Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Filia Garivaldis, Senior Lecturer, BehaviourWorks Australia, Monash University

One thing the COVID-19 pandemic has not changed is the need for employee training and skills development. Although lockdowns have reduced access to offices and increased job insecurity, they have provided the time and opportunity for building skills. Demand for professional development has grown.

However, since early 2020, the only option for employees to upskill has been through remote learning. Training and development specialists have been working tirelessly to adapt programs and courses for online delivery. For most, this has meant replacing face-to-face workshops with dial-in sessions using teleconferencing software.

Unfortunately, these changes have not always been effective. In other cases, employees have been applying their own personal, informal learning methods to develop professionally.

Read more:
Digital technology and the rise of new informal learning methods

In comparison, the global online education sector has steadily and organically expanded over the past 25 years. It’s set to become mainstream sooner than expected. The characteristics of online learning, which can connect a larger and more diverse student body, make it truly scalable and sustainable.

Thankfully, we can draw on decades of research evidence from online education to deliver professional development effectively online. This research shows three of the most important things to consider are flexibility, accessibility and social connectedness.

Make flexible learning a priority

Online education is growing rapidly because of its flexibility. Students can study from wherever, whenever. This means they can maintain roles such as work, parenting and other commitments alongside their studies.

Flexible online learning is erasing traditional boundaries of time and place.
To provide flexibility in professional development, learning should no longer be restricted to a single day and venue. A combination of scheduled and self-paced learning options provides collaborative and independent learning opportunities as needed.

Flexible learning options work best for learners who can stick to their learning plans and schedules and dedicate their attention to these tasks without distractions. Employers can support flexible learning by respecting these learning plans. This means allowing employees to schedule work around their learning.

Read more:
The 7 elements of a good online course

Ensure accessibility for all

A more diverse student body calls for more inclusive teaching and learning practices. The best examples of online education offer all students the same opportunities to do well.

Both learning material and learning management systems need to be reliable and accessible to all. That includes people who are living in remote parts of the country, those who cannot leave the home due to family commitments, or students with special needs who require learning resources to be created that take account of these needs.

Similarly, the use of online learning technology for professional development should act as a learning enabler, not a learning barrier. Advanced learning technology and software – learning management systems such as Moodle, for example – can bring both accessibility and innovation to professional development. It makes for a smoother and more engaging learning environment.

Organisations may need to invest in accessible learning technology – just as they would invest in creating accessible and inclusive office spaces. Guidelines are readily available to help trainers make online learning content accessible and engaging.

Read more:
Massive online open courses see exponential growth during COVID-19 pandemic

Foster connections between learners

Finally, learning remotely, like working remotely, can be isolating. Creating meaningful opportunities to nurture a sense of belonging and connectedness among students is a challenge for online educators. But the benefits of social connectedness are worth the effort. It’s associated with greater academic performance, self-confidence, engagement, retention and satisfaction.

Students who opt for the flexibility of online education are often time-poor or juggling multiple competing demands. They prioritise their goal of learning over their social needs.

For this reason, relying on these students to initiate interaction through social forums can often be ineffective. Rather, trainers should embed social collaboration in core online learning activities.

Activities that involve collaboration include peer review and simulation tasks. Online meetings and workshops should also be designed to capitalise on the interplay of learning and dialogue.

Activities like these ensure participants can maintain focus on learning goals while reaping the benefits of social interaction.

Online professional development is here to stay

Universities are expanding their educational offerings for professional development. They now offer affordable, accredited and verifiable online study options such as short courses and micro-credentials.

Read more:
New learning economy challenges unis to be part of reshaping lifelong education

These courses bridge the gap between higher education and industry needs – bringing a high standard of learning and innovation directly to employees, without the costs of travel or relocation.

The investments universities and other organisations are making in e-learning capabilities mean online professional development is here to stay.

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

– ref. 3 things we need to get right to ensure online professional development works – https://theconversation.com/3-things-we-need-to-get-right-to-ensure-online-professional-development-works-164785

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

Uber has been great for some people and bad for others.

It has been good for its founders and investors. It has been good for riders who get a convenient and well-priced new way to travel. And it has been good for some drivers who want flexible work.

On the other hand, taxi drivers have clearly lost out. Uber has put a serious dent in the value of taxi “plates” and “medallions”. It has also arguably contributed to lower wages for some drivers.

How do we tally up the total social value of Uber? Or, for that matter, any other business or technological innovation? That’s a question raised by a new economics working paper finding that Uber has helped reduce drunk driving.

Uber’s economic benefit

Anyone who takes rides with Uber knows it is a handy service — so handy that research suggests consumers would be prepared to pay up to 60% more for it.

This was calcluated in 2015 by five US economists in a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper. All up that equated to US Uber users valuing the service at US$6.8 billion a year more than what they they spent on it.

Such a valuation is known as the consumer surplus — the extra benefit a consumer gets on top of the price they pay for something.

Uber’s market capitalisation (in excess ofUS$80 billion) meanwhile reflects its producer surplus — the benefit the producer gets from selling something. Typically this might be thought of as the profit, with the market capitalisation basically being the current value of all expected future profits.

Factoring in externalities

An introductory economics textbook will tell you the sum of consumer surplus and producer surplus equals the total benefit to society. This can be illustrated using a simplified demand and supply chart (as shown).

However, the field of welfare economics tells us when this simple arithmetic is not necessarily so.

The first fundamental theorum of welfare economics — known at the First Welfare Theorem — sets out the conditions for Adam Smith’s aphorism that competition and the invisible hand of the market lead to the common good.

A theorem is more than a theory. It is a mathematical truth. The First Welfare Theorem — the most celebrated result in all of economics — was first formally proven in 1951 by Kenneth Arrow and Gerard Debreu.

It says the free market can maximise total societal welfare, but only based on a few crucial assumptions. One is that there are no “externalities” — that is, a transaction between a buyer and seller doesn’t affect anyone else.

For example, if I like Diet Coke that probably doesn’t affect you. Why do you care what I drink? I’m only one person so I can’t even affect you by driving up the price of my preferred beverage.

But things aren’t always so simple. What if I have raucous parties and blast loud music into the early hours of the morning? That might be fun for me and my guests, but certainly not for my neighbours.

That’s why “noise pollution” is banned. It’s an externality. It requires regulatory intervention to be corrected. For the same reasons economists advocate a price on carbon emissions, to fix what’s going wrong in the competitive market that allows greenhouse gas pollution.

Read more:
Vital Signs: a 3-point plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050

All of which is to say we can’t always just look at market outcomes, nor simply add up consumer and producer surplus, to understand the social benefit of an innovation or technology.

Uber’s positive externalities

Which brings us back to Uber.

Enter an interesting new NBER working paper, Uber and Alcohol-related traffic fatalities, by economists Michael Anderson and Lucas Davis of the University of California, Berkeley.

The paper begins with a plausible hypothesis: that some people before the advent of Uber might have chosen to drive their own car, and then drive home drunk after a big night. In many cases Uber is cheaper and more convenient than the taxis that were an option in such circumstances.

If that’s right, then Uber (and other convenient “rideshare” services) will have reduced the incidence of drunk driving, and the accidents and fatalities resulting. This would be an example of a positive externality — a benefit to third parties (or in this case society).

Anderson and Lucas combined data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration Fatality Analysis Reporting System and proprietary rideshare activity data from Uber. They then compared areas or greater and less Uber penetration, to helps factor out common trends in, say, safer motor vehicles or more stringent traffic laws. They conclude:

our results imply that ridesharing has decreased US alcohol-related traffic fatalities by 6.1% and reduced total US traffic fatalities by 4.0%.

They convert this into a dollar value using the conventional measure of the so-called “value of statistical life”. This leads to a benefit of US$2.3 billion to US$5.4 billion a year — a significant value on top of Uber’s estimated consumer surplus.

So the winners from Uber are consumers, producers and society.

Broader lessons

Markets are great. Except when they’re not. One important reason for “not” is negative externalities like pollution. That’s also why a really important role of government is to use policy tools to internalise such externalities.

In the case of ridesharing, governments need to be attentive to those that lose from its advent. Indeed, in 2016 I proposed a compensation scheme to do just that for taxi plate holders.

Read more:
How Uber drivers avoided — and contributed to — the fate of taxi drivers

But sometimes there are positive externalities from technological innovations. The same logic that applies to taxing negative externalities tells us we should subsidise positive externalities.

I’m not sure that’s going to happen with Uber rides. And, of course, without a carbon tax ridesharing still contributes to pollution externalities. So there are pluses and minuses in the “social benefit of Uber” calculus.

But Anderson and Davis compellingly demonstrate that positive externalities can be large and important, all by themselves.

Richard Holden is President-elect of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. In 2016 he wrote a report on taxi-plate compensation commissioned by Uber.

– ref. Vital Signs: Uber’s impact on traffic accidents is a lesson in calculating social benefit – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-ubers-impact-on-traffic-accidents-is-a-lesson-in-calculating-social-benefit-165306

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

Michelle Grattan discusses the week in politics with University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher.

This week the pair discuss the extension of the Sydney lockdown, and the anti-lockdown protests which took place over the weekend. It has been announced the defence force will assist in enforcing the lockdown restrictions, and the government is providing more financial support for those who have lost income due to the restrictions.

They also discuss the changes in Labor policy in preparation for the next election, and what it will mean to some of their voting base.

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. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on changes in opposition policy – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-changes-in-opposition-policy-165384

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Newell, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, UNSW

Online wagering is the fastest-growing segment of gambling in Australia. It’s a trend of particular concern because losing money through online brokering and betting apps is associated with higher rates of gambling-related harm than other types of gambling.

These apps provide the ability to win and lose money anywhere, anytime — and their popularity has been exacerbated by COVID-19 lockdowns.

A survey of 2,000 gamblers by the Australian Gambling Research Centre in mid-2020 found the proportion of gamblers doing so four or more times a week increased from 23% to 32%. Among the biggest online gamblers — men aged 18 to 34 — median spending climbed from A$687 to A$1,075 a month.

Whether in life, the stock market or at the horse races, most of us are notoriously bad at assessing the real odds of good or bad things happening.

For example, we fear dying in a plane crash (the odds of which are so small the US National Safety Council doesn’t even provide a calculation) far more than a car crash (a lifetime chance of about 1 in 107).

Read more:
Why our obsession with happy endings can lead to bad decisions

Gamblers underestimate their chance of losing and overestimate the odds of winning. This is despite the odds in games they are playing being precisely calibrated to ensure the house always wins in the long run. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it in his book Fooled by Randomness, it is “not about the odds, but about the belief in the existence of an alternative outcome, cause, or motive”.

How to inject more reality into these beliefs? One simple tool is feedback.

Feedback is crucial for all learning. When it’s timely, clear and targeted, it can alleviate many of the cognitive biases that cloud decision-making.

For gamblers the biggest bias is that they remember their wins more than losses — known as selective recall.

Feedback that clearly shows them their losses can counteract this. This is, no doubt, why many online wagering service providers don’t give feedback to their customers at all. Those that do tend to use “activity statements” that present a long list of transactions that are often hard to navigate and so don’t help gamblers appreciate just how well — or more likely poorly — they are doing.

Making gaming companies provide such feedback in a clear, comprehensible form is something that policy makers should put high on their reform list.

How to improve feedback

To find the best solution to this problem, the federal Department of Social Services commissioned the Australian government’s Behavioural Economics Team (BETA) to trial feedback online gamblers get from their wagering activities. We provided advice on the trial’s design and implementation.

The trial tested ways to let consumers see at a glance how much they had spent, won, lost and their overall net profit or loss from their bets. These numbers were displayed in an “activity statement”, presented in two formats — one as a table, similar to a bank statement, the other using more graphic elements. Below shows the design of the graphic statement.

BETA tested these statements in an experiment involving about 1,500 participants in a virtual horse-race betting game.

Each participant was given “lab dollars” (rather than real money) to bet on a series of races in blocks. Some were randomly chosen to get one or other of the activity statements after each block of races. Others received no statement.

On average, those who did not see a statement bet $368. Those who saw the “table” statement bet $350 (about 5% less). Those who saw the “graphic” statement bet $340 (about 7.5% less).

Read more:
Designed to deceive: How gambling distorts reality and hooks your brain

Real-world trials needed

These reductions may seem relatively minor but they are still promising. The majority of participants said they would use a summary statement like the ones in the experiment if they were available on real apps. Results also suggested participants with poor financial literacy benefited the most from receiving the feedback statements.

Whether the same results would be achieved in real life is hard to say. Though many participants rated the experiment as at least somewhat like real-life gambling, there are certainly differences between experimental trials and actual online wagering apps, where there can be higher stakes and longer gambling times. This might lead to larger or smaller effects. To answer that will require real-world trials on real apps.

But such trials are definitely worth a shot.

With the right kind of feedback to help us learn, our decisions can improve. The simple summary activity statements in the BETA trial make us optimistic that even in the potentially damaging world of online wagering people can learn to make more informed choices.

Ben Newell receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the Academic Advisory panel of the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) and provided advice on the trial described in this article.

Swee-Hoon Chuah was on secondment to the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) when she worked on the design of the trial described in this article.

Robert Slonim 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. Gamblers bet more when in the dark: feedback can curb their online losses – https://theconversation.com/gamblers-bet-more-when-in-the-dark-feedback-can-curb-their-online-losses-161904

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathomi Gatwiri, Senior lecturer, Southern Cross University

Simone Biles, the US gymnast widely considered “the greatest of all time”, withdrew from the Olympic finals this week, saying:

I have to focus on my mental health […] We have to protect our minds and our bodies and not just go out and do what the world wants us to do.

Biles joins other Black women like Naomi Osaka and Meghan Markle who have chosen to forgo medals, trophies and royalty to prioritise their mental well-being.

In a recent Guardian article about “the rise of the great refusal” author Casey Gerald argued “Biles did not simply quit. She refused”.

There is immense power in refusal. These women have awoken something in those of us who struggle to say “no” or who blindly serve institutions that do not have our best interest at heart. They challenge us to erect boundaries to protect our well-being.

Pressure to take on ever more work and ever more responsibility is familiar to many. But saying “no” can present unique difficulties for people from racially minoritised backgrounds.

Setting professional boundaries can be deeply challenging in the face of pressure, discrimination and adverse mental health impacts.

Pressure to take on ever more work

In academia, this pressure persists. Research by colleagues and I (Kathomi Gatwiri) shows academics from minoritised backgrounds continue to have radically different experiences to their colleagues. We argue that academics from minoritised backgrounds:

are often expected to be grateful, likeable, and […] to provide extensive pastoral care so as to maintain student happiness.

They are also exposed to more severe hostility and punishments through flawed tools of measuring performance such as Student Evaluations of Teaching if they choose not to perform this extra labour.
This causes extended emotional overload for many teachers and can be especially damaging to their mental well-being.

Researchers have written about the pressure of Black tenure-track academics “to engage in service activities that are not expected of their White counterparts” such as doing extra mentoring and joining more committees:

When Black faculty members face enormous requests for service, White colleagues often advise and encourage Black faculty to “just say no”.

However, just saying “no” does not always work to their best interest and can lead to institutional punishment, which can derail career progress.

Another paper which looked at how Black American women contend with the pressure to take on ever more responsibilities, noted “some women talked about the difficulty of saying no […] yet others talked about the empowerment of saying no.” One interviewee said:

I don’t know how to say no […] I feel I have an issue with saying no. I will spread myself like peanut butter out.

In our own research on the pressures faced by Black African professionals in the workplace in Australia, participants reported feeling the workplace was a site of constant surveillance and scrutiny, where they were often assumed to be “out of place”. This increases the burden of having to work “twice as hard” to prove themselves worthy, which can result in an inability to say “no” at work.

Read more:
Battlegrounds: highly skilled Black African professionals on racial microaggressions at work

The power of ‘no’

Simone Biles’ decision to withdrawal from the Olympics might, in retrospect, become one of her greatest achievement of all time. She has since received widespread support from those who view her decision as an incredibly powerful message for all who are burdened with societal pressures and expectations.

Black and Indigenous peoples have engaged in the power and politics of refusal and resistance for centuries — a refusal to lend their bodies, time, expertise and talent to institutions that are violent and abusive.

In ordinary, everyday lives however, people who exercise this kind of resistance might be ostracised. They may lack the necessary support to bolster their decision to “opt out” or just rest.

Biles’ withdrawal came soon after three Black players on the England national football team were subjected to a torrent of extreme racial abuse after the team’s loss at the recent Euro finals with Italy.

Many Black people reflected on social media they already knew that if they lost the game, the outcome would be racial abuse. And so the pressure to win, might be intensified by the fear of the resulting abuse if they lose.

Sport, pressure and abuse

People’s discomfort with athletes expressing vulnerability or anything but toughness and strength can influence the athletes’ complicity in their own harm.

Research by one of us (McPherson and colleagues) investigating the experiences of Australian children in elite sport showed more than 50% also reported negative experiences, including emotional and physical harm and sexual harassment. Emotional and physical abuse was enacted through racial vilification, humiliation, bullying, being shouted or sworn at, have things thrown at them or being told they were worthless or weak.

Read more:
Racial abuse is rife in junior sports – and little is being done to address it

Other research has identified how various minoritised subpopulations of elite athletes, including those with disabilities or from racially minoritised backgrounds, may be more vulnerable to harm in sport.

The liberation of ‘no’

Biles’ refusal to compete citing mental health has resonated widely.

Many struggle to say “no” for a variety of reasons including fear of rejection, a feeling that saying “yes” is the safest option or feeling they will be construed as “rebellious” or “difficult” if they say “no”. Fear of disappointing others or feeling their reason for saying “no” is “not good enough” also play a part.

Biles, Osaka and others may serve as inspiration. Practising the liberation of turning down invites, relationships, extra work and high pressure is part of maintaining good mental health.

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

– ref. The power of no: Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and Black women’s resistance – https://theconversation.com/the-power-of-no-simone-biles-naomi-osaka-and-black-womens-resistance-165318

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lilly Brown, Lecturer, The University of Melbourne

Content warning: This article contains distressing information on Stolen Generations and residential schools.

When I read that the bodies of 215 children had been found in unmarked graves on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, Turtle Island (Canada), my heart ached for these children and the First Nation’s communities they belong to.

Weeks later, the Cowessess First Nation announced they had also found the remains of 751 people, mostly children, at the former Marieval Indian Residential School using ground-penetrating radar.

The residential school system in Canada was a tool of cultural genocide that worked explicitly through the forced removal of children and young people from their families. The impact of policies that enabled this to happen have been felt by generations of Métis, Inuit and First Nations peoples. The last school closed in 1996.

As the tally of bodies found in unmarked graves continues to grow, residential school survivors warn this is just the beginning.

