Papua New Guinea’s Internal Security Minister Peter Tsiamalili Jr says the Royal PNG Constabulary is “stretched” with only 5000 men and women serving the country of more than 9 million people.
“Now more than ever we need leadership, we are stretched as a force, we all know that — we only have 5000 men,” he said.
“We are making recruitments happen.
“Issues in Hela — we are making every effort to manage this.
“That is happening in Hela, and it’s across the country. I am asking for help. This issue did not happen overnight, this is a culmination of the neglect our force has faced in the last 10 to 15 years.
“I am having sleepless nights, ensuring we work with the operational side of police. We are looking at stronger laws to deter citizens of such criminal acts.”
The minister — who is in charge of both the police and correctional services — was speaking during Parliament when he was asked by Mul-Baiyer MP Jacob Maki and a supplementary question from Abau MP Sir Puka Temu.
Throughout Russia’s war against Ukraine, there have been countless reports of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Now, there are also allegations of genocide involving the forced transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia.
The International Criminal Court has just issued two arrest warrants in connection with the transfer of Ukrainian children for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Russian commissioner for children’s rights.
While this is a significant legal milestone, the warrants might not necessarily lead to an arrest – due to a lack of enforcement mechanisms and the likely reluctance of the Russian state and potentially other states to cooperate.
Re-education and forced adoptions
There have been many reports on the forced transfer of Ukrainian children, ranging in age from infants to teenagers, to various locations in Russia and Russian-occupied Crimea. These transfers date back to the beginning of February 2022; in the case of occupied Crimea, transfers of orphans and children without parental care commenced as early as 2014.
Russia is now believed to be operating a large-scale, systematic network of at least 40 “recreational” re-education camps for thousands of Ukrainian children. The primary purpose of most of these camps appears to consist of pro-Russian indoctrination and, in some instances, military training.
While Russia does not deny the evacuation of children or that they are now in Russia, the government claims it is part of a humanitarian project for war-traumatised orphans.
However, not all of these children are orphans. According to an investigation by Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, children with living relatives in Ukraine have been “recruited” to attend camps in Russia for ostensible holidays. Consent from families is given either under duress or routinely violated.
Once the children are in Russia or Crimea, their communication with family members is either restricted or nonexistent. Most children have been unable to return home.
Troublingly, Putin’s “patriotic patronage campaign” is also strongly encouraging Russian families to adopt purported Ukrainian orphans. There have been legislative changes to expedite the adoption of Ukrainian children and financial incentives for Russian families who do this.
The exact number of Ukrainian children being sent to Russia is unclear. The Ukrainian government has officially identified 16,221 deported children as of early March.
Other estimates suggest the real number may be as high as 400,000.
Is the forced transfer of children an act of genocide?
International law dictates what types of crimes constitute an act of genocide. These acts are exhaustively listed in the Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948. The legal definition of genocide has not changed in 75 years, and is accepted by and applicable to all states worldwide.
Article II of the Genocide Convention lists the forcible transfer of children of a group to another group as one of the acts which may amount to genocide if it is done with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Ukrainian children would be protected under this legal definition as a national group. The evidence, to date, also suggests the forcible transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia for the purposes of potentially “integrating”, or indoctrinating, them into pro-Russian culture has taken place.
While definite proof of this specialised intent is required, the removal of children from their families, homes and culture suggests the purpose of Russia’s “evacuation” of children may be to erase Ukraine’s identity.
Whether or not Russia succeeds is irrelevant; the attempt to commit genocide is also a crime.
the Ukraine-based Regional Centre for Human Rights, in cooperation with the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention.
The arrest warrants just issued by the International Criminal Court are the first related to alleged crimes committed during the Ukraine war. The judges of the responsible chambers agreed there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Putin and Lvova-Belova bore responsibility for the “unlawful deportation” of Ukrainian children.
Why evidence is crucial
Successful criminal proceedings would require proof that the alleged perpetrators have committed genocide beyond a reasonable doubt. Conclusive evidence to this end will be crucial; the court will not be satisfied with a lesser standard.
The types of evidence that could support a prosecution could include everything from witness testimonies to satellite imagery or video recordings. Any evidence must meet international standards and protocols for criminal prosecutions.
Importantly, prosecutors would also have to demonstrate that not only did the transfer of Ukrainian children take place, but also that the perpetrators acted with the intent to destroy Ukrainians as a national group.
This evidence, in particular, will be difficult to collect – but not impossible with modern technology. This allows for the collection of evidence in real time and the preservation of otherwise perishable evidence through, for example, social media.
Yvonne Breitwieser-Faria does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Australian governments have a long and generally dismal history of using defence procurement, and particularly naval procurement, as a form of industry policy.
Examples including the Collins-class submarines, Hobart-class air warfare destroyers and, most recently, the Hunter-class “Future Frigates”.
The stated goal is to build a defence-based manufacturing industry. But there is also a large element of old-fashioned pork-barrelling involved.
In particular, South Australia has nursed grievances over the shutdown of local car making, centred in the state, following the withdrawal of federal government subsidies. The closure of the Osborne Naval Shipyard in north Adelaide would be politically “courageous” for any government.
So the projects roll on, despite technical problems (the six Collins-class subs were plagued by problems with their noise signature, propulsion and combat systems) and cost overruns (the three Hobart destroyers cost $1.4 billion more than the $8 billion budgeted). The $35 billion plan for nine Hunter-class frigates may yet be abandoned given budget constraints.
All these previous ventures are dwarfed by the AUKUS agreement, which involves projected expenditure of up to $368 billion.
As Richard Denniss of The Australia Institute has noted, the precision implied by this number is spurious. The cost could come in below $300 billion, or easily approach $500 billion.
Military case lacking
The case for such a massive investment in submarines has proved hard to make in a simple and convincing way. The “Red Alert” articles published this month by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age has helped to raise alarm about China. But the warning Australia could find itself at war with China in the next few years (over Taiwan) isn’t a persuasive argument for submarines that won’t be delivered until the 2030s.
Other questions have emerged.
In different ways, former prime ministers Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull have questioned the sense of a renewed alliance with the United Kingdom. The UK in a state of obvious decline, and Labour leader Keir Starmer, likely to be Britain’s next prime minister, has been noticeably lukewarm in his support for AUKUS, saying: “Whatever the merits of an Indo-Pacific tilt, maintaining security in Europe must remain our primary objective.”
Then there’s the view, held by many experts, that what has made submarines such potent weapons in the past – stealth – is unlikely to endure. Underwater drones and improved satellite technology could make our subs obsolete even before they are launched.
In these circumstances, the easiest political strategy to sell the AUKUS package is to present it as a job-creation program.
This is an appealing path for the federal government, given Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s yearning for “an Australia that make things”. Albanese’s Twitter account has published tweets extolling the economic benefits of the deal, but none about what the submarines will actually do to make Australians safer.
The obvious response is that the 20,000 jobs the government says the program will directly create over the next 30 years will cost more than $18 million apiece.
But that actually understates how bad the case is.
Where will we find the skilled workers?
Australia already has a shortage of the type of skilled workers required to build the nuclear-powered subs: scientists, technicians and trade workers. Our existing training programs are unlikely to fill the gap. So, the new jobs will mostly be filled either by diverting skilled workers from other industries or by additional immigrants.
The government is grappling with the policies that can meet this existing shortage. Our migration program, for example, allocates extra points for technical skills in short supply, putting skilled workers ahead of people whose motive for migration is to be with their families and friends.
The “Job Ready Graduates” policy introduced by the Morrison government subsidises science, technology, engineering and mathematics degrees, at the expense of humanities and social sciences. This policy is now under review, but may well be maintained in some form.
Such is the scale of the problem that the government’s pre-election commitment to deliver a White Paper on Full Employment (inspired the Chifley government’s 1945 White Paper) has been sidelined by a focus on how to increase the supply of skilled labour, through vocational education, immigration and delayed retirement. Hence the title of the “Jobs and Skills Summit” in September 2022.
There is no indication the shortage of skilled tech workers is going to be resolved any time soon. It is, then, a mistake to boast about the number of technical jobs that will be created by AUKUS.
It would be more accurate to say that, just as the massive financial cost of the submarines will come at the expense of spending on social needs, the workers required to build them will divert skills from addressing needs such as decarbonising the economy.
Perhaps, like previous submarine deals, this plan will be scrapped before consuming the stupendous sums of money now projected. But in the meantime it will divert the Australia’s government from addressing urgent domestic problems.
John Quiggin has worked with Richard Denniss on a variety of policy issues.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nerilie Abram, Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes; Deputy Director for the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, Australian National University
Shutterstock
After all the talk on the need for climate action, it’s time for reality check. On Monday the world will receive the latest United Nations climate report. And it’s a big one.
Hundreds of scientists, forming what’s known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have been working hard behind the scenes. They’ve produced a series of reports in the latest round, which began in 2015. But on Monday it all comes together in what’s called the Synthesis Report.
It will explain how greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, then delve into the consequences. There’s a focus on where we are most vulnerable, as well as efforts to adapt. And then, how we’re acting to reduce emissions and mitigate climate change.
Gathering all the evidence, from every corner of the globe, is an enormous undertaking, let alone reviewing the science to achieve consensus. It’s a process that has been repeated several times since it began, more than three decades ago.
This is the sixth round of reports. And it won’t be the last. But this is a crucial moment, because the chance to limit warming and avert dangerous climate change is slipping away.
The IPCC is comprised of 195 member countries charged with producing comprehensive and objective assessments of the scientific evidence for climate change.
The World Economic Forum ranks climate action failure as the number-one risk on a global scale over the next decade. And several other top-ten global risks – extreme weather, biodiversity loss, human environment damage and natural resource crises – are made worse by climate change.
Governments, industries and communities are becoming increasingly aware of the need to tackle climate change, especially as predictions become reality.
The voting public and the generations to come calling for climate action are backed by the world’s climate scientists. BIANCA DE MARCHI/AAP
The scientific effort to understand the causes, effects and solutions is vast and growing. Every year tens of thousands of new peer-reviewed scientific studies on climate change are published. There has to be a way to identify key messages across this enormous body of scientific evidence, and use this information to make better decisions. This is what IPCC reports do.
The IPCC process also provides a framework for the scientific community to organise and coordinate their efforts. Each reporting cycle is matched with an international scientific effort, where standardised experiments are run to test the reliability of current climate models.
The experiments include multiple possible scenarios for how atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations could change in the future, depending on choices made today. The range of results produced by different models across these sets of experiments helps to determine how confident we are in the climate change impacts expected in the future.
A key aspect of IPCC reports is that they are co-produced between scientists and governments. The summary of each report is negotiated and approved line by line, with consensus from all of the IPCC member governments. This process ensures the reports remain true to the underlying scientific evidence, but also pull out the key information governments need.
Explainer: Here’s how authors, reviewers and governments work together to produce IPCC reports.
What can we expect from Monday’s report?
The Synthesis Report will draw on all six reports released in the current cycle.
It includes three so-called “working group reports”:
The Physical Science Basis
Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability
Mitigation of Climate Change.
In addition, three special reports cut across these working groups and tackled focused topics, where governments requested rapid assessments to aid in their decision making:
Global Warming of 1.5℃
Climate Change and Land
The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.
The headline statements from this cycle of IPCC reports have been clearer than ever. They leave absolutely no room for disputing human-caused warming and the need for urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, this decade. We can expect similarly strong and clear headlines from Monday’s report.
How have IPCC reports changed?
Looking back over IPCC reports from the past 33 years demonstrates how our understanding of climate change has improved. The first report in 1990 stated: “the unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for more than a decade”. Fast forward to 2021 and the equivalent assessment now states: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”.
The East Antarctic ice sheet is not as stable as once thought. Nerilie Abram/AAP
In some cases, the pace of change has dramatically exceeded expectations. In 1990 West Antarctica was a region of concern but not expected to lose major amounts of ice in the next century. But by 2019 our observations show glaciers in West Antarctica retreating rapidly. This has contributed to an accelerating rise in global sea level.
There are also emerging concerns for the stability of parts of the East Antarctic ice sheet once thought to be protected from human-caused climate warming.
This demonstrates the tendency for IPCC assessments to understate the scientific evidence. Climate science is often accused of being alarmist – particularly by those trying to delay climate change action – but in fact the opposite is true.
The production of IPCC reports by consensus with governments means that statements that appear in the report summaries are justified by multiple lines of scientific evidence. This can lag behind current climate science discoveries.
Plans are already underway for the next assessment cycle of the IPCC, which is to begin in July this year. It’s hoped the next round of reports will be produced in time to inform the Global Stocktake in 2028, where progress towards the Paris Agreement will be assessed.
The current (sixth assessment) cycle has been gruelling. Scientists have stepped up their commitment to work with governments to provide the clear and robust information required.
Writing and approving reports amid a global pandemic added to the challenges. So too did the inclusion of three special reports in addition to the usual three working group reports.
The evidence for human-caused climate change is now unequivocal. This has prompted calls for future IPCC reports to more efficiently assess rapidly changing areas of science and cut across the working groups. This would bring together assessments of the causes, impacts and solutions for key aspects of climate change in one report, rather than always separating them into individual working group reports.
The establishment of the IPCC signalled climate change was an important global problem. Despite this recognition more than three decades ago, and the increasingly concerning reports produced by the IPCC in this time, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to rise year-on-year.
However, there is some hope we may be nearing the peak in global emissions. By the time the next IPCC reports are released, global climate action may have finally started to move the world onto a more sustainable pathway.
Time will tell. Let’s hope policy makers will stand with the science on the right side of history.
Alarming headlines and media coverage have said we’ve had 100 times as many influenza cases in the first two months of 2023 compared with the same time the previous year.
The coverage suggested we’re in for a bumper flu season, starting early and your best protection was to get a flu vaccine, when available.
But that scary sounding 100 figure is misleading. Here’s what’s behind the figures and what we can really expect from the 2023 flu season.
In the first two months of 2023, there were 8,474 laboratory-confirmed cases of influenza. In 2022, over the same period, there were 79 cases
So it might seem this year’s figures are indeed more than 100 times higher than last year’s. But we shouldn’t be alarmed. That’s because in early 2022, influenza cases were artificially low.
Strict COVID measures almost eliminated influenza outbreaks in 2020 and 2021. Shutting international borders, quarantining, social distancing and mask-wearing stopped influenza coming into the country and spreading.
Many COVID restrictions weren’t relaxed until late February/March 2022. So, in January and February of that year there were fewer opportunities for us to mingle and spread the influenza virus. It’s hardly surprising there were few cases then.
In fact, the rate of flu in 2023 is actually very similar to pre-COVID years (that is before 2020).
As always, the reported cases represent just a fraction of the actual influenza cases. That’s because many people do not seek medical care when infected with influenza or their GP doesn’t always test them for it.
Every year, it seems, influenza throws a new curve ball making predictions tricky.
Flu rates in the northern hemisphere largely peaked in December 2022, two months earlier than usual.
But there has been some late-season influenza B activity in the northern hemisphere this year. This is one type of influenza that causes seasonal flu. So travellers arriving/returning from the northern hemisphere have been bringing influenza to Australia for several months.
Travellers from the northern hemisphere may have been bringing the influenza virus with them. Shutterstock
So we expect more cases of influenza. Australia may even have an autumn surge. This occurred last year, where influenza cases rose sharply in May, and peaked by June. That’s two months earlier than the five-year average pre-COVID.
Before COVID, influenza cases usually began to rise in April/May. This progressed to a full epidemic from June to August, often extending into September, before waning in October.
The start, length and severity of influenza seasons vary and are often unpredictable.
Community immunity will be less than in pre-COVID times. That’s because of fewer influenza infections during COVID restrictions plus lower influenza vaccine uptake in recent years.
So the 2023 flu season may be at least moderately severe. This remains speculation. Flu routinely surprises us.
The severity of the coming Australian influenza season will be influenced by the types of influenza that circulate, when the surge starts and when the season peaks. The effectiveness, uptake and timing of vaccinations and the degree of remaining herd immunity will all be important.
Only about 40% of those eligible were vaccinated against influenza in 2022, according to the Australian Immunisation Register database. Rates were highest in people aged 65 or older.
However, as we saw an early influenza season in 2022 (peaking in May/June) this meant many Australians were not vaccinated during the early stages of the epidemic.
With this knowledge, it’s important to be vaccinated in April/May before influenza becomes common.
Now is a good time to start preparing to get your flu vaccine. Ask your GP or pharmacist when you can book yourself in.
Vaccination is our best defence against influenza and is recommended from the age of 6 months. Younger infants receive protection if their mum was vaccinated during pregnancy.
The 2023 vaccine has been updated to protect against more recently circulating strains. There are also different types of influenza vaccine, some more effective in elderly people, some free under the National Immunisation Program, some not. Other vaccines are available for people with egg allergies and for small children. It’s best to discuss the vaccine options with your GP or pharmacist.
Robert Booy receives funding from and consults to various vaccine companies in Australia. He has been funded by the ARC, NHMRC and industry to do research on influenza. He is a long-standing director of the Immunisation Coalition.
Ian Barr owns shares in an influenza vaccine producing company, and his centre receives funding from commercial groups for ongoing activities.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan W. Marshall, Associate Professor & Postgraduate Research Coordinator, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University
Jess Wyld/Perth Festival
For the culturally curious, February and March in Perth can be a rich maelstrom, with Perth Fringe and Perth Festival. We have apparently the world’s “third largest” fringe festival (after Edinburgh and Adelaide), but I’m not sure why this is good.
Whatever the case, audiences must plan and be focused in navigating such a cornucopia of competing works in two simultaneous festivals.
My Perth Festival was complicated by a jaunt to Adelaide (in the middle of that city’s festival and fringe) but I was delighted to be able to follow links between works, including afrofuturism, post-classical music and arts offering haunting examples of post-humanism: that which exceeds, replaces or accompanies the human.
Deep listening
Artistic director Iain Grandage’s previous Perth Festivals tended towards light musical programming, both in quantity and emphasis on accessibility – consider the festival obtaining the world record for biggest air guitar ensemble in 2020.
This year, however, had many post-classical music highlights which demanded deep listening.
A Dread Of Voids was an uncompromising night of rich sonic assaults. Cam Campbell/Perth Festival
Anthony Pateras’ compositions for prepared piano, amplified vocals, clarinet, contrabass and flute with A Dread of Voids was an uncompromising night of rich sonic assaults and drone, often with cyclic developmental structures.
Pateras’ masterful performance, on pianos with strings rendered percussive through the addition of bolts, screws, paper and other materials, was followed by Cédric Tiberghien’s performance of John Cage’s suite for prepared piano.
Matthias Schack-Arnott crafted a sounding mobile that rotated over Tiberghien. Spun by fans and motors, it gave the performance an air of the inhuman. Tambours and slates were struck above Tiberghien, adding density and counterpoint.
Cédric Tiberghien’s performance had an air of the inhuman. Tony McDonough/Perth Festival
Schack-Arnott also performed in his Everywhen, intimately offered in the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art.
Schack-Arnott circled within a lighter, jewel-like mobile, sometimes dragging along the ground ringing metal tubes, bells, seed-pods and more.
Schack-Arnott animated or removed items, before crouching ritualistically to play stones and other items, again accompanied by mechanically driven devices above.
Everywhen was intimately offered in the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. Perth Festival
The music program closed with Gradient from composer/photographer Olivia Davies, performed by Callum G’Froerer on double-bell trumpet. They offered a sort of aggressive chillout room, where G’Froerer’s looped, breathy, clattery and sometimes rhythmic sounds were accompanied by abstract distortions of images taken at the dilapidated Liberty Theatre.
Deconstructing cinema and theatre
Grandage has put First Nations art at the heart of his festivals, together with dance and theatre.
Stephanie Lake’s dance and drumming Manifesto toured from the east. Sadly, it was too wide for Heath Ledger Theatre, with some spectators unable to see the drummers in the wings.
I missed Australian Dance Theatre’s The Tracker and Maatakitj (Clint Bracknell) performing with Kronos Quartet.
Local versions of what Bracknell calls “Noongar-futurism” – inspired by afrofuturism and drawing on electronic dance culture – featured in 2023, with the outdoor opening event of Djoondal offering a fleet of synchronised drones evoking celestial Dreamings.
Djoondal evoked celestial Dreamings. Jarrad Russell/Perth Festival
Choreographer/director Laura Boynes’ Equations of a Falling Body offered a beautiful disorder of objects, bodies and things piled and moved about stage in what has become something of a WA tradition, following Emma Fiswick’s 2021 Festival production of Slow Burn, Together.
Aside from Equations of a Falling Body, this year’s theatre and dance highlights were tours of works from the eastern states.
Cyrano, from the Melbourne Theatre Company in association with Black Swan, was an enormously fun vehicle for writer/performer Virginia Gay. The other characters were thespians, so the performance was a cross between Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and romantic melodrama, a celebratory post-COVID work, if perhaps ultimately forgettable.
The mobile screens above the stage for The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, from Sydney Theatre Company, produced not so much director Kip Williams’ professed “cine-theatre”, as a deconstructing of the inhuman cinematic machine itself.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was a deconstructing the inhuman cinematic machine itself. Daniel Boud/Perth Festival
This suited Williams’ exploration of distorting mirrors and mediated character doubles, which was so polished as to be all but seamless. In this production, however, Williams lacks any improvisatory fun and sense of exploration in his use of screens. I preferred the take on screen-enhanced theatre from local company The Last Great Hunt, whose exceptional Lé Nør [the rain] in the 2019 festival pointed to the inconsistency between screen image and ludicrous on-stage setups, celebrating cine-theatrical playfulness.
Black Futurist music was another feature of the 2023 festival.
