Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Terri Seddon, Professor of Education, La Trobe University

Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge has launched a six-month review into teacher education. The aim is to return Australian students to the top of international rankings in reading, maths and science by 2030.

In the 2019 round of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), 41% of Australian 15 year olds failed to meet the minimum national standards in reading – up from 31% in 2000. In maths and science, Australian students trailed students in 23 and 12 countries respectively, including Singapore, Poland and Canada.

Read more: Aussie students are a year behind students 10 years ago in science, maths and reading

The ministerial press release for the initial teacher review said teacher education was the most critical element towards lifting our international standards. The review will address two key questions: how to attract and select high-quality candidates into teaching, and how to prepare them to become effective teachers.

The education minister said “many teachers are still graduating from their courses insufficiently prepared to teach in a classroom”.

But what do we mean by classroom readiness? Our education system, and those who work in it, need to be ready not just for classroom teaching, but also for disruption.

The changing classroom

The currently announced review echoes a 2014 report from the the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group, Action Now: Classroom Ready Teachers. This recommended for schools, universities and education systems to work together as partners to prepare “classroom-ready” teachers.

We investigated the effects of the implementation of these 2014 reforms. We interviewed teachers, academics and leaders in schools and universities to help us understand the partnerships recommended in the report.

Our data shows teachers and leaders in education need to be ready not only for classrooms, but also for disruption and catastrophe.

In announcing the launch of the current review, Minister Tudge acknowledged that last year, in particular, had shown us the importance of teachers.

Teachers were challenged to make informed decisions and be as effective as possible during a period of disruption.

Teachers stepped up to the challenges of supporting school students learning from home. But pre-service teachers — those undertaking the initial education courses Tudge wants to review – couldn’t demonstrate how “classroom-ready” they were. That’s because no classrooms operated and, as the university deans noticed, school leaders and teachers did not count pre-service teachers as “priority work”.

The work that had been done to build partnerships between schools, universities and education systems to prepare pre-service teachers for the classroom – as recommended by the 2014 report – fell over when schools had to deny them professional placements.

This created a crisis of teacher supply. Every year Victoria requires around 5,000 teaching graduates to move into the teaching profession to meet workforce needs across the state, Catholic and independent school systems. But internal university data in 2020 suggested Victoria would be lucky to have even 1,500 graduates.

Read more: ‘Exhausted beyond measure’: what teachers are saying about COVID-19 and the disruption to education

The 2014 reports’ recommendations were implemented, but they became impossible to operate when catastrophe struck. This example shows school closures didn’t just affect classrooms but all parts of the education system — teacher education programs, teacher recruitment and supply of teachers to schools in 2021.

It’s an uncertain world

The start of a global pandemic may never happen again in the same way as it did in 2020. But last year also presented mega fires and floods — environmental as well as health scares — and the world is still struggling for control in 2021. Those events affected industries, driving unemployment up and increasing government welfare spending.

In a world that is integrated globally, with continuing evidence of climate consequences, it seems risky to revert to business as usual.

For kids to have jobs of the future, teachers and leaders working in schools and university need to problem-solve when disruption hits. When routine work is impossible, professionals must be confident they can adapt.

Australians need to know how to live in uncertain times, which means teachers must also learn to teach and lead in unexpected circumstances.

– ref. The education minister wants graduating teachers to be ‘classroom-ready’. But the classroom is not what it used to be – https://theconversation.com/the-education-minister-wants-graduating-teachers-to-be-classroom-ready-but-the-classroom-is-not-what-it-used-to-be-159051

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Staff, PhD Candidate, Australian National University

“Suffragette white” is proving to be a popular fashion choice for women who want to make a statement. Most recently, former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate donned a white jacket in her appearance before a Senate inquiry into her controversial departure from the organisation.

Her sartorial choice formed part of the “Wear White 2 Unite” campaign, which encouraged people to sport the colour in support of Holgate and call for an end to workplace bullying.

In doing this, Holgate, like Brittany Higgins last month at the Canberra March4Justice, is building on a trend in which women are wearing white clothing — and often referencing suffrage history — to draw attention to gender inequity today.

Deeds not words

The term “suffragette” is sometimes mistakenly used to refer to all those who campaigned for women’s voting rights. But it was actually a label applied to a specific group of women — initially in a derogatory sense.

The women’s suffrage movement in Britain took off during the 1860s. By the turn of the 20th century, women still did not have the vote.

This led Emmeline Pankhurst to establish the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Her group of primarily white women believed militancy was the only way they could achieve change, living by the motto “deeds not words”.

The British press mockingly labelled these women “suffragettes”, adding the diminutive suffix “-ette” in an attempt to de-legitimise them. But Pankhurst’s group was not deterred. It reclaimed the term, eliminating the element of ridicule and rebranding it as “a name of highest honour”.

Her group’s dramatic actions – from disrupting meetings to damaging public property – cemented their place in the history of women’s suffrage.

Purity, dignity and hope

Early 20th century suffrage campaigns relied heavily on spectacle and pageantry, using striking visual imagery and mass gatherings to garner the attention of the press and the wider public.

Many suffrage organisations adopted colours to symbolise their agenda. In Britain, the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies used red and white in their banners, later adding green. The WSPU chose white, purple and green: white for purity, purple for dignity and green for hope.

Suffragette white was first donned en masse in June 1908 on Women’s Sunday, the first “monster meeting” hosted by the WSPU in London’s Hyde Park. The 30,000 participants were encouraged to wear white, accessorised with touches of purple and green.

Ahead of the march, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence’s newspaper Votes for Women explained:

the effect will be a magnificent moving colour scheme never before seen in London’s streets.

White fabric was relatively affordable, which meant women of different backgrounds could participate. The colour’s association with purity also helped those involved present themselves as respectable, dignified women.

Suffragette white became a mainstay of the WSPU’s demonstrations. In 1911, women who had been imprisoned for militancy were among those who marched in white in the Women’s Coronation Procession.

The Australian suffragist Vida Goldstein, wearing a white dress, famously headed the Australian contingent.

Goldstein later brought the WSPU’s colours to Australia in her campaigns for a parliamentary seat.

Read more: Friday essay: Sex, power and anger — a history of feminist protests in Australia

Two years later in 1913, members of the WSPU wore white in a funeral procession for their colleague Emily Wilding Davison, who died under the hooves of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby.

American suffragists soon picked up this tactic, influenced by the British suffragettes as well as by the temperance movement’s use of white ribbons.

Cities like Washington D.C. witnessed similar scenes of women in white dresses marching through the streets, making striking material for photographers. Contemporary black women — who were excluded from the suffrage movement in many ways — used the colour in their protests against racial violence, too.

Feminist solidarity

The modern trend towards white has had particular traction in the US.

In 2019, Donald Trump faced a sea of suffragette white at his State of the Union address. Last year, Kamala Harris wore a white pantsuit to deliver her remarks as vice president-elect.

Closer to home, at the March4Justice rally in Canberra, Brittany Higgins made a surprise appearance in a white outfit, standing in contrast to the funereal black worn by attendees.

By wearing white, these women — either consciously or not — are building connections with their feminist forebears across the Anglosphere. At times this can flatten the complex history of women’s suffrage. It is important to remember it was primarily white, middle-class women who led these suffrage movements, often to the exclusion of women of colour and others.

In drawing on their feminist genealogy, women today need to acknowledge the limitations of feminisms past and present — and not simply celebrate and reproduce the attitudes of over a hundred years ago.

At the same time, wearing suffragette white is a powerful and highly symbolic gesture that reminds us just how long women have been fighting.

By establishing a sense of feminist solidarity across time and space, this move can also generate inspiration and energy and attract media attention. Women of colour’s choice to wear white can be read as a way of asserting their place within a movement from which they have historically been (and continue to be) excluded — and honouring women of colour who have come before them.

Like the suffragettes of the early 20th century, women today are showing the power of visual spectacle to grab the public’s attention. Whether this will, in turn, lead to real change remains to be seen.

– ref. What is suffragette white? The colour has a 110-year history as a protest tool – https://theconversation.com/what-is-suffragette-white-the-colour-has-a-110-year-history-as-a-protest-tool-158957

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

Although the country’s vaccine rollout is not progressing entirely as planned, thousands of Australians continue to receive their COVID vaccines every week.

As a general practitioner administering the AstraZeneca vaccine, I find it strange that my patients all know about the very rare potential complications — such as blood clots — yet often don’t know what side effects they can realistically expect.

Side effects show the vaccine is working

Vaccines work by training our immune system to fight disease.

Many of the side effects we experience after a vaccination (of any sort, not just against COVID-19) are actually because our immune system is doing its thing. If we train for a sport we expect to get sore muscles from training, as well as when we actually compete. Training our immune system is no different.

Possible reactions to vaccines include headache, fever, injection site pain, muscle and joint pain, and fatigue.

Side effects tend to vary slightly between different vaccines, and different people will experience them differently.

Read more: How do we know the COVID vaccine won’t have long-term side-effects?

Reporting side effects generates information

Because COVID vaccines are so new, Australia’s Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has requested every reaction suspected to be from a COVID vaccine be reported. This is happening in a number of ways.

For doctors and nurses administering COVID vaccines, reporting adverse events is mandatory. Of course, many adverse events only occur after a person has left the clinic, so patients are advised to self-report any symptoms or side effects that concern them.

You can report any side effects via the health-care setting where you had your vaccination (if they have a system for this), via the NPS MedicineWise Adverse Medicine Events line on 1300 134 237, or through the TGA.

Many vaccination centres also send out SMS questionnaires after your vaccine. Innovative software including Vaxtracker and Smartvax are facilitating this.

As a result, we’ve been able to gather a large amount of data about both the Pfizer and the AstraZeneca vaccines since their rollout began in Australia. We no longer need to rely on drug company trial results.

A government-funded research organisation collates the data from these reporting mechanisms, and weekly updates on COVID-19 vaccine safety are freely available.

Read more: Do I still need to get a COVID vaccine if I’ve had coronavirus?

A snapshot of the current data

More than 200,000 Australians — over two-thirds of people surveyed through these mechanisms so far — have participated in feeding back data.

Some 51.8% of respondents have reported some kind of adverse event, but only 1.2% experienced events serious enough for them to seek medical attention.

The types of events people have reported for both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines are similar to those reported in clinical trials, and what we’re seeing in other countries. They include fatigue, headaches, pain/swelling at the injection site, muscle aches, chills, fever and joint pain.

Symptoms appear to be more pronounced after the second dose, which fits with our understanding that they generally indicate a natural immune response rather than anything more sinister (we have a more developed immune response after the second dose). Symptoms usually resolve within three days of vaccination.

How does this compare to other vaccines?

According to Australian data collected on the influenza vaccine in 2020, only 5.5% of people reported any adverse event, with just 0.3% being serious enough to see a doctor about.

You could therefore say the COVID-19 vaccine is causing side effects much more often. It’s possible there’s a biological reason for this — our immune systems may be fighting harder than they do when faced with influenza vaccines.

But there may be a behavioural reason for higher reports too. Perhaps people are being hyper-vigilant about any apparent reaction they’re experiencing to COVID vaccines, possibly inducing what we call a “nocebo” response. This is when negative expectations around a treatment cause patients to report more negative effects than they would have otherwise.

It’s fair to say no vaccine has been as highly scrutinised by the public as the COVID vaccines.

Certain groups may be more likely to get side effects

Are women more likely to have an adverse reaction to a COVID vaccine? While this may seem fairly simple to answer from the data, confounding features make it more complex.

While women do report minor reactions more often, is that partly because they’re more conscientious at reporting? We know women are more likely to seek help for their health in general. The answer to this question continues to be debated.

One group that clearly does have more pronounced reactions is younger people. This is probably because their immune systems mount a stronger response to the vaccine.

Managing side effects

Whichever vaccine you receive, remember side effects are common and expected.

If you’re concerned, the government’s side effect checker asks questions which can help you ascertain whether your reaction is normal, or whether it’s more serious and you should seek medical attention.

It’s fine to take paracetamol or ibuprofen for symptom relief, but taking these pre-emptively is not recommended for COVID-19 vaccines.

Notably, between 4.7% and 23.2% of people are reporting missing work or routine duties for a short period (generally up to one day) following the vaccine. I suggest my patients have their vaccine — especially the second dose — just before a day off work, if possible.

Read more: 5 ways our immune responses to COVID vaccines are unique

There’s excellent ongoing research happening to define the “real world” side effects from COVID-19 vaccines. Many of us can play a part, and this information can inform us as a community about what to expect.

While serious but rare side effects are making the headlines, the realistic expectation for most of us is that we may feel mildly unwell, and may need to take a day off our regular commitments, especially after our second dose.

– ref. We’re gathering data on COVID vaccine side effects in real time. Here’s what you can expect – https://theconversation.com/were-gathering-data-on-covid-vaccine-side-effects-in-real-time-heres-what-you-can-expect-158945

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gail Iles, Senior Lecturer in Physics, RMIT University

Yesterday at 9pm Australian Eastern standard time, the Ingenuity helicopter — which landed on Mars with the Perseverance rover in February — took off from the Martian surface. More importantly, it hovered for about 30 seconds, three metres above the surface and came right back down again.

It may not sound like a huge feat, but it is. Ingenuity’s flight is the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet. It marks a milestone in the story of human space exploration.

While the Apollo 11 spacecraft famously touched down on the Moon, upon re-launch it simply had to exit the Moon’s gravity and return to Earth. To sustain flight within the environment of a world with no atmosphere, however, is a different story.

The now historic Ingenuity helicopter took six years to make. We can understand why, once we understand the complexities of what was required.

Why local flight on Mars is a big deal

There are several technological challenges to conducting a helicopter flight on another world. First, and most significantly, helicopters need an atmosphere to fly.

The blades, or “rotors” of a helicopter must spin fast enough to generate a force called “lift”. But lift can only be generated in the presence of some kind of atmosphere. While Mars does have an atmosphere, it’s much, much thinner than Earth’s — about 100 times thinner, in fact.

Flying Ingenuity in Mars’s atmosphere is therefore the equivalent of flying a helicopter on Earth at a height of 100,000 feet. For reference, commercial aircraft fly between 30,000-40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface and the highest we’ve ever been in a helicopter on Earth is 42,000 feet.

Testing the craft on Earth required a pressurised room, from which a lot of air would have been extracted to emulate Mars’s atmosphere.

Then there’s the Martian gravity to consider, which is about one-third the strength of gravity on Earth. This actually gives us a slight advantage. If Mars had the same atmosphere as Earth, it’s lesser gravity means we’d be able to lift Ingenuity with less power than would be required here.

But while Mars’s gravity works to our advantage, this is offset by the lack of atmosphere.

Ingenuity’s success marks the first time such a flight has even been attempted outside of Earth. And the reason for this may simply be that, as laid out above, this task is very, very difficult.

Read more: ‘7 minutes of terror’: a look at the technology Perseverance will need to survive landing on Mars

Advanced manufacturing

There are two main ways Ingenuity was able to overcome the hurdles presented in Mars’s atmosphere. Firstly, to generate lift, the two rotors (made from carbon fibre) had to spin much faster than any helicopter’s on Earth.

On Earth, most helicopters and drones have rotors that spin at about 400-500 revolutions per minute. The Ingenuity’s rotor spun at about 2,400 revolutions per minute.

It also has a distinct aircraft-to-wingspan ratio. While Ingenuity’s body is about the size of a tissue box, its blades are 1.2m from tip to tip.

Even transmitting the signal for the flight to begin required an array of advanced technology. Whilst it only requires minutes for radio signals to travel between Earth and Mars, there was still a delay of hours for those signals to reach the helicopter.

This makes sense when you consider the journey those signals have to take – from a computer on Earth, to a satellite dish, to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to the Perseverance rover and then, finally, to the helicopter.

Remote controlled flight on Mars

Ingenuity is what we call a “technology demonstrator”. Simply, its only purpose is to prove it can complete a series of simple missions. Over the next few weeks, the helicopter will undertake three or four more flights, the most adventurous of which will involve taking off and travelling about 300m away from Perseverance.

Data retrieved from the flights will be analysed and used as crucial input for future designs of more sophisticated aircraft. Once this technology is applied, its potential will be vast.

Drones and helicopters operating on Mars could act as scouts, checking the land ahead of a rover to confirm whether it’s safe to travel there. Such aircraft could even assist in the search for water and life on the Martian surface.

And in 2035, it’s expected the first humans will land on Mars. There’s a good chance these crews will be trained in operating aircraft locally and in real-time, surveying the land for obstacles and dangerous terrain that could harm humans, or damage suits, aircraft or rovers.

Homage to the past, with the future in sight

As a touching tribute to the first powered flight on Earth, scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory added a historic artefact to the Mars helicopter. Attached to a cable underneath one of its solar panels is a small piece of the wing from the Wright brothers’ 1903 Wright flyer.

This item of flight history is the second piece of an Earth aircraft to go into space; a similar piece of the wing was taken to the Moon during the Apollo missions.

Missions are already in work to push the barriers of powered flight on other worlds. In particular, the Dragonfly helicopter is planned to fly above the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, with arrival scheduled for 2034.

Maybe it too will take a piece of Earth’s history along for the ride as we continue our exploration of other planetary bodies, one world at a time.

– ref. So a helicopter flew on Mars for the first time. A space physicist explains why that’s such a big deal – https://theconversation.com/so-a-helicopter-flew-on-mars-for-the-first-time-a-space-physicist-explains-why-thats-such-a-big-deal-159334

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ann Kayis-Kumar, Associate Professor, UNSW

When Debbie (not her real name) lost her main client and was left without a reliable income, the sole trader sold her home and adjoining investment unit to pay off her debts and ensure she had the means to support her daughter and herself.

But things didn’t work out as she had hoped.

A year later she was still mired in debt – only now to the Australian Tax Office, owing more than A$70,000 in capital gains tax from the sale of the investment property. By the time the payment deadline came, she still owed about A$61,000 plus A$13,500 in ATO-charged interest.

So she applied for tax relief under the “serious hardship” relief provisions that have been part of Australian tax law since 1915.

Her case might seem exactly the sort of reason why Australia’s Taxation Administration Act gives the Commissioner of Taxation discretion to release individuals “in whole or in part” from tax debts, if they will “suffer serious hardship” by being required to pay.

Debbie had always paid her taxes on time. A single mother, she had never drawn child-support payments. She was not in good health, having had breast cancer and depression. But her application was rejected. Twice.

Because Debbie’s claim had a fatal flaw, according to the rules governing the tax commissioner’s discretion. She couldn’t show that having her tax debt waived would, on its own, save her from serious financial hardship.

That is, the rules effectively say a tax debt can only be waived if it is the only debt pushing a person into serious hardship. But even without the tax debt, Debbie couldn’t meet her living expenses. Her application was therefore rejected.

So, perversely, the greater the financial hardship a person finds themselves in, the less likely a tax debt will be waived.

This, and a few other significant quirks, is why the ATO’s tax relief rules need reform.

No published data since 2013

We know Debbie’s story because she is one of a very small number that have appealed the tax Commissioner’s decision to the federal Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Just 34 appeals have been made in the past 50 years, according to our analysis. All but four lost those appeals.