The experiences of Indigenous children and communities in Canada are resonant with those of young First Peoples and children in Australia. These experiences also include the separation of children from their families in an attempt to assimilate and erase us as Aboriginal peoples.

Read more:
Honour those found at residential schools by respecting the human rights of First Nations children today

Residential schools: a tool of cultural genocide

In 1920, Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Minister of [Indigenous] Affairs, stated:

I want to get rid of the Indian problem […] our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed.

Kanienkehaka (Mohawk) scholar Dr Beverley Jacobs, in calling for the deaths of these children to be investigated as a crime against humanity, says:

What happened to Indigenous children is genocide, and the legacy of that continues through denial and inaction.

It’s estimated over 150,000 Indigenous children across Canada were forcibly taken from their families and interned in residential schools. These schools were established in an attempt to “civilise” and assimilate Indigenous peoples.

This process saw children taken from their families and often punished for speaking language and practising culture.

As I held my own daughter close, the uncovering of the remains of these precious children on Turtle Island prompted me to reflect on the survival of First Peoples in the face of ongoing legacies of colonial violence back here in Australia.

Indigenous child removal in Australia

The Bringing Them Home report tabled in parliament in 1997 presented a national investigation into these removals and concluded:

between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and communities in the period from approximately 1910 until 1970.

Drawing on the testimonies of Stolen Generation survivors, the Report also found:

Subsequent generations continue to suffer the effects of parents and grandparents having been forcibly removed, institutionalised, denied contact with their Aboriginality and in some cases traumatised and abused.

This trauma and abuse occurred at places like the former Moore River Native Settlement north of Perth, Western Australia which became a Methodist Mission in 1951.

Research revealed in 2018 374 people buried in largely unmarked graves at the site, a majority of which were children, had died of treatable respiratory and infectious diseases.

Moore River settlement was the subject of the Australian film Rabbit Proof Fence which depicted the true story of three girls who escaped the deplorable conditions at Moore River, despite the real possibility of tortuous punishment, and walked almost 2,500 kilometres north in search of their family.

While the story of Molly, Daisy and Gracie’s escape and survival in this film is exceptional, their experience of violence and removal under policies of assimilation is not. It is but one example of the way many Indigenous children and young people were, and continue to be, treated.

Read more:
Indigenous children are leaving out-of-home care to uncertain futures. This is the support they need

Seeking truth and justice

The recently inaugurated Victorian Yoo-rrook Justice Commission will shepherd Australia’s first ever formal truth telling process.

Part of Yoo-rrook’s mandate is to:

investigate both historical and ongoing injustices committed against Aboriginal Victorians since colonisation by the State and non-State entities, across all areas of social, political and economic life.

This mandate also extends to establishing “an official public record based on First Peoples’ experiences of Systemic Injustice since the start of Colonisation.”

Given the focus of Yoo-rrook, it’s only a matter of time before, as Melbourne-based Ballardong/Nyoongar artist Dianne Jones’ stated in her 2013 exhibition – what lies buried rises. In making these artworks, Jones asked:

Whose crimes are subject to investigation? Whose grief constructs memorials? Whose deaths matter?

In repeating Jones’ questions here, I do not ask them of First Peoples. Rather, I share Jones’ words as a prompt for non-Indigenous, and particularly white, settler Australians. These people may not yet have an informed understanding of the violent past of this continent and how this violence continues to reverberate in the present.

These reverberations have been endured by First Peoples for centuries now.

As Yoo-rrook begins it’s important work, and First Peoples in other States and Territories continue to demand truth and justice, like in Turtle Island, what’s buried will continue to rise and demand justice.

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

– ref. The discovery of Indigenous children’s bodies in Canada is horrific, but Australia has similar tragedies it’s yet to reckon with – https://theconversation.com/the-discovery-of-indigenous-childrens-bodies-in-canada-is-horrific-but-australia-has-similar-tragedies-its-yet-to-reckon-with-164706

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Williamson, Professor of Microbiology, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

Since the start of the pandemic, COVID-19 testing in Australia has been performed using highly sensitive PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests.

But this conventional model of testing, which involves swabbing by a health-care professional and transporting samples to a laboratory for analysis, has important bottlenecks. Recent reports indicate people have been waiting several hours just to have a swab taken.

With the current COVID outbreaks in Australia, there’s been a renewed focus on alternative testing methods to PCR — in particular rapid antigen testing.

New South Wales this week announced it would begin using rapid antigen tests in schools to allow year 12 students to return to the classroom safely, as well as in essential workplaces.

So what are rapid antigen tests, are they effective, and what role should they play in Australia’s response to COVID-19?

What are antigen tests?

Antigen tests detect protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) directly from a sample taken with a swab inserted into the nose.

Because antigen tests do not amplify parts of the virus’ genetic code, they are less sensitive than PCR tests.

The main advantages of antigen tests over PCR tests include their lower cost and their speed. Most antigen tests are designed to be used at the point of care, with results available in about 15 minutes. They cost roughly A$5 to A$20 per test.

Read more:
Why do some COVID-19 tests come back with a ‘weak positive’, and why does it matter?

How effective are they?

In countries such as the United Kingdom and United States, antigen tests have been used widely to complement PCR testing during the pandemic.

So far, the strongest published evidence to support the use of antigen tests is in symptomatic people within the first few days of their symptoms starting, when the amount of virus in nasal secretions is highest.

In other words, antigen tests are most accurate when the viral load is highest and when a person is likely to be most infectious. If an antigen test is taken either too early or too late in the course of infection, it may not detect the virus.

There are conflicting data on the performance of antigen tests in people without symptoms. A Cochrane review looking at results across several studies found the sensitivity of antigen tests (the likelihood of a positive result if someone is infected with the virus) was between 40% and 74% in people without symptoms. So a fair proportion of people tested may receive a negative test when they really have the virus.

With this in mind, compared to a “one-off” antigen test, repeated antigen testing (for example, daily) may improve the detection of virus, particularly in people who don’t have symptoms, or when there’s a low level of disease in the community.

Importantly, “real-world” overseas studies looking at antigen testing have varied widely in the types of tests it was compared with, the populations tested, and how much disease was circulating in the community at the time of the study.

This means it’s very hard to extrapolate information from overseas directly to Australia.

We need to trial rapid antigen testing in Australia to get reliable local information

The Therapeutics Goods Administration has so far approved 20 rapid antigen tests for use in Australia.

But antigen tests can only be supplied to accredited laboratories, medical practitioners, health-care professionals working in residential and aged-care facilities, or health departments. The commercial supply of COVID-19 antigen kits for self-testing at home is prohibited.

One way we could properly evaluate the use of antigen tests in Australia is through a series of clinical trials.

These could include trials of returning travellers undertaking daily self-testing in home quarantine, or repeated testing of groups of workers in potentially high-risk workplaces (for example, food distribution centres, construction sites or aged care).

Read more:
The positives and negatives of mass testing for coronavirus

Lessons from HIV

A precedent for community-based self-testing for an infectious disease in Australia is HIV. There were initially concerns the antibody test used for home HIV testing was not sensitive enough, and not as good as the gold standard laboratory test. There were also concerns people wouldn’t know how to deal with a positive test.

But the implementation of HIV self-testing over the past couple of years has been broadly successful. Education campaigns help people understand the limitations of the test, while there are effective processes in place to support people who return a positive result.

Although COVID-19 and HIV are very different diseases, the HIV experience offers useful lessons on how to implement home testing for a high-impact disease in a low-prevalence setting, while ensuring testing is accessible and convenient for all, including marginalised groups.

It’s not perfect, but it could be useful

One fundamental proviso for the use of widespread antigen testing is that we have to be prepared to accept a degree of risk. We know these tests are less sensitive than the current diagnostic “gold standard”, meaning it’s almost certain they will miss some cases of COVID-19.

PCR testing undoubtedly underpins our high-quality laboratory response to COVID-19 in Australia. But our capacity to sustain PCR testing at the level we will eventually need for communities to function normally and for international borders to reopen is uncertain.

We urgently need pragmatic real-world trials of new testing strategies to help us understand how best to return to a “COVID-normal” life.

Read more:
Why are some COVID test results false positives, and how common are they?

Deborah Williamson receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Sharon Lewin 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. Rapid antigen testing isn’t perfect. But it could be a useful part of Australia’s COVID response – https://theconversation.com/rapid-antigen-testing-isnt-perfect-but-it-could-be-a-useful-part-of-australias-covid-response-164873

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vicki Sentas, Senior Lecturer, UNSW Law, UNSW

With rolling lockdowns now part of how Australians live in the pandemic age, important questions arise about corresponding changes in policing. Constantly changing public health orders bring not only confusion but expansive police authority to enforce many new criminal offences.

On one view, using the police to protect public health by stopping the spread of the virus appears a logical step. But, in practice, do public health objectives always take precedence over existing enforcement approaches?

The recent deployment of 100 additional officers and mounted police to south-west Sydney call to mind the same concerns expressed by the Victorian Ombudsman that the policing and lockdown of public housing tower blocks in 2020 were partly informed by “incorrect and potentially stereotypical assumptions” about residents.

Reports of unfair police actions revise age-old questions about the role and function of the police in enforcing social inequalities and its punitive effects.

Read more:
Beyond the police state to COVID-safe: life after lockdown will need a novel approach

How is COVID being policed?

Fines have been a key method of policing COVID restrictions. Yet our exploratory research suggests fines are merely one way in which police are using their powers during the pandemic.

Select data we obtained from New South Wales Police indicate that from March 15 to June 15 2020, the most common police action was to search those stopped. Although the public health relevance of conducting a search is unclear, police searched 45% of all people stopped for a COVID-related incident.

We also know COVID policing has affected some communities more than others. In Victoria, a parliamentary inquiry found people in lower socioeconomic areas were twice as likely to be fined as those in higher socioeconomic areas.

Our research in NSW found Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples comprised 9% of the stop incidents in which Indigenous or non-Indigenous status was recorded. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were even more disproportionately subject to coercive police powers following a stop, making up 15% of arrests and 10% of people searched.

Whatever the precise level of over-representation, these findings are consistent with the broader, long-standing experience of the over-policing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Considering Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples comprise around 3% of the population, these data alone show disproportionate use of search and arrest powers. They also support concerns that the pandemic has intensified the policing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

COVID policing appears to rely on longstanding criminalisation strategies at odds with public health. An old-school public order approach of stop and search, and fines, undermines public health because of the social harms of criminal justice contact.

Most obviously, increased police contact through personal searches could increase the risk of transmission. And, as we explain elsewhere, questions remain about their lawful basis.

How could COVID be policed?

The social and economic costs of the pandemic have greater impacts on precarious and low-wage workers and marginalised people. It is even more critical that policing does not amplify those inequalities by prioritising punishment over keeping people safe.

The Australian approach isn’t the only possibility. Heavy reliance on enforcement contrasts, for example, with the United Kingdom, where the policing of COVID-19 measures early in the pandemic was independently assessed by policing experts as “taking place at the margins”. These experts pointed out that people are more likely to comply with rules where they regard them as morally right and reflecting social norms, rather than because they fear fines and other sanctions.

Instead of prosecuting individuals for non-compliance with frequently changing laws, a better approach would be to provide financial assistance and accessible information, particularly for disadvantaged groups.

Read more:
Pandemic policing needs to be done with the public’s trust, not confusion

A community-focused, public health approach would move away from coercive policing and emphasise co-developed community resources on COVID restrictions and their purpose.

A small group of NSW Police officers recently joined forces with a community organisation to hand out free masks and hand sanitiser to residents in hard-hit areas of western Sydney. But this has not been a system-wide approach, and is unlikely to erase the memory of mounted police patrols enforcing the lockdown in the same area.

It is too early to say what the lasting changes in policing may be. Will additional powers granted to police persist beyond the emergency in some other form? Will states continue to revert to border control to protect against future, non-biological risks? Will technology-driven population surveillance become more prominent?

This all remains to be seen. But it is certain that mass vaccination would shrink the need for state policing of COVID altogether.

Leanne Weber receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Louise Boon-Kuo and Vicki Sentas 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. COVID has changed policing — but now policing needs to change to respond better to COVID – https://theconversation.com/covid-has-changed-policing-but-now-policing-needs-to-change-to-respond-better-to-covid-164959

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Simpson, Senior Lecturer, University of South Australia

Myanmar is facing a catastrophic health crisis that could have ramifications not just for the country’s long-suffering people, but across the region as well.

The country is experiencing a major spike in COVID cases — what one Doctors Without Borders official referred to as “uncontrolled community spread” — fuelled by the military junta’s gross mismanagement of the crisis and a collapsing health sector.

The military regime’s official COVID statistics are running at around 6,000 cases and 300 deaths per day, but no one believes these are accurate. This is, after all, the junta that staged a military coup in February and then tried to argue it was constitutionally valid.

With only 2.8% of Myanmar’s 54 million people fully vaccinated, there are now concerns the country could become a “COVID superspreader state”. And this could lead to the emergence of new variants, says the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar.

This is very, very dangerous for all kinds of reasons […] This is a region that is susceptible to even greater suffering as a result of Myanmar becoming a super-spreader state.

Doctors being imprisoned

The UN says a “perfect storm” of factors is fuelling the deepening health crisis.

Medical staff have been on strike as part of the civil disobedience movement against the coup. Oxygen and other medical equipment are increasingly expensive and in short supply. Even getting an oxygen concentrator into Myanmar is not straightforward, though Singapore said this week it will rush 200 machines into the country.

Read more:
COVID coup: how Myanmar’s military used the pandemic to justify and enable its power grab

Most troublingly, at least 157 medics, including the former head of Myanmar’s COVID-19 vaccination program, have been arrested and charged with high treason. In Yangon, military personnel have pretended to be COVID patients in need of emergency treatment, then arrested the doctors who came to help.

Reliable figures on the infection rate are impossible to obtain, but civil society groups that assist with cremations and funeral services in Yangon say they are seeing up to 1,000 uncounted COVID deaths a day in that city alone. The national total may be several thousand per day.

One reason it’s impossible to get an accurate count of COVID cases is the extremely low rate of testing. There are only around 15,000 COVID tests being conducted per day in a country of 54 million people. The tests are, however, returning a positive rate of around 37%, or 370 positives for every 1,000 tests.

It’s also believed nearly 50 prisoners at the crowded, notorious Insein Prison are now infected with COVID but are being denied treatment by the military.

These prisoners include top leaders from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, doctors connected with the civil disobedience movement, and foreigners like Australian academic Sean Turnell, an adviser to Suu Kyi who was arrested by the junta after the coup and is being held on bogus charges.

Another adviser and lawyer to Suu Kyi, Nyan Win, died last week after being infected with COVID at Insein.

Myanmar’s poor are disproportionatly suffering

Such a catastrophic health situation is exacerbating Myanmar’s inequalities. Poorer people are less able to socially distance and less likely to get tested and receive meaningful treatment. They suffer invisibly, often in silence.

In a report published this week, the World Bank estimated Myanmar’s economy would contract by 18% this year due to the effects of the pandemic and the coup. The share of people living in poverty is also likely to more than double by the beginning of 2022, compared to 2019.

Read more:
We know how to cut off the financial valve to Myanmar’s military. The world just needs the resolve to act

The ethnic minority regions of the country may well be disproportionately suffering, too. Since the coup, conflicts have intensified across the country between the military and the ethnic armed organisations and pro-democracy advocates that have joined them, causing immense social dislocation.

The UN refugee agency estimates 200,000 people were internally displaced from February to June, bringing the total of displaced people in the country to 680,000. These marginalised groups are even less likely to have access to medical treatment.

These figures are also not taking into account the refugees outside the country, such as the million Rohingya languishing in the cramped refugee camps in Bangladesh. The Bangladesh government has said it will begin vaccinating the Rohingya next month.

International aid desperately needed

When Cyclone Nargis killed 140,000 people in Myanmar in 2008, the country’s previous military regime received wide-ranging offers of assistance from ASEAN, the regional bloc, and the wider international community.

But since the coup, Western aid to Myanmar has been redirected through non-government groups, causing hold-ups. The UN says the junta has also yet to account for US$350 million in COVID aid the International Monetary Fund sent to Myanmar just days before the coup in February.

The country hasn’t received vaccine doses since May, though China pledged to send 6 million doses by August, with the first batch arriving last week. China may end up being the most proactive donor, since it is worried about a COVID outbreak along its shared border with Myanmar.

Optimists say this may be a time for reconciliation and for everyone in Myanmar to unite against the common enemy of COVID. Yet it is hard to imagine that happening right now, when the military’s own mishandling of the pandemic has generated so much outrage from the population.

Read more:
Sanctions against Myanmar’s junta have been tried before. Can they work this time?

What can be done? Perhaps Australia, which we are told is “awash” in AstraZeneca vaccines, could make rapid moves to send desperately needed supplies to Myanmar via its non-government partners. It would be a bold and impressive diplomatic move.

There is then the need for the international community to confront the Myanmar generals for their appalling mishandling of the country since the coup. By seizing control from elected leaders, they have impoverished their own people, sparked new conflicts and exacerbated the damage done by a global pandemic.

The heartbreaking reality is the people of Myanmar have been left without the prospect of significant relief at the worst possible time.

Nicholas Farrelly has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council for Myanmar-focussed work. He is on the board of the Australia-ASEAN Council, which is an Australian government body. These are his personal views.

Adam Simpson 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 a perfect storm of events is turning Myanmar into a ‘super-spreader’ COVID state – https://theconversation.com/how-a-perfect-storm-of-events-is-turning-myanmar-into-a-super-spreader-covid-state-165174

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Blair Williams, Research Fellow, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL), Australian National University

Australia has been rocked by serious allegations of sexual assault and harassment that have poured out of parliament house this year.

In February, former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins revealed a toxic workplace culture for political staffers when she spoke about her own alleged assault. As others have come forward with their stories, we have witnessed a reckoning about sexism and misogyny in our political culture.

In response, the Morrison government initiated a range of reviews. The Foster review into serious incidents at parliament was finished in June. This week, the government accepted all ten recommendations — including an independent complaints process. However, this will not be enough make parliament safe.

Read more:
After Brittany Higgins: will the Foster review prevent another ‘serious incident’ at parliament?

Attention now needs to shift to the work of sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins, who is conducting an independent review into parliament’s workplace culture. Submissions for her landmark review close on Saturday.

Experts and MPs come together to find solutions

Earlier this month, with colleagues from the ANU’s Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, I hosted a summit to develop a model code of conduct to make parliament a safer and more inclusive workplace.

We brought together former and current politicians, political staffers, national and international academic experts, and key stakeholders (such as the Community and Public Sector Union and YWCA) to consider how we can address bullying, intimidation, and harassment within the halls of government.

