercised their power in cruel and inhumane ways, withholding food and quashing any objections with violence.

Read more:
Capturing the lived history of the Aborigines Protection Board while we still can

As an adult, Onus was inspired by the 1933 recording of Joe Anderson (King Burraga) speaking back to this authority, and he would speak out himself through film, photography and theatre.

Across his lifetime, he created a platform for many Aboriginal artists, directed plays and curated extravagant shows to tell the stories of Aboriginal lives and culture, military service and survival.

In a nation blighted by incomprehension of Aboriginal rights, Onus’ storytelling attempted to bring to wider attention the plight of his people and the call for equality.

Film and advocacy

From a young age, Onus combined his advocacy for Aboriginal rights and passion for film.

In the 1930s, he was invited to work on Charles Chauvel’s Uncivilised (1936), a cliche-ridden, Tarzan-inspired “white chief among the dangerous savages” story.

In the 1940s he worked — this time with an apparently enhanced advisory role — on Harry Watt’s The Overlanders (1946), a feature film about drovers driving a large herd of cattle some 2,500 kilometres across northern Australia.

Working on these films exposed Onus to poverty, violence and wage labour exploitation on pastoral stations beyond the south east.

Both Onus’ own experiences and his observations from the north fuelled his fight for Aboriginal equality and the desire to make films of his own.

As Ablaze shows, these ambitions were achieved in his documentary of the stage production White Justice in 1946. Performed at Melbourne’s New Theatre in conjunction with the Australian Aborigines league, White Justice referenced the Aboriginal strike in the Pilbara at that time.

This strike, over a vast territory of pastoral lands, saw Aboriginal workers seek independence from oppression and tyranny at the hands of the pastoralists. The now familiar images of chained Aboriginal men come from this time, a punishment in retaliation for their insubordination.

The family believes he made many more films, but they were all lost in a fire in the 1950s. Tiriki Onus’ discovery of the lost footage, including footage of the stage play, of returned Aboriginal servicemen and of Onus’ boomerang throwing prowess, finally gives an insight into the stories Bill Onus wanted to tell.

Change through stories

In Ablaze, Tiriki Onus interviews family, film historians and community leaders to understand his grandfather and the contents of the lost footage. He combines Bill Onus’ footage with other archival sources, including the expansive and now very useful files from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

Ablaze is a very personal journal, as Tiriki works to better understand what shaped his grandfather’s life and how his grandfather shaped him.

The lost footage takes us on a biographical journey that stretches out across a range of themes now familiar in the Aboriginal civil rights movement. One of the more interesting themes to emerge is Bill Onus’ comprehension of performance: how grand shows were necessary to achieve political change.

Like his grandson, Bill Onus knew storytelling: on film, the stage and in lavish theatre halls. He knew stories could be used as a vehicle for change and reach wide audiences.

Onus’ films never screened nor reached those wider audiences; the stage shows never toured nationally or internationally. But the power of First Nations film and extraordinary creative practice today finds rich lineage in his now revealed work.

Ablaze is streaming at MIFF now.

Heidi Norman 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. Ablaze review: a powerful, personal portrait of Aboriginal activist and filmmaker Bill Onus – https://theconversation.com/ablaze-review-a-powerful-personal-portrait-of-aboriginal-activist-and-filmmaker-bill-onus-165870

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

As the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan finally captured Australians’ attention, Scott Morrison had some well rehearsed talking points during a Monday media blitz dominated by COVID and the lost war.

The questions were predictable. The answers were, to be blunt, mostly trite.

Had it all been a waste?

“It’s always Australia’s cause to fight for freedom, and whatever the result, whatever the outcomes of that, Australians have always stood up for that.”

But it hadn’t achieved anything?

“Everyone who has fallen in an Australian uniform, for our values and under flag, has died in the great cause of freedom, and they are great heroes.”

What had been the point?

“The point was to deny Osama bin Laden and to hunt him down, and to deny al-Qaeda a base of operations in Afghanistan.”

Morrison said he was “absolutely devastated” about the future for the women and girls.

Read more:
The world must not look away as the Taliban sexually enslaves women and girls

The government is currently concentrated on getting out Australians (there are more than 130 in Afghanistan), and Afghans who have previously assisted our forces, as translators and the like.

Morrison insisted this is being undertaken efficiently, although things seem slow, and it surely could have helped if we’d kept our embassy open a few weeks longer while the processing was being done. The accountability will come later.

It’s obvious Morrison does not want to engage in any substantial debate about the whole Afghanistan debacle – another war in Asia in which the United States and its allies have been routed.

Morrison is on strong enough ground when he says the point had been to deny – after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in the US – a base to al-Qaeda and to hunt bin Laden.

That indeed was a proper justification for the initial attack. Afghanistan was a terrorist haven and the west could not afford to leave it as such.

But what came after was another matter. To suggest it is always worth Australians dying for the cause of freedom, win or lose, does not really cut it as an argument.

Of course Australia is a bit player in this long-in-the-making disaster. The Afghan government had been a fragile house of cards, even if its collapse was surprisingly fast once the Americans (first Trump, then Biden) instituted the US exit.

America and its allies, including Australia, had failed to successfully train and motivate an Afghan military force to have the strength and will, when left on its own, to resist the Taliban. The US withdrawal also took out vital capability the Afghan military needed to function.

The Australian forces, and those of other countries, did good things for civilians over the past two decades including for women and their daughters. But after a glimpse of another, better life, all or much of that will now be reversed, and the outlook is bleak for a generation of girls.

During a private trip to Afghanistan in 2002 I met Benafsha, then 19, who told me she wanted to be a doctor, or an engineer.

She was in ninth grade at Ferdous High School in Kabul, run by Catholic Relief Services, where she was catching up on the time when she couldn’t study during the Taliban regime.

“I will be educated. My life will be better than my mother’s,” Benafsha said. It’s not a hope the average 19-year-old girl in Afghanistan will be able to feel today.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne did not exaggerate when she told Sky: “For women and girls I fear this is devastating”.

Morrison, Payne and Defence Minister Peter Dutton said in a statement late Monday, “The Taliban must cease all violence against civilians, and adhere to international humanitarian law and the human rights all Afghans are entitled to expect, in particular women and girls”.

Not much chance, on the Taliban’s previous record.

Read more:
How Joe Biden failed the people of Afghanistan — and tarnished US credibility around the world

Promoting democracy and rebuilding a country proved to be much harder for the coalition that went into Afghanistan than inflicting an initial military defeat.

Determined insurgents, fanatically committed to their ideology, are the most difficult enemies to overcome. They regroup.

John Howard took Australia into Afghanistan, and then out of it at the end of 2002, to facilitate supporting George W Bush’s ill-judged mission in Iraq. He re-engaged Australia in Afghanistan in 2005.

Howard has told the Canberra Times, “I have absolutely no regrets about the decision my government took 20 years ago to involve this country. It was the right thing to do.” But reportedly he wouldn’t be drawn on whether it had been wise to stay.

The Howard government’s decision to return in 2005 is hard to justify in terms of Australia’s national interest.

Australia’s prolonged involvement in Afghanistan, and its role in Iraq were driven by its commitment to the US alliance, as had been its participation in that other failure, the Vietnam war.

Successive Australian governments have judged that the alliance, as the bedrock of Australia’s military security, demands quid pro quos when the US asks us to join in military operations.

The 70th anniversary of the ANZUS treaty is imminent. Howard invoked ANZUS for the first time in the wake of the September 11 attacks, which occurred while he happened to be in Washington.

The alliance is much broader than the formal ANZUS treaty, but the anniversary is a time to reflect on the extent to which the alliance has made some of our key international decisions virtually automatic, regardless of what might be our own distinctive interests.

Sadly but inevitably, Afghanistan’s pain will soon fade from the attention of both the Australian media and our politicians. For all the present talk, the fate of the Afghan women will disappear from our consciousness. When we in Australia talk about “women’s issues” we are usually distinctly near-sighted.

Read more:
As the Taliban returns, 20 years of progress for women looks set to disappear overnight

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

– ref. View from The Hill: There’s no getting away from it – we’ve all failed Afghanistan’s hopeful girls – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-theres-no-getting-away-from-it-weve-all-failed-afghanistans-hopeful-girls-166205

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

As the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan finally captured Australians’ attention, Scott Morrison had some well rehearsed talking points during a Monday media blitz dominated by COVID and the lost war.

The questions were predictable. The answers were, to be blunt, mostly trite.

Had it all been a waste?

“It’s always Australia’s cause to fight for freedom, and whatever the result, whatever the outcomes of that, Australians have always stood up for that.”

But it hadn’t achieved anything?

“Everyone who has fallen in an Australian uniform, for our values and under flag, has died in the great cause of freedom, and they are great heroes.”

What had been the point?

“The point was to deny Osama bin Laden and to hunt him down, and to deny al-Qaeda a base of operations in Afghanistan.”

Morrison said he was “absolutely devastated” about the future for the women and girls.

Read more:
The world must not look away as the Taliban sexually enslaves women and girls

The government is currently concentrated on getting out Australians (there are more than 130 in Afghanistan), and Afghans who have previously assisted our forces, as translators and the like.

Morrison insisted this is being undertaken efficiently, although things seem slow, and it surely could have helped if we’d kept our embassy open a few weeks longer while the processing was being done. The accountability will come later.

It’s obvious Morrison does not want to engage in any substantial debate about the whole Afghanistan debacle – another war in Asia in which the United States and its allies have been routed.

Morrison is on strong enough ground when he says the point had been to deny – after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks in the US – a base to al-Qaeda and to hunt bin Laden.

That indeed was a proper justification for the initial attack. Afghanistan was a terrorist haven and the west could not afford to leave it as such.

But what came after was another matter. To suggest it is always worth Australians dying for the cause of freedom, win or lose, does not really cut it as an argument.

Of course Australia is a bit player in this long-in-the-making disaster. The Afghan government had been a fragile house of cards, even if its collapse was surprisingly fast once the Americans (first Trump, then Biden) instituted the US exit.

America and its allies, including Australia, had failed to successfully train and motivate an Afghan military force to have the strength and will, when left on its own, to resist the Taliban. The US withdrawal also took out vital capability the Afghan military needed to function.

The Australian forces, and those of other countries, did good things for civilians over the past two decades including for women and their daughters. But after a glimpse of another, better life, all or much of that will now be reversed, and the outlook is bleak for a generation of girls.

During a private trip to Afghanistan in 2002 I met Benafsha, then 19, who told me she wanted to be a doctor, or an engineer.

She was in ninth grade at Ferdous High School in Kabul, run by Catholic Relief Services, where she was catching up on the time when she couldn’t study during the Taliban regime.

“I will be educated. My life will be better than my mother’s,” Benafsha said. It’s not a hope the average 19-year-old girl in Afghanistan will be able to feel today.

Foreign Minister Marise Payne did not exaggerate when she told Sky: “For women and girls I fear this is devastating”.

Morrison, Payne and Defence Minister Peter Dutton said in a statement late Monday, “The Taliban must cease all violence against civilians, and adhere to international humanitarian law and the human rights all Afghans are entitled to expect, in particular women and girls”.

Not much chance, on the Taliban’s previous record.

Read more:
How Joe Biden failed the people of Afghanistan — and tarnished US credibility around the world

Promoting democracy and rebuilding a country proved to be much harder for the coalition that went into Afghanistan than inflicting an initial military defeat.

Determined insurgents, fanatically committed to their ideology, are the most difficult enemies to overcome. They regroup.

John Howard took Australia into Afghanistan, and then out of it at the end of 2002, to facilitate supporting George W Bush’s ill-judged mission in Iraq. He re-engaged Australia in Afghanistan in 2005.

Howard has told the Canberra Times, “I have absolutely no regrets about the decision my government took 20 years ago to involve this country. It was the right thing to do.” But reportedly he wouldn’t be drawn on whether it had been wise to stay.

The Howard government’s decision to return in 2005 is hard to justify in terms of Australia’s national interest.

