Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Margaret Kristin Merga, Honorary Adjunct, University of Newcastle; Senior Lecturer in Education, Edith Cowan University
Parents at a loss to find activities for their children during COVID lockdowns can encourage them to escape into a book. New research shows how reading books can help young people escape from their sources of stress, find role models in characters and develop empathy.
Recent media reports have highlighted a concerning rise in severe emotional distress in young people. Isolation and disruption of learning in lockdown have increased their anxiety. Given the recent surge in COVID-19 cases and lockdowns in Australia, parents and educators may look to connect young people with enjoyable activities that also support both their well-being and learning.
A lot has been written about the role of regular reading in building literacy skills. Now, my findings from a BUPA Foundation-funded research project on school libraries and well-being provide insight into how books and reading can help young people deal with the well-being challenges of the pandemic.
The findings suggest books can not only be a great escape during this challenging time, but also offer further well-being benefits.
Reading-based interventions have been used successfully to support children who have experienced trauma. In a recent study, around 60% of young people agreed reading during lockdown helped them to feel better.
My research project confirms young people can use books and reading to escape the pressures of their lives. As one student said:
“If you don’t know what to do, or if you’re sad, or if you’re angry, or whatever the case is, you can just read, and it feels like you’re just escaping the world. And you’re going into the world of the book, and you’re just there.”
If you enjoy reading, there’s a good chance you have favourite characters who hold a place in your heart. The project found young people can find role models in books to look up to and emulate, which can help to build their resilience. A student described her experience reading the autobiography of young Pakistani activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai:
“I thought it was incredible how no matter what happened to her, even after her horrific injury, she just came back and kept fighting for what she believed in.”
Other research has linked connecting with characters to mental health recovery, partly due to its power to instil hope in the reader. Building relationships with characters in books can also be used as “self-soothing” to decrease anxiety.
Young people also celebrate their affection for book characters in social networking spaces such as TikTok, where they share their enjoyment of the book journey with favourite characters.
Young people are taking to TikTok to share their love of books with millions of others.
Developing empathy through reading
Research supports the idea that reading books builds empathy. Reading fiction can improve social cognition, which helps us to connect with others across our lives. My previous work with adult readers found some people read for the pleasure they get from developing insight into other perspectives, to “see the world through other people’s eyes”.
In the project, a student described how reading books helped him to understand others’ perspectives. He explained:
“You get to see in their input, and then you go, ‘Well, actually, they’re not the bad guy. Really, the other guy is, it’s just their point of view makes it seem like the other guy’s the bad guy.’ ”
Your teacher librarian can help you
If parents are not sure what books will best suit their child’s often ever-changing interests and needs, they can get in touch with the teacher librarians at school. Even during lockdown they are usually only an email or a phone call away.
The library managers in the project played an important role in connecting students with books that could lead to enjoyable and positive reading experiences.
For example, a library manager explained that she specifically built her collection to make sure the books provided role model characters for her students. She based her recommendations to students on their interests as well as their needs. To support a student who had a challenging home life, she said,
“I recommend quite a number of books where we’ve got a very strong female character […] in a number of adverse situations and where she navigates her way through those.”
In challenging times, many parents are looking for an activity that supports their children’s well-being. And as reading is also linked to strong literacy benefits, connecting them with books, with the support of their teacher librarian, is a smart way to go.
Margaret Kristin Merga has received funding from the BUPA Health Foundation, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Edith Cowan University and the Collier Foundation. She is the current Patron of the Australian School Library Association.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Livingstone, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University
Nils Versemann/Shutterstock
Crown Resorts was very sorry it had done so many wrong things in running its Melbourne casino, the company’s
senior counsel, Michael Borsky, last week told Victoria’s Finkelstein royal commission.
But his main point was to argue that Crown should keep running the casino, because cancelling or suspending its licence would not be in the public interest.
His submissions — responding to the arguments made by the counsel assisting the commission, Adrian Finanzio, for why Crown should be stripped of its licence — emphasised allowing the company to get on with reforming as the best course of action. At worst, Borsky argued, an independent supervisor or monitor with broad powers could be be appointed to direct the company’s activities.
Crown’s spin is that the public interest is mostly about maintaining the employment of the 11,600 people who work at the sprawling Melbourne casino and entertainment complex. It argues Victoria’s tourism industry would be endangered, should the licence be lost, and it is important to keep the revenue the casino provides to Victoria’s treasury flowing.
But based on the evidence, this seems a very optimistic take.
The commission has heard a litany of revelations about Crown’s malfeasance and improper conduct across a range of areas.
Last month royal commissioner Ray Finkelstein observed that everywhere he looked in the company there was evidence of inappropriate or unlawful behaviour. Last week he compared Crown Resorts to a car thief who promises to stop stealing cars when apprehended. He suggested it was certainly not in the public interest for a decade of malfeasance to be rewarded.
Several paths are open to Finkelstein. He can recommend Crown Resorts lose its licence. He could recommend the company be granted some further opportunity to rehabilitate itself. Perhaps under supervision. A manager could be appointed until Crown achieves its reform agenda, or the business is sold. Some combination of all these might be possible.
But on the prospect of Crown reforming itself, Finanzio made the case that Crown could never again be trusted.
The inevitability of any of the dire consequences painted by Crown if it loses its casino licence is also a question Finkelstein has kept open. Someone else might operate the casino, he has suggested. Given the profitability of the casino, why wouldn’t someone else want it?
But Crown doesn’t have much else to argue for why it should be allowed keep its casino licence.
It began spruiking these arguments to the state government more than a month ago, in a July 2 letter to the Victorian minister for gaming. That letter has been interpreted by Finkelstein and others as an attempt to short-circuit the royal commission’s findings.
Indeed, the whole point of the casino is to contribute to Victoria, as successive governments have argued.
So what, exactly, is this contribution?
What Crown Melbourne gives …
In 2018-19 (Crown’s last “normal” year of operation) ABS data shows the Melbourne casino contributed $268 million in gambling taxes to Victoria’s tax revenue. This amounts to 0.8% of state tax revenue (which was $29.2 billion in that year).
Overall, gambling taxes contributed 8.4% of state tax revenue. Poker machine gambling in pubs and clubs contributed 3.8% ($1.12 billion).
Crown Melbourne employs about 11,600 people. That’s about 0.32% of Victoria’s 3.45 million employes as of March 2021. It contributes about $30 million of the total $6.3 billion the state collects in payroll taxes. That’s about 0.45% of total payroll taxes, about 0.1% of total state tax revenue.
Thus, at the upper range, Crown contributes about 0.9% of state tax revenue.
… and what it takes
Of course 11,600 jobs are significant, as is $300 million a year in taxes.
But what is also significant is Crown’s disproportionate contribution to the $7 billion in annual costs attributable to gambling harm in Victoria.
The casino also significantly contributes to the 36,000 Victorians who are, at any one time, directly affected by serious gambling problems, and to the estimated 216,000 children, partners, employers and others connected to those gamblers who also suffer significant harm.
If Crown were to be placed into independent management, no one need lose their job — with the possible exception of a few board members and executives — and revenue would continue flowing to the state.
Business as usual is not an option
Whatever happens, business as usual at the casino cannot continue.
If effective responsible gambling interventions are put in place and properly observed, revenue will inevitably decline. If Crown’s permit to operate 1,000 “unlimited” poker machines is withdrawn or reduced (as it should be), revenue will decline. If it goes cashless and eliminates indoor smoking, revenue will decline. If criminal syndicates can no longer use the casino to launder money, revenue will decline.
These impacts are the least that can be expected from a reasonable review of casino operating practices in Victoria. A new operator may also impose their own operational requirements, and look to reduce the workforce.
Crown is not and has never been a magic pudding, producing something from nothing. What it has done is transfer large sums to shareholders from many ordinary people (and a few, often criminally connected, high rollers).
The consequences of this have been considerable, in harm to gamblers and their families, to the integrity of Australia’s attempts to stop criminals laundering money, and to stamping out political corruption.
Whatever the royal commission recommends, the profitability of the casino will be affected, with consequences for the jobs and tax revenue it provides.
But the gains — involving a reduction in gambling harm, a strengthening of the rule of law, and the reinforcement of effective regulatory systems — are worth a great deal more.
Charles Livingstone has received funding from the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, the (former) Victorian Gambling Research Panel, and the South Australian Independent Gambling Authority (the funds for which were derived from hypothecation of gambling tax revenue to research purposes), from the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, and from non-government organisations for research into multiple aspects of poker machine gambling, including regulatory reform, existing harm minimisation practices, and technical characteristics of gambling forms. He has received travel and co-operation grants from the Alberta Problem Gambling Research Institute, the Finnish Institute for Public Health, the Finnish Alcohol Research Foundation, the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Committee, and the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand. He was a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council funded project researching mechanisms of influence on government by the tobacco, alcohol and gambling industries. He has undertaken consultancy research for local governments and non-government organisations in Australia and the UK seeking to restrict or reduce the concentration of poker machines and gambling impacts, and was a member of the Australian government’s Ministerial Expert Advisory Group on Gambling in 2010-11. He is a member of the Australian Greens.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ruth McHugh-Dillon, Lecturer in European Languages (Spanish and Latin American Studies), Monash University
Nationaal Archief, CC0
If you haven’t heard of Nada, one of the most important European novels of the 20th century, you’re not alone.
Written in a few short months by Carmen Laforet, it was originally published in Spain in 1944 to immediate acclaim. It won a wide readership and Spain’s inaugural Premio Nadal, now the country’s most prestigious literary prize. Yet Nada took more than 80 years to appear in English translation.
A classic in Spanish, it is still shamefully under-read in English.
In the 20th century, Spanish-language literature was dominated by groundbreaking international names from Latin America such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes.
The atmospheric and cruel Nada overturned this verdict. Laforet’s achievement is remarkable, given her age (just 23 when she wrote Nada) and the challenges she faced as a woman to overcome the sexist bias of her time and secure her place in the literary canon.
Even now, analysis frequently emphasises the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical elements of the novel, diminishing its feat of extraordinary imagination.
A family drama
Nada centres on Andrea, an orphan who arrives in Barcelona aged 18, to stay with relatives she hasn’t seen for years. Escaping to Barcelona to study literature has long been her dream. But the city Andrea encounters resembles nothing of her happy childhood memories.
Once glorious, Barcelona is now defeated and dilapidated, “its silence vivid with the respiration of a thousand souls behind darkened balconies”. Arriving at her grandparents’ crumbling apartment, Andrea enters “what seemed like a nightmare”: a ragged array of relatives teetering between madness and starvation.
Andrea’s grandfather is dead and the household is under the command of her authoritarian aunt, Angustias, who promises to “mould” Andrea into obedience. Every day, the same violent dramas recur. Andrea’s arrogant artistic uncle Román goads his hot-headed brother, Juan, usually about his “piece of trash” wife, Gloria, who Román claims is obsessed with him.
If Gloria gets involved, Juan turns on her. Juan can be found either beating Gloria or painting bad nudes of her to sell for a pittance. Andrea’s tiny, tremulous grandmother tries to keep the peace, recalling how “there were never two brothers who loved each other […] like Román and Juanito”. The scowling maid, Antonia, lurks in the shadows with her dog, relishing the violence.
Censorship and stagnation after the Civil War
Nada, which in Spanish means “nothing”, emerged in one of the darkest and most stagnant periods of Spanish history.
For many Spaniards — already exhausted from the brutal Civil War that ripped the country apart between 1936 and 1939 — their worst nightmare had become a crushing, everyday reality. The dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, whose rebel armies had ultimately vanquished the left-wing Republicans, would drag on until his death in 1975.
Nada was written in the early days of the Franco regime. Biblioteca Virtual de Defensa/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
While the rest of Europe was beginning to emerge from the nightmare of the second world war, by the mid-1940s Spain was settling into one of its bleakest periods. These early years of Franco’s regime are known in Spain as “the hunger years”.
It was in these hunger years Laforet wrote Nada. Andrea recalls how “[the] hunger I almost didn’t feel because it was chronic” weakens her will, making her irritable and unfocused. Sniffing around the kitchen, she drinks cold, leftover vegetable stock.
Bedbugs infest the rooms and characters have discoloured teeth; Gloria’s baby almost dies from pneumonia, a sickness of the undernourished. These are up-close glimpses of the severe deprivations that, as historian Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco argues, Franco used to consolidate his power.
Under Franco, literary works were subject to strict censorship enforcing conservative values and the fascist narrative of the Civil War. As sometimes happens to art made in restricted circumstances, the social and political critiques embedded within Laforet’s novel are all the more remarkable given her creative play with what can and cannot be said directly.
Apart from scattered references to the war, the political situation is rarely named. Yet the atmosphere is oppressive: walls ooze with damp, blinds are drawn against the daylight. Even the air itself is heavy. Family life is a gothic nightmare, replicated behind a thousand “darkened balconies” in Barcelona and beyond.
This apartment and the others like it, are haunted houses inhabited by the ghosts of past violence — but also by its survivors. Civil wars turn neighbour against neighbour, brother against brother. As they attempt to live side-by-side, the apparently intractable conflict between Juan and Román shows how violence can be subdued or domesticated, yet still bubbles beneath the surface.
Family life is oppressive, repeated again and again beyond darkened balconies. Nationaal Archief, CC0
Gloria now views her joy at the end of the war as naïve:
How could I imagine what came afterwards? It was like the end of the novel. Like the end of all sadness.
With Nada, Laforet wrote the novel of what happens after: when the conflict ends but life continues.
A transcendent story of longing and desire
As a work of art, one of Nada’s triumphs is how it transcends this bleak and repressive atmosphere without ignoring it. Laforet’s novel offers compelling testimony of Spain’s post-war hunger years. But it is not a documentary. The novel’s compassionate portrayal of Andrea and its black humour draw the reader into a story that is unsentimental but deeply human: an impatient young woman, learning how to be in the world.
For Andrea, the only reprieve from the suffocating apartment is university. There, she makes friends with people her own age, who provide comfort away from the “ghostly world of older people”.
Andrea searches for respite from the suffocating apartment. Nationaal Archief, CC0
The divide begins to blur, however, when her wealthy and magnetic friend, Ena, becomes drawn to Andrea’s uncle Román. Having already bewitched Gloria and the maid Antonia, Román’s predatory circling of Ena penetrates Andrea’s private world and threatens her most meaningful relationship.
Andrea’s relationship with Ena is charged with intense desire. She is drawn to Ena’s “pleasant, sensual face” and “terrible eyes” glittering with intelligence. Embraced by her friend’s family, Andrea must also endure the pain of watching Ena entertain her many male admirers. This, along with Andrea’s fascinated descriptions of Gloria’s naked body, has led to queer readings of the novel and its protagonist.
Named or unnamed, straight or queer, there is no doubt a deep sexuality surges beneath the novel’s surface. Angustias’s obsession with modesty, and her warnings Andrea stay away from Gloria, “an inappropriate woman”, represent the anxiety around sexual agency and transgression in Franco’s Spain.
Spanish culture before, during and after the dictatorship has challenged Franco’s repressive ideology. Written before the Civil War, Federico García Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba (1936) also uses an authoritarian matriarch in the family home to explore repression and sexual freedom.
Nada sits in between, passionate but understated, escaping the censors with a story of human longing, frustration and hope. Like all classics, it will be read, reread and given new context. Today, Andrea’s anguish at being trapped inside, waiting for life to begin, will speak to many.
Ruth McHugh-Dillon 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.
The director of the Bali Legal Aid Foundation (LBH), Ni Kadek Vany Primaliraning, has been reported to the Bali regional police for treason for allegedly facilitating a mass action by Papuan activists, reports CNN Indonesia.
The report was confirmed by Vany when contacted by CNN Indonesia.
Vany sent CNN Indonesia a photograph of the official receipt of the public complaint, which was registered with the Bali regional police and dated Monday, August 2, via a message application.
Vany has yet to explain in detail about the report but she suspects that it was related to legal assistance that they gave to Papuan activists conducting a protest.
“Assistance for Papua comrades holding a protest action,” said Vany via an SMS message.
The receipt of the reports shows that it is a public complaint registered as Bali regional police report Number Dumas/539/VIII/2021/SPKT.
In the document it states that the person submitting the report is Rico Ardika Panjaitan SH, who is an assistant advocate residing in Datuk Bandar Timor sub-district in North Sumatra. The person being reported is Ni Kadek Vany Primaliraning as the director of LBH Bali.
Alleged makar The brief description of the report concerns an act of alleged makar (treason, subversion, rebellion) and conspiracy to commit makar. The report cites the victim in the case as being the “Constitution of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia” (NKRI).
Vany then explained about the action by activists from the Bali Papua Social Concern Front (FORMALIPA) Bali which resulted in her being reported to the Balinese police.
“The comrades asked for legal aid (assistance) related to a freedom of expression action. On the day of the action the comrades coordinated with us to leave their motorcycles at the LBH for safekeeping then marched to the Bali regional police to hold the action,” she said.
During the march, however, there was an ormas (mass or social organisation) which blocked and assaulted the protesters. As a result they sought refuge on the grounds of the LBH Bali.
“Those assisting the action (LBH Bali) coordinated with police to protect the protesters, bearing in mind that the comrades had already sent a notification [of the action to police]. And, the action was an action to convey an opinion in public, even though the police still asked them to disband,” said Vany.
“After a protracted debate, in the end the comrades were allowed to convey their views in front of the LBH Bali,” she said.
In response to the report against Vany, which is suspected to be related to her providing legal assistance, Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) chairperson Asfinawati that it would be inappropriate for police to pursue the report.
‘This is fabricated’ “The LBH Bali was acting in accordance with its capacity. This is fabricated, if it’s followed up then the police will be endangering all lawyers or people at LBH,” she said when contacted.
Asfinawati – known as Asfin by her friends – emphasised that the LBH’s activities are in accordance with legislation as regulated under Law Number 16/2011 on Legal Aid.
When contacted separately, Rico Ardika Panjaitan, who submitted the police report, claimed that he had reported Vany over a mass action by Papuan activists on May 31.
At the time, he said, the Papuan demonstrators gave speeches in front of the LBH offices, one of which contained the statement, “That the red-and-white [national flag] is not Papua, Papua is the Morning Star [flag]”.
It was this that made him report the LBH Bali for allegedly violating Article 106 of the Criminal Code (KUHP).
“According to my understanding, in legal terms, under Article 106 of the KUHP it is written, right, or it means one thing, meaning that when a part of the Indonesian territory wants to be given independence this is included in the category of makar.
“This means that in the case of the AMP [Papua Student Alliance] it fulfilled [the stipulations of] that article, right?” he said when contacted.
LBH Bali accused In the case of LBH Bali, meanwhile, he is accusing them of facilitating the Papuan mass action and therefore violating Article 110 of the KUHP.
“They (LBH) can be indicted under Article 110”, said Panjaitan, who claimed to have made the report in an individual capacity although he received support from the group Patriot Garuda Nusantara of which he is a member.
CNN Indonesia has attempted to confirm the report with Balinese regional police public relations division chief Senior Commissioner Syamsi but at the time of publication had not received a response.
Four Micronesian leaders skipped the Pacific Islands Forum’s 51st virtual session yesterday, in a continuing protest over the organisation’s refusal to assign the leadership post to the subregion as previously agreed.
Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama’s official apology proved not convincing enough to break the impasse and appease the Micronesian leaders.
The Micronesian nations — Palau, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati and Nauru — declined to reconsider their collective decision to exit from the regional body if the gentleman’s agreement was not honoured.
Nauru President Lionel Aingimea, chair of the Micronesian Presidents’ Summit (MPS), was the only leader from the breakaway group who attended today’s meeting, where PIF discussed a planned in-person leaders’ retreat scheduled for 2022.
In a statement issued after the meeting, Aingimea said Micronesian leaders “are standing on the principles of the Mekreos Communique” and “are not attending the retreat”.
“The Mekreos Communique articulates that if the long-standing gentlemen’s agreement is not honoured, then the Micronesian presidents see no benefit in remaining with PIF,” Aingimea said.
The Mekreos Communique
The Mekreos Communique is a declaration signed by Palau, FSM, Marshall Islands, Nauru and Kiribati in 2020.
Micronesians support Zackios The Micronesian leaders maintain that their candidate, Ambassador Gerald M. Zackios, must assume the secretary-general position in line with the gentlemen’s agreement’ for sub-regional rotation.
“Presidents agreed that the solidarity and integrity of the PIF are strengthened by the gentlemen’s agreement, that this issue is one of respect and Pacific unity, and that it is non-negotiable for the Member States. Presidents agreed that in the ‘Pacific Way’, a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ is an agreement, and if this agreement is not honoured, then the presidents would see no benefit to remaining in the PIF,” the Mekreos Communique stated.
