Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Badenhorst, Lecturer at Massey University, Massey University

Iron deficiency is a common nutritional disorder worldwide, and pre-menopausal women are most at risk of being diagnosed with it.

New Zealand’s most recent nutritional survey (from 2008/09) shows 12% of women may suffer from iron deficiency. But more recent research in New Zealand suggests up to 55% of women of a similar age but of various ethnicities (Caucasian, Middle Eastern and South Asian) present with depleted iron levels.

This higher incidence of iron deficiency in women is often explained as a result of blood loss during menstruation. But my research, which analyses the iron status of athletic and active women, suggests female physiology has evolved to counter iron loss through complex interactions between female reproductive hormones and the hormone that influences iron regulation.

The research shows variations in iron status during a woman’s monthly cycle, and based on this, we would recommend doctors note what phase of the menstrual cycle a women is in when conducting iron-screening blood tests. In addition, before interpreting test results, they should ask women if they have a natural menstrual cycle, not influenced by any hormonal contraceptives (pill or IUD).

Iron in the body

Iron is fundamental for optimal health and well-being. It is an essential part of haemoglobin, the pigment in red blood cells, and transports oxygen throughout the body.

Even though iron is important for healthy and normal functioning, we can’t make the mineral and rely on recycling it within the body and getting enough from food. Dietary sources of iron include whole grain cereals, legumes, fish, poultry and meat.

The body controls and regulates iron well. Daily iron losses are only 1-2mg. Research suggests women will lose an additional 1mg of iron each day of their menses, which may bring the total iron loss to 3-5mg during the time of menstrual blood loss (which may last 1-5 days). This can be exaggerated in women who experience heavy or extended menstrual bleeding.

Read more: What to drink with dinner to get the most iron from your food (and what to avoid)

The primary iron regulatory hormone is hepcidin. It works on the only known iron export channels in the body — found in the small intestine (iron absorption from foods), on the surface of white blood cells (iron recycling in the body) and in liver cells (iron release from its reservoir in the liver).

Higher levels of hepcidin lead to a degradation of the iron export channels, effectively stopping the movement of iron from the gut and the release from its storage sites. This also limits the body’s ability to recycle iron from dead red blood cells, either for the production of new red blood cells or to store it in the liver.

Female physiology and iron status

To date only two research investigations have sought to clarify the changes in iron status and hepcidin across the menstrual cycle in pre-menopausal women.

My research shows a dramatic fall in hepcidin (and some other iron-related factors) during menstruation (days 1-5 of the monthly cycle). Hepcidin remains depressed for the few days following the period and then gradually starts rising at ovulation (at about day 14).

After ovulation, as women enter their luteal phase (days 15-28), hepcidin appears to increase and plateau before repeating the cycle the following month.

Research using isolated cells and studies with women undergoing in-vitro fertilisation show that oestrogen tends to suppress hepcidin activity, while progesterone stimulates it. This explains the low levels of hepcidin in the follicular phase (days 1-14 of the menstrual cycle) and the rebound in the luteal phase (days 15-28).

These results suggest that in response to the blood loss that accelerates iron loss, female physiology is primed for maximising iron absorption in the first half of the menstrual cycle by reducing the activity of hepcidin. This could be a physiological counter mechanism to menstrual blood loss.

Read more: The way we measure iron deficiency in children needs to change. Here’s why

It is worth noting that a few studies have also shown that serum iron, transferrin and haemoglobin — all markers used to measure a person’s iron status — fluctuate throughout the menstrual cycle. In one study, 23% of women were classified as iron deficient during menstruation, but this dropped to 8% in the luteal phase.

Transferrin saturation is a measure of the percentage of iron being transported and used in the body. During the luteal phase, when iron levels may rebound, some women may reach transferrin saturation levels of 45%. This typically indicates excess iron or haemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that results in excessive absorption and storage of iron and can be toxic for vital organs.

Some may say research into iron deficiency is well established and we have covered our bases on how to detect and treat this micro-nutrient deficiency. But 18-55% of pre-menopausal women in New Zealand have sub-optimal iron levels.

Researchers have explored many lifestyle factors that affect a person’s iron balance, including dietary preferences, meat intake and exercise. But we have yet to fully consider female physiology and how the menstrual cycle influences the intricacies of iron deficiency diagnosis and effective treatment.

At a time when many call for female-centred research to identify specific health outcomes and treatments, it might be time to reopen the box on iron deficiency.

– ref. Why we should take a women-centred approach to diagnosing and treating iron deficiency – https://theconversation.com/why-we-should-take-a-women-centred-approach-to-diagnosing-and-treating-iron-deficiency-159198

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Crowther, Senior Lecture in Archaeology, The University of Queensland

Africa is often referred to as the cradle of humankind – the birthplace of our species, Homo sapiens. There is evidence of the development of early symbolic behaviours such as pigment use and perforated shell ornaments in Africa, but so far most of what we know about the development of complex social behaviours such as burial and mourning has come from Eurasia.

However, the remains of a child buried almost 80,000 years ago under an overhang at Panga ya Saidi cave in Kenya is providing important new details.

Working with a team of researchers from Kenya, Germany, Spain, France, Australia, Canada, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, we studied the burial. Our results, published in Nature today, reveal valuable insights into human cultural evolution, including how Middle Stone Age populations interacted with the dead.

A child called ‘Mtoto’

Around 78,000 years ago, a small child of 2.5 to 3 years of age was carefully placed on their right side in a shallow pit in a cave near Kenya’s coast. Their legs were raised to their chest in a flexed position, and their body wrapped in a special cloth, perhaps an animal skin.

The child’s head was placed gently on some kind of perishable support – a pillow in readiness for the long sleep. As a final act, the child was deliberately covered over with dirt from the cave floor and left for thousands of years, slowly becoming buried under another 3 metres of soil.

Our team later nicknamed this person “Mtoto”, meaning “child” in Kenya’s Swahili language.

Unearthing Africa’s oldest burial

Panga ya Saidi is roughly 15 kilometres from the Kenyan coast. Our team first visited in 2010 as part of an archaeological project on the origins of East Africa’s Indian Ocean trade.

When we first entered the cave with our colleagues from the National Museums of Kenya, we knew the site was special. The limestone walls towered some 20-30 metres above us, creating a cool microclimate for forest plants to thrive and humans and animals to take shelter. The cave is sacred to the Mijikenda people who occupy the area today.

Read more: Ancient eggshells and a hoard of crystals reveal early human innovation and ritual in the Kalahari

With permission from the local community to conduct our research, we embarked on what has become a decade-long process of discovery at the cave. We quickly realised the site held far greater significance for understanding human evolution than we originally thought.

Our excavations uncovered a deep series of occupation layers bearing thousands of stone tools and animal remains, as well as shell beads and ochre fragments. These finds revealed more than 78,000 years of early human cultural, technological and symbolic activities.

But our most exciting find came in our third field season in 2013, when the shallow pit containing Mtoto’s burial was exposed some 3 metres below the cave floor.

The remains were so fragile, our team had to cover them in plaster and remove them intact with the block of sediment in which they were buried. The block was sent first to the National Museum in Nairobi, then to our collaborator Maria Martinón-Torres at the National Research Center on Human Evolution (CENIEH) in Spain, who is a leading expert in hominin palaeobiology.

Martinón-Torres and her team spent months painstakingly excavating and documenting the remains in her laboratory, revealing not only that the remains belonged to a modern human (Homo sapiens), but a small child.

Mtoto’s preservation was remarkable. The skull and face bones, including the jawbone, were still articulated. Based on the shapes of the teeth, Martinón-Torres was able to determine that the child was just 2.5–3 years of age.

Microscopic analysis of the bones and surrounding soil confirmed that the body was rapidly covered after burial and that decomposition took place in the pit. In other words, Mtoto was intentionally buried shortly after death.

Furthermore, the position of Mtoto’s flexed body, found lying on the right side with knees drawn toward the chest, suggests it was a tightly shrouded burial with deliberate preparation. The position of the head and the way it had collapsed in the pit suggested a pillow of some kind may have been used, indicating the community may have undertaken some form of funerary rite.

Read more: The revolution that wasn’t: African tools push back the origins of human technological innovation

Our next big question was the age of the burial. The bones were too old for radiocarbon dating, which only works well on organic remains from the past 40,000 years or so.

We turned instead to a method called luminescence dating, which measures when quartz grains in the sediment were last exposed to light (that is, when they were buried). The luminescence dates securely placed Mtoto’s burial at 78,000 years ago, making it the oldest known human burial in Africa.

Implications for human cultural evolution

The Panga ya Saidi burial is a major breakthrough for understanding how early populations in Africa treated their dead, allowing us to start situating these behaviours alongside what we know about how culture developed in other regions.

Child and juvenile burials are not uncommon in the Eurasian record, and now we have definitive evidence for not just intentional burial at 78,000 years ago in Africa, but the burial of a young child. This suggests a kind of special treatment of the young, with complex emotions of mourning linked to complex social behaviours.

Interestingly, the burial was not accompanied by any grave goods or personal ornaments, as have been found with early burials elsewhere in Africa and Eurasia.

In fact, the earliest symbolic ornaments at Panga ya Saidi, in the form of cone snail shell beads, only appear some 10,000 years after Mtoto’s burial. Associated with the burial, though, is a fragment of Giant African land snail shell that bears evidence of incisions from a pointed instrument or tool. While we cannot interpret this evidence symbolically, it does show some form of human modification.

The burial is also significant because of its association with stone tools belonging to the Middle Stone Age tradition, which has been linked to more than one hominin species, including both modern and archaic Homo sapiens. At Panga ya Saidi, we can definitively state that modern Homo sapiens manufactured these stone tools, providing some clarification on the nature of early technology and tool use.

Read more: Why are humans unique? It’s the small things that count

We can also derive new information about the anatomical evolution of our species. A comparison of Mtoto’s teeth with a representative sample of Neanderthal teeth as well as those from recent and fossil Homo sapiens showed that, although they were clearly modern human, they also have some primitive features.

This supports recent archaeological and genetic research suggesting our species didn’t evolve from a single population in one region of Africa. Rather, modern human populations living in different parts of Africa looked different to one another and followed different evolutionary trajectories.

– ref. A cave site in Kenya’s forests reveals the oldest human burial in Africa – https://theconversation.com/a-cave-site-in-kenyas-forests-reveals-the-oldest-human-burial-in-africa-160343

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anastasia Powell, Associate Professor, Criminology and Justice Studies, RMIT University

It may be a familiar statistic, but it is still shocking and unacceptable. In Australia, almost every week a woman dies at the hands of her partner or ex-partner.

In a much-anticipated three-part documentary, See What You Made Me Do, investigative journalist Jess Hill exposes the glaring questions our nation must address if we are to keep women safe.

Why does he do it? And how can we stop it?

For the first time, Hill’s documentary explores the complexity of family violence in visceral detail, from understanding how coercive control works, to the failure of policing and courts, and families’ gut-wrenching stories of how daughters, grandchildren, mothers or friends were murdered by their partner.

But this is not just about making TV content, it’s about making change. So, where do we need to focus our efforts and resources?

A national crisis

As Hill says, domestic and family violence is a “national crisis”.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, one in six women, and one in 17 men, have experienced physical or sexual violence from a current or former cohabiting partner since the age of 15.

Our national helplines are overrun with calls, while police respond to a domestic violence call-out at least every two minutes.

The federal government has a long-term plan to address the gender inequalities that set up the conditions for violence. When women are not equal to men — when our attitudes and behaviours assert male dominance over women — it enables some men to abuse and it prevents women from seeking help.

Australian governments increasingly recognise the need to do more to protect women and children, from improving police responses, to providing crisis accommodation, resourcing support workers and better connecting women with support services. Yet many women are left waiting, with victim support and housing services critically underfunded to meet the demand. Clearly this needs to change.

But there is another area that remains woefully underdeveloped in Australia.

We need to urgently change how we work with men

Many state and territory policy responses talk about holding men accountable for their use of violence. This is primarily through intensified policing and court responses and there is indeed evidence these can help reduce reported domestic violence.

But we still know surprisingly little about men’s pathways into perpetration, and how we might work therapeutically, socially and culturally to intervene earlier.

Read more: How intimate partner violence affects children’s health

For the most part in Australia, the professional response for perpetrators is a men’s behaviour change program. Yet many such programs have long waiting lists, are typically short-term (usually 20 weeks), and are often ordered by a court when a man’s violence is so severe as to reach the attention of the criminal law.

Nationally our interventions with men have largely relied on a patchwork of funding and various pilot programs. Some pilots show promise, like projects providing tailored responses to the needs of a diversity of men, or providing perpetrator accommodation with behaviour change support, or programs that intervene early with fathers at risk of using violence in the home.

Read more: No public outrage, no vigils: Australia’s silence at violence against Indigenous women

In Victoria, a pilot intensive case management model that integrates a family violence social worker with police family violence specialists has been shown to reduce recidivism. The pilot has now been extended to include a social worker focused specifically on working with male perpetrators.

Each of these pilots are promising and, if properly resourced and evaluated, will help improve our knowledge of working better with men who use violence. But there is a lot more we can be doing.

Lessons from overseas

Australia is well behind other countries in terms of coordinated responses to work more holistically with perpetrators and address their use of abuse over the longer term.

Episode three of See What You Made Me Do looks at how Scotland has legislated against coercive control. But this isn’t the country’s only innovation.

In Scotland the “Caledonian system” is an integrated model that, along with a women’s and a children’s program, engages men for a minimum of two years. It includes six months of individual assessment (including engagement and motivation sessions), a 22-week group work phase, and post-group case management and support.

The two-year time frame is more realistic for achieving personal change over time and may provide some protective factors when families are engaged in family court or when a man repartners in a new relationship. This system was developed in 2004 and following an evaluation in 2016 is now offered in 19 councils, covering 75% of the Scottish population.

With Australia currently undertaking development of its next national plan to reduce violence against women, now is the time to draw on the Scottish experience and advance our policy approaches for perpetrator interventions.

Australia needs a national network of coordinated perpetrator interventions that engage men intensively, over time, and in a timely manner.

Protection, prevention and intervention

For decades, our national response to domestic and family violence has been to try to protect women at the point of crisis. And while we must continue to support and train police, as well as properly resource crisis accommodation and support services for women and children escaping violence, we know we need to act sooner in the pathways of violence if we are to save lives. Indeed, our national policy recognises that prevention is also key to a long-term future Australia without violence against women.

But we must also intervene with men earlier, more intensively, and for longer, to stop their use of violence. Given the high risk of repeat perpetration of domestic abuse, when we don’t work well with perpetrators we risk the cycle of abuse continuing in their current and future relationships.

Read more: More than half of Australians will experience trauma, most before they turn 17. We need to talk about it

See What You Made Me Do makes for confronting viewing — it is a problem that involves people all around us in the community. As Hill tells us, there are three million Australian adults and children who are victims of domestic abuse.

Yet we need to do more than acknowledge the scale and reach of domestic violence. The critical message is we must take immediate and innovative action to address it. This is going to take a shift in our approach to domestic violence — one that draws on international best practice and develops a national approach that supports men to change, while holding them to account.

See What You Made Me Do premiered on May 5 on SBS, NITV and SBS On Demand.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732. In immediate danger, call 000.

– ref. ‘See What You Made Me Do’ will change the way we think about domestic violence. Here’s what needs to happen now – https://theconversation.com/see-what-you-made-me-do-will-change-the-way-we-think-about-domestic-violence-heres-what-needs-to-happen-now-160085

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Damian Powell, Historian and Principal, Janet Clarke Hall, The University of Melbourne

The Australian Defence Force has faced a reckoning in the past few months. First came the shocking Brereton report exposing alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan.

Then, in recent weeks, other critical issues have surfaced requiring urgent attention, from the royal commission investigating veteran suicides to a vigorous debate over the very function of the ADF itself in today’s society.

As we prepare to withdraw our forces from the Afghan conflict without any consensus on the war’s outcomes, the ADF is potentially at a crossroads.

Not only are questions being raised about its culture, there appears to be a struggle underway about its identity and purpose, as well.

How the ADF has changed

A century ago, war correspondent and historian Charles Bean gave form to the idea that:

Anzac stood, and still stands, for reckless valour in a good cause, for enterprise, resourcefulness, fidelity, comradeship, and endurance that will never own defeat.

It has been a useful myth, and one that Australian soldiers continue to draw on in terms of their self-awareness and self-identity. It has also promoted civilian understanding of the potential sacrifice that lies at the heart of the ADF’s service ethos.

But it has clear limitations in the modern context of war fighting, among them:

• no awareness of the highly technical realities of modern warfare

• little recognition of women, whose technical and counterintelligence capabilities are of equal or greater importance than men in some specific military roles

• an emphasis on the mythic bonds of (primarily Anglo-Celtic) mateship forged through combat, turning men into marble statues devoid of human frailty.

An opportunity to rethink core values

The Brereton report has provided an opportunity for the ADF to rethink its core values and what it stands for. And it must keep in mind that in the age of social media, it is hard to hide — or forgive — a shadowy side of any institution which holds public trust.

Chief of Defence General Angus Campbell showed in his pained response to Brereton that our military is no different to any other institution in this regard. It needs social trust — including the trust of those young people who are the only source of its future human capital.

This doesn’t mean the military needs to be more “woke”, to borrow a phrase from Liberal backbencher and former soldier Phillip Thompson. It means corporate, political and educational leaders ignore changing social expectations at their peril.

Behaviour once able to be brushed under the carpet or brushed off as a joke is now a potential “career killer”, as social trust (and economic capital) flows away from institutions and their leaders who are deemed to be out of step with social mores.