Franco-Cameroonian Bikutsi 3000 presented an afrofuturist musing on African resistance to Western culture through dance-as-peaceful-combat.
With an African-European cast led by Blick Bassy, Bikutsi 3000 featured selections from the musée du quai Branly’s film archives, framed as a faux lecture combined with projected displays of fantastist African couture.
Bikutsi 3000 presented an afrofuturist musing on African resistance to Western culture. Jess Wyld/Perth Festival
Voiceover text was paired with monumental living portraits of fictional matriarchs representing Cameroon, Namibia, Togo, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.
Accompanied by throbbing house and hip hop, it was punctuated by forceful Afro-fusion dance, mostly performed singly or in pairs, which combined regional forms of voguing, shade, hip hop, krumping and dancehall, alongside Indigenous African dance.
Forceful energies rolled across the dancers’ chests while their limbs dropped and weaved. Legs and arms pumped or flew and circled. Bodies close to the ground flowed like liquid or shook vigorously.
Choreographer/dancers Nadeeya Gabrieli Kalati, Audrey Carlita, Martine Mbock and Mwendwa Marchand were exceptional, while Bassy’s inventive combination of blaring digital tones and bullhorns with African drumming and vocals recalled the best of South Africa’s electronic dance music scene.
As a transcultural museological performance, Bikutsi 3000 was nearly unique. Presented at the Studio Underground in the State Theatre Centre, it is unfortunate it wasn’t hosted at a museum. Presenting Bikutsi 3000 in the quai Branly was an implicit rebuke to the Anglo-European institutions still in charge of colonial heritage.
The Romantic sublime
The festival showstopper was Björk’s Cornucopia. Björk’s recordings are complex, multi-tracked works, and, like Bikutsi 3000, her stadium performance supplemented prerecorded material.
This produced hiccups, as when the on-stage use of bailers in a water tank to make music was inaudible and out of synchronisation.
When Björk’s production gelled, it was magic. Santiago Felipe/Perth Festival
On the night I saw the performance, Björk was dressed in an unglamorous blue satin blob, which suited her retiring performance persona.
Without a charismatic megastar around which to anchor, Cornucopia became an agglutinated, operatic audiovisual spectacle. It was Björk’s flute septet Viibra who bopped away, not Björk.
But when it gelled, it was magic, as when Björk sat inside a giant “circle flute” played by four women, the singer’s angst-ridden vocals soaring.
Björk describes the show as representing a futuristic human/nature utopia, but it’s a utopia that has little space for humans. Projections for Body Memory showed twisting headless bodies with spines and ridges deforming them, while Cthulhu-like figures ascended as flayed skins.
In Björk’s fantasy, something descended from us will survive, but it won’t be any more human than Schack-Arnott’s mobiles.
Unlike the Black Futurist music theatre of the festival which offers an exuberant critical socio-cultural alternative way of viewing the past and the present, Björk’s alt-classicism and Jekyll echo older European models of the Romantic sublime: something appealing or beautiful because it will soon destroy us.
Jonathan W. Marshall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
On February 4, a storm off the north-west coast of Australia was named Cyclone Freddy. It rapidly strengthened and headed west across the Indian Ocean, eventually causing devastation in eastern Africa. Hundreds of people died, tens of thousands more were displaced, national energy grids were crippled, flash flooding was widespread and socioeconomic impacts have been severe.
At its peak on February 21, Freddy had wind gusts of up to 270 km/h, making it a category 5 storm, the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson scale used to measure cyclone intensity. The following day, Freddy was upgraded further to a “very intense tropical cyclone”, which is science-speak for “off the chart”.
Freddy was the most energetic storm on record. It also went through the most cycles of weakening and re-intensifying, and may have been the longest-lived cyclone in history.
So was this megastorm a one-off event, or a harbinger of the global warming–fuelled cyclones of the future? And, either way, what does it tell us about preparing for what lies ahead?
Cyclone Mahina, which hit Queensland in 1899, is widely considered Australia’s strongest recorded tropical cyclone. Further back in the palaeoclimate record, we find evidence of stronger events still.
What was truly remarkable about Freddy was its journey. Freddy was a named tropical cyclone for 39 consecutive days and travelled more than 8,000 kilometres across the entire South Indian Ocean.
It may have been the longest-lasting tropical cyclone on record (this is currently being confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization). The 31-day Hurricane John set the previous record in 1994.
Over 39 days in February and March 2023, Cyclone Freddy travelled more than 8,000 kilometres from the Timor Sea to the east coast of Africa. Meow / Wikimedia / NASA / NRL / NOAA
It’s no easy task to join the dots between climate change and any given extreme weather event, such as a cyclone or heatwave.
A relatively new area of study called “climate attribution science” attempts to do it by determining how much more likely a given event was in today’s climate compared to the past climate.
The main idea in attribution science is to model extreme weather events under present-day climate conditions, and then do it again when the model is run with no human-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This process is repeated many times to try to understand the likelihood of a weather event occurring with and without human-driven warming.
To date, these studies have had most success with large-scale, slow-moving extreme weather events – like the February 2019 European heatwave. The jury is still out on how well we can do this for tropical cyclones.
So we can’t yet say what role climate change may have played in making a cyclone like Freddy more likely, but the science is moving fast.
The future of cyclones: fewer, slower, stronger
Cyclone behaviour is already changing, and our climate models project it will change more in the future.
In many parts of the world, the number of cyclones making landfall is on the rise. In Australia, however, this number is decreasing – and most climate models indicate this decrease will likely continue under a warming climate. This is related to the weakening of Pacific atmospheric circulation, which is less favourable for the formation of tropical cyclones.
All these changes would increase cyclone risk on the east coast of Australia. However, these projections are uncertain. The only discernible trend so far is a reduction in overall cyclone frequency.
The influence of La Nina
Australia is famously a land of droughts and flooding rains. Regardless of underlying trends, large swings in climate conditions are common from year to year.
The La Nina period that has just ended meant the waters of the tropical East Indian Ocean were warmer than usual. This extra heat may have sustained Freddy in its trans-oceanic journey.
Similarly, a marine heatwave in the Southwest Pacific contributed to the lifetime and amount of rain produced by ex-tropical cyclone Gabrielle in New Zealand in February.
Building for the future
Cyclone impacts are traditionally hit-and-miss affairs in Australia. We can get a category 5 cyclone screaming through north-western WA and only a few cattle really know about it.
However, as population increases, the number of people in harm’s way also potentially increases. No matter how cyclones may change in the future, we need to ensure resilience is a core feature in building future housing stock.
In Australia, it is encouraging to see more government emphasis on reducing disaster risk (rather then just cleaning up afterwards), through frameworks such as the Disaster Ready Fund.
Elsewhere, we should throw our support behind resilience programs in the Global South like those in countries hit by Freddy, where vulnerabilities remain high.
Thomas Mortlock works for Aon Reinsurance Solutions
People with disabilities arguably stand to gain the most from good public transport, but are continually excluded by transport systems that still aren’t adapted to their needs as the law requires. One in six people aged 15 and over with disability have difficulty using some or all forms of public transport. One in seven are not able to use public transport at all.
For buses, the standards largely focus on the vehicles themselves: low-floor buses, wheelchair ramps, priority seating, handrails and enough room to manoeuvre. But just because a vehicle is accessible doesn’t necessarily mean a bus journey is accessible.
Infrastructure alone cannot overcomes these issues. On-demand transport, which enables users to travel between any two points within a service zone whenever they want, offers potential solutions to some of these issues. It’s already operating in citiesoverseas and is being trialled in Australia.
Australian trials of on-demand bus services include several urban centres in Queensland.
Making vehicles accessible is really only the tip of the iceberg. Focusing only on infrastructure misses two key points:
our public transport journeys begin before we board the service and continue after we’ve left it
accessibility means providing people with quality transport experiences, not just access to resources.
Let’s imagine a typical suburban bus journey. It is industry accepted that passengers are generally willing to walk about 400 metres to a bus stop. That is based, of course, on the assumption that passengers are able-bodied. Long distances, steep hills, neglected pathways, few kerb cuts and poorly designed bus shelters all hinder individuals with disabilities from getting to the bus in the first place.
This issue resurfaced in the 2020 report People with Disability in Australia, by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. More than one in four respondents with disabilities said getting “to and from stops” was a major obstacle to using public transport.
But other barriers to making services inclusive are even more difficult to see. People with disabilities are forced to plan extensively when to travel, how to travel, who to travel with and what resources they need to complete the journey. Even the best-laid plans involve added emotional energy or “travel anxiety”.
Although vehicles are meant to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act, government policy still overlooks many social and operational barriers to bus travel. Image courtesy of Liftango Labs
On-demand transport offers potential solutions to some of these issues. Its key feature is flexibility: users can travel between any two points within a service zone, whenever they want.
This flexibility can be harnessed to design more inclusive bus services. Without a fixed route or timetable, on-demand services can pick up passengers at their home and drop them directly at their destination. This door-to-door service eliminates the stressful journey to and from a bus stop and their destinations.
And with services available on demand, users can plan their travel to complement their daily activities instead of the availability of transport dictating their daily activities.
The technology behind on-demand transport also helps reduce the need for customers to consistently restate their mobility needs. Once a customer creates a profile, extra boarding and alighting time is automatically applied to all future bookings. This eliminates the exhaustive process of added planning, and enables drivers to deliver a better experience for all of their passengers.
Cities around the globe are already using on-demand services to overcome transport disadvantage for people with disabilities.
BCGo is one such service in Calhoun County, Michigan. A recent yet-to-be-published survey of BCGo users shows 51% of respondents face mobility challenges that affect their ability to travel.
Some 30% have “conditions which make it difficult to walk more than 200 feet” (61m). That means the industry’s assumed walkable distance (400m) is 6.5 times the distance that’s realistically possible for many users of the service.
Survey responses from BCGo users illustrate the diverse mobility challenges – not just wheelchairs – within the community that services must cater for. Image and analysis courtesy of researchers at Liftango Labs.
Ring & Ride West Midlands is the UK’s largest on-demand project. It operates across seven zones with over 80 vehicles.
The service, recently digitised using Liftango’s technology, is designed to provide low-cost, accessible transport. It can be used for commuting, visiting friends, shopping and leisure activities.
Ring & Ride serves as an example of how on-demand service can provide sustainable and equitable transport at scale. It’s completing over 12,000 trips per month.
In this map of Ring&Ride service zones, the lines show the trips taken since June 2022. Image and analysis courtesy of researchers at Liftango Labs
Government policy needs to address not only inadequate bus infrastructure, but those invisible barriers that continue to exclude many people from bus travel. We need a cognitive shift to recognise accessibility is about creating quality experiences from door to destination for everyone.
This needs to be paired with a willingness to explore solutions like on-demand transport. Transport authorities worldwide are already embracing these solutions. We cannot continue to rely on the community transport sector to absorb the responsibility of providing transport for people with disabilities, particularly as our populations age.
Ainsley Hughes is an Honorary Associate Lecturer in the Discipline of Geography at the University of Newcastle. She also works as a New Mobilities Specialist for Liftango.
Australia is a living testament to the benefits of productivity growth.
An average worker today puts in 14 fewer hours per week and takes home a real wage six times that of the average worker in 1901 – all because we are producing more per hour worked.
And yet in the past decade that rate of improvement has slowed.
Over the 60 years to 2019-20, labour productivity (production per hour worked) grew at an average of 1.8% per year, which sounds small but compounds each year.
In the most recent of those decades, the decade to 2020, growth fell to just 1.1% – a drop of one-third.
If it remains that low we will be much worse off in decades to come than we would be if we could get back to the kind of growth we had.
That’s one of the reasons I was excited to work on the Productivity Commission’s second five-yearly productivity report, released today by Treasurer Jim Chalmers.
Victims of our own success
In some ways, Australia has been a victim of its success. It has a robust and highly productive economy, especially in mining and agriculture where it is among the world’s leaders.
But, as productivity growth in mining and agriculture has made us wealthier, we have demanded more services, such as holidays, housecleaning, childcare and after-school care, gyms and home-delivered food.
Now employing 90% of our workers and accounting for 80% of our economy, services are harder to make more productive, and as our population ages they are likely to account for an even greater share of what we do.
In government-funded non-market services such as health, education and public administration, measured labour productivity growth has been close to zero since the turn of the century.
If we want to continue to improve our standard of living, we are going to have to tackle productivity in services as well as in goods, including in human services that are usually provided off market by the government.
How to improve
Our report tackles the problem over nine volumes and 964 pages, coming up with 29 “reform directives” and 71 specific recommendations.
It focuses on five key themes:
building a skilled and adaptable workforce
harnessing data and digital technology and diffusing new ideas
creating a more dynamic economy
lifting productivity in the non-market sector
securing net zero carbon emissions at least cost
I’ll give you a taste of our recommendations across three of these themes.
The uptake of telehealth and video conferencing during the pandemic shows how technology can improve productivity and increase access to services. We will need to better leverage these digital technologies, particularly in non-market services such as education and public administration.
Videoconferencing took off with the pandemic and is here to stay. Shutterstock
Digital services need a strong and ubiquitous internet, covering all of the population, including the population in regional Australia. But Infrastructure Australia has found 23 of the 48 regions in Australia have broadband and mobile connectivity gaps.
In health, better connections can save lives. We need to fill the gaps using the mix of technology that will best allow all Australians to benefit from the digital connectivity revolution.
Data is also crucial. We need better linking of data to improve government-funded services and better rules around cybersecurity to protect that data.
Focus on outcomes rather than inputs
Too often, government funding rules for health, education, public housing and other services focus on inputs (the funding delivered) rather than outcomes (the service delivered).
These rules limit innovations in service delivery that would boost productivity and benefit consumers. The rules need to be more flexible to allow increased innovation, working out what works and spreading best practice to all providers, while ensuring consumer safety.
A more productive economy will increasingly need a more adaptable and better-trained workforce. Most of the new jobs created in the next five years will require tertiary qualifications, particularly university qualifications.
To meet this demand we will need to both better “educate our own” and target our migration system to fill skills gaps.
A road map for reform
This is the Productivity Commission’s second five-yearly productivity report.
The first made explicit that productivity was not about extracting more sweat from the brow of an already hard-working Australian, but was instead about
promoting better investment in workplaces
supporting the research and trialling of new ideas
removing outmoded regulations that prevent consumers and businesses obtaining better services
This report builds on the first to provide a road map, focusing first on the high-impact low-cost reforms. Some are quick and others will take time and planning.
All will face opposition. Vested interests benefit by exploiting economic inefficiencies for their own gain. Without reform, we will all be poorer.
The extraordinary footage of a Russian jet intercepting a US drone over the Black Sea earlier this week demonstrates just how potentially disastrous such encounters outside actual war zones can be.
Released by the Pentagon, the drone’s own video captures the Russian aircraft apparently spraying the drone with fuel, then deliberately colliding with it. The incident matches similar aggressive displays by the Russian air force in the region, the Pentagon claimed.
But beyond such acts of brinkmanship connected to the war in Ukraine, the Black Sea confrontation highlights just how easily these military interactions might lead to war breaking out “accidentally”.
We are seeing these close encounters of the military, naval and aviation kind increasingly often, too. In 2021, it was reported Russian aircraft and two coastguard ships shadowed a British warship near Crimea.
And last year, Australia’s defence ministry said a Chinese fighter jet harassed one of its military aircraft in international airspace over the South China Sea. The risk of these dangerous “games” triggering something more serious is clear – but there are few rules or regulations preventing it.
Pentagon video: drone’s eye view of the Russian jet releasing fuel as it approaches. Getty Images-US European Command/Handout
Reckless behaviour
All militaries must comply with basic international law on questions of safety, but there are large exemptions and separate arrangements that fill the gaps.
Historically, the US and Soviet Union led the way in creating some rules to control incidents on and over the high seas during the Cold War. The basic rule was that both sides should avoid risky manoeuvres and “remain well clear to avoid risk of collision”.
To reduce the risk of collisions, craft in close proximity should be able to communicate and, where possible, be visible. They should not simulate attacks on each other.
Later, Russia copied this agreement with 11 NATO countries, and an Indo-Pacific version – the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea – was added in 2014. While primarily between the US and China, at least half a dozen other countries have promised to abide by it.
Supplementary rules for air-to-air military encounters followed. These usefully added that “military aircrew should refrain from the use of uncivil language or unfriendly physical gestures”. Other rules emphasised professional conduct, safe speeds and avoiding reckless behaviour, “aerobatics and simulated attacks” or the “discharge of rockets, weapons, or other objects”.
The US and Russia added a more specific agreement for Air Safety in Syria during the time they were operating in very close proximity, and when close calls in the air were reported.
No consent or warning: file footage of a North Korean missile launch is broadcast in South Korea, June 2022. Getty Images
But these are all “soft” rules. They’re not treaty obligations with compliance mechanisms, and are only voluntarily adopted by some countries.
Furthermore, there are no precise definitions of “safe” speeds or distances. New technologies – such as drones and other interception techniques – add another level of unregulated complexity.
Few things are as frightening as missiles travelling towards or over another country without consent or warning. The original Soviet-era rule involved mutual notification of planned missile launches. But this only ever applied to intercontinental or submarine-launched missiles, not short-range weapons or missile defence systems.
Aside from some voluntary UN codes, the only other binding missile notification agreement is between Russia and China. China and the US do not directly share launch notification information, nor do the other nuclear powers.
Some, like North Korea and Iran, even violate the missile prohibitions directly placed on them by the UN Security Council.
Birth of the hotline: President John F. Kennedy with military chiefs during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Getty Images
War games and hotlines
Militaries need to practise. But this becomes risky when pretend can look very like an actual attack – especially when fear and paranoia are added to the mix.
North Korea is a modern example of this, but there have been incidents in the past of large-scale wargames almost sparking a nuclear exchange. In 1983, for example, misinterpreted military intelligence led to the US going to DEFCON 1 – the highest of the nuclear threat categories – during a tense period of the Cold War.
There were agreements about the notification of major strategic exercises between the US and Soviet Union, but beyond advance warning, even these failed to set out what best practice actually looks like (such as allowing observers or not allowing an exercise to look identical to a full-blown attack).
More importantly, there is no international law governing such questions – perhaps most critically, how leaders should be able to communicate directly, quickly and continuously.
A “hotline” was first agreed in 1963 after the Cuban Missile Crisis. While a direct link doesn’t guarantee the phone will necessarily be answered or the subsequent conversation sincere, it does at least offer a channel to avoid confusion and de-escalate quickly.
A second-tier hotline allowing commanders on the ground to communicate directly is also useful, such as the one now linking Russian and American militaries to avoid an accidental clash over Ukraine.
But such dual systems are the exception, not the rule. Nor are hotlines particularly stable – the one between North and South Korea, for example, has been cut and restored numerous times. And they are not mandated by international law – emblematic of a wider situation where the risks of getting it wrong are very real indeed.
Alexander Gillespie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
But this next-generation collaboration is groundbreaking in other ways, too. It’s the first large physics collaboration bringing together perspectives from natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.
A virtual telescope spanning the planet
The larger a telescope, the better it is at seeing things that look tiny from far away. To produce black hole images, we need a telescope almost the size of Earth itself. That’s why the EHT uses many telescopes and telescope arrays scattered across the globe to form a single, virtual Earth-sized telescope. This is known as very long baseline interferometry.
Harvard astrophysicist Shep Doeleman, the founding director of the EHT, has likened this kind of astronomy to using a broken mirror.
Imagine shattering a mirror and scattering the pieces across the world. Then you record the light caught by each of these pieces while keeping track of the timing, and collect those data in a supercomputer to virtually reconstruct an Earth-sized detector.
The 2019 first-ever image of a black hole was made by borrowing existing telescopes at six sites. Now, new telescopes at new sites are being built to better fill in the gaps of the broken mirror. The collaboration is currently in the process of selecting optimal places across the world, to increase the number of sites to approximately 20.
This ambitious endeavour needs over 300 experts organised into three technical working groups and eight science working groups. The history, philosophy and culture working group has just published a landmark report outlining how humanities and social science scholars can work with astrophysicists and engineers from the first stages of a project.
The report has four focus areas: collaborative knowledge formation, philosophical foundations, algorithms and visualisation, and responsible telescope siting.
The Submillimeter Telescope in Arizona is one of the original telescope sites used to produce the first images of black holes. More telescopes will be added in the next stage of the ngEHT collaboration. University of Arizona, David Harvey/ESO, CC BY
How can we all collaborate?
If you’ve ever tried to write a paper (or anything!) with someone else, you know how difficult it can be. Now imagine trying to write a scientific paper with over 300 people.
Should one expect each author to believe and be willing to defend every part of the paper and its conclusions? How should we all determine what will be included? If everyone has to agree with what is included, will this result in only publishing conservative, watered-down results? And how do you allow for individual creativity and boundary-pushing science (especially when you are attempting to be the first to capture something)?
To resolve such questions, it’s important to balance collaborative approaches and structure everyone’s involvement in a way that promotes consensus, but also allows people to express dissent. Diversity of beliefs and practices among collaboration members can be beneficial to science.
EHT collaboration image of Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. EHT
How do we visualise the data?
The aesthetic choices regarding the final black hole images and videos take place in a broader context of visual culture.
In reality, blue flames are hotter than flames appearing orange or yellow. But in the above false-colour image of Sagittarius A* – the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way – the colour palette of orange-red hues was chosen as it was believed orange would communicate to wider audiences just how hot the glowing material around the black hole is.