One interpretation of these numbers is the tax office almost always makes the right decision – granting relief when appropriate and denying it when not. We’re not convinced.

How many people apply and are granted relief in any year? We don’t know.

The Australian Tax Office hasn’t published those figures since 2013. The numbers for that year show about 15,000 people applied. About 2,500 were granted full or partial tax debt forgiveness.

We can only speculate about why this data is no longer published. But one effect is to minimise awareness that people in financial hardship can apply for tax debt relief. Our research suggests many more than 15,000 people could potentially qualify.

Perverse rules

But the perversities of the rules mean those most needing help don’t necessarily get it, as shown by the 34 cases we have examined.

The median tax debt in those cases was about A$80,000. A majority (19 of the 34) represented themselves, while the tax office was represented by lawyers. The reasons they found themselves in debt were generally complex – involving serious mental and physical health problems, relationship breakdowns, carer responsibilities preventing full-time return to work, and so on. Seven were self-employed.

Read more: Hard bump ahead? Drop in insolvencies and bankruptcies is a ticking time bomb

Looking at the reasons most these claims were rejected, we see the need for three key reforms.

1. The greater the hardship, the less relief offered

As outlined above, the tax commissioner can release someone from a tax debt only when it is “solely” the payment of that tax debt that will cause “serious hardship”.

This was the case in the two appeals that succeeded. In cases such as Debbie’s, no relief was granted because waiving the tax debt would not resolve all the person’s financial troubles.

This causal link should be removed.

2. Penalised for paying other debts

This leads to the second reform. Evidence of a person paying off other debts is grounds to disqualify them from tax debt relief.

The rationale is that tax obligations shouldn’t be treated as less important than other debts. But it has the perverse outcome that someone who pays off a credit card debt before their tax is effectively barred from serious hardship relief.

Rather than a “one strike and you’re out” approach, the law should recognise degrees of culpability – distinguishing between someone who deliberately and intentionally disregards their obligations and someone who gets in financial trouble due to losing their job, sickness, business failure, relationship breakdown and so on.

3. GST-related debts are excluded

Arguably the most problematic aspect of the rules is they make no provision for financial difficulties arising from being a sole trader or running a small business. In particular, the rules exclude forgiving GST debts.

On one level this makes sense. GST is meant to be collected with every invoice, then forwarded to the tax office with quarterly Business Activity Statements. A GST debt is therefore pocketing other people’s tax.

But these days many people are forced into being small business people, such as through working as contractors. They can be overwhelmed by the paper work, and not have the cash to pay a bookkeeper to do it for them. In our experience from running a tax clinic, people who come to us for help on average are eight years behind on tax returns and seven years on business activity statements.

The rules should recognise this reality and allow GST-related tax liabilities to be forgiven in some circumstances.

Read more: Performers and sole traders find it hard to get JobKeeper in part because they get behind on their paperwork

Time for a serious rethink

When someone is genuinely experiencing serious financial hardship, it is futile to chase them for money they cannot pay. Forcing them into bankruptcy doesn’t help anyone.

We need more compassionate rules that reflect the reality of why people find themselves in debt.

Such reform has been made even more urgent by the COVID economic crisis. Federal government subsidies and relaxation of normal rules have enabled many small businesses to stay afloat during the COVID crisis.

It hardly makes sense, given all the public money spent in other ways, for outdated tax-relief laws to force people into insolvency and bankruptcy now.

– ref. Sometimes people can do with a break: 3 ways tax debt relief rules are too tough – https://theconversation.com/sometimes-people-can-do-with-a-break-3-ways-tax-debt-relief-rules-are-too-tough-156948

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gail Iles, Senior Lecturer in Physics, RMIT University

Yesterday at 9pm Australian Eastern standard time, the Ingenuity helicopter — which landed on Mars with the Perseverance rover in February — took off from the Martian surface. More importantly, it hovered for about 30 seconds, 3 metres above the surface and came right back down again.

It may not sound like a huge feat, but it is. Ingenuity’s flight is the first powered flight of an aircraft on another planet. It marks a milestone in the story of human space exploration.

While the Apollo 11 spacecraft famously touched down on the Moon, upon re-launch it simply had to exit the Moon’s gravity and return to Earth. To sustain flight within the environment of a world with no atmosphere, however, is a different story.

The now historic Ingenuity helicopter took six years to make. We can understand why, once we understand the complexities of what was required.

Why local flight on Mars is a big deal

There are several technological challenges to conducting a helicopter flight on another world. First, and most significantly, helicopters need an atmosphere to fly.

The blades, or “rotors” of a helicopter must spin fast enough to generate a force called “lift”. But lift can only be generated in the presence of some kind of atmosphere. While Mars does have an atmosphere, it’s much, much thinner than Earth’s — about 100 times thinner, in fact.

Flying Ingenuity in Mars’ atmosphere is therefore the equivalent of flying a helicopter on Earth at a height of 100,000 feet. For reference, commercial aircraft fly between 30,000-40,000 feet above the Earth’s surface and the highest we’ve ever been in a helicopter on Earth is 42,000 feet.

Testing the craft on Earth required a pressurised room, from which a lot of air would have been extracted to emulate Mars’ atmosphere.

Then there’s the Martian gravity to consider, which is about one-third the strength of gravity on Earth. This actually gives us a slight advantage. If Mars had the same atmosphere as Earth, it’s lesser gravity means we’d be able to lift Ingenuity with less power than would be required here.

But while Mars’ gravity works to our advantage, this is offset by the lack of atmosphere.

Ingenuity’s success marks the first time such a flight has even been attempted outside of Earth. And the reason for this may simply be that, as laid out above, this task is very, very difficult.

Read more: ‘7 minutes of terror’: a look at the technology Perseverance will need to survive landing on Mars

Advanced manufacturing

There are two main ways Ingenuity was able to overcome the hurdles presented in Mars’s atmosphere. Firstly, to generate lift, the two rotors (made from carbon fibre) had to spin much faster than any helicopter’s on Earth.

On Earth, most helicopters and drones have rotors that spin at about 400-500 revolutions per minute. The Ingenuity’s rotor spun at about 2,400 revolutions per minute.

It also has a distinct aircraft-to-wingspan ratio. While Ingenuity’s body is about the size of a tissue box, its blades are 1.2 metres from tip to tip.

Even transmitting the signal for the flight to begin required an array of advanced technology. Whilst it only requires minutes for radio signals to travel between Earth and Mars, there was still a delay of hours for those signals to reach the helicopter.

This makes sense when you consider the journey those signals have to take – from a computer on Earth, to a satellite dish, to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, to the Perseverance rover and then, finally, to the helicopter.

Remote controlled flight on Mars

Ingenuity is what we call a “technology demonstrator”. Simply, its only purpose is to prove it can complete a series of simple missions. Over the next few weeks, the helicopter will undertake three or four more flights, the most adventurous of which will involve taking off and travelling about 300m away from Perseverance.

Data retrieved from the flights will be analysed and used as crucial input for future designs of more sophisticated aircraft. Once this technology is applied, its potential will be vast.

Drones and helicopters operating on Mars could act as scouts, checking the land ahead of a rover to confirm whether it’s safe to travel there. Such aircraft could even assist in the search for water and life on the Martian surface.

And in 2035, it’s expected the first humans will land on Mars. There’s a good chance these crews will be trained in operating aircraft locally and in real-time, surveying the land for obstacles and dangerous terrain that could harm humans, or damage suits, aircraft or rovers.

Homage to the past, with the future in sight

As a touching tribute to the first powered flight on Earth, scientists at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory added a historic artefact to the Mars helicopter.

Attached to a cable underneath one of its solar panels is a small piece of the wing from the Wright brothers’ 1903 Wright flyer.

This item of flight history is the second piece of an Earth aircraft to go into space; a similar piece of the wing was taken to the Moon during the Apollo missions.

Missions are already in work to push the barriers of powered flight on other worlds. In particular, the Dragonfly helicopter is planned to fly above the surface of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, with arrival scheduled for 2034.

Maybe it too will take a piece of Earth’s history along for the ride as we continue our exploration of other planetary bodies, one world at a time.

– ref. A helicopter flew on Mars for the first time. A space physicist explains why that’s such a big deal – https://theconversation.com/a-helicopter-flew-on-mars-for-the-first-time-a-space-physicist-explains-why-thats-such-a-big-deal-159334

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frédérik Saltré, Research Fellow in Ecology for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Flinders University

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

What was the Medieval warm period? What caused it, and did carbon dioxide play a role?

We are living in a world that is getting warmer year by year, threatening our environment and way of life.

But what if these climate conditions were not exceptional? What if it had already happened in the past when human influences were not part of the picture?

The often mentioned Medieval warm period seems to fit the bill. This evokes the idea that if natural global warming and all its effects occurred in the past without humans causing them, then perhaps we are not responsible for this one. And it does not really matter because if we survived one in the past, then we can surely survive one now.

But it’s just not that simple.

Read more: 2,000 years of records show it’s getting hotter, faster

The Medieval climate anomaly

This Medieval period of warming, also known as the Medieval climate anomaly, was associated with an unusual temperature rise roughly between 750 and 1350 AD (the European Middle Ages). The available evidence suggests that at times, some regions experienced temperatures exceeding those recorded during the period between 1960 and 1990.

Despite being predominantly recorded in Europe, south-western North America and in some tropical regions, the Medieval warm period affected both the northern and southern hemispheres. But the temperature increase was not universal, varying across regions of the world, and did not happen simultaneously everywhere.

While the northern hemisphere, South America, China and Australasia, and even New Zealand, recorded temperatures of 0.3-1.0 ℃ higher than those of 1960-1990 between the early ninth and late 14th centuries, in other areas such as the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, it was much cooler than today.

Mechanisms driving the Medieval warm period

The Medieval warm period was by and large a regional event. Its presence or absence reflects a redistribution of heat around the planet, and this suggests drivers other than a global increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

The most likely cause of the regional changes in temperature was related to a modification of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation.

Read more: Explainer: El Niño and La Niña

This recurring climate pattern of winds and sea-surface temperatures over the tropical eastern Pacific affects the climate and weather of much of the tropics and subtropics. It usually brings clouds and rain in the western tropical Pacific while making regions in the eastern tropical Pacific relatively drier and cooler.

During the Medieval warm period, an increase in solar radiation and decrease in volcanic eruptions created a La Niña-like event that changed the usual patterns. Stronger trade winds pushing more warm water towards Asia created wetter conditions in Australasia, droughts in the southern US and South and Central America, and heavy rains and flooding in the Pacific Northwest and Canada.

The increase in solar radiation also modified the atmospheric pressure system over the north Atlantic Ocean (North Atlantic Oscillation), which brought warmer winters and wetter conditions over northern Europe and most of north-eastern part of the North American continent. These conditions also affected the winter weather in Greenland, north Africa and northern Asia.

Unequal consequences for people and environments

For about 300 years, these new climate conditions changed ecosystems and radically altered human societies.

As northern Europe became warmer, agriculture spread and generated food surpluses. At the time, England was warm enough to support vineyards, centralised governments in Europe were becoming stronger, people no longer needed fortifications to protect their once limited arable lands, and many people left seeking new lands.

Similar agricultural expansion occurred in some parts of North America, but also in central Asia where farmers spread into the northern region of Russia, into Manchuria, the Amur Valley, and northern Japan. The early 13th Century marked the beginning of the conquests of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes.

Read more: Wet climate helped Genghis Khan conquer Asia

With sea ice and land ice in the Arctic shrinking with the rising temperatures, new lands became accessible and Vikings travelled farther north than before. They eventually reached a “green” Greenland and Iceland where they (temporarily) settled.

Such long-distance voyages also happened in the southern hemisphere. The Medieval warm period coincided with the settlement of New Zealand and the development of new trade routes across the Pacific basin.

The warm conditions during this period brought many benefits to Earth’s plant and animal life, but in some other parts of the world, people’s lives were instead made worse by intense droughts. Parts of western America and the great Mayan cities of Central America were hit by mega droughts, and Andean civilisations wilted in the face of an emptied Lake Titicaca and faltering freshwater runoff in coastal river valleys.

Small, scattered communities of the Pacific basin were forced to gather into bigger and more complex societies, concentrated in coastal areas. They harvested seafood and complemented it with products from new types of agriculture (construction of canals and sunken food gardens, agricultural terraces in steep areas, and the irrigation of lowland crops).

In contrast, La Niña brought intense monsoonal flow into northern, central and western Australia’s arid lands, increasing floods and storms that likely disrupted hunter-gatherer settlement patterns in these regions.

What this means for the future

The fact that some areas of the world actually prospered during the Medieval warm period gives ammunition to the global warming sceptics’ position. But there are two fundamental differences that make the Medieval warm period different from what we are experiencing now.

1. The present-day baseline used for comparison to the temperatures in the Medieval warm period is 1960-1990. Although it is true that in some regions the temperatures equalled or exceeded this baseline, globally the planet was still cooler on average than today. Temperatures experienced since 2000 in the northern hemisphere are already hotter than any time during the Medieval warm period.

2. The Medieval warm period is an asynchronous regional warming caused by natural (not human-driven) climatic variation, whereas we are facing a homogeneous and global warming caused by human activity releasing too much greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

Despite the uncertainties, the climate characteristics of the Medieval warm period make it an irrelevant analogue for the magnitude of climate change we are facing.

– ref. Climate explained: what was the Medieval warm period? – https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-what-was-the-medieval-warm-period-155294

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

Of all the weak targets ever adopted by Australian governments, one of the weakest has to have been an unemployment rate “comfortably below six per cent” in last year’s budget.

At the time the budget was delivered on October 6, the published unemployment rate had already fallen to 6.8%.

“Comfortably below six per cent” mattered because it formed part of the “fiscal strategy” required in each year’s budget as part of the Charter of Budget Honesty.

The strategy sets out the circumstances in which the government will tighten or loosen its purse strings.

The October 2020 strategy had two phases. The first required loose purse stings in order to “quickly drive down the unemployment rate”.

It would remain in place until the unemployment rate was comfortably below 6%. In the second phase the government would “shift its focus towards stabilising and then reducing debt as a share of the economy”.

The budget jobs target is comfortably weak

On the very harshest reading, the strategy requires Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to start winding back support for the economy when the unemployment rate falls to comfortably below 6%, as it arguably already has — last week’s reading was 5.6% and heading down.

But that’s probably too harsh. The words “comfortably below” might mean “way below”, and the figure of 6% mightn’t have meant much at all.

As the pandemic gathered pace the treasury was predicting an unemployment rate of 15% – the worst since the Great Depression.

It might have picked 6% as a pseudo target merely because it was something to aim for, and it might not have put much store in what was at the time a one-off result of 5.8% because unemployment rates can bounce around.

We’re about to get an update

Frydenberg says he’ll update the target in a speech to be delivered soon.

Disturbingly, he has defined the present strategy of comfortably below 6% as meaning “around 5.25% or around 5.5%”, which is pretty close to where we are. If he wants to go further, he’ll have to adopt a more ambitious target.

The difference between 6% and 5% is 138,000 unemployed Australians. The difference between 6% and 4% is 277,000 unemployed Australians.

Read more: Josh Frydenberg has the opportunity to transform Australia, permanently lowering unemployment

That’s an extra 138,000 to 277,000 Australians working for us and paying tax; and 138,000 to 277,000 fewer people claiming JobSeeker.

The Reserve Bank governor believes Australia can “achieve and sustain an unemployment rate in the low 4s”.

A good target would approach 4%

The governor makes the point that over the past decade, the estimate of the unemployment rate associated with full employment has been “repeatedly lowered”. The target Frydenberg adopts will tell us a lot.

Because it’s been a year since COVID-19 took off in Australia, it’s possible to get an idea of who’s suffered the most in terms of jobs by comparing March 2021 with March 2020.

The broad-brush Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force survey turns up the surprising result that, in terms of jobs, women have done better than men.

So far, the recovery has been pink-tinged

It’s a surprising outcome because of what was said midway through last year about a pink-tinged recession.

At the time women had indeed suffered more than men. In May, in the depths of the downturn, women were down 471,000 jobs and men down 401,000. But from then on, as things improved, the gap narrowed.

By August women were no worse off than men. By March this year women were 74,940 jobs better off than before the recession, men 650 jobs worse off.

Male versus female employment, March 2020 to March 2021

For full-time jobs, the divide is starker. Men are 47,420 full-time jobs worse off, and women 44,870 full-time jobs better off.

We can get much more detail (than ever before) by examining the newly available payroll data extracted from real-time records of more than 10 million Australians, as opposed to the answers of the 50,000 who take part in the labour force survey.

Women have proved more adaptable

Amongst women, the biggest gains are in the “public administration and safety” industries, where the number of women employed is 13% higher than before the pandemic.

The biggest losses for women are in “accommodation and food services” (which means hospitality and tourism) where female employment remains down 14% on the start of the pandemic.

For men, the biggest — although much smaller — gains have also been in “public administration and safety”, where male employment is up 8% since the start of the pandemic, and in “financial and insurance services”, where male employment is up 6%.

For men, employment in “accommodation and food services” remains down 15%.

The data paint a picture of women being more adaptable than men — having suffered worse than men in the early months of the recession and then refashioning themselves into different types of workers.

Among women it is only the youngest ten-year age bands that remain worse off.

Every age band above the age of 30 is ahead.

Read more: The successor to JobKeeper can’t do its job. We’ll need JobMaker II

For men the damage is more widespread, and perhaps longer lasting. Only in the age bands above 50 are men better rather than worse off.

There’s an awful lot we need to do, and we have discovered during the pandemic we are more than capable of doing it.

We’ll know soon whether the government’s ambition is high or low.

– ref. Men have been hit harder by the COVID recession than women. What matters now is what we do about it – https://theconversation.com/men-have-been-hit-harder-by-the-covid-recession-than-women-what-matters-now-is-what-we-do-about-it-159202

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amanda Porter, Senior Fellow (Indigenous Programs), The University of Melbourne

Cultural warning: This article contains names and images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This article also contains links to graphic footage of police violence.

This month marks 30 years since the final report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. The report consists of five volumes, several regional reports and 339 recommendations. It included 99 individual death reports of Aboriginal deaths in custody that occurred between January 1 1980 and May 31 1989.

Numbers 205-208 of these recommendations address ethical ways the media should report on Aboriginal affairs. The way Aboriginal deaths in custody are reported can cause distress for affected families and communities, and fuel racial biases and prejudices among non-Indigenous Australians.

The Black Lives Matter movement has highlighted the media’s tendency to frame Indigenous stories through a deficit lens. However, misrepresentation of Indigenous people in the media also has potential to influence acts of harm. As the National Inquiry into Racist Violence in Australia was told three decades ago,

the media may generate a climate which provides legitimacy for racist violence.

Earlier this month, the Sydney Morning Herald published an article by commentator Anthony Dillon. It illustrated how prevalent misinformation and inaccuracies still are in the way the media discuss Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Myth: Aboriginal deaths in custody rates are not high

Some in the media tend to downplay the rate at which Indigenous people are dying in custody. Examples of this include Dillon taking issue with Senator Pat Dodson’s characterisation of Aboriginal deaths in custody as a “festering crisis.” Another is Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt stating Aboriginal deaths in custody claims are “wildly exaggerated”.