Australia’s prolonged involvement in Afghanistan, and its role in Iraq were driven by its commitment to the US alliance, as had been its participation in that other failure, the Vietnam war.

Successive Australian governments have judged that the alliance, as the bedrock of Australia’s military security, demands quid pro quos when the US asks us to join in military operations.

The 70th anniversary of the ANZUS treaty is imminent. Howard invoked ANZUS for the first time in the wake of the September 11 attacks, which occurred while he happened to be in Washington.

The alliance is much broader than the formal ANZUS treaty, but the anniversary is a time to reflect on the extent to which the alliance has made some of our key international decisions virtually automatic, regardless of what might be our own distinctive interests.

Sadly but inevitably, Afghanistan’s pain will soon fade from the attention of both the Australian media and our politicians. For all the present talk, the fate of the Afghan women will disappear from our consciousness. When we in Australia talk about “women’s issues” we are usually distinctly near-sighted.

Read more:
As the Taliban returns, 20 years of progress for women looks set to disappear overnight

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

– ref. View from The Hill: There’s no gilding the lily – we’ve all failed Afghanistan’s hopeful girls – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-theres-no-gilding-the-lily-weve-all-failed-afghanistans-hopeful-girls-166205

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Vice-chancellor’s fellow, La Trobe University

In the 19th century, the phrase “The Great Game” was used to describe competition for power and influence in Afghanistan, and neighbouring central and south Asia territories, between the British and Russian empires.

Neither side prevailed in what became known as the “graveyard of empires”.

Two centuries later, an American superpower has been reminded of a similar reality.

The Afghanistan debacle, in which a 300,000-strong US-trained and equipped Afghan army collapsed in hours serves as a reminder of the limits of American power in the wider Middle East.

Read more:
As the Taliban returns, 20 years of progress for women looks set to disappear overnight

US President Joe Biden may be enduring the sharpest criticism for a disastrously executed withdrawal. But there is plenty of blame to go around, dating back to the original ill-fated decision to “nation build” a country that has resisted outside interference for thousands of years.

After the fall of Kabul and the hasty US withdrawal from a country on which it had squandered US$1 trillion dollars, the question remains: what next for the Middle East?

This is a question whose arc stretches from Morocco in the west to Pakistan in the east, from Turkey in the north down into the Gulf and across to the Horn of Africa.

Every corner of the Middle East and North Africa will be touched in some way by the failure of American authority in Afghanistan, the longest war in its history.

America’s reckoning is also shared by its NATO allies and countries like Australia. Australia’s ill-considered participation in an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan should attract censure.

A new Saigon?

Inevitably, comparisons are being made between America’s panicky withdrawal from Kabul and similar scenes in Saigon, 46 years ago.

In some respects, the Afghan situation is more concerning because so much of the Middle East is at risk of descending into chaos.

The defeat of the South Vietnamese army in 1975 might have influenced developments in the neighbouring states of Indo-China, but fallout was largely contained.

Afghanistan is different in the sense that while America’s credibility and self-confidence was battered in Vietnam, it remained the dominant military force in the western Pacific before China’s rise.

Read more:
In Kabul’s ‘Saigon moment’, Australia faces the shame of repeating its mistakes exiting the Vietnam war

In the Middle East, a diminished Washington – in which confidence in its ability to stand by its commitments has been shaken, if not shattered – will find that its authority will be much questioned.

This comes at a time when China and Russia are testing American resolve globally. In the region itself, Turkey and Iran are already seeking to fill a vacuum exposed by an American failure.

Beijing and Moscow, for their own reasons, have an interest in Afghanistan’s future. For China, that goes beyond just sharing a border, while for Russia it is historical concerns about Afghan extremism infecting its own Muslim populations and those of nation states on its periphery.

Recently, China has been cultivating Taliban leaders. Its foreign minister Wang Yi held a well-publicised meeting with the Afghan Taliban’s political chief Mullah Abdul Ghani Barada last month.

Then there is Pakistan, which has supported the Taliban both covertly and overtly over the years. Islamabad will see in the American extreme discomfort opportunities for itself to assume a more significant regional role.

This is not to forget Pakistan’s close ties to China, and its fractious relationship with the United States.

In Afghanistan itself, the Taliban may live up to its undertakings that it has changed and that it will seek to establish consensus rule in a country riven by bloody ethnic and tribal divisions.

Given early indications of brutal Taliban reprisals against its enemies and the panicked reaction of shell-shocked Afghan population it would take a leap of faith to believe much has changed.

What implications will it have in the Middle East?

Will the al-Qaeda and Islamic State franchises be allowed to re-establish themselves in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan? Will the Taliban re-emerge as a state sponsor of terrorism? Will it continue to allow Afghanistan to be used as a giant market garden in the opium trade?

In other words, will the Taliban change its ways and behave in such a manner that it does not constitute a threat to its neighbours, and the region more generally?

From America’s perspective, its exit from Afghanistan leaves its attempts to breathe life into the nuclear deal with Iran as its main piece of unfinished Middle East business – if we put aside the seemingly intractable Israel-Palestine dispute.

Attempts to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) have formed a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s efforts to engage more constructively in the Middle East.

Progress has been faltering. The election of a new hardline Iranian president further complicates efforts to achieve compromise. Failure to resuscitate the JCPOA, abandoned by President Donald Trump, will add a new layer of uncertainty – and risk – to Middle East calculations.

There will have been no more interested party in developments in neighbouring Afghanistan than the leadership in Tehran. Iran’s relationship with the Taliban has been fraught at times, cooperative at others, given the anxiety in Tehran over mistreatment of Afghanistan’s Shia population.

Shia Iran and the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban are not natural partners.

Further afield, the latest developments in Afghanistan will be capturing the close attention of Gulf states. Qatar has provided a diplomatic haven for the Taliban during peace talks with the vanquished Ghani government. This peace initiative, under US auspices, is now revealed to have been a foil for the Taliban’s ambitions to return to power in its own right.

How any reasonable observer could have believed otherwise is confounding.

Saudi Arabia will be unsettled by developments of the past few days because it is not in Riyadh’s interests for American authority in the region to be undermined. But the Saudis have their own longstanding links with the Taliban.

In Saudi Arabian foreign policy, Afghanistan is not a zero sum game.

More generally, the hit to US standing in the region will be worrying for its moderate Arab allies. This includes Egypt and Jordan. For both, with their own versions of the Taliban lurking in the shadows, events in Afghanistan are not good news.

Read more:
The latest ‘spasm’ of violence in Gaza is unlikely to be the last

The Taliban success in Afghanistan will also have implications for the most combustible corner of the Middle East. In both Iraq and parts of Syria where the US maintains a military presence, the American exit will be unsettling.

In Lebanon, which has become to all intents and purposes a failed state, the Afghanistan debacle will be adding to the gloom.

Israel will be calculating the implications of the setback suffered by its principal ally. Increased Middle East instability would not seem to be to Israel’s advantage.

In this next phase, America will no doubt pull back from all but its most pressing Middle East commitments. This will be a time for it to reflect on what lessons might be learned from the painful Afghanistan experience.

One lesson that should be paramount as far as America and its allies are concerned: fighting “failed state” wars is a losing proposition.

Tony Walker 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. As Afghanistan falls, what does it mean for the Middle East? – https://theconversation.com/as-afghanistan-falls-what-does-it-mean-for-the-middle-east-166169

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Azadah Raz Mohammad, PhD student, The University of Melbourne

As the Taliban takes control of the country, Afghanistan has again become an extremely dangerous place to be a woman.

Even before the fall of Kabul on Sunday, the situation was rapidly deteriorating, exacerbated by the planned withdrawal of all foreign military personnel and declining international aid.

In the past few weeks alone, there have been many reports of casualties and violence. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes. The United Nations Refugee Agency says about 80% of those who have fled since the end of May are women and children.

What does the return of the Taliban mean for women and girls?

The history of the Taliban

The Taliban took control of Afghanistan in 1996, enforcing harsh conditions and rules following their strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Under their rule, women had to cover themselves and only leave the house in the company of a male relative. The Taliban also banned girls from attending school, and women from working outside the home. They were also banned from voting.

Women were subject to cruel punishments for disobeying these rules, including being beaten and flogged, and stoned to death if found guilty of adultery. Afghanistan had the highest maternal morality rate in the world.

The past 20 years

With the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the situation for women and girls vastly improved, although these gains were partial and fragile.

Women now hold positions as ambassadors, ministers, governors, and police and security force members. In 2003, the new government ratified the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which requires states to incorporate gender equality into their domestic law.

Read more:
Afghan government collapses and Taliban on verge of controlling country: 5 essential reads

The 2004 Afghan Constitution holds that “citizens of Afghanistan, man and woman, have equal rights and duties before the law”. Meanwhile, a 2009 law was introduced to protect women from forced and under-age marriage, and violence.

According to Human Rights Watch, the law saw a rise in the reporting, investigation and, to a lesser extent, conviction, of violent crimes against women and girls.

While the country has gone from having almost no girls at school to tens of thousands at university, the progress has been slow and unstable. UNICEF reports of the 3.7 million Afghan children out of school some 60% are girls.

A return to dark days

Officially, Taliban leaders have said they want to grant women’s rights “according to Islam”. But this has been met with great scepticism, including by women leaders in Afghanistan. Indeed, the Taliban has given every indication they will reimpose their repressive regime.

In July, the United Nations reported the number of women and girls killed and injured in the first six months of the year nearly doubled compared to the same period the year before.

In the areas again under Taliban control, girls have been banned from school and their freedom of movement restricted. There have also been reports of forced marriages.

Women are putting burqas back on and speak of destroying evidence of their education and life outside the home to protect themselves from the Taliban.

As one anonymous Afghan woman writes in The Guardian:

I did not expect that we would be deprived of all our basic rights again and travel back to 20 years ago. That after 20 years of fighting for our rights and freedom, we should be hunting for burqas and hiding our identity.

Many Afghans are angered by the return of the Taliban and what they see as their abandonment by the international community. There have been protests in the streets. Women have even taken up guns in a rare show of defiance.

But this alone will not be enough to protect women and girls.

The world looks the other way

Currently, the US and its allies are engaged in frantic rescue operations to get their citizens and staff out of Afghanistan. But what of Afghan citizens and their future?

US President Joe Biden remains largely unmoved by the Taliban’s advance and the worsening humanitarian crisis. In an August 14 statement, he said:

an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.

And yet, the US and its allies — including Australia — went to Afghanistan 20 years ago on the premise of removing the Taliban and protecting women’s rights. However, most Afghans do not believe they have experienced peace in their lifetimes.

Read more:
Taliban ‘has not changed,’ say women facing subjugation in areas of Afghanistan under its extremist rule

As the Taliban reassert complete control over the country, the achievements of the past 20 years, especially those made to protect women’s rights and equality, are at risk if the international community once again abandons Afghanistan.

Women and girls are pleading for help as the Taliban advance. We hope the world will listen.

Jenna Sapiano receives funding from the Australian Research Council Discovery Project DP210103549 for a project titled ‘Gendering Peace Mediation’.

Azadah Raz Mohammad 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. As the Taliban returns, 20 years of progress for women looks set to disappear overnight – https://theconversation.com/as-the-taliban-returns-20-years-of-progress-for-women-looks-set-to-disappear-overnight-165012

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Syed Wajid Ali Shah, Research Fellow, Centre for Cyber Security Research and Innovation, Deakin University

It’s now well known that usernames and passwords aren’t enough to securely access online services. A recent study highlighted more than 80% of all hacking-related breaches happen due to compromised and weak credentials, with three billion username/password combinations stolen in 2016 alone.

As such, the implementation of two-factor authentication (2FA) has become a necessity. Generally, 2FA aims to provide an additional layer of security to the relatively vulnerable username/password system.

It works too. Figures suggest users who enabled 2FA ended up blocking about 99.9% of automated attacks.