Read more: Why Australian commanders need to be held responsible for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan

Young Australians may still come out for ANZAC Day marches, but they are equally — if not more — passionate about the “Black Lives Matter” movement and the struggle for gender equality. And they’ll judge the military by how responsive it is to these and other social issues.

As Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie reminded us last month, the military’s core task is using lethal violence in the national interest. Hastie’s emphasis on the application of lethal violence should not be discounted: it represents the sharp end of military capability.

In the end, though, the ADF’s greatest asset is its people. For the best and brightest to be attracted to military service, the application of “lethal violence” must also be lawful and the ethical case for using such violence well understood.

The public also sees the role of the ADF as going beyond war fighting. Here, recent contributions made by defence personnel in the pandemic, alongside bushfire and flood recoveries, have promoted productive layers of community engagement.

As the ADF has drawn on the wide skill set offered by part-time, reserve personnel — supported by defence logistics and command structure — civilians have seen the military working on the ground as engineers, doctors, nurses and in other professions ranging from arborists to veterinarians.

Why reviews can bring lasting change

Successive reviews of military culture make clear the challenges. To ensure its capability, the ADF needs to stay focused, relevant and off the front pages of the papers by addressing poor cultural practice.

It seems reasonable to assume the ADF – perhaps our most valued national “brand” – has the capacity to take the lead in good cultural practice. It did so in owning and then building on the recommendations of the Broderick reviews into the treatment of women in the military.

While far from uniformly popular among service personnel, this put the ADF ahead of society at a time when it threatened to fall badly behind.

Indeed, one of the unresolved questions from the Broderick reviews – the extent to which the Australian Defence Force Academy reflected university culture in terms of its treatment of women – fostered a conversation that led, indirectly, to the Australian Human Rights Commission’s “Change the Course” report on sexual harassment on campus.

Vice chancellors and generals alike now find themselves accountable for ensuring a respectful culture for women across the country.

Read more: Changing the culture of our SAS forces is no easy fix. Instead, we need to face the true costs of war

There is no reason why defence cannot lead future discussions on good practice in all its facets, from war fighting to leadership training.

The Brereton report showed the ADF is willing to subject itself to public scrutiny, and to be judged by the standards it demands of our men and women in uniform. With proper sensitivity towards the effects on our service personnel, we need an honest, open discussion, leading to honest conclusions, about our military conduct in Afghanistan.

We must also examine what we need to do better to train, support and supervise our troops.

The goodwill of the nation depends on it

For the ADF to focus on its primary mission of war fighting, it needs strong morale among its troops. For that, it needs the goodwill of the nation.

Any misalignment of defence values with societal expectations could lead to an eventual dead end – in promoting, recruiting and maintaining a cultural identity without parallel in Australian society.

Read more: Crowds at dawn services have plummeted in recent years. It’s time to reinvent Anzac Day

Some years ago, when addressing a group of ADFA recruits, I was challenged by an officer cadet who claimed the Broderick review team risked turning the Army into the “boy scouts”.

His inference, I assume, was that by addressing a toxic culture in which women were at times objectified and mistreated, we ran the risk of destroying a culture of masculine aggression and fraternity needed in combat.

My response was, above all, that Australia needed its defence forces to maintain their war-fighting capability. To do that, the country needed a great deal of trust, and clarity, around what is required — morally and culturally – of those who are tasked with carrying out lawful violence in our name.

In an age in which individualism is so highly promoted and prized, clarity of expectation and role within the ADF is more important than ever.

– ref. ‘Fit for service’: Why the ADF needs to move with society to retain the public trust – https://theconversation.com/fit-for-service-why-the-adf-needs-to-move-with-society-to-retain-the-public-trust-159924

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Gilroy, ARC Research Fellow in Indigenous Health, Disability and Community Development, University of Sydney

The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is one of the greatest human services reform in Australia’s history, and holds great promise in improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people with disability.

But the federal government’s proposed “independent assessments” aren’t the way forward for Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people with a disability.

I’m a Koori bloke from the Yuin Nation who lives with disability and has a research career spanning nearly 20 years. The biggest problem I have with the proposed framework is that it’s disrespectful and discriminatory towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Rather than designing another layer of bureaucracy, I recommend the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) invests more resources into building and up-skilling the current NDIS planning workforce and the Aboriginal community-controlled services sector.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people with disability have a right to use health specialists with whom they have an established relationship. As such, the government should invest more resources into the health workforce to build consistency in the NDIS planning process.

Read more: ‘Dehumanising’ and ‘a nightmare’: why disability groups want NDIS independent assessments scrapped

What are these reforms again?

Currently, people seeking access to the NDIS are required to work with their health professionals to see if they’re eligible. After this, they work with the NDIS, or an NDIA-funded agency partner, to design a funded package.

The federal government’s proposed independent assessments would see a government-approved health professional unknown to the person with disability visit to determine their eligibility for the NDIS and the amount of funding they would receive. The meetings would take as long as three hours, or longer if there’s a disagreement between the assessor and the applicant’s family.

New NDIS minister Linda Reynolds put on hold the reforms in April amid widespread backlash, although this week she promised “some form” of independent assessments will go ahead.

The NDIA justification for the independent assessments is:

To decide whether a person is eligible for the NDIS and the kinds of supports they receive, we need to have consistent and reliable evidence that captures detail of their functional capacity, and the environment in which they live.

Critics say the reforms are a cost-cutting exercise in response to the cost blow-out of the NDIS, and warn the changes will make it harder for people to access the scheme.

The model is discriminatory

The proposed independent assessment model is discriminatory to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

The model would further disadvantage Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living in remote and rural areas, who rely on visiting professionals and e-health service models. It already takes months or even years to get into the NDIS and complete the planning process. The proposed model adds another hurdle and will likely extend the time frame for NDIS assessments for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.

The first independent assessment pilot program was conducted in 2018, and only 1% of 513 people involved were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. And during the second pilot, before it was paused in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, only 4% of the 99 people involved were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. This participation rate is inadequate.

None of the eight NDIA-funded organisations delivering the independent assessments are Aboriginal community-controlled. Adding salt to the wound, the NDIA says these agencies:

[…] understand and have experience of the disability population in their local area, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) groups and communities.

Simply giving professionals training in cultural competence or cultural safety isn’t enough to establish a culturally safe NDIS environment.

It’s unknown if there’s a requirement for the independent assessment agencies to have Aboriginal workers or Aboriginal allied-health assistants.

Most of the suite of independent assessment tools haven’t been rigorously tested or evaluated for their application with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. Assessment tools should be evaluated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families to ensure they’re applicable for cultural and social norms before they are endorsed by governments.

The NDIA says some of these tools are linked to the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, which is a framework for classifying disability and functioning. My research shows the framework hasn’t been evaluated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities during its development, except one small study in the Northern Territory.

In my professional view, the framework needs to be “Indigenised” to ensure NDIS assessment models are respectful for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

A trusting relationship with a health professional is key

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people currently represent nearly 7% of all NDIS package holders. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics data from 2015, the rate of disability in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population is nearly twice that of the non-Indigenous population.

My research found Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people often have a high level of distrust of government systems due to a history of racism and child removal, meaning many don’t engage with disability services. However, generally, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people engage with disability service providers if they have an established relationship with a worker in that organisation.

In some cases, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people prefer Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers over non-Indigenous workers. GP Debra Blackmore, who works for the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service, explained this perfectly in a submission to a parliamentary inquiry into the independent assessments, stressing:

[…] the importance of long-term therapeutic relationships in building trust, understanding nuances of communication, creating culturally safe spaces and ensuring patients feel safe and confident enough to appropriately express their needs and concerns.

The proposed independent assessments are the antithesis of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural models of health and disability. The proposed model is purely based on the medical model of disability and it excludes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural nuances of the social experiences of disability. What’s more, the independent assessment meetings could trigger post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms linked to a history of disablism, racism, stolen generations, and personal anxiety.

– ref. Here’s why the planned NDIS reforms discriminate against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – https://theconversation.com/heres-why-the-planned-ndis-reforms-discriminate-against-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-people-160183

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Nelson, Associate Professor of Economics, Griffith University

The NSW transport minister said this week that rolling out a distance-based tax on electric car owners (as the state treasurer flagged) would make them the “laughing stock of the world”.

Instead, he proposed incentives to boost the uptake of electric vehicles — such as cheaper car parking and special access to transit lanes.

It comes after the Victorian government this week committed to reducing greenhouse emissions by 45-50% by 2030, and to reaching net zero emissions by 2050. This covers all sectors, including electricity. The government has already legislated to ensure half Victoria’s energy is drawn from renewables by 2030.

Other states are also setting targets closely aligned with the Paris Agreement commitment of limiting warming to 1.5℃.

Their efforts lie in contrast to the federal government, which has promoted low-emissions technology advances but didn’t make any new, meaningful emissions reduction commitments at US President Joe Biden’s climate leaders summit last month.

The ambitious new commitments of state governments go some way to filling the void left by the lack of a national climate policy. So let’s look at how they can best coordinate their efforts to deliver a more efficient, lower-cost outcome — and a national approach to reducing emissions.

What are the states doing?

All states have committed to net zero emissions by 2050, have (or have already achieved) renewables targets of 50% or above by 2030, and are rapidly developing innovative hydrogen projects.

The electricity sector remains the biggest focus of state governments.

South Australia and Tasmania are targeting renewables for more than 100% of their electricity consumption. They plan to export this energy to neighbouring states via new interconnection (transmission lines).

The Victorian government is just about to launch its second auction using “contracts for difference” (CFDs) to buy energy from new renewable energy projects. The ACT Government has already used CFDs to buy 100% renewables.

A CFD is a contract where the government makes a top-up payment when the price of electricity is below the price agreed in the original contract. However, concerns about the use of this policy tool are growing.

Read more: Against the odds, South Australia is a renewable energy powerhouse. How on Earth did they do it?

The Queensland government has taken a different approach altogether. It has created a new company, CleanCo, to help meet its 50% renewable energy target by 2030.

But the most ambitious policy of all the states is the NSW Energy Roadmap. It’s aiming to develop new zones that will create 12 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030. This is the equivalent capacity (not output) of around six Liddell power stations.

The NSW government is currently consulting on how this policy will be developed, but early indications suggest a modified version of CFDs will be used.

A case of Back to the Future

In many ways, the current situation feels a bit like déjà vu. Back in 2005, the states were making commitments to reduce emissions and increasing investment in renewable energy. There was a view the Commonwealth was not doing enough to reduce emissions and they needed to fill the void.

They even formed their own taskforce, which developed a model for the states to introduce their own nationally consistent emissions trading scheme — a tool for putting a price and limit on emissions.

Read more: Climate explained: how emissions trading schemes work and they can help us shift to a zero carbon future

The proposal and individual state policies were largely shelved when both the Howard government and the Rudd opposition took emissions trading and clean energy targets to the 2007 election.

Today, experts largely agree emissions trading is the most effective way to reduce emissions. But in Australia it remains a politically sensitive issue which neither major party will commit to.

To date, the states have not announced any new plans for a coordinated national approach to emissions reductions. But as their respective plans and commitments gather pace, a state-led national policy makes perfect sense – and it could be achieved without the need to reach agreement with the federal government.

Can the states finish what they started?

Back in 2005, the states recognised the best way to deliver national emissions reductions at the lowest cost was to start with the cheapest and easiest actions. By linking their objectives, the cheapest measures would be pursued first, no matter which state the project was located in.

So, is it worth reviving this approach? And how could it be done given the political aversion to emissions trading?

In our view, one of the forgotten pieces of the puzzle is the most successful emissions reduction policy Australia has deployed to date: the Renewable Energy Target (RET). The RET, established by the Howard government and expanded by the Rudd government, has produced more emissions reductions than most other similar policies combined.

Read more: Spot the difference: as world leaders rose to the occasion at the Biden climate summit, Morrison faltered

The RET concept is simple. Energy retailers must buy a set percentage (currently 20%) of their energy from renewable generators. This is achieved by new renewable projects selling certificates (called large-scale generation certificates, or LGCs) for each unit of production to retailers. This results in new investment in wind, solar, and other green technologies.

It’s a better outcome than governments picking the winning projects. The more retailers and new generators build, the more prices fall (as they have recently), resulting in cost savings for consumers.

How could the states work together?

The Clean Energy Regulator runs the RET and ensures compliance. It has a world-class reputation and oversees the federal government’s emissions reduction fund — where the government purchases the lowest cost abatement.

The regulator also issues large-scale generation certificates (LGCs), maintaining a register of its creation. Rather than every state running its own new policy, states could utilise this framework by purchasing and voluntarily surrendering the lowest-cost LGCs from new projects.

This would be a great alternative to the government picking winners and entering into CFDs (“contracts for difference”) that reduce competition and expose them to growing budget liabilities.

Most importantly, this would link all of the policies together and allow direct integration with the federal government’s emissions reduction fund.

In fact, LGCs could be measured by their emissions abatement. As such, they could be directly comparable with abatement issued via the emissions reduction fund.

This would mean that, for the first time, we would have an integrated nationally consistent approach to emissions reductions across the economy.

By adopting this framework, the states and Commonwealth would all achieve their own objectives without needing to agree on anything new, and avoid the fraught political disagreements that have dogged climate policy for two decades.

It would allow Australia to take advantage of global carbon markets as they evolve and avoid likely future penalties being applied on our exports.

– ref. Australia’s states are forging ahead with ambitious emissions reductions. Imagine if they worked together – https://theconversation.com/australias-states-are-forging-ahead-with-ambitious-emissions-reductions-imagine-if-they-worked-together-160191

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mairin Hennebry-Leung, Lecturer in Languages and TESOL, University of Tasmania

People learn a second language for many reasons, including work, to better understand the world, an interest in the culture of the language itself, and love.

Learning a language has many benefits. For children, it can improve literacy, maths and science skills. It can enhance social skills and empathy, and give them an appreciation of cultural diversity. Evidence also suggests learning a language can safeguard against cognitive decline in older age.

People in Australia speak more than 300 languages. Learning one of these can enrich participation in our multicultural country.

The federal government pointed to the importance of languages in preparing job-ready graduates by including the subject in the university fee cuts announced in 2020. Yet, this perspective is not consistently reflected in the way languages are taught in schools across Australia’s states.

Languages have the lowest year 12 enrolments of all subject areas. Only 10% of year 12 students were enrolled in languages in 2019, compared to 30% in health and physical education, and nearly 50% in the sciences.

Learning languages has a different kind of status across different states. This can be partly be seen in the amount of time each state dedicates to language learning at school.

How fast can you learn a language?

The amount of time needed to learn a language depends on several factors, including a student’s baseline level of knowledge and the kind of language they’re learning.

But the University of Cambridge suggests learning a language for a total of 180-200 hours to be able to interact simply, and a total of 1,000-1,200 hours for fluent, precise expression.

The Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (ACARA) recommends language learning for around:

• 350 hours from foundation to year 6

• 160 hours for years 7 and 8

• a further 160 hours across years 9 and 10

• and 200-240 hours across years 11 and 12.

Overall, this is a minimum of 870 hours from the beginning until the end of school.

While students in some states do spend around this amount of time learning languages, others spend far less.

For instance, in Victoria, schools must offer languages from foundation to year 10, with a recommended 150 minutes per week each year. This totals at least 1,203 hours by the end of year 12.

The amount of time students actually spend learning a language in Victoria varies between schools. Data shows 79-98% of students across years 7 to 12 receive 180 minutes or more of language learning per week.

Read more: The time it takes to learn a new language depends on what you want to do with it

But in South Australia, there’s far less requirement for language learning. Schools are required to teach languages for 80 minutes per week from foundation to year 7, and 128 minutes per week in year 8. There is no requirement beyond year 8, meaning the total amount mandated is 474 hours.

This is similar in Western Australia, where languages are required to be taught for 120 minutes per week for students in years 3 to 8 (a total of 444 hours). Every student in WA learns a language in years 3 to 6, with a policy to extend this to year 9 by 2023.

Teaching also differs

There are also differences in the expertise required of language teachers across states and territories.

Victorian language teachers, for example, must have majored in the language they teach. Or they must apply for a Statement of Equivalence to verify their linguistic competence is up to the same standard.

By contrast, neither the Tasmanian education department nor the teachers’ registration board have any specific languages requirement for teacher recruitment.

A non-specialist teacher might manage beginner French, but going beyond that can prove challenging. This may explain the sharp drop in student enrolments beyond year 7 in Tasmania, as shown in the 2019 Tasmania Department of Education Corporate Survey (data that’s not currently publicly available).

Anecdotal evidence also suggests a lack of skilled teachers has led some schools to cut language programs.

Shortage of specialist teachers may also help explain why states such as SA and WA don’t mandate language provision beyond year 8.

In Victoria, mainstream secondary schools offer 19 languages (including Hindi, Indonesia and Auslan). Meanwhile, only five languages are available for students to learn up until year 12 in Tasmania — Chinese, French, German, Italian and Japanese.

What we need to do

In August 2019, the federal government promised to develop a national strategy for languages “to support language teaching and learning in Australia”. But what the strategy will mean in practice is elusive.

To ensure better language education across Australia, states must adequately resource their language education policy and outline a clear plan for how it should be implemented.

Some states are further ahead with this than others. For instance, through 2019 and 2020, Queensland rolled out a series of strategies for language provision in schools. These suggested schools will be required to align with ACARA recommended hours. But the strategy document doesn’t explicitly state how many hours of learning should be provided for languages.

Read more: Learning languages early is key to making Australia more multilingual

A good language policy might consider how much time is to be dedicated to languages, how that time should be distributed, and what criteria should be applied in recruiting language teachers. Development of the policy should also consider what steps will be needed to make policy a practical reality.