Academics offered a scholarly perspective on the impact of gendered norms and culture as an obstacle to change, while staffers and politicians shared personal experiences of sexism, racism and bullying in their careers. This included former-Liberal cabinet minister Sharman Stone, ACT Liberal leader Elizabeth Lee, Labor MP Anne Aly, Greens senator Larissa Waters, and Independent MP Helen Haines. The range of MPs present made it clear how this issue crosses party lines.

Three main messages emerged from the discussion.

1. A code of conduct is necessary

The summit participants unanimously agreed a set of principles is necessary if we are to change the current state of workplace relations in parliament.

With this aim in mind, we have submitted a model code of conduct to the Jenkins inquiry. Our proposal goes further than the Foster recommendations and provides clear guidelines on acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and treatment of others. It also borrows elements from comparable documents in other countries, notably New Zealand and the United Kingdom. It includes seven clear commitments:

1. ensure parliament meets the highest standards of integrity, courtesy and mutual respect

2. make parliament a safe and inclusive workplace where diversity is valued

3. show bullying and harassment, including sexual harassment, are unacceptable

4. speak up about any unacceptable behaviour

5. act professionally towards others

6. participate in training on harassment prevention and office management

7. understand unacceptable behaviour will be dealt with seriously and independently with effective sanctions.

Read more:
Now for some better news: 9 Australians fighting for gender equality and making a difference

For the code to succeed, it must be binding and apply to all, including politicians, staffers, journalists, visitors, volunteers, interns and students. The implementation of the code and handling of complaints must be overseen by an independent body.

The independent complaint-handling authority must be able to investigate both current and historical allegations (the Foster review recommends the latter should remain the responsibility of the Finance Department). The complaints process must be flexible, victim-focused and trauma-informed.

The code must be supported by training in its implementation as well as in harassment prevention, bullying, office management and workplace roles and responsibilities more generally. This training must be mandatory for all workers.

2. We need cultural change

An entrenched culture of sexism persists inside parliament house. In addition to adopting a code of conduct, we desperately need to change the broader cultural norms of Australian political life. As former prime minister Julia Gillard wrote in her 2014 memoir:

[since] politics at senior levels in our nation has almost always been the pursuit of men, the assumptions of politics have been defined around men’s lives not women’s.

Certain stereotypically masculine qualities, such as strength, authority, confrontation, aggression, and determination, are therefore prioritised and accepted in politics, These traits are often on full display during question time. As Stone noted in her speech at the summit:

Question time is one of the worst reinforcers of the masculine, [foregrounding the] aggression, screaming, [and] yelling of men [with] women echoing … that behaviour because [it] is seen as a ‘strong’ performance. And it’ll be written up by the media as a strong performance.

Stone added such behaviour is not only a waste of time, it discourages women who aspire to enter politics.

Question time is also a window into what happens behind closed doors, exposing the kind of behaviour that is accepted within parliament. Combined with the rife power imbalances between politicians and staffers, such behaviour inevitably contributes to a culture of bullying and entitlement.

3. We need diversity

Our political culture also requires a greater recognition and inclusion of diversity.

Parliament is not just a “boys’ club”, it is a white boys’ club. It has been built by and for powerful white men and encourages a sense of entitlement — to spaces, roles and even bodies — protected from any accountability.

During the summit, Lee spoke of experience as the first Korean Australian woman in Australian politics. She reflected on the lack of diversity in this history of “another white man after another white man.” From the Labor side, Aly pointed to the lack of diverse candidates in the 2019 federal election, noting we “specifically [need] more women of colour in politics”.

If we have a parliament that is representative of Australia, this would, in turn, broaden parliamentary culture and break entrenched power relations.

Our model code of conduct will aid in creating a safer workplace for all in parliament, but we also need widespread and permanent change to help transform a misogynistic political culture.

Blair Williams 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 Australia is serious about fixing the culture at parliament, this is the code of conduct we need – https://theconversation.com/if-australia-is-serious-about-fixing-the-culture-at-parliament-this-is-the-code-of-conduct-we-need-161884

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

Earlier this month National Cabinet released a four-phase COVID response plan. It wasn’t so much a plan – it had no dates and no thresholds – but more a back-of-the-napkin thought bubble. It was sensible, but vague.

National Cabinet now faces the hard task of converting vagueness into a real plan. To do this it must answer the question: what proportion of the Australian population needs to be vaccinated before we can open our international borders?

This means allowing stranded Australians to return, letting footloose people travel overseas, and welcoming international tourists and students again.

Read more:
Australia has a new four-phase plan for a return to normality. Here’s what we know so far

Well qualified experts differ on the requisite threshold for vaccination partly because there are so many unknowns, such as how quickly the Delta variant of COVID would spread through Australia if we open up, and how effective the different vaccines will prove to be in preventing transmission.

But new Grattan Institute modelling shows it would be dangerous for Australia to open up before at least 80% of the population is vaccinated.

Here’s what we found, and how we came to the 80% figure. Let’s start with the good news.

Vaccines offer substantial protection

Both vaccines on offer in Australia – Pfizer and AstraZeneca – are effective at preventing infections from the Delta strain. Two doses of Pfizer offers about 88% protection against infection, while two doses of AstraZeneca offers about 67% protection.

Vaccinated people can still catch COVID, but those that do pass it on to about half as many others compared to the unvaccinated.

Read more:
Yes, you can still get COVID after being vaccinated, but you’re unlikely to get as sick

Evidence from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the European Union – areas with higher vaccination levels than Australia – also suggests both vaccines offer substantial protection against hospitalisation and death from COVID. A vaccinated person is about 95% less likely than a vaccinated person to end up in hospital with COVID.

Now for the bad news.

The delta strain is far more infectious

Researchers estimate the Delta variant is 50% to 100% more infectious than the Alpha variant, which itself was more transmissible than the variant that was dominant throughout 2020.

The effective reproduction number, or Reff, tells us how many people one infected person will spread the virus to, taking into account behaviour and public health measures in place designed to reduce transmission, such as masks and physical distancing.

If the Reff of the Delta variant in Australia is around 6 without vaccination, having 50% vaccination coverage will reduce the Reff to 3.

But the national goal must be to bring the Reff down to below 1, which would mean each person who was infected would infect less than one other person – and the virus would eventually peter out.

The higher the vaccination rate, the lower the effective reproduction number. Each person vaccinated offers a chance of breaking a chain of transmission that might lead to an outbreak.

Not only are vaccinated people less likely to become infected, they are also less likely to pass the virus onto others if they are.

The higher the vaccination rate, the lower the effective reproduction number

So why do we need 80% of people vaccinated?

Grattan Institute’s model simulates the spread of COVID within a partially vaccinated population, and helps us peek into the future.

It uses age-based hospitalisation and intensive care unit (ICU) admission rates from more than a year of COVID data from Australian ICU units. It also assumes children under 16 are about one-fifth less likely to get COVID, and children over the age of two are able to be vaccinated.

In most of our simulations, older people have higher rates of vaccination, and no age group has more than 95% vaccine coverage.

Read more:
When will we reach herd immunity? Here are 3 reasons that’s a hard question to answer

We ran thousands of simulations of different vaccination rates, and different estimates of the Reff. The outcomes for 12 distinct scenarios are shown in the table below.

You can see why we recommend Australia not open up until at least 80% of the population is vaccinated – it is the only scenario where the virus is managed, with hospitalisations and deaths kept down to reasonable levels, even if the Reff is high.

Let’s break it down

Our simulations show that opening up at 50% vaccination rate (scenario 1) is a very bad idea, with many, many thousands of deaths.

Scenarios 2 and 3 are the optimist’s and gambler’s scenarios. If you are lucky and the Reff of Delta in Australia is 4 (with 70% vaccination rate) or 5 (with 75% vaccination rate), deaths and hospitalisations would not rise above moderate levels, and lockdowns could end and the borders could reopen.

But if you gambled on the wrong Reff, our hospitals would be overwhelmed and deaths would be unacceptably high. Opening the borders is a one-shot gamble: if you make the wrong call, the virus will quickly spread and all the good work and hard yards of living through lock-downs over the previous two years will have been wasted.

Public health decision-making is often risk averse, for the best of reasons. The difference in virus spread, hospitalisations and deaths between opening at 75% and at 80% are big, but the wait between the two thresholds may only be a month or two.
This is why we recommend an 80% vaccination rate (scenario 4) as the threshold for opening up.

Even if the Reff of Delta is 6, our hospital system will not be overwhelmed, and deaths will not rise above the number of deaths in a moderate flu season, such as 2010, when there were 2,364 flu deaths.

Read more:
80% vaccination won’t get us herd immunity, but it could mean safely opening international borders

Stephen Duckett has had his first AstraZeneca vaccination.

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

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

– ref. Australia shouldn’t ‘open up’ before we vaccinate at least 80% of the population. Here’s why – https://theconversation.com/australia-shouldnt-open-up-before-we-vaccinate-at-least-80-of-the-population-heres-why-165073

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Corey J. A. Bradshaw, Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology and Models Theme Leader for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University

Shamefully, Australia has one of the highest extinction rates in the world.
And the number one threat to our species is invasive or “alien” plants and animals.

But invasive species don’t just cause extinctions and biodiversity loss – they also create a serious economic burden. Our research, published today, reveals invasive species have cost the Australian economy at least A$390 billion in the last 60 years alone.

Our paper – the most detailed assessment of its type ever published in this country – also reveals feral cats are the worst invasive species in terms of total costs, followed by rabbits and fire ants.

Without urgent action, Australia will continue to lose billions of dollars every year on invasive species.

Huge economic burden

Invasive species are those not native to a particular ecosystem. They are introduced either by accident or on purpose and become pests.

Some costs involve direct damage to agriculture, such as insects or fungi destroying fruit. Other examples include measures to control invasive species like feral cats and cane toads, such as paying field staff and buying fuel, ammunition, traps and poisons.

Our previous research put the global cost of invasive species at A$1.7 trillion. But this is most certainly a gross underestimate because so many data are missing.

Read more:
Attack of the alien invaders: pest plants and animals leave a frightening $1.7 trillion bill

As a wealthy nation, Australia has accumulated more reliable cost data than most other regions. These costs have increased exponentially over time – up to sixfold each decade since the 1970s.

We found invasive species now cost Australia around A$24.5 billion a year, or an average 1.26% of the nation’s gross domestic product. The costs total at least A$390 billion in the past 60 years.

Worst of the worst

Our analysis found feral cats have been the most economically costly species since 1960. Their A$18.7 billion bill is mainly associated with attempts to control their abundance and access, such as fencing, trapping, baiting and shooting.

Feral cats are a main driver of extinctions in Australia, and so perhaps investment to limit their damage is worth the price tag.

As a group, the management and control of invasive plants proved the worst of all, collectively costing about A$200 billion. Of these, annual ryegrass, parthenium and ragwort were the costliest culprits because of the great effort needed to eradicate them from croplands.

Invasive mammals were the next biggest burdens, costing Australia A$63 billion.

Variation across regions

For costs that can be attributed to particular states or territories, New South Wales had the highest costs, followed by Western Australia then Victoria.

Red imported fire ants are the costliest species in Queensland, and ragwort is the economic bane of Tasmania.

The common heliotrope is the costliest species in both South Australia and Victoria, and annual ryegrass tops the list in WA.

In the Northern Territory, the dothideomycete fungus that causes banana freckle disease brings the greatest economic burden, whereas cats and foxes are the costliest species in the ACT and NSW.

Better assessments needed

Our study is one of 19 region-specific analyses released today. Because the message about invasive species must get out to as many people as possible, our article’s abstract was translated into 24 languages.

This includes Pitjantjatjara, a widely spoken Indigenous language.

Read more:
Australia’s threatened species plan has failed on several counts. Without change, more extinctions are assured

Even the massive costs we reported are an underestimate. This is because of we haven’t yet surveyed all the places these species occur, and there is a lack of standardised reporting by management authorities and other agencies.

For example, our database lists several fungal plant pathogens. But no cost data exist for some of the worst offenders, such as the widespread Phytophthora cinnamomi pathogen that causes major crop losses and damage to biodiversity.

Developing better methods to estimate the environmental impacts of invasive species, and the benefit of management actions, will allow us to use limited resources more efficiently.

A constant threat

Many species damaging to agriculture and the environment are yet to make it to our shores.

The recent arrival in Australia of fall armyworm, a major agriculture pest, reminds us how invasive species will continue their spread here and elsewhere.

As well as the economic damage, invasive species also bring intangible costs we have yet to measure adequately. These include the true extent of ecological damage, human health consequences, erosion of ecosystem services and the loss of cultural values.

Without better data, increased investment, a stronger biosecurity system and interventions such as animal culls, invasive species will continue to wreak havoc across Australia.

The authors acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they did this research.

Ngadlu tampinthi yalaka ngadlu Kaurna yartangka inparrinthi. Ngadludlu tampinthi, parnaku tuwila yartangka.

Corey J. A. Bradshaw receives funding from Australian Research Council.

Andrew Hoskins receives funding from the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment.

– ref. Pest plants and animals cost Australia around $25 billion a year – and it will get worse – https://theconversation.com/pest-plants-and-animals-cost-australia-around-25-billion-a-year-and-it-will-get-worse-164969

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katherine Seto, Research Fellow, University of Wollongong

Small Pacific Island states depend on their commercial fisheries for food supplies and economic health. But our new research shows climate change will dramatically alter tuna stocks in the tropical Pacific, with potentially severe consequences for the people who depend on them.

As climate change warms the waters of the Pacific, some tuna will be forced to migrate to the open ocean of the high seas, away from the jurisdiction of any country. The changes will affect three key tuna species: skipjack, yellowfin, and bigeye.

Pacific Island nations such as the Cook Islands and territories such as Tokelau charge foreign fishing operators to access their waters, and heavily depend on this revenue. Our research estimates the movement of tuna stocks will cause a fall in annual government revenue to some of these small island states of up to 17%.

This loss will hurt these developing economies, which need fisheries revenue to maintain essential services such as hospitals, roads and schools. The experience of Pacific Island states also bodes poorly for global climate justice more broadly.

Island states at risk

Catches from the Western and Central Pacific represent over half of all tuna produced globally. Much of this catch is taken from the waters of ten small developing island states, which are disproportionately dependent on tuna stocks for food security and economic development.

These states comprise:

• Cook Islands
• Federated States of Micronesia
• Kiribati
• Marshall Islands
• Nauru
• Palau
• Papua New Guinea
• Solomon Islands
• Tokelau
• Tuvalu

Their governments charge tuna fishing access fees to distant nations of between US$7.1 million (A$9.7 million) and $134 million (A$182 million), providing an average of 37% of total government revenue (ranging from 4-84%).

Tuna stocks are critical for these states’ current and future economic development, and have been sustainably managed by a cooperative agreement for decades. However, our analysis reveals this revenue, and other important benefits fisheries provide, are at risk.

Read more:
Warming oceans are changing Australia’s fishing industry

Climate change and migration

Tuna species are highly migratory – they move over large distances according to ocean conditions. The skipjack, yellowfin and bigeye tuna species are found largely within Pacific Island waters.

Concentrations of these stocks normally shift from year to year between areas further to the west in El Niño years, and those further east in La Niña years. However, under climate change, these stocks are projected to shift eastward – out of sovereign waters and into the high seas.

Under climate change, the tropical waters of the Pacific Ocean will warm further. This warming will result in a large eastward shift in the location of the edge of the Western Pacific Warm Pool (a mass of water in the western Pacific Ocean with consistently high water temperatures) and subsequently the prime fishing grounds for some tropical tuna.

This shift into areas beyond national jurisdiction would result in weaker regulation and monitoring, with parallel implications for the long-term sustainability of stocks.

What our research found

Combining climate science, ecological models and economic data from the region, our research published today in Nature Sustainability shows that under strong projections of climate change, small island economies are poised to lose up to US$140 million annually by 2050, and up to 17% of annual government revenue in the case of some states.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides scenarios of various greenhouse gas concentrations, called “representative concentration pathways” (RCP). We used a higher RCP of 8.5 and a more moderate RCP of 4.5 to understand tuna movement in different emissions scenarios.

Read more:
Citizen scientist scuba divers shed light on the impact of warming oceans on marine life

In the RCP 8.5 scenario, by 2050, our model predicted the total biomass of the three species of tuna in the combined jurisdictions of the ten Pacific Island states would decrease by an average of 13%, and up to 20%.

But if emissions were kept to the lower RCP 4.5 scenario, the effects are expected to be far less pronounced, with an average decrease in biomass of just 1%.

While both climate scenarios result in average losses of both tuna catches and revenue, lower emissions scenarios lead to drastically smaller losses, highlighting the importance of climate action.

These projected losses compound the existing climate vulnerability of many Pacific Island people, who will endure some of the earliest and harshest climate realities, while being responsible for only a tiny fraction of global emissions.

What can be done?

Capping greenhouse gas emissions, and reducing them to levels aligning with the Paris Agreement, would reduce multiple climate impacts for these states, including shifting tuna stocks.

In many parts of the world, the consequences of climate change compound upon one another to create complex injustices. Our study identifies new direct and indirect implications of climate change for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Read more:
The 2016 Great Barrier Reef heatwave caused widespread changes to fish populations

Katherine Seto receives funding from the US National Science Foundation (CNH 1826668).

Johann Bell works for Conservation International in the Center for Oceans. His contribution to the research quoted in this article was supported by the Moccasin Lake Foundation. Johann is a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong.

Quentin Hanich receives funding from the Nippon Foundation’s Ocean Nexus Centre, and consults on Pacific fisheries management and negotiation.

Simon Nicol works for the Pacific Community which is an international development organisation owned and governed by the countries and territories of the Pacific region. It receives development funding and supports development of Pacific Islands Nations. The Pacific Community receives financial support from the governments of New Zealand, Australia, France and the European Union and various International Trust Funds to provide technical advise on the impacts of climate change on Pacific fisheries. Simon is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Canberra.

– ref. Climate change is causing tuna to migrate, which could spell catastrophe for the small islands that depend on them – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-causing-tuna-to-migrate-which-could-spell-catastrophe-for-the-small-islands-that-depend-on-them-164000

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharine Gelber, Professor of Politics and Public Policy, The University of Queensland

The University of Melbourne will open the Robert Menzies Institute, in honour of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, in September this year. The presence of board members with close ties to the Liberal Party and the Menzies Research Centre has prompted protests from some students and academics. They question the appropriateness of the university hosting a platform, set up with A$7 million in federal government funding, that lauds Menzies’ achievements but overlooks negative aspects of his legacy.