But as with any good cybersecurity solution, attackers can quickly come up with ways to circumvent it. They can bypass 2FA through the one-time codes sent as an SMS to a user’s smartphone.

Yet many critical online services in Australia still use SMS-based one-time codes, including myGov and the Big 4 banks: ANZ, Commonwealth Bank, NAB and Westpac.

Read more:
A computer can guess more than 100,000,000,000 passwords per second. Still think yours is secure?

So what’s the problem with SMS?

Major vendors such as Microsoft have urged users to abandon 2FA solutions that leverage SMS and voice calls. This is because SMS is renowned for having infamously poor security, leaving it open to a host of different attacks.

For example, SIM swapping has been demonstrated as a way to circumvent 2FA. SIM swapping involves an attacker convincing a victims’s mobile service provider they themselves are the victim, and then requesting the victim’s phone number be switched to a device of their choice.

SMS-based one-time codes are also shown to be compromised through readily available tools such as Modlishka by leveraging a technique called reverse proxy. This facilitates communication between the victim and a service being impersonated.

So in the case of Modlishka, it will intercept communication between a genuine service and a victim and will track and record the victims’s interactions with the service, including any login credentials they may use).

In addition to these existing vulnerabilities, our team have found additional vulnerabilities in SMS-based 2FA. One particular attack exploits a feature provided on the Google Play Store to automatically install apps from the web to your android device.

If an attacker has access to your credentials and manages to log into your Google Play account on a laptop (although you will receive a prompt), they can then install any app they’d like automatically onto your smartphone.

The attack on Android

Our experiments revealed a malicious actor can remotely access a user’s SMS-based 2FA with little effort, through the use of a popular app (name and type withheld for security reasons) designed to synchronise user’s notifications across different devices.

Specifically, attackers can leverage a compromised email/password combination connected to a Google account (such as username@gmail.com) to nefariously install a readily-available message mirroring app on a victim’s smartphone via Google Play.

This is a realistic scenario since it’s common for users to use the same credentials across a variety of services. Using a password manager is an effective way to make your first line of authentication — your username/password login — more secure.

Once the app is installed, the attacker can apply simple social engineering techniques to convince the user to enable the permissions required for the app to function properly.

For example, they may pretend to be calling from a legitimate service provider to persuade the user to enable the permissions. After this they can remotely receive all communications sent to the victim’s phone, including one-time codes used for 2FA.

Although multiple conditions must be fulfilled for the aforementioned attack to work, it still demonstrates the fragile nature of SMS-based 2FA methods.

More importantly, this attack doesn’t need high-end technical capabilities. It simply requires insight into how these specific apps work and how to intelligently use them (along with social engineering) to target a victim.

The threat is even more real when the attacker is a trusted individual (e.g., a family member) with access to the victim’s smartphone.

What’s the alternative?

To remain protected online, you should check whether your initial line of defence is secure. First check your password to see if it’s compromised. There are a number of security programs that will let you do this. And make sure you’re using a well-crafted password.

We also recommend you limit the use of SMS as a 2FA method if you can. You can instead use app-based one-time codes, such as through Google Authenticator. In this case the code is generated within the Google Authenticator app on your device itself, rather than being sent to you.

However, this approach can also be compromised by hackers using some sophisticated malware. A better alternative would be to use dedicated hardware devices such as YubiKey.

These are small USB (or near-field communication-enabled) devices that provide a streamlined way to enable 2FA across different services.

Such physical devices need to be plugged into or brought into close proximity of a login device as a part of 2FA, therefore mitigating the risks associated with visible one-time codes, such as codes sent by SMS.

It must be stressed an underlying condition to any 2FA alternative is the user themselves must have some level of active participation and responsibility.

At the same time, further work must be carried out by service providers, developers and researchers to develop more accessible and secure authentication methods.

Essentially, these methods need to go beyond 2FA and towards a multi-factor authentication environment, where multiple methods of authentication are simultaneously deployed and combined as needed.

Read more:
Can I still be hacked with 2FA enabled?

The work has been supported by the Cyber Security Research Centre Limited whose activities are partially funded by the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Programme.

The work has been supported by the Cyber Security Research Centre Limited whose activities are partially funded by the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Programme.

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

– ref. How hackers can use message mirroring apps to see all your SMS texts — and bypass 2FA security – https://theconversation.com/how-hackers-can-use-message-mirroring-apps-to-see-all-your-sms-texts-and-bypass-2fa-security-165817

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kirsty Buising, Professor, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

Melbourne’s second wave of COVID-19 last year, which led to a lockdown lasting more than 100 days, provided us with many lessons about controlling transmission. Some of these are pertinent as New South Wales endures its ongoing lockdown.

One feature of Melbourne’s second wave was a disproportionate impact on health-care workers, patients in hospital, and residents in aged-care homes. In response to this, a team of Melbourne-based infectious clinicians, engineers and aerosol scientists came together to learn from each other about how to mitigate the risk of airborne COVID-19 transmission in health care.

We are some members of that team. As we hear about COVID spreading in Sydney hospitals during the current outbreak, we want to share what we learnt about how to potentially minimise airborne COVID-19 spread in the hope it’s helpful to our colleagues.

Importantly, much has improved over the course of the pandemic. Most health-care staff and some of our patients (even if not as many as we would like) are vaccinated against COVID-19, reducing the likelihood of severe illness and death. Appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) is generally available, including fit-tested N95 masks, and practices such as physical distancing and use of tele-health have been widely adopted.

But aerosol transmission of COVID-19 remains a very real and ongoing problem.

Read more:
Australia must get serious about airborne infection transmission. Here’s what we need to do

We’ve read recent expert commentaries about dealing with COVID-19 that mention paying attention to indoor ventilation. But rarely do these specify what exactly can and should be done in our existing hospital buildings.

The heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in hospitals, like most public indoor spaces, are built for comfort and energy efficiency, not for infection control (aside from purpose-built isolation areas).

Clearly, we cannot rebuild all our hospital ventilation systems to cope with the current outbreak.

However, there are tangible things that can be done now and in future.

Our recommendations

We recommend hospitals prioritise the use of negative pressure rooms for COVID-19 infected patients where available. Negative pressure rooms are built specifically for patients with highly infectious diseases. We already use them when caring for hospitalised people with tuberculosis, measles and chickenpox.

These rooms usually have an “anteroom” with a door either side before the patient room. The air pressure is lower in the anteroom than the corridor, and then lower again in the patient room compared to the anteroom. This means potentially contaminated air doesn’t escape outside the patient room when the door is opened.

However, these rooms are usually in short supply even in larger hospitals, and may not exist in smaller or rural hospitals.

If negative pressure rooms aren’t available, then where possible, COVID-19 patients should be managed in single rooms with doors that close.

Preferably, these should be rooms with a high number of “air exchanges per hour”. This is a measure of the refreshing of air in the room. Six air exchanges per hour has been suggested at a minimum for hospital rooms, but preferably more.

Hospitals need to be aware the air in normal rooms can travel outside into corridors. Some rooms may be positively pressured without being labelled as such, so we recommend having them tested.

Two small air cleaners can clear 99% of infectious aerosols

If patients with COVID-19 are being managed outside negative pressure rooms, then we recommend hospitals consider using portable air cleaners with HEPA filters.

We published a world-first study in June into airflow and the movement of aerosols in a COVID-19 ward, giving us a real insight into how the virus might be transmitted.

We found portable air cleaners are highly effective in increasing the clearance of particles from the air in clinical spaces and reducing their spread to other areas.

Two small domestic air cleaners in a single patient room of a hospital ward could clear 99% of potentially infectious aerosols within 5.5 minutes.

These air cleaners are relatively cheap and commercially available. We believe they could help reduce the risk of health-care workers and other patients acquiring COVID-19 in health care.

We are currently using them at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Western Health.

Read more:
Poor ventilation may be adding to nursing homes’ COVID-19 risks

Innovations such as personal ventilation hoods can also be extremely useful. Western Health’s intensive care unit, which managed large numbers of patients in Melbourne in 2020, used these hoods to filter air close to COVID-19 positive patients and help protect staff.

It’s also important hospitals perform ventilation assessments of wards to be aware of the pathways of airflow through spaces to help inform where to position patients and staff.

We found minimising the number of infected patients in a given physical space was important as we think this helped to reduce the density of aerosols. When patient numbers are high, hospitals should try to avoid caring for more than one COVID-19 positive patient in a room, if possible, which may mean closing beds.

Clearly, if new COVID-19 case numbers climb, this becomes difficult, and enlisting the help of additional hospitals with suitable facilities to “share the load” will be necessary.

New hospitals must focus on ventilation

We need to focus on practical strategies we can implement right now to retro-fit health-care settings to improve safety for staff and patients.

But we must also plan for the future.

In designing new hospitals, it’s critical to:

• keep ventilation front of mind

• build enough negative pressure rooms and single patient rooms

• add air cleaning and air monitoring to the building operations toolbox.

We will achieve this by designing facilities together with staff.

Vaccinations will help control this current pandemic. But we’ve learnt so much about managing this virus in such a short time. Let’s apply what we’ve learnt about aerosol transmission to make practical changes to improve safety now and into the future.

The authors would like to thank Ashley Stevens, hospital engineer at Royal Melbourne Hospital, for contributing to this article and the research.

Forbes McGain has co-invented a personal isolation hood (the McMonty Hood) with Prof. Monty (UniMelb). The hood is being used clinically to reduce aerosol exposure in healthcare settings.

Together with Forbes McGain, we invented and developed the McMonty Hood. The device is licensed to and sold by Medihood.

Together with Robyn Schofield, we received funding from the Royal Melbourne Hospital to conduct the airflow/aerosol/ventilation study.

Robyn Schofield received funding from the Royal Melbourne Hospital to conduct airflow/aerosol/ventilation study.

Caroline Marshall, Kirsty Buising, Louis Irving, and Marion Kainer 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. We studied how to reduce airborne COVID spread in hospitals. Here’s what we learnt – https://theconversation.com/we-studied-how-to-reduce-airborne-covid-spread-in-hospitals-heres-what-we-learnt-166018

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Vatsikopoulos, Lecturer in Journalism, University of Technology Sydney

Review: The Newsreader, ABC TV

1986 was a very big news year: history-making moments captured by television. The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded live on air. Who can forget the camera lingering on the horrified faces of Christa McAuliffe’s parents, the teacher-in-space being incinerated before our eyes.

Chernobyl’s number 4 reactor gave us the world’s worst nuclear disaster. In Melbourne, a car bomb at the Russell Street Police Headquarters extinguished the life of Angela Taylor, the first policewoman to be killed in the line of duty.

This is the era explored in the ABC’s new TV drama The Newsreader. Creator Michael Lucas and director Emma Freeman have made a program so accurate it gave me a jolting sense of déjà vu.

In 1986, I had just left behind the “slow-news-day” world of Adelaide, packing up my power suit and transferring to the ABC newsroom in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick. It was the big smoke with bigger stories, and it was getting faster.

In Adelaide we might have replaced film with tape but we still typed on heavy, steel, manual typewriters and carbon copy paper. My first day was terrifying as I grappled with a huge, speedy electric typewriter.

Read more:
Why do we find it so hard to move on from the 80s?

The Newsreader captures the changing nature of news-gathering. Stories came via telex, fax and AAP wire. Chiefs of staff eavesdropped on police scanners, communicating with crews on two-way car radios. And there was good old-fashioned “shoe leather reporting”: journalists walking out of the office, observing, meeting people and cultivating contacts.

News at Six, the fictional news program in the ABC series, depicts a typical commercial newsroom of the time. This was the golden age of TV when the rivers of advertising gold flowed freely and ratings made, or broke, careers. A reporter was only as good as their last story but if you delivered enough scoops you too could aspire to become a newsreader, a celebrity and a trusted public figure.

Exaggeration and ambition

In the series, Lindsay Cunningham (William McInnes) is the bullying, sexist news director playing staff off against each other with the promise of a career as a newsreader.