The reality is the rate of Aboriginal deaths in custody remains a source of national shame, with 474 deaths since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody handed down its final report in 1991.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are also among the most incarcerated people in the world.

This is especially true for Aboriginal people in Western Australia and the Northern Territory. Aboriginal people make up over 85% of the NT’s prison population and 90% of police detention.

Read more: Indigenous deaths in custody: inquests can be sites of justice or administrative violence

Myth: Aboriginal people die in custody ‘due to natural causes’

In his piece, Dillon argues the majority of Aboriginal deaths in custody are “due to natural causes”.

The term “natural causes” is deeply political. It is a term used to mitigate the responsibility of police and corrections staff for deaths in custody.

Some prominent examples of this:

Read more: Four Aboriginal deaths in custody in three weeks: is defunding police the answer?

Myth: Aboriginal people are less likely to die in custody than non-Indigenous people

The royal commission found Aboriginal people do not die at a greater overall rate than non-Indigenous people in custody.

However, it makes an important distinction, saying Aboriginal people die in custody at a significant rate comparable to their proportion of the whole population.

The report goes on to say this occurs not because Aboriginal people in custody are more likely to die, but because they are incarcerated more frequently.

Myth: there is no evidence of mistreatment or racism towards Aboriginal people by police or corrections staff

There is plenty of video evidence to demonstrate a pattern of excessive violence and unnecessary force when police arrest Aboriginal people. For example:

There have been numerous investigations into mistreatment and racism towards Indigenous people, such as national inquest on racist violence and a coronial inquest into unconscious racism playing a role in the death of Aunty Tanya Day.

And many other reports and studies such as:

These myths and further misinformation cause harm

Misinformation about deaths in custody has the potential to retraumatise the families and communities of people who have died in custody. Bereaved families often have to live through the pain of losing loved ones knowing they were innocent, did nothing wrong and in some cases should never have been arrested.

This grief is compounded by the knowledge that many of these deaths were preventable, and there is little chance anyone will be held accountable for them.

Read more: Kumanjayi Walker murder trial will be a first in NT for an Indigenous death in custody. Why has it taken so long?

Families and communities are also expected to carry the grief of losing someone in horrific circumstances. Examples include a baby dying after her mother was arrested and the baby separated from her, and an Elder dying of heat stroke after travelling in a prison van for four hours in 56 degree heat.

Recommendation 208 of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody says because Aboriginal people have been disappointed by the portrayal of Indigenous people in the media, media outlets should form relationships with Aboriginal organisations. The recommendation states,

The purpose of such contact should be the creation of a better understanding, on all sides, of issues relating to media treatment of Aboriginal affairs.

Honest and ethical reporting on Aboriginal people is not being undertaken with claims such as this one by Dillon:

simply diverting Aboriginal people from prison will only likely change where they die, given their poorer health status.

And this statement, by Sky News’ Alan Jones:

Aboriginal Australians were far more likely to die at the hands of other Aboriginal Australians than at the hands of white people.

These statement are plainly false and deeply unethical. There are countless examples of Indigenous women and children who have been the victim of violent crimes at the hands of non-Indigenous people.

33-year old Aboriginal woman Lynette Daley was brutally murdered by non-Indigenous men Adrian Attwater and Paul Maris. A non-Indigenous man was under investigation for the death and molestation of Mona-Lisa and Cindy Smith

Misinformed and insensitive reporting can cause additional pain for families and communities. It also spreads misinformation about Aboriginal people, fuelling racial prejudices, stereotypes and hatred towards Black people.

Rather than allowing victim and criminal narratives to dominate media representation of Aboriginal people, mainstream media outlets need to centre the work of families and communities who are doing the work to end Black deaths in custody.

The royal commission recommendations 205-208 were written for Australian media outlets. They require action and leadership from editors, journalists and managers. Journalists and editors would do well to read the recommendations and to act on them.

– ref. Not criminals or passive victims: Reframing the media’s representation of Aboriginal deaths in custody – https://theconversation.com/not-criminals-or-passive-victims-reframing-the-medias-representation-of-aboriginal-deaths-in-custody-158561

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jamie Howarth, Senior lecturer, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The chances of New Zealand’s Alpine Fault rupturing in a damaging earthquake in the next 50 years are much higher than previously thought, according to our research, published today.

The 850km Alpine Fault runs along the mountainous spine of the South Island, marking the boundary where the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates meet and grind against each other, forcing up the Southern Alps. Over the past 4,000 years, it has ruptured more than 20 times, on average around every 250 years.

The last major earthquake on the Alpine Fault was in 1717. It shunted land horizontally by eight metres and uplifted the mountains a couple of metres. Large earthquakes on the fault tend to propagate uninhibited for hundreds of kilometres.

Until now, scientists thought the risk of a major earthquake in the next 50 years was about 30%. But our analysis of data from 20 previous earthquakes along 350 kilometres of the fault shows the probability of that earthquake occurring before 2068 is about 75%. We also calculated an 82% chance the earthquake will be of magnitude 8 or higher.

Alpine Fault earthquakes in space and time

From space, the fault appears like a straight line on the western side of the Southern Alps. But there are variations in the fault’s geometry (its orientation and the angle it dips into Earth’s crust) and the rate at which the two plates slip past each other.

These differences separate the fault into different segments. We thought the boundaries between these segments might be important for stopping earthquake ruptures, but we didn’t appreciate how important until now.

We examined evidence from 20 previous Alpine Fault ruptures recorded in sediments in four lakes and two swamps on the west coast of the South Island over the past 4,000 years. From this evidence, we built one of the most complete earthquake records of its kind.

Once we analysed and dated the sediments from lakes near the Alpine Fault, we were able to see new patterns in the distribution of earthquakes along the fault. One of our findings is a curious “earthquake gate” at the boundary between the fault’s south western and central segments. It appears to determine how large an Alpine Fault earthquake gets.

Some ruptures stop at the gate and produce major earthquakes in the magnitude 7 range. Ruptures that pass through the gate grow into great earthquakes of magnitude 8 or more. This pattern of stopping or letting ruptures pass through tends to occur in sequences, producing phases of major or great earthquakes through time.

Read more: New Zealand’s Alpine Fault reveals extreme underground heat and fluid pressure

Forecasting the next Alpine Fault earthquake

From the record of past earthquakes it is possible to forecast the likelihood of a future earthquake (i.e. a 75% chance the fault will rupture in the next 50 years). But from these data alone it is not possible to estimate the magnitude of the next event.

For this we used a physics-based model of how earthquakes behave and applied it to the Alpine Fault, testing it against data from earlier earthquake sequences. This is the first time we have been able to use past earthquake data that span multiple large earthquakes and are of sufficient quality to allow us to evaluate how such models could be used in forecasting.

The physics-based model simulated Alpine Fault earthquake behaviour when we included the variations in fault geometry that define the different fault segments. When the simulation is combined with our record of past behaviour it is possible to estimate the magnitude of the next earthquake.

Read more: Rocky icebergs and deep anchors – new research on how planetary forces shape the Earth’s surface

The Alpine Fault earthquake record shows the past three earthquakes ruptured through the earthquake gate and produced great (magnitude 8 or higher) earthquakes. Our simulations show that if three earthquakes passed through the gate, the next one is also likely to go through.

This means we’d expect the next earthquake to be similar to the last one in 1717, which ruptured along about 380km of the fault and had an estimated magnitude 8.1.

Our findings do not change the fact the Alpine Fault has always been and will continue to be hazardous. But now we can say the next earthquake will likely happen in the next 50 years.

We need to move beyond planning the immediate response to the next event, which has been done well through the Alpine Fault Magnitude 8 (AF8) programme, to thinking about how we make decisions about future investment to improve infrastructure and community preparedness.

– ref. NZ’s next large Alpine Fault quake is likely coming sooner than we thought, study shows – https://theconversation.com/nzs-next-large-alpine-fault-quake-is-likely-coming-sooner-than-we-thought-study-shows-159223

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Reid, DECRA Research Fellow, Macquarie University

Army ants (Eciton burchellii) are known for their vast foraging raids. Hundreds of thousands of ants flow like a river from their nest site, scouring the jungle as they prey on anything unable to escape the swarm.

These raids are enormous undertakings. A single raid can be 20 metres wide and 100 metres long, comprising more than 200,000 ants, running at 13 centimetres per second, and gathering up to 3,000 prey objects per hour.

To ensure traffic flows efficiently, army ants construct highways and bridges along the rough forest floor. These structures are built entirely out of worker ants that join their bodies together.

How these tiny, blind ants manage to coordinate these dynamic constructions remains largely unknown, but a new study brings us closer to the answer.

Research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences describes for the first time a type of self-assembled ant structure called a “scaffold”.

It also introduces a mathematical model for how scaffolds are formed, which could have implications for several fields of engineering.

Scaffolds for army ant safety

The research shows scaffolds act like a safety net for foraging army ants. They prevent walking ants from slipping and falling when their trail runs along steep ground.

The authors stalked the forests of Panama to find ant swarms, then redirected their trails along a platform that could tip between 20 and 90 degrees from a horizontal position.

The ants rarely formed scaffolds on slopes less than 40 degrees steep, while steeper inclines led to larger and faster-growing structures. Scaffolds were also more likely to be built when many workers were transporting heavy prey items.

And once a scaffold was in place, the number of falling ants would drop nearly to zero — even across a vertical surface.

Amazing self-assembling architects

Ants are masters of collective architecture. Several species are documented to self-assemble into functional structures to overcome challenges in their habitats.

For instance, weaver ants (of the genus Oecophylla) line up in teams to form “pulling chains”, acting as living winches to bend leaves together when building their treetop nests.

Entire colonies of fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) escape flooding by forming floating rafts that can sail for several days, until the water retreats and the colony can safely land ashore.

Army ants (of the genus Eciton), however, have mastered this ability and extended it to almost every aspect of their biology. Along a single foraging raid, army ants can form hundreds of pothole plugs.

Their bridges, which span several ant body-lengths, help ease their passage over the irregular ground of Central and South America’s rainforests. At the end of each day the entire colony self-assembles into a huge hanging nest called a “bivouac”.

The study published today adds “scaffolds” to the existing list of structures built by army ants to sustain their fast-paced lifestyle.

Self-assembling into structures which are orders of magnitude larger than an individual requires an extreme degree of coordination.

Strikingly, this is achieved without any leaders or external blueprints. Each individual can only respond to local interactions with its neighbours and changes in the environment.

Discovering how these one-on-one interactions among individuals lead to complex group formations presents a challenge for biologists, and a golden opportunity for engineers.

Read more: Six amazing facts you need to know about ants

Working on yourself for the good of the team

Scientists have a name for when relatively simple animals display sophisticated behaviour at a group level: “emergence”.

Take the mesmerising undulations flowing through groups of starlings as they evade predators in the air, or the lightning-fast escape waves seen in schools of fish. Such coordination was once thought to be the result of telepathic communication between group members.

Scientists now know simple one-on-one interactions can add up to more than the sum of their parts, explaining much about group-level patterns. But they’ve yet to fully understand how information at an individual level is combined and filtered to translate to a group-level response.

The recent research on army ant scaffolds provides new insight on this front, by developing a theoretical model of scaffold construction that centres around a simple mechanism.

That is: ants can sense how much they are slipping, and are more likely to stop and join scaffolds when their rate of slipping is high.

The ants don’t have to communicate with each other or assess the size of the structure. The properties of the group are modified simply by individuals sensing and correcting their own errors.

Future applications

The ability to form complex, adaptive structures using a minimum amount of sensing and information processing is extremely valuable to many engineering fields.

It could assist with the rapid production of biological products (biofabrication), designing self-healing materials such as metals or plastics that repair themselves when damaged, and in swarm robotics.

For instance, a swarm of simple, cheap and largely expendable robots could be deployed to autonomously explore dangerous environments such as disaster zones.

The swarm could self-assemble into structures that may help it bridge large gaps, or shore up a crumbling building – all the while locating and rescuing survivors.

Crucially, these abilities wouldn’t need to be explicitly programmed into the robots’ behavioural repertoire.

Rather, the abilities would “emerge” from simple rules about how the robots should interact with each other, allowing the swarm to adapt to new environments like never before.

Read more: These ants have evolved a complex system of battlefield triage and rescue

– ref. Bridges, highways, scaffolds: how the amazing engineering of army ants can make us smarter creators – https://theconversation.com/bridges-highways-scaffolds-how-the-amazing-engineering-of-army-ants-can-make-us-smarter-creators-158326

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Kewley, Director, ARC Centre for Excellence in All-Sky Astrophysics in 3D, Australian National University

It will take until at least 2080 before women make up just one-third of Australia’s professional astronomers, unless there is a significant boost to how we nurture female researchers’ careers.

Over the past decade, astronomy has been rightly recognised as leading the push towards gender equity in the sciences. But my new modelling, published today in Nature Astronomy, shows it is not working fast enough.

The National Academy of Science’s decadal plan for astronomy in Australia proposes women should comprise one-third of the senior workforce by 2025.

It’s a worthy, if modest, target. However, with new data from the academy’s Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) program, I have modelled the effects of current hiring rates and practices and arrived at a depressing, if perhaps not surprising, conclusion. Without a change to the current mechanisms, it will take at least 60 years to reach that 30% level.

However, the modelling also suggests that the introduction of ambitious, affirmative hiring programs aimed at recruiting and retaining talented women astronomers could see the target reached in just over a decade – and then growing to 50% in a quarter of a century.

How did we get here?

Before looking at how that might be done, it’s worth examining how the gender imbalance in physics arose in the first place. To put it bluntly: how did we get to a situation in which 40% of astronomy PhDs are awarded to women, yet they occupy fewer than 20% of senior positions?

On a broad level, the answer is simple: my analysis shows women depart astronomy at two to three times the rate of men. In Australia, from postdoc status to assistant professor level, 62% of women leave the field, compared with just 17% of men. Between assistant professor and full professor level, 47% of women leave; the male departure rate is about half that. Women’s departure rates are similar in US astronomy.

Read more: ‘Death by a thousand cuts’: women of colour in science face a subtly hostile work environment

The next question is: why?

Many women leave out of sheer disillusionment. Women in physics and astronomy say their careers progress more slowly than those of male colleagues, and that the culture is not welcoming.

They receive fewer career resources and opportunities. Randomised double blind trials and broad research studies in astronomy and across the sciences show implicit bias in astronomy, which means more men are published, cited, invited to speak at conferences, and given telescope time.

It’s hard to build a solid research-based body of work when one’s access to tools and recognition is disproportionately limited.

The loyalty problem

There is another factor that sometimes contributes to the loss of women astronomers: loyalty. In situations where a woman’s male partner is offered a new job in another town or city, the woman more frequently gives up her work to facilitate the move.

Encouraging universities or research institutes to help partners find suitable work nearby is thus one of the strategies I (and others) have suggested to help recruit women astrophysicists.

But the bigger task at hand requires institutions to identify, tackle and overcome inherent bias — a legacy of a conservative academic tradition that, research shows, is weighted towards men.

A key mechanism to achieve this was introduced in 2014 by the Astronomical Society of Australia. It devised a voluntary rating and assessment system known as the Pleiades Awards, which rewards institutions for taking concrete actions to advance the careers of women and close the gender gap.

Initiatives include longer-term postdoctoral positions with part-time options, support for returning to astronomy research after career breaks, increasing the fraction of permanent positions relative to fixed-term contracts, offering women-only permanent positions, recruitment of women directly to professorial levels, and mentoring of women for promotion to the highest levels.

Most if not all Australian organisations that employ astronomers have signed up to the Pleiades Awards, and are showing genuine commitment to change.

So why is progress still so slow?

Seven years on, we would expect to have seen an increase in women recruited to, and retained in, senior positions.

And we are, but the effect is far from uniform. My own organisation, the ARC Centre of Excellence in All-Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), is on track for a 50:50 women-to-men ratio working at senior levels by the end of this year.

The University of Sydney School of Physics has made nine senior appointments over the past three years, seven of them women.

But these examples are outliers. At many institutions, inequitable hiring ratios and high departure rates persist despite a large pool of women astronomers at postdoc levels and the positive encouragement of the Pleiades Awards.

Using these results and my new workforce models, I have shown current targets of 33% or 50% of women at all levels is unattainable if the status quo remains.

How to move forward

I propose a raft of affirmative measures to increase the presence of women at all senior levels in Australian astronomy – and keep them there.

These include creating multiple women-only roles, creating prestigious senior positions for women, and hiring into multiple positions for men and women to avoid perceptions of tokenism. Improved workplace flexibility is crucial to allowing female researchers to develop their careers while balancing other responsibilities.

Read more: Isaac Newton invented calculus in self-isolation during the Great Plague. He didn’t have kids to look after

Australia is far from unique when it comes to dealing with gender disparities in astronomy. Broadly similar situations persist in China, the United States and Europe. An April 2019 paper outlined similar discrimination experienced by women astronomers in Europe.

Australia, however, is well placed to play a leading role in correcting the imbalance. With the right action, it wouldn’t take long to make our approach to gender equity as world-leading as our research.

– ref. Looking at the stars, or falling by the wayside? How astronomy is failing female scientists – https://theconversation.com/looking-at-the-stars-or-falling-by-the-wayside-how-astronomy-is-failing-female-scientists-159139

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Kenny, Professor, Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University

Forget last week’s healthy 5.6% unemployment rate.

It might be “comfortably below” the Coalition’s 6% threshold for commencing “fiscal repair” (another term for unpopular spending cuts), but the government is under unforeseen political pressure and is anything but relaxed and comfortable.

In any event, this 5.6% figure was from March, which is an important detail because it predated the wind-up of the JobKeeper wage subsidy.

Who knows what that means.

It could mean nothing much or we might see an uptick in jobs lost — employees shed from debt-addled “zombie” firms, which survived the crisis only to perish in the recovery.

At $90-plus billion, the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme was the biggest single program in Australian history. And by any metric, it was a shining success. Any metric that is, if you exclude the country’s fourth biggest pre-pandemic export sector, education.

Higher education’s ‘long COVID’

Universities suffered a triple COVID hit — denied access to the JobKeeper program due to the way they were structured, denied overseas students from whom (admittedly too much) revenue was relied upon and denied any certainty about their return due to a snail-paced vaccine rollout.

Read more: The government keeps shelving plans to bring international students back to Australia. It owes them an explanation

As a result, a country that led the world through the 2020 pandemic trails it in 2021 through a bungled recovery program, while perhaps permanently hobbling one of its most lucrative and reliable exports.

Ever innovative, Australia may have found a way to give its university sector and therefore its own future growth the economic version of long COVID.

A terrible start to 2021

Politically, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s options at the start of 2021 looked pretty inviting. Flush with that 2020 success — a combination of good judgement, good luck, and state government front-footedness — Morrison was riding high in public opinion. Inevitably, talk turned to a possible spring election to capitalise.

Labor’s end of the see-saw was weighed down. Doubts were aired about leader Anthony Albanese’s cut-through, his chances in an early poll, the pros and cons of a challenge.