Involving stakeholders — such as schools, universities, parents and students — in developing language education policy is central to ensure it’s successfully implemented.

States must carefully consider the professional knowledge required for effective teaching of languages. This should inform recruitment and prompt provision of professional development opportunities to equip teachers with strong knowledge of language and pedagogy.

Collaboration between schools, local universities, professional associations and state government plays a key role.

States also need to have a clear definition of language programs. This is so there is a clear understanding and aligned expectations among government, schools and parents.

– ref. Is your kid studying a second language at school? How much they learn will depend on where you live – https://theconversation.com/is-your-kid-studying-a-second-language-at-school-how-much-they-learn-will-depend-on-where-you-live-155219

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Imogen Wegman, Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania

This week, a farmer in the Belgian town of Erquelinnes caused an international ruckus when he moved a stone standing in his tractor’s path.

This stone marked the boundary between Belgium and France. By moving it 2.29 metres, he expanded Belgium’s territory.

We must assume he had driven around it before — the stone was placed on this site in 1819, as part of the proceedings that established the Franco-Belgian border in 1820 after Napoleon’s defeat.

For the farmer, it stood in the way of his tractor. For the governments of France and Belgium, it was an active international border.

This story suggests a fragility to borders that contradicts their apparent solidity in an atlas or on Google Maps. Human history is, however, full of arguments about where the edges of property lie.

‘Beating the bounds’

Nations establish their borders through treaties. Rivers are sometimes relied on to set boundaries, but even here tensions rise when there are disputes about interpretation. Is the boundary on the river banks, the deepest part of the river, or the very centre of the flow?

The fact these measurements can even be calculated is remarkable. Expecting high levels of accuracy in a map is a recent development.

The first attempts at consistent accuracy were in 19th century military maps, such as Britain’s Ordnance Survey.

Later development saw the topographical charts used by bushwalkers and mountain climbers. But only with the arrival of digital mapping did it became normal to pin-point our location on a map in everyday situations.

The precise location of boundaries was usually part of local knowledge, kept and maintained by members of the community. For centuries a practice known as “beating the bounds” was followed in parts of Great Britain, Hungary, Germany and the United States.

Members of the parish or community would walk around the edge of their lands every few years, perhaps singing or performing specific actions to help the route stick in the participants’ minds. By including new generations each time, the knowledge was passed through the community and remained active.

Beating the bounds was a tradition of spatial knowledge that carried weight — it was accepted as evidence in cases of disputed boundaries. It was also part of a larger tradition maintaining borders through physical symbolism, whether for good or bad.

Britain has a long history of using enclosure (the fencing or hedging of land) as a means to excluding the poor from accessing common resources. In contrast, in colonial Australia, the first fences were built to protect essential garden crops from scavenging livestock.

Read more: How – and why – Google is transforming the map

Sometimes the importance of the border was demonstrated with an elaborate marker. The Franco-Belgian stone was carved with a date and compass points, representing not only a boundary but also the end of Napoleon’s destructive wars.

Likewise, the boundary markers of Sydney from the same period included the name of the Governor, Richard Bourke.

Manipulation … and incompetence

Formality was not always required. At a local level in the Australian colonies, boundaries were often marked by painting, slashing or burning a mark into a tree. These were easy to ignore, and frustrated landholders placed public notices in the newspapers cautioning against trespassing. People constantly took timber from private properties, or grazed their livestock without hesitation wherever was convenient to them.

Landholders included descriptions of their properties — detailing landmarks and neighbouring properties — in their notices, so there could be no doubt about which land was taken.

But these descriptions formed a circular argument: the potential trespasser needed to know who held each property in order to establish whose property they were about to enter. How effective they were at actually preventing trespass remains unclear.

Rivers were an obvious boundary marker, although European settlers quickly learned how to manipulate them to suit their own needs. By quietly blocking a section of river with trees and other rubbish, they could divert its route to suit their own wishes. By the time the surveyor came to verify or reassess boundaries, the landholder had been using their stolen acres for several years.

Throughout the 19th century, Australian survey departments devoted huge resources to undoing the confusion created by manipulation and incompetence in earlier years.

Markers of time

When the Belgian farmer this week got fed up with going around the stone and decided to move it, he was participating in a time-honoured tradition of manipulating impermanent boundary markers. But if he was able to move it, then who is to say it had not been moved before?

Historic boundary markers like this one have a habit of being in technically the wrong place, even if they are in precisely the right place to commemorate a moment in time.

Perhaps that is where their true significance sits.

– ref. A Belgian farmer moved a rock and accidentally annexed France: the weird and wonderful history of man-made borders – https://theconversation.com/a-belgian-farmer-moved-a-rock-and-accidentally-annexed-france-the-weird-and-wonderful-history-of-man-made-borders-160342

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

More than $500 million of a $1.2 billion digital economy strategy in Tuesday’s budget will be spent on overhauling the federal government’s myGov and My Health Record sites.

The initiatives, to be announced by Scott Morrison on Thursday, include $200.1 million for myGov, which is the main portal for people to access government services on line.

Changes will make it easier for people to find services, from childcare providers to disaster support, as well as to manage payments and claims.

The government says the time saved by the enhancements will generate benefits across the economy worth an estimated $3.6 billion over a decade.

The package will put $301.8 million into what the government describes as the “next wave” of My Health Record, expanding the system, which has 23 million registered users. My Health Record contains summaries of people’s health information. It is managed by the Australian Digital Health Agency.

Some of this spending will assist the vaccination rollout, such as giving people alerts when vaccinations are due. There will be funds to help the move of aged care into a digital system that can link in with My Health Record to make safer and more efficient transitions between aged care and hospitals and other health facilities.

In other initiatives, $124.1 million will be provided to build Australia’s capability in Artificial Intelligence. This will include a National Artificial Intelligence Centre, to promote the adoption by business of AI technologies, supported by a network of AI and digital capability centres.

More than $100 million will go to boosting digital skills including a pilot program for work-based digital cadetships.

Business will benefit from investment incentives. There will be a digital games tax offset of 30% to help Australia obtain more of the $250 billion annual global video game development market.

The Interactive Games and Entertainment Association says Australia could generate a $1 billion games industry within a decade. In 2018-19, the Australian games sector earned $144 million.

Changes to the way businesses can claim depreciation on intangible assets such as intellectual property and in-house software, and help for small businesses to build digital capacity are also in the measures.

The government will invest $111.3 million to support the Consumer Data Right (CDR) rollout. The CDR helps consumers to compare and switch between products and services. This sharpens price and service competition between providers.

The $1.2 billion in spending on the digital strategy package is over six years.

Morrison said: “We need to keep our foot on the digital accelerator to secure our economic recovery from COVID-19”.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said: “Greater digital adoption will improve our competitiveness and lift our productivity – driving job creation and higher wages”.

In a pre-budget speech on Thursday opposition leader Anthony Albanese will distance himself from the big spending Labor proposed at the last election.

He will say money was tight when he was growing up and his mother taught him “the value of a dollar”.

“That’s why, when it comes to thinking about government spending, I am cautious”.

– ref. Upgrades for myGov and My Health Record sites in budget’s $1.2 billion digital strategy – https://theconversation.com/upgrades-for-mygov-and-my-health-record-sites-in-budgets-1-2-billion-digital-strategy-160387

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

What do business and union leaders believe should be in a budget that is designed in part to pitch to women?

Jennifer Westacott, CEO of the Business Council of Australia, says as well as spending on childcare – which we already know about – the budget should improve women’s access to superannuation.

“Women have been very, very disadvantaged in that superannuation system – they are retiring with very small savings.”

“The superannuation and the childcare go hand in hand because we know that the reason many women don’t have adequate super is because they’ve taken big stints out of work and they haven’t built that savings nest egg. So those two things should be seen in tandem.”

Michele O’Neil, president of the ACTU, says for women the budget “needs to include commitments to addressing insecure work and low wages [and] to make sure that the support for early childhood education and care delivers free and universal childcare. Because this is what will matter in terms of women’s participation at work. We have a relatively low rate of women’s participation.”

“If we just increased women to the same level of participation for those key years of 25-45 as men, we’d see a $70 billion increase in GDP and a $30 billion increase in household incomes.”

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: what should the budget do for women? Jennifer Westacott (BCA) and Michele O’Neil (ACTU) – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-what-should-the-budget-do-for-women-jennifer-westacott-bca-and-michele-oneil-actu-160368

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shreya Mcleod, PhD candidate in sport-related concussion, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

News emerged last week that AFLW player Jacinda Barclay, who died last year at age 29 following a short period of mental illness, had abnormalities in her brain tissue.

Barclay was the first Australian contact sportswoman to have her brain donated to the Australian Sports Brain Bank, a medical laboratory that investigates changes in complex nerve structures after death, in order to understand brain conditions sustained by sportspeople.

Similar to findings seen in some male athletes internationally, the researchers found changes in Barclay’s white matter.

White matter has to do with neural connectivity in the brain. As white matter degrades, as is often seen in ageing and in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, neural connectivity diminishes, contributing to cognitive decline.

However, we don’t understand enough about this process in the brain — particularly in sportswomen.

Women’s sport is becoming more popular

Over the past decade, Australia’s elite women’s sports have experienced unprecedented growth. More than 550,000 Australian women (aged 14 and over) now play a form of football, be it soccer, Australian rules, rugby league or rugby union.

This increase in participation in contact and collision sports has seen a concurrent rise in injuries such as concussions. Concussion is a transient injury to the brain, caused by a jolt to the head or body.

Although specialised brain imaging can detect microscopic changes in the connections between brain regions, concussion is hard to detect on routine brain scans. Diagnosis typically relies on people reporting symptoms such as dizziness, confusion, unsteadiness, nausea and headaches after a collision.

Recognising when someone has suffered a concussion, removing them from the field and carefully assessing recovery are all crucial steps before they return to play.

Read more: Is the National Rugby League legally liable for the long-term impacts of concussions?

Risk factors for female athletes

Female athletes are more likely to sustain a concussion than their male counterparts.

Like males, women report a range of symptoms after a concussion, such as headaches, mental fatigue, concentration difficulties and mood swings.

Although symptoms can last longer in some people, recovery from a concussion normally takes seven to ten days for adults. Research on length of recovery is mixed but overall supports that women take longer to recover than men.

Women also perform worse on neurocognitive testing post-injury, which measures things like decision-making ability and processing.

These gender-based differences may be due to a combination of factors.

Women tend to be more aware of their symptoms and are more likely to report them, so this may account for some degree of the gap. However, under-reporting still exists.

Female athletes also generally have shorter and narrower necks, and lower head mass (their heads are smaller and less dense). These factors are associated with lower neck strength. Neck strength is a protective factor against concussion, so women may be more susceptible for this reason.

Further, female brains metabolise glucose (sugar) and oxygen faster than male brains. If a head injury temporarily disrupts blood supply to the brain, it could have a greater effect on the faster nutrient-burning female brain.

Meanwhile, sex hormones such as progesterone that vary across a women’s menstrual cycle could also affect outcomes after a concussion. Concussions sustained during the follicular phase (after menstruation, before ovulation) are less likely to lead to symptoms a month later, whereas injuries in the luteal phase (after ovulation, before menstruation) result in poorer outcomes.

Although we don’t fully understand why, concussion outcomes appear to be worse when progesterone levels are high. However, these effects may be negated when women take the contraceptive pill.

Despite these differences, women are an understudied population when it comes to concussion, resulting in a lack of gender-specific treatment guidelines.

Read more: What does concussion do to the brain?

Repeated concussions and long-term risk: a complex area

In the context of long-term brain injury and sport, we’ve perhaps most often heard about a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Male former AFL players Danny Frawley and Shane Tuck were both diagnosed with CTE when their brains were examined after their deaths.

CTE is described as a delayed-onset and progressive neurodegenerative disease, with symptoms appearing in midlife or decades after exposure to head traumas. It’s believed these changes lead to an abnormal buildup of a protein called “tau”, which can damage brain cells.

But CTE is not the only way in which changes to the brain might present over time. To date, no sportswoman has been diagnosed with CTE (including Barclay).

An article in The Guardian reported Barclay “did not have a substantial clinical history of concussion and her brain did not show evidence of her having sustained a concussion in the weeks before she died”.

Brain bank research can detect white or grey matter changes but may not be able to ascertain which of several possible factors (for example, concussions, substance use, undiagnosed mental illness, ageing) led to the development of brain pathology in a given case.

Brain changes seen in some deceased athletes have also been found in people with a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders, but with no known history of head trauma or participation in risky activities such as contact sports or military combat.

So there’s a lot we don’t know, and more research we need to do, including involving people outside professional sport.

Increased focus on women is important

Women have higher rates of Alzheimer’s disease than men. Although a history of head trauma is a potential risk factor for developing dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, studies have not yet examined the interaction between sport-related concussions and neurodegenerative diseases in women.

We need studies in women to assess the interaction between exposure to single or repeated head impacts and the potential changes in brain and behaviour across the lifespan.

These studies need to use precise tests of attention, response speed and other cognitive abilities, and include indices of genetic risk factors, mental health, and menstrual cycle function pre- and post-injury.

Barclay’s groundbreaking donation to the Australian Sports Brain Bank is an important step towards gender equity in concussion research.

But to further advance our understanding, brain donors should participate in long-term studies during their lives that consider multiple causal or protective factors.

Read more: Here’s what we know about CTE, the brain condition that affected Danny Frawley

– ref. Sports concussions affect men and women differently. Female athletes need more attention in brain research – https://theconversation.com/sports-concussions-affect-men-and-women-differently-female-athletes-need-more-attention-in-brain-research-160097

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shreya Mcleod, PhD candidate in sport-related concussion, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

News emerged last week that AFLW player Jacinda Barclay, who died last year at age 29 following a short period of mental illness, had abnormalities in her brain tissue.

Barclay was the first Australian contact sportswoman to have her brain donated to the Australian Sports Brain Bank, a medical laboratory that investigates changes in complex nerve structures after death, in order to understand brain conditions sustained by sportspeople.

Similar to findings seen in some male athletes internationally, the researchers found changes in Barclay’s white matter.

White matter has to do with neural connectivity in the brain. As white matter degrades, as is often seen in ageing and in diseases such as Alzheimer’s, neural connectivity diminishes, contributing to cognitive decline.

However, we don’t understand enough about this process in the brain — particularly in sportswomen.

Women’s sport is becoming more popular

Over the past decade, Australia’s elite women’s sports have experienced unprecedented growth. More than 550,000 Australian women (aged 14 and over) now play a form of football, be it soccer, Australian rules, rugby league or rugby union.

This increase in participation in contact and collision sports has seen a concurrent rise in injuries such as concussions. Concussion is a transient injury to the brain, caused by a jolt to the head or body.

Although specialised brain imaging can detect microscopic changes in the connections between brain regions, concussion is hard to detect on routine brain scans. Diagnosis typically relies on people reporting symptoms such as dizziness, confusion, unsteadiness, nausea and headaches after a collision.

Recognising when someone has suffered a concussion, removing them from the field and carefully assessing recovery are all crucial steps before they return to play.

Read more: Is the National Rugby League legally liable for the long-term impacts of concussions?

Risk factors for female athletes

Female athletes are more likely to sustain a concussion than their male counterparts.

Like males, women report a range of symptoms after a concussion, such as headaches, mental fatigue, concentration difficulties and mood swings.

Although symptoms can last longer in some people, recovery from a concussion normally takes seven to ten days for adults. Research on length of recovery is mixed but overall supports that women take longer to recover than men.

Women also perform worse on neurocognitive testing post-injury, which measures things like decision-making ability and processing.

These gender-based differences may be due to a combination of factors.

Women tend to be more aware of their symptoms and are more likely to report them, so this may account for some degree of the gap. However, under-reporting still exists.

Female athletes also generally have shorter and narrower necks, and lower head mass (their heads are smaller and less dense). These factors are associated with lower neck strength. Neck strength is a protective factor against concussion, so women may be more susceptible for this reason.

Further, female brains metabolise glucose (sugar) and oxygen faster than male brains. If a head injury temporarily disrupts blood supply to the brain, it could have a greater effect on the faster nutrient-burning female brain.

Meanwhile, sex hormones such as progesterone that vary across a women’s menstrual cycle could also affect outcomes after a concussion. Concussions sustained during the follicular phase (after menstruation, before ovulation) are less likely to lead to symptoms a month later, whereas injuries in the luteal phase (after ovulation, before menstruation) result in poorer outcomes.

Although we don’t fully understand why, concussion outcomes appear to be worse when progesterone levels are high. However, these effects may be negated when women take the contraceptive pill.

Despite these differences, women are an understudied population when it comes to concussion, resulting in a lack of gender-specific treatment guidelines.

Read more: What does concussion do to the brain?

Repeated concussions and long-term risk: a complex area

In the context of long-term brain injury and sport, we’ve perhaps most often heard about a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Male former AFL players Danny Frawley and Shane Tuck were both diagnosed with CTE when their brains were examined after their deaths.

CTE is described as a delayed-onset and progressive neurodegenerative disease, with symptoms appearing in midlife or decades after exposure to head traumas. It’s believed these changes lead to an abnormal buildup of a protein called “tau”, which can damage brain cells.

But CTE is not the only way in which changes to the brain might present over time. To date, no sportswoman has been diagnosed with CTE (including Barclay).

An article in The Guardian reported Barclay “did not have a substantial clinical history of concussion and her brain did not show evidence of her having sustained a concussion in the weeks before she died”.

Brain bank research can detect white or grey matter changes but may not be able to ascertain which of several possible factors (for example, concussions, substance use, undiagnosed mental illness, ageing) led to the development of brain pathology in a given case.