“Newsreading is the duck’s nuts,” he tells rookie reporter Dale Jennings (Sam Reid), “.. great pay and you get to waltz in here at midday.”

Except that the news cycle is starting to get faster — news breaks, which can interrupt the programming schedule at any time of day, have increased the pressure to be the first network with breaking news and updates.

Enter Helen Norville (Anna Torv) clever, very ambitious and highly telegenic. Helen (as I did) has big helmet hair, big earrings and even bigger shoulder pads. It was as if exaggeration could make us more visible.

Helen is an anchor woman in the new double header line up. Her co-host, veteran newsman Geoff Walters (Robert Taylor) has already sensed serious news is under threat. A former Vietnam War correspondent, Geoff has the “big G for Gravitas” in spades, but unfortunately that is no longer enough. Helen has the “big G for Glamour” and audiences now want eye candy with their bulletin.

How sexist was it back then? Men were in the majority and the decision makers, but women were moving in and up. ABC journalist Mary Delahunty won a Gold Walkley in 1983. Nine’s Jana Wendt conquered 60 minutes, and went on to A Current Affair where she became known as “the perfumed steamroller”, eventually winniing the Gold Logie.

I have never worked in commercial television. Still, it was common knowledge that female reporters were often judged on their “f…ability quotient”. In one episode of the show, Lindsay arrives at Helen’s house ostensibly to discuss her career. He manspreads on her couch in a very uncomfortable scene until she is saved by the doorbell.

Read more:
TV presenters, sexism and the attractiveness double standard

Helen is brilliant but highly strung; while her work days are fuelled by adrenalin she’ll crash and burn in tormented private moments. When Dale rescues her from one of these episodes they become partners in the pursuit of a breaking story.

When Lindy Chamberlain is released from jail in episode three of the series, we get a snapshot of the lengths ambitious reporters will go for an exclusive: stake outs, trespassing and chequebook journalism. Helen and Dale have no ethical problem with offering a quarter of a million dollars for an interview but Geoff’s outrage is such that he sabotages his own network by leaking the offer to rivals at Channel Nine.

In real life, Ray Martin got that interview with Chamberlain and 60 minutes (along with The Women’s Weekly) paid up.

Competition

There are some great characters in The Newsreader and episodes of note. Noelene (Michelle Lim Davidson) is the smart and deserving production assistant who will never get a promotion. So good is she at her job, and making others look better, she has made herself indispensable.

(There is a hilarious scene where Dale is on the road and needs a fact checked. Noelene rummages through the files of newspaper clippings; Google now does this in an instant.)

Newsgathering in the 1980s was fuelled by adrenaline, competition, caffeine, cigarettes and alcohol. Yes, we drank and smoked in the newsroom. Competition was fierce.

A friend and colleague once diverted a crew away from me so he would have the exclusive. Crews were often in short supply and we all knew — no pictures, no story. Our intellectual property resided in our carefully cultivated and recorded contact books — mine was stolen from my desk sometime in ’86-87. We were motivated by bearing witness and we were trusted by the audience.

The Newsreader is a great piece of television drama but one thing doesn’t ring true. Commercial newsrooms in 1986 were not as diverse as the program pretends and definitely not so Asian.

Yes the ABC had journalist Prakash Mirchandani and fourth-generation Chinese Australian Helene Chung was the ABC’s Beijing correspondent. But they were working for the public broadcaster and they were one offs. Some things take a long time to change.

The Newsreader airs on ABC TV on Sundays at 8.30pm, or is available to watch on iview.

Helen Vatsikopoulos is affiliated with ABC Alumni

– ref. Sexism, big hair, contact books: The Newsreader gets a lot right about 80s TV journalism but the times were not so diverse – https://theconversation.com/sexism-big-hair-contact-books-the-newsreader-gets-a-lot-right-about-80s-tv-journalism-but-the-times-were-not-so-diverse-165876

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, The University of Melbourne

Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party advertisements inferentially objecting to COVID-19 lockdowns demonstrate one more way in which the freedoms essential to a democracy can be abused to the detriment of the public interest.

Democracies protect freedom of speech, especially political speech, because without it democracy cannot work. When speech is harmful, however, laws and ethical conventions exist to curb it.

The laws regulating political advertising are minimal.

Section 329 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act is confined to the issue of whether a publication is likely to mislead or deceive an elector in relation to the casting of a vote. It has nothing to say about truth in political advertising for the good reason that defining truth in that context would be highly subjective and therefore oppressive.

Sections 52 and 53 of the Trade Practices Act make it an offence for corporations to engage in misleading or deceptive conduct, or to make false or misleading representations. The act has nothing to say about political advertising.

Ad Standards, the industry self-regulator, has a code of ethics that enjoins advertisers not to engage in misleading or deceptive conduct. It is a general rule that applies to all advertising, political or not.

The Palmer ads do not violate any of these provisions.

Read more:
News Corp walks a delicate line on COVID politics

So where does that leave media organisations that receive an approach from the likes of Palmer to publish advertisements the terms of which are not false, misleading or deceptive, but which are clearly designed to undermine public support for public health measures such as lockdowns?

It leaves them having to decide whether to exercise an ethical prerogative.

Short of a legal requirement to do so – say, in settlement of a law suit – no media organisation is obliged to publish an advertisement. It is in almost all cases an ethical decision.

Naturally, freedom of speech imposes a heavy ethical burden to publish, but it is not the only consideration. John Stuart Mill’s harm principle becomes relevant. That principle says the prevention of harm to others is a legitimate constraint on individual freedom.

Undermining public support for public health measures is obviously harmful and against the public interest. Media organisations are entitled to make decisions on ethical bases like this. An example from relatively ancient history will illustrate the point.

In the late 1970s, 4 Corners ran a program alleging that the Utah Development Corporation’s mining activities in Queensland were causing environmental damage. A few days after the program was broadcast, The Sydney Morning Herald received a full-page advertisement from Utah not only repudiating what 4 Corners had said but attacking the professional integrity of the journalists who made the program.

I was chief of staff of the Herald that day and the advertisement was referred to me, partly because it contained the seeds of what might have been a news story and partly because there were concerns it might be defamatory.

I referred it to the executive assistant to the editor, David Bowman, who refused to publish it.

He objected to it not only on legal grounds but on ethical grounds, because it impugned the integrity of the journalists in circumstances where they would have no opportunity to respond. In his view, this was unfair.

A short while later, the advertising people came back saying Utah had offered to indemnify the Herald against any legal damages or costs arising from publication of the advertisement.

Bowman held to his ethical objection and was supported by the general manager, R. P. Falkingham, who said: “You don’t publish something just because a man with a lot of money stands behind you.”

The advertisement did not run, not because of the legal risks but because it would have breached the ethical value of fairness.

Palmer’s ads – which say lockdowns are bad for mental health, bad for jobs and bad for the economy – contain truisms. There is nothing false or misleading about them. But they clearly seek to exploit public resentment about lockdowns for political gain.

The clear intention is to stir up opposition and make the public health orders harder to enforce.

Read more:
Alarmist reporting on COVID-19 will only heighten people’s anxieties and drive vaccine hesitancy

We live in an age where there are not only high levels of public anxiety, but also a great deal of confusion about who to believe on matters such as climate change and the pandemic. It is against the public interest to add gratuitously to that confusion, and harmful to the public welfare to undermine health orders.

These are grounds for rejecting his advertisements.

Nine Entertainment, which publishes The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review, has rejected Palmer ads that contain misinformation about the pandemic, including about vaccines. Clearly such ads violate the rules against misleading and deceptive content.

But the ads opposing lockdowns on economic or health grounds were initially accepted by Nine, and are still running in News Corporation.

The question now is whether media organisations are willing to make decisions based on ethical considerations that are wider than the narrow standard of deception.

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

– ref. Why Clive Palmer’s lockdown ads can be rejected by newspapers on ethical grounds – https://theconversation.com/why-clive-palmers-lockdown-ads-can-be-rejected-by-newspapers-on-ethical-grounds-166099

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tobias Speare, Lecturer, Pharmacy Academic, Rural and Remote Health NT, Flinders University

There’s a rush to vaccinate vulnerable remote Aboriginal communities in New South Wales after spread of the coronavirus out of metropolitan areas has led to a state-wide lockdown.

So focus is turning to how quickly we can get COVID-19 vaccines over vast distances, far from vaccine warehouses in the cities, into remote Australians’ arms.

But transporting vaccines to remote Australia isn’t new. Nor are the challenges that must be overcome to keep vaccines at the right temperature on the long and bumpy journey to remote clinics.

Here are some of the practical issues nurses, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health practitioners, community health workers, pharmacists and others face when vaccines are transported vast distances by road, air or on water.

It’s a long way

The vast distances and isolated communities of remote Australia pose significant challenges to transporting vaccines. Then there are the environmental extremes, with freezing winter nights and scorching summer days, plus monsoonal rains and cyclones often interrupting transport services and making regions inaccessible for weeks.

Keeping vaccines at the right temperature over large distances, over days and weeks, can be challenging. But vaccines are temperature-sensitive products, and their effectiveness is dependent on correct storage. If a vaccine is too hot or too cold it may be damaged and not work as well.

So it’s critical to keep vaccines at the right temperature to ensure their safety and efficacy.

For non-COVID vaccines and the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine, the recommended cold chain — between 2℃ and 8℃ — must be maintained from the place of manufacture to administration in the community.

However, transport and storage requirements for the Pfizer COVID vaccine are different. Unopened vials of the vaccine need to be stored and transported at domestic freezer temperatures, between -25℃ and -15℃, for up to two weeks.

Unopened vials may also be stored at domestic refrigerator temperatures, between 2℃ to 8℃, for up to five days. Once a Pfizer vaccine has thawed it should not be re-frozen.

Read more:
Cracking the cold chain challenge is key to making vaccines ubiquitous

Keeping vaccines in the recommended temperature range over long distances often means styrofoam boxes and regular eskies are inadequate, particularly when the transit time is likely to be three to four days. Transporting vaccines to remote Australia requires special infrastructure, including dedicated vaccine fridges and insulated containers.

If there’s a cold-chain breach, when vaccines are exposed to temperatures outside the recommended range, the vaccines may become damaged and might need to be thrown away and replaced.

Such breaches are estimated to have cost the Australian health system at least A$25.9 million in replacement vaccines over a five-year period. This estimate is pre-COVID, so the figure is likely higher if we take into account any cold-chain breaches with COVID vaccines.

There is a significant risk of this happening in remote Australia.

All staff need to be aware

All staff involved in the vaccination process, from manufacture to transport to administration, must understand the need to maintain the cold chain and the risks associated with cold chain breaches.

This includes knowing the correct way to pack the vaccines in an insulated container (such as a vaccine cold box, esky or styrofoam box), using temperature monitors, and what to do when there’s a cold-chain breach.

However, there are few training materials dealing with vaccine cold chain in remote Australia. And with high staff turnover, it’s difficult to know everyone in the chain has the right training.

Read more:
First Nations people urgently need to get vaccinated, but are not being consulted on the rollout strategy

We made a video

A team at Flinders University collaborated with Irene Nangala — a Pintupi elder and director of Western Desert Nganampa Walytja Palyantjaku Tjutaku Aboriginal Corporation (Purple House), an Aboriginal community controlled organisation in Alice Springs — to make a short educational video called Vaccine Story.

The video depicts the journey a vaccine takes from a supply centre to a remote Australian community in a culturally appropriate manner.

This freely available video is especially useful for non-clinical staff, who may not otherwise receive professional training or updates.

Transport is important

The video also looks at the importance of transport in maintaining the cold chain, especially in the “last mile” of vaccine logistics.

For remote Australia, variable and unreliable transport add extra logistical challenges. Freight to remote communities is often limited with infrequent or non-existent services.

So local clinics and supply centres need to be adaptable and resourceful to ensure vaccine supply. The right transport option for one day might not be the best for another. Staff need to ask:

• is there a bus travelling to the community today?