Nauru, FSM, RMI and Palau commenced the process for withdrawal from the PIF in February 2021 and will take effect by February 2022.
The 51st Pacific Islands Forum Leaders virtual meeting today also coincided with the 50th Anniversary of the Pacific Islands Forum.
Nauru is a founding member of the Forum, along with six others — Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga and Western Samoa (now Samoa).
Tuvalu Prime Minister Kausea Natano handed over as Forum Chair to host leader of the 51st Pacific Islands Forum, Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama.
Bainarama welcomed Secretary-General Henry Puna and said they were looking forward to working with him.
Samoan PM welcomed Bainarama also welcomed Samoa’s new Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata-afa to the meeting.
While the forum celebrates 50 years of milestones, it is also facing a crisis with the looming fracture of the regional body.
Bainarama apologised anew to the Micronesian head of states over the PIF secretariat leadership row.
“To our Micronesian brothers, I offer my deepest apology, we could have handled the situation better, but I remain confident that we will find a way forward together,”
“I hope this meeting provides an avenue for frank dialogue,” Bainarama said.
He said he did not expect a resolution of the rift yesterday but he said the forum would continue dialogue with the Micronesian leaders.
“None of us can do this alone,” he said, and urged solidarity and to retain Pacific regionalism, especially on the issue of climate change and covid-19-related economic crisis.
Puna in his statement said the region was in the midst of “unprecedented challenges” of covid pandemic, climate change, and geopolitical interests.
He also cited the challenges the forum is facing among the members.
“Our bond as one forum family is being put to the extreme test,” Puna said.
But he was hopeful that the members would stay together with continued dialogue.
Artist Dinar Candy has held a protest action over the extension of Indonesia’s Enforcement of Restrictions on Public Activities (PPKM) by wearing a bikini on the side of a road in Jakarta, reports CNN Indonesia.
During the action, Candy also brought a banner with the message, “I’m stressed out because the PPKM has been extended”.
Candy was arrested by police last Wednesday, August 3, about 9.30 pm near Jalan Fatmawati in South Jakarta. She was taken directly to the South Jakarta district police for questioning.
In addition to this, police also confiscated material evidence in the form of a mobile phone belonging to Candy, which is alleged to have been used to record the protest.
And it was not only Candy. Her younger sister and assistant were also questioned by police for recording the protest at Candy’s request.
After being questioned by police, who also sought advice from an expert witness on morality and culture, Candy was then declared a suspect.
“We have declared DC as a suspect for an alleged act of pornography,” South Jakarta district police chief Senior Commissioner Azis Andriansyah told journalists on Thursday.
Candy has been charged under Article 36 of Law Number 44/2008 on Pornography which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison or a fine of 5 billion rupiah (NZ$987,000).
Candy not detained Despite being declared a suspect, police have not detained Candy who is only obliged to report daily. Andriansyah said that Candy’s protest wearing a bikini did not heed cultural norms.
Artist Dinar Candy … many believe her bikini protest should not be prosecuted under Indonesian law. Image: CNN Indonesia
This is because Candy’s action was held in Indonesia where there are cultural and religious norms which apply in society.
“Anything that is done in Indonesia [is subject to] existing norms, there are ethics, there are cultural norms, there are religious norms which apply in our society, now, the actions of the person concerned did not pay heed to cultural norms,” said Andriansyah.
A number of parties, however, believe that Candy’s bikini protest does not need to be prosecuted under law.
National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) Commissioner Theresia Iswarini believes that Candy did not commit a crime even though she wore a bikini during the protest. She suspects that Candy’s protest was related to mental health issues.
“It would indeed be best, it has to be thought about, [although] this [wearing a bikini in public] is indeed inappropriate, but it does not mean she committed a crime, remember,” Iswarini told CNN Indonesia.
The Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation (LBH), meanwhile, is worried that the state is going too far in regulating what people wear in public. LBH Jakarta lawyer Teo Reffelsen is of the view that in the future the state could enforce its own values on what the public wears.
“If so, then eventually our prisons will be full just because people wear bikinis,” Reffelsen said.
Fiji Olympic rugby sevens captain Seremaia “Jerry” Tuwai’s parents couldn’t hold back their tears and kept thanking God for the blessings they have received.
Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama yesterday announced on his Twitter page that the government was planning a $1 million (NZ$690,000) reward package for the national team.
A special package only for captain and two-time Olympian Jerry Tuwai includes a house.
His parents were emotional and hugged each other when they were asked how did they feel about these plans from the prime minister.
“Our prayers have been answered,” Vunisa said
“We always pray for our family and for Jerry’s life. The hard work, the pain the struggle has finally been answered.
“I told my wife before the team played in Tokyo that whoever walks in Gods sight will be blessed and God has indeed blessed my family.”
Duty to his country Vunisa said that he had encouraged Tuwai to take up an overseas contract and he always replied that he had a duty to his country.
His mum, Serewaia Vualiku, said for the family to be away from each for five months was really hard.
“It wasn’t like this before, even in 2016,and we both knew that within that period he wanted to see his children. He is close to his family, especially his kids.
Rugby doesn’t just let us forget our troubles –– it inspires us to overcome them.
The victories of our men’s 7s and Fijiana have inspired us all. To give back, we’re announcing a million-dollar reward package for these heroes.
“But we kept encouraging him never to give up, the road hasn’t ended yet. It’s his dream and he should focus on his dream.
“For us as parents we know he is chosen for this. This is his destiny and God gave him this and we are grateful for his everlasting love on my family.
“For his children they are all counting the days when they will finally get to see their father.
“As we welcome the Prime Minister’s announcement, we also give thanks to the Almighty that without him we will never achieve this.”
Grateful for support The family is indeed grateful to the support from their families, friends, their neighbours and everyone who has been supporting the national team and Tuwai.
As they wait for his arrival from quarantine, the family plan to hold a small family celebration.
“With the what we are going through now unfortunately we cannot hold a big celebration compared with what was done in 2016 but we will celebrate his achievement as a family.”
The pledged package covers both the men’s sevens, which won gold at Tokyo, and the women’s team Fijiana, which won bronze.
Paulini Curuqarais a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
On Monday, an extremely important report on the physical science of climate change will be released to the world. Produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the report will give world leaders the most up-to-date information about climate change to inform their policies.
It is an enormous undertaking, and has been a long time coming.
This report is the culmination of a marathon five-year assessment, writing, review and approval process from 234 leading scientists hailing from more than 60 countries. These scientists have worked together to rigorously evaluate the world’s climate change research papers — more than 14,000 of them.
I’ve been involved with the IPCC reports in multiple roles since 1997. For this current report, I was a review editor for one of the chapters.
This IPCC assessment report is the sixth overall, and the first since 2013. A lot has changed since then, from major governments setting ambitious climate targets, to the devastating floods, fires and heatwaves across the world.
So what is the IPCC is and why does this report matter so much? And given the report is commissioned and approved by national governments, should we trust it?
What is the IPCC?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was first established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization. Their aim was to provide policymakers with regular and comprehensive scientific assessments on climate change, at a time when climate change was becoming a more mainstream concern around the world.
These reports assess the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. They’re required to be policy-relevant yet policy-neutral. They contain findings, and state the confidence with which the finding is made, but do not recommend action.
This report is the sixth since the IPCC was established in 1988. Shutterstock
emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the concentrations of […] carbon dioxide [and other greenhouse gases]. These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface.
Since then, new assessment cycles have been completed every five to seven years.
The overall assessment — the Sixth Assessment Report — is divided into three main parts. Monday’s report is the first part on the physical science basis for climate change, and was delayed by almost a year due to COVID restrictions.
The next two parts will be released in 2022. One will cover the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability of, for example, people, ecosystems, agriculture, cities, and more. The other will cover the economics and mitigation of climate change.
The Sixth Assessment Report will culminate in a synthesis report, combining the first three parts, in September 2022.
What will we learn?
The report will provide the most updated and comprehensive understanding of the climate system and climate change, both now and into the future. For that reason, it’s relevant to everyone: individuals, communities, businesses and all levels of government.
It will tell us how fast carbon dioxide emissions have been rising, and where they’re coming from. It’ll also tell us how global temperatures and rainfall patterns have changed, and how they are expected to change this century, with associated confidence levels.
Compared to the previous report in 2013, this report puts greater emphasis on regional climate change, on changes in extreme events, and how these events are linked to human-caused climate change.
This greater emphasis on extreme events at regional scales makes it even more important to policy makers and the public.
In recent months the world has watched in horror as heatwaves, bushfires and floods toppled homes and buildings, killing hundreds across China, Europe and North America. The report will help put disasters like these in the context of climate change, noting that similar events are expected to be more frequent and severe in a warming world.
The report also examines the effects of different levels of global warming, such as 1.5℃ and 2℃. It also looks at when such warming is likely to be reached.
The scope of each IPCC report is prepared by scientists and approved by representatives of all governments. The 234 scientists who wrote the report are selected based on their expertise, and represent as many countries as possible.
The reports go through multiple stages of drafting and review. The first draft of the current report had more than 23,000 review comments from experts. Each comment received an individual response.
The second draft had more than 50,000 review comments from experts and governments, and these guided the preparation of the final draft.
You may be thinking that the IPCC reports should not be trusted because they involve government inputs and approval. However, this is probably one of their strengths. Involving government representatives ensures the reports are relevant to the policy interests of all governments.
Indeed, the multi-stage review and revision process used for the IPCC reports has been used as a model for international assessments of other scientific topics.
Can I read it?
The report will be released and free to read at 6pm Australian Eastern Standard time (10am Paris time) on Monday. But each chapter in the final report will be more than 100 pages long in a small font, so few people will read it all.
The most accessible part of the report is its Summary for Policymakers, aimed at a general readership and drafted by the expert authors.
The approval meeting for this report has been taking place over the last two weeks in Paris, as a video conference meeting of government representatives. The meeting approves each chapter, but most time is spent considering and approving the Summary for Policymakers.
Every line in this summary is considered separately, comments from government representatives are considered, and changes must be approved by consensus of all governments. Sometimes reaching consensus can take a long time.
It’s clear the IPCC brings the best of global science together. It’s vital that governments keep the findings of this report front of mind in their decision-making, if the world is to avoid the worst-case climate scenarios.
David Karoly is employed in CSIRO and was Leader of the Earth Sciences and Climate Change Hub in the National Environmental Science Program, which received funding from the Australian government until it closed in June 2021.
David was a Review Editor in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report Working Group 1 chapter 12 and received travel funding from the Australian government to travel to one IPCC Lead Author Meeting in 2019.
This piece is part of a new series in collaboration with the ABC’s Saturday Extra program. Each week, the show will have a “who am I” quiz for listeners about influential figures who helped shape the 20th century, and we will publish profiles for each one. You can read the other pieces in the series here.
Jawaharlal Nehru was not just the architect of modern India and the country’s first prime minister. He also played a central role in the discrediting of European imperialism and gave a voice to people across Asia and Africa struggling for self-determination and racial equality.
An unlikely revolutionary, Nehru was born in 1889 into wealth and privilege. His father was a Kashmiri, a high caste Brahmin and a successful barrister, able to fund the best education for the young Jawaharlal the British system could offer.
After attending Harrow School and Cambridge University, Nehru, too, became a lawyer and could easily have settled into a comfortable life.
Instead, Nehru was swept by the enigmatic Mahatma Gandhi into the campaign against British rule in India. For the next 25 years, he dressed in homespun cotton, endured long terms in prison and campaigned relentlessly for the cause.
Jawaharlal Nehru (left) sharing a joke with Mahatma Gandhi during a meeting of the All India Congress in 1946. Wikimedia Commons
Successes and failures
Once the British were overthrown and he rose to power, Nehru quickly set about ensuring his vast, impoverished and hugely diverse country was governed by democratically elected leaders and the rule of law.
In parallel, he tried to make India economically self-reliant, so that it could no longer be exploited or manipulated by foreign powers.
Perhaps inevitably, given the scale of the challenges involved, the results of these efforts were mixed.
Nehru’s hopes for a peaceful transition from British rule were dashed by the horrific violence that accompanied partition — the division of the British colony into the separate states of India and Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands died in clashes between Hindus and Muslims, and millions more were displaced and traumatised.
Jawaharlal Nehru signing the first Indian constitution in 1950. Wikimedia Commons
Nehru did succeed in the herculean effort of transforming India into a constitutional democracy, but his ambitious plans to modernise the economy proved harder to realise.
To be sure, India avoided mass famines like those that ravaged Bengal in mid-1940s and China during the so-called “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But most Indians did not see major improvements in their standard of living.
A vision for a post-colonial world
Where Nehru really shone was on the world stage. Urbane, well-read, charismatic and eloquent, he was convinced India had a special role to play in international politics, despite its poverty and relative weakness.
And to ensure that happened, Nehru served as his own foreign minister and ambassador-at-large.
Initially, Nehru’s principal concern was the struggle against European imperialism, especially in Asia. Britain, France and the Netherlands all reasserted control over their colonial possessions in the region after the second world war. In response, Nehru and Gandhi rallied anti-colonial leaders, holding the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947 to chart the way forward for the continent.
In Nehru’s view, Asia’s newly liberated or soon-to-be liberated states should show the world a different way to conduct international relations.
They need not be suspicious of each other’s intentions, nor greedy for each other’s territory, he argued. And they should not waste their scarce resources on building armies or atom bombs. Committed to social and economic development and to treating others with mutual respect, they could — and should — create a more just and peaceful world.
He campaigned against nuclear weapons, calling in 1954 for the superpowers to halt their tests of increasingly destructive bombs. This paved the way for a partial ban on testing in 1963.
He called for an end to racial discrimination, most notably in South Africa. He also commissioned India’s diplomats to offer their services to mediate in a series of disputes, including the Korean war and France’s disastrous attempt to cling to its colonial possessions in Indochina.
The birth of non-alignment
Throughout, Nehru made the case for what became known as “non-alignment” — perhaps his greatest contribution to the 20th century world.
India and other post-colonial states, he argued, had no good reason to take sides in the Cold War and plenty of reasons to maintain cordial relations with both the US and Soviet Union.
Jawaharlal Nehru (right) with Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Yugoslavian President Josip Broz Tito at the Conference of Non Aligned Nations in Belgrade in 1961. Wikimedia Commons
Allying with one or the other was too costly and compromising. It brought obligations to build armies and fight distant wars. And it meant renouncing the ability to criticise your ally when it did things with which you disagreed.
Non-alignment annoyed Cold Warriors in both Moscow and Washington. But it proved popular elsewhere, especially among newly independent states.
It helped inspire a series of major meetings intended to promote African and Asian cooperation in the shadow of US-Soviet competition, including the Bandung Conference in 1955, as well as the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s.
Today, 120 states belong to the movement, though India’s interest in the bloc has waned as it has grown stronger and wealthier.
Nehru helped delegitimise imperialism and usher in a new world no longer dominated by the Europe powers. He laid out principles that he hoped would encourage mutual respect in international relations – principles eagerly embraced, if not always followed, by other post-colonial leaders.
It is ironic, then, that arguably Nehru’s greatest failure – the one that irreparably tarnished his leadership and broke his health – concerned foreign policy.
Convinced China would abide by the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” agreement it struck with India in the mid-1950s, Nehru failed to anticipate a military conflict over the long-disputed frontier. When Mao Zedong ordered a surprise attack in 1962, India’s forces were humiliated. And to Nehru’s dismay, neither the UN, nor the superpowers, intervened.
To critics, the Sino-Indian war exposed Nehru’s naivety and the limits of non-alignment. It compelled India to retrench and rearm, and laid bare his dream of an Asia free from “power politics”.
Indian soldiers surrender to Chinese forces during Sino-Indian War in 1962. Wikimedia Commons
India has travelled far since Nehru’s time and left much of his legacy by the wayside. It now possesses the world’s second largest military – after China – and a nuclear arsenal. It has forged a strong security partnership with the United States.
But New Delhi still remains wary of alliances or anything that might compromise independence of voice or action. And it is as convinced today as when Nehru was in power that India is destined to play a special role in the world.
Ian Hall receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Running alongside Judith Collins’ “Demand the Debate” campaign in public is something of a “Demand Reform” mood within her party. There will be heightened demands for change to be made to the top of the party this weekend, when National branch delegates convene for their Annual General Meeting. The conference looks likely to be a significant one.
Collins’ own leadership is not on the line. Instead, the party organisational leadership and rules are set to be shaken up. There is widespread speculation that party president Peter Goodfellow will be ditched.
The mood for change in the party is explained today by Thomas Coughlan in his article, Judith Collins promises change at National conference (paywalled). In this, Collins is reported as front-footing the mood of members wanting a shakeup, apparently promising to “guarantee some significant changes to her party”.
Delegates to the conference will be voting on changes to the rules that govern the party. In particular, they’ll be changing the rules of the board who run it. For instance, they will be considering whether term limits should apply to all board members.
Coughlan reports on how party members will influence change at the conference: “Elections to the board are important. For delegates at the AGM, it is the only opportunity they get to have a say over who runs their party. Delegates at the conference don’t have a direct say over who is elected President. That role is elected by the board. But board elections, which delegates do have a vote in, are a way for the party’s members to send a message to the party about how they feel about its direction.”
Changes to the National Party board membership
Changes to the party organisational leadership are also occurring, according to Coughlan: “The board is getting the message that it might also be unpopular. The swathe of people choosing not to seek re-election is understood to reflect the popularity among party members of a rule change to introduce term limits for board members. Rather than face being voted down, those members are choosing to leave quietly.”
A clear-out of the old guard is expected by many commentators. Former National staffer Matthew Hooton says today: “This weekend’s expected purge of the party’s board should satisfy National activists’ immediate bloodlust and send the necessary message to voters that they accept last year’s verdict” – see: For Judith Collins, biggest danger is success (paywalled).
For details of who the ten candidates for the board are, see the brief profiles by David Farrar: National Party Board candidates.
National Party President to be toppled?
National Party members don’t get to vote for the party president – who is actually chosen by the board members. However, the membership delegates have the opportunity this weekend to vote for board members who they think will help push out the current president, Peter Goodfellow.
This explains why Coughlan singles out John Sunckell and Aryana Nafissi as being likely to be elected as new board members, as they would “most likely attempt to topple Goodfellow if they won election.” Other candidates for the board will be quizzed on whether they will help to depose Goodfellow.
On the question of whether Goodfellow should go, Coughlan says this: “It’s not clear whether Goodfellow privately retains Collins’ support. Some say it would be wise to keep him on to steady the ship while the party is in disarray. Others argue he’s totemic of the party’s recent issues: privileged, and detached from the day-to-day issues of New Zealanders.”
Cooke explains that while there might be discontent with Collins and her caucus, “far more anger is currently directed at the party’s out-of-Parliament executive, particularly Goodfellow. He is widely seen as an excellent fundraiser, but his involvement with the all-important selection processes for National candidates has brought serious criticism.”
Former Speaker of the House David Carter is currently on the National Party board, and is seen as the likely new president. Cooke reports that “Carter was coy when speaking to Stuff, saying more than 100 members had rung him asking him to take the job”. He is reported as saying: “I’m going to keep an open mind. I’m prepared to consider it – it’s a decision of the board”. Carter then goes on to criticise Goodfellow’s involvement in local electorate candidate selection.
However, Cooke also reports: “Party member and political commentator Liam Hehir said he thought Goodfellow would keep his job, noting Goodfellow’s strength as a fundraiser.”
RNZ’s political editor Jane Patterson reports today that Goodfellow has replied to questions on whether he’s heard whispers of a challenge, saying: “I’m not hearing whispers, I’m having people tell me directly that there are a small number of people [who want me gone]” – see: Pressure at the top – National’s annual conference.
Patterson explains the decision-making sequence that will occur at the conference this weekend: “First there will be a vote on party rule changes; that outcome will dictate in part what the new board looks like, and in turn what support remains for Goodfellow.”
A long-time National Party conference attendee, Richard Harman, is picking Goodfellow to go, saying last week that his toppling is “highly likely to happen” and he explains that Goodfellow has become something of a lightning rod for discontent at the grassroots – see: Nats look to change president (paywalled).
Harman says the surprise departure of one of Goodfellow’s allies on the board is not a good sign for the president: “He got a clear signal last week when longtime Auckland board member Alastair Bell who was also selected in 2009, pulled out of the race. Bell has been a supporter of Goodfellow. His withdrawal is being seen as an indication that the mood of the membership is for change.”