Brain changes seen in some deceased athletes have also been found in people with a variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders, but with no known history of head trauma or participation in risky activities such as contact sports or military combat.

So there’s a lot we don’t know, and more research we need to do, including involving people outside professional sport.

Increased focus on women is important

Women have higher rates of Alzheimer’s disease than men. Although a history of head trauma is a potential risk factor for developing dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, studies have not yet examined the interaction between sport-related concussions and neurodegenerative diseases in women.

We need studies in women to assess the interaction between exposure to single or repeated head impacts and the potential changes in brain and behaviour across the lifespan.

These studies need to use precise tests of attention, response speed and other cognitive abilities, and include indices of genetic risk factors, mental health, and menstrual cycle function pre- and post-injury.

Barclay’s groundbreaking donation to the Australian Sports Brain Bank is an important step towards gender equity in concussion research.

But to further advance our understanding, brain donors should participate in long-term studies during their lives that consider multiple causal or protective factors.

Read more: Here’s what we know about CTE, the brain condition that affected Danny Frawley

– ref. Sport concussion in women: are they increasing, and are there long-term cumulative effects? – https://theconversation.com/sport-concussion-in-women-are-they-increasing-and-are-there-long-term-cumulative-effects-160097

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Karg, Associate Professor, Business School, Swinburne University of Technology

Some buy sporting memorabilia for love. Others for money.

The world record for most money paid for a sports-related item goes to the original Olympic manifesto written in 1892 by International Olympic Committee founder Pierre de Coubertin. It changed hands in 2019 for US$8.8 million. In second place is the New York Yankees jersey worn by legendary American baseball player Babe Ruth, sold in 2012 for USA$4.4 million.

As in all markets for collectibles, scarcity equals value.

Which is why sport organisations, memorabilia sellers and collectors are getting excited about non-fungible tokens – or NFTs – a blockchain-enabled technology that proves unique ownership of digital content.

NFTs open up a huge new market to sell limited-edition images, videos and artwork. They also enable the original licensees – be it sports organisations or individual athletes – to share in resale profits.

NFTs are already sweeping the art market. In March, auction house Christie’s sold an NFT of a work by American digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, for US$69 million. Auction house Sotheby’s last month sold a single pixel for $US1.36 million.

Could we see similar NFT values in the sports collectibles market? Quite possibly.

Though tangible items such as uniforms, balls and bats will likely continue to be prized collectibles, collectors are already paying big bucks for digital versions of old favourites such as trading cards.

Leading the game is the US National Basketball Association, which began selling limited-edition “Top Shots” – digitally packaged and NFT-authenticated video highlight clips – in October 2020. Like traditional trading cards, these are sold in “packs”. Some videos are common, others rare. One such rare “moment” – in reality about half a moment – of basketball superstar LeBron James dunking reportedly changed hands in April for US$387,000.

Who knows what someone might pay for that moment in decades to come?

It might be millions more. Or much much less. Because this market, for all its early promises of rich rewards, is not without its downsides, with potential for significant environmental and social costs.

What are non-fungible tokens (NFTs)?

Something is fungible when it has a standardised and interchangeable value. It is replaceable by something else just like it. Cash is the obvious example. Non-fungible essentially means something unique, non-replaceable.

So NFTs are essentially digital certificates, secured with blockchain technology, that authenticate an item’s provenance – that it is a limited edition or one of kind – and enable it to be bought and sold as such.

An NFT provides scarcity of digital content that can be relatively easily copied – a photo of Indian cricket great Sachin Tendulkar making a world-record score, for example, or a video of tennis No. 1 Ash Barty winning at Wimbledon.

Read more: What are NFTs and why are people paying millions for them?

There are big opportunities

The potential riches are evident from the NBA’s Top Shot sales, which accounted for US$500 million in transactions in the first three months of the year. This was a third of the total US$1.5 billion in NFT transactions, according to DappRadar, which tracks blockchain markets.

Last month San Francisco-based NBA team the Golden State Warriors was the first US professional sports team to issue its own NFT collection, which includes limited-edition digital versions of championship rings and ticket stubs.

Individual athletes are also selling their own branded items in NFT form. NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes, for example, is selling signed digital artwork. Champion skateboarder Mariah Duran and paralympian Scout Bassett are among a group of elite women athletes who will release NFTs this month. Expect to see many more selling NFTs in the wake of the Toyko Olympics.

There are also risks

But there are some big downsides.

The first is environmental – because of the energy used in blockchain verification processes.

Of course, making and transporting physical goods has a range of environmental impacts, but by one calculation the carbon footprint of selling an NFT artwork is almost 100 times that of selling and transporting a print version. In February, French digital artist Joanie Lemercier cancelled the sale of six works, and urged others to do the same, after calculating those sales would use the same amount of electricity in ten seconds as his studio used in two years.

Eliminating this downside of NFTs will depend on more efficient technology and more renewable energy.

Read more: NFTs: why digital art has such a massive carbon footprint

The second is social – of people only seeing NFTs as a way to make money.

As in any market where prices are rising rapidly, there is the danger of a speculative bubble. Here, the risk is that buyers spend big on virtual items that may end up being virtually worthless when the bubble bursts.

Last year also saw large and continuing market growth in traditional sport collectibles such as trading cards, along with retail investment in cryptocurrencies and stock markets more generally. So, while the value attached to NFTs may prove to be enduring, it is possible some part of the early interest in sport NFTs is driven by “irrational exuberance” and patterns of people spending more time and money online due to the COVID pandemic.

Read more: NFTs are much bigger than an art fad – here’s how they could change the world

There are likely to be many more sport organisations and athletes peddling their digital wares in the near future. It is though, difficult to predict whether sales will continue this trajectory, how and when this trend might “normalise”, or if NFTs indeed represent a speculative bubble.

Particularly for fans playing in this market, care should be taken to not let emotions trump prudence and good judgment.

– ref. NFTs hit the big league, but not everyone will win from this new sports craze – https://theconversation.com/nfts-hit-the-big-league-but-not-everyone-will-win-from-this-new-sports-craze-158762

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Moore, Professor of English, UNSW

Any social movement needs inspiration. It needs people who can imagine a different future and, more than that, make that future graspable.

Kate Jennings did that for the Australian women’s movement — with her incandescent anger, her sharp tongue and her courage, ready and able to speak straight into the face of power. Her death, in New York aged 72, offers a moment to reflect on the role of writers and literature as forces of social transformation.

many women are beginning to feel the necessity to speak for themselves, for their sisters.

i feel that necessity now.

When Jennings lined up for her turn to speak at a Vietnam moratorium rally on the lawns of Sydney University in 1970, she was a half-drop-out from Sydney’s English Department, living in Glebe.

With the group of determined women libbers at her back, she perhaps wasn’t clear what her speech would do — that it would effectively inaugurate second-wave feminism in Australia and help it become a movement with its own momentum. A new chapter for the world’s longest revolution. But she did know that the time had come.

Read more: Brazen Hussies: a new film captures the heady, turbulent power of Australia’s women’s liberation movement

When the speech appeared as a performative poem in her 2010 retrospective collection Trouble: Evolution of a Radical, she recalled that the group had conceived it as deliberately incendiary.

“Call the speech what you like — agitprop, political theatre, over the top, in your face — but we were genuinely angry, famously fed up. I wrote the speech at a boil: we were getting nowhere asking the men in the movement to listen to us.”

Written from within the mix of galvanising struggles then being fought around the world, the speech tore shreds off those for whom women’s issues were secondary or trivial. She compared the number of Australian men who’d died in Vietnam with the number of women who’d died from illegal abortions.

It was a shocking thing to do then: a similar comparison, now, of the victims of domestic violence to the number of Australian soldiers lost to recent conflicts or suicide, would be met with outrage too. The speech was hardline, uncompromising, militant.

okay i’ve stopped trying to understand my oppressor

i know who my enemy is

i will tell you what i feel, as an individual, as a woman

i feel that there can be no love between men and women

And that passion came from poetry. It wasn’t the theorists or social commentators who inspired the radical feminism powering the speech, she recalled, but the eloquence of visionaries.

In 2010, she listed Robin Morgan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto as her touchstones. This was writing that was “unafraid to be emotional, luminous with rage,” she recalled. “Manifestos and poems that jumped off the page. I loved it.”

Mother I’m Rooted

Jennings’ other extraordinary contribution to the transformational feminism of the 1970s is one of its most revelatory — the huge, collaborative women’s poetry collection called Mother I’m Rooted, published in 1975.

Its confronting title is a distillation of the protest and exhaustion she saw in the poems. With Alison Lyssa, another poet and activist, she planned an anthology as inclusive as possible and advertised for poems — “trying to reach the women Out There”. Within two months they had over 500 replies.

The final volume lists 152 poets, including established ones, unknowns with new feminist pseudonyms, seasoned activists from the old left and many names that would go on to make their marks. It has experimental, Greek-Australian writers contesting the definition of poetry and forthright, white, working-class women writing about the washing — though no First Nations poetry.

It is a beautiful social document now, broken up by lambent photographs of ordinary women together. And its call for women’s control over not just what counted as poetry but over the publishing process itself was hugely influential, arguably changing the literary landscape in Australia forever.

Fierce honesty

Across her writing life, Jennings produced essays, novels, short stories and journalism, as well as poetry, all written with a fierce honesty and wit, refusing what she saw as cant and sentiment.

After she moved to New York in 1979, she continued to write about and for Australia, but often with an outsider’s cynicism. Women Falling Down in the Street, a collection of short stories from 1990, won a Queensland Premier’s Literary Prize and perhaps typified her interest in revisionary engagement with her part in Australia’s cultural life.

The novel Snake, from 1994, explored with concision and power her country childhood on a farm outside Griffith in NSW, and found an international readership.

In 2002, after her husband’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, she published Moral Hazard, a short but perfectly voiced novel about a writer making a living on Wall Street to support a dying partner. One of the few Australian novels to confront the operations of capital directly, even pre-empting the 2008 global collapse, it won a number of prizes, including the ALS Gold Medal.

The legacy she leaves is complex and multi-voiced, marked often by a reassessment of her younger self by the older Jennings and, perhaps, by a certain distrust of any shared story she couldn’t control.

But that legacy has been transformative and extraordinary, by any measure.

– ref. ‘Famously fed up’. How the work of feminist writer Kate Jennings changed Australia – https://theconversation.com/famously-fed-up-how-the-work-of-feminist-writer-kate-jennings-changed-australia-160267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Glitsos, Lecturer in Arts and Humanities, Edith Cowan University

New South Wales Deputy Premier John Barilaro is reportedly threatening legal action against YouTuber and political satirist Jordan Shanks, better known as friendlyjordies, over allegedly defamatory and “racist” comments. Shanks’s parodying of Barilaro has included imitating him with a strong Italian accent.

In 2019, Shanks received a similar legal threat from then-politician Clive Palmer after labelling him a “dense humpty dumpty”, among other profanities. Shanks’s video responding to Palmer’s lawsuit has been viewed more than one million times, with a likes-to-dislikes ratio indicating overwhelming support from viewers.

The latest threat against Shanks reminds us of the key role parody and satirisation now play in the nation’s political discourse. This type of humour provides a way to discuss issues in a way traditional media outlets can’t risk doing. Perhaps this is because parody, by its very nature, is expected to be cheeky (and even offensive).

Add to this contemporary Western society’s desire for freedom of speech — coupled with our increasing connectedness afforded by the internet — and one could argue it has never been easier to create and consume political satire.

But where does the value of this content lie? And is there evidence to suggest it can influence people’s personal politics?

Necessary provocation?

Effective political satire will often cause outrage. Anger may be directed at the satirist or the issue being discussed; in either case, a strong emotional response indicates the audience is tuned in.

Take Shanks, who has been criticised repeatedly for his offensive brand of comedy. And despite being quite open about his political allegiance to the Labor Party, he has offended people right across the political spectrum.

But regardless of anyone’s personal views on him, one could argue Shanks’s brashness and crudity, combined with scathing wit, are what make him relatable to Australians. As former Curtin University academic Rebecca Higgie explains in her research, Australians’ unique sense of larrikinism popularises this particular brand of political discourse.

Prior to the pandemic, a major study of the 2019 federal election found trust in government was at its lowest since the 1970s. In such a landscape, where there is widespread concern regarding how democracy is performing, it becomes easier to understand why some people may trust satirists over politicians and/or mainstream media.

The former, at least, are more willing to put their brand on the line and embrace vitriol from the public.

At last count, Shanks had more than 480,000 subscribers on YouTube. As a crude comparison, the Australian government’s official channel had just over 600, while SBS Australia had about 42,000. (The ABC and SkyNews both had many more.)

Sick of old formats

Research published in March confirmed that “user-generated parodies”, such as those made by Shanks, are far better received by audiences than parodies produced through mainstream or commercial media outlets.

This is in keeping with the general trend towards the fracturing of legacy media institutions, as well as increasing calls for media diversity — manifested in ex-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s bid for a royal commission into News Corp’s ideological domination of Australia’s media landscape.

Myriad studies and surveys carried out in a marketing context have also found user-generated content, as opposed to “professional” or “traditional” content, is more likely to resonate, be trusted, be remembered and influence consumers.

This is particularly illuminating in light of the federal government’s recent problematic “consent” videos, attempting to teach sexual consent by using tacos and milkshakes as metaphors for sex. The videos were heavily criticised by the media and public.

How social media changed the game

According to research, the explosion of social media has unsurprisingly generated an increase in political parodies. And these have certainly become difficult to ignore for anyone engaged in Australia’s broader political conversation.

Apart from friendlyjordies, major satirists leading on this front include the fake news publication The Betoota Advocate, satirical comedy group The Chaser and YouTube channel The Juice Media, which gave us “Honest Government Ads”.

That said, there’s still contention as to whether political parodies can “change people’s minds” on political issues. One 2006 study found the political comedy of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart led to audiences having a more negative view of the politicians being parodied, as well as a more cynical view of the overall US electoral system.

Similarly, researchers from Paris’s Sorbonne Business School claim funny YouTube videos had a real stake in negatively impacting Donald Trump’s “Build a Wall” policy.

The YouTube video “Do You Wanna Build a Wall? Donald Trump (Frozen Parody)” received more than 37 million views and 467,000 interactions, while a similar Peppa Pig-themed parody was viewed more than 49 million times.

Then again, there is research that suggests otherwise. In one study focusing on US television presenter Stephen Colbert’s brand of political satire, researchers analysed how the show was received by both liberal and conservative audiences. They found

[…] there was no significant difference between the groups in thinking Colbert was funny, but conservatives were more likely to report that Colbert only pretends to be joking.

This suggests while viewers from all ends of the political spectrum can “enjoy” Colbert’s political satire, conservatives didn’t necessarily receive the satirical jokes as satire. That is, they didn’t always sense Colbert was being sarcastic.

The researchers suggest this may be because of Colbert’s deadpan delivery style, which could leave ambiguity for some viewers. According to them, conservative viewers found a way to make Colbert’s liberal humour agreeable to their own ideology. They liked the show, but not for the same reason as liberal viewers.

Healthy democracy

Sometimes parody can help all of us see the lighter side of things. For example, the Twitter account “Aus Gov Just Googled” probably gives most people a laugh, except maybe members of the actual government. A recent tweet mocking the government’s misguided sexual consent videos could be enjoyed by both ends of the political spectrum:

It remains to be seen how Barilaro’s legal threats against Shanks will play out. But Australia has a legacy of political satire that connects to our sense of larrikinism and our egalitarian brand of “taking the piss”. Shanks is an example of how, in the age of the internet, anyone can extend and champion this legacy.

And while some online parodies might be absolute shockers — especially if you’re on the receiving end — they remain a sign of a healthy democracy.

– ref. NSW deputy premier threatens to sue FriendlyJordies, reminding us that parody hits in a way traditional media can’t – https://theconversation.com/nsw-deputy-premier-threatens-to-sue-friendlyjordies-reminding-us-that-parody-hits-in-a-way-traditional-media-cant-159345

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stan Karanasios, Associate professor, The University of Queensland

The success of Australia’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout will depend on everyone’s willingness to receive it. But experts have warned vaccine misinformation online puts Australia’s communities at risk, and some more than others.

Often, misinformation and undue scepticism are spread on social media. In March, the ABC reported on WeChat posts spreading the false claim the Pfizer vaccine can integrate with people’s DNA to transform them into “genetically modified humans”.

Studies have shown that people who rely on social platforms such as YouTube for their information are significantly less willing to be vaccinated. Adding to that, research conducted by a Griffith University team found reports about the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines’ (very rare) link to blood clots had led to a drop in vaccine acceptance rates.

In such a rapidly shifting information landscape, we have to make sure those most at risk from COVID-19 are empowered to get vaccinated early.

Read more: Australian vaccine rollout needs all hands on deck after the latest AstraZeneca news, mass vaccination hubs included

False claims spread like wildfire

My colleagues and I surveyed 215 residents in Victoria to find out how vulnerable groups accessed emergency-related news. Survey participants (all of which used social media) included elderly residents, geographically or socially isolated people, and people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

We found 73% of respondents accessed emergency-related news on social media, the second preference after television. Facebook was the platform of choice and was used “often” by 70% of respondents. On average, social media was used more frequently by younger people and women.

The information landscape during a pandemic can be compared to that during a large bushfire: there are high-levels of uncertainty and risk, coupled with large volumes of information. In both scenarios individuals rely on affiliated and geographical groups for important notices, such as community and postcode groups on Facebook.