The institute is a partnership between the university and the Menzies Research Centre, a self-described “think-tank that champions Liberal principles” that “is affiliated with the Liberal Party of Australia”. The institute’s board includes: Sky News commentator Peta Credlin, a former chief of staff to PM Tony Abbott; Geoffrey Hone, chair of the right-wing think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs; and David Kemp, a former Howard government cabinet minister. A former chair of Qantas and a University of Melbourne pro vice-chancellor and dean also sit on the board.

Debates over the legacy of a former head of government and the governance of the institute are legitimate. However, would these concerns justify the exclusion of the institute from the university?

Read more:
Universities and government need to rethink their relationship with each other before it’s too late

Institutes named after PMs aren’t unusual

Australia has other institutes that honour former prime ministers.

The Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University was established in 2000 under an agreement between the university and Gough Whitlam himself. Most of its funding has come from the university. The institute provides access to books and materials donated by its namesake, and hosts public lectures and events.

At Curtin University in Western Australia, the John Curtin Institute of Public Policy was established in 2004 for research, teaching and public engagement on public policy issues. It is named after Australia’s 14th prime minister, as is the university.

The University of South Australia hosts the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library. It provides access to research materials and hosts public events and presentations.

In other countries, it’s normal to honour former heads of government in this way. In the United States, presidential libraries preserve historical materials and support research. Others set up their own, such as the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

As for the Menzies Institute, there are reasons why it might logically be located at the University of Melbourne. Menzies studied law there. After retiring from parliament he became its chancellor (1967-1972).

Being named after a former prime minister, then, does not appear to be a decisive negative against the institute.

Governance and academic freedom

A key issue in locating an institute at a university is whether or not it preserves academic freedom. When industry and political figures from outside academia enter into partnerships with universities, they must do so in a manner that preserves academic freedom, regardless of political viewpoints.

This was the key point of dispute over proposals to establish programs in Western Civilisation, funded by the Ramsay Centre, in Australian universities. Its board includes former Liberal prime ministers John Howard as chair and Tony Abbott.

The Australian National University rejected such a program on the ground that it infringed academic freedom. The centre later established programs at other Australian universities, under conditions that appeared to preserve academic freedom.

Read more:
ANU stood up for academic freedom in rejecting Western Civilisation degree

Academic freedom is a robust protection for activities of academics and students that are central to the mission of the university – the creation and dissemination of knowledge. These activities include:

• lecturing and choice of course content
• deciding what research to pursue
• publishing research findings
• classroom discussions and academic debates.

In turn, those whose activities are protected have responsibilities that include:

• providing evidence to back up claims
• conducting research with integrity using recognised and robust methods
• not engaging in unlawful or discriminatory conduct.

Read more:
Book review: Open Minds explores how academic freedom and the public university are at risk

What does this mean for the Menzies Institute?

In practice, the principles of academic freedom will mean any Menzies Institute board members should have no structural means of determining the content of curriculums and research priorities – or publication of findings – of any academics or students at the university.

Details of the contract between the centre and the university are not public. But the institute’s website says it will curate papers, books and other artefacts in its collection. This represents no threat to academic freedom. In fact, it’s likely to improve access to these archival records.

The institute wants to create a hub for researchers. The key question here is whether it will do so in a manner that preserves academic freedom. With several academic staff members on the board, it appears the governance arrangements recognise this.

The institute also intends to host school visits and “develop curricula”. If that includes university curriculums, then of course while board members could make suggestions, they must not be given the ability to determine, or develop, the curriculum. Academic freedom demands that the academics responsible for learning and teaching decide all the detail on curriculum content, readings, questions, methods and approaches.

Finally, the institute wishes to organise public lectures and exhibitions, and host visiting professors. Again, these activities must be subject to the protections of academic freedom.

Read more:
Don’t just blame the Libs for treating universities harshly. Labor’s 1980s policies ushered in government interference

Funding can be a source of pressure

Funding is one obvious way in which pressure can be brought to bear on academic freedom. Some funding for the institute is coming from the University of Melbourne and the Menzies Research Centre, but its most generous benefactor is the federal Coalition government, which has provided A$7 million. No other comparable institute has received such a large sum.

In 2012, the Whitlam Institute received $7 million from the then federal Labor government. However, this funding was primarily for a historic building restoration, which included providing a permanent home for the institute 12 years after its founding.

The Morrison government’s generosity seems slightly odd, given its reluctance to help a sector struggling with the loss of international student fee revenue. In 2020 it amended JobKeeper three times to ensure public universities were unable to claim it. The Job-Ready Graduates Package cut total funding for teaching in universities. Research is losing the cross-subsidy from teaching revenue.

Read more:
Big-spending ‘recovery budget’ leaves universities out in the cold

The federal government has often been highly critical of universities. Critics would regard its institute funding as a ploy to influence research and engagement in a way that favours its preferred points of view. This is a reasonable suspicion, and the university needs to be alive to it.

Nevertheless, government funding is not a ground for rejecting the institute as long as it is “hands-off” and doesn’t require the institute or the university to violate academic freedom to receive it.

Finally, there is much room in Australian political discourse for a debate over the legacy of Robert Menzies. His time as prime minister (1939-41, 1949-66) spanned the second World War, the Cold War, the Vietnam war, the failed attempt to ban the Communist Party, and the civil rights movement. While the institute honours Menzies’ achievements, his critics point to his support for the White Australia policy, his agreement to test nuclear weapons with no regard for Indigenous owners or their Country, and his refusal to take a position against apartheid.

Universities are the right place for rigorous debates about this legacy. The key issue is whether the Menzies Institute’s funding and governance, which underpin the public debates it wishes to engage in, respect or infringe academic freedom. Time will tell.

Katharine Gelber has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and Facebook.

– ref. Should the University of Melbourne host the Menzies Institute? The answer hinges on academic freedom – https://theconversation.com/should-the-university-of-melbourne-host-the-menzies-institute-the-answer-hinges-on-academic-freedom-165072

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flavio Romero Macau, Associate dean, Edith Cowan University

If a “ring of steel” was actually placed around Sydney, as suggested by Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, the rest of Australia would suffer in ways that aren’t immediately apparent.

Completely sealing a city or a region is not unprecedented. It happened last year in China, India, Italy and France.

In those instances it wasn’t just local facilities that were shut down, but also factories and distribution centres serving the rest of the country and the movement of goods into and out of the regions.

The rest of Australia got a taste of what would happen earlier this month when Amazon temporarily closed down its Moorebank fulfilment centre in Sydney, after two workers tested positive to COVID-19. Suddenly, it was unable to ship tens of thousands of orders.

It’s worthwhile examining what a near-literal ring of steel would do.

Greater Sydney sold A$281 billion of goods and services to the rest of Australia in 2019/20 — $81 billion more than it brought in.

Made in Sydney

Sydney made five times as much from selling goods to the rest of Australia than it did from exports.

While financial services accounts for most of these sales (42.5%), manufacturing comes in a respectable second (12.6%).

Sydney’s Smithfield-Wetherill Park Industrial Estate, home to more than 3,000 manufacturing, wholesale, and transport firms using more than three million square metres of warehouse space, is one the largest industrial areas in the Southern Hemisphere.

About 8% of Australia’s poultry meat and 15% of Australia’s mushrooms come from Sydney. Bacon, ham, and salami would also take a hit without the Primo Foods facility in Chullora.

Without Asahi Beverages in Huntingwood and Coca Cola Amatil’s Eastern Creek distribution centre and Northmead bottling plant, Australia would find it hard to get Pepsi, Coke and Schweppes soft drinks.

Petrol would become harder to come by. While Sydney’s Clyde and Kurnell refineries closed early last decade, Sydney remains a major hub for imports. Sydney’s Clyde and Parramatta terminals store gasoline, diesel and lubricants.

Read more:
‘Panic-buying’ is the new normal: how supply chains have adapted

Much of Australia’s manufacturing takes place in Greater Sydney, including boilers and specialised equipment for the mining industry.

Toilet paper would at least be safe. Australia has four main manufacturers, three in Victoria (Sorbent, Safe, Merino) and one in South East South Australia (Kleenex).

Arnotts has moved much of its output to Brisbane, making Tim Tams safe as well.

Going through Sydney

Greater Sydney is Australia’s largest logistics hub. Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport handles 45% of Australia’s air freight.

Of the 2.5 million containers arriving in Port Botany each year, one-fifth are moved to the rest of Australia over roads such as the Hume and Pacific highways, or through trains running between Sydney and Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth.

Australia Post processes more than half a million parcels a day at Chullora.

The Woolworths distribution facilities at Yennora and Minchinbury move nine million cartons a week.

Many of Australia’s distribution chains aren’t set up to operate without Sydney.

Depending on its strength, a ring of steel would impose considerable challenges.

Flavio Romero Macau is affiliated with the Australasian Supply Chain Institute (ASCI)

– ref. A COVID ‘ring of steel’ around Sydney would play havoc with Australia’s supply chains – https://theconversation.com/a-covid-ring-of-steel-around-sydney-would-play-havoc-with-australias-supply-chains-165313

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Bonyhady, Emeritus professor, Australian National University

The London launch of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in May 1967 was a musical and fashion landmark. While the clothes worn by all four Beatles startled the journalists and disc jockeys, John Lennon stole the show. He wore a green, frilly, flowered shirt, maroon corduroy trousers, canary-yellow socks, corduroy shoes with two particularly unusual additions. One was a leather sporran, the other an Afghan sheepskin coat, worn with the fur inside and the skin outside, which was tanned yellow and embroidered with big red flowers down its front and sleeves.

These coats became a craze with extraordinary longevity. “Afghans”, as they were often called, were worn by many celebrities through the late 1960s. Then, for the best part of a decade, they became standard youth clothing — an archetypal hippie garment and emblem of the counterculture.

They had a resurgence inspired by Penny Lane’s character in the 2000 film Almost Famous and remain a favourite among lovers of bohemian fashion on Instagram.

Their embrace internationally transformed where and how the coats were made and what they looked like. Yet the craze for these coats could only happen because Afghanistan’s relationship with the rest of the world was changing.

Read more:
The politics of the necktie — ‘colonial noose’, masculine marker or silk status symbol?

Short, medium or very long

Afghan coats traditionally came in three forms — sleeveless or short-sleeved hip-length vests known as pustinchas; knee-length, long-sleeved coats known as pustakis; and ankle-length cloaks called pustins.

In a gendered division of labour, men cured the skins, tanned them yellow with the rinds of pomegranates, cut them into pieces and sewed them together, while women and girls embroidered them with geometric and floral designs, usually in red or yellow. Their skins were occasionally bear, fox or goat, but usually karakul (a long-haired breed of sheep).

Although often written about as if only men wore them, women did too, and they were such ubiquitous winter-wear they were considered Afghan national dress.

The poor could typically afford only the smaller pustinchas or pustakis. If they bought the bigger pustins, these coats were usually plain which made them cheaper.

Senior government officials, successful merchants and wealthy clerics bought lavishly decorated pustins that demonstrated their status. In 1946, Maynard Owen Williams — the National Geographic Society’s first field correspondent — considered the pustin to be “the ultimate in masculine chic”. The archetypal Afghan man, he wrote, was “clad in red-embroidered sheepskin”.

Their prime source was Ghazni, south of Kabul. In 1955 British archaeologist Sylvia Matheson found “one shop after another offering nothing but pustin” there.

While entranced by those with white fur, Matheson rejected them as impracticable for her fieldwork that winter. Instead, she opted for a brown-furred pustincha that was still “enchanting, the yellow skin entirely covered in closely stitched flowers of pillar-box red, with here and there a spot of periwinkle blue”.

Read more:
Friday essay: mom jeans and nostalgia in a time of uncertainty

Hippie commerce

Many more foreigners visited from the early 1960s as Afghanistan embarked on a program of modernisation which saw significant numbers of women in the country’s cities unveil and find new forms of paid work.

A small number of westerners, typically older, arrived by plane, with lots to spend, prompting the Afghan government to build Kabul’s first five-star hotel.

In 1969 it opened, under lease to the Intercontinental Group, with rooftop dining and dancing facilities, a cocktail lounge, brasserie coffee shop, tennis courts and swimming pool. Most western visitors were hippies who, as English poet J. C. E. Bowen put it, travelled overland “in every imaginable kind of clapped-out motor vehicle […] through the bottleneck of Kabul on their way towards the imagined Elysium of Kathmandu”.

Their prime destination was Chicken Street in the Shahr-e Naw, a garden suburb close to the city centre, which was the most westernised part of Kabul. Once a domain of poultry vendors, Chicken Street became a tourist strip lined with antique shops, clothing, embroidery and jewellery stores, and carpet dealers. In Across Asia on the Cheap, the first Lonely Planet guide, published in 1973, Tony Wheeler described Chicken Street as “the freak centre of Kabul”.

Hippie capitalism became commonplace. As some travelled, they looked for local products to sell back home in the West and, if they made a good profit, imported more.

Richard Neville, the Australian of Oz Magazine fame, who bought a pustincha for himself while travelling overland from Sydney to London in 1965, encouraged this commerce.

In Play Power, his 1970 manifesto and manual for hippies, Neville recognised the larger exchange of dress occurring in Afghanistan and other countries on the Hippie Trail. He advised:

Sell your western-styled jeans in Nepal, and your long leather boots in Morocco. Once you could make 500% profit bringing back sheepskin jackets from Kabul, and you can triple your money with antique robes.

Read more:
With energy, ideas and cheek to spare, Richard Neville was the boy of OZ

Rock ‘n’ roll

Craig Sams, a young American who also travelled through Kabul in 1965 before settling in London, became a supplier.

His prime outlet was Granny Takes a Trip — London’s weirdest, most extreme, most exotic, hippest boutique — on the King’s Road in Chelsea, which soon eclipsed Carnaby Street as London’s fashion centre. At first, Granny Takes a Trip sold Victorian clothes, often modified to create a slightly modern feel. By 1967, when it began stocking pustinchas, its range included Charleston dresses of the 1920s, Victorian bustles from the 1880s, Boer War helmets, African fezes, Arab headdresses and Chicago gangster suits from the prohibition era.

The pustinchas were bought by men and women as Granny Takes a Trip was one of the first boutiques not to differentiate male from female dress. But it was men, particularly rock and pop stars, who brought Afghan jackets and coats to public attention.

Jimi Hendrix wore his orange-red, brocaded, sleeveless pustincha over an iridescent purple shirt with huge flared sleeves in one of the first all-star rock events in England, at the Kensington Olympia in London. Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of The Who also wore them on stage. Eric Burdon, of House of the Rising Sun fame, got married in his.

All four Beatles wore pustinchas inside-out in their film of the Magical Mystery Tour and on the album’s cover. When the Beatles tried their hand at retail, their Apple Boutique had shelves of them. From across the Atlantic, it appeared to Life in 1968 that pustinchas had been “launched last season in England by the Beatles and their followers”.

Read more:
Friday essay: why traditional Persian music should be known to the world

Global appeal

Abracadabra, Manhattan’s first psychedelic boutique, soon followed. Its interior was lit by fluorescent tubes set on a flicker-flash sequence, which had particular impact since Abracadabra was filled with mirrors like a penny arcade. Its shop window featured a motorised hanger that made the clothes on it “rock ’n’ roll”.

When one hippie traveller returned from Afghanistan with five pustinchas at the start of 1968, Ira Seret of Abracadabra put them in its window where they were spotted by designer Anne Klein, who had just made leather fashionable for the New York outfitter Mallory’s. When Klein asked Seret to secure more and his original provider failed to deliver, Seret went to Afghanistan himself.

That summer and autumn, pustinchas were in Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s and all the glossies. Vogue reported that Afghan “coats and weskits beautifully embroidered in silk floss colours” were being “shovelled out the door” by Limbo, a boutique in New York’s East Village. Life magazine featured pustinchas sent by Ira Seret to Mallory’s, worn by five female models “over bright silk jump suits and slung about with yards of Mideast jewellery”. Harper’s Bazaar devoted two pages to Mallory’s embroidered and braided vests, again presented as womenswear.

Peak pustinchas

The coats were cheap compared to most fashionable western clothes, even after Afghan makers more than doubled their prices in response to international demand. The one complaint was that they smelled foul when wet, due to a skin curing process more akin to pickling than tanning. This lead to Kabul’s first drycleaners to offer “exclusive no-smell treatments”.

By 1969, many more pustinchas were being worn outside Afghanistan than within it, as they maintained their appeal with the most beautiful people and became part of youth’s uniform.

The enduring audience for the pustincha was, however, downmarket — their iconic status confirmed in 1971 by artist Ronald Searle in a cover drawing for the New Yorker of a long-haired, bearded, barefoot hippie with flared trousers, shoulderbag, headband and pustincha.

Their international embrace fuelled new enthusiasm for Afghan clothing among some of Kabul’s elite who accepted that women should unveil but wanted Afghans to fight against foreign influences and keep Afghan customs alive.

Kabul also replaced Ghazni as the Afghan centre of pustincha production.

In 1968, the biggest sweatshop employed 30 workers. In 1970, when demand surged not only in the United States and Europe but also, for the first time, in Japan, one company employed 160 embroiderers who completed 30 to 40 coats each day. Another company built a hostel for its 250–300 embroiderers, primarily widows and young women from the provinces where there were many skilled needleworkers.

As these coats spread round the world, they fuelled awareness of Afghanistan, even if not quite as much as one Kabuli dealer boasted to the New York Times “Before no one remembered Afghanistan,” he said. “Now everybody remembers.”

This essay is an extract from Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium: A History of Afghanistan Through Clothes, Carpets and the Camera, to be published August 3 by Text Publishing.

Tim Bonyhady received funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Friday essay: how ‘Afghan’ coats left Kabul for the fashion world and became a hippie must-have – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-how-afghan-coats-left-kabul-for-the-fashion-world-and-became-a-hippie-must-have-165007

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

Anthony Albanese this week sent a clear message – he intends to use John Howard’s 1996 model as his strategic guide to the election.

With this in mind, it was predictable the opposition leader would embrace the government’s stage three tax cuts, which benefit middle and higher income earners, despite Labor for years denouncing them on equity grounds.

Anyway, Labor couldn’t have guaranteed it would be able to scrap or cap them. They’re already legislated, which would have left their fate in the Senate’s hands. If the opposition had based spending promises on the money saved from ditching them, that would have made its costings flaky.

It was also unsurprising Labor walked away from its policy, taken to two elections, to curb negative gearing and slash the capital gains tax discount.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Labor wouldn’t disturb tax cuts, negative gearing in ‘small target’ strategy

The Liberals in 1996 eschewed their boldness of 1993, curled into an inoffensive ball, and relied primarily on people swinging against the Keating government.

Such tactics don’t always work, and there’s a strong argument voters looking to change government want an appealing alternative. But given the situation Albanese faces, being as small a target as possible – including limiting his range of election promises – is a sensible course.

