Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laure Poncet, Research officer, UNSW Sydney

Fire. Flood. Fire and flood together. Double-whammy storms. Unprecedented rainfall. Heatwaves. Climate change is making some of Australia’s weather more extreme. In 2023, the country was hit by a broad range of particularly intense events, with economy-wide impacts. Winter was the warmest in a record going back to 1910, while we had the driest September since at least 1900.

We often see extreme weather as distinct events in the news. But it can be useful to look at what’s happening over the year.

Today, more than 30 of Australia’s leading climate scientists released a report analysing ten major weather events in 2023, from early fires to low snowpack to compound events.

Can we say how much climate change contributed to these events? Not yet. It normally takes several years of research before we can clearly say what role climate change played. But the longer term trends are well established – more frequent, more intense heatwaves over most of Australia, marine heatwave days more than doubling over the last century, and short, intense rainfall events intensifying in some areas.

What happened in 2023?

January. Event #1: Record-breaking rain in the north (NT, WA, QLD)

The year began with above-average rainfall in northern Australia influenced by the “triple-dip” La Niña phase.

Some parts of the country were already experiencing heavy rainfall even before Cyclone Ellie arrived. From late December 2022 to early January 2023, Ellie brought heavy rainfall to Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Queensland, resulting in a one-in-100-year flooding of the Fitzroy River. Interestingly, Cyclone Ellie was only a “weak” Category 1 tropical cyclone. So why did it cause so much damage? In their analysis, climate scientists suggest it was actually low wind speeds in the mid-troposphere which allowed the system to stall and keep raining.

February–March. Event 2: Extreme rain and food shortages (NT, QLD)

Climate scientists observed the same behaviour from late February to early March 2023, when a persistent slow-moving low-pressure system known as a monsoonal low dumped heavy, widespread rain over the Northern Territory and north-west Queensland. The resulting floods cut transport routes in the NT, and led to food shortages.

June–August. Event 3 and 4: Warmest winter, little snow (NSW)

After a wet start to the year, conditions became drier and warmer in southern and eastern Australia. New South Wales experienced its warmest winter on record, with daily maximums more than 2°C above the long-term average.

The unusual heat and lack of precipitation translated into the second-worst snow season on record (the worst was 2006).

September. Event 5: Record heatwave (SA)

In September, South Australia faced a record-breaking heatwave. Temperatures reached as high as 38°C in Ceduna. As warming continues, scientists suggest unusual heat and heatwaves during the cool season will become more frequent and intense.

September also saw El Niño and a positive Indian Ocean Dipole declared by the Bureau of Meteorology. When these two climate drivers combine, we have a higher chance of a warm and dry Australia, particularly during late winter and spring.

Read more:
2023’s extreme storms, heat and wildfires broke records – a scientist explains how global warming fuels climate disasters

October. Event 6, 7 and 8: Fire-and-flood compound event (VIC), compound wind and rain storms (TAS), unusually early fires (QLD)

Dry conditions gave rise to an unseasonably early fire season in Victoria and Queensland. In October, Queensland’s Western Downs region was hit hard. Dozens of houses and two lives were lost in the town of Tara.

The same month, Victoria’s Gippsland region was hit by back-to-back fires and floods, a phenomenon known as a compound event.

While it’s difficult to attribute these events to climate change, scientists say hot and dry winters make Australia more prone to early season fires.

Also in October, a different compound event struck Tasmania in the form of successive low-pressure systems. The first dumped a month’s worth of rain in a few days over much of the state, while the second brought strong winds. The rain from the first storm loosened the soil, making it easier for trees to be blown down.

Scientists say the combined effects were more severe than if just one of these events occurred without the other. Such extreme wind-and-rain compound events are expected to occur more frequently in regions such as the tropics as the climate continues to change.

November. Event 9: Supercell thunderstorm trashed crops (QLD)

In November, a supercell thunderstorm hit Queensland’s south-east, destroying A$50 million worth of crops and farming equipment. Initial research suggests extreme winds and thunderstorms may become more likely under climate change, but more work is needed.