But events since have changed everything. Two months of attempting to politically nuance a series of negative stories and allegations regarding the treatment of women in politics have damaged the government, consumed its oxygen, and pricked the prime minister’s inflated reputation as the supreme pragmatist.

His unwillingness to get in front of the problem has instead evinced a strange defensiveness. His grudging late-stage efforts at political rescue have been less effective for their pointless delay and for the tightly qualified nature of the language used.

The Christine Holgate saga is merely the latest iteration.

It was clear weeks ago that Holgate had been prejudicially forced from her job at Australia Post. The most senior political leverage in the land had been summarily and publicly applied. A prime ministerial apology was the obvious solution, not just for her but for him also.

The vaccine ‘eekout’

Twice-weekly national cabinet meetings began again on Monday, in a sign the prime minister understands the seriousness of Australia’s vaccine bungles. But his reluctant acknowledgement of multiple problems in the rollout to date reinforces his instinctive stubbornness.

The abject helplessness of Australia at the vaccine stage is also all the more jarring for its contrast with the 2020 suppression of the virus and the glowing vaccination expectations the government itself created.

On these grounds alone, the prime minister’s political judgement is questionable. Australians were promised a world-class vaccine program in which we would be at the front of the queue. What it would lack in immediacy (a luxury of zero community infection, we were assured) would be more than made up for in logistical precision.

In fact, it has failed to materialise. Opaque and piecemeal, the rollout feels more like an eekout.

What will decide the next election?

Now, the Coalition looks to the May 11 Budget for political salvation.

Even with a jobless number of just 5.6%, it has limited political capital to spend and must use the balance sheet to repair its political stocks rather than the nation’s books.

JobKeeper, JobSeeker, and even JobMaker, have either gone or will not make enough difference to matter at the ballot box next year.

What the government really needs is what the country needs — JabMaker.

Read more: To abandon vaccination targets is to abandon the mantle of leadership

After all, it’s the jabless rate rather than the jobless rate that could decide the next election. It currently sits “comfortably” around 95%, with no certainty that the population will be vaccinated this calendar year.

The end of October target has been junked, replaced with … nothing.

Compare that to calamitous America where they expect to reach the full adult population by the end of July.

Last week, the US inoculated roughly the entire population of Australia. On one of those days alone, 4.6 million people received jabs of either Pfizer or others such as Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson.

Australia is well and truly “jab-ready”.

Its government, not so much.

– ref. Forget JobKeeper — what the government and the country need now is a JabMaker plan – https://theconversation.com/forget-jobkeeper-what-the-government-and-the-country-need-now-is-a-jabmaker-plan-159209

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nathan Bartlett, Associate Professor, School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy, University of Newcastle

Last week, the chief executive of Pfizer said anyone who receives its COVID-19 vaccine will probably need to have a third dose within 6-12 months after being fully immunised, and then likely one dose every year going forward.

We’ll need these because it’s likely that, for many of us, immunity will begin to wane within that time frame. The vaccine will also need to be tweaked to cover new coronavirus variants as they emerge.

The advantage of mRNA vaccines like Pfizer’s is they’re much easier to update than the “viral vector” vaccines like AstraZeneca’s. We should still use AstraZeneca now for over-50s, but our best long-term strategy is to use mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, and therefore to develop the capacity to manufacture them here in Australia.

Immunity to coronaviruses doesn’t last

We know our immunity to different coronaviruses wanes over time. This is true for the four common cold (endemic) coronaviruses that circulate all the time — there are always sufficient numbers of people who have lost their immunity to ensure these viruses can persist and continue to cause respiratory illnesses.

Our immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, also seems to wane quickly, although the rate at which this happens can be quite variable. Data suggest immunity acquired from the Pfizer shot is pretty robust for six months, but it isn’t clear how quickly our immunity is lost after that. However, it’s reasonable to predict that within 12 months of a population being vaccinated, a substantial number of people will have likely lost protection against SARS-CoV-2. This will particularly be the case if the prevalent SARS-CoV-2 strain circulating at that time is substantially different from the virus against which people were originally vaccinated.

This relates to the fact that some coronavirus variants have mutations that reduce the effectiveness of vaccine-induced immunity. They’ve been described as “variants of concern” and include a virus that originated in South Africa, which has reduced the efficacy of both the AstraZeneca and Pfizer vaccines. As the pandemic surges around the world, more variants will certainly crop up.

Both waning immunity and viral variants will conspire to reduce our protection over time. So we’ll need booster shots, ideally updated to deal with the viral variant that poses the greatest threat.

Using AstraZeneca is not our best long-term solution

I understand why Australia’s government originally prioritised getting the AstraZeneca vaccine. It’s easier to manufacture, store and distribute. It made sense in the early stages of the pandemic. And it’s still an effective vaccine that people, here and abroad, should be receiving as soon as possible — any immunity is better than none and you will certainly be protected from severe COVID-19.

But as time goes on, using the AstraZeneca shot isn’t the best long-term strategy.

One reason for this is what immunologists call “vector immunity”. The AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines use a viral vector, which is an inactivated (cannot replicate) form of a common type of virus called an “adenovirus”. They use this adenovirus as a delivery vehicle to get DNA into our cells to give them the instructions to develop immunity against the coronavirus. However, you can’t be repeatedly immunised with this type of vaccine because you’ll likely develop immunity to the adenovirus vector (the delivery vehicle) itself. When that happens your immune system interferes with the delivery vehicle getting into your cells and the effectiveness of these vaccines would erode over time.

What’s more, in a very, very small number of people, this viral vector seems to be linked with an extremely rare but serious blood clotting syndrome. In these people, it’s thought that a consequence of the immune response to the viral vector is their immune systems make “auto-antibodies”. These are antibodies that, in addition to fighting a foreign invader (or targeting the adenovirus-based vector used in the AstraZeneca vaccine), also attack our own cells. In this case, these auto-antibodies are attacking blood cells called platelets, leading to the blood clots and low platelet counts seen in around 1 in 250,000 people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot.

There are also clotting concerns with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is also an adenovirus-vector-based vaccine, after six women developed the condition in the United States out of 6.8 million given the shot. However, this link is yet to be proven for this vaccine.

Read more: What is thrombocytopenia, the rare blood condition possibly linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine?

By contrast, mRNA vaccines like Pfizer’s (and Moderna’s) can be updated much more quickly. Pfizer just needs to rework its RNA sequence to cover variants, which is a minor modification. Nothing changes about the delivery system of the vaccine, so reapproval will likely be much easier. Regulatory bodies have indicated there will be a quick path for approval for vaccines updated for variants.

Read more: Why we’ll get COVID booster vaccines quickly and how we know they’re safe

The mRNA vaccines consist of a lipid-based delivery system that protects the mRNA and gets it into cells. Then, the cells can start manufacturing the spike protein to present to your immune system. There’s no protein in the vaccine itself, so there’s no chance of developing immunity to the vaccine components.

mRNA vaccines are our best bet going forward

There’s a fear among researchers, including myself, that we’ll be chasing our tails with these new variants. We’ll identify a new variant and set out to update our vaccines against it, but by the time the formulation is updated, approved, manufactured and distributed, we may already be dealing with another variant, or many variants across different locations.

It’s absolutely vital Australia develops the ability to make mRNA vaccines onshore, particularly if new variants pop up here or in our region. This will be far more effective than waiting months to get new shots from overseas.

Read more: Australia may miss out on several COVID vaccines if it can’t make mRNA ones locally

Federal health minister Greg Hunt has indicated Australia is interested in developing this capacity.

Right now, the AstraZeneca vaccine still has a role in Australia’s current vaccine strategy. We have it and we can make more of it, so let’s get it out there for over-50s as well as give those under 50 the opportunity to make an informed choice to have this vaccine.

So few Australians currently have immunity to the virus, so we remain vulnerable to outbreaks. If there are new outbreaks, we would have to rely on lockdowns, masks and other strategies again, and could find ourselves back to where we were last year. And let’s not forget people will become ill and some will die. The vaccine rollout is lagging, and we really need to catch up as soon as possible.

But as time goes on, the AstraZeneca vaccine will become less attractive, and mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer’s should eventually take its place.

– ref. 3 doses, then 1 each year: why Pfizer, not AstraZeneca, is the best bet for the long haul – https://theconversation.com/3-doses-then-1-each-year-why-pfizer-not-astrazeneca-is-the-best-bet-for-the-long-haul-159137

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gregory Moore, Doctor of Botany, The University of Melbourne

Native deciduous trees are rare in Australia, which means many of the red, yellow and brown leaves we associate with autumn come from introduced species, such as maples, oaks and elms.

One native tree, however, stands out for its leaves with soft autumnal hues that drop in March and April: Australia’s red cedar. Don’t be fooled by its common name — red cedar is not a cedar at all, but naturally grows in rainforests throughout Southeast Asia and Australia.

You may be more familiar with its timber, which I’ve been acquainted with all of my life. My grandmothers had cedar chests of drawers they had inherited from their mothers or grandmothers, and I had assumed they were made from one of the Northern hemisphere cedar species. The wood still smelled of cedar after all this time in family homes – a scent I associate with grandparents and country homes.

By the time I was given one of these chests to restore, I knew much more about the tree and valued the chest of drawers all the more. So, with autumn putting a spotlight on Australian red cedars, let’s look at this species in more detail.

Majestic giants of the rainforest

I first encountered red cedar trees in the sub-tropical rainforests of Queensland and New South Wales in the 1980s. Then, its scientific name was called Cedrela toona and later Toona australis. Now, it’s recognised as Toona ciliata.

The various names reflect a taxonomic history in which the Australian species was once regarded as being separate from its Asian relatives, but all are now considered one.

The trees are awe-inspiring. Under the right conditions, it can grow to 60 metres tall (occasionally more) with a trunk diameter of up to 7m.

After losing its foliage in autumn, the new foliage in spring often has an attractive reddish tinge. In late spring it has small (5 milimetres) white or pale pink flowers, but they usually go unnoticed in the rainforest because of their height or the density of other tree canopies growing beneath.

Older red cedars have wonderful buttresses at the base of their trunk, a characteristic shared by many tall tropical trees. These buttresses have long been considered an advantage for species that can emerge above the canopy of a rainforest where winds are much stronger, with the buttresses and expanded root systems providing greater strength and resistance to the wind.

These buttresses also greatly increase the surface area of the base of the trees exposed to air, which facilitates the uptake of extra oxygen as the activity of micro-organisms in the soil can leave it oxygen-depleted.

Logged to near extinction

With a wide distribution throughout Asia and Australia, its uses in ancient times were many and varied. In traditional medicine, bark was used or digestive remedies as well as wound dressing and its resin was used for treating skin conditions.

Dyes, oils and tannins used for preparing leather could also be extracted by boiling various plant parts. Today the wood is used for culturing shiitake mushrooms, which are much in demand in restaurants.

But the recent history of red cedar is a typically sad colonial tale. The species belongs to the same family as mahogany (Meliaceae) and, not surprisingly, was exploited for its timber from the early days of colonisation.

The timber is durable, lightweight and suitable for naval use and so was very heavily logged, right along the east coast of Australia from the early 1800s until the early 20th century.

The rich deep red colour of its timber and the fact it was soft and easily worked meant it was used for furniture, ornate carvings in public buildings, town halls and parliaments, such as the State Library in Melbourne. It was also used for implements and handles, and for sailing and racing boats.

Read more: The secret life of puddles: their value to nature is subtle, but hugely important

You’ve probably had a close encounter with the lovely red banisters on some of these old buildings that were made of red cedar, often darkened under the patina of so many hands.

The once common and widespread species was logged almost to extinction along the east coast by the mid-1900s, and to the point of practical commercial extinction with little timber available to industry by the 1960s.

So valued was the timber that in the late 1970s, a plan was hatched to remove red cedar from Queensland National Park rainforests using helicopters. Luckily, the idea did not fly and so some great trees persist. The species has a conservation status of concern, but is not considered to be endangered at present.

A terrible pest

The fact they are deciduous makes them potentially very interesting and useful for horticultural use, but that potential remains largely unrealised. And given the value and quality of its timber, you may be wondering why it’s not being grown in plantations across the continent.

The reason is a native moth called the cedar tip moth (Hypsipyla robusta), which lays its eggs on the main growing shoot of the tree. When the eggs hatch the larvae bore down the shoot, which not only results in shoot dieback but also causes the trees to develop multiple stems and branches which reduce its timber value.

Read more: White cedar is a rare bird: a winter deciduous Australian tree

Despite this, they are still planted as a quick-growing ornamental tree for their shade in other parts of the world, such Hawaii and Zimbabwe.

The moths are attracted to the scent of the tree, so they’re very difficult to control. The moth does not attack the tree in South America, for instance, because the moth has not established there, so there are large plantations of red cedar in Brazil.

It’s an interesting reminder: often it’s the little things in ecology that can affect success, or failure. When we humans meddle without knowledge, things don’t necessarily go to plan, usually to our cost.

Read more: Why climate change will dull autumn leaf displays

– ref. Rainforest giants with rare autumn displays: there’s a lot more to Australia’s red cedar than timber – https://theconversation.com/rainforest-giants-with-rare-autumn-displays-theres-a-lot-more-to-australias-red-cedar-than-timber-154065

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amanda Keddie, Professor, Education, Deakin University

Education academics, women’s rights campaigners and many in between have criticised some of the material in the government’s new respectful relationships resource for schools.

Particularly controversial in the Good Society resource is a video of a girl asking a boy to try her milkshake. When he says he’s happy with his own, she smears her milkshake all over his face.

While well-intentioned, the video is simplistic and likely to be viewed by secondary students as condescending. The video is designed to be a lesson in decision-making when someone crosses the line in relationships that may be abusive.

I reviewed the entire Good Society resource from a gender-justice perspective and found problems beyond those in the milkshake video. These include that gender-based violence isn’t addressed in the materials for the primary school years, and harmful gender norms are perpetuated in some of the materials around consent. The resource also overwhelmingly focuses on heterosexual relationships.

What is this resource?

The Good Society resource is part of the Australian government’s Respect Matters program, which aims “to support respectful relationships education in all Australian schools” and to “change the attitudes of young people towards violence, including domestic, family and sexual violence”. The Respect Matters program itself is part of the government’s National Plan to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children .

The resource includes more than 350 videos, podcasts and activities for children in the foundation year of school, up to year 12.

It’s divided into year levels (foundation–year 6, 7-9 and 10-12) with a series of activities for students to explore topics, including:

• positive relationships, inclusion and exclusion, friendships and identity (foundation-year 6)

• peer influence, social power and gender (years 7-9)

• sexual consent and sexting (years 11-12).

There are positive aspects to this resource including teacher guides for each topic with clearly stated learning objectives. All content is linked directly to the Australian Curriculum and there are links in the resource to extensive professional learning support for teachers.

The resource draws on some powerful video material that foregrounds the voices of young people to stimulate students’ interest in, and discussion about, each of the topics. Some topics, like sexting, are addressed comprehensively.

But there are several serious issues.

Nothing on gender-based violence for young children

The government launched The Good Society after Chanel Contos’ viral petition for sexual consent to be taught earlier in schools. But the resource does not mention issues of sexual consent until years 11 and 12.

Children live in a very gender inequitable world and absorb its messages. And the unfortunate reality is young children experience unwanted sexual contact. They need the language and strategies to challenge these experiences and protect themselves.

There is strong evidence attesting to the significance of supporting young children in the early childhood and primary years to critically analyse harmful gender identities.

Read more: Parents, your kids are watching you. Sex education begins at home

And we know young children are capable of understanding gender-based violence. In a recent study, my colleague and I observed a teacher in a year 1 to 2 class eliciting comments from students who defined different forms of gender-based violence including “when someone says girls can’t play soccer” and as “when boys are teased when they cry”.

This teacher was drawing on the teaching materials in the Victorian Respectful Relationships Education curriculum. These materials focus on defining gender-based violence and examining its effects through age-appropriate playground and school scenarios.

But such defining and analysis are absent in The Good Society materials from the first year to year 6. Gender identity features in some of the cartoon stories and there are some gestures to what gender respect might look like. But the materials are quite childish and condescending.

Of concern, some of the the stories reinforce gendered messages. One features a soccer game, where the male character outperforms the girls who “struggle to get the ball”. The girls are angry about the unfairness of the game and force him to pass the ball to them. Without proper critique, this story leaves gender binaries (boys as physically strong and in control and girls as less powerful) intact.

Young women presented as sexual gatekeepers

For years 11-12, The Good Society’s materials explore issues of sexual consent under the headings of influences (like social forces and technology) and situations (such as alcohol and drugs, and parties). These are important focus areas and there are some powerful videos in this section that could open up transformative conversations about gender justice.

Read more: Not as simple as ‘no means no’: what young people need to know about consent

But several of the videos about sexual consent reinforce the notion of females as sexual gatekeepers and males as sexual initiators.

One year 11-12 resource video called “Kiss” involves two teenagers engaged in a passionate kissing session that, for the young woman, is getting out of hand. She halts the process and is relieved when her male partner agrees to “keep it above the clothes”.

The teacher guidance associated with this video recognises tensions of ambivalence around sexual consent. But the decision-making centres on the sexual objectification of the woman. For instance, there are questions about whether the young woman should allow the young man to “squeeze her butt” or “squeeze her boobs”.

There is no real critical engagement with the gendered dimensions of sexual consent, such as the hetero-sexist presumptions that position boys with the power to sexualise and dehumanise girls, and girls with the responsibility to police boys’ excessive sexual appetites.

There’s a good resource available

Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge has said the resource was developed in consultation with experts, such as the eSafety Commissioner, Foundation for Young Australians, and parent, teacher and community groups.

I am surprised this consultation did not draw on the Victorian Respectful Relationships model currently being taken up in more than 1,850 Victorian government, Catholic and independent schools.

Read more: Let’s make it mandatory to teach respectful relationships in every Australian school

This program’s curriculum resources draw on an extensive evidence base. And it situates teaching and learning within a whole school approach, where gender respect and equality are examined and monitored in relation to staffing, school culture, professional learning, support for staff and students and community connections.

A version of this article was also published at EduResearch Matters.

– ref. Not only are some of the government’s consent videos bizarre and confusing, many reinforce harmful gender stereotypes – https://theconversation.com/not-only-are-some-of-the-governments-consent-videos-bizarre-and-confusing-many-reinforce-harmful-gender-stereotypes-159220

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ilan Noy, Chair in the Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

What have we lost because of the pandemic? According to our calculations, a lot — and many of the worst hit countries and regions are far from world media attention.

Typically, damage from any disaster is measured in separate categories: the number of fatalities and injuries it caused, and the financial damage it led to (directly or indirectly).

Only by aggregating these various measures into a comprehensive total can we begin to formulate a fuller picture of the burden of disasters, including pandemics.

The usual approach has been to attach a price tag to death and illness. Many governments calculate this “value of statistical life”.

They do this based on surveys asking people how much they are willing to pay to reduce some risk (for example, improve a road they often use), or by calculating the additional compensation people demand when they take on high-risk occupations (for example, as a diver on an oil rig).

By observing the amount of money people associate with small changes in mortality risk, one can then calculate the overall price of a “statistical life” as valued by the average person.