• can the visiting specialist team take the esky with them on the plane?

• can the patient-transport driver pick up the vaccine from the pharmacy?

• how are the roads today?

Each of these options presents new challenges. Non-clinical staff may have to be trained in how to handle vaccines and the importance of maintaining the cold chain.

For example, the esky needs to be safely secured in the car. If it bounces around, the ice bricks may come into direct contact with the vaccines, which can cause them to freeze (the vaccines are generally separated from the ice with packing materials).

Staff will have to consider the temperature in a car, bus, the hull of a plane or on a barge. Vaccines will have to be handed over to the right person, not left on the runway or on the clinic doorstep in the sun.

There must be good lines of communication so everyone knows where the vaccines are.

The electricity’s out

Vaccines need to be stored in dedicated vaccine fridges when they reach the clinic in remote Australia.

However, challenges in maintaining the cold chain don’t stop there. It’s common in remote communities for electricity outages that mean vaccine fridges go off. Clinic staff need to be trained in how to manage these situations.

Read more:
How to manage your essential medicines in a bushfire or other emergency

It’s a long road

Despite these significant logistical challenges, vaccines have been successfully shipped to remote Australia for years before COVID vaccines became urgently needed.

But with the latest COVID cases in remote NSW, we’re reminded just how different the vaccine cold chain is in the bush compared with the city.

So all eyes are on looking after this precious cargo, including maintaining the cold chain.

Tobias Speare received funding from Northern Territory PHN to create Vaccine Story video.

Suzanne Belton is employed by CARPA to evaluate the Vaccine Story film.

– ref. ‘Don’t leave the esky in the sun’: how to get cold vaccines to hot, remote Australia – https://theconversation.com/dont-leave-the-esky-in-the-sun-how-to-get-cold-vaccines-to-hot-remote-australia-164551

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bhiamie Williamson, Research Associate & PhD Candidate, Australian National University

The afternoon of August 11 was rather exciting in my community – the tiny, remote Aboriginal township of Goodooga in north-western NSW. After months of waiting, our COVID-19 vaccination clinic was planned for the next day.

Then the news came through of a positive case in Walgett, and the vaccine clinic was cancelled. In the midst of an unrelenting COVID-19 outbreak in NSW, other Aboriginal communities like Goodooga are facing uncertain times ahead.

A clearly defined vulnerable community

From the start of the pandemic, Aboriginal people were identified as “a clearly defined vulnerable community”.

These vulnerabilities stem from both chronic health conditions suffered by Aboriginal people and under-resourced health services in regional and remote areas.

In response, the Commonwealth Department of Health listed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Category 1B:

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults have been identified as a priority group for the COVID-19 vaccination rollout program.

Yet as far back as June, concerns were raised over low COVID-19 vaccinations.

Western NSW – a Pfizer desert?

Total Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander vaccination rates are low, but there are also concerns about pockets of poor vaccination coverage in individual communities. As Dr Jason Agostino from the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation shared with the Guardian:

Unless we’re paying attention to those small levels of geography and those individual communities, we might find islands of poor vaccination coverage that leave those communities vulnerable.

Low vaccination rates have been exacerabated by an absence of Pfizer supply to a youthful population. Aboriginal vaccine hesitancy in Western NSW is largely attributable to anxieties around AstraZeneca, something which isn’t specific to Aboriginal communities.

AstraZeneca hesitancy has been heightened by ATAGI’s recommendation that Pfizer is the preferred vaccine for those aged 12–59.

But in Brewarrina, a recent vaccination hub was organised, only for community members to find out it was only administering AstraZeneca. Instances such as this hardly alleviate anxieties, especially when the Aboriginal population is overwhelmingly young — 86% of Aboriginal people in the Brewarrina area are less than 60 years old.

Although Aboriginal people are in priority categories for access to the vaccination, in Western NSW we haven’t been given access to supplies of the Pfizer vaccine ahead of lower priority groups in Sydney. The cancellation of vaccine clinics such as Goodooga and others (Bourke also had their vaccine clinic cancelled), add to these issues.

Indigenous organisations have long identified the need to deliver culturally appropriate public health messaging, especially around vaccinations, with some developing their own communications, such as NITV’s “Keep the Mob safe from COVID-19” campaign. But this messaging has made limited headway given the mixed messaging about AstraZeneca and lack of access to Pfizer.

Lax COVID testing results in community infections

The state government was put on notice by Aboriginal justice advocates who had highlighted the vulnerabilities of Aboriginal people in custody and in prison. Factors such as over-crowded conditions which make physical distancing impossible, and incarcerated people have much higher rates of chronic health conditions.

Research from the USA has highlighted that the rates of COVID-19 infection in custodial settings are far higher than in the general population (about five times higher). Those prisoners are also more likely than the general population to die from COVID-19.

Justice advocates continue to call for more urgent and rapid testing in NSW prisons.

Brett Collins, coordinator for Justice Action stated:

The moment that the infection gets inside any of the prisons it’s really a bomb going off.

Read more:
First Nations people urgently need to get vaccinated, but are not being consulted on the rollout strategy

A nightmare realised

Then, in the first week of August, a young man in Western NSW was taken into custody over a weekend, tested for COVID-19 upon entering the prison, and then released on bail a few days later. This young man’s test was not considered urgent because he had not been to a location of concern nor a close contact of a known case.

By the time the young man’s positive test was returned, he was in his hometown of Walgett. The town was plunged into a snap lockdown, with emergency testing facilities established and urgent pleas for vaccines.

While this was happening, an outbreak was spreading in Dubbo, a large regional centre that services much of the north-west. The adjacent local government areas of Bogan, Brewarrina, Bourke, Warren, Coonamble, Gilgandra and Narromine were also placed in a snap seven-day lockdown.

According to our estimates, Aboriginal people make up 25% of the general population in the nine areas of most concern in western NSW. Of this population, 26.5% are under the age of 11, meaning they are currently unable to be vaccinated.

A further 62.4% are aged 12–59, the age group for which Pfizer is ATAGI’s preferred vaccine. Until adequate supplies of Pfizer are provided, our community is unlikely to be protected against the virus.

Fears in western-NSW continue to rise with the increased rate of positive tests in Aboriginal families with particular concern over the rate of COVID-19 infections in children.

It is also important to understand these remote townships rarely have the services and goods to sustain themselves. For example, my hometown of Goodooga is located in the Brewarrina Shire, and yet our closest store is Lightning Ridge, located in the Walgett local government area. According to the restrictions first announced by the state government, our community were initially not permitted to travel there for basic supplies.

Read more:
COVID-19 restrictions have left many Stolen Generations survivors more isolated without adequate support

Communities being left behind

As COVID-19 has spread, so has fear and anxiety. Uncle Victor Beale, a Walgett Elder speaking to ABCs Nakari Thorpe, said, “I thought Walgett was one of the safest places on earth [but now] there’s a lot of anxious people”. Another Elder, Aunty Marie Denis Kennedy, meanwhile shared her concern and anger, “There’s no sort of protection for us”.

Scott McLachlan, the chief executive of the Western NSW Local Health District, shared his concerns around these recent outbreaks:

The large proportion of the new cases, and our total cases, are Aboriginal people both in Dubbo and Walgett and many of those are children.

Meanwhile, the NSW Health Minister admitted the medical services in Walgett were not prepared for an outbreak.

There has also been anger at the confusion caused by uncoordinated and confusing messaging from the NSW government about infections and exposure sites.

Multiple, successive, and cascading policy failures

The COVID-19 response in Sydney, where the Delta outbreak originated, was late, inadequate and ineffective.

Now what we see unfolding is the result of multiple, successive and cascading policy failures:

• failure to vaccinate Aboriginal communities, one of the highest priority groups

• failure to safely transition inmates and detainees from correctional facilities to their home communities

• failure to plan for and create a surge capacity within local medical services

• failure to plan for a COVID outbreak in regional and remote areas, where Sydney’s rules (such as not leaving your local government area) are ineffective in a vast landscape with interwoven communities that depend on one another.

Sensible strategies with achievable milestones that have long been advocated for – such as securing temporary accommodation for inmates and detainees transitioning from correctional facilities – could have protected our communities.

Now, the responsibility to make our communities safe is falling on our own organisations. Often under-resourced and under-staffed despite calls for extra support from the government, these community organisations work tirelessly, often without due recognition or appropriate pay.

Though this work may seem invisible to outsiders and government alike, we see it and we thank you.

Back in Goodooga, families hide in their homes, hoping to ride out this outbreak. But there is a feeling also of being forgotten. In this extraordinary and scary time, all we seem to have is each other, and our families in the city who worry for us.

This article was prepared in partnership with Charlee-Sue Frail, Dr Francis Markham and Peta MacGillivray.

– ref. The COVID-19 crisis in western NSW Aboriginal communities is a nightmare realised – https://theconversation.com/the-covid-19-crisis-in-western-nsw-aboriginal-communities-is-a-nightmare-realised-166093

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Orr, Professor of Law, The University of Queensland

Are the Liberals liberal? Does the Labor Party stand chiefly for those who labour? Electoral politics is nothing if not about wrapping ideas – about values and power – in words.

On Friday, the Morrison government introduced a Party Registration Integrity Bill to the Commonwealth parliament. The bill would let established parties veto the use of words like “Liberal”, “Labor” or “Democrats” in the names of newer, rival parties. It will also make it harder to register – or keep registered – parties, by tripling the number of members required to 1,500, unless the party has an MP.

What is going on? Is this about democratic values, or is it a power play?

People may differ about the bill’s justification. But one thing is clear to a lawyer: as drafted, the bill is cooked. It overreaches and is not well drafted.

Read more:
From robo calls to spam texts: annoying campaign tricks that are legal

To take an obvious example, the bill will let the Liberal Party control the word “Liberal”, if “contained” in the name of any other registered party. That includes the Liberal Democratic Party of ex-senator David Leyonhjelm and potential-senator Campbell Newman fame.

The Liberal Party is also upset by the emergence of the New Liberals. But “Liberals” is not the same as “Liberal”. Indeed it’s a noun, not an adjective. So perhaps the bill won’t cure that upset.

Mere “function words”, like “the” or “of” don’t count. Nor is any “collective noun for people” protected. Think “party” or “Australians”. Linguists will be left to argue whether collective nouns like “Liberals” or “Greens” are off-limits. Can “Indigenous” be bagsed? Your guess is as good as mine.

“Frivolous and vexatious” names will also be struck out. So no Australian version of the UK’s Monster Raving Loony Party. Oh, the shame; if Brits can take a joke, why can’t we?

Australia’s most colourful political figure is currently seeking to remove his own name from his Clive Palmer United Australia Party. But if he doesn’t, he could forever veto anyone else called “Clive” or “Palmer” naming a party after themselves. Real names are not “function words”.

More seriously, handing one party squatter’s rights over everyday words is troublesome. It creates a virtual intellectual property right. That is fine for trademarking commercial goods; it’s another thing altogether in politics, where language is dynamic and fundamental. Worryingly, it gives leverage to established parties. They could ask a newer party for its support (with legislation or electorally) in return for permission to use the overlapping word in their name.

The government argues the bill is needed to minimise confusion among electors. After all, compulsory and preferential voting means identifiable names on ballot papers are crucial, as most electors vote for parties, and some only decide their full preferences when mulling the ballot itself.

Why does party registration, and names, matter? Anyone can form a political group. But to have your group’s name on the ballot paper, and control public funding for garnering 4% of the vote, you need to register as a “party”.

Before registration systems arose in the 1980s, Australian politics was largely a battle between Labor and the Liberal-Country Party Coalition. Other forces came and went, often via splits in the major groupings.

The Liberal Movement was a progressive liberalist party in the 1970s, while the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) had success as a socially conservative, but union-oriented, party in the 1950s-70s. Their names were natural enough.

Australian parties today are electoral machines more than social movements. Each, understandably, wants to guard its “brand”. Infamously, the Liberal Democratic Party won a Senate seat in 2013 when it lucked the first place on a huge ballot paper while the Liberal Party was hidden in the middle.