December. Event 10: Unprecedented flooding from Cyclone Jasper (QLD)

In mid-December, Tropical Cyclone Jasper made landfall as a Category 2 tropical cyclone in north Queensland. The system weakened into a tropical low and then stalled over Cape York. The weather system’s northerly winds drew in moist air from the Coral Sea, which collided with drier winds from the south-east. This caused persistent heavy rainfall over the region – up to 2 metres in places. Catchments flooded across the region, causing widespread damage to roads, buildings and crops. Similar to ex-Tropical Cyclone Ellie, most damage occurred after landfall as the system stalled and dumped rain.

Climate change can make extreme weather even more extreme

It’s generally easier to identify and understand the role of human-caused climate change in large-scale extreme events, particularly temperature extremes. So we can say 2023’s exceptional winter heat was probably intensified by what we have done to the climate system.

For smaller-scale extremes, it is often harder to determine the role of climate change, but there’s some evidence short, intense rainfall events are getting even more intense as the world warms. Early-season bushfires and low snow cover are consistent with what we expect under global warming.

There’s also an increasing threat from the risk of compound events where concurrent or consecutive extreme events can amplify damage.

Australia’s intense weather events during 2023 are broadly what we can expect to see as the world keeps getting hotter and hotter due to the heat-trapping greenhouse gases humanity continues to emit.

Read more:
Global heating may breach 1.5°C in 2024 – here’s what that could look like

Laure Poncet receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Andrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program.

– ref. What we know about last year’s top 10 wild Australian climatic events – from fire and flood combos to cyclone-driven extreme rain – https://theconversation.com/what-we-know-about-last-years-top-10-wild-australian-climatic-events-from-fire-and-flood-combos-to-cyclone-driven-extreme-rain-224614

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Treadwell, Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Auckland University of Technology

If journalism in Western democracies has been on a roller coaster in recent decades, in Aotearoa New Zealand this week it threatened to come right off the rails.

Today’s shocking announcement by owners Warner Bros Discovery of the closure of Newshub by the end of June will leave only state-funded TVNZ and Whakaata Māori providing public-interest, free-to-air broadcast news.

The impact on the country’s already shrinking and fragile public sphere will be considerable, as yet another tranche of sacked New Zealand journalists goes looking for work.

Up to 350 jobs will go, about 200 of which are from the news operation.

The brutal nature of the decision, and the apparent disregard for affected staff, echoes the closure last year of Mediaworks’ Today FM radio station. It should be yet another wake-up call about the vulnerability of the country’s precious and struggling news media to global investment priorities.

Diversity and competition

The news media is core infrastructure for a democracy. Any attempt at a self-governing society requires a well-informed and, to some degree, unified public.

Today, we understand this to mean media that act as the conduit for a significant plurality of voices, ideas and political arguments. And a healthy and diverse media ecosystem is required to enable this.

Read more:
Closures, cuts, revival and rebirth: how COVID-19 reshaped the NZ media landscape in 2020

Yes, television is now less central to our wider, mobile-based news consumption. But to have just one prime-time mainstream television news service for the entire country is a disaster.

TVNZ on its own will not be able to reflect the complex, multicultural and socially diverse country New Zealand is. Neither will it have the competition essential to doing its best work on behalf of the public.

And yet, despite warnings sounded since the internet began to erode news media income, the public sphere has been left to the vagaries of global markets – even more than other socially critical sectors such as education and health.

Loss of trust

Discovery New Zealand made after-tax losses in 2022 of more than NZ$34 million, up $800,000 on the previous year. Hence the decision of its owner, global media behemoth Warner Bros Discovery, to take out another foundation of the already teetering local news industry.

Politicians murmur about how terrible it is, but argue they can do nothing to save Newshub. The impacts of that impotence are as significant as any other challenge the local media face.

Broadcasting minister Melissa Lee today said there would be no loss of plurality in the national conversation because of the closure. She said most New Zealanders now get their news on mobile phones.

Read more:
Is Winston Peters right to call state-funded journalism ‘bribery’ – or is there a bigger threat to democracy?

But television news also relies on social media, not just the airwaves, for its dissemination. If people are looking on their phones for news, the stories from one of the country’s most impactful newsrooms will no longer be there.

Emergency funding through the government’s $55 million public-interest journalism fund helped during the pandemic lockdowns. But it also triggered allegations from right-wing pundits and politicians that the media had been bought.