Of the people we surveyed, 40% percent believed information encountered on social media could be more accurate than official sources. And the vast majority (88%) said they expected to use social media as a news source in the future. Also, more than half reported getting their information through family or friends (65%), who said they themselves found it on social media.

Sourcing emergency information from social media can complicate our understanding of difficult issues. There are huge volumes of content, the quality is often poor and it can be difficult — particularly for vulnerable groups — to separate fact from fiction.

Filling knowledge gaps

Experts explain how the purveyors of misinformation exploit our willingness to share content without thinking. Even if even a small percentage of what we share is inaccurate, it creates a feedback loop that exacerbates the problem of a high information load coupled with poor information quality.

Adding to this, we know a person’s individual biases and worldview can also make them more vulnerable to misinformation.

Of those we surveyed, 61% felt they had very specific information needs during emergencies based on factors such as age, location and personal circumstances. When there’s a gap between a person’s information needs and information provided by the government, they must fill this gap with other sources.

The good news is there are several ways all of us can help curb vaccine misinformation on social media and, consequently, in our communities.

How to help

For a start, the federal governemnt’s Department of Health has a useful site addressesing common concerns around vaccine development and efficacy. It even responds to conspiracy questions such as: “Can COVID-19 vaccines connect me to the internet?”.

Trusted sites should always be referred to in discussions about vaccines. There are also online guides to help individuals refine their own ability to spot misinformation.

Our research found 87% of respondents thought it was important for official emergency response organisations to use social media. So perhaps it would be beneficial for these groups to increase their visibility on these platforms.

Beyond this, the younger and more tech-savvy among us can help those who are older, or culturally or linguistically diverse. If you know someone who gets their vaccine information from Facebook or a similar platform, redirect them to a more reputable source such as a government website, government-approved social media page or trusted news outlet.

Social media groups have a role to play, too. Group administrators and active members should ensure official health information is shared on pages, as they are often a “go to” source of information for the public. And where misinformation does sneak in, it must always be challenged or reported.

Read more: Cutting the ABC cuts public trust, a cost no democracy can afford

– ref. The first step to curbing COVID vaccine misinformation is finding out who is most vulnerable. Our research sheds some light – https://theconversation.com/the-first-step-to-curbing-covid-vaccine-misinformation-is-finding-out-who-is-most-vulnerable-our-research-sheds-some-light-158309

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stuart McLean, Professor Emeritus, University of Tasmania

Foxes, like other animals, use scent to communicate and survive. They urinate to leave their mark, depositing a complex mix of chemicals to send messages to other foxes. Research by myself and colleagues has uncovered new information about these scents that could help control fox numbers.

Urine scent marking behaviour has long been known in foxes, but there has not been a recent study of the chemical composition of fox urine.

We found foxes produce a set of chemicals unknown in other animals. Some of these chemicals are also found in flowers or skunk sprays. One is so potent, a tiny leak was enough to force the evacuation of a building we were working in.

The results suggest a highly evolved language of chemical communication underlying foxes’ social structure and behaviour. Our research could help improve these methods and protect vulnerable native wildlife from one of Australia’s worst feral pests.

The fox problem

The European red fox was introduced into Australia in the 1870s for recreational hunting, and within 20 years had expanded to pest proportions. The animals are now found in all states and territories except Tasmania.

Foxes hunt and kill native wildlife and have helped drive several species of small mammals and birds to extinction. They also kill livestock, spread weeds and can threaten the health of humans and pets by transmitting disease.

Current fox control methods mainly depend on lethal baits, which can also kill other animals, and trapping and shooting which alone cannot reduce the large fox populations now present.

Knowledge of the chemistry of fox society could help develop new, better methods of population control.

Read more: When introduced species are cute and loveable, culling them is a tricky proposition

Making sense of smell

Mammals, including humans and foxes, smell airborne substances when molecules enter the nose and bind to receptors in the lining of the nasal cavity. The receptors send a signal to the brain’s olfactory cortex, leading to the sensation of smell.

Foxes have an acute sense of smell. They rely on scents to communicate with each other, find food, avoid predators and locate breeding partners. This ability is beneficial for animals active at night when visibility is low, and enables them to avoid dangerous encounters.

Messages can also be deposited as scent marks to be “read” after the marker has departed. This is useful for claiming and defending territory.

Foxes have two glands from which they emit scents. These comprise:

• a patch on the tail known as the “violet gland” because of its floral odour

• a pair of sacs either side of the anus.

Fox scents are also present in the animal’s urine.

Read more: Invasive predators are eating the world’s animals to extinction – and the worst is close to home

On the scent

My colleagues and I have investigated fox scents in the violet gland. More recently, we also investigated the scent chemicals in fox urine, assisted by hunting groups in Victoria.

We analysed the urine of 15 free-ranging wild foxes living in farmlands and bush in Victoria. Foxes there are routinely culled as feral pests, and the urine was collected by bladder puncture soon after death.

Among our key findings were a group of 16 sulfur-containing chemicals which, taken together, are unique to foxes. Some are also found in skunk defensive sprays.

Fox scents are mostly very potent, and have been described as unpleasant and “musty”. They are also persistent – if you get fox scent on your skin it’s very hard to wash off.

One incident demonstrates the smelliness of these chemicals. We’d purchased two drops of a compound to compare against our own samples. Unfortunately, the container leaked and the resulting bad odour, while not dangerous, led to our university building being evacuated.

In contrast, another group of chemicals in fox scents are normally found in flowers. These were present in fox urine but more abundant in the tail gland. They are derivatives of carotenoids, the red and yellow pigments in fruits and flowers.

Foxes eat a lot of plants. The presence of plant-derived scents may signal good nutrition, and research suggests dietary carotenoids are particularly important for the general health of mammals.

Read more: Killing cats, rats and foxes is no silver bullet for saving wildlife

Chemical communicators

The chemistry of fox scents is rich and unique. This suggests foxes have evolved a complex language of chemical communication.

Just as modern drug therapies are based on knowledge of the human body’s internal chemical signalling, an understanding of chemical communication between foxes could lead to novel methods of fox management.

For example, scents signifying a dominant fox could be used to deter subordinate foxes. Conversely, scents that attract foxes could be used to overcome bait shyness.

This could be combined with the non-lethal baiting agent cabergoline, which inhibits the fertility of vixens. And mating could be disrupted if mate choice is found to be determined by chemical signals.

Such new methods may lead to longer-term and more effective control of fox numbers, bringing huge benefits to agriculture and biodiversity in Australia.

The author would like to acknowledge advice on this article from Dr Duncan Sutherland of Phillip Island Nature Parks, Victoria, and the generous assistance of Victorian fox hunting groups which helped collect urine samples.

– ref. Fox scents are so potent they can force a building evacuation. Understanding them may save our wildlife – https://theconversation.com/fox-scents-are-so-potent-they-can-force-a-building-evacuation-understanding-them-may-save-our-wildlife-159337

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn Shine, Journalism Discipline Lead, Curtin University

Last week, the ABC announced it had achieved a milestone it had been trying to reach for more than two years. For the first time, in the previous month of March, it had equal numbers of women and men appearing in its news coverage.

This may seem surprising. You might expect the gender ratio of people quoted in the news would mirror the gender split of our society.

But that’s not the case. Studies of news coverage from around the world have consistently found more than 70% of people seen, quoted and heard in the news are men, while women make up less than 30%.

When it comes to “expert” sources, around 80% are men.

In response to this imbalance, the BBC started its 50:50 equality project in 2017. The ABC followed suit in December 2018. Other media organisations, such as Bloomberg, have introduced similar initiatives.

Despite these encouraging programs, the Global Media Monitoring Project, which analyses sources in news content from around the world on a set day every five years, has reported overall progress in bringing women’s voices into the news is “extremely slow”.

This means news tends to be male-centric, and women are denied the legitimacy, authority and status that often come with inclusion in the news. As a journalist and news researcher, I was interested to learn more about why women are so under-represented.

Is it because, as some journalists will argue, women are reluctant to be interviewed as news sources? Or is it because journalists tend to turn to the same sources again and again, and most of these experienced sources are men?

My research, which included interviewing 30 female academic experts about their attitudes towards interacting with the news media, suggests the latter is more likely.

All but one of the experts I spoke to said they would be willing to be interviewed for a news story. Most understood and appreciated the value of getting their work out into the community via the news.

However, they were not totally comfortable with being in the news. Most of them lacked confidence about the process. This was in part due to fears about their performance, but also due to a lack of knowledge about how the news media operate and what journalists want from them.

So how can journalists address these concerns and be more likely to secure a “yes” when approaching a female source for an interview? And how can sources improve their interactions with journalists and get the most out of their experiences with the media?

Read more: Bloomberg has decided women matter; it’s time Aussie media did

Tips for journalists

Be very clear. Expert sources typically have little knowledge about how the media work. You have a much better chance of securing an interview if you explain exactly what you need in terms of the nature of the interview and the time required.

Make a case. Experts need to demonstrate that their work and research is being seen and heard, and is having an impact. Media engagement is a crucial way to do this. Remind prospective sources about the benefits of promoting their work and research through news coverage.

Be willing to negotiate. Where there is some flexibility about the timing or location of an interview, be prepared to discuss this with the source. Try to come to an arrangement that suits you both. Sometimes, a source might just want 10 minutes to prepare for an interview first.

Respect the source and their time. Sources are much more likely to agree to an interview if the journalist appears to have some knowledge of their research and area of expertise. It’s also important for journalists to recognise that expert sources are usually very time-poor (just like journalists).

Give feedback. Do this during and after the interview, if possible. The experts I spoke to all wanted to know how they had performed in their interviews, and how they could improve.

Tips for sources

Say yes, but … It does not have to be an unconditional yes. It’s okay to say: “Yes, I can do the interview but I need 30 minutes to prepare.” Or “Yes, but I’m not willing to talk about this particular topic or issue.”

Ask questions. You don’t have to let the journalist ask all the questions. If you don’t know what the journalist wants from you, ask.

Don’t over-prepare. Most interviews are brief and will probably only take about 10 minutes. Don’t waste time over-preparing or over-thinking. Trust your expertise and knowledge.

Cut yourself a break, but learn from your mistakes. Listen back to or watch your interviews to see how you can improve. But recognise it takes time and practice to become a polished media commentator.

Be authentic. For radio and TV interviews in particular, try to relax and let your personality and passion for your work come through.

– ref. Male voices dominate the news. Here’s how journalists and female experts can turn this around – https://theconversation.com/male-voices-dominate-the-news-heres-how-journalists-and-female-experts-can-turn-this-around-160209

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

Talk of war has become louder in recent days, but the “drumbeat” has been heard for some time now as China’s military capabilities have grown. China does not want war, at least not yet. It’s playing the long game and its evident intentions become more unnerving.

Scholars like Brendan Taylor have identified four flash points for a possible conflict with China, including Korea, the East China Sea, the South China Sea and Taiwan, but conventional war is not likely at this stage.

Where tensions are currently high

The armistice between North and South Korea has held for nearly 70 years. The pandemic has severely constrained North Korea’s economy and its testing of intercontinental ballistic missiles has ceased, for now. China has a stake in keeping Kim Jong-un’s regime in power in the North, but the prospects of reverting to a hot war have flowed and ebbed.

Just south of Korea, in the East China Sea, China has intensified its military activities around the Japanese-claimed but uninhabited Senkaku Islands. China appears to be wearing down Japan’s resolve to resist its claims over what it calls the Diaoyu Islands.

The United States has assured Japan the islands fall under their mutual defence security guarantee. But a confrontation with China could test US backing and possibly set the stage for escalated confrontation elsewhere.

Similarly, China’s industrial-scale island building in the South China Sea has resulted in extensive military hardware and infrastructure. This will enable the Chinese to consolidate their position militarily and assert control over the so-called nine-dash line — its vast claim over most of the sea.

The US Navy continues to conduct freedom of navigation operations (FONOPS) in the sea to challenge China’s claims. With thousands of marked and unmarked Chinese vessels operating there, however, the risk of an accident triggering an escalation is real.

In 2016, an international tribunal rejected China’s claims to the waters in a case brought by the Philippines. Despite being a signatory to the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, China has ignored the tribunal’s ruling and continued to intrude on islands claimed by both the Philippines and Indonesia.

Recently, 220 Chinese vessels were anchored for months at a reef inside the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. China’s actions appear premised on the dictum that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Like China’s seizure of the Scarborough Shoal in 2012 that preceded its massive island construction further south, China could conceivably take the unwillingness of the US to challenge its latest moves as a cue for more assertive action over Taiwan.

This is, after all, the main prize Beijing seeks to secure President Xi Jinping’s legacy.

Why Taiwan’s security matters

Taiwan presents the US and its allies with a conundrum. It is a liberal open democracy and the world’s leading computer chip maker. It also sits in the middle of what military strategists refer to as the “first island chain” stretching from Japan in the north to the Philippines in the south. Its strategic significance is profound.

Having adopted a “One China” policy since 1979, the US security guarantee for Taiwan is conditional and tenuous. Reflecting growing unease over China’s actions, polls show strong US public support for defending Taiwan.

So far, ambiguity has served US interests well, providing some assurance to Taiwan while discouraging the PRC from invading.

This guarantee has been important for Japan, as well. With its pacifist constitution, and occasional concern over US commitment to its defence, Japan would be closely watching how the US approaches its Taiwan policy.

Read more: Australia would be wise not to pound ‘war drums’ over Taiwan with so much at stake

China is so far avoiding open war

Meanwhile, China has metamorphosed both economically and militarily. An exponential growth in China’s military capabilities has been matched by a steep rise in the lethality, accuracy, range and quantity of its weapons systems. On top of this, Beijing has ratcheted up its warlike rhetoric and tactics.

Last month, Xi made a muscular speech to the Boao Forum Asia, calling for an acceptance of China not only as an emerging superpower but also as an equal in addressing global challenges.

Sometimes actions speak louder than words. And China’s actions so far have avoided crossing the threshold into open warfare, refusing to present a “nail” to a US “hammer”. This is for good reason.

If war did break out, China would be vulnerable. For starters, it shares land borders with 14 countries, bringing the potential for heightened challenges, if not open attack on numerous fronts.

Read more: Is it time for a ‘new way of war?’ What China’s army reforms mean for the rest of the world

Then there are the economic concerns. China has significant Japanese, US and European industrial investments, and is also overwhelmingly dependent on energy and goods passing through the Malacca Strait between Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, the Indo-Pacific’s jugular vein.

This reliance on the Malacca Strait — referred to by one analyst as the “Malacca dilemma” — helps explain why China has invested so much capital in its Belt and Road Initiative and studiously avoided open conflict, at least until it is more self-reliant.

To avoid outright war, China evidently reckons it is better to operate a paramilitary force with white-painted ships and armed fishing vessels in the thousands to push its claims in the South China Sea and East China Sea and constrict Taiwan’s freedom of action.

It also recently passed a new law allowing its coast guard to act more like a military body and enforce maritime law — again in violation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

China is also expanding its “grey zone” warfare against Taiwan, which includes cyber attacks, repeated incursions of its air space and territorial waters, and diplomatic isolation to undermine Taiwan’s resolve and ability to resist.

Read more: Explainer: what is ‘hybrid warfare’ and what is meant by the ‘grey zone’?

Would America’s allies help defend Taiwan?

This persistent and escalating challenge by Chinese forces has demonstrated Taiwan’s inability to fully control its waters and air space. Beijing is continuing to build a fleet of amphibious capabilities to enable an invasion of Taiwan.

US pundits are also no longer confident the Americans would win in an outright war over Taiwan, with Washington’s top military officer in the region arguing one could happen within six years.

Taiwan lacks allies other than the United States, but Japan is mindful of the consequences of a US failure to defend Taiwan. Its ocean surveillance and coastal defence capabilities would be exposed if China took Taiwan. But Japan’s constitution precludes direct involvement in defending Taiwan.

Under its Anzus obligations, the US could call on Australia for military support to defend Taiwan. The mutual assistance provisions are not automatically invoked, but the implications of Canberra standing on the sidelines would be profound.

Warnings about rhetorical drumbeats of war remind us the US is no longer the world’s only superpower and suggest Australia should prepare for a more volatile world.

Rather than rely solely on the US, Australia should bolster its own defence capabilities. At the same time, it should collaborate more with regional partners across Southeast Asia and beyond, particularly Indonesia, Japan, India and South Korea, to deter further belligerence and mitigate the risk of tensions escalating into open war.

– ref. China does not want war, at least not yet. It’s playing the long game – https://theconversation.com/china-does-not-want-war-at-least-not-yet-its-playing-the-long-game-160093

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Komesaroff, Professor of Medicine, Monash University

India’s COVID-19 crisis has revived a longstanding debate about whether foreign governments should come to the aid of countries facing major economic or humanitarian challenges and, if so, what kind of help they should provide.

There’s a common assumption foreign aid produces undoubted benefits. But there’s actually limited evidence that it does. Increasing data suggests it may perpetuate existing inequities and inefficiencies, enable corruption, and generate adverse cultural and economic effects.

There are serious questions about the underlying causes of India’s crisis. There’s evidence the Modi government repeatedly ignored warnings from public health experts and refused to plan for the predicted increases in need. Instead, it pursued a public discourse of misinformation, promoted fake cures, withheld health data, intimidated journalists, and encouraged super-spreading events.

Government officials also continue to deny the existence of shortages of vaccines and other medicines. These facts suggest there are underlying structural obstacles, which aid contributions would be unlikely to reverse.

Read more: COVID in India: how the Modi government prioritised politics over public health

But the moral arguments about the obligations humans have to each other are well established. So is the principle that we should come to someone’s aid if they’re in need. We are also bound by mutually beneficial values such as equity, justice, solidarity and altruism. Consequentialist philosophers, who argue the only things that matter are outcomes (rather than principles, obligations or intentions), claim foreign aid generally provides more benefit than harm overall.