However, despite this, commentators seem united in their view that Collins’ leadership is safe for now. In her column on the conference, Jane Patterson says: “She’ll be as aware as anyone the caucus is biding its time, but there’s no immediate risk of her being rolled. It’s an unpredictable business though and political polls are always high on MPs’ minds; one said any dip below 25 percent could put her into the danger zone.”
Matthew Hooton’s column today focuses on this point. He argues that Collins is safe at the moment, but that, ironically, once her party’s poll ratings go up she will be likely to see a leadership challenge – probably by Christopher Luxon together with Nicola Willis: “Collins risks the same fate as poor old David Shearer. Only when Labour went up in the polls in 2013 and seemed to have a chance of ousting National and Key did David Cunliffe and his supporters finally make their move.”
Debate on National’s direction
It’s not clear how much internal debate will occur at this week’s conference about the policy and ideological direction of National. Newsroom political editor Jo Moir reports today that some activists are unhappy that they can’t challenge the party’s “Demand the Debate” campaign – see: Demand, but no debate, at National AGM.
She reports that party member Terry Dunleavy “wants to have a serious debate about the issues his party has been focused on in recent months”, and he specifies what he has a problem with: “Two issues that need addressing is the He Puapua nonsense, and the Treaty of Waitangi being a partnership nonsense”. However, the configurations of the AGM process mean it’s too late for policy remits and debates about these.
Henry Cooke reports in his column (cited above) that there’s some discontent with the “culture wars” orientation of the National leadership, and he reports one delegate’s dissenting view: “The delegate said she was keen to see the National leadership stop focusing on culture war issues – as it did this week with a suggestion of a referendum on the name ‘Aotearoa’.”
The NBR’s Brent Edwards interviewed Collins this week about the upcoming conference, and also put to her questions about whether in her focus on issues like the name Aotearoa she was being distracted from the “issues of substance” that she claims to be most concerned about – see: How does National win back supporters who deserted it? (paywalled).
Edwards reports that Collins’ conference speech on Sunday “would focus on the future for New Zealand. It would canvas the economy and healthcare, both areas where National thought there had been a significant government failure.
There will also be a major debate at the conference about whether to embed the Treaty of Waitangi within the party’s constitution. According to the party, “The Campaign Review recommended the addition of Te Tiriti o Waitangi or The Treaty into the Constitution to show National’s commitment to Māori”.
A female nurse in Madang is the first local Papua New Guinean to be tested positive for the highly infectious coronavirus covid-19 delta strain, with health officials scrambling to find out where she got it from.
She becomes the eighth confirmed case in Papua New Guinea. The other seven cases recorded so far are:
A woman from Myanmar who had been in hotel quarantine since arriving in PNG. She was a close contact of another traveller who had tested positive on July 13. Both have since recovered; and
Six Filipino crew members, including the captain, of a vessel which arrived from Indonesia last month. Four were in isolation on the vessel while the captain and another were in isolation at a private hospital in Port Moresby. All have recovered, and the Covid-19 National Control Centre (NCC) allowed the vessel to leave the country.
Controller of the PNG Covid-19 National Pandemic Response David Manning said the concern now was on the nurse in Madang.
Controller of the PNG Covid-19 National Pandemic Response David Manning said the concern now was on the nurse in Madang.
“This is a local case, outside of Port Moresby and (not associated) with the (Filipino vessel crew members) cluster tests,” he said.
“This proves community transmission which is of particular concern to us.
“Finding the infection source” “We are working on finding the source of the infection in Madang.”
He said the NCC would continue to update the public on the Madang case.
“She had presented with symptoms on June 30, and immediately went into isolation while awaiting test results,” he said.
“She then remained in quarantine until she was no longer symptomatic.
“But when her positive test result revealed a high viral load, a sample was sent to the Doherty Institute in Melbourne for whole genomic sequencing.”
Manning warned that if the delta strain was to spread in PNG, it could result in “thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of people becoming very sick”.
He also warned about a potential third wave of covid-19 infections and urged the people to follow covid-19 public safety measures and get vaccinated.
“PNG has done well under the international health regulations by detecting the covid-19 celta variant cases, managing them and discharging them when they were cleared medically from isolation.”
The genomic sequencing results for each of the eight confirmed covid-19 delta strain cases were received from the Doherty Institute in Melbourne on August 4.
Miriam Zarriga is a reporter for The National. This article is republished with permission.
Fiji’s Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama used his inaugural speech as the new chair of the Pacific Islands Forum to offer an apology to the Micronesian members of the Pacific grouping who were angered by the way the Forum rejected their nominee for the Forum Secretary-General’s job.
“I offer you my deepest apology,” said Bainimarama at the handover ceremony done virtually at the start of the 51st Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ retreat today.
“We could have handled it better,” he added.
All five Micronesian members of the Forum – Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru and Palau – announced the decision to withdraw from the Pacific leaders group soon after the leaders decision last February to appoint Henry Puna — former prime minister of Cook Islands — as the new Forum SG, ahead of Micronesia’s candidate, Ambassador Gerald Zakios from the Marshall Islands.
The Micronesians had argued that it was Micronesia’s turn to nominate one of their own for the SG position, succeeding Dame Meg Taylor of Papua New Guinea.
At the start of today’s Forum Leaders’ retreat, only Nauru’s President Lionel Aingimea was present.
Outgoing Pacific Islands Forum chair Kausea Natano, who is Prime Minister of Tuvalu, made mention of the Micronesians in his handover address, and although he gave no clue as to whether his attempts to win back the Micronesians into the Forum had had any success, he stressed “unity and solidarity” for the Pacific regional bloc.
Pacific Way He believes the Pacific Way of talanoa and dialogue as the way forward to resolving the impasse between the northern Micronesian nations and their southern Pacific neighbours.
The dialogue should be “frank and respectful”, he said.
Prime Minister Natano also spoke about the need for the islands of the Pacific to stay the course on climate change, that their voices ought to be “united and loud”.
He also wanted Pacific Islands Forum unity in opposing Japan’s plans to dump contaminated nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean.
Both Scott Morrison of Australia and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand were at the opening of the Leaders Retreat this morning, as well as the Pacific Islands Forum’s newest member, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, Prime Minister of Samoa.
Prime Minister Bainimarama congratulated Prime Minister Fiame by stating that while her coming into office was “not easy,” her achievement was still a proud milestone.
As the new Forum chair, and recalling his navigation days as a navy boat commander, Bainimarama said the Forum’s 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent would be the “northern star” in charting the work of the regional body.
Blue Pacific strategy The strategy is on the agenda of the leaders’ one-day retreat today together with a common position on the incoming climate change negotiations in COP26 in Scotland in October, as well as a review of a joint forum action on combatting covid-19.
Due to the closure of international borders, all these discussions are held over zoom, although another leaders’ retreat is planned for January next year, by which time Fiji hopes its international borders would be open, and the Pacific Leaders would be able to attend the meeting in person.
In addition to speeches of the outgoing and incoming chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, this morning’s opening of the 51st Leaders retreat was also addressed by the new Forum Secretary General Henry Puna, as well as an address via video by United States President Joe Biden.
A video to mark the 50th anniversary of the Pacific Islands Forum was also screened.
Fiji has reported 968 new cases of covid-19 and 11 more deaths, including a teenager, for the 24 hours to 8am yesterday.
That compares with 1187 infections and 11 deaths in the previous 24-hour period.
The government also confirmed last night that all but one of the victims were not vaccinated.
Of the latest cases, 292 were from the Western Division while the rest from the Central Division.
More than 23,000 covid-positive people are in isolation, with more than a quarter of them at home.
Health Secretary Dr James Fong said 385 people had recovered from the coronavirus, which means there are now 23,226 active cases in isolation.
He said 18,589 of them are in the Central Division and 4637 in the west.
11 deaths recorded “All cases that were recorded in the Northern and Eastern Divisions (cases that were imported from Viti Levu) have recovered and there are no active cases currently in those divisions.
“There have been 34,818 cases during the outbreak that started in April 2021. We have recorded a total of 34,888 cases in Fiji since the first case was reported in March 2020, with 11,233 recoveries.”
Dr Fong said the latest 11 deaths were recorded between August 2 and 5, eight of them in the Central Division and three in the west.
A 15-year-old girl from Tavua presented to a medical facility in respiratory distress and she was transferred to Lautoka Hospital on August 2. Her family reported that she had a fever, cough and shortness of breath two days prior to visiting the health centre. Clinical investigations revealed she had both leptospirosis and covid-19.
“Sadly, her condition worsened at the hospital and she died one day after admission,” Dr Fong said. “Her doctors have determined that she died from severe covid-19 and leptospirosis. Both diseases contributed to her death.
“She was not vaccinated as she was not in the target population of people 18 years and over who are eligible to receive the vaccine.”
Summary of deaths
A 60-year-old man from Lami near Suva died at home on August 4.
A 51-year-old woman from Raiwaqa in Suva also died at home on August 4.
An 85-year-old man from Lautoka was declared dead on arrival by the attending medical officer at the Lautoka Hospital’s Emergency Department.
Dr Fong said this meant that he died at home or on his way to the hospital.
An 88-year-old man from Sigatoka was declared dead on arrival by the attending medical officer at the Sigatoka Sub Divisional Hospital. This means he died at home or on his way to the hospital.
An 86-year-old man from Toorak, Suva, presented to the Colonial War Memorial Hospital in severe respiratory distress on August 4. His condition worsened in the hospital and he died on the same day.
An 85-year-old woman from Tailevu died at home on August 2.
A 55-year-old man from Tailevu also died at home on the August 2.
A 70-year-old woman from Tailevu died at home on August 2.
A 90-year-old man from Raiwai died at home on August 5.
An 85-year-old man from Naitasiri died at home on August 5.
Four other people who tested positive to covid-19 have died, however Dr Fong said their deaths were caused by serious pre-existing medical conditions and not covid.
He said a total of 146 covid-positive people had died but their deaths were classified as caused by the virus.
311 covid patients in hospital “There are 311 covid-19 patients admitted to hospital, 63 of them are at Lautoka, 78 patients are admitted at the FEMAT field hospital, and 170 at Suva’s CWM, St Giles and Makoi hospitals. 48 patients are in severe condition, with six in critical condition.”
Almost 6000 people were screened and 636 swabbed at the clinics in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 411,142 individuals screened and 73,893 swabbed to date.
Dr Fong said as of August 4, the ministry’s teams had screened a total of 1928 individuals and swabbed 91 others.
“This brings our cumulative total to 776,034 individuals screened and 68,462 swabbed by our mobile teams,” he said.
“A total of 287,237 samples have been tested since this outbreak started in April 2021, with 330,098 tested since March 2020. 3352 tests have been reported for August 3.”
Dr Fong said the daily test average was 3401 per day or 3.8 tests per 1000 population. The national daily test positivity was 32.4 percent, almost seven times the World Health Organisation (WHO) threshold which is five percent.
“As of August 4, 498,680 adults in Fiji have received their first dose of the vaccine and 164,974 have received their second doses. This means that 85 percent of the target population have received at least one dose and 28.1 percent are fully vaccinated nation-wide.
Daily average “The daily average for new cases is 1156 or 1193 cases per million population per day. Daily case numbers remain high and daily test positivity remains high, indicating ongoing widespread community transmission in the Suva-Nausori containment zone.
“The cases are also increasing in the West with evidence of community transmission in the division.
“We are also recording increasing numbers of people with severe disease, and deaths in the West. The Northern and Eastern Divisions currently have no active cases.”
Dr Fong is urging the public to adhere to the covid-safe protocols including the daily curfew from 6pm-4am.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Papua New Guinea and neighbouring Indonesia have been discussing a potential reopening of their shared border.
The border was officially closed early last year due to the covid-19 pandemic, but the illegal movement of people back and forth has continued across the porous international boundary.
PNG Prime Minister James Marape met with Indonesia’s Ambassador in Port Moresby, Andriana Supandy, and agreed that the border must be properly policed to prevent the spread of covid-19.
Indonesia’s heath system is being stretched with high covid infection rates, and PNG has also struggled to contain the spread of the virus.
No date has been given for when the border may reopen officially.
In others areas discussed, Supandy proposed for the two countries to enter into a Free Trade Agreement to boost trade and commerce, citing the potential as demonstrated in the success of vanilla trade between PNG and Indonesia.
The ambassador also informed Prime Minister Marape that Indonesia has already ratified the Border and Defence Cooperation Agreement and Land Border Transport Agreement and was awaiting PNG to do the same.
He said these agreements would pave the way for a more robust bilateral tie between the two countries.
On West Papua, the diplomat said that Indonesia appreciated the consistent position that PNG government has taken in acknowledging that the western half of New Guinea was an integral part of Indonesia.
He said the West Papuan self-determination demands remained an internal issue for Indonesia to resolve.
A release from Marape’s office also said both countries had discussed the need for joint cooperation in power connectivity to areas in PNG’s Western and West Sepik provinces.
Military donation The Indonesian military has donated an aircraft engine to the PNG Defence Force Air Transport Squadron for one of its aircraft to be used for operations in the 2022 general election.
Marape also confirmed yesterday that US$14 million would be ballocated in 2021 and 2022 to ensure all aircraft were ready to be used next year.
The head of the Indonesian National Armed Forces Strategic Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant-General Joni Supriyanto, arrived on a Lockheed C-130H Hercules in Port Moresby yesterday with the engine.
He said transporting the overhauled Casa aircraft engine to PNG “would enhance relationship and cooperation between the armed forces contributing to security and stability in the region”.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
When is a cabinet not a cabinet? When it is really an intergovernmental body that is pretending to be a cabinet so it can avoid transparency? Simply calling itself a “cabinet” is not enough to trigger an exemption in freedom of information legislation.
Justice Richard White this week so held in a proceeding before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal brought by Senator Rex Patrick.
What was the case about?
Patrick was seeking, through freedom of information (FOI), certain records of the “national cabinet” as well as documents concerning the formation and functioning of the cabinet. This would include its rules, how it makes decisions, whether any jurisdiction has a right of veto over its decisions, whether those decisions are binding, what conventions apply to it and whether its deliberations are recorded and transcribed.
The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) refused access to the records on the ground they were records of a committee of the federal cabinet and therefore exempt from disclosure.
Patrick successfully challenged this refusal in review proceedings before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
The national cabinet was established in March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, to replace the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). It is an intergovernmental body comprised of the political leaders of the Commonwealth, states and territories.
The national cabinet reaches agreed positions on matters of national and intergovernmental importance, so there can be some consistency and coordinated planning across the nation. But it leaves it to each jurisdiction to implement the agreed standards or principles in its own way.
Senator Rex Patrick successfully challenged the idea of the ‘national cabinet’ as having the protections of a standard cabinet. AAP/Lukas Coch
What is meant by the term ‘cabinet’?
The Constitution does not refer to the cabinet or the prime minister, but it was always intended they exist. Their existence, however, is based on convention and an understanding of how the system of responsible government works.
Ministers advise the governor-general through the Federal Executive Council. But it is the cabinet (which at the federal level is a smaller group of senior ministers) that makes the important policy decisions.
Those decisions are given effect through the enactment of legislation or by formal acts of the governor-general (such as proclamations or regulations), or by public servants developing and administering the policies and programs of the government.
A critical element of a “cabinet” is that it derives its existence from, and is accountable to, parliament. This is a fundamental aspect of the principle of “responsible government”. Ministers are responsible to parliament for their actions as ministers. The lower house can hold the government to account for cabinet’s decisions by voting no confidence in it, forcing its resignation or an election.
Another important feature of a cabinet is that it makes collective decisions for which all members are equally responsible. To maintain this collective responsibility, records of who argued for and against a decision are kept strictly confidential for decades. Otherwise, ministers could absolve themselves of responsibility for government decisions by saying they did not support the decision at the time. If a minister fundamentally objects to a decision and is not prepared to support it publicly and be responsible to parliament for it, then he or she is, by convention, obliged to resign.
The convention of cabinet confidentiality applies to support this principle of collective ministerial responsibility.
Does calling something a ‘cabinet’ turn it into one?
Justice White rightly commented that the
mere use of the name ‘National Cabinet’ does not, of itself, have the effect of making a group of persons using the name a “committee of the Cabinet”. Nor does the mere labelling of a committee as a “Cabinet committee” have that effect.
He considered that a “committee of the cabinet” means a subgroup of the cabinet, and that the cabinet must be comprised of ministers who, according to the Constitution, must be members of parliament within three months of their appointment.
PM&C argued that any committee was a cabinet committee as long as the prime minister decided to establish it as such. Justice White called this argument “unsound”. He did not think the prime minister could change the statutory meaning of a cabinet committee simply by giving a committee that name.
In any case, he also concluded that neither the prime minister nor the federal cabinet created the national cabinet. It was instead established by resolution of COAG on March 13 2020.
Why is the ‘national cabinet’ not a federal ‘cabinet committee’ under FOI?
First, a cabinet and its committees are comprised, at least substantially, of ministers responsible to the one parliament or government. National cabinet is comprised of ministers responsible to different parliaments, governments and political parties. Only the prime minister is a member of both the national cabinet and the federal cabinet.
Another feature of a federal cabinet committee is that the prime minister appoints its members. In contrast, Justice White found that the members of the national cabinet were not appointed by the prime minister. They are members of national cabinet because of the offices they hold.
Federal cabinet committees derive their powers from the federal cabinet, have their decisions endorsed or overridden by that cabinet, and are ultimately subject its powers and directions. The national cabinet does not meet this description. Its decisions do not have to be endorsed by the federal cabinet and the federal cabinet cannot overrule them. National cabinet also addresses matters over which the federal cabinet has no authority or control.
The Commonwealth has 28 days to initiate an appeal of the decision. No doubt it will – even though the decision seems to be plainly correct. If the decision stands, it means Rex Patrick will be able to gain access to the national cabinet’s documents (unless other exemptions apply), increasing transparency about how it operates and the decisions it makes.
It will also remove a convenient method for the Commonwealth government to assert secrecy over anything it wants.
Finally, it should (but probably won’t) put an end to the government’s claims of cabinet confidentiality when parliamentary committees seek access to the documents of the national cabinet or any other dubiously established cabinet committees. If this were to happen, it would greatly enhance government accountability.
Anne Twomey has received funding from the Australian Research Council and occasionally does consultancy work for governments and inter-governmental bodies.
We learned this week of the tragic death of a 27-year-old man from Sydney who had COVID-19. This follows a 38-year-old woman who died from the virus last month.
Throughout the current Delta outbreak in New South Wales, we’ve heard young people are making up a greater proportion of people in hospital compared with earlier in the pandemic. We’re seeing similar patterns overseas.
In NSW between June 13 and July 17, the 30-49 age group represented the highest number of COVID-19 hospitalisations, with 45 people in their 30s and 40s admitted (26% of total COVID hospitalisations). Some 13 people aged 49 and under were admitted to ICU, representing 36% of total ICU admissions, with the youngest just a teenager.
What’s behind this worrying trend? Is it the fact more older people are now vaccinated? Or perhaps the Delta variant is causing more severe disease in young people? It may well be a bit of both. Let’s take a look.
Older age is the biggest risk factor
As we learned about COVID-19 last year, it became clear the elderly were the most likely to get very sick. This is true of other infectious diseases too.
A review published late last year shows the steep rise of the infection fatality rate (the chance of dying from COVID-19 if you contract it) with increasing age:
People aged in their 20s have consistently made up a high proportion of COVID-19 cases in Australia and overseas. If we look at all cases of COVID recorded in Australia since the pandemic began, 20 to 29-year-olds account for the highest number (around 22% of total infections).
Reports indicate 67% of new cases recorded in NSW on Thursday were in people under 40.
Some people have proposed greater social contact among those under 40 explains the higher infection rates in this age group. But equally it’s been acknowledged this may reflect more widespread testing among younger people, greater shielding by older people (staying at home to reduce their risk of infection), and a failure to communicate important public health messages around social distancing to younger people probably contribute.
Whatever the reasons, while the risk of death from COVID-19 is low for younger people, it’s self-evident that if more younger people become infected then more will develop serious illness and die.
Younger adults have generally been more likely to contract COVID-19 compared to older adults. Shutterstock
There are other risk factors for young people
Age is not the only factor that influences outcomes with COVID-19.
Having a chronic illness is associated with higher likelihood of more severe disease and death.
Being male and being obese also increase the risk of dying from COVID-19. Obesity may in fact add more significantly to the risk of serious disease in younger people.
Of course, none of these risk factors have to be present for a person to develop severe COVID-19.
For younger people who are unwell enough to be hospitalised with COVID-19, the outcomes can be quite serious. A large study from the United Kingdom showed 27% of 19 to 29-year-olds admitted to hospital suffered some form of organ damage to the liver, lungs or kidneys — any of which can lead to permanent disability.