By adding the dollar value of asset damage to the “priced” value of life lost (or injured), the overall cost of an adverse event (such as an earthquake or an epidemic) can be calculated.

Calculating ‘lost life years’

But “value of life” prices can vary a lot between and even within countries. There is also an understandable public distaste for putting a price tag on human life. Governments typically don’t openly discuss these calculations, making it difficult to assess their legitimacy.

An alternative is a “life years lost index”. It is based on the World Health Organization (WHO) measure of “disability-adjusted life years” (DALY), calculated for a long list of diseases and published in a yearly account of the associated human costs.

Read more: How would digital COVID vaccine passports work? And what’s stopping people from faking them?

In conventional measurements of the impact of disaster risk, the unit used is dollars. For this alternative index, the unit of measurement is “lost life years” — the loss of the equivalent of one year of full health.

This is a sum of three key measures of the pandemic’s impact: lost life years because of death and sickness from the disease, and the equivalent lost years due to decline in economic activity. The map below presents these figures per person, in order to enable the relevant comparison across countries.

For example, in the map above we see Australia has a life-years-lost figure of 0.02. This means, on average, every person in Australia lost just over seven life days from the pandemic. In New Zealand, where fewer people died and there have been only a few thousand cases, the figure is 0.01, meaning each person lost fewer than four life days.

In India, by contrast, the average person lost nearly 15 days and in Peru the equivalent figure is 25 days. That loss is based on a combination of the precipitous recession and the death and sickness caused by the virus directly.

So, how do we put this in context? Is losing 25 days a catastrophic loss that justifies the kinds of public actions we have observed around the world? We can answer that question by comparing the impact of COVID-19 to other disasters.

Read more: COVID lockdowns have human costs as well as benefits. It’s time to consider both

The price of a pandemic

When we compare the total aggregate costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 with the average annual costs associated with all other disasters in the previous 20 years, we find the pandemic has indeed been extremely costly (in terms of lost life years).

This is despite those past two decades having seen many catastrophic events: horrific tsunamis in Indonesia (2004) and Japan (2011), very damaging hurricanes in the US (2005 and 2017), a high-mortality cyclone in Myanmar (2008), deadly earthquakes in India (2001), Pakistan (2005), China (2008), Haiti (2010) and Nepal (2015), and others.

The graph below shows the life years lost in 2020 by continent, per person, from COVID-19 compared to the average annual cost of all other disasters 2000-2019. As we can see, the costs of the pandemic are much higher — more than three times higher in Asia and more than 30 times higher in Europe.

The most vulnerable countries have been small, open economies such as Fiji, Maldives and Belize, which rely heavily on the export of services, especially tourism.

These are not necessarily countries that have experienced a high number of deaths from the pandemic, but their overall loss is staggering.

More generally, the per-capita loss associated with COVID-19 is particularly high in most of Latin America, southern Africa, southern Europe, India and some of the Pacific Islands. This is in stark contrast to where the global media’s attention has been directed (the US, UK and EU).

Costs will continue to rise

These measures are for 2020 only. Obviously, the pandemic is continuing to rage, and will most likely continue to have an impact on the global economy well into 2022. Many of the adverse economic impacts will still be felt years from now.

Worryingly, some of the countries that have already suffered the greatest economic impact have also been slow to secure enough vaccine doses for their populations. They may well see their economic slumps carry on into next year, especially with larger, richer countries having the resources to buy vaccines first.

Much public and media attention has focused on the death toll and immediate economic impact from COVID-19. But the human and social costs associated with that economic loss are potentially much greater, particularly in poorer countries.

Read more: Global obsession with economic growth will increase risk of deadly pandemics in future

The heavy burden many small countries have borne has, to some extent, been overlooked. Countries such as Lebanon and the Maldives are experiencing dramatic and painful crises, largely under the radar of world attention.

However, our conclusion that the human cost of the economic loss is possibly much higher than the cost associated with health loss does not imply public policies such as lockdowns, border restrictions and quarantines have been unwarranted.

If anything, countries that experienced a deeper health crisis also experienced a deeper economic crisis. There has been no effective trade-off between saving lives and saving livelihoods.

This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the stories here.

– ref. COVID-19 cost more in 2020 than the world’s combined natural disasters in any of the past 20 years – https://theconversation.com/covid-19-cost-more-in-2020-than-the-worlds-combined-natural-disasters-in-any-of-the-past-20-years-156646

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Phillips, Associate Professor, Centre for Social Research and Methods, Director, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), Australian National University

The good news from new research conducted by the Australian National University for Social Ventures Australia and the Brotherhood of St Laurence is that fewer of us are in severe financial stress, by which we mean missing meals, seeking help from charities or being unable to heat our homes.

The bad news is that for certain types of households the proportion in stress is growing, and for many the stress is getting worse.

It is well documented that JobSeeker households are faring poorly with high rates of poverty but less well documented that other working age households are also suffering from high financial stress.

We have used as a measure of severe stress answers to questions in the Bureau of Statistics household expenditure surveys in 1998, 2003, 2009 and 2015 about seeking assistance from charities, going without meals, and the ability to pay bills.

For households headed by wage earners and for age pensioners, financial stress remains low.

For households headed by recipients of non-age pensions such as disability, carers’ and single parent payments, and for households headed by Australians on unemployment and related benefits, the proportion in stress has been climbing.

Severe financial stress by source of income

Around 37% — more than one in three — households headed by Australians on allowances were in severe financial stress in 2015, up from one in four in 1998.

Twenty eight per cent of households headed by working-age pensioners were severely financially stressed, up from 19%.

The difference between a working-age pension and an allowance is that pensions are usually paid to people who aren’t expected to return to work for some time.

Read more: There are lots of poverty lines, and JobSeeker isn’t above any of them

Allowances such as JobSeeker (previously Newstart) and Youth Allowance are usually paid to people who are expected to return to work, and are typically lower.

The reason households headed by both working-age pensioners and recipients of allowances are falling behind are complex.

Those on allowances struggle with incomes that climb only in line with the consumer price index and so until recently have not increased in real terms for more than 25 years.

Income matters, and the type of family

Working-age pensioners have suffered from higher housing costs, limited liquid assets and tighter eligibility requirements which has meant those who have received working age pensions have been worse off.

Among households headed by age pensioners and wage earners, the incidence of financial stress was much lower, at 4% and 3%.

Severe financial stress by family type

Twenty three per cent of households headed by single parents were in severe stress, compared to 3% of households headed by partnered parents.

Financial stress was at its most acute in households with children aged under five.

A lower 9% of single person households and 3% of couple-only households were in severe financial stress.

Renters better off, but still badly off

Renter households are much more likely to be in financial stress than homeowner households, but the proportion in severe stress has fallen from 15% to 12%

Severe financial stress by housing tenure

Beyond these broad brush observations, we find considerable unexplained variation in financial stress. That might be because some households are better at managing money than others and some are more risk averse.

When we run our findings through our model of the social security and tax system we find that while small increases in working-age payments would decrease the severity of financial stress, they wouldn’t do much to reduce the incidence of it.

A big increase in the overall social security budget would do a lot.

An increase of 10% could allow JobSeeker to increase from the current $620 per fortnight to $996 and disability support payments to increase from $953 per fortnight to $1060 and other working-age pensions to increase by similar amounts. Other payments would remain unchanged.

Read more: As one gets out, another gets in: thousands of students are ‘hot-bedding’

Our modelling shows that while increases to other payments could also lower severe financial stress, money spent on them would have less effect.

The scenario of a 10% increase in the social security budget that we put forward would cut the rate of severe financial stress among JobSeeker households by 16%.

The high rates of financial stress among households supported by working age payments is largely a policy choice. Extra money wouldn’t solve all of their problems but a decent safety net would go a long way.

– ref. Financial stress in 3 graphs: there’s fewer of us in it, but for those who are, it’s worse – https://theconversation.com/financial-stress-in-3-graphs-theres-fewer-of-us-in-it-but-for-those-who-are-its-worse-159218

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of Canberra

In this series we pay tribute to the art we wish could visit — and hope to see once travel restrictions are lifted.

She’s called Maman, and she emerged into the world in 1999, just in time to find her feet and grace the opening of the Tate Modern in the heart of London.

Maman. The biggest spider you’ve ever seen at more than nine metres high. The extent to which you are entranced by her bears a direct correlation to whether, when you think “spider”, you think Charlotte in her web or Hobbit-bothering Shelob.

For her maker, that most fertile and perhaps febrile artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), spiders represent maternal beings in their care of the young, and in their skillful making and repairing of the family web (that is, they are Charlotte, not Shelob).

A more typical human response is a severe case of the “ick” factor at best, and panic at worst. Yet under Bourgeois’ hands, something marvellous happens — new ways of seeing spiders, and with them the more-than-human world.

Her spiders have populated the globe since 1999. They are to be found poised, crouching, menacing or magnificent (depending on your attitude to arachnids) in Ottawa, Shanghai, Bilboa, Provence, Geneva, Zurich, New York, San Francisco, Moscow and elsewhere.

If I could go anywhere, one option would be to trail around the world on a Bourgeois spider-hunt, though I have always been uncomfortable around spiders.

In recent years, chagrined by my species-ism and captivated by videos of tiny dancing peacock spiders, I have been making valiant attempts to recognise their beauty; with some success. Recently, with much of Australia under floodwaters and my news-feeds full of stories of spiders desperately swarming up fenceposts and trees and human legs to escape death, I would leave this country and fly straight to London, to see Maman again.

Read more: Review: The naked nude from the Tate

Incidental art

I would take the underground from whichever dingy affordable flat I could find to rent, arriving at Southwark Station. I stood there in 2006 for nearly half an hour, entranced by Bill Fontana’s Harmonic Bridge. That work is the product of the Millennium Bridge vibrating under the feet of pedestrians crossing from St Paul’s to Bankside, and against the movement of the river below it and the wind that crosses it.

Like Bourgeois’ Maman, the sounds captured by Fontana and shaped into an audio sculpture have the capacity to shift one’s sense of lived experience and what it can mean.

Incidentally, in 2011 I visited Tate Modern to see Ai Weiwei’s 1-125,000,000 (2010), a hill of handcrafted sunflower seeds made of porcelain, fired and painted, displayed in the Turbine Hall. Gazing at the seeds, I found myself listening to percussive sounds coming from further up the building, and hunted about for a plaque to say it was also the work of Bill Fontana. Eventually I asked a nearby guide who the sound artist was and, without a hint of condescension, she smiled and said, “They’re doing some plumbing work next door”.

In my fantasy art trip now, I choke down that humiliating memory and walk the ten minutes or so down toward the Thames, back to what was the Bankside Power Station, and is now the Tate Modern.

And in my imagination, I retrace my steps to the Turbine Hall, greet Maman, and then wander up through gallery after gallery, through permanent collection and special exhibitions, all the way to the bar on Level … is it 5? I forget. There I buy a glass of wine, alone or with friends and colleagues, and gaze across the Thames to the dome of Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s cathedral.

Read more: If I could go anywhere: Japanese art island Chichu, a meditation and an education

A special host

St Paul’s is just around the corner from where my late aunt lived, in the brutalist Barbican estate.

She generously provided me a bed on various of my trips, and showed me the art at the heart of her city. I saw Benjamin Britten’s haunting, heartbreaking War Requiem in her private box at the Royal Albert Hall, that remarkable Victorian structure that resembles, to a stranger seated within, the inside of someone else’s mouth. Later she took me to Bach’s St Matthew Passion performed at the Barbican, where we sang along with the choir, lustily and not entirely in tune.

She took me, too, on her personalised tour of the city. I saw another Christopher Wren building, the church of St Stephen Walbrook, and its splendidly democratic Henry Moore altar. I saw remnants of that ancient Roman construction, the London Wall.

Read more: If I could go anywhere: Boughton House, ‘the English Versailles’ and its shimmering treasures

Just beyond my aunt’s apartment is Michael Ayrton’s priapic Minotaur sculpture, which, she told me, often boasts a shopping bag or scarf hooked by some passing wag across the phallus. We went to Postman’s Park, devised in the late 19th century by the artist George Frederick Watts as a place to remember everyday heroes who lost their lives in saving others.

I want to go back to London, a city all awash with art, and with history tucked between the glass and steel monoliths that characterise its skyline.

I want — in my imagination — to visit my aunt and Maman: to revisit women’s care for family; to remember my aunt’s knowledge of and passion for the city and its art, and her generosity to a niece landing on her doorstep, fresh from the antipodes.

– ref. If I could go anywhere: I’d revisit Maman, Louise Bourgeois’ 9-metre spider at London’s Tate Modern – https://theconversation.com/if-i-could-go-anywhere-id-revisit-maman-louise-bourgeois-9-metre-spider-at-londons-tate-modern-157859

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

As Scott Morrison gradually pivots his climate policy towards embracing a target of net zero emissions by 2050, he is seeking to distinguish the government from “inner city” types and political opponents who’ve been marching down that road for a long time.

The Prime Minister told a Business Council of Australia dinner on Monday the government was charting its own course “to ensure Australia is well placed to prosper through the great energy transition of our time, consistent with strong action on climate change”.

“The key to meeting our climate change ambitions is commercialisation of low emissions technology,” he said.

“We are going to meet our ambitions with the smartest minds, the best technology and the animal spirits of capitalism.”

Morrison was speaking ahead of this week’s two-day virtual summit on climate called by President Biden.

The Biden administration has made the issue a major policy priority, which has increased the pressure on Australia to sign up to the 2050 target before the Glasgow meeting on climate late in the year.

Morrison acknowledged that “we need to change our energy mix over the next 30 years on the road to net zero emissions”.

But he said “we will not achieve net zero in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities.

“It will not be achieved by taxing our industries that provide livelihoods for millions of Australians off the planet, as our political opponents sort to do, when they were given the chance.

“It will be achieved by the pioneering entrepreneurialism and innovation of Australia’s industrial workhorses, farmers and scientists.

“It will be won in places like the Pilbara, the Hunter, Gladstone, Portland, Whyalla, Bell Bay, and the Riverina.

“In the factories of our regional towns and outer suburbs. In the labs of our best research institutes and scientists.

“It will be won in our energy sector. In our industrial sector. In our agricultural sector. In our manufacturing sector.

“This is where the road to net zero is being paved in Australia. And those industries and all who work in them, will reap the benefits of the changes they are making and pioneering.”

Morrison said Australia’s natural resources and its industries’ strength presented “a huge opportunity to capitalise on the new energy economy”.

“And let’s not forget that Australia already produces many of the products that will be in growing demand as part of a low carbon future – from copper to lithium.

“It is this practical approach of making new technologies commercial that will see us achieve our goals.”

He said Australia was making real progress.

“Our domestic emissions have already fallen by 36% from 2005 levels.

“Australia has deployed renewable energy ten times faster than the global average and four times faster than in Europe and the United States.

“One in four rooftops has solar, more than anywhere else in the world.

“Australia takes our emission reductions targets very seriously. We don’t make them lightly. We prepare our plan to achieve them and we follow through.”

– ref. Net zero won’t be achieved in inner city wine bars: Morrison – https://theconversation.com/net-zero-wont-be-achieved-in-inner-city-wine-bars-morrison-159265

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

Peter Dutton has begun his tenure as defence minister by delivering a very public slap to his most senior military adviser, chief of the Australian Defence Force Angus Campbell.

Dutton’s overriding of Campbell’s initial command decision to revoke a meritorious unit citation that had been awarded to some 3,000 special forces soldiers who served in Afghanistan is a humiliation to the general who is supposedly in command of the military.

The minister’s claim that he has full faith in Campbell does not alter this point.

On an issue that goes to the core of military professionalism, ethics and discipline, the government has not trusted Campbell’s judgement.

The opposition is no better – it has supported Dutton’s decision.

We don’t know how Campbell is taking it, but Dutton says he’s “pragmatic”. In such circumstances, some military leaders would be considering their position.

The salt has been rubbed in by Dutton seeking to highlight the override, with a leaked story in The Australian and media interviews.

Dutton’s argument that “the decision [Campbell] made in the first instance is perfectly reasonable. But my judgement is that we look at the circumstances now,” doesn’t pass (as the government might say) the pub test.

Of course the government overrule effectively came months ago, after the release of the Brereton report on allegations of misconduct by Australian special forces in Afghanistan, which said the citation should be revoked.

The war crimes inquiry said there was “credible information” of 23 incidents in which one or more non-combatants or prisoners of war “were unlawfully killed by or at the direction of members of the Special Operations Task Group”. It recommended the ADF chief refer 36 matters to the Australian Federal Police for criminal investigation, involving 19 individuals.

Faced with pressure from veterans and from some within the special forces, Scott Morrison was quick to indicate he opposed the proposal to revoke the citation, and Campbell began a tactical retreat.

Former defence minister Linda Reynolds smoothed the waters to give time for consideration. But it was always clear what was going to happen.

A less assertive minister, however, might have found a form of announcement to allow Campbell to have saved a little more face (assuming he wished to).

As he grasps the reins of a portfolio he has long coveted, Dutton is sending the message that (unlike his predecessor) he wants be an activist minister who is in the public eye.

In considering how the citation award has been handled, it is important to understand exactly what it is.

The Brereton inquiry made separate recommendations about the Meritorious Unit Citation which went to the Special Operations Task Group, and individual awards, and it explained the reasons for viewing them differently.

“Although many members of the Special Operations Task Group demonstrated great courage and commitment and although it had considerable achievements, what is now known must disentitle the unit as a whole to eligibility for recognition for sustained outstanding service.

“It has to be said that what this Report discloses is disgraceful and a profound betrayal of the Australian Defence Force’s professional standards and expectations. It is not meritorious.

“The inquiry has recommended the revocation of the award of the Meritorious Unit Citation, as an effective demonstration of the collective responsibility and accountability of the Special Operations Group as a whole for those events.

“In contrast, the cancellation of an individual award such as a distinguished service award impacts on the status and reputation of the individual concerned, could not be undertaken on a broad-brush collective basis, and would require procedural fairness.”

Brereton is making a very reasonable distinction between collective and individual responsibility, and the need to send a broad signal about, and from, the collective.

In rejecting Campbell’s judgment, Dutton and the government have rebuffed the official inquiry, led by a distinguished and experienced judge – a bad look of the political taking precedence over the legal.

One has to wonder just how much will finally be delivered as a result of the Brereton investigation. The process to get prosecutions for alleged crimes is underway but by its nature it will be incredibly complex and difficult.

Which, one could argue, made it even more important to carry through the symbolic gesture of removing the citation.

Meanwhile on another front, Morrison on Monday announced a royal commission into past suicides in the defence forces and among veterans.

This wasn’t the government’s preference. Its plan was for an ongoing commissioner on the issue, but that did not satisfy many families and veterans, and the government couldn’t muster the parliamentary numbers.

Now both processes will be undertaken, the government says.

The outcome on these very different issues – the citation and the royal commission – reflect the political power of veterans.

– ref. View from The Hill: Dutton humiliates defence force chief Angus Campbell over citation – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-dutton-humiliates-defence-force-chief-angus-campbell-over-citation-159243

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Blakely, Professor of Epidemiology, Population Interventions Unit, Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne

Coinciding with the Trans-Tasman travel bubble starting today, over the past week there have been murmurings Australia could soon relax its borders further, through mechanisms such as home quarantine or letting in vaccinated people.