This election won’t be a contest where either side has a charismatic leader. Or where there’s any compelling “vision” on offer, much as the protagonists will claim otherwise.

It will be a battle of the pragmatists, of two grey men who are, nevertheless, canny campaigners.

Scott Morrison desperately hopes that by polling day – in May at the latest – we’ll be clearly on our way to some sort of normality, allowing him to say, “I got you through the crisis”.

His opponent is banking on the government’s mistakes remaining sharp enough in people’s minds for them to mark down the Coalition, making Morrison the first Australian leader to become victim of pandemic incumbency.

Even more than usual, the 2022 campaign is unlikely to tell us much about what the winner will be doing by, say, 2024.

Every new term brings its surprises, because circumstances change and leaders don’t reveal all their intentions. Howard promised he’d “never ever” bring in a GST, and produced a policy for one in his first term.

COVID accentuates the uncertainty. In the campaign, focus will still centre on the exit journey. Albanese will need to be convincing on how he’d deal with its challenge.

Whoever wins, voters will likely be buying a pig in a poke for the longer term.

Albanese has upset some on Labor’s left by Monday’s tax decisions, mulled over for months then rushed through a virtual caucus meeting that morning.

His rationale is that whatever policies Labor has, they are useless unless it can win power. As Gough Whitlam famously said when dealing with a recalcitrant state branch of the ALP, “the impotent are pure”.

The caucus meeting saw questions but not opposition to the tax decisions.

There’ll be a degree of concern about how they’ll go down in left wing seats. But even if there’s leakage to the Greens Labor can assume most of those votes would return via preferences. For Albanese, the task is to gather votes in the centre.

Bill Shorten’s strategy of presenting an extensive, expensive and politically risky program gave the Coalition the broadest possible front on which to attack Labor.

Next year, the government will have to scratch around a good deal more in its targeting – although parties are endlessly creative in devising scares.

It may focus on Albanese himself, homing in on his inner city “leftie” profile (except the “leftie” part is now pretty diluted). But the Liberals won’t have the advantage of facing an inherently unpopular opponent, as they did with Shorten. Albanese does not attract the same level of active dislike.

Last election climate policy, which should have been a strong positive for Labor, became a trouble point. Albanese is yet to produce the revamped version, which will come after the Glasgow climate conference. It will require adroit management, given internal party differences and separate imperatives for coal seats and inner city electorates. He’ll need to convince workers in the fossil fuel sector that Labor would provide adequate structural adjustment for them as the economy transitions to clean energy.

Morrison remains mired in difficulties on climate, as he attempts to move to a firm 2050 net zero target while facing resistance from within the Nationals. Whatever the outcome, it will probably be an uneasy one. The climate issue is scratchy for both sides.

One unknown is the part Labor premiers might play in the election run up. Daniel Andrews, Annastacia Pałaszczuk, and Mark McGowan have all been subject to federal government attacks – they may return serve, directly or indirectly. If they judge Albanese has a fair chance, they may also calculate they want to get some brownie points for later.

Crucially important for Morrison and Albanese is how the economy pans out over the next few months. That hinges largely on NSW – Morrison’s home state and where he has hoped to pick up seats.

This week NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian announced another month of lockdown. The latest COVID case numbers in Sydney are bad. Pessimists believe the extension mightn’t be enough to do the job.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has flagged Australia’s September quarter growth number is likely to be negative and indicated the December quarter is up in the air. No wonder the federal government is throwing a heap of money at the state.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Morrison shakes money tree again in bid to avoid second recession

Two negative quarters would be a second recession – announced, given the delay in the statistics, just before the election. For a government with economic management at the core of its pitch and a V-shaped recovery to boast about after the recent recession, that would be a body blow. Whether, however, in such a time of uncertainty voters would desert the Coalition or be afraid of change is anyone’s guess.

Another view is that a bad September quarter could mean the December bounce back is strong enough to keep the economy out of recession.

With the future and fortunes in flux, Albanese has every reason to be hard-nosed about lightening his boat, even if some of the faithful are dismayed at seeing prized treasure going overboard.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Albanese lightens his boat, ahead of the battle of the ‘grey men’ – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-albanese-lightens-his-boat-ahead-of-the-battle-of-the-grey-men-165331

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University

Having a baby brings enough stress and uncertainty without having to deal with a pandemic. Added to that is the difficult decision to have a recently developed vaccine or not.

Last week, pregnant women of all ages were added to Australia’s priority phase 1b of the COVID vaccine rollout. Pregnant women are now eligible for Pfizer.

But some are unclear if they should get vaccinated. Our survey (still ongoing) of 519 women who had a baby 12 months ago asked their intention to be vaccinated. We found 62% said they would, 12% wouldn’t and 26% were unsure, mainly due to fears over safety during pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Increasingly, international evidence supports the safety of COVID vaccines for pregnant women and demonstrates it is effective at preventing severe disease. Here’s what it says so far.

Read more:
Generation COVID: pregnancy, birth and postnatal life in the pandemic

What does the new advice say?

The peak medical body for Australian obstetricians and gynaecologists recently updated its advice in a joint statement with the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), the government’s vaccine advisory group.

The two groups recommend:

pregnant women are routinely offered Pfizer mRNA vaccine (Cominarty) at any stage of pregnancy […] because the risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 is significantly higher for pregnant women and their unborn baby.

There are also other benefits. During pregnancy, antibodies that pass through the umbilical cord may offer protection to the baby. We don’t know how long this protection lasts.

The statement also recommends breastfeeding women should get vaccinated. Evidence suggests antibodies pass to the baby through breastmilk and may protect the baby.

Why the change?

The main reason the advice has changed is new data from recently published studies.

A study from the United States of 827 pregnant women who had mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer, mostly in their third trimester, found no safety concerns.

The rates of miscarriage (12.6%), stillbirth (one baby), preterm birth (9.4%) small babies (3.2%) and abnormalities in the baby (2.2%) were similar to what would be expected in an unvaccinated group of women.

This study is still under way and includes nearly 4,000 pregnant women in total, many of whom were yet to give birth when this paper was published.

Read more:
Should I get the COVID-19 vaccine while pregnant or breastfeeding? Experts explain the safety, evidence and clinical trials

In July, a paper from Israel looked at 7,530 pregnant women who were vaccinated and 7,530 unvaccinated pregnant women.
Rates of COVID were higher among unvaccinated pregnant women (202) than vaccinated pregnant women (118).

Of the pregnant women who were vaccinated, 68 reported possible vaccine-related side effects, such as headache, body aches, pain at the injection site, but none were severe or prolonged or different to non-pregnant people. There was no difference in any other pregnancy outcomes.

What about clinical trials?

The studies above looked at what was happening in real world data, rather than testing the vaccine in trials, where people don’t know if they got the vaccine or a placebo (disguised as a vaccine).

Pregnant women are often excluded from vaccine trials. This is because vaccinating pregnant women has the potential to affect both mother and baby, and testing medications on them rightly makes us nervous.

But while animal studies of COVID vaccines show no fertility or pregnancy effects, we need more than mouse models to test safety and efficacy in humans. Calls are therefore growing for pregnant women to be involved in trials.

One such trial of Pfizer involving pregnant women is currently under way but only started in February this year so data won’t be available yet.

Real world data from the UK and US

In the UK, the professional bodies for midwives, obstetricians and gynaecologists have expressed concern about the effect easing restrictions will have on pregnant women.

Around 58% of pregnant women in the UK have declined the vaccine. The main reason for declining is waiting for more evidence to reassure them it’s safe for their baby.

Read more:
Pregnant women at increased risk of severe COVID – new study

One in ten pregnant women admitted to hospital with COVID symptoms in the UK go to intensive care. These women are more likely to have a baby born early (preterm), develop high blood pressure, need a caesarean during labour and become very ill, particularly after 28 weeks.

More than 100 pregnant women have been admitted to hospital in the UK in the past couple of weeks with COVID; none had received both doses of the vaccine and five had one dose.

Meanwhile in the US, more than 130,000 pregnant women have received a COVID vaccine to date, and the data so far is reassuring. Side effects such as getting a sore arm or headache or feeling tired are common but don’t appear to affect the pregnancy.

What else do pregnant women need to know?

The Pfizer vaccine is recommended in Australia for pregnant women and doesn’t contain live coronavirus or additional ingredients harmful to pregnant women.

It’s now one of three vaccines offered in pregnancy, along with the whooping cough (pertussis) and influenza vaccines.

Read more:
Vaccines to expect when you’re expecting, and why

Pregnant women are higher risk of becoming very unwell with COVID-19 if they:

• have underlying medical issues such as high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma, heart disease, immune problems
• are overweight
• are over 35 years of age
• in their final trimester.

So getting vaccinated before 28 weeks will offer protection for mother and baby in the riskiest time.

If you are pregnant, keep in mind no vaccine is 100% effective, so it’s important to continue social distancing, wearing masks when needed, and keeping up good hand hygiene.

The decision to get vaccinated as a pregnant woman is not an easy one. The decision should be the woman’s and that decision should be informed and free of pressure or misinformation.

Hannah Dahlen 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. Should pregnant women have a COVID vaccine? The evidence says it’s safe and effective – https://theconversation.com/should-pregnant-women-have-a-covid-vaccine-the-evidence-says-its-safe-and-effective-165192

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ray Norris, Professor, School of Science, Western Sydney University

Can we find alien technology? That is the ambitious goal of the Galileo Project, launched this week by Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb with substantial private financial backing.

The project is far from the first attempt to detect signs of civilisations beyond Earth. Loeb has been criticised in the past for his dismissive approach to previous efforts to find extraterrestrial life and his argument that an alien artefact passed through our solar system in 2017.

So why do Loeb and his collaborators think they have a chance of finding something where others have failed? There are three triggers that suggest they might.

Exoplanets, ‘Oumuamua, and UFOs

First, years of painstaking observations have shown that many stars host Earth-like planets. There is a real chance these “exoplanets” might be home to alien civilisations.

Second, five years ago, an interstellar visitor, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, tumbled though our solar system. It was a skinny object about 400 metres long, and we know from its speed and trajectory that it arrived from outside our solar system. It was the first time we had ever seen an interstellar object enter our neighbourhood.

Unfortunately it caught us on the hop, and we didn’t notice it until it was on its way out. So we didn’t get a chance to have a really good look at it.

Read more:
No sign of alien life ‘so far’ on the mystery visitor from space, but we’re still looking

Scientists were divided on the question of what ‘Oumuamua might be. Many thought it was simply an interstellar shard of rock, even though we had no idea how such a shard might be produced or slung our way.

Others, including Loeb, thought there was a chance it was a spacecraft from another civilisation. Some scientists felt such claims to be far-fetched. Others pointed out that science should be open-minded and, in the absence of a good explanation, we should examine all plausible solutions.

Today, the question is still hanging. We don’t know whether ‘Oumuamua was a spaceship or merely an inert lump of rock.

The third trigger for the Galileo Project came from the US military. In June, the Office of the US Director of National Intelligence announced that some military reports of UFOs, or UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) as they are now known, seem real.

Specifically, the report said some UAPs “probably do represent physical objects given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors” and there was no known explanation for them.

In other words, they aren’t meteorological phenomena, or faulty instruments, or weather balloons, or clandestine military experiments. So what are they?

Again, the question is left hanging. The report seems to rule out known technology, and suggests “advanced technology”, but stops short of suggesting it is the work of aliens.

Science to the rescue

Loeb takes the view that instead of debating whether either ‘Oumuamua or UAPs provide evidence of alien intelligence, we should do what scientists are good at: get some reliable data. And, he argues, scientists are the people to do it, not politicians or military staff. As the US report says, the sensors used by the military “are not generally suited for identifying UAP”.

Few subjects divide scientists as much as the existence of aliens. On one hand, there are serious SETI (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) projects, such as Project Phoenix and Breakthrough Listen, that use the world’s largest telescopes to search for signals from some extraterrestrial intelligence.

At the other extreme, few scientists are persuaded by the fuzzy photos and dubious eyewitness accounts that seem to characterise many UFO reports.

The Galileo Project is very different from SETI searches or collections of UFO sightings. Instead, it will explicitly search for evidence of alien artefacts, either in space or on Earth.

But is it science?

Is this science? Loeb is convinced that it is. He argues the Galileo Project will bring scientific techniques and expertise to bear on one of the most important questions we can ask: are we alone? And the project will build purpose-designed equipment, optimised for the detection of alien artefacts.

Will it find anything? The odds are poor, as Loeb admits. In essence it’s a fishing expedition. But if there is a prima facie case for the existence of alien technology, then science has a duty to investigate it.

But suppose they do find something? Will we get to hear about it, or will it be locked up in some future Area 51?

The Galileo Project has promised all data will be made public, and all results will be published in peer-reviewed journals. Indeed, one of the reasons it will not use existing military data is because much of it is classified, which would restrict the project’s freedom to make the results public.

Or perhaps the project will find natural explanations for ‘Oumuamua and UAPs. But even that will be a new scientific discovery, perhaps revealing new natural phenomena.

As Loeb says:

Whenever we look at the sky in a new way, we find something new. We will find something exciting no matter what.

Read more:
‘WTF?’: newly discovered ghostly circles in the sky can’t be explained by current theories, and astronomers are excited

Ray Norris 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. Is the truth out there? How the Harvard-based Galileo Project will search the skies for alien technology – https://theconversation.com/is-the-truth-out-there-how-the-harvard-based-galileo-project-will-search-the-skies-for-alien-technology-165237

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dominic O’Sullivan, Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology and Professor of Political Science, Charles Sturt University

The arrest of nine Fijian opposition politicians, including party leaders and two former prime ministers, once again exposes Fijian democracy’s fragility. The intimidation doesn’t bode well for the parliamentary elections due next year (or early 2023).

The political crisis has been overshadowed by Fiji’s COVID-19 crisis, which has seen more than 25,000 infections and over 100 deaths since April. Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama even used a COVID analogy when he called those arrested “super-spreaders of lies”.

While no charges have been laid, the nine are accused of inciting unrest by opposing a government bill to change the management of iTaukei (indigenous) land rights.

The original iTaukei Land Trust Act 1940 allows for long-term land leases to private interests. The idea is to maximise the economic return on land, while protecting it against permanent alienation.

The act aims to protect indigenous interests by prohibiting the sub-lease or raising of mortgages on leased land without the consent of the iTaukei Land Trust Board.

The proposed amendment would remove the requirement to obtain the board’s consent, and prevent land owners going to court to dispute land use.

Arresting the opposition

Bainimarama, who also chairs the board, says the bill’s purpose is to remove bureaucratic obstacles to minor activities such as arranging electricity or water supply. He says the board takes too long to provide consent and this is a constraint on economic development.

But critics of the bill, including some of those arrested, argue it will weaken iTaukei land rights. Opposition MP Lynda Tabuya was accused of a “malicious act” after she posted a “Say no to iTaukei Land Trust Bill” cover picture on Facebook last week.

In a separate post, demonstrating the low threshold for “malice” in modern Fiji, she asked:

What protection is left for landowners? This is absolutely illegal and a breach of human rights of landowners. This is not a race issue, this is a human rights issue and breaches Section 29 of the Fijian Constitution.

Tabuya is not alone. The National Federation Party has said the government has not properly consulted on the bill, and party leader Biman Prasad was among those arrested, along with former prime ministers Mahendra Chaudhry and Sitivini Rabuka.

Read more:
Two past coup leaders face off in Fiji election as Australia sharpens its focus on Pacific

Limited media scrutiny

Media coverage, too, has felt the effects of the arrests. For example, the Fiji Sun’s one story on the issue in its July 28 edition cited only supporters of the bill and offered no insight into why it was controversial.

This isn’t surprising, given Fijian journalism operates under a constitutional provision limiting its rights and freedoms “in the interests of national security, public safety, public order, public morality, public health or the orderly conduct of elections”.

Read more:
NZ journalists arrested in Fiji have been released but a new era of press freedom is yet to arrive

The Fiji Times took a risk last week by publishing an opinion column arguing poor drafting and failure to consult meant the bill goes further than its purported aims of administrative simplicity and efficiency.

Beyond the legal complexities of the land bill, however, the real problem is political. As the article asks, “What’s the issue?”.

As I discuss in my book Indigeneity: a politics of potential — Australia, Fiji and New Zealand, the issue is that Fiji is a fragile, reluctant and conditional democracy.

Military interference

Coups in 1987 and 2006, and a putsch in 2000, happened because democracy failed to provide the perpetrators with the “right” answers to complex political questions at the intersection of class, military power and personal interest.

The rights of indigenous Fijians were always a side issue, as the present conflict shows.

The 2013 constitution established that “it shall be the overall responsibility of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces to ensure at all times the security, defence and well-being of Fiji and all Fijians”.

Read more:
Bainimarama wins again in Fiji, helped by muzzling the media, unions and the church

Military oversight of the workings of government is intentional and explicit. When
Bainimarama (then head of the military forces) led the 2006 coup, he was dismissive of accusations of political interference. If the military didn’t act against the government, he said, “this country is going to go to the dogs”.

He also claimed then-prime minister Laisenia Qarase was trying to weaken the army by attempting to remove him: “If he succeeds there will be no one to monitor them, and imagine how corrupt it is going to be.”

No room to move

Intimidation is political strategy in Fiji. The proposed amendments to the iTaukei Land Trust Act are not what is at stake — a functioning parliamentary process could identify and resolve any substantive disagreements.

The bigger issue is that autocratic leadership, and the national constitution itself, leave little room for Fijian citizens to work out for themselves the kind of society they want.

This also leaves little room for Fijians to demand more effective policy responses to their country’s COVID-19 crisis.

Dominic O’Sullivan 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. Fiji’s other crisis: away from the COVID emergency, political dissent can still get you arrested – https://theconversation.com/fijis-other-crisis-away-from-the-covid-emergency-political-dissent-can-still-get-you-arrested-165238

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Janine Mohamed, Distinguished Fellow, George Institute for Global Health

The 2021 Close the Gap report declared the national agreement on Closing the Gap “a game changer” that sets a new standard for how governments work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations and communities.

The national agreement was signed a year ago and put its signatories on a 12-month timetable for action.

Since then, the Productivity Commission has released a new database for reporting on the government’s progress across 17 key socioeconomic indicators and on priority reforms when the data is available. The first report based on this data has been released today.

We are now at a crucial moment, with the federal, state and territory governments and the Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peaks due to hand down their implementation plans and begin the task of annually reporting on their actions.

So, what will the new report provide and what else do we need to ensure the national agreement lives up to its promise for improved Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and wellbeing?

Data on expanded socioeconomic targets

The minister for Indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, said the dashboard will bring all the data together

so that people can readily see the current situation and trajectories of indicators for each target, providing a level of transparency and access that we haven’t had before.