A separate study showed 14% of patients under 40 admitted to ICU died, compared with 31% across all ages.
There is evidence COVID-19 can be associated with sudden deterioration and death in people who seem to be OK, presumably from damage to the heart and sudden cardiac arrest. This phenomenon is very rare at any age.
And younger people are certainly not spared from “long COVID”. A recent Norwegian study looked at people aged 16-30 who had COVID-19 but hadn’t needed hospital treatment. It found after six months, 52% had persistent symptoms including loss of taste or smell, fatigue, breathlessness or impaired concentration.
The Delta variant
While more people are being vaccinated every day, at the same time, the virus is changing. Most recently we’ve seen the rapid global spread of the Delta variant, which is behind Australia’s current outbreaks.
Delta is estimated to be 60% more transmissible compared to the Alpha variant, and may be up to twice as likely to lead to hospitalisation.
The Delta variant also seems more likely to infect younger people. In the UK it’s thought to now be spreading through schools more than any other setting. Last year, school transmission was relatively rare.
There’s been concern in Europe infection with the Delta variant may be leading to a greater proportion of younger people being hospitalised and treated in intensive care compared to earlier in the pandemic. Data from Switzerland show people being admitted to ICU are on average five years younger, have a higher body-mass index, and are presenting with more severe lung failure.
How much of this is due to the change in the virus and how much is because older adults are increasingly vaccinated remains to be determined.
Despite the increased transmission and what appears to be increased severity of infection with the Delta variant, protection from vaccines is holding up. Certainly both the Pfizer and the AstraZeneca shots continue to be very effective at preventing severe illness and death.
The take home message, though, is that nobody is safe from COVID-19. Serious infection, and even death, can occur at any age; we can’t predict this.
Until we’ve vaccinated enough people in Australia we will need to take care and follow the public health advice, such as social distancing and wearing a mask. This is just as important if you’re 20 as it is if you’re 80.
Peter Wark 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.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the tech giant will shift from being a social media company to becoming “a metaverse company”, functioning in an “embodied internet” that blends real and virtual worlds more than ever before.
So what is “the metaverse”? It sounds like the kind of thing billionaires talk about to earn headlines, like Tesla chief Elon Musk spruiking “pizza joints” on Mars. Yet given almost three billion people use Facebook each month, Zuckerberg’s suggestion of a change of direction is worth some attention.
The idea of the metaverse is useful and it’s likely to be with us for some time. It’s a concept worth understanding even if, like me, you are critical of the future its proponents suggest.
The metaverse: a name whose time has come?
Humans have developed many technologies to trick our senses, from audio speakers and televisions to interactive video games and virtual reality, and in future we may develop tools to trick our other senses such as touch and smell. We have many words for these technologies, but as yet no popular word that refers to the totality of the mash-up of old-fashioned reality (the physical world) and our fabricated extensions to reality (the virtual world).
Words like “the internet” and “cyberspace” have come to be associated with places we access through screens. They don’t quite capture the steady interweaving of the internet with virtual realities (such as 3D game worlds or virtual cities) and augmented reality (such as navigation overlays or Pokémon GO).
Just as important, the old names don’t capture the new social relationships, sensory experiences and economic behaviours that are emerging along with these extensions to the virtual. For example, Upland mashes together a virtual reflection of our world with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and property markets.
Upland is a kind of ‘metaverse’ property-trading game based on real-world addresses. Upland
Facebook’s announcement speaks to its attempts to envision what social media within the metaverse might look like.
It also helps that “metaverse” is a poetic term. Academics have been writing about a similar idea under the name of “extended reality” for years, but it’s a rather dull name.
“Metaverse”, coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has a lot more romantic appeal. Writers have a habit of recognising trends in need of naming: “cyberspace” comes from a 1982 book by William Gibson; “robot” is from a 1920 play by Karel Čapek.
Recent neologisms such as “the cloud” or the “Internet of Things” have stuck with us precisely because they are handy ways to refer to technologies that were becoming increasingly important. The metaverse sits in this same category.
Who benefits from the metaverse?
If you spend too long reading about big tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, you might end up feeling advances in technology (like the rise of the metaverse) are inevitable. It’s hard not to then start thinking about how these new technologies will shape our society, politics and culture, and how we might fit into that future.
This idea is called “technological determinism”: the sense that advances in technology shape our social relations, power relations, and culture, with us as mere passengers. It leaves out the fact that in a democratic society we have a say in how all of this plays out.
For Facebook and other large corporations, determined to embrace the “next big thing” before their competitors, the metaverse is exciting because it presents an opportunity for new markets, new kinds of social network, new consumer electronics and new patents.
What’s not so clear is why you or I would be excited by all this.
A familiar story
In the mundane world, most of us are grappling with things like a pandemic, a climate emergency, and mass human-induced species extinction. We are struggling to understand what a good life looks like with technology we’ve already adopted (mobile devices, social media and global connectivity are linked to many unwanted effects such as anxiety and stress).
So why would we get excited about tech companies investing untold billions in new ways to distract us from the everyday world that gives us air to breathe, food to eat and water to drink?
Metaverse-style ideas might help us organise our societies more productively. Shared standards and protocols that bring disparate virtual worlds and augmented realities into a single, open metaverse could help people work together and cut down on duplication of effort.
In South Korea, for example, a “metaverse alliance” is working to persuade companies and government to work together to develop an open national VR platform. A big part of this is finding ways to blend smartphones, 5G networks, augmented reality, virtual currencies and social networks to solve problems for society (and, more cynically, make profits).
Similar claims for sharing and collaboration were made in the early days of the internet. But over time the early promise was swept aside by the dominance of large platforms and surveillance capitalism.
The internet has been wildly successful in connecting people all around the world to one another and functioning as a kind of modern Library of Alexandria to house vast stores of knowledge. Yet it has also increased the privatisation of public spaces, invited advertising into every corner of our lives, tethered us to a handful of giant companies more powerful than many countries, and led to the virtual world consuming the physical world via environmental damage.
Beyond the one-world world
The deeper problems with the metaverse are about the kind of worldview it would represent.
In one worldview, we we can think of ourselves as passengers inside a singular reality that is like a container for our lives. This view is probably familiar to most readers, and it also describes what you see on something like Facebook: a “platform” that exists independently of any of its users.
In another worldview, which sociologists suggest is common in Indigenous cultures, each of us creates the reality that we live in through what we do. Practices such as work and rituals connect people, land, life and spirituality, and together create reality.
A key problem with the former view is that it leads to a “one-world world”: a reality that does not permit other realities. This is what we see already on existing platforms.
The current version of Facebook may increase your ability to connect to other people and communities. But at the same time it limits how you connect to them: features such as six preset “reactions” to posts and content chosen by invisible algorithms shape the entire experience. Similarly, a game like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (with more than 100 million active users) allows limitless possibilities for how a game might play out – but defines the rules by which the game can be played.
The idea of a metaverse, by shifting even more of our lives onto a universal platform, extends this problem to a deeper level. It offers us limitless possibility to overcome the constraints of the physical world; yet in doing so, only replaces them with constraints imposed by what the metaverse will allow.
Nick Kelly 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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Quentin Grafton, Australian Laureate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
Mick Tsikas/AAP
On July 15, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said Sydney’s COVID lockdown wouldn’t end until the number of new cases not in full isolation was zero or as close to zero as possible.
But by August 1 the premier’s message had shifted:
Once you get to 50% vaccination, 60%, 70% it obviously triggers more freedoms […] The challenge for us is to get as many people vaccinated in August as possible so that by the time August 28 comes around, we have a number of options before us as to how we can ease restrictions.
There are around five million Australians under 16 who aren’t eligible to be vaccinated (bar a few groups of 12-15-year-olds whom the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) said this week should be prioritised for vaccination, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and those with certain underlying health conditions).
So, vaccinating 50% of the eligible population represents only about 40% of the whole population. Vaccinating 70% of the eligible population means only 56% of the whole population are vaccinated.
There can be no relaxation options determined solely by vaccination rates of 50% or even 70% of the eligible population. We cannot give up on our safety by pretending these vaccination rates in over-16s during an insufficiently controlled COVID outbreak would be like “living with the flu”. It won’t be.
Relaxing lockdown prematurely based solely on an arbitrary (and much too low) vaccination rate will likely lead to escalating cases and impose huge costs on Sydney and the rest of Australia.
Having not gone early, hard and fast, we propose seven key actions to save Sydney.
Crucially, Sydney’s lockdown needs to continue until the number of new daily cases who weren’t in full isolation reaches zero.
What does 70% of the eligible population vaccinated mean for Australia?
The premier’s August 1 announcement was similar to the federal government’s National Transition Plan released on July 30. The plan states that when 70% of Australians over 16 are vaccinated, governments should “ease restrictions on vaccinated residents”, and that lockdowns will be “less likely but possible”.
As we’re seeing in Southeast Queensland now, Delta is acquired and transmitted by children. This means only vaccinating 70% of over-16s will leave our kids vulnerable to COVID outbreaks. In the absence of public health measures, these children will pass it on to their friends and families.
While the risk of death from COVID, even with Delta, is lower among children than adults, there’s still a risk of long-term health consequences called “long COVID” among the young (and old).
Researchers dispute how common long COVID is in kids. But a study of children in Italy who have had COVID reported more than half had at least one symptom lasting more than four months, and more than 40% had a health problem due to long COVID that impaired their daily activities.
A UK survey of 23,000 households, published online as a preprint in June, found 5% of children infected with COVID had suffered persistent post-COVID symptoms for longer than four weeks.
What could happen if Sydney’s lockdown is relaxed too soon?
As of August 6, and since the Delta outbreak began in Sydney on June 16, there have been 4,610 locally acquired cases and 22 deaths. On August 6 there were 304 people hospitalised, 50 in intensive care with 22 requiring ventilation.
Using these stats, we can estimate what might happen should there be a partial relaxation of the current Sydney lockdown after 70% of over-16s in Greater Sydney are fully vaccinated and the outbreak is still ongoing.
First, if the vast majority of new daily cases aren’t in full isolation while infectious when lockdown restrictions are relaxed, this could easily result in a rapid growth in infections. This is because Delta is highly transmissible — infected people develop a viral load on average 1,000 times higher than the original strain. Even with new daily case numbers much lower than the numbers in early August, contact tracing wouldn’t be an effective secondary prevention strategy.
Let’s say partial relaxation after August 28 resulted in rapid and uncontrolled growth of new cases. We estimate that over a few months, and in the absence of subsequent lockdowns, this could result in as many as 100,000 cumulative hospitalisations, a total of more than 10,000 COVID patients in intensive care and, tragically, thousands of deaths in Greater Sydney alone.
This assumes that in an uncontrolled spread, eventually all unvaccinated people become exposed to COVID. We based these figures on the current ratios of how many people in Sydney have been hospitalised and died from COVID from the total number of cases, multiplied these numbers by the unvaccinated population, and extrapolated these numbers forward in the scenario of an uncontrolled outbreak.
Based on our previous research, the minimum economic cost of those hospitalisations (ignoring lost wages and the costs of “long COVID” and ongoing care generally) in Greater Sydney could easily exceed half a billion dollars. The economic costs from the expected loss of life would be in the tens of billions.
Experience from Australia and around the world tells us what needs to be done to protect public health and the economy.
NSW must:
ensure Sydney’s lockdown continues beyond August 28 until the number of new daily cases who aren’t in full isolation reaches zero
focus on daily testing of essential and front-line workers so pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic workers are identified before they enter the workplace. NSW should use the very best rapid test technology. Essential workers can be quickly and easily screened at a fraction of the cost and time of the standard PCR test
ensure everyone in lockdown gets adequate financial support to stay home, including those on visas. This is much more cost-effective than having those struggling financially not get tested and go to work, get infected and possibly spread COVID
actively minimise leakage to rural NSW, including setting up a “ring of steel” around Greater Sydney. This should include checking essential services drivers are up to date with daily rapid testing and measures to prevent other travellers from leaving
make masks mandatory outdoors as well as indoors (outside the home) throughout Greater Sydney
maintain the focus on increasing the vaccination rate among Sydneysiders by taking vaccinations to essential workplaces
recognise that until Sydneysiders, including children, have had the opportunity to be fully vaccinated then stringent lockdowns will need to be implemented rapidly whenever there are uncontrolled outbreaks of COVID.
Quentin Grafton has received funding from the Australian Research Council for his research. However, he has received no funding from any source in relation to his COVID-19 modelling or research.
Mary-Louise McLaws is a member of the World Health Organization Health Emergencies Ad Hoc COVID-19 Infection Prevention and Control Guidance Discussion Group
Tom Kompas has received funding from the Australian Research Council for his research. However, he has received no funding from any source in relation to his COVID-19 modelling or research.
The issues to watch out for now are the extent to which countries with high vaccination rates are (1) getting positive cases, and (2) getting Covid19 deaths. And one particular point to watch out for is the extent to which early vaccinator countries show signs of relapse, as immunity levels wane over time.
As for 2020, the tropical holiday destinations are well represented (and a significant number of these are not shown here, because their populations are less than 300,000 people). Important holiday destinations that do show are these French dependencies: Martinique, Guadaloupe, and Réunion. We also see popular Mediterranean holiday destinations showing up: Spain, France, Greece, Portugal, Morocco. Generally these have low death rates, but it’s still too early into August holiday month to declare that deaths will remain low.
Generally the places with the highest per capita cases of Covid19 are now quite dispersed, reflecting a mix of countries which experience high traffic at their borders, and other countries which have struggled to control domestic outbreaks.
Israel, Iceland, United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Greece all have very high full vaccination rates, high case numbers, but low death rates. All should be watched to see if death rates stay low. Of these, Israel and Iceland have had the most recent outbreaks. (Also, little Gibraltar has the world’s highest vaccination rate, at over 100%, and would be in about 6th place on the above chart.) We should also note Cyprus, which is coming out of a particularly bad outbreak, after having largely missed out on earlier covid waves.
I have also included Australia, for context. Australia’s lockdowns have clearly had a major impact on slowing down the growth rate of Covid19 infections. But low levels of immunity in Australia – both low from past infections and low from vaccinations – mean that it’s slow exponential outbreak may continue for a fearfully long time.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
On deaths, we still see the impacts of the major outbreaks in Southern Africa, North Africa, South America, and South Asia. And Russia. And Iran. My hunch is that deaths will continue to fall in most of these countries, and will not appear in large numbers in the northern autumn as they did in 2020.
One country to watch is China. It has low levels of immunity; and reliance on draconian lockdowns and a vaccine that may have been the least effective so far. In other words – to use a forest fire analogy – it has by far the most ‘fuel’ to power an outbreak that may prove as hard as the Australian outbreak to contain.
In New Zealand, we now know that the speed of the vaccine rollout is the difference between life and death. The SARS-COV2 virus will reach an equilibrium in the Northern Hemisphere in a year or two – as did the virus that caused the ‘Russian flu’ pandemic around 1890. But it will kill many kiwis – sooner or later – unless we can achieve herd immunity through vaccination.
First Nations women are the fastest-growing prison population, constituting 37% of the female prison population, despite making up only 2% of Australia’s total population. The daily average number of women in full-time custody in the 2021 March quarter was 3,302, of whom 1,247 were First Nations women.
The incarceration of First Nations women is interwoven with the experience of domestic, family, sexual and other forms of violence against women. A high number of First Nations women spend time in custody unsentenced for domestic violence incidents that would never result in a custodial sentence.
the case of Jody Gore, who after experiencing decades of abuse, killed her former partner and was found guilty in 2016 and sentenced to life behind bars.
Ms Dhu, who was detained after calling for help during a domestic violence incident in 2014, only to be detained for unpaid fines. She subsequently died in police custody from septicaemia caused by a previous domestic violence injury.
Ava, who called police because she feared for her safety after a fight with her son in 2020. She was misidentified by police as the primary aggressor and spent five weeks in custody.
These cases draw attention to the connection between the multiple forms of violence First Nations women experience, and incarceration.
Links with domestic violence
Up to 90% of women in prison have experienced domestic and family violence. Most First Nations women in prison report experiencing multiple forms of violence at different times in their life.
Some had witnessed and experienced family violence as children and gone on to experience sexual assault, social isolation and physical intimate partner violence as young people and adults.
Trauma from these experiences contributes to other risk factors for incarceration, such as poor mental health, substance misuse, unemployment and low education. These factors disproportionately affect First Nations women and are linked to their own offending.
Twenty years ago, a report by the NSW Aboriginal Justice Council found that at least 80% of First Nations women linked previous abuse to their offending. This report revealed sexual abuse was “a central feature of pathways into offending”.
Domestic and family violence is also driving the incarceration of First Nations women through misidentification by police and other authorities.
Often, women who have experienced long-term abuse from an intimate partner are misidentified as the primary abuser and/or are named as the respondent in domestic violence orders. A domestic violence order sets out rules that must be obeyed by the respondent — the person who committed domestic violence — to protect the person listed as the aggrieved.
Women who have used retaliatory or pre-emptive violence in response to abuse or to protect themselves also come into contact with the criminal legal system. First Nations women are also more likely to encounter structural racism in their interactions with the criminal legal system.
First Nations women misidentified as perpetrators of violence
Misidentification can have disastrous and devastating consequences for women.
Research has found that almost half of the women murdered by an intimate partner in Queensland had formerly been misidentified by police as a domestic violence perpetrator.
Alarmingly, in nearly all of the domestic and family violence-related deaths of Aboriginal people, the deceased person had been recorded as both a respondent and an aggrieved party in domestic violence orders.
Not only is the misidentification of First Nations women as the primary domestic violence abuser driving incarceration rates, it is costing women their lives. Not only are they not protected, they are being killed, and when they try to protect themselves, they are jailed.
Behind the increasing incarceration rates lies a serious crisis with many Indigenous policy considerations, such as the experiences of trauma, sexual and emotional abuse, and family and intimate partner violence.
Community-led, trauma-informed preventative support programs for First Nations women are desperately needed. This would include significant investment in community-based services and housing for vulnerable First Nations women at risk of becoming involved in the criminal legal system.
Systemic change is needed to divert women from entering prison by addressing the way the police and criminal legal system identify primary domestic violence abusers and respond to domestic, family, and sexual violence.
Ultimately, addressing violence against women requires long-term commitment to create social and cultural change through the promotion of gender and racial equality.
Deirdre Howard-Wagner is the recipient of funding from the Australian Research Council and the Commonwealth and NSW government departments in relation to Indigenous policy research. That funding is not related to the topic of this piece.
Chay Brown receives funding from ANROWS and the Office for the eSafety Commissioner. She is affiliated with the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University and the Equality Institute.
University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Paddy Nixon discuss the week in politics.
This week Michelle and Paddy discuss the ongoing lockdowns across the nation, and the plans released by the government this week to increase the vaccine rollout, and put lock downs behind us. One incentive, proposed by the opposition, is a $300 payment to any individual who is fully vaccinated by 1 December.
They also discusses a judgment delivered by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal on Thursday which says the minutes of National Cabinet should be released under the Freedom of Information Act.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
If you ask most people what economists do, they might tell you it has something to do with money. Or perhaps forecasting what the economy will look like a year from now. Most of the other comparisons would be less charitable. I’ve heard plenty that can’t be printed.
The reality is very different.
For example, my UNSW colleague Pauline Grosjean and her economist co-authors published a paper in 2020 that asked “can heroes legitimise strongly proscribed and repugnant political behaviours?” and answered the question using recently declassified intelligence data on nearly 100,000 soldiers serving under French Field Marshall Philippe Petain at the battle of Verdun in 1916.
It turns out the home municipalities of these soldiers ended up producing 7% more Nazi collaborators during the Petain-led Vichy government from 1940-44.
While there are “market economists” whose job it is to try to produce credible forecasts, academic economists largely use an economic lens — and often very rich data sources — to understand and describe the world in which we live, and how to improve it.
Ironically, it is the “ivory-tower” types who do some of the most interesting work — on a range of social and economic issues that might surprise you in its breadth.
#whateconomistsdo
As is often the case, social media has amplified misunderstandings about the role of economists and laced it with a good dose of bile. In reaction to this misconception, prominent economists in Europe and the United States began tweeting about #whateconomistsdo.
If you check out that hashtag you will see an avalanche of academic papers on all sorts of interesting topics. What they have in common is the use of economic theory to inform analysis of incredibly rich data to answer big, social-scientific questions.
The big ideas in economics involve formal (i.e. mathematical) theory.
Think of things like supply and demand, when and why markets are an efficient way to allocate resources, how asymmetric information can lead markets to break down, and the role of innovation and capital accumulation in driving economic growth.