Research conducted at the Centre for Media, Journalism and Democracy (JMAD) shows public trust in news is falling dramatically in Aotearoa New Zealand. Early results from this work in 2024 show that decline is accelerating.

The reasons for this loss of trust are complex and are under further study at JMAD. Indeed, the news media itself must look long in the mirror as it works through its trust issues. How did it lose the audience so badly?

But any attempts at rebuilding that trust and its role in a functioning democracy will be futile if the public perceives the production of news to be now largely controlled by self-interested global corporates.

Read more:
‘Let them watch Netflix’ – what can be salvaged from the wreckage of the failed TVNZ-RNZ merger?

Journalism as a public good

Poor media literacy, active conspiracy theorists, and decades of underfunding of journalism have likely all contributed to the increasing rejection of mainstream news media.

However, it would be foolish to think trust in democratic media can be rebuilt when the industrial forces behind it have only a financialised interest. If news is the daily record of human life, how can it be left to something as remote and disinterested as a global corporation?

None of this is to say the mainstream media should be viewed as entirely trustworthy. Some scepticism of everything, including news, is healthy in a democracy. We need critically thinking and politically active citizens challenging many things, including mainstream media news agendas.

But those serious about democracy understand the mainstream is where society is anchored, stable and productive.

The dangers of an increasingly fragmented and reduced mainstream media are real. It includes leaving open ground for radicalised actors to occupy and facilitate further social disharmony. If things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, as the poet Yeats put it, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.

The time to restore journalism as a public good and not simply a plaything for shareholders and other investors is overdue. The news in Aotearoa New Zealand today simply confirms that.

Dr Greg Treadwell is a former journalist who works at Auckland University of Technology and is a researcher in its Centre for Journalism, Media and Democracy. He is currently vice-president of the Journalism Education Association of New Zealand.

– ref. With the end of Newshub, the slippery slope just got steeper for NZ journalism and democracy – https://theconversation.com/with-the-end-of-newshub-the-slippery-slope-just-got-steeper-for-nz-journalism-and-democracy-224625

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Bowman, Professor of Pyrogeography and Fire Science, University of Tasmania

Victorians were braced for the worst on Wednesday amid soaring temperatures and gusty winds, creating the state’s worst fire conditions in years. Authorities have declared a “catastrophic” fire risk in some parts of the state.

At the time of writing, the Bayindeen bushfire near Ballarat was still burning out of control, almost a week after it began. It had razed 21,300 hectares, destroyed six homes and killed livestock. And more than 30,000 people in high-risk areas between Ballarat and Ararat had reportedly been told to leave their homes.

This statewide emergency is noteworthy for several reasons. First, it represent a big test of Australia’s updated fire danger rating system. The new version adopted in 2022 dictates that if a fire takes hold under catastrophic conditions, people should leave an area rather than shelter in place or stay defend their homes.

The second point to note is the timing: late February, when many Australians probably thought the worst of the bushfire season was over. Climate change is bringing not just more frequent and severe fires, but longer fire seasons. That means we must stay on heightened alert for much longer than in the past.

Under catastrophic conditions, leave

The current Australian Fire Danger Rating System was implemented in September 2022. It’s a nationally consistent system based on the latest scientific research.

Authorities hope the system will more accurately predict fire danger. It was also designed to more clearly communicate the danger rating to the public. For example, it involves just four danger ratings, compared to the previous six under the old Victorian regime.

“Catastrophic” fire danger – previously “code red” in Victoria – represents the worst conditions. The main message for the public under these conditions is:

If a fire starts and takes hold, lives are likely to be lost. For your survival leave bushfire risk areas.

Under catastrophic conditions, people are advised to move to a safer location early in the morning or even the day before. Authorities warn “homes cannot withstand fires in these conditions. You may not be able to leave, and help may not be available”.

Lessons from Black Saturday

Australia’s previous fire danger rating system was developed in the 1960s and was formally known as the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index. It initially comprised five risk levels ranging from low-moderate to extreme. However, states were free to adapt the system to their needs, including adding extra categories.

The devastating 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria killed 173 people. Many people died after staying to defend their properties.

The tragedy prompted scrutiny of the fire danger ratings system in Victoria and the “code red” category was added. The message under those conditions was that those living in a bushfire-prone area should leave. The first code red was declared in 2010, then another in 2019.