But what are the risks?

Here I propose three things we must consider:

• the prevalence of the virus in the country from where travellers are coming, including the strain of virus

• measures taken for the people travelling, including home quarantine and whether travellers are vaccinated

• the percentage of our population who are immune.

Importantly, all these factors matter. It’s not simply a case of needing to ensure all travellers are vaccinated.

The level of infection in the country of origin matters enormously

At around Christmas time, roughly 2% of the UK population was infected. That percentage is now considerably less, but it’s still likely around 1,000 times higher or more than the risk in China and other East Asian countries. The risk is near zero for New Zealand, Taiwan and many Pacific countries.

However, things will change. At the moment the United States seems to be maintaining high infection rates while also rapidly vaccinating the population. This is probably because of more transmissible variants, and society loosening up, offsetting gains from more people being immune. But at some point, perhaps around mid-year, the infection rate in the US should plummet as the percentage of people immune increases to somewhere around 60-80%. All this is to say we can expect infection rates in countries to vary a lot in the next six to 12 months.

Read more: New COVID variants have changed the game, and vaccines will not be enough. We need global ‘maximum suppression’

Let’s work through an example of the United Kingdom. Assume the UK has another surge of infections such that 0.5% of British people are infected and unaware of it, and could jump on a plane to Australia. Let’s assume we decide to let 10,000 Brits come to Australia each month. So 0.5% of 10,000 would mean roughly 50 infected people arriving per month.

Mitigating the risk of travellers

Of course, we would do more to reduce the risk. We could test people before they get on the plane and when they arrive. Let’s assume that weeds out another 50%, as the other half may be still incubating and not yet testing positive. That’s 25 COVID-positive British people arriving per month.

Next, let’s assume we require all travellers to be vaccinated. That will reduce their risk of unwittingly carrying the virus (through either symptomatic or asymptomatic infection) by between 66% for the UK variant and 81% for “normal” virus for the AstraZeneca vaccine. Data are still sketchy on any infection for Pfizer, but it’s likely 90% or more, given 95% protection against symptomatic disease in Pfizer’s clinical trial. If we assume 80%, we are now down to five infected Brits arriving here per month.

Importantly, the vaccine also reduces both the duration of the disease and its infectiousness, for vaccinated people unlucky enough to get infected. We don’t know by how much as the real-world evidence is still accruing, although animal data on peak viral load and duration of likely infective viral load supports this contention.

If we assume (conservatively in my view) that there is a 50% reduction in duration and 50% reduction in peak infectivity for hapless vaccinated people who still get infected, that is 25% of the risk of passing it on (that is, 50% of 50%).

Therefore, if an unvaccinated person, infected with the UK variant, was going to infect an average of 3.5 people in the absence of any social measures such as mask-wearing, the infected-after-vaccination person would only infect 0.875 other people – a 75% reduction in the reproductive rate. So our remaining five infected Brits are less infectious.

Intensity of quarantine measures for arrivals

Let’s consider the option of home quarantine. We don’t know how effective this will be, because of potential compliance issues.

But the risk of home quarantine breaches can be reduced by technology like ankle bracelets, GPS tracking on travellers’ phones to ensure they stay home, and only allowing home quarantine if any other members of the household are also vaccinated, to give an extra layer of protection.

Let’s assume home quarantine with these extra measures stops 80% of infected people getting out and about in Australia while infectious.

So we are now down to one infected British person who has slipped through per month. But given they are also vaccinated, they’re less likely to pass on the infection. And this risk can be reduced further still by ensuring they’re wearing a mask – although if they “breached” home quarantine rules they may not be likely to wear a mask.

It’s important to remember even “proper” quarantine isn’t foolproof. About one in 250 infected people last year in hotel quarantine caused a leakage.

Is Australia a tinderbox?

Yes. Perhaps only 5% of us are immune. Even if, via the above measures, we get just one infected person a month in Australia – the situation could blow up. Keep in mind the above example assumes we’re only allowing travellers from one country too. More countries means more travellers means more risk – although as above, the risk varies based on the infection rate in the origin country.

You can play with various scenarios in our COVID-19 Pandemic Trade-offs tool, launched two weeks ago. What you’ll find is that until most adults in Australia are vaccinated, any loosening up of how we respond to the virus incursion is unwise. If contact tracing cannot mop up the inevitable incursions, we’ll still need to use social restrictions, including lockdowns, until the vaccination rollout is complete.

But we can probably think about inching forward to some increased risk once all over-50s are vaccinated (phase 2A), with some modest relaxation of the border. Yet we can never totally escape the risk of outbreaks.

So what can we do now with borders?

First, continue with the Trans-Tasman bubble.

Read more: A quarantine-free trans-Tasman bubble opens on April 19, but ‘flyer beware’ remains the reality of pandemic travel

Second, remove or greatly reduce quarantine for vaccinated travellers from many East Asian countries, which present a low risk to Australia. As an example, the average number of known active infectious people in China at any point in time recently is about 250. Let’s assume this equates to about 100 unknown infections at any point in time (that is, people who are not yet symptomatic or detected). For a population of 1.4 billion, that’s a 0.000007% risk of any person in China being infected.

This suggests that for 10,000 vaccinated arrivals from China per month with modified quarantine, the expected number of infected people unwittingly getting out into the Australian population per month is 0.000014. Or, put another way, our above UK example presents 70,000 times the risk of an arrival from China. Given such low risk, it’s hard to justify why university students from China cannot start in time for semester two this year if they’re vaccinated and going into some form of modified quarantine.

Third, we need a national framework to assess the risk. Focusing on one measure alone isn’t wise — you have to look at the whole system. Such a framework can be developed now, at the same time as setting our risk thresholds so policy-makers, airlines and other industries can start planning.

– ref. What’s the risk if Australia opens its international borders? An epidemiologist explains – https://theconversation.com/whats-the-risk-if-australia-opens-its-international-borders-an-epidemiologist-explains-159208

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By George Wilson, Honorary Professor, Australian National University

The US Congress is considering a proposed law to ban the import and sale of kangaroo parts. Backed by a campaign called Kangaroos Are Not Shoes, the bill is aimed at stopping Nike, Adidas and other big brands from using kangaroo leather in their products.

Supporters of the bill decry the “mass slaughter of kangaroos – more than two million a year”.

We have a combined 80 years experience in kangaroo management. In our view, this proposal is one of the most comprehensive own goals in history of improving kangaroo welfare. Our research shows the kangaroo industry leads to better kangaroo welfare, more stable populations and improved conservation outcomes.

Weakening the industry will result in more kangaroo suffering, not less. If the bill succeeds, it would further suppress global demand for kangaroo products, and allow unregulated, uncontrolled and unmonitored killing by amateur hunters to flourish.

The industry state of play

Kangaroos are widely dispersed and abundant on the temperate Australian rangelands where cattle and sheep are raised. Over the past 200 years their numbers have increased steadily due to greater availability of pasture, increased watering points, dingo control and less Indigenous hunting. In the rangelands where aerial surveys are conducted, the kangaroo population is estimated at more than 40 million.

Harvesting of kangaroos in Australia is tightly controlled by state and federal governments, and quotas are set to ensure only a sustainable proportion of kangaroos are commercially harvested.

The graph below shows how only a tiny proportion of Australia’s kangaroo populations is harvested commercially each year, and at numbers far less than quotas allow.

In 2018 for example, the kangaroo population in commercial harvest areas in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia was about 4.25 million. The following year, a sustainable quota of 674,000 was set (15.9% of the population). However, just 88,472 kangaroos, or about 2% of the population, were harvested.

The commercial kangaroo industry employs accredited, licensed shooters who kill kangaroos in the field at night using high-powered spotlights and rifles. A national code of practice requires that kangaroos are shot in the head and die immediately.

Abattoirs reject carcasses not killed with a headshot. Commercial shooters must not target females with obvious young in their pouch or at foot. If a mother is shot, the joeys must also be killed using sanctioned methods.

Kangaroo meat is sold in Australia – to the food service industry, retail outlets and as pet food – and exported to many countries.

Managing kangaroo numbers

Kangaroo numbers decline in droughts and rise in good seasons. They roam from property to property, and in and out of national parks, seeking best pastures in response to local rainfall.

Overabundant kangaroos are a serious issue for threatened plants and animals and revegetation programs. They also compromise landholders’ ability to manage their properties. For example, during drought, kangaroos graze on valuable pasture, making it harder for farmers to keep cattle alive.

Because the commercial industry harvests so few kangaroos, landholders must take steps to prevent the animals from damaging their properties. They erect fences around clusters of properties, often with government support, to exclude kangaroos from pastures and watering points.

They use amateur shooters and even illegal poisons, to reduce kangaroo numbers on their properties. Our research shows the number of permits for non-commercial culling of kangaroos is increasing and in recent years exceeded the commercial harvest.

Read more: Yes, it’s been raining a lot – but that doesn’t mean Australia’s drought has broken

Overabundance can also affect the welfare of the animals themselves. During the recent drought, for example, millions of kangaroos starved and breeding was suppressed, causing kangaroo numbers to fall markedly.

According to the NSW Department of Primary Industries and the RSPCA, professional marksmen, operating within a commercial industry, are the most humane way to manage kangaroo populations.

When kangaroo kills are brought in for processing, regulators can monitor the industry’s compliance with welfare codes. Such monitoring is nonexistent with amateur culling.

We believe a further decline in the kangaroo industry – the goal of the proposed US legislation – will lead to worse animal welfare outcomes. It will prompt more amateur culling, and risks mass kangaroo starvation in the next drought.

Read more: FactCheck: are kangaroos at risk?

Where to now?

We welcome the Australian government’s opposition to the bill. Regardless of whether the bill succeeds, a broader question remains: what should Australia’s future kangaroo industry look like?

We believe an alternative vision is required – one in which consumer demand for kangaroo products increases. Landholders would then consider kangaroos, including the young, valuable rather than pests – creating a form of custodianship and an incentive to integrate kangaroos with other farm enterprises. This would lead to more effective management and animal welfare outcomes.

Key to encouraging farmers to value kangaroos is increasing public demand for – and therefore the price of – kangaroo products. But in recent years, demand has been falling. For example, in 2016 California banned the import of kangaroo skins. This rendered them worthless and led to a processing plant at Broken Hill discarding them as town waste. Our research found in 2018 a kangaroo was worth as little as A$13 – much less than goats (A$70), sheep (A$100) or cattle (A$800).

Demand for kangaroo products could be increased by promoting:

• the positive health attributes of kangaroo meat
• the leather’s high strength-to-weight ratio
• the ethical advantages of field harvesting.

Kangaroos can benefit landholders in other ways. Their soft feet cause less damage to soils than hard-hooved introduced livestock. And farmers could earn carbon credits through better management of grazing pressures and substituting high-emission meat and leather for kangaroo alternatives.

We urge the federal government to show leadership and work with the states to improve kangaroo management. Doing so would seem a great project for the Future Drought Fund.

A stronger kangaroo industry integrated with the other red meat industries, delivering high-value products, is possible. But the US bill is not the right way forward.

Read more: Riding on the kangaroo’s back: animal skin fashion, exports and ethical trade

– ref. A US ban on kangaroo leather would be an animal welfare disaster – and a missed farming opportunity – https://theconversation.com/a-us-ban-on-kangaroo-leather-would-be-an-animal-welfare-disaster-and-a-missed-farming-opportunity-155904

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharine Kemp, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, UNSW, and Academic Lead, UNSW Grand Challenge on Trust, UNSW

The Federal Court has found Google misled some users about personal location data collected through Android devices for two years, from January 2017 to December 2018.

The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) says this decision is a “world first” in relation to Google’s location privacy settings. The ACCC now intends to seek various orders against Google. These will include monetary penalties under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL), which could be up to A$10 million or 10% of Google’s local turnover.

Other companies too should be warned that representations in their privacy policies and privacy settings could lead to similar liability under the ACL.

But this won’t be a complete solution to the problem of many companies concealing what they do with data, including the way they share consumers’ personal information.

How did Google mislead consumers about their location history?

The Federal Court found Google’s previous location history settings would have led some reasonable consumers to believe they could prevent their location data being saved to their Google account. In fact, selecting “Don’t save my Location History in my Google Account” alone could not achieve this outcome.

Users needed to change an additional, separate setting to stop location data from being saved to their Google account. In particular, they needed to navigate to “Web & App Activity” and select “Don’t save my Web & App Activity to my Google Account”, even if they had already selected the “Don’t save” option under “Location History”.

Read more: The ugly truth: tech companies are tracking and misusing our data, and there’s little we can do

ACCC Chair Rod Sims responded to the Federal Court’s findings, saying:

This is an important victory for consumers, especially anyone concerned about their privacy online, as the Court’s decision sends a strong message to Google and others that big businesses must not mislead their customers.

Google has since changed the way these settings are presented to consumers, but is still liable for the conduct the court found was likely to mislead some reasonable consumers for two years in 2017 and 2018.

ACCC has misleading privacy policies in its sights

This is the second recent case in which the ACCC has succeeded in establishing misleading conduct in a company’s representations about its use of consumer data.

In 2020, the medical appointment booking app HealthEngine admitted it had disclosed more than 135,000 patients’ non-clinical personal information to insurance brokers without the informed consent of those patients. HealthEngine paid fines of A$2.9 million, including approximately A$1.4 million relating to this misleading conduct.

Read more: How safe are your data when you book a COVID vaccine?

The ACCC has two similar cases in the wings, including another case regarding Google’s privacy-related notifications and a case about Facebook’s representations about a supposedly privacy-enhancing app called Onavo.

In bringing proceedings against companies for misleading conduct in their privacy policies, the ACCC is following the US Federal Trade Commission which has sued many US companies for misleading privacy policies.

Will this solve the problem of confusing and unfair privacy policies?

The ACCC’s success against Google and HealthEngine in these cases sends an important message to companies: they must not mislead consumers when they publish privacy policies and privacy settings. And they may receive significant fines if they do.

However, this will not be enough to stop companies from setting privacy-degrading terms for their users, if they spell such conditions out in the fine print. Such terms are currently commonplace, even though consumers are increasingly concerned about their privacy and want more privacy options.

Consider the US experience. The US Federal Trade Commission brought action against the creators of a flashlight app for publishing a privacy policy which didn’t reveal the app was tracking and sharing users’ location information with third parties.

Read more: We need a code to protect our online privacy and wipe out ‘dark patterns’ in digital design

However, in the agreement settling this claim, the solution was for the creators to rewrite the privacy policy to disclose that users’ location and device ID data are shared with third parties. The question of whether this practice was legitimate or proportionate was not considered.

Major changes to Australian privacy laws will also be required before companies will be prevented from pervasively tracking consumers who do not wish to be tracked. The current review of the federal Privacy Act could be the beginning of a process to obtain fairer privacy practices for consumers, but any reforms from this review will be a long time coming.

This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on UNSW Newsroom.

– ref. ACCC ‘world first’: Australia’s Federal Court found Google misled users about personal location data – https://theconversation.com/accc-world-first-australias-federal-court-found-google-misled-users-about-personal-location-data-159138

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeannie Marie Paterson, Professor of Law, The University of Melbourne

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has had a significant win against Google. The Federal Court found Google misled some Android users about how to disable personal location tracking.

Will this decision actually change the behaviour of the big tech companies? The answer will depend on the size of the penalty awarded in response to the misconduct.

In theory, the penalty is A$1.1 million per contravention. There is a contravention each time a reasonable person in the relevant class is misled. So the total award could, in theory, amount to many millions of dollars.

But the actual penalty will depend on how the court characterises the misconduct. We believe Google’s behaviour should not be treated as a simple accident, and the Federal Court should issue a heavy fine to deter Google and other companies from behaving this way in future.

Misleading conduct and privacy settings

The case arose from the representations made by Google to users of Android phones in 2018 about how it obtained personal location data.

The Federal Court held Google had misled some consumers by representing that “having Web & App Activity turned ‘on’ would not allow Google to obtain, retain and use personal data about the user’s location”.

In other words, some consumers were misled into thinking they could control Google’s location data collection practices by switching “off” Location History, whereas Web & App Activity also needed to be disabled to provide this protection.

Read more: The ACCC is suing Google for misleading millions. But calling it out is easier than fixing it

The ACCC also argued consumers reading Google’s privacy statement would be misled into thinking personal data was collected for their own benefit rather than Google’s. However, the court dismissed this argument on the grounds that reasonable users wanting to turn the Location History “off”

would have assumed that Google was obtaining as much commercial advantage as it could from use of the user’s personal location data.

This is surprising and might deserve further attention from regulators concerned to protect consumers from corporations “data harvesting” for profit.

How much should Google pay?

The penalty and other enforcement orders against Google will be made at a later date.

The aim of the penalty is to deter Google specifically, and other firms like Google, from engaging in misleading conduct again. If penalties are too low they may be treated by wrongdoing firms as merely a “cost of doing business”.

However, in circumstances where there is a high degree of corporate culpability, the Federal Court has shown willingness to award higher amounts than in the past. This has occurred even where the regulator has not sought higher penalties. In the recent Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft v ACCC judgement, the full Federal Court confirmed an award of A$125 million against Volkswagen for making false representations about compliance with Australian diesel emissions standards.

In setting Google’s penalty, a court will consider factors such as the nature and extent of the misleading conduct and any loss to consumers. The court will also take into account whether the wrongdoer was involved in “deliberate, covert or reckless conduct, as opposed to negligence or carelessness”.

At this point, Google may well argue that only some consumers were misled, that it was possible for consumers to be informed if they read more about Google’s privacy policies, that it was only one slip-up, and that its contravention of the law was unintentional. These might seem to reduce the seriousness or at least the moral culpability of the offence.

But we argue they should not unduly cap the penalty awarded. Google’s conduct may not appear as “egregious and deliberately deceptive” as the Volkswagen case.

But equally Google is a massively profitable company that makes its money precisely from obtaining, sorting and using its users’ personal data. We think therefore the court should look at the number of Android users potentially affected by the misleading conduct and Google’s responsibility for its own choice architecture, and work from there.

Only some consumers?

The Federal Court acknowledged not all consumers would be misled by Google’s representations. The court accepted many consumers would simply accept the privacy terms without reviewing them, an outcome consistent with the so-called privacy paradox. Others would review the terms and click through to more information about the options for limiting Google’s use of personal data to discover the scope of what was collected under the “Web & App Activity” default.

Read more: The privacy paradox: we claim we care about our data, so why don’t our actions match?

This might sound like the court was condoning consumers’ carelessness. In fact the court made use of insights from economists about the behavioural biases of consumers in making decisions.

Consumers have limited time to read legal terms and limited ability to understand the future risks arising from those terms. Thus, if consumers are concerned about privacy they might try to limit data collection by selecting various options, but are unlikely to be able to read and understand privacy legalese like a trained lawyer or with the background understanding of a data scientist.

If one option is labelled “Location History”, it is entirely rational for everyday consumers to assume turning it off limits location data collection by Google.

The number of consumers misled by Google’s representations will be difficult to assess. But even if a small proportion of Android users were misled, that will be a very large number of people.