Economic theory of this kind is incredibly important and influential. But most of what most economists do most of the time, involves working with data.
As I wrote in June (in discussing teenage driving accidents), empirical economics is basically about the so-called “identification problem” — figuring out how to identify the true causal effect of a policy intervention.
Developing and applying a set of empirical techniques to do this is what MIT economist Joshua Angrist has called “the credibility revolution”.
I personally prefer the term “identification revolution”. It’s an important part of what many of us teach in undergraduate economics classes, but with applications to political science, law and other fields beyond economics.
It’s a “revolution” because scholars have developed ways to credibly identify the causal effect of all manner of policy interventions. That allows us researchers to provide sensible policy prescriptions based on empirical evidence.
This is the true spirit of the oft-abused term “evidence-based policy”; and because public policy covers a lot of territory — from social policy to economic policy —these techniques have been applied to lots of important policy questions.
Each of these are policy-relevant topics where economists have brought modern techniques and good data to bear. This, in turn, provides useful, factual input into important political debates.
It has been suggested that economics isn’t very useful because, for example, few economists predicted the financial crisis of 2008, and forecasts of things such as GDP, unemployment or house prices are usually pretty lousy.
It’s true that economic forecasting is a mug’s game. In the words of that great line typically attributed to American baseball legend Yogi Berra, it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
So if you want to know what the dollar will be worth two years from now, the best answer is probably “whatever it is today”. If you want to ask anyone, ask an astrologer, not an economist.
But since the identification revolution, economists around the world have contributed to a vastly richer understanding of important public-policy questions by combining rich data with clever empirical methods.
It also makes for much more interesting dinner party conversation than macroeconomic forecasting.
That’s #whateconomistsdo.
Richard Holden is President-elect of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
Talk of healing, care, and well-being is woven throughout the refreshed Closing the Gap agreement. These things were also central to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement of the Closing the Gap implementation package this week.
The package also directs additional funding to Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations to “maintain the high level of care they offer”.
Recognition of the significant violence perpetrated by the settler state and measures to support healing are welcome and long overdue. However, history gives us good reason to be sceptical of the government’s lofty Closing the Gap rhetoric around pursuing improved well-being.
If improved well-being is supposed to underpin the refreshed Closing the Gap approach, then this must filter into all actions taken under the framework. However, measures to promote healing and care will only be treating the symptoms and not the cause while governments continue inflicting harm on Indigenous people.
We use the example of employment policy (targets 7 and 8 in the Closing the Gap agreement) in remote areas to show how government policies continue to create damage that must later be healed.
Stop punishing the unemployed in remote Australia
Since 2015, Indigenous peoples living remotely have been routinely punished under the Community Development Program (CDP). CDP requires individuals on income support payments to complete activities (like job searches and “work for the dole”) to receive their social security benefits. These activities were mandatory from 2015–20, though work for the dole was recently made voluntary.
CDP has roughly 40,000 participants, around 80% of whom are Indigenous. So harsh was this policy that the Commonwealth government has been taken to court by one remote council that claims the program is racist.
The introduction of the punitive scheme has hardly budged the number of Indigenous people in work, with employment numbers barely rising in remote Australia between 2008 and 2018–19.
However, mass unemployment is not a result of people choosing to remain on welfare. There are just not enough jobs for everyone. Consequently, attempts to close the “employment gap” in remote Australia by targeting the attitudes and behaviours of the unemployed have failed because they ignore the real cause: unemployment is structural, not behavioural.
CDP has meanwhile caused significant harm and torn at the social fabric of remote communities. It has disproportionately high levels of penalties and payment suspensions, which have lowered already impoverished household incomes.
CDP is a dire example of how, on the one hand, the government talks about wanting to enable healing, while on the other hand, its own policies are a significant cause of ongoing harm.
Still listed in the Closing the Gap plan
In a welcome announcement around the time of the 2021–22 budget, the Morrison government committed to abolish CDP and replace it with a new “co-designed” program from 2023.
Yet, CDP remains listed in the Commonwealth’s implementation plan as an “action” that will contribute to closing the gap on “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people engaged in employment or education” (target 7).
Indeed, the Commonwealth did not announce any new initiatives yesterday that will assist in meeting its employment targets.
The failure of CDP provides an opportunity to carefully reconsider its harmful effects and to move forward in a manner consistent with Closing the Gap commitments around healing, caring, and ensuring well-being.
Care work for people, Country and culture
There are unquestionable health and well-being benefits associated with work. However, if future policy looks to support people to engage in work, then suitable work must be available.
Pathways into waged jobs will only be open to a minority of unemployed Indigenous peoples in remote Australia. Yet, there is much productive work already being done that is unpaid. Policies that deploy narrow definitions of “work” ignore these diverse forms of labour, which are critically important in supporting the strained social fabric of remote communities.
Care work should be supported in all its forms.
An example is care work: a term we use here to refer to caring for people, as well as for Country and culture — all of which are interlinked and mutually interdependent.
While some caring for Country and culture work is recognised and remunerated under the successful Indigenous ranger and language maintenance programs, much “caring for people” work remains unsupported and unpaid. Such work is overwhelmingly provided by Indigenous women.
If the Australian government is serious about supporting well-being and healing as key elements of Closing the Gap targets, then it must ensure care work in all its forms is supported, irrespective of its position within or beyond the formal economy.
Governments of all persuasions are increasingly embracing the notion of caring for Country. In the past 15 years, they have recognised, and more appropriately supported, Indigenous efforts in environmental healing.
We argue it is time that far greater emphasis is also placed on caring for people; a CDP replacement should have this objective as an underpinning feature.
The CDP overwhelmingly failed to care for people; its unintended consequence was to further deepen poverty and anomie. There will never be a better time to shift our policy focus in a positive direction as the nation reflects on our collective failure to Close the Gap, and as a new employment and income support program is being co-designed.
Zoe Staines receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).
Elise Klein has received funding from the British Academy. She is a board member for the Institute of Postcolonial Studies.
In the last three years, Francis Markham has received funding from the National Native Title Council, the Commonwealth Department of Social Services, Aboriginal Affairs New South Wales, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the former Commonwealth Department of Communications and the Arts.
Jon Altman 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.
When significant voices on the political left start speaking out against Labour’s proposed hate speech laws it’s a sign that they’re in big trouble. With criticisms now coming from across the political spectrum, it’s much more likely that the Government will ditch the botched speech regulation reforms.
The latest leftwing activist to speak out against the proposals is unionist Matt McCarten. He is encouraging the public to make submissions against the proposals (submissions close tomorrow).
McCarten’s leftwing credentials are strong – not only has he been involved in progressive and socialist organising for decades, he was the Labour Party’s Chief of Staff at Parliament for two years from 2014. His opposition will carry a lot weight.
This week he made the following statement: “Free speech is not a left-right political issue. It’s about democratic civil society where everyone has a right to have their say. Sometimes your opinion can make other people uncomfortable and even create conflict. But sharing your views can start a real conversation of ideas that often leads to positive societal change. If we risk free speech then we risk progress. We must not allow that.”
McCarten also gave a lengthy interview with another leftwing activist, Dane Giraud, of the Free Speech Union, on the problems he sees with the proposals, as well as wider criticisms of the contemporary left – see: Interview with legend of the NZ Union movement Matt McCarten.
Cowan has also written about his own opposition to what he sees as a clampdown on political activity and expression – see: We need more democracy, not less. He argues the hate speech laws are just a continuation of the growth of a “liberal support for authoritarian identity or woke politics and for cancel culture”. In contrast, he points to historic socialist figures who have battled for free speech.
In this regard, it’s also worth reading Victoria University of Wellington academics Michael Johnston and James Kierstead who explain how free speech has been vital to not just democracy and progress, but for marginal groups liberating themselves – see: Hate speech law a threat to democracy. They say: “The historical record, from the suffragettes to the civil rights movement to gay liberation, makes it clear: free speech has been a vital – perhaps the vital – tool in the struggle of marginalised peoples to defend their rights.”
They have written this week about their opposition to the proposals – see: Why the new ‘hate speech’ legislation should be scrapped. They argue that leftwing governments should be concerned with advancing leftwing policies and dealing with problems faced by those at the bottom, but Ardern’s Government is instead pursuing an illiberal programme on political expression. They say the Government is siding with a more illiberal movement around the world that is concerned with suppressing open debate.
The political commentator who has led the fight against the hate speech laws is Chris Trotter. Last week he reported on the only authoritative public survey that has been carried out on the hate speech proposals, which shows the public is clearly more opposed than supportive – see: Free speech vs hate speech – by numbers.
The survey commissioned by the Free Speech Union shows that 43 per cent are either strongly or somewhat opposed, 31 per cent are somewhat or strongly in favour, and 15 per cent are neutral. The survey shows that Labour and Green voters are much more inclined to support the proposals, and National and Act supports much less so. There are some other interesting demographic skews as well – in terms of gender, ethnicity, income, and geography.
Trotter has written at length about the problems with the hate speech proposals. His latest column on this is a plea to the Prime Minister not to go ahead with the ill-thought-out changes to the law – see: I understand why you want to do it, Jacinda – but don’t.
Trotter explains that the horrors of the Mosque attacks have made this a personal quest for Ardern, but argues it’s a mistaken response that won’t achieve its objective and will have many undemocratic and harmful consequences.
The Government-friendly blogsite The Standard has also published a strong critique of the new law, pointing out that the existence of free speech has allowed radical political organisation to occur, and “we need our existing freedom of expression protected more, not less” – see: Oppose this new hate speech bill. They point out that the Labour Party was able to be founded because of free speech, and “I doubt the Labour Party would have been able to exist today if this proposed control of speech had occurred then.”
Others on the left have also been outspoken. Martyn Bradbury, the editor of the Daily Blog, has written frequently about how the left should be opposing the Government’s reform ideas. In a recent blog post he says: “we are the Left, we should be championing free speech, not repressing it! We can’t allow brittle millennial trigger culture to hand the State powers that history tells us will be used against us!” – see: Kris Faafoi has gone into hiding over Hate Speech law & would Debbie Ngarewa-Packer get prosecuted?.
Minto argues that, although the Government thinks the reforms would protect minorities, it’s possible minorities would be the victims of clamp downs. For example, “I think it will be the Muslim community and progressive voices who are more likely to feel the harsh edge of this law”, and other activist groups such as pro-Palestine movements would easily be labelled hateful and threatened with prosecution.
This last point has also been made by media law scholar Steven Price, who pointed out on TVNZ’s Q+A on Sunday “Hate-speech laws are often used to prosecute the very minorities that they are designed to protect” such as “gay people who are attacking religions who are attacking them”. You can watch this here: Q+A with Jack Tame – Lawyers ‘tearing their hair out’ over proposed hate speech laws.
For an excellent review of the Q+A debate, see Graham Adams’ latest column: The thorny hate-speech debate sorts sheep from goats. He discusses Price’s negative evaluations of the possible law changes – especially his view that it would be difficult to establish what is and isn’t a crime under the Government proposals.
Adams also highlights the appearance on the Q+A panel of former Labour MP Sue Moroney, who grapples with the lack of clarity in the proposals, essentially recommending that people self-censor to avoid prosecution. He quotes Moroney: “Well here’s a tip for middle New Zealand. If you think that what you’re about to do or say or tweet might actually be hate speech or might be captured by the law, don’t do it… and we’ll all be better off… If you’re making that judgement – ‘Could this be illegal?’ – don’t do it!”
Adams also points to a recently published video of police officer warning a street preacher: “There is a difference between preaching and hate speech and you are very close to crossing the line”. On this video, barrister and legal commentator Graeme Edgeler has tweeted to say: “The police officer is recorded saying there’s a fine line between preaching and hate speech. He then explicitly acknowledges they had not crossed that line, and still thinks he has a role in policing what they are saying. That is concerning.”
Edgeler has written frequently about the Government’s new proposals. His concluding blog post is a must-read, as he argues strongly against the hate speech laws in their current form, and he is highly critical of how the Government has gone about the reform process – see: The New New Prohibition.
Edgeler draws parallels with other draconian attempts to outlaw harmful activities such as alcohol and drugs, which have been counterproductive. He says: “We may be facing a similar issue with hate speech.”
Amongst his many problems with the proposals, Edgeler highlights the lack of certainty over what would actually qualify as illegal hate speech in the new rules, which he says would have a chilling impact on public debate: “An important component of the rule of law (perhaps the most important) is certainty. The law should be declared in advance so that people can comply with it. And the biggest problem for people who will try to moderate their behaviour in response to a new criminal law isn’t whether they can recognise a bunch of things that will be covered by it, it’s whether they can recognise what things won’t. Because if it is not clear, then important, protected speech will be chilled.”
Edgeler points to another lawyer’s strong arguments about the problems of enforcement – the idea that even if the legal system ends up absolving an individual of hate speech crimes, the mere fact of having to fight a prosecution will be extremely chilling – see Liam Hehir’s Hate speech and what legal elites sometimes miss about the law.
Ultimately it seems likely that Ardern will pragmatically decide to ditch the proposals, given that they have turned out to be such a mess. This will be hard to do, since Ardern has made much of her promise and it’s a Labour Party manifesto commitment. Nonetheless, according to Graham Adams there are signs the Prime Minister is trying to find a way out – see: Is Ardern preparing her escape route from hate speech laws?.
Finally, the Minister of Justice responsible for the hate speech proposals gave a train wreck of an interview about the reforms and then went to ground – or as one commentator recently said is probably “tied up in a basement somewhere by the Prime Minister’s staff and not allowed to do interviews”. But his failure to front on this and other important issues is explained today by Jo Moir – see: What’s eating Kris Faafoi?.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. Click here to subscribe to Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup and New Zealand Politics Daily.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney
Conservative Christians are prominent in Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition parties. Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott are two of the most devout and theologically conservative prime ministers in Australian history.
Since 2018, Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia have all liberalised their abortion laws. This happened under Coalition governments in NSW and SA, to the dismay of some conservatives. Abbott and Barnaby Joyce appeared at protests against the NSW laws. Morrison declined to get involved, despite his “conservative” views on abortion.
In a new article in Religion, State and Society, I examine why Australian Christian conservatives are losing policy battles even when they win elections. Compared to the United States, Australia does not have a strong link between Christianity and nationalism. I show that, if anything, the concept of Australia as a “Christian nation” has declined over the past decade. This makes it harder for religious traditionalism to piggyback on the electoral success of exclusionary nationalism.
The rise and fall of the Christian right
Religious adherence is declining in Australia, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the end of religious influence in politics.
In her book Nations Under God, Anna Grzymala-Busse shows religious groups can continue to shape policy even in countries where people are averse to their involvement in politics. They can do this when they are seen as being “above politics”. Religious figures are powerful when they appear to be giving non-partisan guidance to political figures, legitimised by a strong relationship between church and nation.
In a 2014 article, Marion Maddox described the success of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) in Canberra. Howard brought the ACL to prominence by treating it as a “legitimate peak body” for Christianity.
Despite having a devoutly Christian prime minister, the role of the Christian right in Australia has waned in recent years. Mick Tsikas/AAP
The ACL’s political access continued under Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
At a 2007 ACL conference, Rudd and Howard both spoke, with Rudd describing how his Christian beliefs gave him a unifying vision for the nation.
Gillard, raised Baptist but a self-described atheist, held private meetings on anti-discrimination laws with ACL leader Jim Wallace. In a 2011 interview, Gillard described herself as a “cultural traditionalist” who believed it was important for people to understand the Bible because “the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture”. As prime minister, Gillard opposed same-sex marriage.
Maddox warned that Australians had failed to recognise the “extremist” right-wing nature of the ACL. It successfully presented itself as “middle of the road” politically, theologically and culturally. In reality, it represented a small, ultraconservative slice of mostly neo-Pentecostal Christianity.
As Carol Johnson and Marion Maddox point out, Australia’s biggest churches used to oppose efforts to expand religious freedom. They did so from a position of majority dominance, worried that efforts to protect minorities could lead to stricter separation of church and state.
In 2008, the Human Rights Commission conducted the Freedom of Religion and Belief in Australia Inquiry. An analysis found 40% of public submissions included the “assertion that Australia is a Christian nation”. That assertion is much rarer today.
Even large churches are now conscious of being in a national minority on issues like marriage and sexuality. In 2017 the Turnbull government announced a Religious Freedom Review in response to conservative worries about the implications of changing marriage laws. In my analysis of the 15,500 public submissions to the review, I found just four assertions that Australia is a Christian nation or country.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott has referred to Australian society as ‘relentlessly secular’. Joel Carrett/AAP
The term “Christian nation” was used 101 unique times across print media (in reference to Australia) from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2020. It appears to be in decline as a term. It appeared 35 times in 2016, 34 times in 2017 (the year of the same-sex marriage referendum), 16 times in 2018, 7 times in 2019 and 8 times in 2020. Furthermore, nearly half the times it was mentioned, it was by someone refuting the claim that Australia is a Christian nation.
When Australians do refer to their country as “Christian”, they are usually talking about heritage, rituals, holidays and census numbers. These may involve implied racial boundaries.
But Australians generally lack the classic ingredients of true religious nationalism: a sense of being “chosen” by God or of a sacred covenant between God and the nation.
Many of Australia’s devoutly Christian politicians don’t like calling Australia a Christian nation. Indeed, Abbott once described Australia as “relentlessly secular”. I can find no record of Morrison publicly calling Australia a Christian nation or country. The last prime minister to do so was Malcolm Turnbull, who described Australia as a “majority Christian nation” sharing a biblical heritage with Israel.
The debate around religious freedom reflects a new concept of religious traditionalists as minorities requiring protection. It also reframes religious alliances in terms of multiculturalism and diversity.
Conservative religious actors will fight to protect their existing privileges and will try to carve out new ones. But they are no longer in a position to bring Australian society into line with their beliefs.
David Smith 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.
As we write this article, the Delta strain of COVID-19 is reminding the world the pandemic is far from over, with millions of Australians in lockdown and infection rates outpacing a global vaccination effort.
In the northern hemisphere, record breaking temperatures in the form of heat domes recently caused uncontrollable “firebombs”, while unprecedented floods disrupted millions of people. Hundreds of lives have been lost due to heat stress, drownings and fire.
During the pandemic’s first wave in 2020, we collected nationwide data from 5,483 adults across Australia on how climate change affects their mental health. In our new paper, we found that while Australians are concerned about COVID-19, they were almost three times more concerned about climate change.
That Australians are very worried about climate change is not a new finding. But our study goes further, warning of an impending epidemic of mental health related disorders such as eco-anxiety, climate disaster-related post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and future-orientated despair.
Which Australians are most worried?
We asked Australians to compare their concerns about climate change, COVID, retirement, health, ageing and employment, using a four-point scale (responses ranging from “not a problem” to “very much a problem”).
A high level of concern about climate change was reported across the whole population regardless of gender, age, or residential location (city or rural, disadvantaged or affluent areas). Women, young adults, the well-off, and those in their middle years (aged 35 to 54) showed the highest levels of concern about climate change.
The latter group (aged 35 to 54) may be particularly worried because they are, or plan to become, parents and may be concerned about the future for their children.
The high level of concern among young Australians (aged 18 to 34) is not surprising, as they’re inheriting the greatest existential crisis faced by any generation. This age group have shown their concern through numerous campaigns such as the School Strike 4 Climate, and several successful litigations.
Of the people we surveyed in more affluent groups, 78% reported a high level of worry. But climate change was still very much a problem for those outside this group (42%) when compared to COVID-related worry (27%).
We also found many of those who directly experienced a climate-related disaster — bushfires, floods, extreme heat waves — reported symptoms consistent with PTSD. This includes recurrent memories of the trauma event, feeling on guard, easily startled and nightmares.
Others reported significant pre-trauma and eco-anxiety symptoms. These include recurrent nightmares about future trauma, poor concentration, insomnia, tearfulness, despair and relationship and work difficulties.
Overall, we found the inevitability of climate threats limit Australians’ ability to feel optimistic about their future, more so than their anxieties about COVID.
How are people managing their climate worry?
Our research also provides insights into what people are doing to manage their mental health in the face of the impending threat of climate change.
Rather than seeking professional mental health support such as counsellors or psychologists, many Australians said they were self-prescribing their own remedies, such as being in natural environments (67%) and taking positive climate action (83%), where possible.
Many said they strengthen their resilience through individual action (such as limiting their plastic use), joining community action (such as volunteering), or joining advocacy efforts to influence policy and raise awareness.
Indeed, our research from earlier this year showed environmental volunteering has mental health benefits, such as improving connection to place and learning more about the environment.