That system was replaced by the national system in 2022.

Read more:
Our planet is burning in unexpected ways – here’s how we can protect people and nature

Don’t stay and defend

Under the current fire danger rating system, catastrophic conditions mean everyone should leave an area. The leave orders currently issued in Victoria cover many thousands of people, and represent a big test of this advice.

We don’t yet know how many people will heed the advice of authorities. However, at least some people have reportedly decided to stay and defend their properties.

If thousands of others do flee, what will result? Will rural roads be blocked? Do we have the infrastructure to temporarily house all those evacuees? Whether or not the fire situation escalates on Wednesday, there will be much to learn about how we deal with such threats.

Certainly, it’s prudent for people in high-risk areas to leave. In hot, windy conditions, a fire could erupt and take hold in minutes. The collapse of electricity transmission towers in Victoria last week showed the vulnerability of such infrastructure in high winds. It doesn’t take long for downed power lines to ignite the surrounding bush.

Is there an potential alternative to the mass relocation of people in response to a major fire risk? Yes: building communities that are sufficiently fire-proofed to withstand catastrophic fire weather.

This could be achieved through adaptation measures such as building fire bunkers and specially-designed houses. It would also involve carefully managed bushland and creating fire breaks by planting non-flammable plants. It may also include targeted cultural burning by Traditional Owners. These options require further discussion and research.

Read more:
‘Australia is sleepwalking’: a bushfire scientist explains what the Hawaii tragedy means for our flammable continent

Our fire seasons are getting longer

The current emergency in Victoria shows how Australia’s fire seasons are changing.

It’s late February and summer is almost over. The kids are back at school and the adults are back at work. It seemed southeast Australia had escaped the bad fire summer that many had feared. Few people expected this late-season emergency.

But as climate change escalates, we must expect the unexpected. In a fire-prone continent such as Australia, we can never relax in a warming world. We must be in a constant, heightened state of preparedness.

That means know your risk and prepare your home. Draw up a bushfire survival plan – think about details such as what to do with pets and who will check on vulnerable neighbours. And please, heed the advice of authorities.

David Bowman receives funding from the Australian Research Council, New South Wales Bushfire and Natural Hazards Research Centre and Natural Hazards Research Australia.

– ref. Victoria’s fire alert has knocked Australians out of complacency. Under climate change, catastrophic bushfires can strike any time – https://theconversation.com/victorias-fire-alert-has-knocked-australians-out-of-complacency-under-climate-change-catastrophic-bushfires-can-strike-any-time-224636

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

If you believe Newspoll and the Australian Financial Review, Australia wants to go nuclear – as long it’s small.

Newspoll this week suggests a majority of us are in favour of building small modular nuclear reactors. A poll of Australian Financial Review readers last year told a similar story.

These polls (and a more general question about nuclear power in a Resolve poll for Nine newspapers this week) come after a concerted effort by the Coalition to normalise talking about nuclear power – specifically, the small, modular kind that’s meant to be cheaper and safer. Unfortunately, while small reactors have been around for decades, they are generally costlier than larger reactors with a similar design. This reflects the economies of size associated with larger boilers.

The hope (and it’s still only a hope) is “modular” design will permit reactors to be built in factories in large numbers (and therefore at low cost), then shipped to the sites where they are installed.

Coalition enthusiasm for talking about small modular reactors has not been dented by the failure of the only serious proposal to build them: that of NuScale, a company that designs and markets these reactors in the United States. Faced with long delays and increases in the projected costs of the Voygr reactor, the intended buyers, a group of municipal power utilities, pulled the plug. The project had a decade of development behind it but had not even reached prototype stage.

Other proposals to build small modular reactors abound but none are likely to be constructed anywhere before the mid-2030s, if at all. Even if they work as planned (a big if), they will arrive too late to replace coal power in Australia. So Opposition Leader Peter Dutton needs to put up a detailed plan for how he would deliver nuclear power in time.

Read more:
Is nuclear the answer to Australia’s climate crisis?

So why would Australians support nuclear?

It is worth looking at the claim that Australians support nuclear power. This was the question the Newspoll asked:

There is a proposal to build several small modular nuclear reactors around Australia to produce zero-emissions energy on the sites of existing coal-fired power stations once they are retired. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?