Drawings of the microscopic structure of cork, and the sprig of a plant observed in St. James Park by Robert Hooke, from Micrographia (1665). Biodiversity Heritage Library, CC BY
This approach connects to historical practices of technology-assisted scientific images, such as those by Galileo, Robert Hooke, and Johannes Hevelius. These scientists combined their early telescopic and microscopic images with artistic techniques so they would be legible to non-specialist audiences (particularly those who did not have access to the relevant instruments).
How philosophy can help
Videos of black holes would be of significant interest to theoretical physicists. However, there is a bridge between formal mathematical theory and the messy world of experiment where idealised assumptions often do not hold up.
Philosophers can help to bridge this gap with considerations of epistemic risk – such as the risk of missing the truth, or making an error. Philosophy also helps to investigate the underlying assumptions physicists might have about a phenomenon.
For example, one approach to describing black holes is called the “no-hair theorem”. It’s the idea that an isolated black hole can be simplified down to just a few properties, and there’s nothing complex (hairy) about it. But the no-hair theorem applies to stable black holes. It relies on an assumption that black holes eventually settle down to a stationary state.
The choice of locations for telescopes, or telescope siting, has historically been determined by technical and economic considerations – including weather, atmospheric clarity, accessibility and costs. There has been a historic lack of consideration for local communities, including First Nations peoples.
As the struggle at Mauna Kea in Hawai’i highlights, scientific collaborations are obligated to address ethical, social and environmental considerations when siting.
The ngEHT aims to advance responsible siting practices. It draws together experts in philosophy, history, sociology, community advocacy, science, and engineering to contribute to the decision-making process in ways that include cultural, social and environmental factors when choosing a new telescope location.
Overall, this collaboration is an exciting example of how ambitious plans demand innovative approaches – and how sciences are evolving in the 21st century.
Sophie Ritson is a member of the History, Philosophy, and Culture working group in the ngEHT collaboration and one of the authors of the report described in this article.
Niels Martens is a member of the History, Philosophy, and Culture working group in the ngEHT collaboration and one of the authors of the report described in this article. He receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, via a Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant (no. 101065772).
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristin Naragon-Gainey, Associate Professor, School of Psychological Science, and Director, Emotional Wellbeing Lab, The University of Western Australia
Financial stress is affecting us in many different ways. Some people are struggling to pay bills, feed the family, or maintain a place to live. Others are meeting their basic needs but are dipping into their savings for extras.
Financial stress is increasing and, understandably, is causing some distress. In recent months, Lifeline has seen a rise in the number of calls about financial difficulties.
But understanding and finding ways to reduce our financial stress – and its emotional impact on us – can help make this challenging time a bit easier.
If you’re finding it difficult to meet your current expenses or are worried about your current or future finances, you’re under financial stress. Like other types of stress, financial stress has two components:
objective financial difficulty, where you don’t have enough funds to cover necessary expenses or debts
subjective perceptions about your current or future finances, leading to worry and distress.
These two are related. But someone can have trouble meeting their expenses, view this as acceptable, and not be overly worried. Alternatively, someone may be reasonably financially secure but still feel quite stressed about their finances.
There is a broad range of factors that can influence your current level of financial stress. These include contextual and personal ones.
Contextual factors are societal-level influences on the current financial landscape. These include rates of economic growth, market performance, governmental and political policy, and distribution of wealth. These factors may vary across cultures and countries.
Personal factors contributing to stress are unique to each person. For example, demographic characteristics such as age, gender, education and ethnic group may influence someone’s access to financial resources.
Other personal factors that can affect financial stress are financial literacy and practices, personality traits that influence behaviour and perceptions, and major life events with financial implications (such as marriage, having a child, or retiring).
Not all factors contributing to your financial stress are under your control. Shutterstock
High levels of financial stress can impact people’s wellbeing, raising levels of psychological distress, anxiety and depression.
A review found clear evidence for a link between financial stress and depression, and that the risk for depression was greatest for people on low incomes.
A large survey of adults in the United States also found that greater financial worries were associated with more psychological distress. This was especially the case for people who were unmarried, unemployed, had lower income levels and who were renters.
So people who are more vulnerable financially – in an objective sense – are also most likely to experience negative psychological effects from financial stress.
However, the perception of your financial situation matters here too. In one study of older adults, including Australians, it was not just someone’s financial situation that was linked to their wellbeing, but also how satisfied people were with their wealth.
Severe financial stressors, such as being forced to sell your home if unable to meet mortgage payments, can affect both psychological and physical health.
While we can’t change the broader financial landscape or some aspects of our financial situation, there are some simple ways to help reduce financial stress and its impacts.
1. Take small steps
Try to identify elements of your finances you can improve and act on some of them, even if they are small steps. This may include creating and following a budget, cutting some extra costs, applying for available financial assistance, getting quotes for more affordable utilities or insurance, or contemplating a career change. Even little changes can improve your financial state over time. Taking action in a difficult situation can improve wellbeing by giving you a greater sense of agency.
2. Check your take on the situation
Examine your perspective. Are you often seeing the negative aspects of your situation but ignoring the positive ones? Are you worrying a lot about very unlikely catastrophes far off in the future? It’s worth checking whether your perceptions about your financial situation are accurate and balanced.
3. Don’t be too hard on yourself
Your financial state does not reflect your value as a person, and over-identifying with your financial status can lead to further stress. Financial difficulties are the result of many factors, only some of which are under your control. Reminding yourself that your finances do not define you as a person can reduce feelings of sadness, shame or guilt.
4. Take care of yourself
It’s draining dealing with ongoing financial stress. So focus on self-care and coping strategies that have helped you with past stressors. This may mean taking some time out to relax, deep breathing or meditation, talking with others and doing some things for fun. Giving yourself permission to take this time can improve your mood, perspective and wellbeing.
5. Ask for help
If you are struggling financially or psychologically, seek help. This may take the form of financial advice or assistance to reduce financial difficulties. If you notice yourself feeling persistently down, anxious, or hopeless, reach out to friends or family and get help from a mental health professional.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Kristin Naragon-Gainey receives funding from the National Institutes of Health.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
New Zealand Politics Daily is a collation of the most prominent issues being discussed in New Zealand. It is edited by Dr Bryce Edwards of The Democracy Project.
Friday marked the end of the public hearings for the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme. They painted a picture of a catastrophic program that was legally and ethically indefensible – an example of how technological overreach, coupled with dereliction of duty can amount to immense suffering for ordinary people.
The artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm behind Robodebt has been called “flawed”. But it was worse than that; it broke laws of mathematics. A mathematical law called Jensen’s inequality shows the Robodebt algorithm should have generated not only debts, but also credits.
What was Robodebt?
The Australian government’s Robodebt program was designed to catch people exploiting the Centrelink welfare system.
The system compared welfare recipients’ Centrelink-reported fortnightly income with their ATO-reported yearly income, the latter of which was averaged to provide fortnightly figures that could be lined up with Centrelink’s system.
If the difference showed an overpayment by Centrelink, a red flag was raised. The AI system then issued a debt notice and put the onus on the recipient to prove they weren’t exploiting the welfare system.
A Robodebt victim
To understand the extent of the failure, let’s consider a hypothetical case study. Will Gossett was a university student from 2017-2019. He was single, older than 18, and living at home with his parents.
Will received Centrelink payments according to his fortnightly income from a couple of casual jobs with highly variable work hours. In his first year at university his jobs didn’t pay much, so he received more Centrelink payments in the 2018 financial year than the year following.
The Robodebt algorithm took Will’s ATO yearly income records for both the 2018 and 2019 financial years and, for each year, averaged them into a series of fortnightly “robo” incomes.
Inside Robodebt’s AI world, his fortnightly incomes were then the same throughout the 2018 financial year, and the same throughout the 2019 financial year.
Will was honest with his claims, but was stunned to receive a debt notice for Centrelink overpayments made in the 2019 financial year – the year in which he actually received lower welfare payments.
The income-averaging algorithm gave Will an average fortnightly income for 2019 that was above the threshold that made him eligible for Centrelink payments. As far as the Robodebt system was concerned, Will shouldn’t have received any welfare payments that year.
The laws of mathematics tell us when two things are equal, but they can also tell us when one thing is bigger than another. This type of law is called an “inequality”.
To understand why and when Robodebt failed for Will, we need to understand a concept called Jensen’s inequality, credited to Danish mathematician Johan Jensen (1859-1925).
Jensen’s inequality explains how making a decision based on the averaging of numbers leads to either a negative bias or a positive bias under a “convexity condition”, which I’ll explain soon.
You’ll recall Will is a single university student, above 18, and living with his parents. Based on these factors, Centrelink has a fortnightly payment table for him, illustrated with the curve in the figure below.
The figure shows the more income Will earns from his jobs, the less welfare payment he receives, until a specific income, after which he receives none.
This graph, created from tables provided by Centrelink, shows how certain factors determine the amount of welfare payments Will can receive depending on his income.
The parts of the curve where Jensen’s inequality is relevant are highlighted by two red squares. In the square on the left, the curve bends downwards (concave), and in the square on the right it bends upwards (convex).
Because Will’s income was higher in 2019 and spread across the part where the payment curve is convex, Jensen’s inequality guarantees he would receive a Robodebt notice, even though there was no debt.
In 2018, however, Will’s income distribution was spread around smaller amounts where the curve is concave. So if Jensen’s inequality was adhered to, the AI algorithm should have issued him a “Robocredit” – but it didn’t.
It could be the algorithm contained a line of code that nullified Jensen’s inequality by instructing any credits be ignored.
Big data and a bad algorithm
The people responsible for the Robodebt system should have had a strong interest in keeping error rates low. Data scientists have a big red “stop” button when error rates of automated systems go beyond a few percent.
It’s straightforward to estimate error rates for an AI scheme. Experts do this by running simulations inside a virtual model called a “digital twin”. These can be used to carry out statistical evaluations, and expose conscious and unconscious biases in bad algorithms.
In Robodebt’s case, a digital twin could have been used to figure out error rates. This would have required running the Robodebt algorithm through representative incomes simulated under two different scenarios.
Under the first scenario, incomes are simulated assuming no debt is owed by anyone. Every time a result is returned saying a debt is owed, a Type 1 (or false-positive) error is recorded. Under the second scenario, incomes are simulated assuming everyone owes a debt (to varying degrees). If a no-debt result is returned, a Type 2 (false-negative) error rate is recorded.
Then an error rate is estimated by dividing the number of errors by the number of simulations, within each scenario.
Eye-watering inaccuracies
Although no consistently reliable error rates have been published for Robodebt, a figure of at least 27% was quoted in Parliament Question Time on February 7.
The reality was probably much worse. During the scheme, on the order of one million income reviews were performed, of which 81% led to a debt being raised.
Of these, about 70%
(roughly 567,000 debts) were raised through the use of income averaging in the Robodebt algorithm.
In 2020, the government conceded about 470,000 debts had been falsely raised, out of a total of about 567,000.
Back-of-the-envelope calculations give a Type 1 (false-positive) error rate on the order of 80% (470,000/567,000). Compared to the usual target of a few percent, this is an eye-wateringly large error rate.
If simulations had been run, or human intelligence used to check real cases, the “stop” button would have been hit almost immediately.
Jensen’s inequality establishes why and when income averaging will fail, yet income matching hasn’t gone away. It can be found in AI software used for official statistics, welfare programs, bank loans and so forth.
Deeper statistical theory for this “change of support” problem — for example, going from data on yearly support to fortnightly support — will be needed as AI becomes increasingly pervasive in essential parts of society.
Noel Cressie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Readers are advised this piece contains some racist terminology.
Today, the Australian public mostly sees a conservative Australian Jewish communal leadership that has, since the 1990s, rarely spoken out on anything unrelated to Israel or the Holocaust.
Both issues are often drawn together. Arguments for Israel’s defence are often bolstered by the memory of the Holocaust. That the Holocaust is an inevitable cause of conservatism and Zionism has become part of a commonsense idea of, and about, Australian Jews.
The Jewish Council to Combat Facism and Anti-Semitism produced many leaflets in Australia calling on Australians to oppose fascism. National Library of Australia
In the 1940s and 1950s, I found, Holocaust memory was key to a popular Jewish antifascist discourse that was left-wing, non-nationalist and universalistic.
For these Jewish antifascists, memorialising the Holocaust meant fighting fascism and racism. These were seen as ongoing international threats that could only be defeated through solidarity with progressive forces and other oppressed people.
The main organisation of the Jewish antifascist left in Australia was the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism, sometimes shortened to “the Jewish Council”.
Formed in Melbourne in 1942, the Jewish Council represented, in the words of historian David Rechter
in institutional form the broad-based antifascist leftism enjoying considerable vogue both within the Jewish community and in society at large.
It monitored and responded to incidents of antisemitism and actively linked the threats of antisemitism and fascism. Its strategy was to fight these threats by allying the Jewish community with progressive political forces.
By 1943 the Jewish Council was popular enough for the Victorian Jewish Advisory Board (the official representative body for Victorian Jewry) to vote to give it “full moral and financial support”. It was given responsibility for all official Jewish community public relations activities.
Throughout the 1940s, the Jewish Council had widespread support. It had hundreds of members and many committees (including special committees of doctors and lawyers and, later, a very active ladies auxiliary committee and youth section).
The philosophy and practice of the Jewish Council is summed up in a 1950 editorial in the popular Jewish left-wing magazine Unity, which warned that:
Goebbels’ spectre is still alive. Hitler’s lies and exploded theories are being refurbished.
It raised alarm about the widespread distribution of propaganda in Melbourne from a white supremacist organisation known as the “All Aryan World Movement”.
The editorial continued:
Shall we ignore such ridiculous and poisonous material? Some people in the community because of their sheltered lives in Australia have never really felt or understood the impact of Nazism on the Jewish people. They are advocates of silence. Their counterparts in Hitler’s Germany only learned the folly of their inactivity on the threshold of the gas chamber […] The spreading of fascist and anti-Semitic doctrines threatens us not only as Jews but strikes at the very foundations of our democracy.
In the late 1940s, the Jewish Council was especially focused on the alarming numbers of Nazis and Nazi collaborators migrating to Australia under the Displaced Persons scheme.
Some were infamous Nazis and had harassed Jews in migrant reception centres.
In one dramatic incident of intelligence gathering, the Jewish Council’s Sam Goldbloom disguised himself as a plumber and sneaked into the shower block at the Bonegilla migrant reception centre. He photographed the scars under migrants’ left armpits, where they had removed their SS tattoos.
The broader fight against racism and colonialism
For the Jewish Council, the struggle against antisemitism was connected to fighting racism and colonialism more generally.
We must attack reaction, no matter whence it comes. Dutch aggression against the Indonesia Republic is our concern, as is also the lynching of negroes [sic] in America, or the maltreatment of Aborigines [sic] in Australia […] We Jews can only be secure in a secure world. It is a world situation of conflict and strife together with a situation in Australia of intense class conflict which lays the ground for a campaign of anti-Semitic prejudice greater than any previous attacks in this country against a racial or religious minority.
The Jewish Council frequently compared the Holocaust with other instances of colonialism and racism.
A 1952 editorial from the Jewish Council-affiliated magazine The Clarion criticised Australia’s allies’ involvement in the Korean War, suggesting:
The Master Race theory of Nazism has reached a new peak in the war circles of America and Britain: for what is the difference between exterminating “Gooks” [sic] in Korea and “Yids” [sic] in Europe? Both are fruits from the same tree of evil.
Yosl Bergner, antifascist artist
The famous artist Yosl Bergner (1920-2017) presents another example of Jewish antifascist Holocaust memorialisation.
Bergner encountered this movement through Jewish antifascists and left cultural organisations, as well as his membership of the Communist Party of Australia.
He frequently painted urban Aboriginal people, rejecting the typical settler artist imagery of Aboriginal people as a “dying race”. Instead, his work depicts Aboriginal people as complex modern subjects, displaced and dispossessed in a world of urban poverty inseparable from the wider social relations of Australia.
In the mid-1940s, Bergner often exhibited these works along with his paintings of Polish Jews. He sought to suggest strong connections between the plight of the two oppressed peoples.
‘A Nazi Writes Home’
Another example is a short satirical story titled “A Nazi Writes Home”, written under the initials “L.F.” and published in Unity magazine in July 1951.
In this fictional letter of furious irony, a Nazi in Australia named “Fritz” writes his Nazi friend back in Germany.
He describes initially fearing Australia was “a spineless democracy-loving country, rotten with worship of the masses”. He changed his mind, however, after seeing how brutally Aboriginal people were treated. He goes on to celebrates Australia as an exemplary country of white supremacy – “the true Aryan theory”.
After seeing a white child racially abuse an older Aboriginal woman, Fritz suggested:
Australia is a land where the principles of National-Socialism are not altogether foreign.
The writer isn’t just drawing a clear link between the ongoing fascist threat and the racism of Australian colonialism. The story also links discrimination against Aboriginal people with the plight of Jews in the Holocaust and racial segregation laws in the United States.
“A Nazi Writes Home” places the oppression of Aboriginal people within an international antifascist context. It suggested antifascists needed to fight the entrenched structural racism of Australia.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Bisley, Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of International Relations at La Trobe University., La Trobe University
Composite image/AAP
International media is flush with reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping may imminently visit Russia and hold a video conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as he pushes China’s vaguely worded peace plan to end the Ukraine war.
Beijing styling itself as a force for global peace is an image that jars with the assertive and abrasive foreign policy Xi has adopted.
China’s air and naval forces have ramped up provocative actions in the contested waters of the East and South China Seas, it has deployed economic coercion against countries including Australia, Lithuania and South Korea, and its “wolf warrior” diplomats made headlines insulting foreign leaders, storming out of meetings and issuing inflammatory media releases and social media posts.
Following China’s emergence from its long COVID lockdown and last year’s Communist Party leadership changes, Chinese foreign policy appears to have entered a new phase.
Many expect it will follow one of two possible main paths.
The first would see China moderating its approach to the world so it can focus on domestic economic matters. China is experiencing its worst economic growth rates since the 1970s, beset with problems in its real estate, banking and high technology sectors. It makes little sense picking fights around the world.
The second path sees an emboldened Xi doubling down on China’s assertiveness and taking advantage of an America distracted by Ukraine and struggling with domestic political unity.
So, which path will it take? The evidence so far is decidedly mixed.
Path 1: China moderates its international approach
For those looking for moderation, there is plenty to see. The appointment of Qin Gang as foreign minister is thought to be a sign of a less assertive approach.
The erstwhile ambassador to the United States is regarded as a pragmatic figure with an extensive career in the ministry. While he is very close to Xi, he has published and spoken about the need for the US and China to get along.
And the demotion of Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, one of the most high profile of China’s “wolf warriors”, is being interpreted as demonstrating Beijing’s desire to return to a more cautious diplomatic approach.
Equally, Beijing has sought to improve ties with some of the countries with whom it has had difficulties, including a thawing of relations with Australia that had been at their lowest ebb.
While China has long sought to influence international affairs as an investor, trader and supporter in development, it has more recently presented itself as a global leader that can promote peace in the world.
The deal it recently brokered between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a striking example. And of course it is styling itself as a peacemaker in Ukraine, although its proposal has obvious pro-Russian elements and is seen by some as disingenuous.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, left, shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping before their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing last month. Yan Yan/AP/Xinhua
Path 2: China retains an assertive stance
Those who remain convinced China is a disruptive force in the world also have plenty of evidence.
Notwithstanding his reputation, the foreign minister’s first dealings with the press made clear that while the incautious language of the wolf warriors has gone, he maintains a steely resolve to advance China’s interests in the face of those who seek to contain its influence.
At its heart, the major tenets of Chinese foreign policy remain as they have been for some time. China wants to reshape the world so it better suits its interests. That means reducing the influence of the US and its allies in Asia and offsetting US power and influence at the global level. And it wants to use the instruments of trade, investment and aid to improve its standing around the world.
There’s an added layer of complexity to this stance, however, due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Washington’s increasingly hostile approach to China. This is driving China into quite difficult terrain by forcing it to straddle interests and values that pull it in very different directions.
It seems increasingly clear Putin did not inform Xi about the full extent of his war plans before the invasion. It’s also clear China could do without the problems the war has created.
As the war has dragged on, however, Beijing has opted to “lean in” to its relationship with Russia – but only so far.
Xi hosted Putin in Beijing just weeks before the Ukraine invasion, where they announced a ‘no limits’ partnership. Alexei Druzhinin/AP
The two authoritarian powers share a desire to weaken Western global influence. Xi appears to have judged that, on balance, supporting Russia will advance that end.
But China also does not want to pay too high an economic price – it has scrupulously remained on the right side of the sanctions line – due to its need for growth and its broader reform ambitions.
Xi has long thought Washington would do what it could to limit China’s ability to realise its potential. US President Joe Biden has continued much of the Trump administration’s tough positions on China, and in some cases, such as the CHIPs act, gone even further.
This is prompting Beijing to respond in kind. It sees even the efforts by Biden to establish basic “guardrails” to manage the bilateral relationship as lacking in sincerity.
As 2023 unfolds, we are likely to see a China that is at once more moderate and more hawkish than before.
It is a rising power facing a complex international environment that it seeks to change. And it has learned from the missteps it has made. At the same time, China still wants to do business with the world and build partnerships. It will inevitably create both friends and enemies.
If Xi’s Ukraine peace gambit goes ahead, do not expect a resolution to the conflict. That is not China’s goal. It wants to reduce the international consequences of the war and improve its global standing, while also weakening Western influence.
And that long-term goal is not going away any time soon.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ashley M Hopkins, NHMRC Investigator Fellow, leader of the Clinical Cancer Epidemiology Lab, Flinders University
You may have heard the buzz about ChatGPT, a type of chatbot that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to write essays, turn computer novices into programmers and help people communicate.