Unfortunately, the fact we have a moral obligation to rescue someone from harm provides little or no guidance about what kind of help or assistance is thereby required.

We should enter into discussions, led by the Indian people, about what kinds of support are likely to make a difference.

As imperfect as the outcome may be, Australia might genuinely be able to help in areas such as assisting the development of expertise and infrastructure, and advocating for the relaxation of vaccine patent restrictions.

Here’s how Australia can help

Last week, Australia committed to sending an initial support package of ventilators, oxygen, and personal protective equipment to India.

If we choose to act further, we should do so in a generous and compassionate manner, but also with prudence and circumspection. We should be realistic about the limited options available to us. Aid cannot be given with conditions attached — for example, that it be directed preferentially to those in greatest need.

What’s more, it cannot be contingent on the enforcement of a value system that’s contrary to those presently in authority. Foreign donors have no straightforward right to insist on the abolition of corrupt or counterproductive policies and practices in the countries they’re supporting.

However, there are options available to us that can ensure we actually make a difference — and some of these may appear to undermine our own interests.

Top health officials have suggested wealthy countries, which have contracted to purchase many more vaccine doses than they need, should urgently donate excess vaccines to middle- and lower-income countries such as India. Some people may argue that, because of our present lesser need, Australia could donate its entire stock of available vaccines. However, this wouldn’t likely be of much benefit given the logistical, political and structural impediments described above.

Instead, we should draw on our experience over the past year in developing effective processes for responding to the pandemic. We should offer to provide India with expertise about quarantine measures, hygiene, masks, and vaccine education campaigns. Our experts and policymakers could respectfully advise on appropriate economic and social policies.

What’s more, we could call for the relaxation of patent and other intellectual property restrictions. These have, since the late 1980s, imposed severe limits on the ability of poorer countries to produce vaccines and pharmaceuticals developed in the United States and Europe. Although India is the world’s largest vaccine producer, the current demand obviously exceeds supply.

What vaccines are available are much less likely to find their way to poorer sections of India’s population than wealthier ones. This is partly because of insufficient government support, but is also exacerbated by the refusal of rich countries (including Australia) to allow the relaxation of the strict patent laws that prevent state-of-the-art vaccines being manufactured cheaply and efficiently in developing countries.

Read more: Over 700 health experts are calling for urgent action to expand global production of COVID vaccines

There’s already a well-tested mechanism for suspending patent restrictions in an emergency, known as the “Doha Declaration”. This was negotiated in 2001 in response to the urgent need for increased access to newly developed HIV medications. This instrument is ready to use and could be implemented rapidly. Australia should announce its unqualified support for the immediate application of the Doha Declaration to COVID vaccine production.

But that’s not all

India’s huge pharmaceutical industry has previously provided vaccines and medicines to developing countries — many of them in Africa — largely funded by the World Health Organization. The Indian crisis has left these countries vulnerable, through no fault of their own.

Rather than merely responding to the crisis in India, largely self-inflicted by its own government, we should also turn our attention to the increasingly urgent needs of those countries that now face their own major emergencies as a consequence.

Regardless of what anyone does, many people will still die. All that’s open to us is to act ethically in accordance with our own values, informed by knowledge about the complexity of the multiple forces at work.

– ref. India is facing a terrible crisis. How can Australia respond ethically? – https://theconversation.com/india-is-facing-a-terrible-crisis-how-can-australia-respond-ethically-159992

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Latty, Associate professor, University of Sydney

The busy buzz of pollinating bees is a sound most of us associate with summer. If you live in temperate regions of Australia, you may start to notice fewer insects as the weather gets colder. Across most of the continent, however, some flower-visiting insects are active all year round – and some are more common in cooler months.

Planting winter-blooming flowers is a great way to support beneficial garden insects. Now is the perfect time to start planning your pollinator-friendly winter garden.

Flowers are an important source of food for insects such as bees, butterflies, wasps and hoverflies. Sugary nectar is an important source of carbohydrates, while pollen packs a powerful protein punch.

Planting flowers also attracts and sustains predatory insects. This can help keep pest species under control, meaning less need for pesticides.

Know your winter-active insects

First, let’s look at which pollinators and helpful predators you can expect in your garden in winter. This guide, as well as the below gardening tips, applies primarily to temperate regions of Australia where temperatures become cool over winter.

The temperate region comprises the areas shown in blue below. It includes the coastal rim that curves from inland of Brisbane down to Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide, as well as Tasmania.

One of the most common pollinators is the Western honeybee (Apis mellifera). This introduced species evolved in cooler regions of the world and tends to be more cold-tolerant than most native bees. They’ll start to leave the hive when the temperature rises above 13℃, but are most active above 19℃.

Most native Australian bees prefer warmer temperatures. But a few species, such as reed bees (Exonerua) and the sugarbag bee (Tetragonula carbonaria), make an appearance on warmer winter days when the temperatures reach the mid- to high teens (although the sugar bag bee is usually not found south of Sydney).

Flies tend to be relatively tolerant of cooler temperatures, and are the stars of winter pollination. Hoverflies (Syrphidae), in particular, are garden superheroes.

Adult hoverflies feed on nectar and pollen and can pollinate a range of plants. As a bonus, the maggot-like larvae of some hoverfly species are voracious predators, happily eating soft-bodied pests such as aphids.

Read more: It’s bee season. To avoid getting stung, just stay calm and don’t swat

Hoverflies are often mistaken for bees or wasps because of their similar yellow and black patterning. The resemblance is not accidental; hoverflies have evolved to mimic the appearance of stinging wasps and bees. Don’t let them fool you – hoverflies cannot sting and are generally harmless.

Some hoverfly species lay their eggs in stagnant water. The resulting larvae are known by the unflattering name “rat-tailed maggots” because they breathe underwater through a long, thin siphon that resembles a tail. Don’t worry if you find these alien-looking critters swimming in your pond or beneath potted plants – the adults are flower-loving vegetarians that can help with pollination.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Eleanor Anne Ormerod, the self taught agricultural entomologist who tasted a live newt

Other flies such as blowflies (Calliphoridae) are also active through the cooler months. Although blowflies are often considered pests, they play an important role in the pollination of some fruits including avocado and mango, as well as seed production for carrot, celery and cauliflower.

With the right planting, you can also attract predators such as parasitoid wasps, lacewings and ladybird beetles. These insects mostly feed on other insects, but live longer and produce more offspring when they have access to a sweet sip of nectar.

So now we’ve met our winter pollinators and predators, read on for three ways to support them in your garden.

1. Plant lots of flowers

The easiest – and most beautiful – way to support winter insects is to plant lots of colourful winter-blooming flowers. Winter-loving brassicas such as broccoli, bok choi and mustard greens produce flowers that are a favourite food of many insects. Letting a few of these veggies go to flower will help support your local beneficial insects.

Salvias such as chia (Salvia hispanica) and basils such as sweet basil (Ocimum basilicum) will attract and support a variety of flower-visiting insects.

Native flowers such as coastal rosemary (Westringia fruticosa), Happy Wanderer (Hardenbergia violacea), wattles (Acacia) and grevilleas are excellent for some of our pickier native insects.

2. Create variety

When planning your winter garden, aim for a variety of colours, shapes and blooming times. Ideally, something should be in bloom all year round. Try to include as many native species as possible. Different winter-active insects have different preferences, so a variety of flower types can ensure you cater to a wider range of insects.

For example, a winter survey of community gardens in Sydney found honeybees were most abundant on sweet basil, lavender (Lavendula) and borage (Borago officinalis), while hoverflies (Melangyna_sp) preferred Brassica rapa, Veronica persica and Stellaria media.

The differences in flower preferences likely reflect differences in the shape and length of insect mouth parts. Honeybees have relatively long tongues that can access nectar in tube-shaped flowers (such as basil and lavender).

Hoverflies, with their shorter tongues, have an easier time accessing nectar and pollen from shallower, daisy-like flowers. By planting a variety of flower shapes, you can make sure no insect misses out.

3. Avoid insecticides

Even organic or so-called “eco-friendly” insecticides may harm beneficial insects. Instead of insecticides, try low-impact options such as removing caterpillars by hand, or using a water spray to remove aphids.

If you feel you must use insecticides, read the label carefully and choose selective baits and sprays, which target one type of insect, over broad-spectrum sprays (such as pyrethrins, pyrethroids and neonicotinoids) which kill insects indiscriminately. Keep in mind that in some cases, using insecticides can actually make your pest problems worse by killing beneficial predatory insects.

Get planting!

Planting a garden for winter-active insects is a wonderful way to support local wildlife. Your garden will thrive as a result of the free pollination and pest control services these beneficial insects provide.

So get planting, and enjoy the delight of a buzzing garden full of helpful insects.

Read more: Why tiny ants have invaded your house, and what to do about it

– ref. These 3 tips will help you create a thriving pollinator-friendly garden this winter – https://theconversation.com/these-3-tips-will-help-you-create-a-thriving-pollinator-friendly-garden-this-winter-157880

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Conley Tyler, Research Associate, Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne

Indications are that the federal government is very cautious about accepting a Victorian government proposal to establish an additional hotel quarantine stream. The plan is to start bringing back 120 international students and event workers per week from May 24. It might seem like a drop in the ocean – more than 150,000 students are stranded overseas – but it’s an important start.

Australia benefits from international students returning: not just directly in the higher education sector, which has had massive job losses since Australia closed its borders, but also in the flow-on economic benefits from student spending in areas like housing, food and services. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, international education was Australia’s third-largest export industry, worth about A$40 billion a year to the wider economy.

Read more: As hopes of international students’ return fade, closed borders could cost $20bn a year in 2022 – half the sector’s value

If a solution is not found soon, there might be fewer international students to return. Australia risks falling behind competitors, like the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, that are welcoming and assisting international students. The long-term impact on Australia’s reputation as a study destination should also be considered.

Many international students have been very tenacious in continuing to study, but they are finding it extremely difficult. They need to believe there is some hope of return.

Victoria’s current proposal is less ambitious than some of its earlier plans. It’s a shame it didn’t take up plans to use student accommodation for quarantine.

Read more: How unis can use student housing to solve international student quarantine issues

And it’s a real shame it didn’t look at options other than hotel quarantine for students from low-risk locations.

The return of students from places like Vietnam or Taiwan poses a negligible risk to the Australian community. Ideally the system design should reflect this, leaving more quarantine spots available for those who need them.

Even with these faults, Victoria’s proposal is the first plan that would enable an ongoing stream of international students to return. It doesn’t pit international students against returning Australians: it’s an additional program, so it won’t take a single place from those who are trying to get home. It could build confidence to scale up – and give international students some comfort.

Why the year-long wait for a plan?

With such a strong self-interest case for Australia, the question is why this hasn’t been tried sooner. Pilot programs for South Australia and the ACT were announced then postponed. New South Wales has called for expressions of interest, but there are no firm plans. The only pilot that actually went ahead brought back 63 incredibly lucky students to Charles Darwin University.

So why hasn’t there been more urgency? Some of the explanations apply to all groups who want to return.

The federal government does not want to take responsibility for quarantine. We saw that again the last few days in its response to Victoria’s plans for cabin-style quarantine on federal land.

Outbreaks from quarantine hotels have spooked state governments and the public. Victoria, which suffered one of the world’s longest lockdowns, has not been as strong an advocate as might have been expected from a state whose biggest export industry is international education.

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

Isolationism ultimately hurts Australia

The lack of urgency in finding solutions to enable travel is hard to explain given the sheer number of people and groups affected, including at least 34,000 stranded Australians, international students, workers in the tourism sector and ultimately every business that depends on students and migrants. Cutting itself off from the world harms Australia deeply.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s statement that Australia is in “no hurry” to reopen was jarring. Perhaps the strong reaction to making it a crime to return from India might cause the government to reconsider. Opinion polling shows 33% think the federal government has not done enough to help Australians to return.

For international students in particular the problem has been compounded by the federal government’s lack of sympathy – bordering on antipathy – towards the higher education sector. Some of this is likely to be party politics, but one factor worth considering is the impact of defence and security concerns about China in stigmatising international engagement by Australia’s universities.

Australia’s success in international education is now being viewed as dependence. Some see it as a positive that the higher education sector is being forced into structural reform. Federal MP Bob Katter went so far as calling universities “prostitutes” who have “sold their bodies and souls” to the Chinese Communist Party. Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge has explicitly called on universities to diversify students’ source countries.

Read more: Which universities are best placed financially to weather COVID?

It will be a tragedy if Australia manages to kill off its third-largest export industry. Rational economic and public health policy would be for Australia to pull out all stops to help international students to return, particularly those from low-risk countries. Any steps in this direction, no matter how small, would be welcome.

– ref. We have so many good reasons to give international students hope, so why the lack of government urgency? – https://theconversation.com/we-have-so-many-good-reasons-to-give-international-students-hope-so-why-the-lack-of-government-urgency-159996

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jason M. Gibson, Research Fellow, Deakin University

After 140 years, researchers have rediscovered an Aboriginal ceremonial ground in Victoria’s East Gippsland. The site was host to the last young men’s initiation ceremony of the Gunaikurnai back in 1884, witnessed by the anthropologist A.W. Howitt.

Howitt’s field notes, combined with contemporary Gunaikurnai knowledge of their country, has led to the rediscovery. The site is located on public land, on the edge of the small fishing village of Seacombe. Its precise location had been lost following decades of colonial suppression of Gunaikurnai ritual and religious practices.

Researchers from the Howitt and Fison Archive project and the Gunaikurnai Land and Waters Aboriginal Corporation began searching for the site in 2018. While it lacks archaeological traces, such as middens, rock art, stone arrangements or artefact scatters, the importance of such ceremonial grounds is under-recognised. They are a central feature of Australian Indigenous conceptions of landscape and have considerable historical and cultural importance.

The Jeraeil

In the first few weeks of 1884, the Gunaikurnai peoples of Gippsland were preparing for a historic gathering. After decades of discussion and negotiation with Howitt, who was also a local magistrate and power broker, they finally agreed to allow him to record their secretive young men’s initiation ceremony, known as the Jeraeil.

Last held in 1857, just a few years before Howitt arrived in Gippsland, the Jeraeil had ceased to be performed due to tighter governmental restrictions and stern dissuasion from Christian missionaries.

On January 30 1884, all the required Gunaikurnai people had assembled. Those coming from the Lake Tyers Mission came on the paddle steamer Tanjil. Those from Ramahyuck Mission, on the shores of Lake Wellington, arrived on the steamer Dargo.

Convinced that an Aboriginal initiation ceremony from this part of the colony would never be performed again, Howitt arranged and paid for his primary Kulin informants from the Melbourne area, William Barak and Dick Richards, to attend so they could contribute their commentary on Victorian ceremonies.

The event, which lasted four days, began with a series of preliminary ceremonies involving men and women singing together. The women kept time by beating on rugs folded in their laps and hitting digging sticks on the ground. Many of the performances that followed were restricted only to men, with six youths eventually initiated into manhood.

“It was remarkable,” Howitt commented, that although he had known many of these men “intimately,” and for a long time, they had kept these “special secrets […] carefully concealed” from him for many years.

Howitt’s published description of the Jeraeil, along with the equally significant work on similar ceremonies in New South Wales produced by Robert Hamilton Mathews, went on to influence the way religious life and ritual in south-eastern Australia was understood.

Finding the site

Lacking from Howitt’s record, however, was a precise description of where the historic ceremony had been held. A recent project to work on Howitt’s field notes in collaboration with Gunaikurnai people has uncovered new details, including a sketch map of the ceremony ground, sparking community interest in finding the site.

Howitt’s drawing of the ceremony ground, along with his notes and newspaper articles, enabled the research team to positively locate the site, on the edge of Seacombe, near the McLellan’s strait, which links Lake Wellington with the Southern Ocean.

The site’s significance lies not in any immediately observable physical property, but in its historical and cultural associations. They span the story associated with this place, including the local creation stories associated with Bullum Baukan (a woman with two spirits inside her); the complicated relationship with Howitt; interactions with other colonial authorities and the status of the Jeraeil in anthropological literature.

Discovery of this site means it is now protected under the (Victorian) Aboriginal Heritage Act 2006. All Aboriginal cultural heritage is protected in Victoria whether it has been formally registered or not and it is an offence to harm it.

The Jeraeil site is arguably one of the most significant of places in terms of the ritual and ceremonial life of Gunaikurnai people. However, the prospect of erecting signage at the Jeraeil site can produce mixed responses.

On the one hand, telling the world about these places might secure them. On the other, the Gunaikurnai live in a region dotted with monuments that remind people of the colonial violence enacted by men such as Scottish explorer Angus McMillian. One plaque brazenly describes McMillan as an explorer who achieved “territorial ascendancy over Gippsland Aborigines”.

Victorian Aboriginal cultural heritage continues to be damaged as happened with the recent partial destruction of the Kooyang Stone Arrangement in Lake Bolac. Some in the Gunaikurnai community fear too little is being done to protect such places but also worry about the public’s readiness to embrace Aboriginal cultural heritage.

Still, it is imperative places like the 1884 Jeraeil ground are better understood, recognised and protected. Not only does it tell a story of Aboriginal cultural practice but of shared Aboriginal and European interactions we should all know more about.