This question assumes two things. First, that small modular reactors exist. Second, that someone is proposing to build and operate them, presumably expecting they can do so at a cost low enough to compete with alternative energy sources.

Unfortunately, neither is true. Nuclear-generated power costs up to ten times as much as solar and wind energy. A more accurate phrasing of the question would be:

There is a proposal to keep coal-fired power stations operating until the development of small modular reactors which might, in the future, supply zero-emissions energy. Do you approve or disapprove of this proposal?

It seems unlikely such a proposal would gain majority support.

Read more:
Military interests are pushing new nuclear power – and the UK government has finally admitted it

Building nuclear takes a long time

When we consider the timeline for existing reactor projects, the difficulties with nuclear power come into sharp focus.

As National Party Senate Leader Bridget McKenzie has pointed out, the most successful recent implementation of nuclear power has been in the United Arab Emirates. In 2008, the UAE president (and emir of Abi Dhabi), Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, announced a plan to build four nuclear reactors. Construction started in 2012. The last reactor is about to be connected to the grid, 16 years after the project was announced.

The UAE’s performance is better than that achieved recently in Western countries including the US, UK, France and Finland.

In 16 years’ time, by 2040, most of Australia’s remaining coal-fired power stations will have shut down. Suppose the Coalition gained office in 2025 on a program of advocating nuclear power and managed to pass the necessary legislation in 2026. If we could match the pace of the UAE, nuclear power stations would start coming online just in time to replace them.

If we spent three to five years discussing the issue, then matched the UAE schedule, the plants would arrive too late.

Read more:
Dutton wants Australia to join the “nuclear renaissance” – but this dream has failed before

It would take longer in Australia

Would it be possible to match the UAE schedule? The UAE had no need to pass legislation: it doesn’t have a parliament like ours, let alone a Senate that can obstruct government legislation. The necessary institutions, including a regulatory commission and a publicly owned nuclear power firm, were established by decree.

There were no problems with site selection, not to mention environmental impact statements and court actions. The site at Barakah was conveniently located on an almost uninhabited stretch of desert coastline, but still close enough to the main population centres to permit a connection to transmission lines, access for workers, and so on. There’s nowhere in Australia’s eastern states (where the power is needed) that matches that description.

Finally, there are no problems with strikes or union demands: both are illegal in the UAE. Foreign workers with even less rights than Emirati citizens did almost all the construction work.

Despite all these advantages, the UAE has not gone any further with nuclear power. Instead of building more reactors after the first four, it’s investing massively in solar power and battery storage.

Read more:
Climate minister Chris Bowen says replacing coal-fired power stations with nuclear would cost $387 billion

Time to start work is running out

The Coalition began calling for a “mature debate” on nuclear immediately after losing office.

But it’s now too late for discussion. If Australia is to replace any of our retiring coal-fired power stations with nuclear reactors, Dutton must commit to this goal before the 2025 election.

Talk about hypothetical future technologies is, at this point, nothing more than a distraction. If Dutton is serious about nuclear power in Australia, he needs to put forward a plan now. It must spell out a realistic timeline that includes the establishment of necessary regulation, the required funding model and the sites to be considered.

In summary, it’s time to put up or shut up.

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

– ref. Dutton wants a ‘mature debate’ about nuclear power. By the time we’ve had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal – https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-a-mature-debate-about-nuclear-power-by-the-time-weve-had-one-new-plants-will-be-too-late-to-replace-coal-224513

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Blythe Worthy, PhD Candidate, The University of Sydney, University of Sydney

In Justine Triet’s French legal drama Anatomy of a Fall, novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) is on trial for murdering her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis), after he falls to his death from the attic of their Grenoble home.

During an early interview with her lawyer Vincent (Swann Arlaud), Sandra holds up her hand abruptly and utters “stop”. She’s a successful writer, used to being in control of the story – and she’s stopping this one before it goes any further.

Sandra’s hand hovers in front of Vincent, and it shakes with emotion. “I did not kill him,” she asserts. “That’s not the point,” her lawyer replies.