It’s both ironic and understandable Australians want to be in natural environments to lessen their climate-related anxiety. Events such as the mega fires of 2019 and 2020 may be renewing Australians’ understanding and appreciation of nature’s value in enhancing the quality of their lives. There is now ample research showing green spaces improve psychological well-being.
Walking in nature can improve your mental well-being. Sebastian Pichler/Unsplash
An impending epidemic
Our research illuminates the profound, growing mental health burden on Australians.
As the global temperature rises and climate-related disasters escalate in frequency and severity, this mental health burden will likely worsen. More people will suffer symptoms of PTSD, eco-anxiety, and more.
Of great concern is that people are not seeking professional mental health care to cope with climate change concern. Rather, they are finding their own solutions. The lack of effective climate change policy and action from the Australian government is also likely adding to the collective despair.
As Harriet Ingle and Michael Mikulewicz — a neuropsychologist and a human geographer from the UK — wrote in their 2020 paper:
For many, the ominous reality of climate change results in feelings of powerlessness to improve the situation, leaving them with an unresolved sense of loss, helplessness, and frustration.
It is imperative public health responses addressing climate change at the individual, community, and policy levels, are put into place. Governments need to respond to the health sector’s calls for effective climate related responses, to prevent a looming mental health crisis.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Rhonda Garad is an elected local Councillor and a member of the Greens party.
Rebecca Patrick received funding from the Institute for Health Transformation (Deakin University) to undertake the research reported in this article . She is affiliated with the Climate and Health Alliance.
Joanne Enticott 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.
Remote learning online has been a common tool in the battle against COVID-19. School and university campus closures have affected over 1.5 billion learners in 165 countries. The reduced need for students to be in their physical classrooms gives them greater autonomy, with more choice about what they do with their time. Some might skip classes, but what impact does this have on their learning?
There is extensive evidence that missing classes has a negative impact on the performance of low-achieving students. But in our recently published study with Silvia Griselda of Bocconi University, we found higher-achieving students benefit from autonomy in the form of relaxed school attendance. These students increased their performance in high-stakes exams, improving their university placement and potentially, their careers.
A 2020 OECD report highlighted the unequal impacts of greater autonomy on students:
“Effective learning out of school has clearly placed greater demands on students’ autonomy, capacity for independent learning, executive functioning, self-monitoring and capacity to learn online. These are all essential skills for the present and the future. It is likely that some students were more proficient in them than others and that, as a result, were able to learn more than their peers while not in school.”
Why do student responses to autonomy matter?
Understanding the different ways in which students respond to autonomy can inform recovery strategies from pandemic-related learning losses and help predict their success. This knowledge can help ensure resources are allocated where they are most needed.
In Australia, each week of remote learning equates to a loss of about 25 hours of face-to-face compulsory instruction time at school. That’s equivalent to missing 2.5% of a year’s instruction time.
The effects of reduced in-person class attendance on student performance are complicated in Australia by the fact that, in an OECD survey, only 88% of students reported having a quiet place to study at home. This is lower than the OECD average (91%). For students in the bottom quarter for socioeconomic status, the gap is even wider – 78% in Australia to 85% for the OECD overall.
Research shows high-performing students may tend to better self-regulate their study. This means they can acquire more knowledge on their own.
Another study found high-performing students may be allocating their time across subjects and material more efficiently. Classroom-based instruction may offer less challenging material to these high-performing students, which means they might learn faster from remote learning projects and tasks tailored to their knowledge and ability.
High-performing students appear to make better use of their time when they can choose to skip unproductive classes. Shutterstock
There are lessons to be learned from policies that have previously provided students with increased autonomy. Our insights come from an innovative policy in Greece. Our study used data on more than 12,000 secondary school students in Greece across all high school grades over four years.
The Greek Ministry of Education provided higher-performing students with more autonomy. In particular, high performers were permitted to miss 30% more classes than before without penalty.
The rationale was that this would allow higher-performing students to make decisions on attending class that best served their own interests. So instead of attending class, they could, for example, use this time for self-study or leisure.
To be classed as high-performing, students had to have an average grade above 75% in the previous year. The percentage of students characterised as high performers in maths and reading is almost the same in Australia and Greece, according to the results of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA).
We found higher-performing students choose to miss more classes when allowed to distance themselves from school. This is in line with our previous research that showed high-achieving students take more absences during a pandemic.
Under the increased autonomy policy, these students improved their performance in national exams in high-stakes subjects. They also significantly increased their university admission scores. As a result, they were admitted to university degree programs of higher quality or selectiveness.
Higher-performing students were more likely to choose to miss some classes but improved their results in national exams and university admissions. Shutterstock
Academic diversity of classes is another factor
We also found high-achieving students who were assigned to more academically diverse classrooms chose to distance themselves more from school.
Specifically, we looked at the effects on two groups of high-achieving students with previously similar grades – one group was in more academically diverse classrooms than the other. Even if they had identical grades in the previous year, these two groups ended up performing differently in the subsequent national exams and enrolled in post-secondary institutions of different quality. In particular, the group in the more academically diverse classes was more likely to distance themselves from school and improve their exam performance than the group in the less diverse classrooms.
A more diverse classroom is likely to be associated with lower in-class learning productivity and higher classroom disruption, which reduces the efficiency of instruction. There is evidence that teacher effectiveness drops in more academically diverse classrooms. Therefore, a more diverse classroom may be less conducive to learning for higher-performing students.
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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dr Amanda-Jane George, Postgraduate Research Coordinator, Senior Lecturer in Innovation & Intellectual Property Law, School of Business and Law, CQUniversity Australia
Shutterstock
What does it mean to be an inventor?
In patent law, designed to protect the intellectual property of inventors, officials are used to thinking of inventors as humans, taking an “inventive step” – a new way of doing something — not obvious to a person skilled in the same art.
But last week — in a judicial world first — Australia’s Federal Court ruled an artificial intelligence (AI) system can be named as an inventor.
That judgement overturned a decision by the nation’s Commissioner of Patents that meant US scientist Stephen Thaler could not patent inventions by his AI system, DABUS (Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience).
Thaler says DABUS independently designed a fractal-shaped container for improved grip and heat transfer, and an emergency beacon that flashes more noticeably. So he can’t take credit as the actual inventor.
He has filed patent applications in 17 countries, as permitted by the international Patent Cooperation Treaty. In the US, UK, Germany, Europe and Australia, the patent offices have not approved them. Patent office decisions are pending in 11 other countries.
Just one patent office has granted the patent: South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, which published the Thaler patent on July 28, two days before the Australian Federal Court ruling.
An extract from Stephen Thaler’s patent application for a ‘Food container and devices and methods for attracting attention’ on behalf of the inventor, DABUS. CC BY
So Australia is not the world’s first nation to allow a machine to be named as inventor. But the South African patent office granted the patent because its practice prevented examination of inventorship and ownership.
Accordingly, the ruling of the Federal Court — to which Thaler appealed the Patent Commissioner’s decision — is a world first in terms of a court ruling in favour of AI as an inventor in its own right.
A machine can invent, but can’t own its invention
The specific reasons why most patent offices have rejected Thaler’s application differ according to the wording of legislation and how patents officials have interpreted the rules.
But there are some common themes. In the case of the UK and Australian patent offices, the main stumbling block was not that the examiners couldn’t accept a machine could invent something; it was that they did not see how a machine could own what it invented.
This issue of ownership is essential to the patent process. It requires, in cases where the applicant is different to the inventor, that the applicant show they have properly obtained ownership — or “title” — from the inventor.
The patent offices rejected Thaler’s application on the basis DABUS, as a machine, couldn’t “hold” title or pass it to Thaler, who didn’t want to name himself as the inventor because he didn’t do the inventing.
The English and Australian patent offices also argued the wording of their respective patent laws suggested an inventor needed to be human. The US and European offices also made this argument.
Why Australia’s Federal Court ruled for AI
But Australian Federal Court judge Jonathan Beach ruled, at least when it comes to Australia, this is not the case.
In overturning interpretation made by Australia’s Commissioner of Patents, Justice Beach said the patents legislation did not require the inventor to hold title, or pass it to the applicant. It simply required the applicant to receive title in a way the law recognises — like, for example, a dairy farmer receives “title” in their cows’ milk.
Thaler received title because he owned and controlled DABUS, its code, and he possessed DABUS’ output: the invention.
Justice Beach noted his interpretation served the rationale of the Patents Act, which is to incentivise innovation. Without taking this view, the “odd outcome” would be that DABUS’ invention was not owned, and was unpatentable. There would therefore be a patent black hole for AI-generated inventions.
Fears of AI monopolising technology
For now, Justice Beach’s decision means Australia and South Africa are the only two countries in the world accepting AI as inventors.
That won’t necessarily be the case for long, depending on the outcome of Thaler’s UK legal challenge against the decision of the High Court of Justice. The Court of Appeal is due to hand down a decision on the appeal in October. Thaler is also making legal challenges against the decisions of the US Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office.
If these other courts decide differently to Justice Beach, it could mean Australia and South Africa become beacons for the lodging of AI-invented patents. This would not be the bonus it might seem. It could leave local companies having to pay even more to use patented foreign inventions.
But what if other jurisdictions do follow Australia’s lead?
There are concerns that accepting machines as inventors could, as Melbourne Law School senior fellow Mark Summerfield has warned, create an avalanche of “automated patent generators” monopolising technology.
This would further entrench the dominance of tech companies for whom AI is central, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Alibaba. As University College Cork economist Wim Naudé, has written, these platforms have a huge first-mover advantage in AI, “turning them into monopolists and gatekeepers”.
Summerfield has argued restricting the notion of invention to humans is the “primary legal barrier” to prevent this.
Phantom fears
But there are three reasons to agree with Justice Beach that such fears are a “phantom”.
First, to get a patent an invention must satisfy a stringent range of requirements. Applicants must prove, among other things, the invention has “worldwide novelty” and involves an inventive step.
Second, patents are expensive. It’s not like speculating on a domain name. The cost of a PCT patent in 10 jurisdictions is about A$150,000 plus maintenance fees. This is a big disincentive to abusing the patents system.
Finally, since 2019, patent owners are subject to anti-monopoly laws, so the competition watchdog, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, can take action against those seeking to abuse intellectual property rights to stifle competition.
As the Open Letter on Artificial Intelligence signed by Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and many others involved in AI research says, more research on AI needed “to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls”.
Dr Amanda-Jane George 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.
Lieutenant John Bowen and party arriving at Risdon, by Thomas Gregson (c.1860). Courtesy of the WL Crowther Library
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.
Australians love their war heroes. Our founding myth centres on the heroism of the ANZACs. Our Victoria Cross recipients are considered emblematic of our highest virtues. We also revere our dissident heroes, such as Ned Kelly and the Eureka rebels. But where in this pantheon are our Black war heroes?
If it’s underdog heroism we’re after, we need look no further than the warriors who resisted the invasion of their homelands between 1788 and 1928. And none distinguished himself more than Tongerlongeter — the subject of a new book I have written with historian Henry Reynolds.
Tongerlongeter’s story
In Tasmania’s “Black War” of 1823–31, Tongerlongeter led a stunning resistance campaign against invading British soldiers and colonists. Leader of the Oyster Bay nation, he inspired dread throughout the island’s southeast. Convicts refused to work alone or unarmed, terrified settlers abandoned their farms, the economy faltered and the government seemed powerless to suppress the insurgency.
It was a legacy Tongerlongeter could never have imagined in 1802, when his people encountered the French explorers under Nicolas Baudin on Maria Island. Having never heard of foreign lands or peoples, they concluded the pale-faced visitors were ancestral spirits returned from the dead. If zombies are an apt comparison, they were soon to experience a zombie invasion.
The British established their first settlement at Risdon Cove, opposite today’s Hobart, in 1803. Only from the 1820s did settlement accelerate up the fertile valleys of the southeast. Tongerlongeter initially restricted his warriors to targeted retribution, but as the violence intensified, all stops were pulled.
By night, Tongerlongeter and his people were vulnerable to ambushes. Gangs of frontiersmen and sealers killed hundreds of men and abducted countless women and girls. Tongerlongeter’s first wife was taken in just such an ambush.
Being wary of evil spirits, Tongerlongeter’s people never attacked by night. But from sun-up to sun-down, exposed colonists lived in constant fear of attack. Using sophisticated tactics such as reconnaissance, decoys, flanking and pincer manoeuvres, sabotage, and arson, Tongerlongeter’s war parties attacked hut after hut, and often several at a time.
Trained from infancy in the arts of war, Aboriginal warriors carried out guerrilla operations with extraordinary discipline and strategy. Apart from soldiers, most colonists were woefully unprepared to face such assailants. Typically, warriors would surround a hut, then kill its occupants, plunder whatever they wanted, and set it alight. Then they “simply vanished”, outwitting even mounted pursuit parties.
In 1828, as the body count rose, Lieutenant Governor George Arthur declared martial law. Vigilantes had long “hunted the blacks” with impunity; now they did so legally.
While such measures took a devastating toll, Tongerlongeter and his allies only intensified their resistance, making 137 documented attacks in 1828, 152 in 1829, and 204 in 1830. Each year they refined their tactics. Some settlers insisted the colony should be abandoned.
In September 1830, under mounting pressure, Arthur initiated a massive military operation designed to crush the resistance of Tongerlongeter and his allies.
The Black Line, as it came to be known, was Australia’s largest ever domestic military offensive. It involved 2,200 soldiers, settlers and convicts — 10% of the white population — in a seven-week campaign designed to “capture the hostile tribes”. Outnumbered by about 200 to one, and using only traditional weapons, Aboriginal resistance had driven the colony to take the most desperate of measures.
Commanded by Arthur himself, the Black Line was a human cordon, sweeping down eastern Tasmania. It was also a stunning failure, resulting in just two Aboriginal people captured and two killed. During the same period, Oyster Bay-Big River warriors killed five colonists and wounded six.
Field plan of military operations against the Aboriginal inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, by George Frankland (1830). This retrospective map illustrates the general pattern of divisional movements during the ‘Black Line’ campaign in October and November 1830. Courtesy of the WL Crowther Library
Still, the white men had made an impressive show of force, so Tongerlongeter’s people headed for the relative safety of the Central Plateau.
They didn’t make it unscathed. According to Tongerlongeter, who recounted his wartime experiences years later in exile, he
[…] was with his tribe in the neighbourhood of the Den Hill and that there was men cutting wood. The men were frightened and run away. At night they came back with plenty of white men (it was moonlight), and they looked and saw our fires. Then they shot at us, shot my arm, killed two men and three women. The women they beat on the head and killed them; they then burnt them in the fire.
A musket ball almost severed Tongerlongeter’s arm just below the elbow. As his comrades sliced off what remained of his limb, the chief’s pain would have been stupefying. But worse was to come. We know from post-mortem records that someone, presumably using abrasive rock, ground smooth his splintered forearm bone. To stem the bleeding, Tongerlongeter simply said his kinfolk “burnt the end”, belying the true horror of cauterisation without anaesthetic.
The desperate final year
Miraculously, Tongerlongeter survived and made it to the plateau, but the momentum of the resistance waned. Oyster Bay and Big River bands made only 57 attacks in 1831. Desperate to avoid the white man’s guns, they wintered in the frigid high country.
Then, in the spring of 1831, Tongerlongeter’s people made one last foray to the east coast where they found themselves trapped on the Freycinet Peninsula by more than 100 armed white men. They were again forced to slip past the muskets at night.
Tongerlongeter made a beeline back west where his wife, Droomteemetyer, gave birth to a son. Parperermanener was the last Oyster Bay-Big River child — a delicate flame kindled from the dying embers of his people.
An engraving of Oyster Bay on Tasmania’s east coast (1873). Published in The Illustrated Australian by Ebenezer and David Syme. State Library of Victoria
The armistice
On New Year’s Eve 1831, Tongerlongeter’s war-weary remnant, now just 26 in number, were holed up in the remote lake country when they were approached by a small Aboriginal party. They were envoys of George Augustus Robinson’s “friendly mission”, whom Arthur had tasked with “conciliating the hostile tribes”.
Robinson’s terms were: if Tongerlongeter’s people laid down their arms they could, once order was restored, remain on their Country with a government emissary for protection. The chief was undoubtedly suspicious, but the alternative was the wholesale erasure of his people and culture.
When Tongerlongeter’s small band of survivors entered Hobart a week later, the whole town came to witness the spectacle. Spears in hand, they approached Government House, where the governor invited them in. His administration kept meticulous records — but as important as this meeting was, Arthur knew better than to document the promises he made.
Ten days later the whole party set sail for Flinders Island. They became dreadfully seasick. Severely dehydrated, Droomteemetyer would have struggled to breastfeed Parperermanener, and soon after disembarking, his tiny body went limp. For the Oyster Bay-Big River remnant, this was no ordinary tragedy. It wasn’t just that a child had died, or even that it was the child of a chief. There were no more children.
Despite the loss of his son, his arm, his country, his way of life and almost everyone he had ever known, Tongerlongeter did not give up hope. As a leader, he couldn’t, and from the outset he was proactive. By popular vote, he represented the exiles in negotiations, settled disputes, provided counsel, distributed justice, and was instrumental in a range of improvements.
Watercolour of Flinders Island by J. S. Prout (1840s). Courtesy of the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts
In 1834, a visiting missionary identified Tongerlongeter as “the principal chief at Flinders”, where 244 Aboriginal Tasmanians were eventually exiled. When Robinson took command of the settlement in 1835, he immediately recognised the chief’s seniority, renaming him King William after Britain’s reigning monarch.
But good leadership could only do so much. During the five years Tongerlongeter was at the settlement, there were four births but well over 100 deaths, mostly from influenza. On March 21 1837, Tongerlongeter demanded they be allowed “to leave this place of sickness”; and when Robinson hesitated, he asked: “What, do you mean to stay till all the black men are dead?”
It wasn’t just that an “evil spirit” was sickening his people — Tongerlongeter never stopped advocating for their promised return to Country. When that failed, he supported Robinson’s plan for their removal to Victoria, even if the fledgling settlement’s only appeal was that it was not Flinders Island. Some eventually made that journey, but Tongerlongeter was not among them.
The two men could scarcely have been more different. One led the largest empire on Earth; the other led a small band of hunter-gatherers. One dispossessed millions of indigenous peoples; the other determinedly resisted dispossession. One died in the comfort of a lavish castle, the other in a draughty hut on an accursed island far from home.
King William was just a character Tongerlongeter played so his people might have a voice.
If he had anything in common with the British monarch, it was that his death produced a comparable tide of shock and sorrow, albeit confined to a shrinking settlement on a tiny island at the edge of the known world.
The Black War, as everyone at the time understood, was just that — a war. Yes, it was a small guerrilla war, but so were most wars throughout history. It’s impossible to overstate its significance for Tasmania and its peoples. The impacts of subsequent wars pale by comparison, and yet these overseas conflicts and their heroes monopolise our commemorative spaces.
How can this be? Almost all those who fought alongside Tongerlongeter were killed in action — not as helpless victims, but as warriors. Theirs was the most effective frontier resistance campaign in Australian history, killing at least 182 invaders and wounding another 176. No less intimidating were their efforts to sabotage the invasion by spearing thousands of sheep and cattle, and burning dozens of homes and crops.
And the impact of their resistance was felt beyond Tasmania. Governor Arthur later wrote it had been “a great oversight that a treaty was not […] made with the natives”, and a chastened Colonial Office took steps not to repeat that mistake. New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi, for instance, was due in no small part to Tongerlongeter and his warriors, who taught the British Empire a lesson in the true cost of “free land”.
Tasmania’s Flinders Island was Tongerlongeter last residence, but not his Country. Shutterstock/Alex Cimbal
Tongerlongeter should be recognised as one of our nation’s greatest war heroes. He should be celebrated by politicians and school children alike, and yet almost no one has ever heard of him.
Tongerlongeter showed the “extreme devotion to duty” and “self-sacrifice” that would later make a soldier eligible for the Victoria Cross. He and his warriors fought year after year in the face of staggering odds.
It’s not that these heroes should receive posthumous medals, but they should receive the respect accorded to those who do. Their skin was black, and they wore no uniform, but if the men and women who scarified everything in defence of their country do not exemplify our highest virtues, then who does?
It is an Australian quirk that we don’t officially commemorate or memorialise our frontier wars or those who fought in them. When contrasted against memorials to overseas campaigns, this sends a stark message: our country values these foreign conflicts more than those fought on this country, for this country. And it implies our war heroes are all white.
Other countries are far ahead of us in this regard.