At this stage, the dashboard includes data on the 17 socioeconomic targets outlined in the national agreement, expanding on the original seven Closing the Gap targets on life expectancy and other health issues.

The expanded targets, which our people had urged for years, include the wider social and cultural determinants of health, such as language, housing, child protection, family violence, social and emotional wellbeing, and land and water access and rights.

These targets provide a focus on critical areas of need that have been long neglected in government policy.

Targets 10, 11 and 12, for instance, seek to address over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the criminal justice and child protection systems. This is crucial given the failures to implement the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Target 16 is to ensure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and languages are “strong, supported and flourishing.”

However, it appears the target only addresses languages, calling for a sustained increase in the number and strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages being spoken by 2031. The dashboard reports there are 123 currently spoken, but only 14 languages considered “strong”.

While language is a vital component of culture, it is only one of the cultural determinants of health for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Therefore, there is an opportunity to further expand the data and reporting for this target to include other components of culture, such as cultural knowledge, expression and continuity, and strong kinship systems.

The reliability of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data is also an issue. For example, the life expectancy indicator requires both census and mortality data, but the most recent census may undercount Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples by approximately 17%.

In addition, there is evidence that misclassification of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths is increasing over time, potentially inflating life expectancy and artificially closing the gap. Therefore, improving the quality of data will be beneficial to all.

Read more:
For too long, research was done on First Nations peoples, not with them. Universities can change this

Exploring new ways to track progress

The dashboard is a positive step, but just reporting on the 17 targets alone cannot deliver the change we need.

It is imperative we track progress on the four priority reform areas in the national agreement. They are:

1. sharing decision-making through formal partnership arrangements with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations

2. building the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled sector

3. improving mainstream institutions and government organisations

4. sharing access to data and increasing the amount of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led data.

These reforms provide momentum for a critical shift in the current approach to data reporting and most significantly, the way all governments and mainstream organisations work with us.

Read more:
For too long, research was done on First Nations peoples, not with them. Universities can change this

Addressing racism in these reforms

According to the dashboard, data to address the indicators for each priority reform is currently under development.

For example, in the third priority reform area is a target to decrease the proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who have experiences of racism.

Data will include the numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people “reporting experiences of racism” and those who feel “culturally safe in dealing with government, mainstream institutions and agencies”. However, this data is yet to be collected by governments, let alone reported on.

And significant work remains to be done across government institutions and agencies to ensure they better understand what racism is and implement strategies to prevent racism from occurring.

Why stories and truth-telling also matter

A recommendation from the 2021 Close the Gap report was to invest in local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data development and infrastructure to help communities collect better data and control what is done with it.

For the database to fully play the critical role intended, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples need to have access to and control of the data that it draws on, particularly at the local community level.

For us, data are not simply numbers. This data represent our story as peoples, so the numbers need to be humanised and embodied through both story-telling and truth-telling.

Read more:
First Nations families need support to stay together, before we create another Stolen Generation

We can look to the work of Mabu Liyan by the Yawuru people who stepped away from a Western-centric view of health and, with their communities, defined what wellbeing and a good life mean to them.

This is an excellent example of communities filling gaps in the data and collecting information that is important to them, an approach that needs to become the rule rather than the exception.

The Productivity Commission’s database is a great step forward and we eagerly await further developments, knowing they will have a stronger focus on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language and narratives to assist in interpreting the data.

However, the database still relies on data from a Western-centric world view, and we are yet to see details from governments about how they plan to meet both the targets and reforms in the national agreement.

A comprehensive way to access data on Closing the Gap progress is helpful, but human commitment and transparency is what will achieve change. This work requires nationally reported planning, a commitment to monitoring and evaluation, and mechanisms for gathering data on actions taken and outcomes achieved.

Better data, including data owned by communities themselves, and better ways of working with us are the missing pieces of the puzzle. They need to be fully embraced and implemented if we are to truly have “a game changer”.

Janine Mohamed 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 can the new Closing the Gap dashboard highlight what indicators and targets are on track? – https://theconversation.com/how-can-the-new-closing-the-gap-dashboard-highlight-what-indicators-and-targets-are-on-track-163809

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Soutphommasane, Professor of Practice (Sociology and Political Theory) Director, Culture Strategy, University of Sydney

It’s four more weeks of lockdown for Sydneysiders, with no end yet in sight. NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is still to outline a roadmap out.

Sydney feels like it is going through COVID Groundhog Day right now. And not just because many are having to cope with being confined to home or struggling to stay on top of homeschooling.

Australia’s public policy approach to COVID also hasn’t significantly shifted from the settings of 2020. Despite the advent of astonishingly powerful vaccines and lessons from across the world, we still seem fixated on getting cases down to zero. We are also reliant on lockdowns.

Even Berejiklian, once so resistant to lockdowns, has now fallen into line.

It is vital, of course, that we vigorously control the current outbreak. We can’t afford to let the virus run rampant. Too many remain vulnerable as most Australians have not yet been offered the opportunity to be fully vaccinated.

But we have to prepare for a new future. Despite frequent promises, we have no focus on the more fundamental question about how we transition to reopening and rebuilding.

How can we learn from the examples of other countries that have adapted their public policies in the face of the Delta variant? What plans can we start putting in place now to safely reopen to the rest of the world when our vaccination rates eventually catch up?

The lessons learned in other countries

COVID-19 will be with the world for at least the foreseeable future. Experts tell us it will become endemic. The challenge then is to learn to live with the virus effectively, protecting public health while restoring freedoms and reconnecting with each other.

Countries around the world have taken different approaches to this challenge.

The UK has placed most of its confidence in vaccinations, with almost all pandemic restrictions now lifted and a plan to allow people who were fully vaccinated in the US and the European Union, and arriving from safer countries, to begin travelling to the UK without quarantining.

While there are many critics of the UK’s overall strategy, the country is also widely deploying rapid antigen home testing, which enables people to ascertain their own risk to others before they step out into crowded streets. Infection numbers have fallen in recent weeks, with some suggesting the country is perhaps reaching endemic equilibrium.

Read more:
Why COVID cases are now falling in the UK – and what could happen next

France is taking another route, with a firmer focus on mandating vaccinations. Parliament this week approved a bill that will require a health pass (proof they are fully vaccinated, recently tested negative or recently recovered from the virus) to enter restaurants, bars, trains and planes.

In the wake of President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement of the new policies, more than 2.2 million vaccination appointments were made in under 48 hours.

And in the US, President Joe Biden has unveiled a new door-to-door campaign in which health workers are literally knocking on doors to counter misinformation about vaccines and convince people to get the jabs.

Meanwhile, many countries that have pursued a zero-COVID path have struggled. Taiwan, once a success story in countering the virus, has only just emerged from more than two months of partial lockdown.

Like Australia, it has failed to vaccinate its population quickly enough – just 28% of Taiwanese people have had a single dose and only 1% are fully vaccinated.

Plans we could put in place now

For Australia to plan its next steps, we need to break the psychological hold that “zero Covid” has had on us for many months. We need to shift our attention to a long-term strategy for minimising hospitalisations and death.

Two months ago, a taskforce we convened published a “roadmap to reopening” that called for a staged, controlled and safe re-engagement with the world.

Read more:
Australia risks becoming a hermit nation. Here’s a five-step road-map to reopen our borders safely

We recommended the creation of travel bubbles prior to the conclusion of the nationwide vaccination program — namely, piloting programs for fully vaccinated foreign nationals with negative COVID tests to enter Australia for education or to work in specific industries, such as horticultural agriculture.

We also called for improving government messaging on vaccinations to challenge the terrible misinformation that has been spread, particularly about the AstraZeneca vaccine. And we argued that fully vaccinated people within Australia should be granted specific exemptions from some of the more onerous restrictions as a way of incentivising vaccinations further.

In addition, Australian states should be working to keep our schools open — even during outbreaks – by vaccinating our teachers, improving ventilation, mandating masks where required and deploying rapid testing. The NSW government’s plan to introduce rapid antigen testing at schools for Year 12 students is a welcome announcement, but more needs to be done.

Lastly, we urge the prime minister to make a more concrete plan to reopen the country. There should be a clear target date set for easing our domestic border restrictions and reopening our international borders. We should also move to home quarantine restrictions for fully vaccinated travellers and those travelling with negative tests from safer countries.

All of these measures should be in our grasp. If we look beyond ourselves, we see other forward-looking, democratic countries have chosen to work towards a staged, controlled and safe reopening with the rest of the world. Once the immediate crisis has passed, it’s time that became our choice, too.

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

– ref. Zero-COVID is no longer an effective strategy. We need to learn from other countries how to adapt – https://theconversation.com/zero-covid-is-no-longer-an-effective-strategy-we-need-to-learn-from-other-countries-how-to-adapt-165241

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heather Sharp, Associate Professor, History and Curriculum Studies, University of Newcastle

This article is part of a series providing school students with evidence-based advice for choosing subjects in their senior years.

History is for students curious about the world. It involves discovery, evaluation and imagination.

Around 40% of Australian senior students chose to study year 11 and 12 history in 2016. It was more popular than other humanities subjects such as geography and psychology and more girls chose to enrol (23%) than boys (18%).

Here’s what you need to know if you’re considering taking history in the senior years.

What kinds of history subject are there?

There are a variety of history subjects offered across Australia. For example, Victoria’s history subjects include Australian history, 20th century history, ancient history and revolutions.

Australian history is only available in Victoria. It investigates Aboriginal history and contact with colonialists, through to Federation and 20th century nation building. But the subject is losing popularity. The number of students who completed Australian history almost halved between 2014 and 2019, from 1,245 in 2014 to just 632 in 2019.

Teachers are aiming to make it more interesting and the structure of Australian history will change next year. Instead of learning the entire span of Australian history chronologically, Victorian students will conduct two semester-length investigations of themes including creating a nation, power and resistance, and war and upheaval.

Ancient history and revolutions explores societies such as Ancient Egypt, classical Rome and Greece with a focus on politics, military and social history. Revolutions includes an in-depth study of French, American and Russian revolutions.

Year 12 student Taylah told us she took ancient history because:

I always had a fascination with the ancient Egyptian civilisation. I was especially interested in how civilisations have or haven’t learned from the past.

Modern history is available in New South Wales and Queensland. This generally focuses on prominent topics and events from the French Revolution to the present. It covers major conflicts such as the world wars, the Cold War, the Vietnam war, international race relations and peace initiatives such as the beginnings of the United Nations.

Modern history was the most popular course in NSW in 2020, with similar numbers of boys and girls choosing it.

Uniquely, NSW offers an extension history course, which examines historical theory and the uses of history today. This course features a major research project that places students in the role of a historian, extending learning beyond content to communicate conceptual understandings.

What will I be learning?

History is for students interested in understanding the origins of the present and who like to see beyond simple, right-or-wrong answers.

Samantha who is studying teaching at university told us she chose history in years 11 and 12 because:

It always fascinated me how history made the world we live in. I also thought it was interesting how in Australia we are so tied to the Western world, considering geographically we are quite removed.

History isn’t just about learning facts like names and dates. Senior history opens up knowledge to be questioned and explored in depth. For example, students can compare and contrast the revolutions of France and Russia and investigate whether and how the first world war was a precursor to the second.

Jack who has a bachelor in business studies told us he:

enjoyed the combination of skills involved in studying history: writing, critical analysis and assessment of a range of different sources such as books, film and interviews.

A major skill students learn is historical inquiry. This means finding out about the past by researching information from different perspectives, locations and times. Students synthesise information to form a historical evidence-based argument.

Let’s take competing perspectives on Aboriginal civilisation before the British arrived in Australia. For years, our history textbooks told us Aboriginal people were hunter gatherers moving from place to place. But more recent evidence claims many Aboriginal people cultivated the land for farming and aquaculture.

Read more:
Secondary school textbooks teach our kids the myth that Aboriginal Australians were nomadic hunter-gatherers

There is still debate about this in the media and in the classroom. Students could research the topic for themselves, read up on the different types of evidence and present their own conclusions.

History is best suited to students who enjoy research as well as reading and writing an argument in response to a question. Students need to be prepared for assigned reading and extended writing tasks.

Where history takes you after school?

Many careers are open to those who study history in senior school and later at university. Some careers that come directly from history study include:

• historian, genealogist (family history researcher) or archaeologist

• school teacher

• museum guide, curator, or education officer (someone who develops education materials and experiences in museums and other public history sites)

• research officer for a policy institution, a member of parliament or industry think tank

• librarian or archivist (including in conservation and preservation).

Senior curator at a rail museum, Jennifer, told us:

History was the only subject I liked. I chose modern and ancient history for senior because I hoped to have a career in history. I loved learning, analysing and evaluating, finding different sources and opinions, and deep discussions in class. Still choosing history today.

But you don’t just have to take history for a career in it. History also helps develop a range of employment-related skills.

Many employers appreciate skills such as being able to write and communicate effectively and persuasively, to think critically, to consider multiple perspectives and to logically consider consequences based on evidence.

Read more:
If the government listened to business leaders, they would encourage humanities education, not pull funds from it

These skills are vital for careers such as in journalism, law, human resources, policy, diplomacy, and other jobs that require critical thinking and clear communication skills.

Rebecca, who studied modern and ancient history in school in Brisbane and then at university told us:

Studying social sciences gives a greater understanding and interest of the wider world […] I work in the UK public service now, and history provides you with excellent analytical, investigation and communication skills. Lots of people in my office have history degrees.

When selecting subjects for senior school, there is one important consideration that is often overlooked or set aside. The senior years are hectic. Students should choose at least some of their school subjects for themselves, because they like them and they think the subject is valuable for them.

Read more:
Choosing your senior school subjects doesn’t have to be scary. Here are 6 things to keep in mind

For many students, history is one of these subjects. By investigating the past, students discover insights about humans and the world they have inherited. These can help them find the paths they will take beyond school.

Read the other articles in our series on choosing senior subjects, here.

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

– ref. History made the world we live in: here’s what you’ll learn if you choose it in years 11 and 12 – https://theconversation.com/history-made-the-world-we-live-in-heres-what-youll-learn-if-you-choose-it-in-years-11-and-12-163366

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Toland, Senior Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, University of Technology Sydney

In 2014, a Florida real estate group began advertising its latest in a series of luxury condominiums designed by global “starchitects”.

The ads featured photorealistic computer-generated imagery inhabited by rich and beautiful people lounging by the rooftop pool; staring languidly out towards the endless view of the sea from expansive balconies; working out in the lavishly appointed gym.

Its marketing slogan? “I don’t want realism. I want magic.”

This world of magical hyper-luxury also underpins the appeal of reality television shows like the new Luxe Listings Sydney, Sunset Selling, Million Dollar Listing and the soon to be revived MTV Cribs.

The real estate voyeurism of these shows — and, pre-reality TV, of glossy magazines like Architectural Digest (which now has its own luxury YouTube channel), World of Interiors, Belle or Vogue Living — uses the eye of the camera to place us inside these otherwise hidden and inaccessible worlds.

A similar voyeuristic impulse might drive us to slip into our neighbours’ homes when they are up for sale. Instead of twitching the curtains and pretending we were never looking at all, an open-for-inspection allows us to wander through the most private aspects of another’s domain while imagining: “What if I lived here, instead of them?”

Nary a penny to spend

Despite all the disruptions of the pandemic, property prices in Australian cities have continued their rise and housing affordability has become even more out of reach. But our current pandemic era seems to be witnessing an intensification of the escape into fantasy.

Why do we exhibit an insatiable appetite for property voyeurism and fantasy at a time when young people, especially, are less and less likely to be able to afford housing at all? Why do we love to scroll, watch, swipe and drool over luxury property on television, in magazines and via social media?

In May, New Yorker writer Anna Wiener explored Instagram feeds of “renderporn”: hyperrealistic computer-generated architectural renderings of pure fantasy luxury interiors which will never be built.

They represent the denial of real-world constraints and the promise of not just escapism, but of financial escapism. Puzzling over the strangely soothing effect of such images, she wrote:

nothing is unaffordable in a [computer-generated] dreamscape, and rent is never due.

From Louis’ court to Trump’s penthouse

Showing off via property — even unbuilt property — has a long history.

In the 18th century, the opulence of the “Louis-style” of the French court was captured in engravings and pattern books compiled by artists and architects circulated throughout Europe (and even further afield — Jesuit designers brought Baroque style to the Imperial Court in Beijing).

The mania for wide-scale luxury consumption began on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution through the dissemination of images of luxury in books and prints. It accelerated throughout the 19th century with its diffusion into the upper realms of the emergent bourgeoise.

The château, hôtel particulier, villa, townhouse, country house and, eventually, apartment became the perfect vessels for the display of fashionable luxury. Architects and other designers were called upon to transform these images into built realities (or, in the language of MTV, “pimp my crib”).

Read more:
Going for gold: Trump, Louis XIV and interior design

All too often, desire outpaced means. Even wealthy individuals plunged themselves into crippling debt in their efforts to, literally, keep up appearances.

Over the period of the Trump presidency, much was made of large portions of the American electorate retreating into the realm of conspiracy theories, magical thinking and belief in wishful narratives baring little relationship to truth or reality.

Some psychologists say this flight into fantasy is the direct result of declining economic prospects and of certain social groups feeling like unnecessary bit-players in the national story.

Whatever the complex underlying reasons, note this: Trump was a figure who had built a global brand on the associations of luxury property, supercharged by reality television.

Trading in fantasies

Small tokens of luxury, or even images of luxury, might provide some satisfaction and solace beyond just signalling one’s aspirations, however unrealistic.

Perhaps especially when such aspirations are wildly unrealistic.

When stable employment, sick pay and annual leave, wages growth, housing security and affordability have been eroded for decades, the economy of images might feel more dependable than the real economy.

A large part of sustaining a market that fundamentally depends on speculation in the financial sense is the encouragement of speculation in a more personalised sense: the speculation of fantasies.

Fantasy and escapism are well documented responses to stress and anxiety. What better way to soothe one’s rising panic at the level of debt required to buy even a basic Australian suburban home, or the prospect of even that being permanently out of reach? Switch on the TV and stream someone else’s home. I don’t want realism. I want magic.

This line was not dreamed up by a Florida marketing team. It comes from the brute theatrical naturalism of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

It is the desperate and wishful plea of Blanche DuBois as she clings to the façade of her supposed Southern gentility, the mask concealing her precipitous downward social spiral.

Maybe we are all a little bit Blanche now. Our cultural preoccupation with luxury property television, magazines and Instagram images would certainly seem to suggest so.