Read more:
High Court challenge in Kooyong and Chisholm unlikely to win, but may still land a blow

In response, laws were passed to allow visual cues on ballot papers, via party logos. And the independent Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and courts can already rule whether a name can be confused with another party, or implies a false association.

In recent decades, registered parties have proliferated, partly due to opportunists wanting a ticket in the lottery of the final Senate seat up for grabs. That gambit has been significantly nullified by making voters choose where their preferences go (if anywhere) in the Senate.

That leaves the long-term decline in voter base of both major parties as the chief driver of the creation of new parties. For national elections, there are 46 registered parties. In Queensland, without a state Senate, there are barely a dozen. Is too much potential choice a bad thing?

Forty-six is a lot, but some will die naturally. Others will be wiped away by the increased, 1,500-member rule. Which is fair enough, unless you are a regional party focused only on the Senate in a small state or territory. The 1,500-member rule also won’t deter parties formed by wealthy interests, if the party can afford a zero-dollar membership “fee”.

Ultimately, this bill is dubious not because of mathematics, but linguistics. It gives established parties control over language. Not even the Académie Française, much lampooned for its elite rulings over how French should be used, has that kind of power.

Graeme Orr has received grant money from the Electoral Council of Australia and done pro bono and consultancy work with various political parties and movements. He is currently a paid consultant on the NSW Electoral Commission’s statutory iVote Expert Panel.

– ref. Who’s Liberal? What’s Labor? New bill to give established parties control of their names is full of holes – https://theconversation.com/whos-liberal-whats-labor-new-bill-to-give-established-parties-control-of-their-names-is-full-of-holes-166088

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Blaxland, Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

Scenes of mayhem unfolded at Kabul airport overnight, as foreigners and Afghans try to flee Afghanistan following the seizure of the capital by the Taliban.

As many, including myself, observed, this is Kabul’s “Saigon moment”.

What we are seeing — with, for now, the airport remaining open and the Taliban talking in benign terms about the governance of Kabul — echoes what happened in Saigon in 1975, as the United States and its allies exited the Vietnam War. Then, there was a fight north of the city but the North Vietnamese forces didn’t roll directly into town.

In that moment, there was a hiatus — a window of opportunity to leave. A brief moment for extraction of US personnel, their allies, including Australians, and the local people who helped them, before the final takeover of the city occurred.

The way things have unfolded in Kabul, with the airport remaining open for now, speaks to a level of collaboration between the Taliban and the US government in its negotiations about how US and coalition partners would be able to extricate themselves.

Whether Australia can extract its people — particularly the Afghans who helped us and are now in grave danger — remains to be seen. In Saigon, the window of opportunity was open for just a matter of days before it slammed shut.

Read more:
Afghanistan: Taliban victory inevitable despite the trillions the US poured in

Australia’s moral responsibility

I think there is considerable moral responsibility for the Australian government to continue to try to get out as many Afghans who helped us, even though their government seems to have collapsed.

In Saigon in 1975, Australia basically turned its back on locally employed staff and refused to repatriate them. Many people feel a bit ashamed about Australia’s attitude back then.

That may have informed the attitude of our government in recent weeks. Bowing to pressure, it has agreed to work toward extricating hundreds of Afghan people who have worked for us.

What is concerning is we haven’t gone hard or quick enough. There is a considerable number of people who remain very vulnerable, who would be worried about being earmarked as collaborators if they stayed.

Eyewitness reports at the airport speak of up to 1,000 people trying to board a plane designed to take 300. It is worth noting that a lot of aircraft can take more people than they are designated for if they don’t fill the cargo bay with luggage. That’s particularly true with big cargo aircraft. It’s not very safe but for some, it’s safer than staying in Kabul.

Australia, a bit late in the piece, has ramped up forces to go in and help extract people who are associated with Australia’s presence there over the past 20 years. I hope that is still on track and those people can still get out.

It is hard to know, because it’s so opaque whether that will materialise. It’s not entirely clear whether Australia’s RAAF flights can get in, or whether we will be able to piggyback off what the British and Americans, and perhaps the Canadians, are doing.

It’s worth noting that Kabul airport is quite vulnerable. It’s surrounded by hills, from which Taliban with ill intent can create havoc. That’s why the US has talked about deploying extra troops to support the extraction.

Turkey, which is still technically a NATO ally but is also a Muslim democracy that is seen as more palatable for the Taliban, has promised to provide security at the airport in Kabul as the Americans and their allies leave.

So there’s an arrangement for a transition out and we will see whether it comes to fruition.

Morale defeats physical force

More broadly, what we have seen in Afghanistan in recent weeks is a vast military power being clearly outfoxed by a Taliban force that, materially, is significantly inferior. Yet in terms of morale, resolve and endurance, the Taliban has clearly outmatched the US and its coalition partners, including Australia.

The saying, “you have the watches but we have the time” speaks to a problem we were not able to address.

The Taliban’s smooth talking has seen city after city give in without a fight, despite having been equipped in a way that shows, on paper, the Afghan security forces on the ground should have been able to defeat the Taliban.

But in battle, morale is three to one to physical force and the morale just wasn’t there.

If you don’t have soldiers and police resolved to defend and hold off the Taliban, it’s worse than useless. Because now the Taliban is replete with American high-tech drones and sophisticated weaponry.

Cauterising the wound

There’s another dimension to this which is important for the future: what all this means for America’s fighting resolve.

In 1975, there was a sense that America’s pullout from Vietnam represented a major catastrophe and a failure of the West’s ability to hold off Communism. But in hindsight it seemed like that was just a low point. The Berlin wall still eventually fell.

There was also a sense in 1975 of the US and its allies being untrustworthy, that they leave people behind and that this will cause would-be allies not to trust them.

So perhaps there’s an argument that this exit from Afghanistan throws up similar issues.

On the other hand, others will argue it is a case of the US and its allies finally seeing reason and cutting their losses in a war that is, according to a hard-nosed realpolitik calculus, of little consequence strategically in the context of Russia modernising and being in cahoots with China.

Regardless of how it unfolded, many pundits saw little long-term prospect of the Taliban being pushed back forever in Afghanistan — particularly given the deep, behind-the-scenes support it got from Pakistan and, increasingly, elsewhere.

The US and its allies had to exit sooner or later. The bottom line is that, at some level, the wound had to be cauterised.

The question is: was there a better way to cauterise the wound?

The scenes unfolding at Kabul airport suggest that perhaps what was done to help those who helped us was a case of too little, too late.

Read more:
As the Taliban surges across Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is poised for a swift return

John Blaxland is the author of The Australian Army from Whitlam to Howard, Cambridge University Press, 2014. He is also editor of ‘Niche Wars: Australia in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001 – 2014’ which is a free download from ANU Press.

– ref. In Kabul’s ‘Saigon moment’, Australia faces the shame of repeating its mistakes exiting the Vietnam war – https://theconversation.com/in-kabuls-saigon-moment-australia-faces-the-shame-of-repeating-its-mistakes-exiting-the-vietnam-war-166163

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Maley, Emeritus Professor, Australian National University

In April 1961, just months after the young John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as the 35th president of the United States, his reputation for expertise in foreign policy took a battering as a result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a covert action against the Cuban government that collapsed within a matter of days.

The collapse in Afghanistan that has flowed from current President Joe Biden’s decision to proceed with a complete US troop withdrawal is more than likely to be seen as his own Bay of Pigs moment.

But it may be something worse, akin to the Suez crisis of 1956, which not only humiliated the British government of Sir Anthony Eden, but marked the end of the United Kingdom as a global power.

When historians look back at the shambolic US exit from Afghanistan, it may increasingly appear a critical marker of America’s decline in the world, far eclipsing the flight from Saigon in 1975.

The path to disaster

How did this come to pass? Afghans, turning on themselves, are already pinning the blame on now-departed President Ashraf Ghani, and Biden’s defenders are sure to join the chorus. Yet this is an oversimplification of how things unravelled.

Ghani’s domineering style, poor personnel choices, and reluctance to delegate power to others all played significant roles in the current crisis.

However, the institutional and political problems that were festering long before Ghani became president are perhaps more to blame: a seriously overcentralised state; a presidential system that placed far too much formal power in Kabul; and the development of “neopatrimonial” politics, based on patronage networks that had flourished under former President Hamid Karzai, which in turn fostered electoral fraud.

Read more:
Why the US won’t be able to shirk moral responsibility in leaving Afghanistan

An even more significant role was played by Pakistan, the Taliban’s longstanding patron and supplier of sanctuaries, logistical support, and equipment.

But the (unintentional) green light for Pakistan’s “creeping invasion” of Afghanistan, with the Taliban as its proxy, ultimately came from Washington.

First, there was the catastrophic exit agreement signed with the Taliban on behalf of the Trump administration by the US special envoy to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, in February 2020. The flaws of this deal were immediately obvious. Following that was Biden’s conscious choice to adhere to it.

Biden has since sought to emphasise that he inherited the agreement from Trump, but it was his decision to stick with it, and to retain its architect, Khalilzad, as his own representative. Appalling US decision-making lies at the heart of the tragedy.

What lies behind Biden’s failures?

What factors might explain Biden’s gross misjudgement? At this point, several come to mind.

A first factor, universally overlooked, is his lack of relevant experience in dealing hands-on with complex and dangerous foreign policy challenges.

Until becoming president in January 2021, Biden had never held an office with distinct executive authority. He was a longtime legislator and then vice president, and he was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 12 years, including several years as chairman.

But he never occupied a position where he was routinely required to make final decisions on matters of high policy with significant associated risks.

Having an interest in world affairs is not the same thing as having strong judgement or a talent for developing and implementing foreign policy. Robert Gates, a former defence secretary in both Republican and Democrat administrations, argued in his 2014 memoir that Biden had been

wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.

Some reports suggest Biden’s decision to follow Trump’s path was driven more by instinct and longstanding beliefs than by a methodical, cerebral appraisal of the dangers.

Biden may also have been influenced by a deep, almost visceral, suspicion of the advice of the US military, going back to his failed attempts while vice president to argue against the “surge” of US troops in Afghanistan, which President Barack Obama ultimately decided to do.

A second factor at play is likely US domestic politics. Biden and his supporters have quoted polling in support of a complete US troop withdrawal, but it is unlikely this was much of a contributor to the final decision, as Afghanistan has never generated anything like the heat in US politics that was associated with the Vietnam War.

A more likely contributor was the internal politics of the Democratic Party. Biden had endured considerable criticism from the left over his ardent support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Supporting an Afghanistan troop withdrawal had the potential to ameliorate some of those concerns, and to appeal to the party’s progressive wing and ideological isolationists.

How the US-Taliban deal eroded confidence

The US decision also reflected a grave misunderstanding of power dynamics in Afghanistan.

As I have previously noted, mass psychology is a critical determinant of political trajectories in an environment as threatening and de-institutionalised as that in Afghanistan.

As in an avalanche, a small shift can rapidly snowball, resulting in what social scientists call “cascades”.

The collapse of the Afghan government provides a perfect example of a cascade at work. The 2020 US-Taliban deal created deep and widespread apprehension about what the future might hold. Then, it only took a few localised failures to sap the confidence of all sorts of actors, both military and civilian, in the survival of the government. Side-switching became a rational strategy, then spun out of control.

Read more:
On the brink of disaster: how decades of progress in Afghanistan could be wiped out in short order

The US troop withdrawal also seems to have reflected a failure on the part of Biden – although not the US military — to appreciate how destructive the February 2020 agreement had been to the effectiveness of the Afghan military.

In requiring the withdrawal not just of US troops but US maintenance contractors, it compromised the ongoing capabilities of key assets in the inventory of the Afghan National Army, as well as depriving the army of critical air cover. As an insightful analysis put it,

in the wake of President Biden’s withdrawal decision, the US pulled its air support, intelligence and contractors servicing Afghanistan’s planes and helicopters. That meant the Afghan military simply couldn’t operate anymore.