A statue of the Chilean Mapuche leader Caupolicán has commanded an imposing position in the centre of Santiago since 1910. Samuel Sharpe, the leader of the Jamaican slave rebellion, was declared a national hero in 1975. And outside the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s government recently erected a 15-metre bronze statue of indigenous guerrilla fighter Juana Azurduy.
Momentum for commemoration in Australia is building. Aboriginal community groups and elders, with the support of RSL Tasmania, Reconciliation Tasmania and the Hobart City Council, are planning to install a Black War memorial in Hobart’s Cenotaph precinct. When erected, it will be the first of its kind in Australia.
Tongerlongeter and many other heroes of The Black War are buried at the Wybalenna Cemetery on Flinders Island. But rather than being overlooked by an impressive memorial, only thistles adorn their unmarked graves. How Aboriginal people are commemorated or memorialised is the prerogative of their descendants, but admiration for warriors like Tongerlongeter has the potential to transcend race, culture and creed.
A memorial is planned to Tongerlongeter and his fellow fighters near Hobart’s Cenotaph. Shutterstock/D. Cunningham
Nicholas Clements 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.
On the one hand we’re talking about how life will be when 70% or 80% per cent of eligible people are fully vaccinated.
On the other, what we can call our third wave of COVID is spreading, hitting young people, infecting children, resisting efforts at suppression. Sydney is in dreadful shape, NSW regions are under threat (there’s a lockdown in the Hunter), south east Queensland is shuttered, as is Victoria, and the rollout remains beset by difficulties.
We must, of course, have the conversation about exiting the pandemic. We need to consider issues including how a vaccination passport would work, when home quarantine can kick in, and much else around “opening up”.
“Transition” and “campaign” plans abound – from national cabinet last week and rollout tsar Lieutenant General JJ Frewen this week.
All good but there’s a pie-in-the-sky element about them when we’re moving forward so slowly.
Unfortunately but perhaps inevitably Frewen, the logistics expert, this week found himself caught on the political fly paper, after Anthony Albanese made his populist call for everyone who’s vaccinated by December 1 to receive $300.
Even in this age of the money tree, providing $6 billion not just to give the hesitant an incentive but also to reward those who need no encouragement would seem profligate.
The government, either worried the Labor proposal might catch on or because it wanted to pursue Albanese, launched a massive attack on on this “bubble without a thought”.
Frewen was dragged in because he’s canvassed various incentives. His position seems to be: possibly some cash, but not now. Both sides invoked his name in making their cases for and against the Labor proposal.
Morrison is using Frewen as a political shield, just as he once used former chief medical officer and now Health Department Secretary Brendan Murphy.
This has brought claims Frewen is being politicised, a perception the general needs to avoid, because it could make him less credible to the public, and is bad for the military.
It would have been better if Frewen had performed his role in civvies rather than in uniform, but Morrison no doubt likes the khaki. Certainly Frewen should guard against being drawn on political questions.
The Doherty Institute modelling presented publicly on Tuesday by professor Jodie McVernon showed how the rollout’s limitations have undermined our fight against the Delta variant and will continue to do so.
The modelling’s message was that the super spreaders are the younger adults, those between 20 and 40. As McVernon said, they infect both their children and their parents.
But they’ve been the worst catered for in the rollout. They were initially placed at the back of the queue, after the most vulnerable, key workers, and the middle aged. And Pfizer, the vaccine preferred for them – although they are now being urged to take AstraZeneca – has been in short supply.
Belatedly, vaccinations for them are being somewhat accelerated, but it is all ad hoc and unclear.
The politicians like to talk about the “learnings” (aka lessons) coming out of the experience of this pandemic. At some point, when we are much further down the exit road, there should be a comprehensive inquiry into how decisions were made and what went right and wrong, at both federal and state levels, particularly in the rollout but in other areas too.
In this context, Thursday’s decision by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal that the national cabinet is not, as the federal government tried to claim, a cabinet committee and therefore not subject to cabinet confidentiality, is a welcome development.
We can perhaps understand – while still strongly criticising – how the federal government, not expecting the problems with AstraZeneca, failed to order enough Pfizer or to have sufficient alternatives.
But how come on Thursday, when people were being shouted at to get the jab, an inefficient booking system in NSW was hampering many doing that?
And why, way back when, did the government put so much weight on the doctors in delivering the early months of the rollout? The pharmacists have only recently been brought in. If they’d been involved from near the start, we would likely be in a lot better position, at least with the AstraZeneca coverage.
The question has to be asked: how much did doctors’ lobbying influence the initial shape of the rollout? What clout did they have with senior health officials?
In February, the Australian Medical Association issued a statement headed “GPs, not pharmacists, best placed for vaccine rollout”.
It said AMA president Omar Khorshid had written to Health Minister Greg Hunt to express the AMA’s concerns.
The release went on: “Dr Khorshid told Sky News that the AMA would prefer that the rollout remained part of usual GP interactions.
“We do have significant reservations about the place of vaccination in pharmacy, [he said].
“In the very, very rare occurrence of a severe reaction like anaphylaxis to a vaccine, it’s something that we really can’t expect a pharmacist to be able to manage[…]
“But the main reason is that we think that vaccination is part of a primarily holistic care package where people have a healthcare home. They know to go and see their local GP for their healthcare needs.”
In the AMA’s defence, this was as the program was about to get underway and reaction to the vaccines had unknown elements. But the reference to the “main reason” is a giveaway. As is sometimes said, the AMA is the country’s most powerful trade union. It fights doggedly to protect its turf.
When the Coalition came to power it launched a royal commission into the pink bats scheme. This was seen, and was, a political exercise. Nevertheless, it did identify faults in planning and administration.
The pink bats program and its problems pale against the importance of, and the inadequacies in, the rollout.
An inquiry into the handling of the pandemic should not be driven by political motives, but rather by the need to understand the reasons for the mistakes and how to be better prepared in future.
This isn’t to diminish how well, comparatively, Australia did earlier in the pandemic. But the good side of the record shouldn’t be an excuse to avoid rigorous scrutiny of the negatives.
You won’t find provision for an inquiry in the government’s exit plan. But it should be there, in stage four.
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.
The Morrison government has been dealt a blow with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal ruling national cabinet is not a committee of federal cabinet and therefore is not covered by cabinet confidentiality.
This means its documents are accessible under freedom of information legislation. The federal government had argued that, as a cabinet committee, it was exempt from FOI.
The challenge to national cabinet secrecy was brought by crossbench senator Rex Patrick.
In his judgment, federal court Justice Richard White said: “The mere use of the name ‘National Cabinet’ does not, of itself, have the effect of making a group of persons using the name a ‘committee of the Cabinet’.
“Nor does the mere labelling of a committee as a ‘Cabinet committee’ have that effect.”
White rejected the government’s argument the prime minister had the ability to determine what a cabinet committee was.
“This seemed tantamount to a submission that any committee may be a ‘committee of the Cabinet’ for the purposes of the FOI Act merely because the Prime Minister of the day has purported to establish it as such. This premise is unsound,” White said.
Patrick said the decision was “a decisive win for transparency and accountability”.
He said what Morrison labelled “national cabinet” was a faux cabinet – in effect, the former Council of Australian Governments by another name.
“For almost 40 years Australians have had a legal right under the Freedom of Information Act 1984 to access information relating to intergovernmental meetings, subject only to a test of public harm,” Patrick said.
Morrison had tried to take that right away, he said.
“He did not ask the Parliament to change the law, he just declared that National Cabinet to be part of the Federal Cabinet and as such exempt under the Cabinet secrecy exemption of the FOI Act.
“That arrogant declaration has now been overturned,” Patrick said.
He said this now “opens the vault” including to documents of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, which advises national cabinet.
Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus said the ruling rejected what had been a “tricky marketing ploy” by Morrison. The government was “addicted to secrecy”, he said.
The government can appeal the decision. There is a stay of 28 days before it has to hand over to Patrick the documents he sought.
The judgment, unless overturned, will mean the Senate’s COVID committee will be able to seek access to information it has been refused on confidentiality grounds.
An Australia Institute poll done in May found 58% of people supported allowing national cabinet documents to be accessible via FOI requests.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Hillsong church pastor Brian Houston has been charged over the alleged concealment of information relating to child sex offences.
Houston is a personal friend of Scott Morrison who wanted him invited to the White House state dinner President Donald Trump held in the prime minister’s honour in 2019.
But the White House rejected Houston.
A NSW Police statement issued late Thursday said: “In 2019, an investigation commenced by officers attached to The Hills Police Area Command into reports a 67-year-old man had knowingly concealed information relating to child sexual offences.
“Following extensive investigations, detectives requested the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) review their brief of evidence.”
Earlier this week, the ODPP gave its advice to police. After further inquiries, “detectives served a Court Attendance Notice for conceal serious indictable offence on the man’s legal representative” on Thursday afternoon.
“Police will allege in court the man knew information relating to the sexual abuse of a young male in the 1970s and failed to bring that information to the attention of police.
“The man is expected to appear in Downing Centre Local Court on Tuesday 5 October 2021,” the police statement said.
In 2015 the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, which examined allegations against Houston’s father Frank, found neither the executive of the Assemblies of God in Australia nor Brian Houston referred the allegations to police.
It found Brian Houston “had a conflict of interest” in assuming responsibility for dealing with the allegations “because he was both the National President of the Assemblies of God in Australia and the son of Mr Frank Houston, the alleged perpetrator”.
The Wall Street Journal broke the story, during Morrison’s US trip, of the PM’s nomination of Houston for the dinner and the rejection.
Morrison dodged questions at the time and later about whether he had put Houston’s name up. He said the story was “gossip”.
It wasn’t until March 2020 that he confirmed it, telling 2GB “we put forward a number of names, that included Brian, but not everybody whose names were put forward were invited”. He said he had known Houston a long time.
In the 2GB interview, Morrison was asked whether he was not aware that Houston was under police investigation at the time.
“These are not things I follow closely,” Morrison said. “All I know is that they’re a very large and very well attended and well-supported organisation here in Australia.
“They are very well known in the United States – are so well known that Brian was actually at the White House a few months after I was. So the President obviously didn’t have an issue with it. And that’s why I think that’s where the matter rests.”
Houston has been living in the US for some time.
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.
In the past two weeks numerous opposition politicians — MPs, former prime ministers, party leaders and even party volunteers — have been taken in for police questioning in relation to their criticism of a government land bill.
Land ownership is a highly sensitive issue in Fiji. As new legislation relating to land and introduced in the middle of the country’s alarming covid-19 crisis, the iTaukei Land Trust Bill No. 17 was destined to trigger debate.
But criticism of the contentious legislation has prompted the repeated detention of opposition figures, with police saying they were being questioned under the Public Order Act.
The National Federation Party leader, professor Biman Prasad, was taken in four times.
“All this talk about Fiji being a genuine democracy as espoused sometimes by [Prime Minister Voreqe] Bainimarama and others in the government is all hogwash,” the MP said.
“We are not in a country where we have the freedom to talk about legislation which has been tabled in Parliament. I mean, that’s the role of the opposition.”
Public order While Dr Prasad said he was treated courteously by police, it is unclear who has been laying the complaints which spark the arrests, or who is ordering them.
Dr Prasad said the head of the police, or the government, should come clean about it.
However, Fiji police are contending with what the Acting Commissioner of Police, Rusiate Tudravu, describes as attempts to incite instability and rally support against the government.
He issued warnings to the public, particularly after a series of recent fires, including at a shopping arcade in Ba, and a mosque compound in Tavenui.
“We want to assure all Fijians that any attempts to destabilise and cause instability will be investigated and dealt with,” Tudravu said on a police Facebook post.
Fire at a commercial precinct in Ba, western Fiji. Image: Fiji Police
The head of the Fiji Women’s Crisis Centre, Shamima Ali, said while there was tension in the community over the worsening pandemic, job losses and economic hardship, it was unclear whether the fires could be linked to anti-government sentiment.
But according to her, community fear and uncertainty have deepened regarding what people are or aren’t allowed to say.
“The police, whenever people start talking, start questioning the government, in recent years, they come in and start talking about the Public Order Act.
“But the laws are such that people are scared to talk,” Ali said, adding that the media in Fiji remained largely muzzled.
Shamima Ali … Image: FWCC/RNZ
No room for criticism Fiji’s government has not taken up RNZ Pacific’s requests for comment on the issues raised here.
A government on the back foot, it continues to defend its no-lockdown policy as covid-19 spreads like wildfire on Fiji’s main island, Viti Levu.
For the past two weeks around 1000 new cases of the virus were reported each day, along with a steady rise in deaths.
There has been no shortage of epidemiologists quietly urging the Fiji First government to employ some form of lockdown in order to curb the spread of the virus, perhaps buy it some time to complete vaccination without too many people becoming gravely ill. But Bainimarama and his deputy remain unmoved.
After delivering a new budget aimed at helping Fijians recover from the pandemic’s economic fallout, the Attorney-General and Minister for Economy, Aiyaz Saiyed-Khaiyum bristled at opposition suggestions that throwing all of Fiji”s eggs in the vaccination basket was unwise.
“What is the alternative? There is none, and of course they [the opposition] won’t offer any,” he said.
“If we just rely on lockdowns, unfortunately we’ll forever be closed to the outside world. That is why the opposition wants a lockdown, because they don’t want this crisis to end, so they can blame the socio-economic woes on the government, and make this an election issue.”
The government has made steady progress with the vaccine rollout, with 85 percent of Fiji’s eligible population having received at least a first dose, and almost 30 percent having had two doses.
The rollout is being conducted using doses purchased for Fiji by Australia and New Zealand, whom Saiyed-Khaiyum claims are supporting his country with vaccines because it is “the only solution”.
Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum … vaccines “the only solution” for Fiji. Image: RNZ/Facebook/Fiji govt
Ali said people who criticised government handling of the covid-19 crisis were lambasted by the administration.
More worrying, she said, some critics of the goverment land legislation were held in police detention over for almost 48 hours without charge.
“Democratic and human rights spaces are really diminishing in this country over the years, and it’s at its worst right now, with the taking in of all these people — two former prime ministers, leaders of this country — with no reason or rhyme. No charges have been laid, just intimidation and so on.”
‘Docile’ regional response Most regional governments, including Australia, have been silent on the arrests. New Zealand’s government has registered concern, via a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“New Zealand is concerned by reports about the detention of a number of Fiji political figures,” a ministry spokesperson said.
“We are continuing to monitor the situation and the New Zealand High Commission in Suva is making inquiries with Fiji officials to ascertain further details.”
Ali said that she had worked with various diplomatic missions in Fiji over the years as upheavals, including coups, have happened in the country.
“I have never seen such a docile international community as I have seen this time around. The threat of China is also there, so people are taking it easy,” she said.
“Monitoring the situation is good, they need to do that. But I just think some firm diplomacy around accountability and those things also should be there.”
The situation in Fiji is a major concern for the Pacific Islands Forum, but the regional body’s limited ability to respond to the crisis is compounded by the expectation that the Bainimarama government is about to take up the Forum’s rotational chair.
While covid has the country’s health system is on its knees, job losses and food shortages are causing serious hardship in Fiji.
Shamima Ali said her centre was seeing increasing cases of domestic violence, a sign that the strain on Fiji’s social fabric is becoming untenable.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Artificial systems such as homecare robots or driver-assistance technology are becoming more common, and it’s timely to investigate whether people or algorithms are better at reading emotions, particularly given the added challenge brought on by face coverings.
In our recent study, we compared how face masks or sunglasses affect our ability to determine different emotions compared with the accuracy of artificial systems.
The study used full and partial masks and sunglasses to obscure parts of the face. Author provided
We presented images of emotional facial expressions and added two different types of masks — the full mask used by frontline workers and a recently introduced mask with a transparent window to allow lip reading.
Our findings show algorithms and people both struggle when faces are partially obscured. But artificial systems are more likely to misinterpret emotions in unusual ways.
Artificial systems performed significantly better than people in recognising emotions when the face was not covered — 98.48% compared to 82.72% for seven different types of emotion.
But depending on the type of covering, the accuracy for both people and artificial systems varied. For instance, sunglasses obscured fear for people while partial masks helped both people and artificial systems to identify happiness correctly.
Importantly, people classified unknown expressions mainly as neutral, but artificial systems were less systematic. They often incorrectly selected anger for images obscured with a full mask, and either anger, happiness, neutral, or surprise for partially masked expressions.
Decoding facial expressions
Our ability to recognise emotion uses the visual system of the brain to interpret what we see. We even have an area of the brain specialised for face recognition, known as the fusiform face area, which helps interpret information revealed by people’s faces.
Together with the context of a particular situation (social interaction, speech and body movement) and our understanding of past behaviours and sympathy towards our own feelings, we can decode how people feel.
A system of facial action units has been proposed for decoding emotions based on facial cues. It includes units such as “the cheek raiser” and “the lip corner puller”, which are both considered part of an expression of happiness.
Can you read the researchers’ emotion from their covered faces? Both artificial systems and people are compromised in categorising emotions when faces are obscured. Author provided
In contrast, artificial systems analyse pixels from images of a face when categorising emotions. They pass pixel intensity values through a network of filters mimicking the human visual system.
The finding that artificial systems misclassify emotions from partially obscured faces is important. It could lead to unexpected behaviours of robots interacting with people wearing face masks.
Imagine if they misclassify a negative emotion, such as anger or sadness, as a positive emotional expression. The artificial systems would try to interact with a person taking actions on the misguided interpretation they are happy. This could have detrimental effects for the safety of these artificial systems and interacting humans.
Risks of using algorithms to read emotion
Our research reiterates that algorithms are susceptible to biases in their judgement. For instance, the performance of artificial systems is greatly affected when it comes to categorising emotion from natural images. Even just the sun’s angle or shade can influence outcomes.
Algorithms can also be racially biased. As previous studies have found, even a small change to the colour of the image, which has nothing to do with emotional expressions, can lead to a drop in performance of algorithms used in artificial systems.
As if that wasn’t enough of a problem, even small visual perturbations, imperceptible to the human eye, can cause these systems to misidentify an input as something else.
Some of these misclassification issues can be addressed. For instance, algorithms can be designed to consider emotion-related features such as the shape of the mouth, rather than gleaning information from the colour and intensity of pixels.
Another way to address this is by changing the training data characteristics — oversampling the training data so that algorithms mimic human behaviour better and make less extreme mistakes when they do misclassify an expression.
But overall, the performance of these systems drops when interpreting images in real-world situations when faces are partially covered.
Although robots may claim higher than human accuracy in emotion recognition for static images of completely visible faces, in real-world situations that we experience every day, their performance is still not human-like.
Will Browne receives funding from Science for Technological Innovation, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.
Harisu Abdullahi Shehu and Hedwig Eisenbarth 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.
Six months after the prime minister received his first jab, Australia finally has a national plan to roll out COVID vaccines.
The plan’s goals, set out in the Operation COVID Shield document released this week, are to ensure public confidence in the vaccine rollout and to get as many Australians as possible vaccinated as early as possible.
The plan looks to reach the vaccination targets set out in modelling from the Doherty Institute and announced after national cabinet.
That would aim to have 80% of eligible Australians fully vaccinated by the end of the year. This figure has been criticised by some experts as too low. On this basis alone the plan is short-term and arguably short-sighted.
But, as the plan admits, there is no exhaustive detail for any of these initiatives, and in particular for how to reach the vaccination target. And any substance competes with jargon and sloganeering.
At best this is an optimistic vision for an improved vaccination rollout that fails to acknowledge and fully address the errors of the past.
The man in charge, Lieutenant General John Frewen, says: “Mathematically, we can get there.”
The plan proposes three key elements for achieving its vision — coordinate, motivate and deliver — each of which comes with inherent problems.
Coordinate
Ramping up the vaccination rollout will require an unprecedented level of collaboration between the Commonwealth and the states, and with other stakeholders. That’s a no-brainer.
But national cabinet has only agreed “in principal” to the prime minister’s plans, with more work to be done. If state and territory governments are not fully on board, then national coordination is impossible.
Motivate
Positive public sentiment and the willingness of Australians to get vaccinated are seen as the “centre of gravity”.
The plan defines this as “the primary entity that possesses the inherent capability to achieve the desired end state” for the plan. This language is a direct steal from the Australian Defence Glossary.
The key new element in this section is setting up an “industry liaison cell” to coordinate messaging and to work with business.
Deliver
Arguably the real centre of gravity of the plan must be the ability to deliver vaccinations at times and locations that ensure jabs in people’s arms. If these commitments are not met, the “positive public sentiments” seen as so crucial to the “motivate” part of the plan will quickly become negative.
Some pretty heroic assumptions underpin the 19 million vaccine doses expected to be available in November (that’s 10 million Pfizer, 5 million AstraZeneca, 4 million Moderna).