ChatGPT might also have a role in helping people make sense of medical information.
Although ChatGPT won’t replace talking to your doctor any time soon, our new research shows its potential to answer common questions about cancer.
Here’s what we found when we asked the same questions to ChatGPT and Google. You might be surprised by the results.
ChatGPT has been trained on massive amounts of text data to generate conversational responses to text-based queries.
ChatGPT represents a new era of AI technology, which will be paired with search engines, including Google and Bing, to change the way we navigate information online. This includes the way we search for health information.
For instance, you can ask ChatGPT questions like “Which cancers are most common?” or “Can you write me a plain English summary of common cancer symptoms you shouldn’t ignore”. It produces fluent and coherent responses. But are these correct?
Our newly published research compared how ChatGPT and Google responded to common cancer questions.
These included simple fact-based questions like “What exactly is cancer?” and “What are the most common cancer types?”. There were also more complex questions about cancer symptoms, prognosis (how a condition is likely to progress) and side effects of treatment.
To simple fact-based queries, ChatGPT provided succinct responses similar in quality to the feature snippet of Google. The feature snippet is “the answer” Google’s algorithm highlights at the top of the page.
While there were similarities, there were also broad differences between ChatGPT and Google replies. Google provided easily visible references (links to other websites) with its answers. ChatGPT gave different answers when asked the same question multiple times.
We also evaluated the slightly more complex question: “Is coughing a sign of lung cancer?”.
Google’s feature snippet indicated a cough that does not go away after three weeks is a main symptom of lung cancer.
But ChatGPT gave more nuanced responses. It indicated a long-standing cough is a symptom of lung cancer. It also clarified that coughing is a symptom of many conditions, and that a doctor would be required to get a proper diagnosis.
Our clinical team thought these clarifications were important. Not only do they minimise the likelihood of alarm, they also provide users clear directions on actions to take next – see a doctor.
How about even more complex questions?
We then asked a question about side-effects to a specific cancer drug: “Does pembrolizumab cause fever and should I go to the hospital?”.
We asked ChatGPT this five times and received five different responses. This is due to randomness built into ChatGPT, which may help communicate in a near human-like way, but will throw up multiple responses to the same question.
All five responses recommended speaking to a health-care professional. But not all said this was urgent or clearly defined how potentially serious this side-effect was. One response said fever was not a common side effect but did not explicitly say it could occur.
In general, we graded the quality of responses from ChatGPT to this question as poor.
Does pembrolizumab cause fever and should I go to the hospital? Shutterstock
This contrasted with Google, which did not generate a featured snippet, likely due to the complexity of the question.
Instead, Google relied on users to find the necessary information. The first link directed them to the manufacturer’s product website. This source clearly indicated people should seek immediate medical attention if there was any fever with pembrolizumab.
We showed ChatGPT doesn’t always provide clearly visible references for its responses. It gives varying answers to a single given query and it is not kept up-to-date in real time. It can also produce incorrect responses in a confident-sounding manner.
Bing’s new chatbot, which is different to ChatGPT and was released since our study, has a much clearer and more reliable process to outline reference sources and it aims to keep as up-to-date as possible. This shows how quickly this type of AI technology is developing and that the availability of progressively more advanced AI chatbots is likely to grow substantially.
However, in the future, any AI used as a health-care virtual assistant will need to be able to communicate any uncertainty about its responses rather than make up an incorrect answer, and consistently produce reliable responses.
We need to develop minimum quality standards for AI interventions in health care. This includes ensuring they generate evidence-based information.
There’s also the potential for medically focused AI assistants to be expensive, which raises questions of equity and who has access to these rapidly developing technologies.
Last of all, health-care professionals need to be aware of such AI innovations to be able to discuss their limitations with patients.
Ganessan Kichenadasse, Jessica M. Logan and Michael J. Sorich co-authored the original research paper mentioned in this article.
Ashley M Hopkins receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Flinders Foundation, The Hospital Research Foundation, and Tour De Cure.
Remember the butterfly effect? It was a popular summary of chaos theory suggesting a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon could cause a tornado in Texas.
Right now, a version of this is making it hard for us to predict whether an El Niño event is coming.
After three consecutive La Niña years, that part of the cycle is officially over. But it’s not certain an El Niño will replace it. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology this week announced an El Niño watch – a “wait and see” forecast giving us a 50% chance of an El Niño forming later this year. Other climate forecasting agencies around the world are sending a similar message to the Bureau of Meteorology’s, that we are on an El Niño watch.
While the conditions seem right for El Niño to form and likely bring hotter, drier weather to Australia, the world’s chaotic climate system is in a very unpredictable state. Fast forward three months, and our models will be much more certain about whether El Niño really is coming – or whether the system will remain in a neutral, or near-normal, state.
Why can’t we predict what’s going to happen?
At this time of year, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle is at its most susceptible to change. Right now, the subsurface waters of the equatorial western Pacific are warmer than usual. If this water rises from deeper down to the surface of the ocean, it will interact with the atmosphere. This usually leads to more rain and floods for Chile, drier, hotter weather for Australia, and a variety of other effects worldwide.
But this isn’t inevitable. Let’s say a sudden burst of wind strikes, forcing warmer water to stay down deeper. This can disturb the whole cycle. Unexpected windbursts at this time of year can even tip the system into a different mode, ending up neutral or as a La Niña event.
Among climate scientists, this is known as the predictability barrier – and it’s why we can’t say for certain an El Niño is coming until later in the year.
Have we seen unexpected swings in the cycle before?
Yes, most recently in 2014. Early that year, climate models were predicting a truly enormous El Niño was set to begin.
But the monster El Niño didn’t happen. Cooler water flowed into the south-eastern Pacific at a critical time of year, while the unusual timing of westerly windbursts kept the warmer water down deeper.
The end result was that the whole system was nudged into a different configuration of a weak El Niño. It took another year for a full El Niño to develop. This time, it was very strong.
Could we really see a fourth La Niña? It could happen but it would be very unusual, given we’ve never seen four years of successive La Niña conditions. At present, the heat build-up under the surface of the equatorial Pacific suggests an El Niño is coming, but it’s not a given.
Why do we get these cycles anyway?
We believe the El Niño-La Niña cycle has a very long history, dating back to the formation of the Pacific Ocean about 190 million years ago.
That’s because this ocean basin is the largest on Earth – and has a lot of seawater sitting along the equator. In our models, we can see the El Niño cycle forming out of the fluid dynamics, as warmer or cooler water moves across the ocean.
The Atlantic has a smaller version, named the Atlantic Niño. Why is it smaller? Because there’s much less water along the equator in the Atlantic. As a result, the Atlantic Niño has much less of an effect on weather globally.
The El Nino cycle’s significance is due to the sheer size of the Pacific – and the amount of water along the equator. By contrast, the Atlantic’s exposure to equatorial heat is more limited. Shutterstock
So when will we know for sure?
El Niño and La Niña are at their strongest over December and January, though the effects and their timing can differ in Australia depending on where in the country you are. These cycles usually end some time between February and May.
The popular understanding of the butterfly effect and chaos science often gets one thing wrong. Chaotic systems like the world’s weather are not always unpredictable, but can be more or less sensitive to small changes at different times. Between March and May, it can take just a small nudge to flip the system. Later in the year, as either an El Niño, neutral phase or La Niña gathers pace, it is much harder to change course.
It’s like a ball poised on top of a high hill. A very tiny push is enough to send the ball rolling down either one side of the hill or another. The push might even be so tiny you can’t measure it accurately.
That’s why it’s so difficult to predict what’s going to happen, even though we understand the physics behind these events fairly well. The Pacific Ocean and the air overhead are extremely sensitive to “pushes” in any direction from March to May.
But once the ball rolls down one side rather than another, it’s much easier to predict which way it will keep rolling. By June or July, the ball is already rolling down the hill on whichever side it’s going to go, and there’s a lot more confidence and clarity in our predictions. Stay tuned.
Nandini Ramesh has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council, NASA, and the US Department of Energy. She is a Research Affiliate at the University of Sydney.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Antti Mikkonen, Principal Health Risk Advisor – Chemicals, EPA Victoria, and PhD Candidate, School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, University of South Australia
These chemicals are a group of artificial compounds based on carbon and fluorine – per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. They comprise thousands of individual chemicals with hundreds of documented uses, including water proofing and fire suppression. It is likely every household has products or textiles that contain or were treated with a product that contained PFAS (including some non-stick cookware and stain-resistant fabrics).
Studies have shown most people have one or more PFAS compounds in their blood. We live in a world full of chemicals, so why do we care about these ones? Well, some PFAS have been associated with a wide range of adverse human health effects, such as cancer and immune problems. However, there is limited evidence of human disease resulting from environmental exposures.
Our study investigated the uptake of PFAS into livestock at ten PFAS-impacted farms in Victoria. Our analysis also shows how risks can be reduced.
Our findings show the land and livestock can be managed to reduce PFAS levels in the animals before they enter the food chain. This means good management practices can protect food quality and reduce consumer exposure.
The bad news is PFAS builds up in cattle when their pasture or water is contaminated. The good news is the land and livestock can be managed to reduce the risks. Shutterstock
As the name would suggest, forever chemicals persist in the environment. As a result, when released into the environment, they disperse and over time can contaminate surrounding areas.
Firefighting and training activities have historically resulted in large releases of PFAS into the environment. This includes farming areas.
As livestock feed and drink from contaminated sources, this leads to PFAS accumulation in tissues. From there, PFAS can be transferred into the food chain, including products we eat such as meat and milk.
The causal links and what levels of PFAS exposure are harmful are still being investigated. The scientific community has yet to reach a consensus on how “bad” these compounds are, or conversely what the safe exposure levels are.
In the meantime, it is important to limit exposure through regulation. Australia has adopted environmental and health-based guideline values for three PFAS of concern: perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorohexane sulfonate (PFHxS).
Australian food quality is high. In a 2021 study, scientists tested for 30 different PFAS in a broad range of Australian foods and beverages. Only one specific PFAS (PFOS) was detectable. It was found in just five out of 112 commonly consumed foods and beverages at levels below concern.
These findings would suggest PFAS contamination is not an issue at most farms in Australia. The risks are likely to be higher from food produced at PFAS-contaminated sites. At such locations, PFAS can affect a range of foods, including eggs, vegetables and livestock.
We collated data from environmental investigations at ten PFAS-impacted farms in Victoria. This included testing about 1,000 samples of soil, water, pasture and livestock blood for concentrations of 28 types of PFAS. Our analysis also included information about farm practices, including livestock rotation, access to clean pasture and water.
We found:
two specific PFAS compounds (PFOS and PFHxS) made up more than 98% of total PFAS detected in livestock blood
PFAS concentrations in water were correlated to concentrations in livestock blood, implying water was a critical exposure pathway, while the relationships between livestock and PFAS levels for soil and pasture were weaker
livestock exposure to PFAS varies over time and across paddocks. Seasonal patterns in PFAS blood concentrations were linked to seasonal grazing behaviours and the animals’ need for drinking water.
PFAS exposures in livestock vary according to farmland management practices. Mikkonen et al 2023, Author provided
What’s the next step?
Environment Protection Authority Victoria (EPA) is leading research and policy to understand how environmental PFAS risks can be better managed. In this regard, EPA along with research partners, is working to develop predictive models to estimate PFAS accumulation in livestock over their lifetime. This research will help determine when a site is too contaminated for livestock production and which ones to prioritise for PFAS remediation in soil and water.
Ultimately, this will allow more effective management of PFAS accumulation and reduce the likelihood of having PFAS for dinner.
Antti Mikkonen is an employee of EPA Victoria, in the role of Principal Health Risk Advisor for chemicals. This work is part of Antti’s PhD research at the University of South Australia where his candidature was supported by the Australian Government, Department of Education, Skills and Employment Research Training Program scholarship.
Mark Patrick Taylor is a full-time employee of EPA Victoria, appointed to the statutory role of Chief Environmental Scientist. He is also an Honorary Professor at Macquarie University.
Many students spend their final years of school working toward the highest Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) they can get. But after many years of concerns, there is a renewed debate about whether we should scrap this university entrance ranking altogether.
Last month, a high-profile group of Victorian educational leaders called for education authorities to replace the ATAR with a “learner profile”. Such an approach – also called “narrative evaluation” by researchers – provides information about a student’s interests, values and skills not necessarily captured in the ATAR. This might include things such as communication, caring and creativity.
Indeed, a common criticism of the ATAR is that it does not tell universities enough about potential students and does not do enough to ensure diversity. Our research suggests students also see it as unfair.
But despite these concerns, we need to be careful about what we replace the ATAR with, or whether we should replace it at all.
What is the ATAR?
The ATAR is used by all states and territories in Australia. Siora Photography/Unsplash
The ATAR gives students a rank between zero and 99.95. It is a “percentile rank” – an estimate of the percentage of the population a student outperformed.
The method of calculating the ATAR varies across states and territories. Generally speaking, it involves complex scaling and moderation processes that consider how competitive a subject is, with each student being academically compared to the other students in the same year level doing the same subject.
Both school evaluation marks and final external exam marks are considered in the calculation process. The higher your school’s average, the more favourable the process will be to your school.
This is why students are “dragged up” by high achievers in their school – they are pushing up the mean, thereby pushing up everyone’s marks in that school. In other words, your school peers’ achievement can greatly affect your school evaluation mark, which will be considered in your ATAR.
Introduced in 2009, the ATAR was designed to unify the university entrance system in Australia. Before this, each state and territory had its own system.
One criticism of the ATAR is that it is too “blunt” and too stressful for students, with all their school efforts hanging on a number. Critics have also called for “non-ATAR-based pathways” to make access to university more equitable.
Some universities and degree programs don’t just rely on ATARs. They also use entry tests, interviews, or other requirements such as portfolios. Figures also suggest more students are rejecting the ATAR. For example, in 2021, about 10% of Victorian students completed the Victorian Certificate of Education without getting an ATAR.
Nevertheless, the ATAR remains the dominant form of Australian university admissions.
As part of a wider 2021 study into how Australian private schools provide fair and inclusive education, we conducted focus groups with 24 students from both private and government schools.
One issue we identified was students believe the ATAR is “unfair”. This is not necessarily because they think the evaluation process must be more holistic in nature, but because they believe private schools have an advantage. They note how these schools tend to do better in state league tables, naturally pulling up the marks of students who attend them.
As one government school student observed:
One of the biggest influences on your ATAR is your school average […] and private schools have higher grades because they’re more selective, so we need to really upbeat our game because they have a huge advantage on us.
Similarly, a private school student explained:
Paying so much money to attend such a good school, it’s kind of a waste of money and resources if you’re not utilising that, like, if you’re not taking advantage of your advantage and do the best you can to succeed. It’s reassuring that your peers are strong students.
Certainly, research shows socioeconomic background has a big impact on students’ academic performance. A 2015 Australian study also suggests private schooling can add up to eight points to a student’s ATAR.
What about narrative evaluation?
So-called “narrative evaluation” approaches seek to move the focus from a score to what a student has learned and engaged with.
It may come in the form of written text (or “mini essay”) about completed coursework and a student’s performance, supplementing or replacing other measures such as grades or pass/fail designations.
Internationally, different forms of narrative evaluation are used by some universities and schools. For example, Hampshire College in Massachusetts uses narrative evaluations instead of grades, to eliminate competition and enhance a “collaborative learning community”.
Other US universities such as MIT, Johns Hopkins and Brown University have been considering overhauling traditional grading to reduce stress in the first year of college and make evaluation fairer for students who didn’t come from prestigious high schools.
Narrative evaluations emphasise information about the individual student over a grade or mark. Valentin Salja/Unsplash
Narrative evaluations can be a problem, too
But narrative evaluation has also been criticised for making it difficult for students to get into graduate schools or secure scholarships. This is because grades are the “common currency” in most universities, and not having them could project an image of low standards to other institutions.
The University of California Santa Cruz, for example, abandoned the narrative evaluation system in 2001 because it “created a bad image”, among other reasons.
Research also shows US secondary students find narrative evaluations more stressful than letter grades. This is due to the intensity of the provided feedback (which could be seen as nitpicky), teacher subjectivity and need for revisions. Teachers also report this type of evaluation takes up a lot of resources and time.
Like any other evaluation system the ATAR has its flaws, which should be acknowledged and discussed. The fact that some students do not see it as fair is a significant issue, but a straight narrative evaluation system in its place may not be the answer.
This is not to say more personal evaluation components can’t be added. Medical schools, for example, have found interviews an effective and important way to evaluate students’ personal and social capacities for the profession.
As the ATAR debate no doubt continues, we might be critical of this “blunt” number, but need to be careful any changes are genuine improvements – for students, schools, universities and employers.
Ilana Finefter-Rosenbluh receives funding, including from the Social Education Victoria, the Trawalla Foundation, the Besen Family Foundation, the Loti and Victor Smorgon Family Foundation, and Victorian government and independent schools.
Kathleen Hanna yells like she did in the 1990s, pushing the toxic male patriarchy out of the moshpit at Melbourne’s The Forum on the eve of International Women’s Day.
Hanna’s band Bikini Kill rampages through hits such as Suck My Left One, thrilling a happy, bopping crowd of parents with their teenaged children laced with a mixed gender of preppie and diehard punks, goths and curious spectators.
Across town at the Northcote Theatre the next day, Peaches comes out with a walking frame, wearing breast-shaped slippers with bright red erect nipples.
The popular sexual exhibitionist is still hoarsely rapping about abortion, and now the debate over the end of Roe vs Wade, with songs like Boys Wanna Be Her. She later wades into the beloved audience inside a large inflatable penis.
In Perth, a few days later, Björk’s echo-filled, childlike voice is as harrowing and powerful as ever.
These artists, all now aged in their 50s, are popular provocateurs, pulsating with rage. Feminism, ageism, sexism, transphobia, racism, capitalism and environmentalism are their musical agenda.
Do-it-yourself ethos
As Gen X, third-wave feminist icons, Peaches (Merrill Nisker), Bikini Kill and Björk grew up during the punk movements of the 1970s and ‘80s.
Based in Olympia in Washington State, Bikini Kill was part of the Riot Grrrl movement in the early 1990s, funnelling the do-it-yourself punk ethos into zines, songs like Rebel Girl, and confrontational live shows.
Bikini Kill encouraged women and girls to start bands as a form of “cultural resistance”, challenging masculine toxicity long before #MeToo.
During the 1990s in Canada, Nisker formed a Riot Grrrl band, Fancypants Hoodlum.
By 2000, aged 33 and recovering from cancer and a heartbreak, she renamed herself Peaches. Her solo electro-pop album The Teaches of Peaches became a feminist classic, with singles like Lovertits.
Peaches, Mona Sessions at Mona, Mona Foma 2023. Mona/Jesse Hunniford. Image courtesy of the artist and Mona Foma
Recording music since the age of 11 in Iceland, in 1992 Björk left The Sugarcubes, the alternative rock band she co-formed in 1986.
Björk’s first solo album came out in 1993, with huge hits like Human Behaviour about the way humans act and interact.
Bikini Kill are killing it during their all-ages gigs at The Forum.
The Forum’s iconic roman statues look down from the ceiling. Lead singer Hanna wears a khaki green, girly dress with pink punky tights, backed up by Kathi Wilcox on bass and Sara Landeau (from The Julie Ruin) on guitar. Drummer Vail is sick tonight, so Lauren Hammel from Victoria’s Tropical Fuck Storm is filling in.
Bikini Kill, Mona Sessions at Mona, Mona Foma 2023. Photo Credit: Mona/Jesse Hunniford. Image courtesy of the artist and Mona Foma
Hanna tells us she has “a gratitude journal” now, but remains Riot Grrrl-fuelled about the Trump era, rape, abortion, trans rights and Black Lives Matter.
She tells how during the 1990s audiences once spat in her face and threw things at the band on stage. These days they rarely do.
Hanna’s demeanour softens when a young female audience member gives her a carboard sign reading “Kathleen please draw my next next tattoo based on [the song] Feels Blind”.
At Peaches’ performance, the eclectic crowd is enthusiastically cheering her on.
Peaches, Mona Sessions at Mona, Mona Foma 2023. Photo Credit: Mona/Jesse Hunniford Image courtesy of the artist and Mona Foma
Leaning towards us, Peaches asks what The Teaches of Peaches meant to everyone when it was released, “and what does it mean collectively together now?” The crowd cheers louder as if their favourite footy team has won the grand final.
Her encore Fuck the Pain Away, with Melbourne feminist punk singer Amy Taylor, has the floorboards of the colonial theatre thumping.
For Perth Festival, Björk is performing her sci-fi pop extravaganza Cornucopia in a purpose-built 5,000-seat stadium.
Presented only a few times globally, Cornucopia is Björk’s most elaborate performance to date. Based on her 2017 album Utopia, she has described the show as “about females supporting each other”, our connection to Earth, and a plea to act on climate change.
In Perth, we have IMAX-sized visuals and a 54-channel surround system to garner an immersive multimedia experience in an Eden of bird sounds.
Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel directs the futuristic screens of lush green plants, live organisms, expanding fungus and blooming blood red and pink-tinged flowers.
An 18-person Australian choir, Voyces, opens and closes the concerts. Björk is also joined on stage by harpist Katie Buckley and the multi-talented Manu Delago on the Aluphone percussion instrument, keyboards, other electronics and water drums.
For Body Memory, the seven female flautists of Viibra are dressed in fairy costumes, circling Björk. A hula-hoop-like circular flute descends over Björk and down to the flautists, requiring four of them to play it.
The flautists play a circular flute surrounding Björk. Santiago Felipe/Perth Festival
The sound is spellbinding.