The long-lasting damage to US credibility

It is hard to see how Biden can emerge from this disaster without his credibility shredded, but the greater loss is to the credibility of the United States, which increasingly appears a fading power internationally (as well as a failing state at home).

For no great gain, it sold out the most pro-western government and public in the region to a brutal terrorist group, all this after having long promised the Afghans that they would never be abandoned.

Read more:
As the Taliban surges across Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is poised for a swift return

The implications of this abandonment stretch far beyond Afghanistan’s borders. As a group of eminent retired ambassadors has put it,

an ignominious American departure from the country would send a terrible signal to other countries as the United States competes with China and other authoritarian states. If US security guarantees are not credible, why not cut deals with China?

In May 1940, in a scathing indictment of the failures of the Chamberlain government to stand effectively by its allies, former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George observed cuttingly that “our promissory notes are now rubbish on the market”.

As a result of its failures over Afghanistan, the Biden administration is rapidly heading in a similar direction.

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

– ref. How Joe Biden failed the people of Afghanistan — and tarnished US credibility around the world – https://theconversation.com/how-joe-biden-failed-the-people-of-afghanistan-and-tarnished-us-credibility-around-the-world-166160

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

Great crises are a stimulus to right-wing political mobilisation. Famously, the Great Depression of the 1930s gave the Nazis their chance. It was a good time for fascists or near-fascists in other countries as well, including Australia. Here, the ground was thick with the Old Guard, New Guard, White Army, Country Movement, New Staters, Western Australian secessionists, patriotic bodies and citizens’ leagues, all claiming to be sick of politics and above it all.

The present pandemic has been no exception. The uncertainty of the times has been a great generator of conspiracy theories and, dangerously, of do-it-yourself medical science. The Depression gave a great boost to funny money theories such as Social Credit, which identified an evil and conspiratorial “money power” as the root of all social and economic evil, a theory that sometimes had anti-Semitic content.

Such conspiracy theories are still with us, expressed most obviously by the obsession of a section of the right with the supposedly malign influence of billionaire George Soros. Others worry Bill Gates is listening in, 5G technology is enslaving us, and vaccination is a plot to destroy our liberty. For many years now, the far right has been preoccupied with Islam. Without abandoning old enemies, it’s now finding new ones to worry about.

But not entirely new. It is a feature of right-wing political mobilisation that it tends to stitch together bits and pieces of fabric that have often been around for a long while, tailoring them into new garments for the present. Anti-vaccination arguments have been around for years. They are now being repurposed for the times.

Where are they coming from? Not entirely from the right, of course: there are wellness and natural lifestyle advocates, and social media influencers, who object to vaccination. Lockdown protesters might be predominantly of the right, but not exclusively so. There is a palpable frustration with restrictions on personal freedom. This extends well beyond those who might consider themselves on the right.

Still, is it striking that much that is recognisable as right-wing protest about “freedom” at present has its origins in the mainstream politics of the right. Craig Kelly, an enthusiastic purveyor of COVID misinformation, was until recently a Liberal member for a Sydney seat, his preselection under the protection of the current prime minister. John Ruddick, a prominent member of the libertarian Liberal Democrats conspicuous in recent anti-lockdown protests in Sydney, is a former candidate for president of the Liberal Party. Campbell Newman was Liberal National Party premier of Queensland for a term: he’s now also hitched a ride with the Liberal Democrats and announced his Senate candidature in the noble cause of “freedom”. Others complaining of lockdowns and restrictions, such as George Christensen and Matt Canavan, both Queensland federal politicians, remain in the Coalition government.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Barnaby Joyce repudiates Christensen’s COVID misinformation

All of this conforms to a historical pattern. Pauline Hanson would likely never have been heard of if not for Liberal Party preselection for Oxley in 1996. Sky News is fronted by former Liberal advisers such as Alan Jones and Peta Credlin – even if Andrew Bolt once worked on the Labor side of politics and Mark Latham puts in the odd appearance.

The right benefits from our media ecology. The role of the Murdoch media in turning last night’s exotic and extreme into this evening’s political meat and three veg is well enough understood. So is the role of social media in enabling the spread of conspiracy theories, loopy ideas and even violent extremism of the kind witnessed in Washington DC on January 6.

But there is an understandable reluctance on the part of the mainstream media, given their complicity, in exploring their own role in facilitating right-wing political mobilisation. Just over a fortnight ago, Senator Matt Canavan was talking on a program fronted by Breitbart founder and Trump adviser Steven Bannon. Last week, he was on the ABC’s Q&A, where he was handed a national audience.

Mainstream media thrive on the melodrama provided by the staging of stark disagreement. The advocate of locking down the population for its own safety while infections run at over 300 per day in the country’s largest city needs to be confronted with a “let the virus run free” type. For the sake of “representation” and “balance”, the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs gets media opportunities quite out of proportion to any real public interest in its libertarian ideas.

The revival of Hanson’s political career in the mid-2010s was fundamentally dependent on the opportunities provided by commercial television, where her extreme views and opinions could be guaranteed to draw attention, viewers and advertising coin. Similarly, she and her advisers have always understood the media value of the political gimmick – such as appearing in parliament in a burqa.

To read the Australian section of The Spectator these days – I realise I am among a small minority who do – is to encounter a fragment of the right-wing commentariat that seems out of sorts with the Coalition government under Scott Morrison.

Indeed, it seems almost as upset with him as it was with its previous dangerous radical enemy, Malcolm Turnbull. In the July 17 issue, it asserted:

The Liberal Party is adrift, a large, ugly and ungainly tanker that has slipped its moorings and is taking on water as it flounders in a turbulent and unpredictable sea. On the bridge, an ineffectual captain navigates by opinion polls and focus groups, with sinister factional bosses whispering in his ear.

Commentators of this kind – and the editorial goes on to praise Ruddick as “one of the great thinkers of the modern Liberal Party over three decades” – seem almost as worried these days by Morrison as by “Dictator Dan” Andrews in Melbourne. Perhaps more so. They are worried by the authoritarianism, the big spending and the flirtation with zero-carbon ideas. Above all, they are worried by what they call the lies and deceit about COVID.

The basic idea in these circles is that most politicians and their health advisers have persistently exaggerated the risks of the disease. They have done so because they fundamentally hate individual freedom, care nothing for ordinary people and are cosseted from having to earn their bread in the real economy. And, once again, here are ideas you will find among certain commentators in the mainstream media, not only in strange corners of the internet or in low-circulation, right-wing magazines.

Read more:
How the pandemic has brought out the worst — and the best — in Australians and their governments

In one sense, they are the Australian backwash of Brexit and Trump, mouthing the slogans of British Europhobes, Hungarian despots, Dixieland governors and Republican Party senators – and Steve Bannon.

But like these right-wing populist counterparts elsewhere, they are also political adventurers and entrepreneurs, seeking to build new constituencies in unknown territory. Short on solutions, big on rhetoric and in the fortunate position of not having to run anything, the libertarian right is frustrated that most of the population seems content to do what it’s told.

At times, it sounds as shrill as the sectarians on the far left whom it sometimes resembles. But those on the right are more consequential because they have significant media sponsors, they exploit real fears and frustrations, and they can sound reasonable when they criticise government excess and authoritarianism.

That is because our governments have sometimes, during this crisis, practised excess and authoritarianism.

Frank Bongiorno 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. Right out there: how the pandemic has given rise to extreme views and fractured conservative politics – https://theconversation.com/right-out-there-how-the-pandemic-has-given-rise-to-extreme-views-and-fractured-conservative-politics-165448

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ryan Keith, PhD Candidate, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

Parents and researchers have long suspected city kids are disconnecting from nature due to technological distractions, indoor lifestyles and increased urban density. Limited access to nature during COVID-19 lockdowns has heightened such fears.

In fact, “nature-deficit disorder” has become a buzzword, driving concerns about children’s well-being and their ability to understand and care for the natural world.

Yet, there’s been surprisingly little investigation to directly test whether a disconnect exists between children and nature – and if it does, how this might affect their environmental behaviours. Our recent research, focused on Australian children in urban areas, sought to address this knowledge gap.

We found most younger children, especially girls, reported strong connections to nature and commitment to pro-environmental behaviours. But by their teenage years, many children have fallen out of love with nature. Understanding and reversing this trend is vital to tackling climate change, species loss and other grave environmental problems.

What we did

Our research involved more than 1,000 students aged 8-14 years, attending 16 public schools across Sydney.

We measured the students’ connections to nature using a questionnaire which asked about their:

• enjoyment of nature
• empathy for creatures
• sense of oneness with nature
• sense of responsibility towards nature.

The survey also canvassed students’ current environmental behaviours, such as whether they recycled waste and conserved water and energy, as well as their willingness to:

• volunteer to help protect nature
• donate money to nature charities
• talk to friends and family about protecting nature.

Read more:
Being in nature is good for learning, here’s how to get kids off screens and outside

What we found

Contrary to the conventional wisdom about nature-deficit disorder, we found one in two children aged 8 to 11 felt strongly connected to nature, despite living in the city. However, only one in five teens reported strong nature connections.

Children in the younger age group were also more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviours. For example, one in two were committed to saving water and energy on a daily basis, and two in three recycled each day.

Girls generally formed closer emotional connections to nature than boys did – a difference especially apparent in the final stage of primary school.

Importantly, girls differed from boys in their responses to questions about sensory stimulation. Girls particularly liked to see wildflowers, hear nature sounds and touch animals and plants. This finding echoes previous research which found motivation for sensory pleasure is greater in women than men.

Girls also felt greater empathy for nonhuman animals than did boys, even after accounting for differences in sensory experience.

Children with strong nature connections were much more likely to demonstrate pro-environmental behaviours. This helps explain why girls were more willing than boys to volunteer for nature conservation.

Read more:
‘Nature doesn’t judge you’: how young people in cities feel about the natural world

What does all this mean?

These findings suggest parents, educators, and others seeking to “reconnect” youth with nature should focus on the transition between childhood and the teenage years.

Adolescence is a period of great change. Children move from primary to high school, switching peer groups and struggling through puberty. They gain independence and must adapt to a maturing brain.

Relationships with nature easily fall by the wayside when teens prioritise other aspects of their busy lives. In fact, evidence of the adolescent dip in nature connection is emerging across different cultures.

Educators and parents hoping to engage girls with nature might give them activities focused on sensory stimuli.

Girls’ greater empathy for nonhuman animals may result from societal norms that socialise girls to be more caring, cooperative, and empathetic than boys. Boys can be encouraged to have more empathy for nonhuman animals through activities focused on perspective-taking and role-playing.

Even when locked down at home, both girls and boys can cultivate empathy for animals and nourish their connections to nature by taking mindful note of their surroundings. Though cities can appear to be concrete jungles, they still contain urban wildlife, parks and other green elements.

Read more:
Look up! A powerful owl could be sleeping in your backyard after a night surveying kilometres of territory

Children are the future

Recent research has demonstrated that stronger nature connections are associated with improved health and wellbeing in children.

The benefits of connecting to nature should be distributed among youth in a just and equitable way. That means working with groups often marginalised in discussions about nature, such as ethnic minorities.

Conservation is increasingly reliant on young citizens forming meaningful connections with urban nature. Many environmental leaders, such as Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, are teenage girls.

Ensuring urban children maintain nature connections through adolescence is crucial to tackling Earth’s serious environmental problems. But it will also require more young people to confront the difficult realisation that the world’s climate is in crisis. For this, we need to develop better ways to help them cope.

Read more:
How COVID-19 has affected overnight school trips, and why this matters

Ryan Keith 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 his academic appointment.

Dieter Hochuli receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the City of Sydney and the Inner West Council.