– ref. After 140 years, researchers have rediscovered an important Aboriginal ceremonial ground in East Gippsland – https://theconversation.com/after-140-years-researchers-have-rediscovered-an-important-aboriginal-ceremonial-ground-in-east-gippsland-155119

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mohiuddin Ahmed, Lecturer of Computing & Security, Edith Cowan University

It has been a big year for cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is worth six times what it was 12 months ago, and the joke currency Dogecoin has seen a hundredfold increase in price. A boom in “non-fungible tokens”, or NFTs – tradable tokens based on the same technology as cryptocurrency – is transforming the art market.

With this growth has come renewed scrutiny, with critics attacking Bitcoin in particular as a speculative bubble that uses vast amounts of electricity and produces no real value.

A new cryptocurrency called Chia, which has just begun trading, sets out to remedy these flaws while upholding cryptocurrency’s promise of a secure, decentralised form of payment.

Chia is the brainchild of Bram Cohen, who invented the BitTorrent peer-to-peer filesharing system. He claims it will be more reliable than other cryptocurrencies, and more environmentally friendly too.

What is cryptocurrency?

Unlike traditional currencies such as the dollar or euro, which are issued by central banks and rely on trust in governments, cryptocurrencies rely on a decentralised database called a blockchain, secured by sophisticated cryptographic tools.

The first cryptocurrency was Bitcoin, released in 2009, and today there are at least 5,922 cryptocurrencies available. Bitcoin is still by far the biggest; the total value of all Bitcoin now in existence is some US$1.2 trillion.

Read more: Demystifying the blockchain: a basic user guide

Despite this booming popularity, very few retailers accept cryptocurrency as payment.

Governments around the world are also exploring digital currencies. The Bank of England is hiring a dedicated team to explore the possibilities in this area, while the Australian Stock Exchange is reviewing applications for a cryptocurrency-based exchange-traded fund. Germany is one of the frontrunners in embracing crypto, and is heavily investing in blockchain solutions for institutional investment.

How is Chia different from Bitcoin?

Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies use a system in which currency is created or “mined” using computers to solve mathematical puzzles. These are known as “proof of work” systems — solving the puzzle is proof that your computer has done a certain amount of work.

Read more: The ‘utopian’ currency Bitcoin is a potentially catastrophic energy guzzler

Doing this work takes specialised hardware and lots of energy. Bitcoin mining has helped create shortages of graphics processors, and by some estimates it is more energy-intensive than copper mining and uses more electricity than some entire countries.

Chia runs on a system that should use less energy, called “proof of space and time”. In this system, users need to show they have reserved a specific amount of hard drive space at a precise time.

So Chia won’t use huge amounts of electricity, and won’t see miners buying up every graphics card in sight. But the requirement for hard drive storage space may lead to other drawbacks.

Hard drive price surge

Even before its official launch, Chia has used more than an exabyte of data storage. That’s the equivalent of about a million of the 1 terabyte hard drives you might find in an average desktop computer.

According to the South China Morning Post, hard drive prices in China have begun to soar as Chia miners stockpile storage. The price of 12-terabyte drives has increased by 59% since Chia was announced in February this year, and most professional-quality hard drives with more than 8 terabytes of capacity are sold out.

Vietnam is also seeing hard drive shortages as a result of China’s Chia craze.

We may well see similar effects in other countries in the not too distant future. At present, Chia lacks the name recognition and celebrity endorsements that have helped the likes of Bitcoin and Dogecoin to soar, but it has a clear cost advantage.

We can expect cryptocurrency miners will be inclined to try Chia, as a cheaper option than established cryptocurrencies. Eventually, hard drive manufacturers may also revise their prices to increase their own revenue.

Time will tell how Chia ends up performing on the market. If it takes off, we can expect a boom in hard drive prices. But on the flipside, it might also mean graphics processor prices come back down.

– ref. New Chia cryptocurrency promises to be greener than Bitcoin, but may drive up hard drive prices – https://theconversation.com/new-chia-cryptocurrency-promises-to-be-greener-than-bitcoin-but-may-drive-up-hard-drive-prices-160114

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Humpage, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Auckland

The government’s recently announced health sector reforms go well beyond what its expert health review had recommended. This was rightly welcomed by many in the sector, but it does raise the question: if radical change can be made in health, why not the same for welfare?

For years now, benefit recipients, welfare advocates and their allies have been calling for a significant increase in core benefit levels to provide a liveable income.

They have also called for major changes in how Work and Income (WINZ) deals with people with chronic illness and disability and those in relationships; how it treats benefit recipients seeking assistance; and how it makes decisions about discretionary hardship and supplementary assistance.

Back in 2019, the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s analysis stressed that immediate and significant reform in all of these areas was long overdue. It made 42 key recommendations but only a handful have been addressed. Almost two years on, we are still waiting for real action.

Life on a benefit ‘soul destroying’

My recent research involving benefit recipients’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic suggests this delay is causing real hardship and emotional stress for those relying on core benefits to survive.

Only some of those interviewed had received the full $25 per week increase provided in April 2020, due to reduced Temporary Additional Support payments or increased public housing rents. This year’s indexation of benefits to wages was welcome but inadequate to meet significant shortfalls in weekly income.

They have described their lives as “soul destroying” and a “daily grind”, resulting in feelings of hopelessness, despair and the impression they did not belong to the “team of five million”.

During the national lockdown, for example, already inadequate food budgets were made to stretch even further as shoppers hoarded staples, cheaper options flew off the shelves, and people with disabilities or sole parents who were not allowed to take their children shopping had to pay delivery charges.

Read more: COVID-19 is predicted to make child poverty worse. Should NZ’s next government make temporary safety nets permanent?

Dangers of a two-tier welfare system

In response to increasing pressure to act on social security, the government has suggested it might establish a two-tier unemployment insurance scheme. Workers would contribute directly to an unemployment insurance fund that would pay a significant proportion (possibly up to 80%) of their previous wages if they become unemployed.

But this would simply mean those who have been recently employed will be better off than those who have not.

The same principle underpinned the government’s Income Relief Payment for those who lost their jobs due to COVID-19. This benefit was paid at a higher rate and with easier eligibility conditions than the standard Jobseeker Support.

Unemployment insurance is common in some countries, so there is considerable international evidence indicating it creates a two-tier system: those already well off due to high wages continue to be privileged by receiving higher unemployment benefits than those on lower wages when they become unemployed.

At least, they are better off for one or two years, before they are relegated to the safety net system that sole parents, people with disabilities or chronic illness, refugees, migrants and others with weak attachment to the labour market are forced to rely on.

Privileging the already privileged

Such systems usually offer very low core benefits and increase social stigma by suggesting these groups are not as “deserving” as those more recently unemployed.

Indeed, one of my research participants described how the temporary Income Relief Payment came as a “kick in the gut” and was a significant blow to their mental health for precisely this reason.

Read more: New authority could transform Māori health, but only if it’s a leader, not a partner

A permanent form of unemployment insurance would send the message that we care more about shoring up the middle class, who already own homes and have retirement investments, than ensuring sick and disabled people or sole parents have enough to eat and a healthy home to live in.

Introducing an unemployment insurance system wouldn’t improve the living standards and emotional well-being of the sole parents and those living with disabilities or chronic illness who took part in my research.

Liveable incomes for all

Nor would it improve the “toxic culture” of WINZ or address many of the other problems highlighted by the Welfare Expert Working Group and various research studies.

Rather, it will reinforce existing inequalities, likely increase child poverty rates, and take up public service time and resources that could be better spent improving the current welfare system.

Read more: Children had no say in New Zealand’s well-being budget, and that matters

The radical reform we need is a system that provides a liveable income for all when we are unable to support ourselves, as is often inevitable at some stage in our lives.

This system would treat benefit recipients with dignity and respect, no matter what their circumstances or prior history, value the contributions sole parents make to society by bringing up our tamariki, and recognise the particular needs and strengths of people living with disability or illness.

This is the kind of welfare overhaul I hope is announced in the 2021 Budget.

– ref. If New Zealand can radically reform its health system, why not do the same for welfare? – https://theconversation.com/if-new-zealand-can-radically-reform-its-health-system-why-not-do-the-same-for-welfare-160247

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kaaren Mathias, Lecturer in Health systems and policy, University of Canterbury

As India’s COVID-19 crisis continues, the percentage of the population testing positive for the virus has grown from 4.2% to 18.4% in the past 30 days.

With more than 300,000 new cases reported each day, hospitals and crematoria face collapse. Global media have been awash with heartbreaking images, statistics and stories showing the failure of the country’s health system in the face of surging infections and deaths.

The fracture lines in India’s health system have been developing for years. After decades of under-investment in healthcare and preventative health, India has one of the most privatised health systems in the world. As a consequence, healthcare costs are a leading cause of poverty.

As my recent research into rural mental health services shows, patients are caught between the under-resourced public sector and the profit-focused private health market. Some even many, have to “sell a buffalo to pay for a brain scan”.

Lack of investment in health

Back in 1946, India’s visionary Bhore Committee report declared in its preamble that:

No individual should fail to secure adequate medical care because of inability to pay for it.

In 2021, countries like Vietnam, South Korea and China have successfully contained COVID-19 with few deaths, while in India hundreds of thousands are sick with the virus without adequate medical care.

Promised oxygen generation plants have not been set up and most days I receive messages from colleagues in India seeking hospital beds and oxygen cylinders for loved ones gasping with severe COVID-19 infections.

Read more: India’s staggering COVID crisis could have been avoided. But the government dropped its guard too soon

The cost of healthcare pushes many into destitution. The global average of out-of-pocket healthcare costs is 18.2%, but in India the number is 62.7%.

While India has bounced along with 8% or higher growth in GDP for the past three decades, in 2018 the Indian government invested just 1.3% of GDP in healthcare. The average investment in health across South Asia is twice that at 3.5% and New Zealand and Australia spend over 9.0% of their GDP on health.

In the past two decades, use of public hospitals has dropped in India, from 43% in 1993-4 to 32%. In 2011, 70% of community health centres could not provide emergency obstetric care.

Not trustworthy and not trusted

My research into community health systems also underlines that in a country as diverse and vast as India, one size cannot fit all.

A key component of the treatment gap for people with neurological and mental health problems is that the system has not engaged with the priorities of local communities. The health system is not trustworthy and not trusted.

The consequences of India’s flawed health system are obvious. In the field of nutrition (the most basic building block of health) India is among the world’s top 20 for stunting (38.7% for children under five).

A third of children are not immunised and India’s ranking in basic health indicators compared to regional neighbours has dropped. In a list of 195 countries, ranked by the healthcare access and quality index, India is behind neighbours Bhutan and Sri Lanka.

The smaller but more resilient nations of Nepal and Bangladesh have a lower per capita GDP, but in 2020 both achieved an infant mortality rate of under 26 per 1000 live births. In India, more than 28 per 1000 babies died.

Read more: COVID in India: how the Modi government prioritised politics over public health

Rising infant and maternal deaths

India’s COVID-19 surge has revealed a system in disarray. During the country’s harsh lockdown in March and April last year, healthcare was less affordable, less accessible and of poorer quality.

While the private sector is much larger than the public sector, it handled less than 10% of cases during the first COVID-19 wave. Many private hospitals stayed closed for weeks.

Rationing of public services meant limits had to be introduced on the number of COVID-19 tests per day. Diverting resources (personnel, resources, hospital beds, policymaker attention) to respond to COVID-19 meant vaccination rates have slowed and maternal mortality worsened in the past 12 months.

As a consequence of disruptions to neonatal and child health services, India is expected to record an increase in the number of deaths among under fives by 15% (154,000 deaths) for 2020. The Indian economy is predicted to contract by 10% or more, which means more people in poverty and less cash to pay for health infrastructure and staff.

Read more: India COVID crisis: four reasons it will derail the world economy

Health systems are complex but they are not rigid. They can be resilient and responsive to new challenges like COVID-19. There are some simple steps India could take to strengthen its failing health system.

It could invest in the public sector — staff, infrastructure, medicines and equipment. It could set up accountable governance structures and prioritise care for those experiencing inequities in access and outcomes. Maybe COVID-19’s exposure of its fragmented health system will push India to rebuild, from the ground up.

– ref. Selling a buffalo for a brain scan: India’s COVID-19 crisis reveals deep fractures in its health system – https://theconversation.com/selling-a-buffalo-for-a-brain-scan-indias-covid-19-crisis-reveals-deep-fractures-in-its-health-system-160180

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

How hard is Scott Morrison willing to poke the panda? That’s a question posed by the government’s review of the Chinese company Landbridge’s 99-year lease of the Port of Darwin.

The defence department is to advise on the security implications of the lease, granted by the Northern Territory government in a $500 million highly controversial deal in 2015.

At the time, then-United States president Barack Obama chided prime minister Malcolm Turnbull for not giving the Americans a heads up about the deal.

Turnbull added insult to injury by suggesting the president should subscribe to the NT’ News, where it was reported.

Although the federal government had no formal part in the lease at the time, the NT government sought federal advice. The defence department, ASIO and others in the national security establishment were not fazed by it. Neither was the national security committee of the Coalition cabinet.

The defence department secretary at the time, Dennis Richardson, and Duncan Lewis, who headed ASIO, both defended the arrangement when questioned by a senate committee.

Nevertheless, the deal had many critics and subsequently the federal government acted to ensure that in future such proposals would go before the Foreign Investment Review Board.

Fast forward to the present, and this week the new and hairy-chested defence minister Peter Dutton told the Sydney Morning Herald cabinet’s national security committee had asked his department to review the lease and “come back with some advice”. The work was already under way, Dutton said.

Last week Morrison had flagged the move, saying if the government received any advice from the defence department or intelligence agencies suggesting “there are national security risks there then you’d expect the government to take action”.

The Port of Darwin came into the frame after Foreign Minister Marise Payne cancelled two Victorian government agreements with China that were under that country’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Read more: Why scrap Victoria’s ‘meaningless’ Belt and Road deal? Because it sends a powerful message to Beijing

She was implementing the recent legislation for the examination of agreements state and territory governments and public universities have (or propose) with foreign governments.

The Port of Darwin lease, being with a commercial company, does not fall within that legislation, but the segue to discussion of its future was inevitable.

Despite its defenders at the time, it is clear the deal should never have been concluded. But it is less clear what should be done about it now.

The increasing assertive and aggressive stands by China seem to argue for the lease to be broken.

While the lease is only over the commercial port, the Chinese presence sits somewhat uneasily with the growing US military footprint in northern Australia.

Peter Jennings, executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) think tank, says: “I do think this is probably the moment that the government needs to step in”. He believes the government should buy out the lease and then sell it to a less problematic owner.

If the judgement is that a time of reckoning will come in relation to the port, a case can be put for not delaying that time.

On the other hand, does the government want to make the present difficult relationship with China significantly worse?

Overturning a major commercial deal is a big step (much bigger than killing the Victorian BRI agreements) and the government would have to give substantial reasons. The action would cause offence to China and probably invite more trade retaliation.

The decision would turn the focus onto other Chinese investments in Australian infrastructure, including the 50% stake in the Port of Newcastle, and stakes in the power grid.

It would be taken as implying a more general signal about Australia’s attitude to Chinese investment and perhaps about investment from some other countries.

Managing both the diplomatic and foreign investment messages would be tricky, to say the least.

Asked on Tuesday about the various complications, Morrison told Seven “we’ll just take this one step at a time”.

He said he wasn’t presuming anything about the advice to come, and he was sure it would include “many options”. He also noted the commercial port area was separate from “where our military and defence facilities are”.

Now that the future of the Port of Darwin has been put on the table, a significant factor in the mix is domestic public opinion, which is very distrustful of China. The government has raised expectations of action, which it will have to deal with if it decides not to act.

One way out of a vexed situation could be to seek a middle course – for example putting in place certain conditions (on reporting, governance and the like) for this and other relevant ports under the revised security of critical infrastructure legislation that is now going through the parliament.

Whatever is decided will be a revealing test of the power of the China hawks in and around the government.

– ref. View from The Hill: Port of Darwin review opens a Pandora’s box – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-port-of-darwin-review-opens-a-pandoras-box-160288

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven Freeland, Professorial Fellow, Bond University / Emeritus Professor of International Law, Western Sydney University, Western Sydney University

A large piece of space debris, possibly weighing several tonnes, is currently on an uncontrolled reentry phase (that’s space speak for “out of control”), and parts of it are expected to crash down to Earth over the next few weeks.

If that isn’t worrying enough, it is impossible to predict exactly where the pieces that don’t burn up in the atmosphere might land. Given the object’s orbit, the possible landing points are anywhere in a band of latitudes “a little farther north than New York, Madrid and Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand”.

The debris is part of the Long March 5B rocket that recently successfully launched China’s first module for its proposed space station. The incident comes roughly a year after another similar Chinese rocket fell to Earth, landing in the Atlantic Ocean but not before it reportedly left a trail of debris in the African nation of Cote D’Ivoire.

At the time, experts noted this was one of the largest pieces of human-made debris ever to fall to Earth. We cannot say with certainty what fate awaits this latest piece of space junk.

Litter from space

Australia already holds the record in the category of “who can be hit by the biggest piece of space junk”. In 1979, the 77-tonne US space station SkyLab disintegrated over Western Australia, peppering the area around the southern coastal town of Esperance with fragments.

At the time, the event was met with with excitement and a sense of lightheartedness, and many pieces were collected by space enthusiasts. Esperance shire council flippantly issued NASA with a fine for littering, and a US radio station later raised enough money to pay the debt.

Although there have been no recorded deaths or serious injuries from people being hit by space debris, that’s no reason to think it’s not dangerous. Just one year before SkyLab’s demise, a Soviet remote sensing (spy) satellite, Cosmos 954, plummeted into a barren region of Canada’s Northwest Territories, spreading radioactive debris over several hundred square kilometres.