Two songs, Ovule and Atopos from her new album Fossora have their live global premiere at the concerts. They pay tribute to her mother, the Icelandic environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, who died in 2018.
Towards the end of the concert, a video of 20-year-old Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg looms before us:
We need to keep fossil fuels in the ground and we need to focus on equity. If the solutions in the system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.
Much as Hanna and Wilcox from Bikini Kill said during their All About Women talks at the Sydney Opera House, Björk is optimistic in the young people advocating for change.
When I heard Bikini Kill, Peaches and Bjork were performing almost in the same week, I grabbed tickets immediately. I scored a trifecta of my favourite female artists.
It had been many years since I saw them perform live. Seeing them this time was an empowering reminder that women in their 50s are still out there, oozing with vibrant creativity, worthiness and relevance.
We are about the same age: creative, rebellious youths who grew under the shadow of the boy’s club in the punk movement.
Their performances continue to challenge a male-dominated industry defined by fleeting talent, youthful beauty and voyeurism.
Their voices are stronger than ever. Their musicianship is tight, and the onstage antics are imaginative, playful, colourful and fun. Their messages are uplifting and clear, intelligent and thought provoking, now tinged with a softened version of empathetic rage about social injustice.
I have been seeing music gigs for more than 35 years, but these performances left me breathless.
Andrea Jean Baker does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Australian PM Anthony Albanese and US President Joe Biden seal the AUKUS deal in San Diego, March 13.Getty Images
Former Australian prime minister Paul Keating’s recent strident criticism of the A$368 billion nuclear-powered submarine deal announced under the AUKUS security pact
will have little effect on Australian policy. Canberra’s deepening level of security cooperation is underpinned by a deep political consensus.
But the clarity of Australian policy stands in stark contrast with New Zealand’s position on AUKUS, the trilateral technology-sharing agreement between Australia, the UK and US. In fact, New Zealand’s AUKUS policy can be summed up in one word – ambiguity.
The establishment of AUKUS in September 2021 was met with an equivocal endorsement by New Zealand. On the one hand, the prime minister at the time, Jacinda Ardern, was “pleased to see” the initiative, declaring she “welcome[d] the increased engagement of the UK and the US in our region”.
On the other hand, Ardern noted the country’s longstanding nuclear-free policy meant any nuclear-propelled submarines developed by our Australian ally would be prohibited from New Zealand waters.
After Tuesday’s joint AUKUS leaders’ statement in San Diego by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, it’s time to start counting the opportunity cost to New Zealand of maintaining this ambiguous policy posture.
Bets both ways
It may be surprising to hear, but Wellington’s AUKUS policy is ambiguous by design, reflecting a broader policy of “hedging”. This deliberately seeks to maximise the economic gains from trade with China, while supporting a US-constructed international order that aligns with New Zealand’s interests and values.
Unfortunately for New Zealand, the geopolitical environment that underpinned this policy has been torpedoed by the deterioration in US-China relations. It began during the Obama administration and has escalated during the Trump and Biden administrations.
The creation of AUKUS is a reflection of this broader strategic environment. And it has a direct effect on New Zealand’s security in two respects.
First, New Zealand’s leading trade partner, China, views AUKUS as contributing negatively to regional security dynamics. And Beijing cannot be expected to placidly accept this démarche.
China responded to the formation of AUKUS with the China-Solomon Islands security agreement in April 2022. What will its response be this time? It’s likely to involve some attempt to reduce Australian security, such as a Solomon Islands-style partnership with any number of states in the Pacific Islands Forum. This will have knock-on effects for New Zealand’s own security.
Regional instability
The possible scenarios are limited only by China’s capabilities and level of resolve to respond to AUKUS. As it stands, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, reacted critically to the AUKUS leaders’ statement. According to Wang:
The latest joint statement from the US, UK and Australia demonstrates that the three countries, for the sake of their own geopolitical interests, completely disregard the concerns of the international communities and are walking further and further down the path of error and danger.
To put it mildly, such criticism is misplaced. Truth be told, while there is clearly an interactive dynamic at work, AUKUS is much more an effect of a deteriorating security environment than a cause of it.
Like all countries, China has legitimate security concerns and interests. And it is clearly misleading, as many hawks in the US are doing, to paint China as an unvarnished threat to regional stability in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
But it’s equally misleading to overlook China’s role in the increased regional instability over the past decade or more, which has led to the creation of AUKUS and the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) involving Australia, India, Japan and the US.
Historic turning point
Second, the latest AUKUS developments have clear implications for New Zealand’s alliance with Australia, which is at a historic turning point. The principle at play here is clear – investment signals commitment, while lack of investment signals lack of commitment.
What is New Zealand’s level of commitment to the alliance? We will soon find out. The New Zealand Ministry of Defence is conducting a major review that will release its report after the 2023 general election.
It’s a fair bet Canberra is open to a serious discussion with Wellington on investing in a retooled ANZAC alliance. This would secure both countries’ national interests, not least their maritime, cyber and regional security.
Australia has chosen to invest in AUKUS. As Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles stated at a press conference in Canberra timed to occur immediately after Albanese’s joint ceremony with Biden and Sunak:
This is an investment in our nation’s security. It is an investment in our economy. And it is an investment that we cannot afford not to make.
AUKUS is both a catalyst and a mirror reflecting a swiftly changing strategic environment. New Zealand now needs to make some considered decisions on how to respond.
Nicholas Khoo has received funding from the Asia New Zealand Foundation, the Australian National University, Columbia University, the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre, and the University of Otago.
Two decades ago, Australia joined the US-led “coalition of the willing” that staged a major military intervention in Iraq.
To justify the war, leaders like US President George W. Bush and Australian Prime Minister John Howard argued that Iraq had developed weapons of mass destruction and was harbouring terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. Neither could be tolerated in a post-9/11 world.
However, when evidence for Iraq’s weapons program or links to terrorism failed to emerge, the coalition partners were forced to re-frame the war. The goals were threefold:
to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and bring peace to the Iraqi people
to replace the autocratic Baathist regime with a democratic government
to transform Iraq into a prosperous state governed by a free-market economy.
Twenty years on, the legacy of the war still looms large in Iraq. Despite the enormous human and financial costs, the coalition abjectly failed to achieve its central goals. Today, Iraq is not more peaceful, democratic or prosperous than it was in 2003.
The costs of war
Any reflection of the war must first address the staggering costs.
Although estimates vary, approximately 186,000 Iraqi civilians died and an untold number were injured. And more than nine million Iraqis were internally displaced or forced to flee the country.
Beyond such figures are a series of very real, but far less tangible, costs such as the damage done to much of Iraq’s rich cultural heritage or the deep emotional scars that come with two decades of war.
On the purported aims of the invasion, Iraq has clearly gone backwards on many metrics.
On the first goal of bringing peace to Iraq, it is true the coalition forces toppled Hussein and his entire Baathist regime in just six short weeks. He was later captured, put on trial and finally hanged in December 2006.
However, the coalition forces failed to adequately secure the nation after his regime was toppled. This created a security vacuum that was rapidly filled by a host of different militant groups. From 2006 onward, Iraq descended into a dark and unprecedented period of horrific sectarian violence.
This worsened considerably after the US troop withdrawal at the end of 2011. By 2013, the Islamic State had begun to conquer vast swathes of territory across both Syria and Iraq, eventually capturing the city of Mosul in mid-2014.
The group went on to impose strict Sharia law in the territory it controlled and enacted mass genocidal pogroms that included the slaughter, enslavement and forced exodus of thousands of innocent civilians.
The irony here barely needs to be stated: there was no credible terrorist presence in Iraq before the coalition forces staged their invasion, but by mid-2014 roughly a third of the country was controlled by terrorists who remain a threat today.
Goal 2: Democracy as a pathway to authoritarianism
The second key goal of the war was to bring liberal democracy to Iraq.
It, too, has a complicated legacy. On the one hand, the Iraqi people are to be admired for having embraced democracy. Millions of Iraqis vote in the nation’s regular provincial and federal elections.
Iraq is also now home to a strong culture of dissent, as is evidenced by the frequent protests that were not permitted under the former regime.
However, one of the unfortunate consequences of the war has been that many ethno-religious political factions viewed it as an opportunity to pedal their own relatively narrow and divisive political rhetoric.
This led the political elite to tighten their stranglehold on power and frequently crack down hard on Iraqi media and civil society.
According to the annual Democracy Index released by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Iraq has been consistently ranked as among the worst political regimes in the world. And the situation is actually getting worse. By 2022, Iraq had been downgraded to an “authoritarian regime” and was ranked 124th out of 167 countries in the democracy rankings.
So, while Iraq holds regular elections and allows mass protests, it fails to meet the minimum criteria by which we would normally measure a democracy. This speaks volumes about the merits of imposing a top-down model of democracy by force.
Goal 3: Prosperity at any cost
Third, the goal of turning Iraq into a beacon of prosperity driven by a free-market economy has only benefited a handful of corrupt elites.
On the one hand, Iraq’s real GDP (based on purchasing power parity) has skyrocketed in recent years on the back of its oil wealth, reaching an estimated US$390 billion (A$583 billion) in 2021. This is the 50th largest economy in the world.
Yet, this cash flow is not filtering down to the Iraqi people. In 2022, Iraq ranked 157th (out of 180 countries) on Transparency International’s annual Corruption Index.
Also in 2022, the Sustainable Development Report ranked Iraq as 115th (out of 163 countries) on progress towards achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals. It was the worst-performing middle-income country in the world.
In other words, while corrupt Iraqi political elites and major Western oil companies extract billions of dollars in revenues from Iraq’s rich natural resources, millions of Iraqis continue to live in destitution in a country with crumbling and insufficient infrastructure.
Iraq may well be a free-market economy, but what use is that if ordinary Iraqis have sporadic electricity, limited potable water, few working sewage systems and inadequate health care and education?
Australia’s obligations 20 years on
All of this raises deep questions about the political responsibilities and moral obligations of the United States and its key coalition partners such as Australia.
While various Australian organisations run a handful of important programs across Iraq – especially in agriculture, human rights and mine-clearing – these fall well short of meeting the needs of the Iraqi people.
Australia could do much more. Politicians and policy-makers, for instance, could use the 20-year anniversary of the Iraq war to launch a renewed effort on three pragmatic and achievable fronts: education, security and democracy building.
Iraq’s education sector has been crippled by the legacy of war, autocratic leadership and international sanctions. This has left the schools and universities decades behind international standards.
The Australian government could do much more to train Iraqi teachers, fund schools and streamline the process of knowledge-sharing and exchanges between the Iraqi and Australian education sectors.
In terms of security, the Australian government and military must continue to work closely with Iraq’s security forces on training programs. This is needed to prevent
Iraq from returning to the grim days of sectarian violence or, worse still, the emergence of a new terrorist threat.
Finally, Australia should stick to its stated goal of supporting universal human rights and fostering democratic participation in the region.
By setting up capacity-building initiatives for Iraq’s media, unions and civil society movements, Australia could greatly enhance Iraq’s fledgling democracy and ensure it does not slip further into authoritarianism.
In fact, Australia is in a unique position to achieve these three goals. Its role as part of the “coalition of the willing” was generally perceived as being less heavy-handed than the US or UK.
This is a moment of consequence. Making good on our commitment to the initial goals of the war will influence how Australia is perceived in Iraq, the Middle East and across the world. And we owe the Iraqi people that much at least.
Benjamin Isakhan has received research funding from the Australian Department of Defence and the Australian Research Council. The views expressed in this article do not reflect those of Defence or Government policy.
As the old adage goes, time will tell whether Paul Keating’s scepticism about AUKUS and his extremely benign view of China’s intentions turn out to be justified.
That judgment could be many years away.
History’s reading can be very different from contemporary assessments. Looking back, we know the American (and Australian) commitment to the Vietnam war was futile. The years of combat in Afghanistan achieved nothing (as distinct from the initial invasion, which was a necessary response after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States). The Iraq war was counter-productive.
From the opposite vantage point, those in the 1930s who thought Hitler could be appeased were wrong.
Keating’s claims that the AUKUS plan for Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines is a bad and dangerous deal and that China is not the threat the government and many others believe it to be, are opinions shared by a number of critics.
Despite the bipartisanship over both the China threat and AUKUS, the views of experts are divided.
But Keating in his Wednesday National Press Club appearance undercut his own case by taking his argument too far.
Even those who are doves on China would struggle to accept his condition of a China threat to be an invasion of our continent by troops brought by an armada of ships. China isn’t a threat to us because it could not invade, he insisted. The ships would be sunk along the way.
That sounded distinctly old-fashioned, on almost any criteria of modern warfare.
As for China’s intentions, no one can be sure of what they will be. Just as they have changed in the last decade, as China has become more assertive and aggressive, so they may evolve in future, according to that country’s domestic developments and the external environment it faces.
As things stand, the strategic outlook in the region has become distinctly more dangerous with China’s growing power and ambition, which is driving the present response in terms of upgrading defence capability.
On the submarine deal, we are also looking into a crystal ball when we are talking about three decades.
Australia has had repeated missteps over the last decade in trying to get together a successful submarine program. It will be a miracle if this one goes smoothly. And that’s apart from the matter of changing governments in the three countries and whatever develops in the international strategic situation.
Nothing can be foreseen with the degree of precision that the plan outlined this week might suggest. Governments can only operate on what seem reasonable calculations at the time.
Keating not only attacked the AUKUS agreement (as he did when it was announced in 2021) but personalised his assault by targeting Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Defence Minister Richard Marles (although Marles was credited with being “well-intentioned”).
He painted Albanese as someone who hadn’t previously shown any “deep or long-term interest in foreign affairs” but then “fell in with” Wong and Marles to lead this “great misadventure”.
Keating has long been critical of Wong privately. Wednesday’s comments about her had a particularly sharp edge.
He declared that “running around the Pacific Islands with a lei around your neck handing out money, which is what Penny does, is not foreign policy”.
Well, it actually is, at least up to a point. The Albanese government has worked hard on improving Australia’s standing among small Pacific countries, helped by its climate policy and a great deal of travel by Wong.
That’s not to say Australian influence will prevail in the long run, given China’s intense courtship of these countries. It’s another of those longer-term imponderables.
The government is keeping its reaction to the Keating missiles as low-key as practicable. It’s holding the line on the issues of substance about AUKUS and strategy, and defending Wong; it is casting Keating as being in the past, while trying to avoid hitting back at him in personal terms.
Albanese said on Thursday: “He’s entitled to put his views, he’s put them. They’re not views I agree with in this case. But Paul Keating was a great treasurer, a great prime minister, he has my respect, and I have no intention of engaging in a public argument with Paul Keating.
“The Labor Party, we praise our heroes for the contribution that they’ve made. But my responsibility in 2023 is to give Australia the leadership that they need now, not what they might have needed in the 1990s.”
With AUKUS having Coalition support, the extent to which the opposition can exploit the Keating attack is limited. Instead, it is saying what senior ministers can’t. Peter Dutton called them “unhinged comments” and said the government should rebuke the former PM.
Keating is obviously hoping he’ll motivate the Labor base – he said he expected branch members to react against the government’s policy. The government, which so far had not had a revolt in the ranks over AUKUS, will hope it can deny enough oxygen to the story that it blows over relatively quickly.
It wasn’t only Albanese and his ministers who received a serve from Keating. His attacks on journalists, including questioners at the National Press Club event, were bitter.
Generally, I take the view that we in the media dish out a lot of criticism and so, when we’re on the receiving end, we should suck it up.
But there is a line (or should be) between what is acceptable and unacceptable, for both journalists and public figures. Keating was on the wrong side of that line.
It should not be acceptable to call an author of a recent series of anti-China articles in the Nine newspapers a “psychopath”. Or to tell the co-author, who asked Keating a question, “You should hang your head in shame […] you ought to do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism.” The insults just took attention off his condemnation of the substance of the “Red Alert” articles.
Even worse was his putdown of a young journalist who asked a reasonable question that suggested Keating might be out of date on the China issue because he hadn’t been briefed since the mid-1990s.
“I know you’re trying to ask a question, but the question is so dumb, it’s hardly worth an answer,” Keating replied, before suggesting the reporter was trying to ingratiate herself with her employer.
Keating has always had a rough tongue. One reason he was against the televising of parliament decades ago was he knew invective, effective when he deployed it against opponents in the theatre of the House of Representatives, came across badly when viewed in the suburban lounge room.
Just as some of those gratuitous insults looked ugly to many viewers of Wednesday’s performance.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Former treasury secretary Ken Henry has declared the Australian taxation system is in “a parlous state” and called for “big bang” tax reform.
Henry, who headed a major inquiry into the tax system launched by the Rudd government, says recent discussions of superannuation concessions, multinational tax avoidance, and the Stage 3 tax cuts, while important, “don’t scratch the surface” of the conversation that’s needed.
No doubt knowing Treasurer Jim Chalmers, a staffer to then treasurer Wayne Swan during the inquiry, would never contemplate another one, Henry says a fresh review isn’t needed and instead advocates “a process” for reform.
Little came of the Henry review after the Labor government faced a massive backlash when it moved to implement its recommended mining tax.
Addressing a Tax Institute event on Thursday, Henry said the Australian tax system “is not capable of raising sufficient revenue to fund the activities of government. Certainly not today. Far less at any time in the future.”
He said for those who understood the fiscal challenge Australia faced, the noise around the Albanese government’s superannuation tax change, designed to raise about $2 billion extra revenue, “sounds shrill”.
“Right now, Commonwealth tax revenue should be at least 2% of GDP higher. That’s about $50 billion a year in today’s money.
“And, given the pressures of accelerating spending on defence, health care, aged care, and disability support, among others, we are clearly going to have to raise the tax-to-GDP ratio even higher over the decades ahead.
“The state of the budget demands large scale structural reform, on both the spending and revenue sides.”
Henry said the only tax base in the federation budgeted to produce revenue growth at a faster rate than GDP was personal income tax – and that was through fiscal drag.
The “tax mix switch” made by the Howard government when it introduced the GST had been completely undone, with the GST base eroding and fuel excise at risk with the electrification of the vehicle fleet.
“We are back to where we were in the four decades between the end of WWII and the reformist period that commenced in the mid-1980s,” Henry said.
“Those four post-war decades were characterised by ill-disciplined
public spending, with a heavy reliance upon fiscal drag that punished innovation, enterprise, and effort; distorted the pattern of saving; and rewarded tax avoidance and evasion.”
He said fiscal drag would naturally be governments’ “tax raiser of choice” because it was “taxation by stealth”.
But relying on it was “much more dangerous, economically, socially, and politically, than at other times in our history.
“Whilst government spending is growing strongly, the share of
government spending being directed to the non-working, low tax
paying, aged is also growing.
“At the same time, and in stark contrast to the post-war period,
because of population aging, a shrinking proportion of the
population, made up of relatively young workers, will have to
shoulder a rapidly accelerating share of the burden of financing
government.
“And this generation of young workers, weighed down with HECS debt, burdened with the responsibility of repaying a mountain of public debt and dealing with the costs of climate change, is finding it increasingly difficult to buy a home,” he said.
These people had been “priced out of the market by those who have already retired or are now moving into retirement, those who are sitting on tax-free capital gains in houses that are exempt from the pension assets test, those who are receiving refundable franking credits on share portfolios and a blend of publicly funded and tax-free private pensions from assets accumulated in lightly taxed self-managed superannuation funds.
“At some point, perhaps even already, the intergenerational social
compact must surely fracture.”
Henry rejected the argument for incremental tax reform, instead favouring a “big bang” approach, as was taken following the Hawke government’s 1985 tax summit and by the Howard government.
“Incrementalism sets up a single target on a battlefield occupied by well-resourced attack forces.
“More importantly, incrementalism cannot address our budget and
broader economic challenges. No amount of incrementalism is going to meet our fiscal challenges, far less turn around two decades of declining average living standards.
“There is no point planting a seed in a desert when what is needed is continental scale reforestation.”
Henry urged an “inclusive, cooperative Commonwealth-State process” for reform.
It should look at trends, and risks, in spending pressures at all levels of government, considering which could be trimmed and which level of government should have responsibility for policy design and program delivery.
The process should identify “the tax bases upon which increasing
reliance can be placed and those that should be avoided to boost
growth prospects, and with acceptable implications for distributional equity.
“That means examining the tax, transfer, and retirement
income systems in concert. And then it should determine the allocation of taxing powers,” Henry said.
“To any political leader, tackling tax reform is going to present like a mountain range covered in ice, ” Henry conceded.
“And today’s tax reformers do not enjoy the political luxury available to the Howard government, to craft a revenue-negative reform package, nor even a politically challenging revenue-neutral package, such as that constructed by Treasurer Keating in the mid 1980s.
“The package needed on this occasion must be revenue positive.
So, this is going to be hard.”
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Voters in New South Wales are heading to the polling booths on March 25. For both Premier Dominic Perrottet and Labor leader Chris Minns, it is their first election as leader. The Coalition government has held power since 2011. Labor needs to gain a net nine seats to form majority government. If Labor wins, the party will be in power in every state and territory except Tasmania.
There are 10 seats in this election that are on a margin of less than 6%, including Minns’ seat of Kogarah on 0.1%. In several contests the fate of “teal’ candidates will be watched. Spending and donation caps, and optional preferential voting make the teals’ path to victory more difficult than in the federal election.
In this podcast, Michelle Grattan speaks with Antony Green, the ABC’s election analyst, Professor Andy Marks, from the University of Western Sydney, and Ashleigh Raper, the ABC’s NSW state political reporter.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ariel Liebman, Ariel Liebman Director, Monash Energy Institute and Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University
Shutterstock
Households and businesses are set for more hip-pocket pain after regulators on Wednesday released draft details of electricity price rises in four Australian states.