Vincent’s suggestion that the truth of Samuel’s death is unimportant is a tragic forecast. As Anatomy of a Fall unfolds and Sandra is scrutinised in court, Triet channels a forensic evisceration of the patriarchy against the backdrop of the French legal system to explore anti-feminist backlash and the rising tensions around gender parity in the modern family.

Finding the story underneath

Sandra is a strikingly unique character. As her trial progresses, Sandra’s grief is overlooked as Vincent and the court probe her personal life. Often, when she is pressed on her relationship, Sandra loudly clears the phlegm from her throat to mask rising emotion.

Rushed into her defence and not able to grieve, Sandra struggles with her emotions, concealing them whenever possible. When comforting her bedridden son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner), she appeals to his sense of reason instead of emotion – despite speaking with a wavering voice. When nothing elicits a reaction, she shrugs and allows his godmother Monica (Sophie Fillières) to take her place.

Sandra is unabashed about prioritising her ambition alongside domestic labour and family responsibilities. She also places her own emotional wellbeing first. During the year her son is recovering from an accident which leaves him partially blind, she is revealed to have had several affairs with women in order to stay afloat emotionally. Speaking about these infidelities in court, Sandra is matter-of-fact, unremorseful about hurting her husband to protect herself.

Hüller plays Sandra with a naturalism aided by minimal makeup and simple costuming. Triet developed the script for the actress, and calls Hüller “honest” and her portrayal of Sandra “ungraspable”. This slipperiness – in portrayal and characterisation – shows Sandra as a dynamic, flawed creature. Triet showcases this nuanced portrayal via strategically shallow lensing and the occasional close up when framing Hüller, foregrounding the drama of her micro-expressions.

In one scene, blood rushes up Sandra’s neck and face during an argument with Samuel. He insists he performs the majority of their domestic labour and can’t focus on his writing. Her expression ripples, muscles in her neck contorting. She labels him a victim of his own making, before striking him on the face.

Read more:
What do women want? Freud’s infamous question invites voyeurism – but examining what they do is far more revealing

A woman’s place

Anatomy of a Fall begins with Samuel being found dead by Daniel. Police retrieve damning audio of an argument between the couple from Samuel’s computer, and Sandra is arrested for murder.

Placed on trial opposite a formidable state prosecutor, played by Antoine Reinartz, Sandra’s initial suggestion that Samuel died by suicide is dismissed. The prosecutor attempts to discredit Sandra as a selfish and unfeeling partner who cuckolded her husband and stole his ideas for her novel.

The trial begins with a thorough examination of Sandra’s sexual orientation and maternal instinct in order to isolate her. The prosecutor signals doubt over Daniel’s testimony, attempting to separate Sandra from her only ally.

Despite its firm feminist history, sexism is on the rise in France. Triet explores this issue through the sustained attacks male characters direct at Sandra’s nontraditional lifestyle choices. The state prosecutor, defending his right to speak for Samuel’s absent voice, reiterates Samuel’s accusations surrounding Sandra’s success that verge into gaslighting.

The case reaches its crescendo via the audio recording of the fight, in which a tearful Samuel demands Sandra take more domestic responsibility to give him time to write. Stoic, she refuses.

The prosecutor frames Sandra as a time-greedy novelist with disdain for her family obligations. But Triet suggests another perspective: Sandra is a woman who has been dragged from her beloved London by the man she loves and stuck in an isolated house in a country where she doesn’t speak the language. She helps to take care of her son, and enjoys her work because she’s good at it and it makes her happy. Why should she give it up?

The gendered lens of domestic labour

Triet flips the traditional roles in Anatomy of a Fall. Samuel is the homemaker while Sandra performs traditionally masculine roles as the more confident, career-focused family member.

Through the inversion of these roles, Triet explores the persistence of patriarchal attitudes to women in the labour market. The director critiques the traditional notion of a woman’s place as being in the home via Sandra’s disinterest in playing the self-sacrificial role of homemaker Samuel seems desperate for her to take.

While one might initially see Sandra as an overworked mother in a co-parenting relationship with the usual financial and time management problems, she is slowly revealed as the less skillful parent: Samuel is more suited to homeschooling, comforting and supporting their son, no matter the extenuating circumstances. His distaste at this role reveals the incongruity of insisting Sandra take his place.