There was evidence before the Federal Court that, after press reports of the tracking problem, the number of consumers switching off the “Web” option increased by 500%. Moreover, Google makes considerable profit from the large amounts of personal data it gathers and retains, and profit is important when it comes deterrence.

Google’s choice architecture

It has also been revealed that some employees at Google were not aware of the problem until an exposé in the press. An urgent meeting was held, referred to internally as the “Oh Shit” meeting.

The individual Google employees at the “Oh Shit” meeting may not have been aware of the details of the system. But that is not the point.

It is the company fault that is the question. And a company’s culpability is not just determined by what some executive or senior employee knew or didn’t know about its processes. Google’s corporate mindset is manifested or revealed in the systems it designs and puts in place.

Read more: Inducing choice paralysis: how retailers bury customers in an avalanche of options

Google designed the information system that faced consumers trying to manage their privacy settings. This kind of system design is sometimes referred to as “choice architecture”.

Here the choices offered to consumers steered them away from opting out of Google collecting, retaining and using personal location data.

The “Other Options” (for privacy) information failed to refer to the fact that location tracking was carried out via other processes beyond the one labelled “Location History”. Plus, the default option for “Web & App Activity” (which included location tracking) was set as “on”.

This privacy eroding system arose via the design of the “choice architecture”. It therefore warrants a serious penalty.

– ref. Privacy erosion by design: why the Federal Court should throw the book at Google over location data tracking – https://theconversation.com/privacy-erosion-by-design-why-the-federal-court-should-throw-the-book-at-google-over-location-data-tracking-159206

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ted Snell, Honorary Professor, Edith Cowan University

Review: This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist, directed by Colin Barnicle.

After dreaming for many years of visiting Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, I was surprised by its dour presence when I finally arrived on its doorstep. The original building presented a rather austere face to the world, its stolid facade dwarfing an unobtrusive entrance. However, once inside, my every longed-for fantasy was realised.

The internal courtyard glowed with light sucked down from the glass ceiling. Palms and exotic ferns flourished in this hothouse environment. Visitors stood in awe — it looked like a Venetian palace, rooted like a tropical orchid in a frost-bitten landscape. In every room, masterpieces softly glowed within their gilt frames; antique furniture filled each nook, vases, and objects d’art on every surface. It was magical.

Then, on entering the Dutch gallery, the mood changed again. Hanging on the walls were empty frames, their vacant centres an aching tribute to the works that once resided there: Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee from 1633 and Vermeer’s The Concert painted soon after. Although still well-resourced with great works of art, the 1990 heist of 13 artworks had left a gaping hole in the Gardner’s collection.

Still unrecovered after 30 years, the US$200 million heist (at 1990 estimates, then equal to A$258 million) remains one of the most notorious art crimes of the century. Netflix’s four-part miniseries This is a Robbery digs deep into the myth and conjecture that surrounds this case. In the process, it provides insights into the criminal mind and dark machinations within the art world.

Read more: What’s so special about the Mona Lisa?

Memories and mistakes

This is a rollicking good story, and director Colin Barnicle dives right in with fast editing and flashback clips that introduce us to the first of a huge cast of characters. We meet the museum director Anne Hawley, only six months into the role when the robbery occurred. We hear from the guards and police officers involved and local reporters who covered the news.

There are clues this might have been an inside job: the thieves spent 81 minutes in the gallery cutting paintings from their frames, unframing a tiny Rembrandt etching and unscrewing a finial from a Napoleonic banner.

The careful exposition of the details of the crime in contrast to the rough handling of the artworks makes for engrossing television.

“It was incomprehensible to me that even if they were wanting to steal art that you would treat it that way,” explains Hawley. Footage pans again and again over the detritus of the thieves’ actions strewn across the gallery floor.

As the series progresses, we hear from security consultant Steve Keller about the museum’s poor protocols plus earlier botched robberies and attempts to vandalise the building.

The museum’s vulnerability was well known. Its poor state of repair also put the valuable artworks held within its walls at risk and the extent to which the place was woefully ill-prepared for the St Patrick’s day break-in is laid bare in the documentary.

Read more: Guy Pearce shines, but The Last Vermeer paints over the remarkable true story of the world’s most successful art forger

Bad company

On top of these security lapses, we meet an entertaining cast of crooks and hoodlums. Like the outrageous Myles Connor Jnr, who once walked out of the nearby Boston Museum of Fine Arts with a Rembrandt under his arm.

Then there are the colourful members of the Italian and Irish Mafias, stirring spaghetti sauce and wearing wires. Woven into the latter narrative is an exploration of the mechanics of large-scale art burglaries, used as collateral to underwrite drug sales and fund arms purchases for the IRA.

This roll call of crooks and dangerous criminals continues to expand and branch off over the four episodes until we begin to lose sight of the lost Rembrandts, Vermeers, Manets, and works by Degas.

Barnicle enthralls us with the daring escapades of central casting type crims including Louis Royce from the Rossetti Gang, Bobby Donati, Bobby Guarente, David Turner, Anthony Romano, Carmelo Merlino, and Robert Gentile.

Indeed as the plot thickens, the theft of the paintings and their ultimate fate sneaks off stage right. The viewer may feel like they are watching an episode of The Sopranos, interspersed with announcements by the Gardner Museum they are offering a reward of first $1 million, then $2 million, then $5 million and finally $10 million for the return of priceless artworks.

In a sense, the series functions as a big budget appeal for information from the public — a kind of art theft episode of Crimestoppers.

Read more: Trial over Picasso’s ‘gift’ to handyman and the murky world of art crime

No happy ending … yet

Finally, as we near the end of our three-and-a half-hour odyssey into this mystery, the focus shifts back to the Gardner Museum and the deep sense of loss that still beguiles the main protagonists.

Each has a suggestion of where the 13 artworks might be and who took them.

“When Robert Gentile dies, something will shake loose … someone will come forward”, a reporter says he’s been told.

The works might be in Dublin, Australia, Saudi Arabia or France others speculate. But as Robert Fisher, former Assistant US Attorney, intones as the camera pans up to the empty frame that previously held Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee, “Until you have the paintings, it’s all still just a theory”.

Although it meanders through true crime anecdotes at times, this is a great tale well told and definitely worth the investment.

This is a Robbery: The World’s Biggest Art Heist is streaming on Netflix.

– ref. Grand theft art world: Netflix probe into history’s biggest gallery heist is a rollicking story of lapses and loss – https://theconversation.com/grand-theft-art-world-netflix-probe-into-historys-biggest-gallery-heist-is-a-rollicking-story-of-lapses-and-loss-159054

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Megan Munsie, Deputy Director – Centre for Stem Cell Systems and Head of Engagements, Ethics & Policy Program, Stem Cells Australia, The University of Melbourne

The recent announcement that scientists have made human-monkey embryos and cultured them in the lab for two weeks made international headlines.

The technology to make animals that contain cells from other species has been available for decades and used extensively in research. These organisms are called “chimeras”.

But this latest advance highlights the need to broaden the discussion around the possible benefits of such research and, specifically, how inter-species chimeric research should be conducted in future.

Human-animal chimeras blur the line about what it means to be human, and this raises serious ethical questions about how we should use them.

How to make a human-animal chimera?

Human-monkey chimeras were first made in 2019. Inter-species chimeras are made by mixing cells belonging to one species with those of another.

This usually involves conducting microsurgery to introduce “pluripotent” stem cells — which can develop into several different types of cells — into a host embryo from another species.

In the recent study, human stem cells were placed inside monkey embryos created by fertilisation. The human-monkey embryos comprised mostly of monkey cells and some human cells.

These embryos were then kept in a laboratory, where researchers monitored the interactions between the human and monkey cells for up to 14 days, although most embryos didn’t survive.

Why do this research?

Some will find the idea of mixing human cells with any animal embryo (let alone a primate embryo) highly questionable. For the researchers who led the study, the rationale was clear.

They were interested in addressing the shortage of life-saving organs for human transplantation. If done successfully, a chimera could grow an organ suitable for direct transplant into a human.

Researchers have previously created human-pig chimeras, where pig embryos containing human cells were allowed to grow into a foetus.

However, the contribution of human cells was low and the goal to create transplantable organs remained elusive. The question of how to solve this challenge is what led to the recent experiment.

Read more: What’s the benefit in making human-animal hybrids?

In this recent study, researchers weren’t attempting to create human-monkey chimeras with a view to harvest organs. Rather, they created an in-vitro model (outside a living organism) to explore what happens to the transferred human cells.

They wanted to identify ways to enhance the survival of the human cells and ultimately improve human chimerism in pigs and other evolutionarily-distant species, with a view to developing transplantable “human” organs from animal donors.

What are the issues raised?

This project might conjure images of mad scientists (think Victor Frankenstein) meddling with nature, irresponsible and without oversight. But unlike Frankenstein’s experiments, this study was not done in secret.

In the paper, the researchers describe in detail the steps they took to comply with international guidelines. This included extensive ethics reviews undertaken within the institutions involved and consultation with external bioethicists.

Of note, the study involved the use of eggs harvested from female monkeys. While the animals weren’t killed, any use of non-human primates should be approached conservatively and be consistent with international standards.

Research involving non-human primates is carefully scrutinised. Such projects receive special consideration from regulatory bodies and ethics committees around the world.

Nonetheless, even when conducted with ample oversight, human-animal chimera research does raise ethical questions.

The thorniest ones are linked not to the creation of in-vitro chimeric embryos, but rather the eventual creation of live-born chimeras, such as a human-pig chimera, if future research can overcome current limitations.

Read more: Fully-grown pig chimeras are only a few years away – we need to understand where they stand now

A future moral dilemma

Humans are widely (but not universally) thought to have a higher moral status than other animals. But human-animal chimeras blur this line. They are not fully human, nor fully non-human.

So the big question is whether (or under what conditions) we should be allowed to use them as a source of transplantable organs, in harmful research, or for other purposes we wouldn’t use humans for.

These concerns will be most acute for chimeras with human-like brains, wherein human cells are incorporated into an animal’s brain during development.

Humans pride themselves on their autonomy, rationality and sophisticated self-awareness. If a human-pig chimera developed this capacity, it may have a moral claim to be treated more like a human than a pig.

The study raises a second ethical concern that is more immediately relevant. Using recent advances in monkey-embryo culture, the researchers cultured some embryos until 19 days post-fertilisation.

Many jurisdictions explicitly limit human embryo research to the first 14 days of development, when what will become the central nervous system begins to develop.

Should the 14-day limit also apply to human-animal chimeric embryos?

Perhaps it should depend on the proportion of human cells in developing chimeric embryo. Although, this leaves us with the question of how many human cells is too many.

Or perhaps, as some have argued, the 14-day rule ought to be revised.

How should we manage these concerns?

Like many other aspects of stem cell research, we can find a starting point in guidelines from the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

These standards, soon to be updated, explicitly recommend specialised review for human-animal chimera research. This includes monitoring chimeric animals for unexpected behaviours that indicate suffering, which could then be addressed under existing animal ethics principles.

Experts say it might be worth monitoring chimeric animals for evidence they may be autonomous, rational, or self-aware — and modifying their treatment accordingly.

Given the ethical complexity and sensitivity of human-animal chimera research, it’s crucial it receives careful oversight. As the field develops we must continuously review where the boundaries of the research lie.

And these conversations must not only explore animal welfare, but also how potential patients and the broader community view access to organs derived from donor animals.

– ref. As scientists move closer to making part human, part animal organisms, what are the concerns? – https://theconversation.com/as-scientists-move-closer-to-making-part-human-part-animal-organisms-what-are-the-concerns-159049

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris O’Neill, Research fellow, Monash University

COVID-19 lockdowns were a huge disruption for Australian universities. With students unable to come to campus, many universities turned to “online proctoring solutions” to monitor students during exam time.

Many of these systems rely on automated facial recognition or detection, often combined with human video-monitoring of students’ homes, leading to concerns about bias, inaccuracy and intrusiveness. The rapid rollout of these systems led to student protests in Australia and elsewhere.

We interviewed students, activists, tutors, academics, and managerial and technical staff at several Australian universities to explore the effect and experience of online proctoring. We found concerns from staff around the extra workload involved in maintaining “buggy” proprietary systems. Students, meanwhile, were worried about the invasiveness of the technology, and nervous at the prospect of platform glitches disrupting exams.

Over time, students have become more tolerant of online proctoring (or perhaps resigned to it). This habituation to the technology might serve as a lesson for how emerging uses of biometric surveillance are being incorporated into daily life — as well as how they need to be controlled and regulated.

The EdTech boom

The pandemic presented a golden opportunity for the mostly US-based education technology (or “EdTech”) industry. For these players, last year was a bonanza. Two months into the pandemic, the chief executive of “comprehensive learning integrity program” Proctorio told the Washington Post:

It’s insanity. I shouldn’t be happy. I know a lot of people aren’t doing so well right now, but for us — I can’t even explain it […] We’ll probably increase our value by four to five times just this year.

At least 24 universities in Australia and New Zealand used some sort of online proctoring tool last year. In some cases this simply involved the relatively low-tech use of Zoom, but many universities opted for proctoring platforms such as Proctorio, Examity or the most popular choice, ProctorU.

Read more: The coronavirus pandemic is boosting the big tech transformation to warp speed

How online proctoring works

Typically, proctoring platforms use a combination of “human” monitoring and AI monitoring to monitor students’ conduct during exams.

Students take their exams before the unblinking eye of their laptop camera. The AI monitoring uses tools like face detection, gaze detection and keystroke biometrics to verify students’ identity and flag “suspicious” behaviour (such as looking around the room, or moving away from their desk).

Suspicious behaviour can be reviewed by a “live” remote proctor. This work is often outsourced to developing nations such as India and the Philippines, where remote proctors are reportedly paid around A$3.50 per hour.

Read more: Online exam monitoring can invade privacy and erode trust at universities

It is also possible to use fully automated versions of such platforms — though as we found, even “fully” automated systems require a great deal of extra work for teaching staff.

Automation creates more work

Tutors we interviewed described the additional unseen work involved.

They had to write suitable assessment tasks, set up the proctoring parameters, and wade through post-exam reports to judge evidence of anomalies. Moreover, technical staff had to methodically review the content of every assessment to confirm it would be compatible with the software.

Even after all this work, exams were still troubled by glitches. One computer science tutor described the platforms as “totally, totally, buggy”. Staff have little direct control over how the platforms work, as the precise rules used to determine “suspicious” behaviour are tightly protected commercial secrets.

Problems with facial recognition

The emergence of online proctoring has been extremely controversial. Some see it as an invasion of students’ privacy based on an idea that students are inherently prone to cheating.

Critics have also argued the facial recognition tools these platforms depend on may be racially biased, and more likely to misrecognise people of colour. In the United States, facial recognition technologies have been banned outright in several cities.

Read more: Facial recognition technology is expanding rapidly across Australia. Are our laws keeping pace?

The use of facial recognition is growing in Australia, with the federal government set to deploy the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability. However, debates around facial recognition’s impacts and implications have been much more muted here than overseas.

An initial wave of protests

The initial deployment of online proctoring nevertheless prompted a storm of protest on Australian campuses. Student protest leaders we interviewed found students considered remote proctoring an unacceptable invasion of privacy, and there was anxiety around the prospect of glitches affecting exam performance.

Even students who would not normally get involved in student politics were driven to protest. As one student organiser told us:

a lot of students are pretty apathetic to that kind of stuff [but] the response in terms of [the use of online proctoring] was a lot more visceral.

In the wake of these protests, online proctoring was limited or entirely removed in some university subjects.

‘That whole Big Brother scenario’

However, once exams had actually taken place using the platforms, some students became more “jaded” or “resigned” towards use of the technology. Some students we interviewed were even relatively positive about the convenience of taking exams from home. One student reflected:

convenience far outweighs anything [or] any sort of issue that could possibly come up […] it’s that whole Big Brother scenario, you sort of forget they’re watching you after a little bit.

Others felt the comfort and calmness of the home environment was favourable when compared to a busy and emotionally charged exam hall.

Despite the controversy and added work of online proctoring, university administrators we spoke to were confident the technology would continue to be used in Australian institutions. As one technical support officer put it, it is rare to “un-procure” technology:

once we start (with) any new technology, it’s hard to just step back completely, and not make that offering anymore, that’s not […] how these things work.

Will an emergency fix become normal?

Online exam proctoring was introduced as an “emergency fix” during the pandemic, and may well become more prevalent as universities continue to incorporate online learning in the post-pandemic world. Before we accept it as normal, we should make sure it actually improves students’ experience of learning.

The introduction of online exam proctoring systems raises serious issues, including the impact on student education, the extra work required to keep “buggy” systems working, and the commercialisation and outsourcing of key university infrastructure.

The use and regulation of these systems must be guided by educational “best practice” principles: imbued with genuine respect for “users”, a substantive set of ethics, morals and political intent, and a meaningful contribution to the quality of higher education.

– ref. Online exam monitoring is now common in Australian universities — but is it here to stay? – https://theconversation.com/online-exam-monitoring-is-now-common-in-australian-universities-but-is-it-here-to-stay-159074

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

It feels like every day brings more harrowing claims of harassment, bullying and abuse of women in our community.

In the space of just two months, we have seen Brittany Higgins’ claims she was raped at parliament, historical rape allegations against Christian Porter (which he denies), staffers performing sex acts on the desks of female MPs, MP Andrew Laming’s harassment of women and Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s “bullying” of Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate.

Last week, senior Indigenous academics authored an open letter, decrying the lack of public concern and national planning about the violence against First Nations women. Indigenous people are 32 times more likely to be hospitalised for family violence than a non-Indigenous adult.

Read more: No public outrage, no vigils: Australia’s silence at violence against Indigenous women

And as Australia marks 30 years since the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, the massive over-representation of Indigenous women in the prison population remains a “national shame”.

There is hope

Many women are understandably feeling traumatised, triggered, overwhelmed and exhausted. And it would be easy to think it is all bad news and nothing is changing.

But there is hope. As a result of what’s emerged, we’ve seen an outpouring of rage from people around Australia who are fed up with the way we treat women and victim-survivors. As an organiser of the recent March 4 Justice rally in Canberra, I saw firsthand the collective anger and frustration directed at federal parliament and wider society and the thirst for change.

I’m also taking heart from the many Australians — some household names, some less well-known — who are fighting for change and making a difference to gender equality. Here are just nine.

1. Grace Tame

Tame is the 2021 Australian of the Year for her advocacy for survivors of sexual assault. She is a prime example of how one person can make concrete change.

As a teenager, Tame was groomed and sexually abused by her school teacher. But despite his conviction and jailing, she was unable to publicly share her story because of Tasmania’s sexual assault victim gag laws.

Almost a decade later, her experience was a catalyst for the creation of the #LetHerSpeak campaign , which reformed these laws.

Tame is now redefining what it means to be a survivor of abuse. Her focus is on empowering survivors and using education as the primary method of prevention. As she says,

Change is happening and it’s happening right now.

2. Brittany Higgins

Higgins can arguably be credited as prompting Australia’s second #MeToo wave.

A former Liberal staffer, Higgins came forward in February with allegations she was raped in parliament house by a male colleague. In part, she was inspired by Tame’s call to arms a month earlier.