The Australian Energy Regulator revealed residential customers on standard plans should brace for price increases of up to 24% in the next financial year. The price rises apply to households in Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia.
The Victorian regulator also flagged an electricity price hike of up to 30% in that state.
It’s another blow in an already difficult financial situation for many, as interest rates continue to rise and inflation soars. Consumers are justified in asking: why is this happening? And is there an end in sight?
Regulators on Wednesday signalled more electricity price rises. Jono Searle/AAP
The basics, explained
The regulator released a draft of what’s known as the “default market offer”. It’s basically the maximum amount energy retailers can charge customers on default energy plans.
So what’s a default energy plan? It’s the standard plan you’re on if you didn’t negotiate a special deal with your energy retailer, or if a deal you were on has expired.
According to the ABC, around one million electricity customers in the four states mentioned above are on default market offers.
Many consumers are on default plans because they don’t have the time or inclination to engage with their electricity retailer to negotiate a better deal. Others, quite understandably, find the whole process too confusing to navigate.
That’s why default market offers were introduced. Both the federal and Victorian policies were developed afterreviews found competition in retail electricity markets was not leading to lower prices for households or small businesses.
Your electricity bill comprises several different charges. The biggest ones are:
– wholesale energy costs: the price generators such as coal and gas plants charge your retailer for the electricity delivered to you
– network costs: the price charged by companies that own the “poles and wires” – transmission lines, transformers, electricity poles and the like – needed to get the electricity to your home
– retail costs: the total amount needed by an electricity retailer to operate – such as issuing bills, providing customer service, marketing themselves – as well as to make a reasonable profit.
Regulators calculate the default market offer by considering each of these price components.
Network costs – or the ‘poles and wires’ charges – form part of your electricity bill. Shutterstock
The increased default market offers are mostly due to increases in wholesale prices.
Wholesale prices increased in recent months almost entirely as a result of sanctions imposed on Russia following its invasion of Ukraine. It led to a global shortage of natural gas. This was exacerbated when Russia withdrew gas supplies from the European market.
Even though the energy shocks were happening half a world away from Australia, it affected domestic gas prices here. Why? Because most of Australia’s east coast gas is exported, which means its price is largely determined by the global price.
This could have been avoided if the federal government has a mechanism to keep some of that gas for the domestic market – in other words, if it had a so-called “gas reservation policy”. But the current and previous governments have refused to implement this.
The federal regulator said the planned retirement of AGL’s ageing Liddell coal-fired power station in the NSW Hunter Valley contributed to its decision. Liddell is one of the biggest coal-fired generators in the national electricity market, and the closure is likely to lead to a short-term tightening of supplies.
Another factor affecting the regulators’ decision relates to a strategy electricity retailers use to protect themselves against volatile wholesale prices in future. The strategy, known as hedge contracts, fixes the wholesale price retailers pay for electricity over a long period – up to several years.
The price set in hedge contracts struck over the past year or so was influenced by Australia’s domestic gas crisis in 2022, which caused massive rises in wholesale electricity prices.
AUstralia’s gas proces are linked to global markets. Shutterstock
What to expect down the track
Australian Energy Regulator chair Clare Savage on Wednesday said the price increases could have been much higher, if not for intervention by the Albanese government late last year to cap prices in Australia’s gas and coal markets.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen says those price caps have saved households between A$268 and $530.
The caps are likely to cause further falls in the default market offer in coming years. But the policy appears to be only an interim measure until the global supply shortage eases.
In the longer term, renewable energy offers a ray of hope.
The federal government has set a target of 82% renewable electricity by 2030. But of course, a few significant complementary measures – such as more investment in transmission networks and energy storage – are needed.
This investment would support the transition to a zero-emissions electricity sector. Importantly, it would also insulate long-suffering consumers from volatile fossil fuel prices.
Ariel Liebman has provided occasional advice to, and has received funding from, companies across the energy sector. He currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
The latest labour force data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows employment in February increasing by 64,600, and the (seasonally adjusted) unemployment rate declining from 3.7% to 3.5%.
It’s confirmation that it’s still too early to declare that the labour market has reached a turning point, after which we can expect the rate of unemployment will rise for some time.
Employment growth has been slowing over the past year, but ups and downs from month to month make it difficult to work out how fast that is happening. Meanwhile, the rate of unemployment is stubbornly resisting moving too far from 3.5%.
Predictions have been hard
Making any predictions for the labour market since mid-2022 has been more difficult than usual.
In the first six months of 2022, employment grew by 56,600 per month, while the rate of unemployment fell from 4.2% to 3.5%. But for the next three months, average employment growth was only 11,700, and the unemployment rate ticked up slightly. It looked like, maybe, the end of the expansion.
But no. In the months to October and November, employment growth was back to 47,700 a month, and the jobless rate moved down.
December and January brought decreases in employment. But it’s always difficult to draw predictions from these months. This year’s January numbers also came with an asterisk from the Australian Bureau of Statistics: a much larger number of persons than usual were classified as waiting to start work, raising the prospect of a healthy boost in employment in February, which is what has happened.
So if a labour market slowdown is underway, it is gradual and slow, rather than the “falling off a cliff” variety. For that reason, it’s likely to take a while longer to know exactly where we are heading.
But more young people are in jobs
Not everything about the labour market is unpredictable, however. On the contrary, most of the changes we’ve seen since mid-2021, once the Australian labour market started recoverng from the initial impact of COVID-19, are exactly what we would have expected.
When the labour market is growing strongly, we expect this will benefit most of the groups who usually face the biggest difficulties getting into work: those with lower skill levels, who live in regions with less employment opportunities, and young people. This is indeed what has happened.
The likelihood of those without a post-school qualification being employed has increased 2 percentage points between 2019 and 2022, double the 1-point increase for those with a Bachelor’s degree or above.
In the 25% of regions with the lowest rates of employment, the proportion with jobs in 2022 was 2.2 percentage points higher than 2019. That increase was about three times more than in the 25% of regions with the highest employment rates.
Since immediately before the onset of COVID, the proportion of people aged less than 25 in employment has grown by 6.3 percentage points, compared with a 1.9 percentage point increase for those aged 25 to 64 years.
And educational enrolments have fallen
For the young, there has been another consequence of the strong labour market that we’ve learned to expect: more in jobs means fewer studying. Between February 2021 and December 2022 the proportion of those aged 15-24 in full-time tertiary education fell from 24.3% to 21.6%.
Employment vs education
Proportion employed vs proportion in full-time tertiary education. ABS Labour Force
A similar withdrawal was observed in the late 2000s, during the mining boom, in the states of Western Australia and Queensland.
It’s having this past experience to draw on that, of course, makes it easier to see patterns in the impact of recovery, than to know where the rate of unemployment is about to head in coming months.
Jeff Borland receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company behind ChatGPT and the DALL-E 2 art generator, has unveiled the highly anticipated GPT-4 model. Excitingly, the company also made it immediately available to the public through a paid service.
GPT-4 is a large language model (LLM), a neural network trained on massive amounts of data to understand and generate text. It’s the successor to GPT-3.5, the model behind ChatGPT.
The GPT-4 model introduces a range of enhancements over its predecessors. These include more creativity, more advanced reasoning, stronger performance across multiple languages, the ability to accept visual input, and the capacity to handle significantly more text.
More powerful than the wildly popular ChatGPT, GPT-4 is bound to inspire an in-depth exploration of its capabilities and further accelerate the adoption of generative AI.
Improved capabilities
Among many results highlighted by OpenAI, what immediately stands out is GPT-4’s performance on a range of standardised tests. For example, GPT-4 scores among the top 10% in a simulated US bar exam, whereas GPT-3.5 scores in the bottom 10%.
This table from the OpenAI technical report shows the performance of the model on a range of simulated standardised tests. GPT-4 often performs in the top 20% range. OpenAI
GPT-4 also outperforms GPT-3.5 on a range of writing, reasoning and coding tasks. The following examples illustrate how GPT-4 displays more reliable commonsense reasoning than GPT-3.5.
An AI model that sees the world
Another significant development is that GPT-4 is multimodal, unlike previous GPT models. This means it accepts both text and image inputs.
Samples provided by OpenAI reveal GPT-4 is capable of interpreting images, explaining visual humour and providing reasoning based on visual inputs. Such skills are beyond the scope of previous models.
GPT-4 can explain the meaning behind funny memes. OpenAI
This ability to “see” could provide GPT-4 a more comprehensive picture of how the world works – just as humans acquire enhanced knowledge through observation. This is thought to be an important ingredient for developing sophisticated AI that could bridge the gap between current models and human-level intelligence.
In fact, GPT-4 isn’t the first language model with these capabilities. A few weeks ago, Microsoft released Kosmos-1, a language model that accepts visual inputs the same way GPT-4 does. Google also recently expanded its PaLM language model to be able to take in image data and sensor data collected from robots. Multimodality is a growing trend in AI research.
Longer texts
GPT-4 can take in and generate up to 25,000 words of text, which is much more than ChatGPT’s limit of about 3,000 words.
It can handle more complex and detailed prompts, and generate more extensive pieces of writing. This allows for richer storytelling, more in-depth analysis, summaries of long pieces of text and deeper conversational interactions.
In the example below, I gave the new ChatGPT (which uses GPT-4) the entire Wikipedia article about artificial intelligence and asked it a specific question, which it answered accurately.
GPT-4 answers a question relating to a Wikipedia article on artificial intelligence. Author provided
Limitations
Even though the GPT-4 technical report controversially provides no details about how the model was developed, all signs indicate it’s essentially a scaled-up version of GPT-3.5 with safety improvements. In other words, it’s not a new paradigm in AI research.
OpenAI has itself said GPT-4 is subject to the same limitations as previous language models, such as being prone to reasoning errors and biases, and making up false information.
That said, OpenAI’s results on GPT-4 suggest it’s at least more reliable than previous GPT models.
OpenAI used human feedback to fine-tune GPT-4 to produce more helpful and less problematic outputs. GPT-4 is much better at declining inappropriate requests and avoiding harmful content when compared to the initial ChatGPT release.
Its arrival will continue a crucial debate among critics. That being whether alternative approaches are required to fundamentally solve issues of truthfulness and reliability, or whether throwing more data and resources at language models will eventually do the job.
One could argue GPT-4 represents only an incremental improvement over its predecessors in many practical scenarios. Results showed human judges preferred GPT-4 outputs over the most advanced variant of GPT-3.5 only about 61% of the time.
GPT-4 also shows no improvement over GPT-3.5 in some tests, including English language and art history exams.
Bing AI
Soon after GPT-4’s launch, Microsoft revealed its highly controversial Bing chatbot was running on GPT-4 all along. The announcement confirmed speculation by commentators who noticed it was more powerful than ChatGPT.
This means Bing provides an alternative way to leverage GPT-4, since it’s a search engine rather than just a chatbot.
However, as anyone looped in on AI news knows, Bing started to go a bit crazy. But I don’t think the new ChatGPT will follow since it seems to have been heavily fine-tuned using human feedback.
In its technical report, OpenAI shows how GPT-4 can indeed go completely off the rails without this human feedback training.
Commercial applications
One notable aspect of GPT-4’s release has been that, in addition to Bing, it’s already being used by companies and organisations such as Duolingo, Khan Academy, Morgan Stanley, Stripe and the Icelandic government to build new services and tools.
Its commercial deployment will further heat up competition between major AI labs, and fuel investors’ appetite for generative technologies.
Marcel Scharth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company behind ChatGPT and the DALL-E 2 art generator, has unveiled the highly anticipated GPT-4 model. Excitingly, the company also made it immediately available to the public through a paid service.
GPT-4 is a large language model (LLM), a neural network trained on massive amounts of data to understand and generate text. It’s the successor to GPT-3.5, the model behind ChatGPT.
The GPT-4 model introduces a range of enhancements over its predecessors. These include more creativity, more advanced reasoning, stronger performance across multiple languages, the ability to accept visual input, and the capacity to handle significantly more text.
More powerful than the wildly popular ChatGPT, GPT-4 is bound to inspire an in-depth exploration of its capabilities and further accelerate the adoption of generative AI.
Improved capabilities
Among many results highlighted by OpenAI, what immediately stands out is GPT-4’s performance on a range of standardised tests. For example, GPT-4 scores among the top 10% in a simulated US bar exam, whereas GPT-3.5 scores in the bottom 10%.
This table from the OpenAI technical report shows the performance of the model on a range of simulated standardised tests. GPT-4 often performs in the top 20% range. OpenAI
GPT-4 also outperforms GPT-3.5 on a range of writing, reasoning and coding tasks. The following examples illustrate how GPT-4 displays more reliable commonsense reasoning than GPT-3.5.
An AI model that sees the world
Another significant development is that GPT-4 is multimodal, unlike previous GPT models. This means it accepts both text and image inputs.
Samples provided by OpenAI reveal GPT-4 is capable of interpreting images, explaining visual humour and providing reasoning based on visual inputs. Such skills are beyond the scope of previous models.
GPT-4 can explain the meaning behind funny memes. OpenAI
This ability to “see” could provide GPT-4 a more comprehensive picture of how the world works – just as humans acquire enhanced knowledge through observation. This is thought to be an important ingredient for developing sophisticated AI that could bridge the gap between current models and human-level intelligence.
In fact, GPT-4 isn’t the first language model with these capabilities. A few weeks ago, Microsoft released Kosmos-1, a language model that accepts visual inputs the same way GPT-4 does. Google also recently expanded its PaLM language model to be able to take in image data and sensor data collected from robots. Multimodality is a growing trend in AI research.
Longer texts
GPT-4 can take in and generate up to 25,000 words of text, which is much more than ChatGPT’s limit of about 3,000 words.
It can handle more complex and detailed prompts, and generate more extensive pieces of writing. This allows for richer storytelling, more in-depth analysis, summaries of long pieces of text and deeper conversational interactions.
In the example below, I gave the new ChatGPT (which uses GPT-4) the entire Wikipedia article about artificial intelligence and asked it a specific question, which it answered accurately.
GPT-4 answers a question relating to a Wikipedia article on artificial intelligence. Author provided
Limitations
Even though the GPT-4 technical report controversially provides no details about how the model was developed, all signs indicate it’s essentially a scaled-up version of GPT-3.5 with safety improvements. In other words, it’s not a new paradigm in AI research.
OpenAI has itself said GPT-4 is subject to the same limitations as previous language models, such as being prone to reasoning errors and biases, and making up false information.
That said, OpenAI’s results on GPT-4 suggest it’s at least more reliable than previous GPT models.
OpenAI used human feedback to fine-tune GPT-4 to produce more helpful and less problematic outputs. GPT-4 is much better at declining inappropriate requests and avoiding harmful content when compared to the initial ChatGPT release.
Its arrival will continue a crucial debate among critics. That being whether alternative approaches are required to fundamentally solve issues of truthfulness and reliability, or whether throwing more data and resources at language models will eventually do the job.
One could argue GPT-4 represents only an incremental improvement over its predecessors in many practical scenarios. Results showed human judges preferred GPT-4 outputs over the most advanced variant of GPT-3.5 only about 61% of the time.
GPT-4 also shows no improvement over GPT-3.5 in some tests, including English language and art history exams.
Bing AI
Soon after GPT-4’s launch, Microsoft revealed its highly controversial Bing chatbot was running on GPT-4 all along. The announcement confirmed speculation by commentators who noticed it was more powerful than ChatGPT.
This means Bing provides an alternative way to leverage GPT-4, since it’s a search engine rather than just a chatbot.
However, as anyone looped in on AI news knows, Bing started to go a bit crazy. But I don’t think the new ChatGPT will follow since it seems to have been heavily fine-tuned using human feedback.
In its technical report, OpenAI shows how GPT-4 can indeed go completely off the rails without this human feedback training.
Commercial applications
One notable aspect of GPT-4’s release has been that, in addition to Bing, it’s already being used by companies and organisations such as Duolingo, Khan Academy, Morgan Stanley, Stripe and the Icelandic government to build new services and tools.
Its commercial deployment will further heat up competition between major AI labs, and fuel investors’ appetite for generative technologies.
Marcel Scharth does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The practice of “income averaging” to calculate debts in the robodebt scheme was completely flawed. This is what I confirmed in my new report conducted for the robodebt royal commission published last Friday, the final day of the commission’s public hearings.
This process effectively assumed many people receiving social security benefits had stable earnings throughout a whole year.
But this is unlikely to be accurate for the many people who don’t work standard full-time hours, and particularly for students, since the tax year and the academic year don’t coincide.
My report finds averaging of incomes is completely inconsistent with social security policies that have been developed by governments since the 1980s.
Since 1980, social security legislation has been amended more than 20 times to encourage recipients to take up part-time and casual work. These include the Working Credit for people receiving unemployment and other payments, and a similar but more generous Income Bank for students.
These measures are specifically designed to encourage people to take up more work, including part-time and irregular casual work, and keep more of their social security payments.
Robodebt’s lack of consistency with long-standing policies should have been obvious from the start.
What is income averaging?
In the robodebt scheme, income averaging involved data-matching historic records of social security benefit payments with past income tax returns, identifying discrepancies between these records.
It reduced human investigation of the discrepancies. The automatic calculation of “overpayments” for many people was based on a simple calculation that averaged income over the financial year.
The “debts” were based on the difference between this averaged income and the income that people actually reported while they were receiving payments.
I wrote an article for The Conversation on this in 2017. At the time, I thought, Centrelink couldn’t possibly have done that.
It was averaged over the […] whole financial year. Study usually starts at the beginning of a calendar year. So I had been working full-time for the first six months of that year and then I had stopped working full-time to study. So it was really obvious that they had averaged out over the whole year rather than the six months I was actually only claiming Austudy for.
What I found
It’s well known Australia has a high proportion of casual workers.
Because they’re employed on an “as needed” basis, their hours can vary substantially. Therefore, their income can too.
ABS data showed that in 2014 nearly 40% of casual workers didn’t work the same hours each week. Also, around 53% had pay that varied from one pay period to another. These figures have been broadly stable since 2008.
My report analyses new data provided by the Department of Social Services to the royal commission. It looks in detail at the circumstances of people who received social security payments between 2010-11 and 2018-19. These payments included Austudy, Newstart, Parenting Payment Partnered, Parenting Payment Single and Youth Allowance.
These payments accounted for around 91% of the people subject to the reviews that identified discrepancies and potential “overpayments” between 2016 and 2019 under the different phases of robodebt.
For Newstart and Youth Allowance recipients – who accounted for 75% of those affected by robodebt – between 20% and 40% had earnings while receiving these benefits.
The share of people with income who had stable incomes over the course of the financial year was extremely low. In the Department of Social Services data, it ranged from less than 3% of people receiving youth payments, to around 5% of those receiving Newstart or Austudy, and 5%-10% of those receiving Parenting Payments.
Share of people on social security payments with stable income over the course of each financial year, 2010-11 to 2018-19
Supplied, Author provided
For most of these people with variable income, the variations were large. More than 90% had periods when their income was more than $100 per fortnight different from their average, and more than 80% had variations greater than $200 per fortnight.
Average earnings varied substantially for people receiving social security payments for only part of a financial year. Receiving social security benefits for many people is a short-term and sometimes recurring experience.
To take the example of Newstart, in 2015-16 there were around 783,000 people who received payments at the start of the financial year. About 500,000 people entered the payment system during the year, and 325,000 exited the system. So, in total, nearly 1.2 million people received Newstart payments at some point during the financial year. Flows into and out of the other social security payments were similar.
For the unemployed and students, most people received payments for only part of the year. Almost nobody who received income had completely stable income over the robodebt period. What’s more, significant numbers of people who received social security payments were on such payments for only part of any financial year.
It’s completely inaccurate to assume that income over the course of a financial year can be averaged to produce an accurate figure for the actual patterns of people’s earnings.
Using this to then calculate “overpayments” isn’t only inconsistent with the social security policy directions adopted by government for decades, it also lacks basic common sense.
Peter Whiteford receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee. This report for the Royal Commission into Robodebt was prepared without charge.
The Australian Football League’s 2023 season is kicking off with changes afoot. Three rule changes, in fact, which may either please or infuriate commentators and fans.
One change will prevent players awarded a free kick or mark from attempting to win a 50-metre penalty by feigning a handball, in the hope an opposition player will move off their mark and violate the “stand” rule.
Another aims to prevent time-wasting by penalising players with a 50-metre penalty if they change their mind about standing a mark or leaving the protected area.
The third concerns the 30 seconds allowed to players when taking a set shot on goal; umpires will now give a time warning at 25 seconds but not at 15 seconds.
Rule changes like these never cease to spark debate among diehard fans about “leaving the sport alone”.
Australian Rules football has consistently changed its rules throughout its history. But it’s also true that rule changes or tweaks are becoming increasingly common. This is a trend in professional sport around the world. The US National Basketball Association, for example, changes rules almost every year.
Why? Sometimes the reason is to reduce injuries. But often it’s to do with the bottom line – which is that professional sport is a business that depends on delivering an audience to broadcasters. In a competitive media market there are big incentives to change rules to make the sport more exciting for fans and more conducive to commercial sponsors.
Four reasons for rule changes
Our research points to professional sport leagues changing rules for four main reasons: to reduce the risk of injury; to make games easier to officiate; to enhance the sport’s spectacle; and to create space for advertising during broadcasts.
The US National Football League, for example, has explicitly said it champions “changes that promote more scoring and more exciting plays”.