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

– ref. ‘I don’t want realism. I want magic’: behind the fantasy fuelling our real estate voyeurism – https://theconversation.com/i-dont-want-realism-i-want-magic-behind-the-fantasy-fuelling-our-real-estate-voyeurism-164708

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Grimmer, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, University of Tasmania

Have you been vaccinated yet? And if you have, are you one of a growing number of people who posted a selfie on social media afterwards? At a time when many people distrust government advertising, vaccine selfies — or “vaxxies” — may well be the secret weapon to encourage more people to get the jab.

Suddenly our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feeds are filling up with selfies of family, friends and even strangers getting their COVID shot.

But vaxxies are more than mere selfies, as they have a unique social function. They are likely helping normalise the vaccine procedure, reducing hesitancy around perceived risks and increasing vaccine trust within social circles.

As governments and health officials continue to flip-flop on vaccine age requirements, and anti-vaxxers spread falsehoods through social media and protests, the vaxxie might just be a powerful line of defence against vaccine hesitancy.

Read more:
Public protest or selfish ratbaggery? Why free speech doesn’t give you the right to endanger other people’s health

As of July 21, more than 10.6 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered in Australia. As time passes, more and more people are showing their support by posting about their vaccination experience online.

Normally, we see this type of behaviour demonstrating “civic duty” during elections or with social movements such as Pride or Black Lives Matter. We’re now seeing similar posts involving vaccination, using a variety of hashtags including #vaxxie, #GetVaccinated, #GetVaccinatedNow, #Vaccination and #jab.

In friends we trust

The vaxxie could be a useful tool in encouraging people to get vaccinated. Over the past decade in particular, there has been an erosion of trust in traditional advertising and a huge surge in social media use.

This means word-of-mouth recommendations and reviews from people we know (and even people we don’t) are often considered more “authentic” than standard advertising and government messaging.

Read more:
Australia’s new vaccination campaign is another wasted opportunity

Research indicates we look to our friends, family and social groups for guidance during uncertain times. They provide us with subjective norms: the desire to behave as those who are significant to us think we should.

This results in social pressure to engage in certain behaviours. If our family and friends are posting vaxxies, it’s an implicit nudge for us to get vaccinated too. And as reported vaccine shortages continue and demand grows, seeing vaxxies can also increase our fear of missing out (FOMO).

In-groups and out-groups

In the same way one shows support for social movements on social media, sharing a vaxxie communicates your position on vaccinations — you are either pro-vax or anti-vax. Essentially, you are either with us or against us: a hallmark of classic in-group/out-group behaviour.

The psychology of the in-group/out-group is best illustrated using social identity theory. This theory states internal cohesion and loyalty to the in-group exists when the group members maintain a state of almost hostility or assertive opposition toward out-groups — which are often perceived as inferior.

This theory explains spectator behaviour at sporting events. As we see more of our friends sharing their vaxxies, we may desire to be a member of the “in-group”. But to be in this group, we need to get a jab (and show evidence with our own vaxxie).

The in-group pressure may be further increased when we see our political leaders or favourite celebrities get involved. US President Joe Biden, Dolly Parton and Sir Ian McKellen are just some of the icons whose vaccinations made headlines.

Risks of virtue signalling

One of the main risks in posting a vaxxie is it could alienate others through virtue signalling, which is when a person behaves in a way that highlights their own “good” moral values. People on Facebook will often loudly proclaim their support for a certain cause because they want to seem caring or “woke”.

But most of us aren’t impressed by those who overtly express their own moral correctness. There’s a fine line between encouraging others to engage in a certain behaviour and coming across as self-righteous.

There may also be an element of mob mentality at play with vaxxies. Due to excessive pressure from peers, some may find themselves getting vaccinated for emotional (versus rational) reasons. While the pressure to get vaccinated is arguably positive, some individuals may have legitimate concerns which they will suppress in order to conform.

That said, this is not the same as crowd behaviour which is often shrouded in anonymity and involves blindly following others. Vaxxies are personal, identifiable messages and are not anti-social.

Another risk with vaxxies is they may encourage “brand” competition. Vaxxie posters regularly include the hashtag of their vaccine: #pfizer or #astrazeneca.

Given the mixed messaging around AstraZeneca, could a proliferation of Pfizer vaxxies discourage people from seeking out AstraZeneca, at a time when we’re encouraged to take whichever option we can?

Despite the risks, however, it’s clear we will need a variety of tools to encourage people to get vaccinated during this crucial phase of the pandemic. Vaxxies likely have an important role to play on this front.

And as long as they don’t seek to overtly shame or alienate others, they could help engender a strong sense of solidarity as more and more people get the jab.

Read more:
‘Virtue signalling’, a slur meant to imply moral grandstanding that might not be all bad

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

– ref. Vaccine selfies may seem trivial, but they show people doing their civic duty — and probably encourage others too – https://theconversation.com/vaccine-selfies-may-seem-trivial-but-they-show-people-doing-their-civic-duty-and-probably-encourage-others-too-164950

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Nolan, Associate Professor – Communication and Media, University of Canberra

Everyone knows 2020 was a weird year. But was news coverage atypical too, or did it perform as per usual?

To find out, researchers at the University of Canberra worked with media monitoring company Streem to understand how Australian news media covered COVID-19 over the course of 2020.

Together, we identified and analysed the content of over 2.5 million distinct news items on COVID-19 between January and November 2020, across online, TV, radio and print.

We coded these items into different topic areas – employment, mask wearing or vaccines, for example – identifying 37 different topics. We then sorted results into categories: health, the economy, lockdowns, public transport and so on.

Finally, we sorted these categories into four broad themes relating to the pandemic. There were stories focused on providing information, about the pandemic’s impact, about people’s experiences and, finally, stories that focused on political and social conflict. The results show how media performed in an extraordinary year.

Read more:
Tensions rise on coronavirus handling as the media take control of the accountability narrative

Our major finding may surprise those who assume sensational and irresponsible journalism generally dominates media reporting.

During 2020, by far the most dominant theme related to COVID-19 was information. This included stories about social distancing, tracking the spread of infections, case numbers and employment figures.

By contrast, stories about conflict were the least covered. Only about a quarter of news items addressed this theme.

While this may seem surprising, 2020 was a very different year from 2021. Australia’s initial response to the crisis was marked by political consensus, the formation of national cabinet, and widespread agreement that scientific experts needed to be taken seriously.

In the first phase of the pandemic, news items tended to focus on informing citizens. Media played a “civic” and “loyal facilitator” role in this, encouraging people to be part of a common push to keep Australia safe.

As 2020 wore on, cracks began to appear in the political consensus between federal and state authorities.

While federal authorities sought to gradually relax restrictions, most states refused to budge on issues such as state borders. Instead, they saw greater benefit in adopting an “elimination strategy” for their state.

As politics re-emerged, more critical coverage also appeared. This included stories on Victoria’s hotel quarantine failures, the lockdown of Melbourne’s tower blocks and failures to protect aged care facilities.

The gradual breakdown in political consensus saw a parallel breakdown in media consensus in the later months of the year.

While the pandemic’s early months saw “social distancing” trend as a topic, this fell sharply in the second half of 2020. Then, more conflict-based stories centred on “state borders”. Tellingly, “blame” came to the fore.

Previous research tells us that if political elites are in conflict, media usually reproduce and amplify that conflict. But in the first few months of Australia’s coverage that wasn’t the case. This was in contrast to media in other countries, especially where the politics surrounding COVID-19 was more divisive (most obviously the United States).

The Australian media’s focus on information also pushed medical officers to the fore as key sources in stories. Journalists often simply relayed information and advice from these figures.

Notably, state political leaders at times received much more coverage than their federal counterparts. Their prominence aligns with the Australia Institute’s suggestion that the COVID-19 crisis has engendered a state revival in Australian politics.

The most notable example of this in 2020 was the prominence of Victorian Premier Dan Andrews, who famously ran 120 consecutive daily press conferences during Victoria’s “second wave” lockdown. Coverage of Andrews exceeded that of Prime Minister Scott Morrison between July and October by quite a margin.

Similarly, while then-Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy became a familiar media figure in the first wave, his Victorian counterpart, Brett Sutton, ended the year as Australia’s most-quoted health source.

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

Alongside such statistics, our report looked at how the COVID-19 story developed over the course of the year. We tracked how coverage responded to the initial outbreak before gradually moving towards its own “COVID-normal”.

Overall, our research suggests Australia’s coverage in 2020 contributed to a more tempered and responsible response to the pandemic than we observed in overseas media.

By November 2020, however, two trends were notable. First, we saw a spike in coverage of the vaccine rollout, a topic that has since become a dominant focus of news discussion.

Second, we saw a retreat from the civic-minded, consensual politics of early 2020, and a return to a more fractured and partisan news environment – or what we characterise as “politics as usual”.

David Nolan receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), and has been involved in ARC industry linkage research projects with The Guardian and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Kerry McCallum receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and the Australian Communication and Media Authority.

Kieran McGuinness has received funding from Google News Initiative and the Australian Communications & Media Authority.

– ref. Australian media showed their best in covering the COVID pandemic — at least for the first few months – https://theconversation.com/australian-media-showed-their-best-in-covering-the-covid-pandemic-at-least-for-the-first-few-months-164772

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natasha Yates, Assistant Professor, General Practice, Bond University

If you are 18 or older, and in an area where there is a COVID-19 outbreak, the best vaccine for you is the one you can get right now. That possibly means you should get the AstraZeneca vaccine, as Pfizer is still in short supply.

This updated advice was given by ATAGI (the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation), the government’s expert vaccine advisory body, on July 24. Why would it change to recommending either AstraZeneca or Pfizer, after months of preferring Pfizer for younger people?

More young people are being hospitalised, in ICU and dying during this current outbreak in Australia, where the Delta strain is dominating.

Whether this is a function of the Delta strain being more dangerous to young people, or because older people are (as a group) more likely to be protected by already being vaccinated, remains a subject of debate.

Read more:
Why is Delta such a worry? It’s more infectious, probably causes more severe disease, and challenges our vaccines

There is little argument, however, that the Delta strain is more infectious, which is why we want to vaccinate our population as quickly as possible.

So if you are 18 or older and have not been vaccinated yet, you may be asking whether getting an AstraZeneca vaccine right now is the right thing for you to do. To answer this we need to consider the benefits and risks of the AstraZeneca vaccination.

What do vaccines achieve?

When thinking about what any COVID-19 vaccine should achieve, there is an order of priority.

First, it should stop people who catch COVID-19 from dying.

Second, it should reduce risk of severe disease (symptoms bad enough to need ICU treatment).

Third, hospitalisations should go down.

If a vaccine is doing more than these three things, it is a bonus.

We are very lucky the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines not only achieve all three, they also decrease numbers of people suffering illness of any sort (including mild symptoms), and possibly even reduce transmission (making people who have caught COVID-19 less infective).

Do vaccines work against the Delta variant?

Since Delta became the dominant strain of COVID-19 worldwide, researchers have been working hard to see how well current vaccines perform against it.

So far, the news is good. Let’s look at the evidence.

In the United Kingdom where the Delta strain is the cause of the majority of infections at the moment, there were 229,218 COVID infections between February and July. Of these, 12.5% were in fully vaccinated people. These are known as “breakthrough infections” (because they “broke through” the protection of the vaccine).

Of those breakthrough infections, 3.8%, required a visit to ED. Just 2.9% required hospital admission, and less than 1% died.

This means even though the vaccines didn’t fully protect people against disease, they did achieve their primary purpose: to save lives and keep people out of hospital.

Read more:
Most COVID deaths in England now are in the vaccinated – here’s why that shouldn’t alarm you

Another study in the UK that narrowed down to look at just hospitalisation with Delta strain concludes AstraZeneca is 92% effective against hospitalisation, after two doses.

Other studies have shown a 60% to 67% reduction in symptomatic disease.

Although AstraZeneca works to reduce infectivity of the Delta strain, vaccinated people can still transmit it to others.

That’s why it’s so important for vaccinated people to still observe all the other evidence-based ways of reducing spread including wearing masks, social distancing, and lockdown restrictions – at least until we have enough people in the community vaccinated.

Read more:
When will we reach herd immunity? Here are 3 reasons that’s a hard question to answer

But what are the down sides?

Of course there are potential risks from the AstraZeneca vaccine: injection site pain, tiredness, headache, muscle pain, fever and chills are the most commonly reported side effects.

Most of these are mild and temporary, going away within one to two days.

There are also rare but severe side effects: anaphylaxis (two to five per million people), and thrombosis with thrombocytopenia (TTS) – known colloquially as “clots”. The only risk factor that has been shown to predict how likely you are to get TTS after an AstraZeneca vaccine is age.

TTS clots are very different from other blood clots you may hear about. In the same way that having a basal cell cancer removed from your skin does not make you more at risk of getting a brain tumour, having a blood clot in your medical history (or family history) does not make you more at risk of TTS.

In addition, we have effective treatments for TTS now, so the death rate is low.

To keep it in perspective, your risk of getting a blood clot from TTS is still far less than your risk of dying in a car accident in the next year, and most people still don’t think twice about getting into a car.

Read more:
How rare are blood clots after the AstraZeneca vaccine? What should you look out for? And how are they treated?

Obviously, if there is no COVID-19 in the community then the risk from the vaccine will outweigh the risk from the disease – even a tiny risk is bigger than zero.

The reason ATAGI changed its advice to recommend the AstraZeneca vaccine to younger age groups in areas of outbreak is because as soon as COVID-19 starts to spread in the community, the risk of serious disease and death skyrockets. Which makes the vaccine suddenly become a very sensible option in Sydney and other high-risk areas.

How can you get it?

If and when you decide to have the AstraZeneca vaccine and you live in NSW, you can simply book in with any place that is giving it in your area. This may be a GP or state vaccination clinic.

You are not required to see a GP first, but of course you should only book once you’ve had your questions answered and are ready to go ahead with it.

Apart from contacting local providers directly, you can register for vaccination via the eligibility checker here (you fill in your details after completing the checker).

Pharmacies will not be administering AstraZeneca vaccines to people under 40 at this stage.

Finally, I have had in my practice many young people express frustration at being unable to get a vaccine before now, because they see it as a vital step forward for our community and the world.

Their lives have often been hugely disrupted by COVID-19 and they believe the risk of any vaccine is better than continuing with the status quo.

As one patient told me: “I’m young, I live a risky life. Getting this vaccine is the safest thing I have done all week.”

Natasha Yates is affiliated with RACGP.

– ref. Over 18 and considering the AstraZeneca vaccine? This may help you decide – https://theconversation.com/over-18-and-considering-the-astrazeneca-vaccine-this-may-help-you-decide-165085

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jodi Rowley, Curator, Amphibian & Reptile Conservation Biology, UNSW, Australian Museum

Over the past few weeks, we’ve received a flurry of emails from concerned people who’ve seen sick and dead frogs across eastern Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.

One person wrote:

About a month ago, I noticed the Green Tree Frogs living around our home showing signs of lethargy & ill health. I was devastated to find about 7 of them dead.

Another wrote:

We previously had a very healthy population of green tree frogs and a couple of months ago I noticed a frog that had turned brown. I then noticed more of them and have found numerous dead frogs around our property.

And another said she’d seen so many dead frogs on her daily runs she had to “seriously wonder how many more are there”.

So what’s going on? The short answer is: we don’t really know. How many frogs have died and why is a mystery, and we’re relying on people across Australia to help us solve it.

Why are frogs important?

Frogs are an integral part of healthy Australian ecosystems. While they are usually small and unseen, they’re an important thread in the food web, and a kind of environmental glue that keeps ecosystems functioning. Healthy frog populations are usually a good indication of a healthy environment.

They eat vast amounts of invertebrates, including pest species, and they’re a fundamental food source for a wide variety of other wildlife, including birds, mammals and reptiles. Tadpoles fill our creeks and dams, helping keep algae and mosquito larvae under control while they too become food for fish and other wildlife.

But many of Australia’s frog populations are imperilled from multiple, compounding threats, such as habitat loss and modification, climate change, invasive plants, animals and diseases.

Although we’re fortunate to have at least 242 native frog species in Australia, 35 are considered threatened with extinction. At least four are considered extinct: the southern and northern gastric-brooding frogs (Rheobatrachus silus and Rheobatrachus vitellinus), the sharp-snouted day frog (Taudactylus acutirostris) and the southern day frog (Taudactylus diurnus).

A truly unusual outbreak

In most circumstances, it’s rare to see a dead frog. Most frogs are secretive in nature and, when they die, they decompose rapidly. So the growing reports of dead and dying frogs from across eastern Australia over the last few months are surprising, to say the least.

While the first cold snap of each year can be accompanied by a few localised frog deaths, this outbreak has affected more animals over a greater range than previously encountered.

This is truly an unusual amphibian mass mortality event.

In this outbreak, frogs appear to be either darker or lighter than normal, slow, out in the daytime (they’re usually nocturnal), and are thin. Some frogs have red bellies, red feet, and excessive sloughed skin.

The iconic green tree frog (Litoria caeulea) seems hardest hit in this event, with the often apple-green and plump frogs turning brown and shrivelled.

This frog is widespread and generally rather common. In fact, it’s the ninth most commonly recorded frog in the national citizen science project, FrogID. But it has disappeared from parts of its former range.

Other species reported as being among the sick and dying include Peron’s tree frog (Litoria peronii), the Stony Creek frog (Litoria lesueuri), and green stream frog (Litoria phyllochroa). These are all relatively common and widespread species, which is likely why they have been found in and around our gardens.

We simply don’t know the true impacts of this event on Australia’s frog species, particularly those that are rare, cryptic or living in remote places. Well over 100 species of frog live within the geographic range of this outbreak. Dozens of these are considered threatened, including the booroolong Frog (Litoria booroolongensis) and the giant barred frog (Mixophyes iteratus).

So what might be going on?

Amphibians are susceptible to environmental toxins and a wide range of parasitic, bacterial, viral and fungal pathogens. Frogs globally have been battling it out with a pandemic of their own for decades — a potentially deadly fungus often called amphibian chytrid fungus.

This fungus attacks the skin, which frogs use to breathe, drink, and control electrolytes important for the heart to function. It’s also responsible for causing population declines in more than 500 amphibian species around the world, and 50 extinctions.

For example, in Australia the bright yellow and black southern corroboree frog (Pseudophryne corroboree) is just hanging on in the wild, thanks only to intensive management and captive breeding.

Curiously, some other frog species appear more tolerant to the amphibian chytrid fungus than others. Many now common frogs seem able to live with the fungus, such as the near-ubiquitous Australian common eastern froglet (Crinia signifera).

But if frogs have had this fungus affecting them for decades, why are we seeing so many dead frogs now?

Read more:
A deadly fungus threatens to wipe out 100 frog species – here’s how it can be stopped

Well, disease is the outcome of a battle between a pathogen (in this case a fungus), a host (in this case the frog) and the environment. The fungus doesn’t do well in warm, dry conditions. So during summer, frogs are more likely to have the upper hand.