John M. Martin receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Lisa M. Given receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. 1 in 2 primary-aged kids have strong connections to nature, but this drops off in teenage years. Here’s how to reverse the trend – https://theconversation.com/1-in-2-primary-aged-kids-have-strong-connections-to-nature-but-this-drops-off-in-teenage-years-heres-how-to-reverse-the-trend-165660

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ksenia Sawczak, Head, Research and Development, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney

Research at Australian universities has been scrutinised through the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) assessment exercise, Excellence in Research for Australia, since 2010.

A companion Engagement and Impact Assessment exercise began in 2018. The time and costs for universities of running these exercises (the ARC collected this information when ERA began but never released it) and the value they generate for universities, government, industry and the public are unknown.

It’s difficult to see how any future versions can be justified without evidence of a healthy return on investment.

Read more:
Starting next year, universities have to prove their research has real-world impact

The question of future assessment exercises is now in the spotlight. The ARC recently completed a review of ERA and EIA to “ensure the national research assessments address Australia’s future needs”.

The review’s terms of reference included consideration of “the purpose and value of research evaluation, including how it can further contribute to the Government’s science, research and innovation agendas”. This is important, as no evidence has ever been provided of exactly how the government, industry or community uses assessments for informing agendas.

The review received 112 submissions in response to a consultation paper. Most came from universities, peak bodies/associations and various service providers and consultants. No responses were received from the sectors that supposedly benefit from these exercises, namely government, industry and the community.

Read more:
Who cares about university research? The answer depends on its impacts

What are the issues with the system?

A review advisory committee was then appointed to consider key issues and make recommendations to the ARC CEO. The committee readily identified key concerns about how the assessments work, such as rating scales, streamlining and automation, evaluation cycles and eligibility requirements. These matters also came up in university submissions.

But what came through most clearly from universities were the mixed views about the value of assessments as a whole. By extension, there is a question mark over whether they should continue if their utility cannot be clearly demonstrated.

While EIA has been run only once, there have now been four rounds of ERA overseen by four different ministers. Each round has culminated in a detailed national report with a minister’s foreword that consistently focuses on the same two matters:

• ERA results provide assurance of the government’s investment in the research sector
• the results will inform and guide future strategies and investments.

In other words, there has been an overreaching focus on justification for the exercise and on its purported utility. But how convincing is this?

Read more:
Explainer: how and why is research assessed?

ERA is past its use-by date

In its early days, ERA was credited with playing an important role in focusing university efforts on lifting research performance. Indeed, a number of university submissions to the review acknowledged this.

However, much has changed since then. As university responses noted, new databases and digital tools – together with greater expertise in data analytics within universities to analyse performance – as well as the impact of international benchmarking through university and subject rankings have meant ERA’s influence has dramatically dwindled. Universities no longer need an outdated assessment exercise to tell them how they are performing.

As for its actual application, there was a brief time when ERA informed funding allocations under the Sustainable Research Excellence for Universities scheme. It was one of a number of schemes through which government support for university research was based on their performance. But this was quickly abandoned.

In 2015, with a clear focus on incentivising performance and simplifying funding, the government introduced revised research block grants. In the process, it overlooked the very exercise that identifies research excellence and so ought to inform performance-based funding.

Since then, the best the government has been able to come up with is adding national benchmarking standards for research to the Higher Education Standards Framework. But with the bar set so low and no apparent reward for institutions that perform well above the required standards, barely an eyelid has been batted over this change.

‘Informing’ without evidence of use

Returning to the review committee, its final report of June 2021 acknowledged the vision for and objectives of ERA required rethinking, as these had lost their relevance or failed. This included the objectives of providing a stocktake of Australian research and identifying emerging research areas and opportunities for development.

But the committee has danced around the issue of ERA’s utility. It issued a lofty vision statement:

“that rigorous and transparent research assessment informs and promotes Australian universities’ pursuit of research that is excellent, engaged with community, industry and government, and delivers social, economic, environmental and cultural impact.”

The ARC has adopted it as part of the ERA and EI Action Plan.

The notion of “informing” as a buzzword for influence and utility has been the consistent feature of ERA. It seems this will continue. The review committee’s report contains over 50 references to this idea. And “informing decisions” is to be one of the four objectives taken up by the ARC, specifically to “provide a rich and robust source of information on university excellence and activity to inform and support the needs of university, industry, government and community stakeholders”.

But no evidence has ever been provided of ERA’s usefulness to these sectors. This objective rings hollow, particularly in light of the conspicuous absence of industry or government responses to the review.

Read more:
Unis want research shared widely. So why don’t they properly back academics to do it?

The vanishing link to funding

Of course, the really big question is whether ERA and EI will ever inform research funding. That’s something the ARC has brought up over the years, and possibly the only reason why universities are so compliant.

Curiously, though, the review’s terms of reference did not cover this issue. Perhaps, after 11 years, no one can work this out. Now that would surely represent a very poor return on investment.

Ksenia Sawczak 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. Where is the evidence for ERA? Time’s up for Australia’s research evaluation system – https://theconversation.com/where-is-the-evidence-for-era-times-up-for-australias-research-evaluation-system-165622

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary Voice, Lecturer – Climate (Honorary), The University of Melbourne

In this series we pay tribute to the art we wish could visit — and hope to see once travel restrictions are lifted.

Have you ever entered a gallery, cathedral or grand old ballroom and drawn breath with surprise? Usually, it is opulence, vastness or one stunning painting or sculpture that evokes this response — think Michelangelo’s David, or Chartres Cathedral or the hall of mirrors at Versailles.

In London, an extraordinary gallery draws gasps because there is none like it anywhere else. It is like entering a giant “globe” covered in paintings of faraway places and plants. You can walk from South America to North America to Asia in a few paces.

All the paintings are by the Victorian-era female botanical artist and explorer Marianne North. The small gallery nestles in a stunning natural setting — Kew Gardens beside the Thames River.

Read more:
If I could go anywhere: Marie Antoinette’s private boudoir and mechanical mirror room at Versailles

A very intrepid painter

The design of the gallery and the layout of the 800-plus paintings were largely North’s idea, assisted by Kew Gardens staff. Though she was a largely self-taught botanical illustrator, she also discovered four specimens that were named in her honour.

I remember my first impression of the peacefulness and softness on entering the gallery, elicited by a timber-panelled gallery covered top-to-bottom with paintings. It is a tightly packed mosaic of artworks.

Then I notice the gold lettering of countries and continents above the panels —America, Australia, Japan, Jamaica — and begin to explore the natural world as it was in Victorian times.

The vibrancy, colour and beauty in each individual painting emerges on closer viewing.

I walk from one continent to another noticing the unique vegetation of each, but also the similarity and diversity of natural forms — when these paintings were being created and collated, Charles Darwin had already written:

[…] endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The gallery displays this exquisitely, from a grand avenue of Indian rubber trees in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), medicinal plants from the tropics, vivid tangerine flowers on coral trees in Brazil, early coffee plantations in Jamaica, to a tall and majestic monkey puzzle tree in Chile. Australian banksia, bottle tree and bottle-brush are accurately and beautifully depicted.

Within the walls of the gallery, I can even travel back in time to see what Mudgee in NSW looked like in the late 1800s.

Read more:
Friday essay: the forgotten German botanist who took 200,000 Australian plants to Europe

Then there are the four specimens named in North’s honour. Kniphofia northiae, discovered in South Africa, now grows in many gardens with the common name red hot poker (Painting no. 367). Northia seychellana is also called the capucin tree Painting no. 501). Nepenthes northiana, a large and unusual pitcher plant, was discovered by Marianne in Borneo (Painting no. 561). And crinum northianum , in the lily family (Painting no. 602), comes from Sarawak, Borneo.

When Charles met Marianne

North was one of several Victorian-era British female explorers. She was born (1830) into a wealthy family and had early connections to Kew gardens since her father knew its first director, Sir William Hooker.

Her interest in botanical art grew as an educational activity and as a means of passing on knowledge in pre-photography times. She made nearly 900 works from across the continents and larger islands.

North set out on her first main botanical tours in the 1870s, 40 years after Darwin sailed on HMS Beagle, determined to “paint from nature”. Her paintings of vegetation, birds, mammals and terrain, depicted with close accuracy, helped to foster awareness of the evolutionary connections between plants, animals and environment.

North and Darwin were in fact acquainted. In 1880 they met and discussed her paintings and he advised her to see and paint the Australian vegetation “which was unlike that of any other country”. North took Darwin’s advice, and returned to Down house in 1881 with a new collection spanning Townsville to Perth.

Read more:
Guide to the classics: Darwin’s The Descent of Man 150 years on — sex, race and our ‘lowly’ ape ancestry

The world through her eyes

North gifted her botanical collection to Kew Gardens along with a gallery to house it. She arranged the paintings and also the decorations surrounding the doors to the gallery. Hence the unique design and global feel of the gallery interior. It opened in 1882.

Some 140 years later, we can explore her adventurous life and travels and view a global nature study in one gallery. With today’s technology we can see much of it online, which is handy during lockdown. I wonder what human expansion and global warming have done to those special places? If I could retrace North’s steps, what would I see?

After “browsing the continents”, you can exit the gallery into Kew Gardens. Among the 50,000 plants at the World Heritage site, you can search for the rare Australian Wollemi Pine, growing quite vigorously in the grounds.

The words of Darwin in 1859’s Origin of Species come to mind: “There is grandeur in this view of life”.

Read more:
Janet Laurence: After Nature sounds an exquisite warning bell for extinction

Mary Voice 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. If I could go anywhere: a world through the eyes of botanical artist Marianne North at Kew Gardens – https://theconversation.com/if-i-could-go-anywhere-a-world-through-the-eyes-of-botanical-artist-marianne-north-at-kew-gardens-165663

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

People aged 20-39, who were identified by the Doherty Institute modelling as super spreaders of COVID, will be targeted for the one million Pfizer doses the Morrison government has purchased from Poland.

Of these, 530,000 doses will be sent urgently to a dozen Sydney local government areas, where the outbreak is still growing. They will start being administered in state clinics this week, Scott Morrison said.

He said the allocation to NSW “will give everyone aged 20 to 39 years in the 12 LGAs the opportunity to be vaccinated”.

The Doherty modelling said: “As supply allows, extending vaccinations for adults under 40 years offers the greatest potential to reduce transmission now that a high proportion of vulnerable Australians are vaccinated”.

When the modelling was recently released Professor Jodie McVernon, Director of Epidemiology at the Doherty Institute, said the 20 to 39 year olds were “the peak spreaders” of the virus.

“They will bring COVID home to their children, they will take it home to their own parents, and this is the group now where we’re proposing the reorientation of the strategy,” she said.

In the heartland of the Sydney outbreak many of this age group are necessarily mobile because they are in essential jobs and unable to work from home,

Sunday saw 415 new locally acquired NSW cases announced and four deaths. Late Saturday the state government locked down the whole of regional NSW. Victoria recorded 25 new cases and the ACT two, in Sunday’s announcements.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said:“The experience of Delta is that no other jurisdiction has been able to eliminate it. It’s not possible to eliminate it completely. We have to learn to live with it. But the best chance we have to live with it freely and safely is to get the case numbers down as low as possible.”

A particular concern is the spread of the disease into outback areas of NSW with higher Indigenous populations, who are particularly vulnerable.

The Pfizer doses from Poland were set to begin landing in Australia on Sunday night.

The rest of the vaccines will be distributed on a per capita basis to other parts of the country, to accelerate the vaccination of the under 40s and high risk groups.

“Within days of landing in Australia, these extra Pfizer doses will be available to go into the arms of young Australians in our hardest hit COVID hot-spots,” Morrison said.

“These young Australians are often the backbone of our essential workforce and these doses will not only protect them, but their loved ones, their state and our nation.”

He thanked Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and the Polish government “for their generous support of Australia’s COVID-19 response, during this challenging time”.

The vaccines were produced at Pfizer’s Belgium facility.

The federal government has been pulling out all stops internationally to try to get more Pfizer.

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

– ref. Pfizer from Poland directed to young super spreaders – https://theconversation.com/pfizer-from-poland-directed-to-young-super-spreaders-166155