Higgins’ claims have rocked Australian politics, sparking a fresh focus into its toxic culture. In the weeks since, more allegations of sexism and assault in politics have emerged, with an independent inquiry into parliament house culture now underway.

But Higgins has also ignited the anger of many around Australia, resulting in nationwide protests against sexism and gendered violence. In her speech at the March 4 Justice rally in Canberra, she said,

I came forward with my story to hopefully protect other women.

3. Latoya Aroha Rule

Aroha Rule, a Wiradjuri and Māori Takatāpui person, is an activist and writer.

After their brother Wayne Fella Morrison died in custody, Aroha Rule created the #JusticeforFella campaign and helped organise nationwide protests calling for justice for the hundreds of Aboriginal people who have died in custody.

Around the recent March 4 Justice rallies, Aroha Rule played a pivotal role, drawing attention to the experiences of First Nations women.

As they wrote in The Guardian:

Women’s liberation marches have been growing since the 1960s in Australia, just as the incarceration rates and deaths of Aboriginal women in custody have steadily increased.

They also point out the complexity of experiences and perspectives when it comes to equality, race, gender and sexuality.

4. Stella Donnelly

Donnelly is a singer-songwriter who writes music that critiques rape culture, the patriarchy and Australian politics.

Her first song, Boys Will Be Boys, was written about a friend’s sexual assault and released in 2017 during the “first wave” of the #MeToo movement in Australia. It was quickly adopted as an anthem by victim-survivors.

Why was she all alone

Wearing her shirt that low

They said, ‘boys will be boys’

Deaf to the word no

Through a “reel-‘em-in, knock-’em-out” comedic style of lyrics and indie-pop tunes, Donnelly sparks awareness of issues like sexism and sexual assault for a wide audience.

5. Amy McQuire

McQuire, a Darumbal and South Sea Islander woman from Rockhampton, is a journalist, writer and PhD candidate, researching media representations of violence against Aboriginal women.

She is one of a number of younger Indigenous voices who are helping to put First Nations women at the centre of conversations about violence against women and equality.

McQuire has written extensively on Aboriginal deaths in custody and the erasure of Aboriginal women from the mainstream feminist movement and discussions about domestic violence.

If you think Aboriginal women have been silent, it’s only because you haven’t heard us, our voices now hoarse after decades of screaming into the abyss of Australia’s apathy.

She also writes about the racism inherent in violence against Indigenous women.

In Australia, violence was not just used as a tool of patriarchy – it was and is used as a tool of colonialism.

When we talk about eliminating violence against Aboriginal women, we aren’t just talking about individual acts, or solely interpersonal violence. Sexual violence was and is used as a strategy to mark our bodies as acceptable for violation, not just by individuals, but by the forces of the state.

6. Saxon Mullins

In a 2018 Four Corners episode, Mullins told the story of her 2013 sexual assault and the widely publicised trials and appeals that followed.

This generated debate about sexual consent laws and how they differ around the country. The NSW Law Reform Commission then reviewed the section of the Crimes Act that deals with sexual assault and consent (the final report was a disappointment to those wanting comprehensive reforms).

Mullins recently founded the Rape and Sexual Assault Research and Advocacy Centre. It aims to prevent sexual violence through reforming consent laws and raising public understanding of consent, healthy relationships and sex education.

As she recently told the ABC’s 7.30,

I have moved into an advocacy position […] this feels like my resolution. This feels like me being able to finish this story how I think it should be finished with real change.

7. Yasmin Poole

Poole is a speaker, writer and youth advocate who champions the inclusion of young women, particularly women of colour, in political conversations.

In 2019, she was listed in both the 40 Under 40 Most Influential Asian Australians and the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence. She was also named The Martin Luther King Jr Center’s 2021 Youth Influencer of the Year.

After the March 4 Justice, Poole criticised Morrison’s comments about the rally — he said protesters in other countries are often “met with bullets” — and the inadequate handling of Higgins’ allegations by the government.

I’m not thankful for not being shot. I’m furious. I am angry that any young woman that desires or aspires to go into politics now will have to think twice.

Poole clearly demonstrates that young women need not wait to speak up about political issues and create societal change. They aren’t simply “future leaders” but, like Poole, are already leading the way.

8. Nicole Lee

Lee is a family violence and disability activist. As a woman with disability and a survivor of family violence, Lee fights for the rights of survivors who are often excluded from this conversation altogether.

As a member of Victoria’s Victims Survivors Advisory Council, Lee has helped shaped the state’s response to family violence.

We can’t get away from the fact that women with disabilities are vulnerable. Society is slowly changing, but as much as people hate hearing it women are already on the back foot and then you add a disability […] we’re so much further behind.

9. Caitlin Figueiredo

Figueiredo is an Anglo-Indian woman, internationally recognised activist and social entrepreneur.

She is the founder and CEO of Jasiri Australia, a youth-led movement that encourages girls to be leaders in their communities, and fights for the increased representation of women in politics through leading the Girls Takeover Parliament program.

As Figueiredo said in 2017,

I want to accelerate change.

– ref. Now for some better news: 9 Australians fighting for gender equality and making a difference – https://theconversation.com/now-for-some-better-news-9-australians-fighting-for-gender-equality-and-making-a-difference-158127

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

Very recently in the Bay of Bengal a naval exercise took place involving India, France, Japan and Australia. While it received little or no coverage in New Zealand, it nonetheless represented a foreign policy challenge as serious as any other this country currently faces.

The exercise was an extension of what is known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or “Quad” for short. At the core of this relatively recent security grouping are the four major Indo-Pacific democracies: the United States, India, Japan and Australia.

The Quad group can also expand to include others. France was participating in the Indian exercise as part of a “Quad-plus” agreement — emblematic of emerging political alliances forming in response to perceived Chinese influence and belligerence in the region.

According to its joint statement, the Quad group is primarily committed to:

promoting a free, open rules-based order, rooted in international law to advance security and prosperity and counter threats to both in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. We support the rule of law, freedom of navigation and overflight, peaceful resolution of disputes, democratic values, and territorial integrity.

Within the group there also deepening strategic bonds, including between Australia and Japan, and Australia and India.

Given New Zealand’s strategic and economic relationships with China, one might expect this to be more widely discussed and debated. In fact, New Zealand has largely been missing from the picture when it comes to this major geopolitical shift. At some point, this will have to change.

Confronting China

According to the US intelligence community’s recently released Annual Threat Assessment, China can be expected to continue its efforts to spread its influence, and drive wedges between Washington and its allies and partners.

There is little doubt China has become noticeably more aggressive within its sphere of influence. It has all but swallowed Hong Kong, contrary to its commitments under the Joint Declaration.

Britain, France and Germany all recently declared against China’s island-building programme in the South China Sea, in breach of its obligations under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. China has responded by authorising its Coast Guard to fire on vessels in what it claims to be its territorial water.

Read more: What’s at stake for NZ in Australia’s case against China at the World Trade Organisation?

China is increasingly provocative in its behaviour towards Taiwan, and continues to clash with India along the two countries’ poorly defined border, without the underlying issues being resolved.

Where China has worked with the international community, such as in the investigation into the origins of COVID-19, the process has been less than ideal.

Similarly, China has rejected claims of genocide against the Muslim Uyghur population, and UN attempts to investigate the situation seem permanently stalled.

Of course, speaking up comes with clear risks, as Australia discovered when China responded to criticism with a barrage of trade restrictions.

Chinese sanctions now extend beyond nations to also cover parliamentarians, diplomats and even academics for actions or claims that “severely harm China’s sovereignty and interests and maliciously spread lies and disinformation”.

Even companies that question human rights standards within their supply chains risk boycotts and backlashes, such as happened to Nike and H&M.

The situation has now created the riddle of our epoch: how do we advance human rights, enhance respect for international agreements and secure economic prosperity — without sabre-rattling and increasing the risk of war?

Read more: Russia and China present a united front to the west – but there’s plenty of potential for friction

New Zealand sits on the fence

So far, the focus of the Quad alliance has been on military cooperation. And while New Zealand has taken part in wider exercises, it has steered away from war games designed to demonstrate collective opposition to China.

Instead, New Zealand has preferred to make noises about democracy in Hong Kong, quietly grumble about the need for all countries to abide by the law of the sea, and express “grave concerns” over “credible” reports of severe human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

But New Zealand isn’t pushing as hard as its allies. When trade minister Damien O’Connor suggested other countries (notably Australia) “show respect” to China, it caused a minor diplomatic meltdown.

The government has even avoided joining 14 like-minded nations in signing a joint statement expressing concern over China’s cooperation during the World Health Organisation’s search for the origins of COVID-19.

Read more: The WHO report into the origin of the coronavirus is out. Here’s what happens next, says the Australian doctor who went to China

Time for more than lip service

There is merit in trying to be an honest broker, and it is part of New Zealand’s independent foreign policy position. But eventually we need some evidence of success (beyond a self-interested trade upgrade), and so far that evidence is missing.

Without progress in the next six months, or if tensions escalate before then, sticking to the middle ground will look less like wise diplomacy and more like appeasement. The values New Zealand professes to stand for – human rights, democracy and the rule of international law – have to be more than lip service.

New Zealand can either act as a genuine intermediary in negotiations with China about what a new, stable global order might look like. Or it can make a stand, with both words and actions, next to like-minded countries.

Putting its hand up for the next Quad-plus exercise is perhaps not ideal, but it’s an option that needs to be debated.

Read more: Why China’s attempts to stifle foreign media criticism are likely to fail

– ref. Without evidence of real progress, NZ’s foreign policy towards China looks increasingly empty – https://theconversation.com/without-evidence-of-real-progress-nzs-foreign-policy-towards-china-looks-increasingly-empty-158946

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

Australia’s aged-care system is in a state of a disaster. The aged care royal commission’s final report, released last month, is just the latest in a decades-long string of depressing reports and inquiries exposing horrific abuse, neglect, and systemic failures.

Aged care needs a complete overhaul. Piecemeal reform will not be enough. Although the two commissioners didn’t agree on everything, they did agree on the fundamental reforms needed to throw out the old paradigm of rationed care, which has left too many older Australians with inadequate care — or none at all.

In a new Grattan Institute report, we navigate the commissioners’ disagreements and identify four key criteria for transformational change.

Of course, fixing aged care won’t come cheap. We also set out some ideas as to how the government could secure the billions of additional dollars needed every year to fund a better aged-care system. In this regard, next month’s federal budget offers a crucial opportunity for the government to step up.

Forging a clear path to change: 4 steps

First, the government must develop a new Aged Care Act that enshrines the rights of older Australians and includes a universal entitlement to needs-based care. Reforms to create a single new integrated aged-care program that includes both home care and residential care categories would make care easier to access. This would also help ensure high-quality care for all older Australians who need it, without waiting times or co-payments for care.

Second, the government must introduce new independent governance arrangements, including independent pricing, independent quality standards, independent oversight, and regional governance structures. This would help address poor regulation and failures in the current market-based system that have meant many older Australians haven’t been getting the level or quality of care they need. Better governance and enhanced transparency would help create a properly functioning aged-care system dedicated to providing high-quality care.

Read more: 4 key takeaways from the aged care royal commission’s final report

Third, the government must announce major reforms to the aged-care workforce. It must set and enforce minimum care hours per resident in residential aged care, set up a national registration system for all personal care workers, and mandate that all aged-care workers complete Certificate III training at a minimum.

Finally, the government must announce a massive boost in aged-care funding — and detail how they’re going to finance it.

Coming up with the cash

People receiving care should contribute to their ordinary costs of living, such as accommodation. But the government should pay for their care costs, just as the government pays for patients’ costs in public hospitals (through Medicare).

This approach would provide universal insurance for people with high care needs, and would reduce the need for precautionary savings in older age, because people would not need to worry about how they are going to fund their possible care needs.

The royal commission identified a A$9.8 billion annual funding shortfall in aged care, and that figure will only increase as Australia’s population ages.

This funding gap could be financed through some combination of a Medicare-style levy on taxable income, changes to the pension assets test, reductions in tax breaks on superannuation, or other mechanisms.

The royal commission recommended a 1% aged-care levy on personal income tax, just like the Medicare levy, as a way to share costs across the community. This would raise about A$8 billion per year and cost the median taxpayer about A$610 per year.

Read more: If we have the guts to give older people a fair go, this is how we fix aged care in Australia

Other tax measures targeted at wealthier older Australians would also help ensure equity in funding a better aged-care system.

The average household headed by someone aged 65-74 now has more than A$1.3 million in net assets. That figure has more than doubled in the past two decades. Counting more of the value of the family home in the pension assets test (a means test that determines your eligibility for the pension) above a certain threshold — such as A$500,000 — would make the pension fairer. It would also save the budget up to A$2 billion a year, which could be reallocated to aged care.

The government could also wind back excessively generous tax breaks for older Australians in superannuation, which result in only one in six people over 65 paying any income tax.

Superannuation earnings in retirement — currently untaxed for people with superannuation balances of less than A$1.6 million — should be taxed at 15%, the same as superannuation earnings before retirement. This would improve budget balances by about A$6 billion a year today, and much more in future.

Surveys consistently show Australians are willing to pay more tax to fix aged care.

Read more: Australians want more funding for higher-quality aged care — and most are willing to pay extra tax to achieve it

Money has to be spent wisely

Pre-budget leaks suggest the government is prepared to invest additional billions in aged care, but the amount foreshadowed in a media report over the weekend — A$10 billion over a four-year period — is below what experts identify as necessary to fix the problems revealed by the royal commission.

Just as important, if the additional funding is not accompanied by system reform, then an opportunity will have been wasted, and the spending will be wasted on system inefficiencies and excess management fees rather than on improved services for consumers.

The time is now

Properly administered, extra funding could transform the aged-care system. It could clear the 100,000-long waiting list for adequate home care, provide higher-level care at home for longer, employ at least 70,000 more aged-care workers, lift the amount of care per resident, and ensure a qualified nurse is on site 24/7 in all residential care homes. But achieving these needed changes will require more than what appears to be on offer in the pre-budget leak.

The government must seize this moment. It must sharpen its pencil and take this historic opportunity where there is substantial public support for transformative change and fund the necessary reform fully. Next month’s budget should include policies — and funding — to create an aged-care system in which all Australians can take pride.

– ref. Next month’s federal budget is the time to stop talking about aged care and start fixing it – https://theconversation.com/next-months-federal-budget-is-the-time-to-stop-talking-about-aged-care-and-start-fixing-it-158951

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

They’re one of the most damaging environmental forces on Earth. They’ve colonised pretty much every place humans have set foot on the planet. Yet you might not even know they exist.

We’re talking about alien species. Not little green extraterrestrials, but invasive plants and animals not native to an ecosystem and which become pests. They might be plants from South America, starfish from Africa, insects from Europe or birds from Asia.

These species can threaten the health of plants and animals, including humans. And they cause huge economic harm. Our research, recently published in the journal Nature, puts a figure on that damage. We found that globally, invasive species cost US$1.3 trillion (A$1.7 trillion) in money lost or spent between 1970 and 2017.

The cost is increasing exponentially over time. And troublingly, most of the cost relates to the damage and losses invasive species cause. Meanwhile, far cheaper control and prevention measures are often ignored.

An expansive toll

Invasive species have been invading foreign territories for centuries. They hail from habitats as diverse as tropical forests, dry savannas, temperate lakes and cold oceans.

They arrived because we brought them — as pets, ornamental plants or as stowaways on our holidays or via commercial trade.

The problems they cause can be:

• ecological, such as causing the extinction of native species
• human health-related, such as causing allergies and spreading disease
• economic, such as reducing crop yields or destroying human-built infrastructure.

In Australia, invasive species are one of our most serious environmental problems – and the biggest cause of extinctions.

Feral animals such as rabbits, goats, cattle, pigs and horses can degrade grazing areas and compact soil, damaging farm production. Feral rabbits take over the burrows of native animals, while feral cats and foxes hunt and kill native animals.

Read more: Invasive species are Australia’s number-one extinction threat

Introduced insects, such as yellow crazy ants on Christmas Island, pose a serious threat to a native species. Across Australia, feral honeybees compete with native animals for nectar, pollen and habitat.

Invasive fish compete with native species, disturb aquatic vegetation and introduce disease. Some, such as plague minnows, prey on the eggs and tadpoles of frogs and attack native fish.

Environmental weeds and invasive fungi and parasites also cause major damage.

Of course, the problem is global – and examples abound. In Africa’s Lake Victoria, the huge, carnivorous Nile perch — introduced to boost fisheries – has wiped out more than 200 of the 300 known species of cichlid fish — prized by aquarium enthusiasts the world over.

And in the Florida Everglades, thousands of five metre-long Burmese pythons have gobbled up small, native mammals at alarming rates.

Read more: Invasive predators are eating the world’s animals to extinction – and the worst is close to home

Money talks

Despite the serious threat biological invasions pose, the problem receives little political, media or public attention.

Our research sought to reframe the problem of invasive species in terms of economic cost. But this was not an easy task.

The costs are diverse and not easily compared. Our analysis involved thousands of cost estimates, compiled and analysed over several years in our still-growing InvaCost database. Economists and ecologists helped fine-tune the data.

The results were staggering. We discovered invasive species have cost the world US$1.3 trillion (A$1.7 trillion) lost or spent between 1970 and 2017. The cost largely involves damages and losses; the cost of preventing or controlling the invasions were ten to 100 times lower.

Clearly, getting on top of control and prevention would have helped avoid the massive damage bill.

Read more: Global agriculture study finds developing countries most threatened by invasive pest species

Average costs have been increasing exponentially over time — trebling each decade since 1970. For 2017 alone, the estimated cost of invasive species was more than US$163 billion. That’s more than 20 times higher than the combined budgets of the World Health Organisation and the United Nations in the same year.

Perhaps more alarming, this massive cost is a conservative estimate and likely represents only the tip of the iceberg, for several reasons:

• we analysed only the most robust available data; had we included all published data, the cost figure would have been 33 times higher for the estimate in 2017

• some damage caused by invasive species cannot be measured in dollars, such as carbon uptake and the loss of ecosystem services such as pollination

• most of the impacts have not been properly estimated

• most countries have little to no relevant data.

Prevention is better than cure

National regulations for dealing with invasive species are patently insufficient. And because alien species do not respect borders, the problem also requires a global approach.

International cooperation must include financial assistance for developing countries where invasions are expected to increase substantially in the coming decades, and where regulations and management are most lacking.

Proactive measures to prevent invasion must become a priority. As the old saying goes, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. And this must happen early – if we miss the start of an invasion, control in many cases is impossible.

More and better research on the economic costs of biological invasions is essential. Our current knowledge is fragmented, hampering our understanding of patterns and trends, and our capacity to manage the problem efficiently.

We hope quantifying the economic impacts of invasive species will mean political leaders start to take notice. Certainly, confirmation of a A$1.7 trillion bill should be enough to get the ball rolling.

Read more: Worried about Earth’s future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp

– ref. Attack of the alien invaders: pest plants and animals leave a frightening $1.7 trillion bill – https://theconversation.com/attack-of-the-alien-invaders-pest-plants-and-animals-leave-a-frightening-1-7-trillion-bill-158628