In winter, the tables turn. As the frog’s immune system slows, the fungus may be able to take hold.

Of course, the amphibian chytrid fungus is just one possible culprit. Other less well-known diseases affect frogs.

To date, the Australian Registry of Wildlife Health has confirmed the presence of the amphibian chytrid fungus in a very small number of sick frogs they’ve examined from the recent outbreak. However, other diseases — such as ranavirus, myxosporean parasites and trypanosome parasites — have also been responsible for native frog mass mortality events in Australia.

It’s also possible a novel or exotic pathogen could be behind this. So the Australian Registry of Wildlife Health is working with the Australian Museum, government biosecurity and environment agencies as part of the investigation.

Here’s how you can help

While we suspect a combination of the amphibian chytrid fungus and the chilly temperatures, we simply don’t know what factors may be contributing to the outbreak.

We also aren’t sure how widespread it is, what impact it will have on our frog populations, or how long it will last.

While the temperatures stay low, we suspect our frogs will continue to succumb. If we don’t investigate quickly, we will lose the opportunity to achieve a diagnosis and understand what has transpired.

We need your help to solve this mystery.

Please send any reports of sick or dead frogs (and if possible, photos) to us, via the national citizen science project FrogID, or email calls@frogid.net.au.

Read more:
Clicks, bonks and dripping taps: listen to the calls of 6 frogs out and about this summer

Jodi Rowley is the Lead Scientist of the Australian Museum’s citizen science project, FrogID. She has received funding from the NSW Saving Our Species program and other state, federal and philanthopic agencies.

Karrie Rose leads the Australian Registry of Wildlife Health, a collaboration between Taronga Conservation Society Australia and the University of Sydney. The Registry is funded by Taronga Conservation Society Australia, service agreements and project-based funding from state, commonwealth and philanthropic agencies..

– ref. Dead, shrivelled frogs are unexpectedly turning up across eastern Australia. We need your help to find out why – https://theconversation.com/dead-shrivelled-frogs-are-unexpectedly-turning-up-across-eastern-australia-we-need-your-help-to-find-out-why-165176

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole (Nikki) Brunker, Lecturer in Education, University of Sydney

Adding to the clamour of argument over whether schools should be open to all during lockdown is confusion in terminology. Using the term “home schooling” to describe schooling during lockdown is disrespectful to both teachers and home schoolers.

Home schooling requires parents to seek registration for their child to not attend school. These parents are then required to develop and implement learning with their children. That is a far cry from the situation for students enrolled at school who have been temporarily learning at home during lockdown in Sydney and, until July 28 when restrictions eased, in Victoria and South Australia.

Nonetheless, home schooling does offer parents lessons in how to support schooling from home. This article includes five essential tips drawn from home schooling.

Schools are offering support

Families have been provided with enormous support during lockdowns. They are encouraged to contact the school with any specific needs they might have. Teachers and schools have enabled schooling during lockdown through online classes, independent learning activities, printed learning materials and other resources to support the learning within a class.

School during lockdown takes many different forms to provide individual and class-based learning opportunities. Schools can provide additional support to meet diverse student (and family) needs.

Support necessarily looks different across schools. Each school works with families to determine and meet their needs. The support from schools ranges from surveys and individual phone calls, online one-on-one learning support sessions, walk-by pick-up of printed materials and resources such as stationery and art supplies, to home delivery of technology and even food.

Schools have learned from the experience of 2020, creating the best way forward for their communities when lockdowns prevent learning in a physical classroom.

Beyond schools, education systems and many school-related organisations are providing extensive resources to support schooling during lockdown. They are offering virtual excursions, videos and print activities that are downloaded or posted.

To suggest that schooling during lockdown is home schooling disregards the enormous, valuable work every teacher and school staff member is providing.

Yes, parents are required to do more than they usually need to when their children are physically attending school. It still doesn’t make it home schooling.

Home schooling is a big step

Home schooling is a big step outside the schooling system. It’s a step outside the free support and resources from teachers and schools – parents do it all.

To be permitted to home-school, parents must seek registration with the National Education Standards Authority (NESA). They must adhere to all of the curriculum requirements that schools must meet.

Parents must interpret the curriculum documents and assessment requirements to select and design appropriate learning opportunities for their children. They must implement assessment processes. They must maintain accurate records of learning and achievement.

Contrary to a common assumption, home-schooled children are well socialised. They are engaged in a vast array of shared learning within and beyond the home. Excursions, sports carnivals, performances, workshops, social gatherings and more feature constantly within the home-schooling community.

When states lock down, what cannot be moved online is in limbo. The best that can be hoped for is postponement. This means home schoolers feel the pressure of lockdown along with every other parent and child right now.

To sum up, home-schooling parents must do everything that teachers, schools and education systems are doing in enabling schooling during lockdown, as well as what many parents are now facing with their children at home.

Lessons from home schooling

So, what can we learn from home schooling as we juggle working from home with children schooling at home during lockdown?

Children are always learning (and succeeding). So value the immense learning that occurs through play, and build on the incidental learning that arises.

A six-hour school day is made up of many different things and does not equate to a six-hour day of schooling at home. We need to shift our view of what learning looks like, be flexible, value what might seem like a “distraction” and recognise not everything prepared by school will be finished.

Support independence by drawing on interests to build skills for self-organisation. This could involve setting a daily Lego challenge, or building a bridge that spans 15cm, or a vehicle that moves without wheels, or a marble run, or a boat that floats. Remember that supporting their learning means not doing it for them.

Resources are available everywhere. From the home-delivery boxes taking over the living room to the exponential growth in online sources, everything offers an opportunity for learning. For example, why not gather paper and card from the recycling for paper plane challenges using different types and sizes of paper? And when your child needs help with maths go online.

Don’t try to do it all yourself. Collaborate with friends, family and parents in your child’s class to rotate regular online gatherings hosted by a parent. It could be a social gathering, shared reading, maths problem solving, completing a school activity together, music activity, art activity and so on. This will give every other parent time to work.

Nicole (Nikki) Brunker 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. Schooling in lockdown isn’t home schooling – but we can learn from the real thing – https://theconversation.com/schooling-in-lockdown-isnt-home-schooling-but-we-can-learn-from-the-real-thing-165004

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Neal Hughes, Senior Economist, Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES)

Australian farmers have proven their resilience, rebounding from drought and withstanding a global pandemic to produce record-breaking output in 2020-21.

But while the pain of drought is fading from view for some, the challenge of a changing climate continues to loom large.

Farmers have endured a poor run of conditions over the last 20 years, including a reduction in average rainfall (particularly in southern Australia during the winter cropping season) and general increases in temperature.

While these trends relate to climate change, uncertainty remains over how they will develop, particularly over how much rain or drought farmers will face.

Research published today by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) examines the effects of past and potential future changes in climate, and sets out how productivity gains to date have been helping farmers adapt to the drier and hotter conditions.

Conditions have been tough

The research examines the effect on farms of climate conditions over the past 20 years, compared to the preceding 50 years.

Holding other factors constant (including commodity prices and technology) ABARES estimates the post-2000 shift in conditions reduced farm profits by an average of 23%, or around A$29,000 per farm per year.

Read more:
Climate change since 2000 has cut farm profits 22%

As with past research, these effects have been strongest among cropping farmers in south-eastern and southern-western Australia, with impacts of over 50% observed in some of the most severely affected areas.

Effect of 2001 to 2020 climate conditions on average farm profit

Farmers have been adapting

While these changes in conditions have been dramatic, farmers’ adaptation has been equally impressive.

After controlling for climate, farm productivity (the output from a given amount of land and other inputs) has climbed around 28% since 1989, with a much larger 68% gain in the cropping sector.

These gains have offset the adverse climate conditions and along with increases in commodity prices have allowed farmers to maintain and even increase average production and profit levels over the last decade.

While productivity growth in agriculture is nothing new, the recent gains have been especially focused on adapting to drier and hotter conditions.

Within the cropping sector, for example, a range of new technologies and practices have emerged to better utilise soil moisture to cope with lower rainfall.

As a result, Australian farmers have produced remarkable harvests making use of limited rain, particularly in Western Australia.

Adaptation has also involved movement of traditional Australian cropping zones, increasing cropping in higher rainfall coastal areas, and reducing cropping in marginal in-land areas.

Climate change could make conditions tougher

While climate models generally project a hotter and drier future, a wide range of outcomes are possible, particularly for rainfall.

Climate projections suggest that nationally farmers could experience reductions in average winter season rainfall of 3% to 30% by 2050 (compared to 1950-2000).

The study simulates the effect of future climate change scenarios with current farm technology and no further productivity gains.

As such, these scenarios are not a prediction, but an indication of which regions and sectors might be under the greatest pressure to adapt.

For example, under most scenarios cropping farmers in Western Australia will face more pressure than those in eastern Australia.

Livestock farms will also face more pressure under high emissions scenarios as they are especially impacted by higher temperatures.

Generally, inland low-rainfall farming areas are expected to face greater challenges than regions closer to the coast.

Simulated change in farm profits relative to historical (1950 to 2000) climate

There is more work ahead

Recent experience shows that productivity growth can help offset the impact of a changing climate.

However, there remains uncertainty over how far technology can push farm efficiency beyond current levels.

Further, even if technology can offset climate impacts, other exporting nations could still become more competitive relative to Australia, if they are less affected by climate change or can adapt faster.

Here, investment in research and development remains crucial, including efforts to improve the productivity and reduce the carbon footprint of existing crop and livestock systems, along with research into more transformational responses to help diversify farm incomes.

This could include for example, carbon and biodiversity farming, plantation forestry and the use of land to produce renewable energy.

Carbon and biodiversity farming schemes are the subject of ongoing research and policy trials, and already we have seen farmers generate significant revenue from carbon farming.

Uncertainty over the future climate, especially rainfall, remains a key constraint on adaptation. Efforts to refine and better communicate climate information through initiatives such as Climate Services for Agriculture could help farmers and governments make more informed decisions.

While the future is still highly uncertain, the challenge of adapting to climate change is here and now.

Significant resources have been committed in this area, including the Australian government’s Future Drought Fund.

We need to make the most of these investments to prepare for whatever the future holds.

Neal Hughes 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. Australian farmers are adapting well to climate change, but there’s work ahead – https://theconversation.com/australian-farmers-are-adapting-well-to-climate-change-but-theres-work-ahead-164860

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Toland, Senior Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, University of Technology Sydney

In 2014, a Florida real estate group began advertising its latest in a series of luxury condominiums designed by global “starchitects”.

The ads featured photorealistic computer-generated imagery inhabited by rich and beautiful people lounging by the rooftop pool; staring languidly out towards the endless view of the sea from expansive balconies; working out in the lavishly appointed gym.

Its marketing slogan? “I don’t want realism. I want magic.”

This world of magical hyper-luxury also underpins the appeal of reality television shows like the new Luxe Listings Sydney, Sunset Selling, Million Dollar Listing and the soon to be revived MTV Cribs.

The real estate voyeurism of these shows — and, pre-reality TV, of glossy magazines like Architectural Digest (which now has its own luxury YouTube channel), World of Interiors, Belle or Vogue Living — uses the eye of the camera to place us inside these otherwise hidden and inaccessible worlds.

A similar voyeuristic impulse might drive us to slip into our neighbours’ homes when they are up for sale. Instead of twitching the curtains and pretending we were never looking at all, an open-for-inspection allows us to wander through the most private aspects of another’s domain while imagining: “What if I lived here, instead of them?”

Nary a penny to spend

Despite all the disruptions of the pandemic, property prices in Australian cities have continued their rise and housing affordability has become even more out of reach. But our current pandemic era seems to be witnessing an intensification of the escape into fantasy.

Why do we exhibit an insatiable appetite for property voyeurism and fantasy at a time when young people, especially, are less and less likely to be able to afford housing at all? Why do we love to scroll, watch, swipe and drool over luxury property on television, in magazines and via social media?

In May, New Yorker writer Anna Wiener explored Instagram feeds of “renderporn”: hyperrealistic computer-generated architectural renderings of pure fantasy luxury interiors which will never be built.

They represent the denial of real-world constraints and the promise of not just escapism, but of financial escapism. Puzzling over the strangely soothing effect of such images, she wrote:

nothing is unaffordable in a [computer-generated] dreamscape, and rent is never due.

From Louis’ court to Trump’s penthouse

Showing off via property — even unbuilt property — has a long history.

In the 18th century, the opulence of the “Louis-style” of the French court was captured in engravings and pattern books compiled by artists and architects circulated throughout Europe (and even further afield — Jesuit designers brought Baroque style to the Imperial Court in Beijing).

The mania for wide-scale luxury consumption began on the cusp of the Industrial Revolution through the dissemination of images of luxury in books and prints. It accelerated throughout the 19th century with its diffusion into the upper realms of the emergent bourgeoise.

The château, hôtel particulier, villa, townhouse, country house and, eventually, apartment became the perfect vessels for the display of fashionable luxury. Architects and other designers were called upon to transform these images into built realities (or, in the language of MTV, “pimp my crib”).

Read more:
Going for gold: Trump, Louis XIV and interior design

All too often, desire outpaced means. Even wealthy individuals plunged themselves into crippling debt in their efforts to, literally, keep up appearances.

Over the period of the Trump presidency, much was made of large portions of the American electorate retreating into the realm of conspiracy theories, magical thinking and belief in wishful narratives baring little relationship to truth or reality.

Some psychologists say this flight into fantasy is the direct result of declining economic prospects and of certain social groups feeling like unnecessary bit-players in the national story.

Whatever the complex underlying reasons, note this: Trump was a figure who had built a global brand on the associations of luxury property, supercharged by reality television.

Trading in fantasies

Small tokens of luxury, or even images of luxury, might provide some satisfaction and solace beyond just signalling one’s aspirations, however unrealistic.

Perhaps especially when such aspirations are wildly unrealistic.

When stable employment, sick pay and annual leave, wages growth, housing security and affordability have been eroded for decades, the economy of images might feel more dependable than the real economy.

A large part of sustaining a market that fundamentally depends on speculation in the financial sense is the encouragement of speculation in a more personalised sense: the speculation of fantasies.

Fantasy and escapism are well documented responses to stress and anxiety. What better way to soothe one’s rising panic at the level of debt required to buy even a basic Australian suburban home, or the prospect of even that being permanently out of reach? Switch on the TV and stream someone else’s home. I don’t want realism. I want magic.

This line was not dreamed up by a Florida marketing team. It comes from the brute theatrical naturalism of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

It is the desperate and wishful plea of Blanche DuBois as she clings to the façade of her supposed Southern gentility, the mask concealing her precipitous downward social spiral.

Maybe we are all a little bit Blanche now. Our cultural preoccupation with luxury property television, magazines and Instagram images would certainly seem to suggest so.

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

– ref. ‘I don’t want realism. I want magic’: behind the fantasy fueling our real estate voyeurism – https://theconversation.com/i-dont-want-realism-i-want-magic-behind-the-fantasy-fueling-our-real-estate-voyeurism-164708

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

As NSW on Wednesday extended its lockdown for another month and the federal government shelled out more money, it was as if we were back in 2020 and Victoria’s long incarceration.

Thankfully, one big difference is that the Sydney outbreak, where the latest figure is 177 new locally acquired cases, hasn’t had (at least so far) a high death rate.

Some deaths are occurring, including a woman in her 30s, but the nursing homes now seem substantially protected, although there remains concern immunisation of aged care workers has a long way to go.

In its latest funding, the federal government has resisted calls for the reinstatement of JobKeeper, but there is help for both individuals and businesses.

Scott Morrison announced the maximum COVID disaster payment for workers who lose hours would rise from $600 to a maximum of $750 (the original JobKeeper level). There will also be $200 for people on welfare payments who lose more than eight hours work.

The Prime Minister argued JobKeeper did not have the flexibility now required.

JobKeeper was “not the right solution for the problems we have now,” he told his news conference (held at The Lodge, where he’s isolating, with reporters clutching umbrellas).

“What we are doing now is faster [paying the money direct to workers rather than through the employers], it’s more effective, it’s more targeted, it’s getting help where it is needed
far more quickly.

“We’re not dealing with a pandemic outbreak across
the whole country.

“What we need now is the focused effort on where the need is right now. And so it can be turned on and off to the extent that we have outbreaks.

“JobKeeper was a great scheme. But you don’t play last year’s grand final this year. You deal with this year’s challenges.”

The cost of boosting the disaster payment and the welfare top up will depend on how long the NSW lockdown lasts – and what other (if any) future lockdowns occur there or elsewhere.

Under an expanded package for businesses hit by the NSW restrictions, more businesses will be covered, with the maximum turnover threshold increased from $50 million to $250 million.

Those eligible – including not-for-profits – will be able to receive $1,500 to $100,000 a week (compared to $1500 to $10,000 previously).

The government says up to an extra 1,900 businesses employing about 300,000 people could benefit from the widening of eligibility.

The total cost of the NSW package – funded on a 50-50 split with the state – is $600 million a week, up from $500 million in the previous package.

Morrison said Commonwealth support to NSW amounted to $750 million a week.

There is also a new joint federal-state package (funded on a 50-50 basis) to give Victorian small and medium businesses extra support to recover from the recent lockdown. This will total an extra $400 million.

On the vaccine front the NSW government, having failed to get more Pfizer from other states, has decided to divert some Pfizer doses from regional areas to inoculate Year 12 students in the COVID hot spots.

These students will be able to return to face to face learning on August 16.

We’ve yet to see how the reallocation decision will go down in the regions.

Morrison was upbeat in predicting Australia’s economy would bounce back strongly, as it did after the earlier dive. It’s crystal ball territory. The September quarter is set to be negative. The December quarter result is unforeseeable.

Read more:
Now that Australia’s inflation rate is 3.8%, is it time to worry?

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said what happens in the December quarter, “will largely depend on how successful NSW is in getting on top of this virus.”

The government is trying to judge what it will take to keep the economy out of a second recession, which would likely kill many businesses that just managed to hold on through the earlier one.

A second recession would inflict a major hit on the government politically, only months before an election that must be held by May.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Labor wouldn’t disturb tax cuts, negative gearing in ‘small target’ strategy

A poll done by Utting Research in NSW on Monday underlines the message of other polls: COVID currently is taking serious skin off the PM. Only 37% were satisfied with the job he is doing handling the COVID crisis; 51% were dissatisfied.

Morrison said on Wednesday: “I would expect by Christmas we will be seeing a very different Australia to what we’re seeing now”.

He knows if we don’t, he could be in dire straits.

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: Morrison shakes money tree again in bid to avoid second recession – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-morrison-shakes-money-tree-again-in-bid-to-avoid-second-recession-165245