The most striking feature of the plan is the array of new structures it imposes, such as new committees or “cells”. These are on top of the complicated array that already exists and the many stakeholders.
Frewen is the coordinator general of the National COVID Vaccine Taskforce, known as Operation COVID Shield. But there are many other hands on the tiller. He reports to the prime minister, the health minister, cabinet and the national cabinet. He must also work in partnership with the states and territories.
The taskforce now has streams to coordinate, motivate and deliver. It also oversees an “assessments cell”, which will analyse data and track progress of the vaccine rollout against targets.
There will also be a new “program governance committee” to oversee and advise the taskforce on managing key (unspecified) risks and achieving outcomes.
Then there are business stakeholders who will be looked after by the already mentioned new “industry liaison cell”.
This interesting addition will coordinate the allocation of vaccines to approved business partners, drive how businesses communicate about vaccination, and facilitate policy discussions relating to issues business raises.
This could help efficiently drive vaccinations in the workplace. But it’s easy to see how disruptive this could be if industry voices and needs are privileged over those of communities that may not have the government’s ear.
Two issues highlight the potential problems ahead.
The first is the deliberate decision that a number of vulnerable population groups — including community carers, people in mental health facilities and immigration detention, the homeless and prisoners — are not included in this plan and responsibilities for their vaccinations will be left to current jurisdictions. This is unfair and untenable.
The second is the lack of insight into what has gone wrong with the vaccine rollout to date.
Ultimately, the only way to know if this military-style campaign plan will fight the pandemic war and defeat the coronavirus enemy is to marshal the troops, invoke a national call to arms, and begin the battle, adjusting the battle plan as needed.
Lesley Russell 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.
The Belarusian sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya left Tokyo this week after her Olympics were over, bound not for her home country, but a new home in Poland.
Tsimanouskaya was granted a humanitarian visa by the Polish government after claiming the Belarusian Olympic Committee was trying to force her back to Minsk where she was in danger for her life. According to Tsimanouskaya, “her team had ‘made it clear’ she would face punishment if she returned home”. She wanted protection and asylum.
Tsimanouskaya was not the only athlete to attempt to flee in Japan. On July 16, the Ugandan weightlifter Julius Ssekitoleko left his training camp, with a note saying he hoped to find work in Japan. He is now back in Uganda, where he has been charged with conspiracy to defraud for allegedly travelling to Japan without having qualified for the games.
A history of asylum claims
As the historian Barbara Keys notes, international sporting competitions “provide a very attractive opportunity for people to escape difficult situations at home, most often political repression”.
While athletes claiming asylum often have overlapping political and economic motives, the most high-profile defections of athletes were strongly linked to geopolitics during the Cold War.
In the 1948 London Games, the gymnastics coach Marie Provazníková became the first known defector from the Olympics when she refused to return to Czechoslovakia after the communist coup that toppled the democratic Benes government. Provazníková said she sought asylum because of the “lack of freedom” in Prague.
During the Cold War, athletes seeking to abandon communist states for the US or western Europe expressed diverse motivations, but newspapers mobilised the politicised language of “defection” as a catch-all phrase for these moves.
One of the largest numbers of asylum seekers at an Olympics were the Hungarians who defected during the 1956 Games in Melbourne.
The Olympics came shortly after the bloody Soviet invasion of Hungary, which ended political reforms in that country. CIA planners helped convince Hungarian athletes to defect, even as the Hungarians battled Soviet athletes in the pool and on the track. However, as historian Johanna Mellis explains, some of those defectors soon discovered that life in America was not necessarily as good as in communist Hungary.
Laszlo Tabori, a Hungarian champion miler, for instance, shared a three-bedroom house with 12 other athletes in California. A quarter of the defectors eventually returned to Hungary.
In 1972, over a hundred athletes defected during the Munich Olympics, but some reporters privileged political motives over other reasons in telling their stories.
And during the 1976 Montreal Games, Soviet diver Sergei Nemtsanov sought asylum in Canada, but his defection seemed motivated by love rather than by politics. When his American girlfriend broke up with him, he returned broken-hearted to the Soviet Union.
The role of international law
Under the 1967 protocol of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of a Refugee, a refugee is defined to be
anyone who is outside their own country and is unable or unwilling to return due to a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, membership to a particular social group, or political opinion.
Signatories to that convention have the obligation to not return refugees to their country of origin. Other international treaties offer rules and guidelines on the treatment of refugees in host countries.
The crux of many of these agreements is that asylum seekers need to be physically in another country to claim asylum and their reason for not wanting to return home is linked to political, ethnic or other forms of persecution, not economics.
Because of their greater mobility, athletes are more able than most to be in a position to ask for asylum. Before finally defecting at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, for instance, Iraqi weightlifter Raed Ahmed had sought international competitions “as the best way to get out of Iraq for good”, according to one report.
As a result, countries hosting international sporting competitions have long prepared for athletes to defect. Even so, officials can still be caught off-guard.
More than a dozen athletes sought asylum during the 2012 London Olympics, and over three years later, the government was still adjudicating their claims. Many athletes who seek asylum face difficult circumstances, including homelessness.
Ironically, many countries happily welcome successful migrant athletes into their fold if they can win gold medals. Qatar and Bahrain have recently fielded Olympic teams full of migrants. In fact, 23 of the 39 Qatari athletes at the 2016 Rio Games were foreign-born.
The International Olympic Committee’s uneven approach to refugees complicates how nations respond to athletic asylum claims.
Officially, the IOC keeps no official tally of asylum seekers at the games. In response to a German media outlet in 2012, the IOC said
There is no stipulation relating to this subject contained in the Olympic Charter. The IOC does not keep a record of cases where athletes, other members of team delegations, or sporting officials may have defected while attending the Olympic Games.
Nevertheless, for over 25 years, the IOC has worked closely with the UN Human Rights Commission to promote athletics in refugee camps and there is now even an Olympic refugee team that competes at the games.
Whenever they saw fit, they exploited me […] I am one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran who they have been playing with for years.
At the same time, however, the IOC did not heed international calls to punish Iran after a wrestler was executed for what human rights activists say were political reasons. (The IOC says its president made appeals to Iran’s leaders to show “mercy” to the wrestler.)
The IOC has opened an investigation into Tsimanouskaya’s case and has demanded Belarus respond to allegations it tried to force the sprinter onto a plane back to Minsk last week. The IOC could sanction Belarus over the incident, but this remains to be seen.
Keith Rathbone 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.
One reason is the official narratives universities present about themselves. The expectations of many stakeholders, not least national governments, shape these narratives. The cruel irony is that this makes our universities all appear the same.
So universities are castigated for their lack of originality and failure to differentiate. There are calls for greater diversity in their teaching and research.
It was claimed these reforms would promote greater diversity in higher education. Observers suggest the opposite occurred very rapidly. Subsequent government reports continued to advocate greater institutional diversity.
By 2008 the Bradley Review had led to so-called mission-based compacts. These were intended to formalise diverse university missions, through agreements negotiated with the Commonwealth. In practice, each university periodically completes a template outlining its planned activities and key performance indicators.
So what does this government program, designed to stimulate diverse and specialised missions, show us? The university compacts provide a veritable bingo card of descriptors for research activity such as:
focus and concentration on research strengths
collaboration and cross-disciplinary thematic approaches
application to complex national and global problems
investment in health and medical areas
growth and nurturing of external partnerships, engagement and impact.
The sameness of institutional research positioning is so pronounced that individual university claims of distinctiveness appear contradictory. It’s easy to see from the compacts how a view has taken hold that universities are all too much alike.
What do we see, though, when exploring beyond abstract institutional descriptions? In another part of our research we looked at Australia’s oldest university, the University of Sydney. This case shows how institutional pronouncements represent a veneer over what is really a hugely diverse internal ecosystem.
This university’s compacts and strategy identify around two dozen areas of research. Extracting from its website and annual reports, however, we find the number of faculties, schools, centres, networks and research groupings exceeds 240.
The picture presented by the University of Sydney’s mission-based compact doesn’t do justice to the full diversity of its research. Shutterstock
The finer detail of such an environment is impossible to articulate in a digestible form. Nobody, least of all government departments with templates and performance indicators in hand, is likely to want to read about such a labyrinth. They are even less likely to invest in something so difficult to describe and manage that it could be labelled organised anarchy.
Universities aim to produce institutional descriptions acceptable to both internal and external stakeholders. This means the extent of internal diversity within even a single university requires considerable finessing.
While the resulting products are then vague and unoriginal, they follow a recipe of heavily institutionalised norms and expectations through which universities signal their status and legitimacy. Australian universities universally believe this is the key to the resources they need to survive and thrive.
It may not appear so at first glance, but differences between universities become clear when examined closely through their research. The research enterprise itself is built on the value of originality and difference. These attributes are controlled mercilessly at a project level through peer review.
And, unlike other enterprises, cross-institutional collaborations are the norm for research.
While important in terms of status and branding, and to those who manage and co-ordinate resource allocation, institutional constructs can be arbitrary distinctions. They can be quite removed from the day-to-day activities of researchers, who are akin to franchisees managing their own research businesses.
Our research also supports the idea that, at the institutional level, Australian universities are highly passive in how they respond to environmental influences. In particular, universities respond diligently to signals from government, on which they feel dependent.
Couple this with a contradiction between policy logic that seeks diversity and associated programs that appear to stifle it, and the result is the homogeneity that we perceive. Compacts provide but one example of this dynamic.
The funding model for universities makes research a (mandatory) cost-bearing exercise. To subsidise research, universities have converged upon the international student market, which lacks the regulatory constraints placed upon domestic student fees and enrolments. A more comprehensive suite of offerings for international students naturally enables institutions to maximise the fees they can generate. This then helps cover the unfunded costs of research.
The funding and regulatory settings that limit university choices are rightly easy targets for blame. But these settings work hand in hand with the unoriginal goals of universities, which reflect a lack of diversity in thinking and approaches to dealing with systemic challenges.
Before jumping headlong into reconfiguring the sector, it may be prudent to examine more closely how and in what ways our universities are similar. When perceiving sameness, we should be careful to ensure we are not missing the finer details that are often – for good reasons – obscured.
The long-observed homogeneity of our universities may be a function of how and why we are asking certain questions, as well as where we choose to focus our attention.
The research on University of Sydney was undertaken before Kalervo Gulson commenced his current position.
Kristy Muir currently receives funding from Vincent Fairfax Foundation, The Myer Foundation, Sidney Myer Trust, Paul Ramsay Foundation and the National Australia Bank.
Julian Zipparo 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.
Recently released modelling from the Doherty Institute, which the federal government used to back its roadmap out of the pandemic, misses one critical point — the importance of vaccinating children.
The Doherty modelling instead focuses on vaccinating 70-80% of the adult population as thresholds for easing various restrictions, such as lockdowns. It says vaccinating younger adults, in particular, is important to reach these thresholds.
However, our modelling shows vaccinating children is vital if we are to reach herd immunity, which would allow us to ease restrictions and safely open up.
This would mean potentially vaccinating children as young as 5 years old.
However, we are still waiting to see if this is safe and effective, with trials under way in the United States. So we need a plan that assumes we may never achieve herd immunity.
Here’s what our modelling shows and how it differs from the modelling used to advise the federal government.
Our modelling, which we’ve uploaded as a pre-print and has yet to be peer-reviewed, considers different vaccine strategies for Australia to achieve herd immunity. That’s when we can expect no sustained transmission of the virus in the community.
We take into account the Delta variant, which is twice as infectious as the original Wuhan strain of the virus, and has a reproduction number estimated between 5 and 10. In other words, this is when one person infected with Delta is estimated to infect 5-10 others.
We also consider different contact patterns across various age groups. This is because some age groups are more mobile and have many contacts. If infected, these people are more likely to infect many others, particularly of similar age, which can lead to reservoirs of transmission.
We combine this information with possible vaccine effects. These include the possibility of having the vaccine then becoming infected, having symptoms, and if infected, how serious the illness is and how infectious people are.
This allows us to model what’s likely, given we’re focused on the Delta variant for now, and allows us to assess the impact of strategies across different age groups, types of vaccines and percentage vaccinated.
Our interactive tool also allows rapid response to changing information, such as new variants, or new evidence about vaccine impact.
Delta is more infectious
The Wuhan strain had a basic reproduction number of 2.5. This means, at the start of the pandemic, one person infected with it was expected to infect 2.5 others.
If the Delta variant is twice as infectious, this means its basic reproduction number may be over 5 (at the lower range of international estimates). So this changes the number (and type) of people we need to vaccinate to reach herd immunity considerably.
The simplest form of the herd immunity equation would suggest we needed to fully immunise 60% of the population to achieve herd immunity for the Wuhan strain but as much as 80% for the Delta variant.
If we take into account how different age groups mingle or are in contact with others, the situation is worse.
For the Wuhan strain, children were not as infectious or susceptible to infection and we predict that if we vaccinate 65% of the adults, transmission would not continue among children.
However, with the Delta variant, we predict children will continue to infect other children, even when most adults are vaccinated.
We also know both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines are less able to protect against the Delta variant, with a reduced efficacy after one dose and slightly reduced efficacy after two doses.
All this makes achieving herd immunity a great challenge.
We estimate if the reproduction number is 5, then vaccinating 85% of the population, including children down to age 5, will be necessary to achieve herd immunity.
If the reproduction number is as low as 3, then vaccinating children will not be necessary to achieve herd immunity and we will only need to vaccinate 60% of the population.
The Doherty modelling uses an effective reproduction number of 3.6. This explains why its modelling does not see vaccinating children as critical to reaching herd immunity. This is the major difference between our model and theirs.
What happens next?
Of course, new variants may arise pushing Delta aside, and the world post-COVID is unpredictable.
The lesson from Delta is if we don’t vaccinate children, we may need to continue some form of public health action to prevent large-scale circulation of the virus.
This would not require stringent lockdown, but may require ongoing mask use and physical distancing, including in children. The alternative is to reduce the focus on case numbers, expect transmission and focus on protecting the most vulnerable.
Herd immunity is not the only possible target. Even if we don’t reach full herd immunity, we may achieve “herd protection”. This provides some reduced risk to people who can’t or won’t be vaccinated, and it will make outbreaks smaller and easier to control.
And without full herd immunity, individuals still benefit from vaccination as they are dramatically less likely to die from COVID.
We predict Australia’s strategy of vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable first is the best strategy for reducing deaths under most circumstances, particularly when there is insufficient vaccine available.
But once the most vulnerable groups have been covered, we should turn our attention to the highest transmitters to achieve herd protection. In Australia, this group is the late teens and young adults.
Whether we next focus on vaccinating children is controversial and many people have voiced their concerns about going down this path. This is because COVID is generally a very mild illness for most children — although long COVID and life-threatening complications can arise.
So we need to balance the risks with benefits. But included in the benefits should be the potential benefit of herd protection and the freedoms that may bring.
The typical Australian will change careers five to seven times during their professional lifetime, by some estimates. And this is likely to increase as new technologies automate labour, production is moved abroad, and economic crises unfold.
Jobs disappearing is not a new phenomenon – have you seen an elevator operator recently? – but the pace of change is picking up, threatening to leave large numbers of workers unemployed and unemployable.
New technologies also create new jobs, but the skills they require do not always match the old jobs. Successfully moving between jobs requires making the most of your current skills and acquiring new ones, but these transitions can falter if the gap between old and new skills is too large.
We have built a system to recommend career transitions, using machine learning to analyse more than 8 million online job ads to see what moves are likely to be successful. The details are published in PLOS ONE.
Our system starts by measuring similarities between the skills required by each occupation. For example, an accountant could become a financial analyst because the required skills are similar, but a speech therapist might find it harder to become a financial analyst as the skill sets are quite different.
Next, we looked at a large set of real-world career transitions to see which way around these transitions usually go: accountants are more likely to become financial analysts than vice versa.
Finally, our system can recommend a career change that’s likely to succeed – and tell you what skills you may need to make it work.
Measure the similarity of occupations
Our system uses a measure economists call “revealed comparative advantage” (RCA) to identify how important an individual skill is to a job, using online job ads from 2018. The map below visualises the similarity of the top 500 skills. Each marker represents an individual skill, coloured according to one of 13 clusters of highly similar skills.
The similarity between the top 500 skills in Australian job ads in 2018. Highly similar skills cluster together.
Once we know how similar different skills are, we can estimate how similar different professions are based on the skills required. The figure below visualises the similarity between Australian occupations in 2018.
Each marker shows an individual occupation, and the colours depict the risk each occupation faces from automation over the next two decades (blue shows low risk and red shows high risk). Visibly similar occupations are grouped closely together, with medical and highly skilled occupations facing the lowest automation risk.
The similarity between occupations, coloured by technological automation risk.
Mapping transitions
We then took our measure of similarity between occupations and combined it with a range of other labour market variables, such as employment levels and education requirements, to build our job transition recommender system.
Our system uses machine learning techniques to “learn” from real job transitions in the past and predict job movements in the future. Not only does it achieve high levels of accuracy (76%), but it also accounts for asymmetries between job transitions. Performance is measured by how accurately the system predicts whether a transition occurred, when applied to historic job transitions.
The full transitions map is big and complicated, but you can see how it works below in a small version that only includes transitions between 20 occupations. In the map, the “source” occupation is shown on the horizontal axis and the “target” occupation on the vertical axis.
If you look at a given occupation at the bottom of the map, the column of squares shows the probability of moving from that occupation to the one listed at the right-hand side. The darker the square, the higher the probability of making the transition.
A small piece of the transitions map, with 20 occupations. Transitions occur from columns to rows, and darker blue shades depict high transition probabilities. Source, Author provided
Sometimes a new career requires developing new skills, but which skills? Our system can help identify those. Let’s take a look at how it works for “domestic cleaners”, an occupation where employment has shrunk severely during COVID-19 in Australia.
New occupations and skills recommendations made by the Job Transitions Recommender System for ‘Domestic Cleaners’ – a ‘non-essential’ occupation that has experienced significant declines during the COVID-19 outbreak in Australia.
First, we use the transitions map to see which occupations it is easiest for a domestic cleaner to transition to. The colours split occupations by their status during the COVID-19 crisis – blue occupations are “essential” jobs that can continue to operate during lockdown, and red are “non-essential”.
We identify top recommended occupations, as seen on the right side of the flow diagram (bottom half of the image), sorted in descending order by transition probability. The width of each band in the diagram shows the number of openings available for each occupation. The segment colours represent whether the demand has increased or decreased compared with the same period of 2019 (pre-COVID).
The first six transition recommendations for are all “non-essential” services, which have unsurprisingly experienced decreased demand. However, the seventh is “aged and disabled carers”, which is classified as “essential” and grew significantly in demand during the beginning of the COVID-19 period.
Since your prospects of finding work are better if you transition to an occupation
in high demand, we select “aged and disabled carers” as the target occupation for this example.
What skills to develop for new occupations
Our system can also recommend skills that workers need to develop to increase their chances of a successful transition. We argue that a worker should invest in developing the skills most important to their new profession and which are most different from the skills they currently have.
For a “domestic cleaner”, the top-recommended skills needed to transition to “aged and disabled carer” are specialised patient care skills, such as “patient hygiene assistance”.
On the other hand, there’s less need to develop unimportant skills or ones that are highly similar to skills from your current occupation. Skills such as “business analysis” and “finance” are of low importance for an “aged and disabled carer”, so they should not be prioritised. Similarly, skills such as “ironing” and “laundry” are required for the new job but it is likely that a “domestic cleaner” already possesses these skills (or can easily acquire them).
The benefit of smoother job transitions
While the future of work remains unclear, change is inevitable. New technologies, economic crises and other factors will continue to shift labour demands, causing workers to move between jobs.
If labour transitions occur efficiently, there are significant productivity and equity benefits for everyone. If transitions are slow, or fail, it will have significant costs for both individuals and the state and the individual. The methods and systems we put forward here could significantly improve the achievement of these goals.
We thank Bledi Taska and Davor Miskulin from Burning Glass Technologies for generously providing the job advertisements data for this research and for their valuable feedback. We also thank Stijn Broecke and other colleagues from the OECD for their ongoing input and guidance in the development of this work.
Nik Dawson works as a Senior Data Scientist for FutureFit AI. Nik received funding from the OECD as a Future of Work Fellow to support this research. Burning Glass Technologies generously provided the job advertisements data that enabled this research.
Marian-Andrei Rizoiu receives funding from Facebook Research under the Content Policy Research Initiative grants and by the Commonwealth of Australia (represented by the Defence Science and Technology Group).
Mary-Anne Williams receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