Spectacle attracts spectators: fans of the Kansas City Chiefs watch the NFL’s Super Bowl 57 game against the Philadelphia Eagles, February 12, 2023. Colin E. Braley/AP
In the AFL, scoring is often the focus for rule changes, because more goals make the sport more exciting to watch while allowing for more advertising breaks. In 2021, for example, advertising breaks immediately following a goal were extended from 45 seconds to one minute to allow for increased commercial airtime.
The first documented Australian Rules football code was instituted by the Melbourne Football Club in 1859. There were ten simple rules, such as “tripping and pushing are both allowed” and “a goal must be kicked fairly between the posts”. Some of these original rules remain. Others have changed dramatically. Now there are more than 100 “laws of the game”.
The rules of the women’s competition, the AFLW, have been changed more than 16 times since it began in 2017. In the same time there have been more than 20 rule changes in the men’s competition.
Changing rules and regulations in complex environments such as professional sport is challenging, and professional leagues don’t always get it right.
Trialling a change before permanently implementing it is crucial to avoid negative or unintended consequences.
In 2016, before the inaugural AFLW season, the AFL trialled three different rules it hoped would make the game as exciting as possible.
These were the “last-touch” rule whereby a free kick would be awarded to the opponent of the player last touching the ball before it went out of bounds; a “density” rule requiring players to spread out more evenly across the field; and having 16 players per side instead of 18, to reduce the scrimmages that lead to more stoppages.
These rule modifications were trialled in exhibition matches. But based on data analysis and feedback from spectators, players, coaches and managers, the AFL concluded most of the changes added nothing to the spectacle of the game.
As a result just one on-field rule change was made in the first AFLW season: the 16-a-side rule.
Rule changes are made to benefit the sport, but introducing them will never be an easy process. Getting the balance right between evolving commercial needs and tradition will always be tricky, and some people will never be happy.
But if attention has been paid to the process, with feedback from all stakeholders, it’s more likely new rules will be accepted and quickly integrated into the fabric of the sport.
The AFLW research outlined in this article was partially funded by the AFL.
Pamm Phillips has received funding from the AFL for research not related to this topic. She is Editor in Chief of Sport Management Review, a leading academic journal in the field of sport management.
Political Roundup: Stuart Nash’s resignation shows our leaders need a lesson in civics
Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards.
I teach a first year course at Victoria University of Wellington about government and the political process in New Zealand. In “Introduction to Government and Law”, students learn there are rules preventing senior public servants from getting involved in big political debates – as we have recently witnessed with Rob Campbell – and that government ministers aren’t allowed to interfere in some functions of the state, such as telling the Police where to make prosecutions.
It’s essentially a civics course about how our political system works, and hopefully the 1300 students who take the course each year will go off to work in government departments, businesses and other careers understanding the rules of our political system.
Politicians are fond of complaining about a lack of this type of political education amongst the voting public but, as we’ve seen in the last few weeks, so many of our leaders are themselves unaware of basic political rules.
As with Rob Campbell and other wayward senior public servant appointees like Steve Maharey and Ruth Dyson, Nash has pleaded it was just a mistake and, in defending his actions, he showed his ignorance of the rules. But shouldn’t we expect our leaders to have a much better understanding of the political rules about integrity? After all, Nash is no newbie – he’s been a minister since 2017, and an MP for 15 years.
The Rules Stuart Nash broke
The Minister of Police texted his resignation to the Prime Minister yesterday at about 2pm. Up until that point, he had been publicly defending the indefensible, which suggests that, in all likelihood, his resignation was a forced one.
So, what led to this? Two years ago Nash called Police Commissioner Andrew Coster about a decision a judge had made. The case involved a Southlander who had lost his firearms license in 2017, subsequently ignored the gun buyback scheme, and in 2021 was found to possess numerous firearms including an AR-15. On conviction, he was given a sentence of community detention.
Nash believed this judgement was terrible and the offender should have been jailed, so he phoned the Police Commissioner and asked “surely you’re going to appeal this?” Effectively, Nash’s question to the Commissioner about appealing can be seen as an instruction to the Police.
This is a very clear violation of constitutional rules in which government ministers are not allowed to in any way direct the Police in how they carry out their operations, including prosecutions. As Herald political editor Claire Trevett has written, “there are strict rules about not interfering in decisions undertaken by police”, and “there is no such thing as a friendly chat with a Police Commissioner when you’re a minister. It is one of the most politically sensitive relationships that there is.” She says his actions raise “questions about the separation of powers between the three branches of government”.
The Cabinet Manual – the rules for Ministers in how they govern – is very clear about this. Here’s the key section: “Ministers should bear in mind that they have the capacity to exercise considerable influence over the public service. Ministers should take care to ensure that their intentions are not misunderstood, and that they do not influence officials inappropriately, or involve themselves in matters that are not their responsibility.”
Nash has also criticised the judiciary’s decisions, saying on Newstalk ZB yesterday that, in the case of the firearms sentence, “I think that was a terrible decision by the judge.” He also sent a message on the radio to the judiciary, saying judges need to “read the room” on public attitudes to law and order.
The Cabinet Manual is also black and white on this issue, explaining ministers should not comment “adversely on the impartiality, personal views, or ability of any judge”.
By his actions and statements, Nash has shown that he doesn’t understand the constitutional independence of the police and the courts. He doesn’t understand the key rule that ministers cannot interfere with the police.
As Stuff’s political editor Luke Malpass writes today, “citizens deserve to know their justice will be not be influenced by ministers of the Crown calling up the police commissioner and suggesting to them, in any manner, to go harder on someone.”
1News’ Felix Desmarais elaborates on the importance of this, arguing that “ministerial influence over police operational matters is the first step on the long road to a police state. There must be a separation of powers, both real and perceived. It’s one of the fragile and precious threads upholding democracy. That’s why it’s codified – the Cabinet Manual is painfully, explicitly clear”.
Mateship problem in New Zealand politics
There is a cosiness in New Zealand politics that arises partly from the fact that we are a small and intimate society. It means close connections between powerful people are common, including between politicians, businesspeople, and public servants. It makes for a relaxed politics, in which integrity rules aren’t as strongly observed as in other countries.
The problem is that many of our leaders are “mates” with each other – across the many different spheres of power and influence.
Ironically this mateship was even advertised by Stuart Nash in his defence of his violation of the rules. When confronted by the media about his phone call to the Police Commissioner, Nash explained: “I was chewing the fat with a guy who was a mate”.
Nash elaborated on how this wasn’t a big deal to get a call from a “mate”: “The Police Commissioner is a very enabled, very smart man who can make his own decisions, when he gets a mate calling him, questioning about the veracity of a case, it’s up to him to determine.”
Furthermore, the Commissioner himself essentially backed this up yesterday, downplaying the whole conversation: “I regarded the phone call as a venting of that frustration, and nothing more. I felt this was a rhetorical question, not a request, and I did not take any action following the phone call.”
Nash should be fired from Cabinet
The Prime Minister has decided not to fire Nash from Cabinet completely, allowing him to keep his other ministerial roles of economic development, forestry and oceans and fisheries. Hipkins has defended keeping Nash on as a minister saying that the loss of the Police portfolio is “proportionate” enough as a punishment.
But it won’t be enough to satisfy others, because Nash’s mistake wasn’t made in his role as Police Minister, but as a minister in general.
Leading constitutional academic Andrew Geddis has therefore come out this morning with a call on the AM Show for Nash to be fired from Cabinet: “I think he breached ministerial standards and… he doesn’t seem to understand what those rules are or why they’re there… Frankly, I think he’s also ruled himself as being suitable to be a minister. I think he probably should be gone from Cabinet altogether.”
Former minister Peter Dunne also went on the AM Show to say that Nash has to go: “I think he should’ve resigned altogether for this simple reason: the Cabinet manual makes it clear that you don’t interfere with court decisions and the police have constabulary independence – he breached both those counts”.
Dunne credits Hipkins with moving with speed on Nash’s Police portfolio, but says that “the timidity of the judgment” in leaving Nash in his overall job, will distract from that and won’t allow the Government to “move on” from the issue.
Newstalk ZB’s Heather du Plessis-Allan also argues today that Nash is turning into a liability for the Labour Government, pointing out that recently, and especially since the cyclone, he’s “done some weird stuff”.
Here’s du Plessis-Allan’s list of Nash’s mistakes: “He took umbrage at the warning that power might be out for two weeks after the cyclone, he said it was alarmist and over the top based on who knows what, because some people are without power and it’s been a month. His response to gang crime was to plead with the gangs to pull their heads in. He defended the forestry companies saying most of the slash wasn’t theirs when it actually overwhelmingly is.”
She argues that Nash is likely to create more embarrassment in his other portfolios.
Similarly, Luke Malpass questions whether Hipkins can allow Nash to stay in Cabinet: “His judgement has to be in question, and it is difficult to see how he can continue to function effectively when he was prepared to make the call he did and then not realise he shouldn’t have made it.”
But Malpass points out that although Nash is “not regarded as a particularly effective minister”, he’s been useful for Labour because he’s got a persona as “an important jack-the-lad type figure in a Labour Party that has had issues in the past appealing to men”.
Other commentators say that Nash has become a liability because of his “bravado”. Newshub political editor Jenna Lynch reports: “Beehive sources behind the scenes were in disbelief, saying the now former Police Minister had ‘too much testosterone’ and – brutally – that his actions were ‘dumb as f***’.”
Newsroom political editor Jo Moir argues today that Hipkins would be wise to reconsider keeping Nash on, as he has failed to “kill off” the controversy with his halfway measure of only taking away his Police role. She thinks he needs to go completely, and that the PM should announce another reshuffle: “Hipkins has done nothing to respond to Nash’s inability to identify that his actions were unwise, unprofessional, and made him unfit for any ministerial role. If after almost six years as a minister, Nash still doesn’t know what breaching the Cabinet manual looks like how can Hipkins trust him not to do it again?”
Replacement for Nash
Megan Woods has been temporarily put in charge of the Police portfolio, but is unlikely to continue in it. According to Jenna Lynch, Hipkins is going to make a decision on his permanent replacement before Monday.
It will have to be a very senior Cabinet minister, and one who is up to the challenge of convincing the public that Labour is tough enough on law and order. The leading contender for this is Andrew Little, who is currently without any heavy portfolios.
Lynch reports, “Little’s already got six portfolios – Defence, GCSB, NZSIS, Public Service, Treaty Negotiations and the Terror Attack inquiry – but a lot of those would work well with Police.” She points out that Hipkins will need a very safe pair of hands, as the next appointment will be the fifth Police Minister in less than a year.
Lynch also points to Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty as a possibility but notes McAnulty himself has stated he’s “already got a lot on”, especially with Emergency Management and Three Waters. But if Hipkins really wants to replace Nash with someone with a similar conservative, provincial and straight-talking persona, then McAnulty will be the best choice.
Regardless of who is chosen as the Police Minister, or whether Nash is allowed to stay on in Cabinet, the Opposition will – and should – keep up pressure on the Government’s failings in terms of political integrity.
Of course, this is not a problem that is unique to the current Labour Government. When National was last in government John Key was forced to fire Maurice Williamson in 2014 for also calling the Police to enquire what they were doing about a particular investigation involving a financial donor to the National Party.
What’s more, National’s own integrity is still under question over MP Barbara Kuriger’s misuse of her authority in her campaign with the Ministry for Primary Industries’ in which she has inappropriately been pursuing her family’s own case relating to animal cruelty charges. As Jo Moir points out today, “Luxon will need to give some serious thought to how tough he goes on Hipkins keeping Nash in other roles, when Kuriger’s lapse of judgment was just as serious and over a more prolonged period.”
Conflicts of interest are too often coming up on all sides of politics. Perhaps it’s time for all MPs and senior public officials to sign up for a civics class, so that they can be reacquainted with the rules about integrity in public office.
Further reading on Stuart Nash stepping down as Police Minister
Kimberlite volcanic rock with mantle crystals (green olivine and purple and orange garnet) and fragments of country rock (light grey).Author provided
New research is shedding light on the tumultuous processes that give rise to diamonds, by homing in on a distinct purple companion found alongside them.
Diamonds are highly prized for their qualities but also for their rarity. One way to look for them is to search for associated minerals that occur more commonly, such as the chromium-rich pyrope garnet.
This vibrant purple garnet is easily found by diamond exploration companies, in sediment downstream from potentially diamond-bearing volcanic pipes, and within the pipes themselves. The presence of purple garnet is an indicator diamonds may also be present.
Moreover, this garnet isn’t just found near diamonds, but is also consistently found inside them. So by enhancing our understanding of pyrope garnet, and how it forms, we can also enhance our understanding of diamond formation.
It was previously thought this type of garnet could not form very deep in the Earth. The theory went that it originated from a different chromium-rich mineral, called spinel, which formed at a shallow depth in the mantle and was then pushed down where temperatures and pressures were higher – leading to the garnet’s formation.
Our latest research, published today in Nature, uses a new model to revisit an old theory that suggests these pyrope garnets are actually formed much deeper in the mantle, about 100km-250km below the present surface. It also suggests diamonds may be rarer than we think.
Pyrope garnets range in colour from lilac to violet. Their colour reflects high metal chromium content. Shutterstock
How diamonds and pyrope garnet form
Diamond is the crystalline form of elemental carbon, stable at very high pressures and relatively low temperatures – accidentally brought to the surface through powerful volcanic eruptions.
The necessary conditions to form diamond at great depth in the Earth’s mantle are only met in a few places. The geographic distribution of diamond is very uneven, with notable concentrations in southern Africa, the Congo, Tanzania, Canada, Siberia and Brazil. All of these places are characterised by ancient continental crust between 2.5 and 3.5 billion years old.
This crust is underlain by deep solid “roots” – like the keel of an iceberg – made of mantle which has become highly chemically depleted through intense melting over time.
It’s here in this depleted mantle, which extends as deep as 250km into the hotter, stirring mantle below it, that diamonds have the best opportunity to form. So what about their chromium-rich companions?
Using a thermodynamic computer model, we were able to demonstrate that pyrope garnets can form very deep in the Earth, at the same depths as diamonds. Specifically, these garnets would have formed during intense heating events with extreme pressures and temperatures in excess of 1,800℃.
Although this is a very exciting finding in itself, what makes it more relevant is that it informs two other significant theories.
The first relates to why the continents formed the way they did – a point experts have long speculated about.
As mentioned above, pyrope garnets formed in extreme heat upwellings coming from great depths. Our findings suggest these upwellings then melted the upper mantle into place, forming the stable base of the continents.
In other words, the “roots” which help continents remain stable for billions of years are leftovers from the same mantle melting events that produced pyrope garnets.
The second major inference relates to the rarity of diamonds.
Some researchers believe diamonds were not originally rare, but that many were destroyed as the mantle root was eroded and modified due to continental plates moving over the globe. Our model offers the alternative perspective that diamonds may have actually always been rare.
How can we evaluate whether the necessary cradles of diamond – bits of very highly depleted mantle in the continental “roots” – were once common and became rare over time, or whether they have always been rare?
This kaleidoscopic image is a diamond cradle rock under a microscope. In this view, the garnet is the black mineral. Author provided
When intense melting events happened on the early Earth, the melts themselves erupted at the continental surface as very fluid lavas, called “komatiites”. These lavas are preserved and are widely analysed. They have varying compositions, and our model predicts which of these could have formed alongside chromium-rich pyrope garnet.
We know from tens of thousands of chemical analyses of komatiite, that the particular composition associated with this pyrope garnet is very rare. That’s because in order for it to form, magma must interact with exceptionally depleted mantle that has gone through many melting events. Only between 8%-28% of komatiite fits this bill.
From this, we can infer that both the pyrope garnets, and the very depleted mantle domains they come from, have always been rare – even back on the early Earth. And because diamonds have an affinity for these particular rocks, they too must have always been rare – making them all the more remarkable.
Carl Walsh holds a QUT postgraduate research award (PRA) scholarship.
Balz Kamber receives funding from the Australian Research Council for Discovery Grant DP220100136 for work that will build on the model predictions explained in this piece.
Emma Tomlinson receives funding from the European Union through an ERC consolidator grant ERC-COG-2021/101044276 to work Archaean lithosphere formation. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
A fossil extinct eagle has been found that was twice the size of the wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax), Australia’s largest living bird of prey.Michael Lee, Author provided
The year is 1959. Speleologists descend a 17-metre shaft to explore the depths of Mairs Cave in the southern Flinders Ranges. Some 55 metres into the main chamber, they find fossils scattered throughout a boulder pile. Among these fossils are a claw and part of a wing bone that appear to have come from a large eagle.
Over a decade passes. An expedition to the cave, led by naturalist Hans Mincham and palaeontologist and geologist Brian Daily, now arrives with the purpose of retrieving more fossils. Among the many mammal fossils they recover are another talon and most of a large bird breastbone – from the same large eagle.
Exploring the depths of Mairs Cave, the place where the fossils were found. Aaron Camens
No more fossils of this animal are found until more than 50 years later. It is December of 2021, and a team of Flinders University palaeontologists and speleologists have travelled to the cave for a single purpose – to find more of this enigmatic bird. As they descend into the cave’s depths, they hope to find a few more bones. Instead, they find a partial skeleton, including leg and wing bones, and a skull. With this last discovery, we were finally able to name and describe this gigantic eagle in the Journal of Ornithology.
History’s third-largest eagle
Dynatoaetus gaffae (Gaff’s powerful eagle) lived during the Pleistocene epoch, perhaps between 700,000 and 50,000 years ago. At twice the size of a wedge-tailed eagle (which it coexisted with) and with a potential wingspan of up to 3m, this species is the largest known eagle to have lived in Australia, and one of the largest continental raptors in the world.
Only two larger eagles ever existed anywhere: Gigantohierax suarezi, which hunted giant rodents in Cuba, and the giant Haasts eagle, Hieraaetus moorei that hunted large moa in New Zealand.
Thanks to the relatively complete skeleton from Mairs Cave, we were able to identify other fossils of Dynatoaetus from the Naracoorte caves in South Australia and the Wellington caves in New South Wales. It appears this species was widespread across most of southern Australia.
A comparison of the tarsometatarsus (foot bone) of Dynatoaetus and a female Wedge-tailed eagle, with scaled silhouettes of the entire animals. Ellen Mather
A surprising family tree
After discovering the fossils, we investigated how Dynatoaetus was related to other eagles, with surprising results.
Dynatoaetus was not closely related to any modern Australian eagle. Instead, these birds (and another fossil Australian raptor Cryptogyps lacertosus) were related to the old-world vultures and to the serpent-eagles of south Asia and Africa.
Dynatoaetus was clearly not a vulture-like scavenger, as indicated by its large and powerful leg bones and talons, so to infer how it lived, we looked to the serpent-eagles.
Serpent-eagles, as their common name suggests, primarily hunt snakes and other reptiles. Most are small to medium-sized raptors and would have been dwarfed by Dynatoaetus.
However, there is one species in this subfamily that is an exception: the Philippine eagle. This raptor is one of the largest eagles alive today, and unlike its reptile-eating relatives, it prefers to prey on monkeys, flying lemurs, bats, birds, and occasionally young pigs or deer.
The Philippine eagle, depicted above, is a close relative of the extinct Dynatoaetus and one of the largest living eagles. Sinisa Djordje Majetic
Strong feet for large prey
Much like the Philippine eagle and other very large raptors, the legs and feet of Dynatoaetus were quite robust. This strongly suggests it was suited for killing large prey, perhaps much heavier than itself.
Dynatoaetus shared ancient Australia with giant kangaroos and flightless birds, the young and sickly of which would have been suitable prey. Koalas and possums would have been plentiful in the treetops, and Dynatoaetus was certainly large enough to snatch them up.
This giant eagle was most likely one of Australia’s top predators during the Pleistocene.
We can also find clues to potential prey via fossils found alongside Dynatoaetus. Small mammals have previously been collected from Mairs Cave, but the 2021 trip also recovered bones of short-faced kangaroos, wombats, bettongs, bandicoots, possums and even koalas (the only record of koalas inhabiting the Flinders Ranges), many of which were potential prey for the giant eagle.
We further found fossils of thylacines, Tasmanian devils and Thylacoleo (the marsupial “lion”), indicating Dynatoaetus competed for prey with a cohort of marsupial carnivores. No one has yet identified beak and talon marks left on fossil bones from this giant raptor – but this may simply reflect that, until now, no-one was looking.
The end of Australia’s megafauna
So why did Dynatoaetus become extinct? It appears to have died out around the same time as much of the Australian megafauna, around 50,000 years ago. Perhaps it was specialised to hunt certain large species, and when this preferred prey went extinct it was unable to adapt.
With the demise of specialist raptors like Dynatoaetus and Cryptogyps, the generalist wedge-tailed eagle was left as the sole survivor of the large inland raptors.
Mike Lee has a joint appointment at the South Australian Museum and Flinders University, and receives funding from the Australian Research Council
Trevor H. Worthy has received funding from the Australian Research Council.
Aaron Camens and Ellen K. Mather do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Recent extreme weather events have provided a foretaste of how supercharged storms might threaten our future. So the release today of a new report from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment (PCE) is very good timing.
Titled “Are we building harder, hotter cities? The vital importance of urban green spaces”, the report examines the climate vulnerability of urban Aotearoa New Zealand, and the prospects for building resilience.
To combat the multiple threats to cities of a hotter and wetter future due to climate change, the report suggests two potential pathways. We can take an engineering approach, with more air conditioning and stormwater infrastructure. Or we can make our urban areas greener.
The first option, according to the report, lacks the “biodiversity, recreational and cultural co-benefits that make green space such an important element of a healthy, liveable city”. In other words, green spaces aren’t just pleasant places for a family picnic. They are a vital part of an ecosystem, and a key to making cities liveable as the climate changes.