With the Cold War at its height, the sensitivity of the nuclear technology on board Cosmos 954 led to an unfortunate delay in locating and cleaning up the wreckage, because of the distrust between the Soviet Union and the Canadian/US recovery effort.

The clean-up operation took months but located only a portion of the debris. Canada billed the Soviet Union more than C$6 million, having spent millions more, but was ultimately paid only C$3 million.

Read more: Trash or treasure? A lot of space debris is junk, but some is precious heritage

Since the late 1970s, pieces of space debris have fallen to Earth regularly and are viewed with increasing concern. Of course, more than 70% of Earth is covered by oceans, and only a minuscule fraction of the remaining 30% is covered by your house. But for anyone falling foul of the extremely long odds, the consequences would be truly disastrous.

It was just a quirk of fate that Cosmos 954 did not land on Toronto or Quebec City, where the radioactive fallout would have necessitated a large-scale evacuation. In 2007, pieces of debris from a Russian satellite narrowly missed a Chilean passenger plane flying between Santiago and Auckland. As we send more objects into space, the chances of a calamitous crash-landing will only increase.

Read more: Two satellites just avoided a head-on smash. How close did they come to disaster?

Who pays to clean up the mess, anyway?

International law sets out a compensation regime that would apply in many circumstances of damage on Earth, as well as when satellites collide in space. The 1972 Liability Convention, a UN treaty, imposes liability on “launching states” for damage caused by their space objects, which includes an absolute liability regime when they crash to Earth as debris.

In the case of the Long March 5B, this would impose potential liability on China. The treaty has only been invoked once before (for the Cosmos 954 incident) and therefore may not be regarded as a powerful disincentive. However, it is likely to come into play in the future in a more crowded space environment, and with more uncontrolled reentries. Of course, this legal framework applies only after the damage occurs.

Read more: It’s not how big your laser is, it’s how you use it: space law is an important part of the fight against space debris

Other international guidelines regarding debris mitigation and long-term sustainability of space activities set out voluntary standards intended to limit the probability of collisions in space, and minimise the breakup of satellites either during or after their missions.

Some satellites can be moved into a graveyard orbit at the end of their operational life. While this works well for certain specific orbits at a relatively high altitude, it is impractical and hazardous to start moving the vast majority of satellites around between orbital planes. Most of the millions of pieces of space junk are destined either to orbit in an uncontrollable manner for many years or, if they are in low Earth orbit, to gradually descend towards the Earth, hopefully burning up in the atmosphere before contact with terra firma.

A globally coordinated space traffic management system will be vital to avoid collisions that would result in loss of control of satellites, leaving them to tumble helplessly in orbit or fall back to Earth.

Comprehensively tracking every satellite’s movement and functionality is even harder than it sounds, because it would inevitably require countries to be willing to share information they often currently regard as confidential matters of national security.

But, ultimately, global cooperation is essential if we are to avoid an unsustainable future for our space activities. In the meantime, don’t forget to gaze upwards every now and then — you might spot some of the most spectacular litter on the planet.

– ref. A giant piece of space junk is hurtling towards Earth. Here’s how worried you should be – https://theconversation.com/a-giant-piece-of-space-junk-is-hurtling-towards-earth-heres-how-worried-you-should-be-160254

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Egliston, Postdoctoral research fellow, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology

The ABC’s latest Four Corners report is an investigation into how videogames are “deliberately designed to get people hooked”.

It describes the use of gambling-like “loot boxes” in games, the hotly debated notion of videogame addiction and, to a lesser extent, the “predatory techniques” of using user data and AI to increase spending in freemium games (free to play games which are monetised through in-app transactions and advertising).

The process of monetising and collecting data through videogames does require scrutiny, as it can be problematic for some users. But in working out what the harms are, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact videogames are enjoyable and valuable for the vast majority.

How do game companies use data?

Videogame production is increasingly supported by collecting large amounts of player data. Game developers use this data to optimise game design and, perhaps more commonly, how games are monetised.

Historically, data about players’ actions and gaming experiences have been collected through quality assurance testing, or by game developers trawling through online forums. This has changed with the rise of data mining and analysis, referred to as telemetry, or more commonly as “data analytics”.

Such approaches were once limited to large “Triple A” companies such as EA or social gaming giants like Zynga. Only the biggest game designers could afford in-house software engineers to create these systems, and data analysts to use them.

Today data analytics are relatively cheap, accessible tools aimed at both big and small independent developers. Data analytics suites are a core feature of game development software, are offered by tech giants such as Amazon and are also sold by standalone analytics providers such as GameAnalytics.

Analytics might involve simple data such as the number of downloads, or may provide more complex insights, such as in-game behaviour, playing time and frequency of play.

The shift to freemium play, encouraged by smartphone platforms, has made it particularly important to collect data on in-app purchasing. This could include players’ geographic location, their device and operating system and their spending habits.

In turn, this can help game developers to determine which players are more likely to spend money while playing, and how to optimise the placement of in-game ads — a major source of revenue in freemium games.

The software Game of Whales — named after the industry’s practice of calling big spenders “whales” — claims to use AI to track players’ behaviour in real-time and interact with them in a way that maximises “lifetime value”, which is the total amount of revenue a player will generate while playing a game.

These tools are framed as allowing both large and smaller developers to create conditions which increase player spending. For example, they might minimise ads and encourage increased playing time for a high-value “whale”, while providing more ads for users who are unlikely to make in-app purchases.

This is the subset of the gaming industry that frames itself as being able to “control” players through data analytics.

What’s the data on the data?

However, while analytics companies would suggest their products work as promised, we lack scholarly evidence that data capture allows videogame companies to control our minds or our wallets.

As critics of Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism theory would argue, just because game companies collect our data, that doesn’t mean they can automatically control how we behave. Data does not rob us of our agency, writes Virginia Tech’s Lee Vinsel:

[…] it seems that Mark Zuckerberg can’t sell me fucking socks, let alone purposefully/significantly change my politics or self-concept.

Research on how developers use data analytics reflects this ambivalence. One study of French videogame company Ubisoft, and its use of data, suggests data collection “augments” (or enhances) products, rather than necessarily manipulating users into continued spending via microtransactions.

Read more: Facebook’s virtual reality push is about data, not gaming

Are you being manipulated?

The recent Four Corners report frames the gaming industry as a largely manipulative one. It attacks the industry’s calculated pricing strategies, which can affect how we value in-game purchases.

But these same strategies are also widely used in the restaurant industry. Even supermarkets are designed so customers spend as much time as possible inside.

Push notifications that encourage play and consumption have a real-world equivalent, too, such as scent machines at Disneyland used to boost cotton candy and caramel apple sales.

Yet, we don’t think of these subtle techniques as completely robbing us of our agency. So why does the gaming industry draw so much criticism?

Are there solutions?

Many of the mobile and freemium games discussed in the Four Corners report are designed for children who do need greater protection since, according to some psychologists, they don’t “comprehend commercial messages in the same way as more mature audiences”.

In part, concerns about spending in games can be attributed to parents and non-players misunderstanding how virtual goods can actually have real value for players.

A virtual outfit can still help someone express their identity. A helpful strategy could be for parents to discuss with their kids what it means to spend real money on virtual goods and why they want to.

Although, the way some games target whales to encourage unlimited spending is a source of genuine concern. When it comes to monetising responsibly, game platforms and developers both have a role to play.

The solution may be to introduce spending limits, which research has found helps gamblers avoid problem gambling.

Looking after children

It’s important not to conflate issues with how game companies encourage in-game spending with gaming addiction, about which there is significant disagreement among scholars.

Speaking to the Four Corners team, one psychiatrist frames gameplay through language such as “detox” and “relapse”. This approach, which critics refer to as a form of “concept creep”, can result in children’s play being unnecessarily pathologised.

Read more: Gaming addiction as a mental disorder: it’s premature to pathologise players

In our research, we found reason to be concerned by how this type of discourse can negatively affect children with healthy digital play habits, by stigmatising their play, causing parent-child conflict and devaluing concern about drug and alcohol addiction.

Children have the right to play and this extends to the digital world.

– ref. Sure, video games want to get you hooked on spending. But there’s no evidence they can manipulate you – https://theconversation.com/sure-video-games-want-to-get-you-hooked-on-spending-but-theres-no-evidence-they-can-manipulate-you-160182

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, PhD Student/Epidemiologist, University of Wollongong

In early 2020, during the first thrashes of the pandemic, we were all talking about herd immunity.

At that stage, many commentators were arguing we should let COVID-19 rip through populations so we could get enough people immune to the virus that it would stop spreading. As I argued at the time, this was a terrible idea that would overwhelm hospitals and gravely sicken and kill many people.

Now we have safe and effective vaccines, we can aim to reach herd immunity in a much safer way. It’s certainly possible we’ll be able to reach and maintain local herd immunity in certain regions, states and countries. However the pandemic ends, it will involve this immunity to some extent.

But it’s still very uncertain whether long-term, global herd immunity is achievable. It’s quite likely the coronavirus could continue to spread even in places with high proportions of their populations vaccinated. It will probably never be eliminated.

However, if we’re all vaccinated, we’ll be largely safe from the worst ravages of the infection even if it does break out.

What is herd immunity again? And what does it mean for us long-term?

There are a few different definitions of herd immunity. Nevertheless, they all deal with the “reproductive number” of a disease, known as the R number. This is the average number of people an infected person will pass a disease on to, at a certain point in time.

Read more: What is herd immunity and how many people need to be vaccinated to protect a community?

The R number depends on how infectious a disease is. Measles is often used as an example, because it’s one of the most infectious diseases. In a group of people among whom no one is immune to the disease, on average one person will pass measles on to around 15 others.

But as more people in the community become immune, either through vaccination or getting the disease and recovering, each infected person will pass on the infection to fewer and fewer others. Eventually, we reach a point at which the R number is below 1, and the disease starts to die out. The R number falling below 1 here is in a population where there are no social restrictions, so the disease starts to die out because of immunity and not because of measures like lockdowns. This is one definition of herd immunity.

However, another potential definition is that herd immunity is a state where enough people are immune in a population that a disease won’t spread at all. One of the more confusing parts of the pandemic is we scientists haven’t always used the same definition across the board.

For example, when we say “reached the herd immunity threshold”, we could be talking about a transient state where we’re likely to see another epidemic in the near future, or a situation where the vast majority of a population is immune and thus the disease won’t spread at all. Both are technically “herd immunity”, but they’re very different ideas.

How’s herd immunity calculated?

COVID-19 has an R number somewhere between 2 and 4 in groups of people where no one is immune. Using a simple mathematical formula, 50-75% of people need to be immune to COVID-19 for the R number to fall below 1 so it starts to die out, in a population with no social restrictions. Some researchers have done more complex versions of this calculation throughout the pandemic, but that’s the basic idea behind them all.

However, herd immunity is a moving target. For example, if everyone in your local population is taking great care to socially distance, COVID-19 won’t spread as much. Therefore, in practice, different cultures spread diseases to different extents, so the R number varies in both place and time.

Vaccines are the ultimate path to long-term immunity

Vaccines give us immunity against diseases, often to a greater extent than contracting the disease itself, and without the nasty consequences of being sick.

Our COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective. Without going too much into the debate over which one is better, they are all capable of getting us to a point at which the disease would no longer spread through the community. For some vaccines, the percentage of people who we need to immunise is higher. But it’s the same basic idea regardless, and we need to vaccinate as many people as we can to have a shot at herd immunity.

We can already see this happening in some places. For example, in the United Kingdom and Israel, enough people have been vaccinated that even though restrictions are being relaxed, infection rates are staying low or continuing to drop. This is a beautiful sight.

The coronavirus will probably never be eliminated

Even with great vaccines, the problem is complex. There are almost always communities who aren’t immunised, for various reasons, even in countries with large proportions of the total population vaccinated. These small communities can continue to get sick and spread the disease long after the general population has passed the herd immunity line, which means there may always be some risk of COVID-19 outbreaks.

On top of this, new variants of the virus have emerged. Our current vaccines are probably enough to provide most people with immunity to the original strain in the long term. But several variants may substantially reduce our vaccines’ effectiveness as time goes by, so we may need boosters at some point.

What’s more, the global situation isn’t rosy. India and Brazil are currently experiencing horrifying COVID-19 outbreaks. The global case count continues to rise, partially because developed nations have hoarded vaccine doses jealously, despite this being a terrible approach to a pandemic. Rising case numbers anywhere increase the chances even more variants pop up, thereby impacting us all.

Even if we overcome vaccine hesitancy and global inaction, and we immunise most of the world, we may not be protected against the virus forever. Even higher-income nations may never get rid of COVID-19.

It’s quite likely this virus will never be eradicated (eliminated from every country across the globe). There may be places where the disease is gone, where local campaigns are successful, but there’ll also be places where the disease is still spreading.

Read more: COVID-19 will probably become endemic – here’s what that means

What does this mean for Australia?

This presents a challenge for Australia. We have virtually no local COVID-19 transmission, so there’s no real risk from the virus as long as our border controls hold steady.

However, we probably can’t maintain this level of vigilance forever. And even with our very effective vaccines, we may not have long-term herd immunity — of any definition — to COVID-19.

At some point in the future, it’s likely we will see some cases of COVID-19 spreading in even the safest places in the world, including Australia.

Even so, getting vaccinated enormously reduces your risk of severe outcomes like hospitalisation and death. We should aim to vaccinate as many people as possible, while acknowledging that the future is inherently uncertain, and herd immunity is a challenging goal.

– ref. We may never achieve long-term global herd immunity for COVID. But if we’re all vaccinated, we’ll be safe from the worst – https://theconversation.com/we-may-never-achieve-long-term-global-herd-immunity-for-covid-but-if-were-all-vaccinated-well-be-safe-from-the-worst-159821

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

What in America they call the State of the Union, in Australia we call the federal budget.

As surprising as it may seem, Australian budgets aren’t really about money — they’re about values.

As a case in point, a key part of next week’s budget will be an announcement about childcare, but the childcare measures won’t start until 2022-23.

It’s not clear that they’ll need to be in the 2021-22 budget in order to get approved.

Indeed, the budget’s formal title is Appropriation bill (No. 1) 2021-22. The budget bill will deal only with appropriations for 2021-22.

But the theatre that has built up around the presentation of that bill — the budget speech — has given it the space to deal with so much more.

Legally, the budget needn’t deal with much

Last year’s speech mentioned values, twice. It spoke of our “cherished way of life”, of the courage, commitment, and compassion of healthcare workers and volunteer firefighters, of our “invisible strength”.

And it extended the low and middle income tax offset for another year.

Legally, the budget bill can’t include tax measures. That’s outlawed by the Constitution.

Tax measures have to be introduced in separate legislation, measure by measure — or not be introduced at all. Our government can continue to collect tax at the existing rates for as long as it likes, unlike in Britain where tax collections form the core of the budget bill and need to be re-authorised every year.

In Australia, government spending does need to be re-authorised every year but only spending which is for the “ordinary annual services” of government.

Everything else — the vast bulk of government spending, everything from Medicare to pensions to grants to the states to family support to support for private schools and private health insurance — is ongoing, approved on a never-ending basis under so-called “standing appropriations” or “special appropriations”.

At the last count there were 240 such special appropriations, covering everything from the funding of universities to paid parental leave.

The Department of Finance says 167 of them are unlimited, meaning there is “no defined ceiling on total expenditure”.

What’s left, what actually needs to be re-approved in the budget each year, is little more than the payment of rent and public service wages, suggesting that if the Senate had rejected “supply” (the budget appropriation bill) during the 1975 constitutional crisis as it had threatened to do, the Whitlam government could have taxed and spent much as before, although it would have had to get private banks to advance public servants’ wages, something it was investigating doing.

Practically, it deals with most things

It might be because it needs to do so little that the budget has come to do so much.

Now the “forward estimates” for spending and revenue and the state of the economy go out for four years, and some of them for ten.

The budget has become a statement of the government’s values in part because it puts numbers on those values — how much it is prepared to spend on health compared to defence, how much it plans to spend on superannuation tax concessions for high earners compared to pensions for low earners.

Which makes it a statement of values

As with the US President’s State of the Union speech, it’s the only night of the year in which the government sets out clearly what stands for and what it plans to do.

An accident of history means it’s the treasurer rather than the prime minister who delivers the statement of values, although the treasurer speaks for the prime minister, as Joe Hockey spoke for Tony Abbott in 2014 when he infamously declared his budget to be for “lifters, not leaners”.

Josh Frydenberg’s values will be apparent in how he responds to a surging iron ore price (last year’s budget assumed US$55 a tonne and on a slightly different measure it’s currently north of US$180) and much stronger than expected recoveries in jobs and the share market.

Read more: Exclusive. Top economists back budget push for an unemployment rate beginning with ‘4’

It would be tempting to wind back spending and push up taxes in order to close the budget deficit without seeing how far the recovery can run.

That Frydenberg says he won’t, not until he gets the unemployment rate below 5% and hundreds of thousands more Australians are in jobs, is a statement of values.

That he is reportedly planning to spend an extra $10 billion (over the four-year “forward estimates”, not per year) on responding to the findings of the aged-care royal commission when the commission identified much greater needs might also be a statement of values.

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

As might the forecasts he makes for immigration, for the spending on mental health promised in response to the Productivity Commission inquiry, for the rollout of vaccines for Australians and vaccines for countries that need them more than Australia.

They’ll all be part of a program that makes clear what the government stands for and against which it can be judged.

– ref. The budget is a window into the treasurer’s soul. Here’s what to look for Tuesday night – https://theconversation.com/the-budget-is-a-window-into-the-treasurers-soul-heres-what-to-look-for-tuesday-night-160086