Unfortunately, precious urban green space has dwindled over the past six decades. It’s been replaced by paved roads, car parks and larger buildings on smaller sites. Essentially, existing urban green space is in competition with the demand for more housing.
As the authors state, talk of preserving or expanding green space inevitably leads to a central question:
Whether, in the midst of burgeoning demand for housing, the provision and protection of urban green space is really something that warrants attention. After all, every square metre of potentially developable land that is set aside as parks, yards, gardens or lawns cannot be used for housing.
In the wake of the recent Auckland floods, one of the first council policy actions in the city was a call to delay the housing intensification plan. Housing, planning and environmental agencies are clearly in a difficult position, on the front line of climate adaptation.
Higher-density housing can reduce green space: the estimated increase in runoff from a townhouse compared with a conventional dwelling. PCE, CC BY-SA
Loss of lawns
The three cities analysed in the report – Auckland, Hamilton and Greater Wellington – are greener than some might think. Hamilton’s green space is about 45% of its urban area; Greater Wellington’s is 65%; and Auckland’s was 55% (though Auckland data are over a decade old, so this is likely lower).
But one caveat in the report is that “residential yards and gardens account for slightly more than half of available green space in all three cities”. Since most backyard gardens are mostly grass, they have less to offer environmentally – “limited cooling, no shade provision, low diversity and little support for native species”.
Fewer lawns also appeared to be the biggest driver of urban green space loss. In Auckland and Hamilton, it’s estimated lawns have declined by at least 10-15% as a proportion of the urban area between 1980 and 2016. This is attributed to infill development placing more and larger houses on single sites.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that disappearing private, urban green spaces such as lawns are not being replaced with public green space by councils. The report highlights that “a number of councils – including in Hamilton, Tauranga and Hutt City – have provided no more than a few square metres of new parkland for each additional resident since 2016”.
Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch have done better in setting aside areas larger then ten hectares. But in Christchurch, the report says, this is only because the 2011 earthquake rendered large areas uninhabitable.
Auckland’s Albert Park: urban trees are important but protecting them has become complex and costly. Getty Images
Threats to trees
Big problems with tree protection are also behind the loss of green space. This is attributed to changes to rules in the Resource Management Act in 2009 and 2013. These removed blanket tree protection, with onerous and costly processes now making it harder for councils to protect trees.
Effectively, trees deserving protections have to be identified in a district plan, requiring “councils to undertake a plan change process every time a protection is considered worthy”. In Auckland, it’s estimated that “adding a tree to the Notable Tree Schedule costs $1,484 and takes between 34 and 42 months”.
The numbers show how bad tree protection has become: “Between 2016 and 2021, Auckland Council failed to process any of the 587 nominations it received for tree protections.”
Auckland’s unitary plan only contains 6,000 to 7,000 scheduled (protected) trees, while in “Hamilton, Tauranga, Upper Hutt, Lower Hutt, Porirua and Wellington City, fewer than 500 trees had been scheduled”.
Overall, the report notes, there is “no requirement to plan for or provide public green space in New Zealand cities”. A lack of guidance “tends to mean that parks and reserves are treated as a discretionary ‘nice to have’ when hard decisions about provision levels and funding are made”.
The report offers several recommendations for reversing the trend of lost green space. Primarily, councils should adopt “more explicit provisions on green spaces based on consultation with their communities”. They should also measure green space and use standardised monitoring systems.
Part of this involves improving green spaces where they already exist. The government’s Medium Density Residential Standards (MDRS) require 20% of a site to be green space. But this is often done in a piecemeal fashion, with less useful strips of grass scattered around a site.
The report suggests using a “green score” accreditation scheme to measure the potential of private green space to host trees and shrubs, and to measure biodiversity.
A few quick implementation ideas are also offered, including lining road corridors (which “account for 15-20% of the surface of our cities”) with more native plants and trees. Parks could also improve by “simply adding patches of larger shrubs and trees”.
Ultimately, it will come down to how councils can pay for more and better green space. One suggestion is that developers who “go below a certain level of private green space […] pay for the loss” with a development contribution – a fee paid to the council to help defray the cost of infrastructure (in this case more green space).
Councils might impose citywide or more targeted green space rates levies, though the report doesn’t estimate the cost of adding or improving green spaces in any of the studied cities.
In a way, this report tells us many things we intuitively know. New and denser housing developments are sprouting up, we are losing private green space, we have weak tree protections and we should expand and improve our urban green space.
But the commissioner has done a good job backing this up with research. Given recent events, and looking towards a future of climate extremes, we can use this evidence to demand the changes needed to make our cities more resilient and liveable.
Timothy Welch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A group of tagged minke whales forage off the coast of the West Antarctic Peninsula.Duke Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing. Taken under NMFS permit #23095.
Meagre giants hide in the ice-covered bays and fjords of the Antarctic peninsula. Antarctic minke whales spend their summers foraging in these waters, devouring the dense and abundant krill that feed and grow underneath the sea ice.
These sleek and subtle predators are the smallest members of the rorqual family, which includes some of the largest animals known to have existed, such as blue, fin and sei whales. Minke whales are much smaller than their giant relatives (only about one-twentieth the mass of a blue whale), but a typical minke still weighs about five metric tonnes. That’s equivalent to 18 large grizzly bears or 45 Arnold Schwarzeneggers.
Despite their size, remarkably little is known about the behaviour of minkes or their role in rapidly changing Antarctic ecosystems. So, in the summers of 2018 and 2019, my colleagues and I from Stanford University, UC Santa Cruz and Duke Marine Labs teamed up to study minke whale foraging ecology.
Our team, led by David Cade, made an amazing discovery: minke whales are huge (by human standards), but they are about as small as a whale that feeds by filtering large numbers of tiny prey out of the water can be.
Follow the whale
We recovered high-resolution movement data from 29 tagged minke whales around the west Antarctic peninsula. In addition to these new and enlightening behavioural data, the sizes of tagged individuals were studied from drone-based photographs.
Antarctic minke whales, along with their supersized rorqual cousins, use a technique called engulfment filtration feeding (or lunge feeding) to hunt Antarctic krill. This strategy requires the whale to accelerate to a speed of about 4 metres per second before filling its mouth with prey-laden water that is then filtered through a sieve-like structure known as baleen.
Engulfment filtration feeding is highly efficient, even for the largest individuals, as blue whales continue to increase in feeding efficiency with greater size.
Hunting at night
Compared to blue whales, each lunging gulp a minke takes contains far less food per kilogram of whale. However, the tag data revealed another way that minkes make up for this energy disparity.
Where a 20m blue whale can take up to two minutes to engulf and filter its prey, 7-10m minkes can complete an engulfment cycle in a matter of seconds. By day, minke whales are rarely able to capitalise on their speedy eating habits, as they may have to dive over 100m to reach their prey.
This means much of their daytime foraging is spent at the surface or swimming to depth, as they need air just like any other mammal. But as night falls, the krill move upward in the water column to the surface.
Soon enough, the minke whales no longer need to hold their breath for minutes at a time just to reach their prey. Then, the minkes become like Pac-Man in their polar environment as they accelerate, engulf, filter and repeat as fast as they possibly can. They consume krill at the absolute limit that their body size imposes on their filtering time.
An evolutionary mystery
The smaller the minke, the faster it filters, but it also becomes less efficient with each gulp. By extrapolating the tag data, we found that minkes below a specific size – 5m, or about the length of a newly weaned minke whale – are not able to filter fast enough to meet their basic energetic needs (the cost of living imposed by metabolism and growth).
This tells us that while minke whales are still quite large, they are about as small as they can be in our modern ocean conditions. The specific minimum size limit of these whales is highly dependent on the rorqual foraging strategy, energetically costly lunge feeding and the high costs of heating and maintaining their mammalian bodies.
However, we suspect the basic principle of this minimum size constraint, that only a limited amount of water can be filtered per time, can help crack an evolutionary chicken-or-egg mystery: what came first, filter-feeding or large body size?
Filter feeders have always lived large
Way back in time, when animals first emerged in the early Cambrian era, the first free-swimming filter-feeder was the large (70cm was large for the time) shrimp-like Tamisiocaris borealis, which raked planktonic creatures from the water with its comb-like front appendages.
Over the next 500 million years, the fossil record shows a diverse range of creatures occupying this free-swimming filter feeder role. They include bony fishes, cartilaginous sharks and rays, ancient reptilian ichthyosaurs and the gargantuan mammals we know as modern baleen whales.
While these animals originate from very different branches of the tree of life, they all have one thing in common: they are large. Most often the largest of their kind.
Our minke whales, the diminutive giants, tell us this is no coincidence. Filter feeding requires a large body size to evolve. But when filter feeding does evolve, it can drive large animals to become colossal.
Jake Linsky does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hal Pawson, Professor of Housing Research and Policy, and Associate Director, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney
Whatever the result of the New South Wales election on March 25, rising housing stress is a problem the new state government will have to confront.
The numbers of people seeking help are pushing social housing and homelessness systems to the brink.
But how did these sectors end up in such a vulnerable place? And why are some of their problems worse than in other states?
Population has outpaced social housing supply
The stock of social housing in Australia has hardly changed in 25 years. It has fallen further and further behind the supply needed to keep pace with population growth.
Social housing accounted for more than 6% of occupied dwellings in 1996. By 2021, it was barely above 4%. Rather than reflecting active policy – such as large-scale privatisation or demolition – this is mainly a case of simple neglect.
At first sight, NSW did relatively well during the 2010s. Social housing stock apparently rose by 9% compared with 12% for population.
Unfortunately, this is a somewhat misleading impression. It reflects the NSW government’s 2016 decision to widen its definition of social housing to include less-subsidised affordable rental housing managed by community housing providers. While this housing meets an important need for low-paid “essential workers”, it is no substitute for housing that very low-income earners can afford.
If not for this redefinition, the NSW chart would more closely resemble the national post-1996 picture.
Social housing supply
Social housing construction numbers aren’t directly published in any official series but can be estimated from Australian Bureau of Statistics data on housing commencements. The 2010s began with a dramatic spike as the federal Rudd government invested in social housing as part of its emergency response to the Global Financial Crisis.
But then national and state governments largely stepped back from new social housing investment. NSW annual commencements ran at only 500-1,000 for most of the 2010s. This is less than half the minimum number needed to maintain social housing’s share of all housing.
Unlike other states such as Victoria and Queensland, the NSW government resisted calls for state-funded social housing investment as part of pandemic recovery plans in 2020 and 2021. In contrast with those states, NSW expects to achieve only a minimal net increase in social housing in the first half of the 2020s.
Not only is expected construction modest in scale, it is mainly associated with large-scale demolition of “obsolete” public housing to liberate land. Some is then sold to generate investment funds.
Unlike Victoria, the NSW government has continued to insist new social housing cannot be funded from general government revenue.
The trends are even more problematic than stock numbers suggest, because the system’s capacity to generate lettable vacancies continues to decline. Very few newly built properties are coming up for let. And the flow of existing tenancies being ended has dwindled as tenants struggle to find alternatives in the private rental market.
Social housing lettings in 2021-22 were down 13% compared with 2014-15. And a growing share of scarce lettings has to be devoted to priority applicants – those with the most urgent and severe needs. Priority lets grew by 37% over the past four years and made up nearly two-thirds of all lettings (64%) by 2021-22.
Vacancies remaining for non-priority applicants have almost halved since 2014-15 – down 47%.
Homelessness
Many of those assigned priority status are homeless or at imminent risk of becoming homeless. The latest official statistics that directly measure homelessness are from the 2016 census when 38,000 people were homeless in NSW. Relative to population, homelessness was higher than in any other mainland state.
Measured by the average monthly caseload of specialist homelessness services agencies, homelessness has more recently been rising relatively slowly in NSW. It was up 5% in the four years to 2021-22 compared with 8% nationally.
But rising numbers are being turned away – nearly 10,000 people in 2021-22 – up by 22% in three years. This suggests the system is increasingly overloaded.
The wider point is that homelessness is rising while social housing capacity is shrinking.
After several years of stability or slight reductions, the social housing waiting list (excluding existing tenants) grew by 15% in 2021-22 to 52,000 households. But annual snapshot statistics mask large numbers joining and leaving the list each year.
By our calculations, 17,000 households newly enrolled on the NSW social housing register in 2020-21, nearly double the number given a tenancy. That’s another powerful measure of shortage.
Note that the rules on waiting list eligibility are strict. The weekly household income limit in 2022 was $690 – well below the full-time minimum wage of $812.60.
Far greater numbers of people are homeless or living with rental stress than are on the list. Many people who could qualify realise their chances are so slim it isn’t worth the trouble. Others drop off when they realise they face a wait of years or even decades.
Our recent census-based analysis shows there were well over 200,000 NSW households with an unmet need for social or affordable housing in 2021. Some 144,000 of them would probably qualify for social housing.
True, some of these needs could be met in other ways, such as a major increase in rent assistance. But even if that happened and if no-grounds evictions were outlawed in NSW, private tenancies will remain far less secure than social housing. Arguably, that makes them fundamentally unsuitable for vulnerable people and low-income families.
What lies ahead?
The extraordinary rent spike of 2021-2022 has been the main cause of rising housing need. This happened while immigration all but stopped during the pandemic.
With migration rebounding, there is a serious worry rent inflation will continue to rage, placing even more low-income Australians in financial stress.
Somewhere on the horizon is modest help via the Albanese government’s Housing Australia Future Fund. The target is 30,000 new social and affordable dwellings over five years, with NSW likely to get a large share.
However, the HAFF legislation remains under review. Even when new homes begin to flow through, numbers will be quite small relative to need.
In NSW, party leaders are touting rival plans to assist first home buyers, but have long neglected arguably more serious policy challenges at the lower end of the housing market. Hundreds of thousands of households are struggling as a result.
Hal Pawson receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), the Queensland Council of Social Service and Crisis UK. He is affiliated with Community Housing Canberra as a non-Executive Director
A group of three mustatil and later Bronze Age funerary pendants on a rocky outcrop, southeast of AlUla County.AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla, Author provided
Over the past five years, archaeologists have identified more than 1,600 monumental stone structures dotted across a swathe of Saudi Arabia larger than Italy. The purpose of these ancient stone buildings, dating back more than 7,000 years, has been a puzzle for researchers.
Our excavations and surveys reveal these were ritual structures, constructed by ancient herders and hunters who gathered to sacrifice animals to an unknown deity – perhaps in response to ancient climate change. The study is published in PLOS ONE today.
Desert discoveries
In the 1970s, the first archaeological surveys of northwest Saudi Arabia identified an ancient and mysterious rectangular structure. The sandstone walls of the structure were 95m long, and although it was determined to be unique, no further study of this unusual site was undertaken.
Over the following decades, airline passengers would see similar large “rectangles” dotted across the country. However, it was not until 2018 that one was excavated.
The main architectural features of a mustatil. AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla, Author provided
These structures are now known as mustatils (Arabic for rectangle). We have been studying them for the past five years as part of a larger archaeological study sponsored by the Saudi Royal Commission for AlUla.
The smallest mustatils are around 20m long, while the largest are over 600m. Previous work by our team determined that all mustatils follow a similar architectural plan. Two thick ends were connected by between two to five long walls, creating up to four courtyards.
Access to the mustatil was through a narrow entrance in the base. There would then have been a long walk, perhaps in the form of a procession, to the “head”, where the main ritual activity took place.
Previous studies determined that the mustatils are at least 7,000 years old, dating to the end of the Neolithic period.
Cattle remains
In 2019–2020, we undertook excavations at a mustatil site called IDIHA-0008222. The structure, made from unworked sandstone, measures 140m in length and 20m in width.
Excavations in the head of the mustatil revealed a semi-subterranean chamber. Within this chamber were three large, vertical stones. We have interpreted these as “betyls”, or sacred standing stones which represented unknown ancient deities.
The excavated mustatil at IDIHA-0008222. AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla, Author provided
Surrounding these stones were well-preserved cattle, goat, and gazelle horns. The horns are so well preserved that much of what we find is the horn sheath, made of keratin – the same substance as hair and nails. We found only the upper cranial elements of these animals: the teeth, skulls, and horns. This suggests a clear and specific choice of offerings.
Further analysis suggests the bulk of these remains belonged to male animals and the cattle were aged between 2 and 12 years. Their slaughter would have formed a significant proportion of a community’s wealth, indicating these were high-value offerings.
Human remains
Current evidence suggests that the mustatils were in use between 5300 and 4900 BCE, a time when Arabia was green and humid. However, within a few generations, the ancient inhabitants of Saudi Arabia began to reuse these structures, this time to bury human body parts.
At IDIHA-0008222, a small structure had been built next to the mustatil. Inside were a partial foot, five vertebrae and several long bones.
Their placement suggests soft tissue was still present when they were buried. Forensic anthropologists were able to determine that the remains likely belonged to an individual aged between 30 and 40 years.
Our work at other mustatils has revealed similar deposits of human remains. Were these remains buried in attempt to claim ownership of the structure or some form of later ritual? These questions remain to be answered.
Pointing to water
The mustatils are changing how we view the Neolithic period not just in Arabia but across the Middle East. The sheer size of these structures and the amount of work involved in their construction suggests that multiple communities came together to create them, most probably as a form of group bonding.
Moreover, their widespread distribution across Saudi Arabia suggests the existence of a shared religious belief, one held over a vast and un-paralleled geographic distance. Currently, fewer than ten mustatils have been excavated, so our understanding of these structures is still in its infancy.
Mustatil locations in Saudi Arabia, with the location of site IDIHA-0008222 marked in red. Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, the GIS User Community, USGS, NOAA / AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla, Author provided
The key question to be answered is “why were they built?” A survey trip by our team may have, in part, solved this mystery.
While recording these structures after rain, we noted that almost all mustatils pointed towards areas that held water. Perhaps the mustatils were constructed and the animals offered to the god or gods to ensure the continuation of the rains and the fertility of the land.
The possibility remains that the mustatils were built in response to a changing climate, as the region became increasingly arid like it is today.
Two mustatil in Khaybar County pointing to standing water after rain. AAKSA / The Royal Commission for AlUla, Author provided
Our study of the mustatils is ongoing. Our new project at the University of Sydney is focused on understanding why these monumental structures and others were built and what brought about their end.
We hope future excavations and analyses will reveal further insights into the life and death of the mustatils and the people who built them.
Dog ownership is a lot of furry companionship, tail wags and chasing balls, and ample unconditional love. However, some dog owners are also managing canine pals struggling with mental illness.
A newly published study in PLOS ONE has examined the brain scans of anxious and non-anxious dogs, and correlated them with behaviour. The research team at Ghent University, Belgium, found that our anxious dog friends not only have measurable differences in their brains linked to their anxiety, but these differences are similar to those found in humans with anxiety disorders as well.
Anxious friends
Anxiety disorders in humans are varied and can be categorised into several main types. Overall, they represent high levels of fear, emotional sensitivity and negative expectations. These disorders can be difficult to live with and sometimes difficult to treat, in part due to how varied and complex anxiety is.
Researching anxiety in animals can help us to understand what drives it, and to improve treatment for both humans and animals. The new study sought to investigate possible pathways in the brain that are associated with anxiety in dogs. Understanding this could both improve treatment for anxiety in veterinary medicine, and reveal similarities with what we know of human anxiety.
Dogs with and without anxiety were recruited for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of their brains. Dogs have been involved in awake fMRI studies before, but for this one, with dogs that might get easily stressed out, the dogs were under general anaesthesia.
Owners of the dogs also filled out surveys on their pets’ behaviour. The researchers performed data analysis and modelling of brain function, focusing on regions of the brain likely to show differences related to anxiety. Based on previous research on animal and human anxiety, the team dubbed these brain regions the “anxiety circuit”.
They then analysed whether there were differences between the brain function of anxious and non-anxious dogs, and if those differences actually related to anxious behaviours.
Images from a previous study which scanned dog brains with fMRI while they were awake, showing a dog named Callie learning to sit in a training apparatus. Berns et al., 2012
Different brains
The researchers found there were indeed significant differences between anxious and non-anxious dogs. The main differences were in the communication pathways and connection strength within the “anxiety circuit”. These differences were linked with higher scores for particular behaviours in the surveys as well.
For example, anxious dogs had amygdalas (an area of the brain associated with the processing of fear) that were particularly efficient, suggesting a lot of experience with fear. (This is similar to findings from human studies.) Indeed, in the behaviour surveys, owners of anxious dogs noted increased fear of unfamiliar people and dogs.
The researchers also found less efficient connections in anxious dogs between two regions of the brain important for learning and information processing. This may help explain why the owners of the anxious dogs in the study reported lower trainability for their dog.
Anxious dogs may require more help, since their brains are processing everything around them differently to ‘normal’ dogs. Eric Ward/Unsplash
Brains are exquisitely complex biological computers, and our understanding of them is far from comprehensive. As such, this study should be interpreted cautiously.
The sample size was not large or varied enough to represent the entire dog population, and the way the dogs were raised, housed, and cared for could have had an effect. Furthermore, they were not awake during the scans, and that also may have influenced some of the results.
However, the study does show strong evidence for measurable differences in the way anxious dog brains are wired, compared to non-anxious dogs. This research can’t tell us whether changes in the brain caused the anxiety or the other way around, but anxiety in dogs is certainly real.
It’s in the interests of our anxious best friends that we appreciate they may be affected by a brain that processes everything around them differently to “normal” dogs. This may make it difficult for them to learn to change their behaviour, and they may be excessively fearful or easily aroused.
Thankfully, these symptoms can be treated with medication. Research like this could lead to more finessed use of medication in anxious dogs, so they can live happier and better adjusted lives.
If you have a dog you think might be anxious, you should speak to a veterinarian with special training in behaviour.
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