Especially in the post-COVID era, where so many now work from home, Triet’s reversal of the familiarly gendered lens of domestic labour forms a timely critique. When viewed from this perspective Sandra’s earlier “stop” hand signal feels less like a threat than a plea for clemency.

Read more:
How Anatomy of a Fall reversed French art cinema’s box office decline

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

– ref. What is the role of the mother? At the heart of Anatomy of a Fall is a critique of anti-feminist backlash – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-role-of-the-mother-at-the-heart-of-anatomy-of-a-fall-is-a-critique-of-anti-feminist-backlash-224139

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Maxwell, Associate Professor in Performance Studies, University of Sydney

Over five engaging and enjoyable hours, the Lewis Trilogy, three works by Lewis Nowra, works insistently to convince its audience it is about love. Love that overcomes, that transcends, that is everything. And there certainly is a lot of love in the room.

Love for outsiders: battered and ruined families scraping sullen lives in the post-war badlands of a northern Melbourne housing commission estate; the dislocated, disjointed patients of a psychiatric institution muddling their way through rehearsals for Mozart’s Cosi fan tutti; flotsam and jetsam misfits carving out a place to belong in the front bar of a harbourside hotel.

Love for theatre: the sharing of stories in a strange little room, an irregular rhomboid set between the steep rakes of benched seating: 120 souls packed in tight, thankful for the companionship (and air conditioning), celebrating the work.

The love of a playwright for his characters. And the love of a man for a woman. Or for many women: “I was”, the narrator reflects at one point, “between divorces”.

Read more:
A theatre production … in the pool? This new play in Perth leaves the audience buoyed

A dream to do something

Louis Nowra is one of the most significant Australian playwrights of the past 40 years. His work stretches form and convention beyond realism towards a heightened theatrical lyricism, never losing sight of the textures and cadences of the world.

Under the direction of Declan Greene, each play in the trilogy has been trimmed to around 90 minutes. Summer of the Aliens (1992) is first: a coming-of-age drama, a guileless theatre à clef narrated by William Zappa’s warmly-rendered old Lewis, unfolding on the appropriately arid, unadorned boards of the stage, over which looms a flickering cinema hoarding touting a Cold War sci-fi alien invasion film.

The action centres on the friendship of the young Lewis (Philip Lynch) with the precociously worldly — and, as we discover, sexually-abused – Dulcie (Masego Pitso), starting with play wrestling and culminating in a booze-fuelled break-in at the local RSL club. Both dream of something more: to sprout angel wings, to be kidnapped by aliens, to get away.

To do something, to be somewhere other than there.

The second play, Cosi (1992), is the most conventionally accomplished of the three. Young Lewis is now an arts graduate and sometime political activist, taking on his first job: directing an opera in an asylum.

Nowra’s writing here is at its most assured. Even in the relatively shortened form, the dramaturgy is assured, the dramatic arc solid. The chaotic menagerie of recovering junkies, pyromaniacs, narcissists and all but catatonics resolves into a sublime, show-stopping set-piece performance of operatic highlights.

Finally, the most explicitly reflexive and formally adventurous of the plays, 2017’s This Much is True.

A more-than-affectionate love letter, a late-in-life coming of age story, as the old Lewis (Zappa again) finds his people: a picaresque assemblage of character sketches (the pub itself one of them) and story shards woven into a narrative of loss, yearning, betrayal and redemption.

Old Lewis, now a full-blown character in the world he narrates, explains: when people know that you are a writer, they bring their stories to you. It’s almost an apology for the frenetic, episodic magic realism that has unfolded. This perhaps unreliable narrator assures us, though, that the stories were the ones he had heard about and experienced:

Some of you may think they’re exaggerated, but we locals think otherwise.

A span of life

As relentless as the insistence on love is the insistence of time. The five hours are bracketed by repeated tones, a metabolic rhythm as implacable as a metronome, the tympanic beating of an angiogram. A coiling: love and time; time and love. Themes of death, loss and regret press and surge, pushing back, hard, against the simplicity of the promise of love.

The plays chart a span of life; spending a day in the theatre with the plays redoubles the palpability of time itself. We – the audience – dwell in the power of theatre to immerse us in place and time. Between plays we sit on the kerb outside, have a coffee at a local café, a bowl of pasta or salad, return and smile at our fellow audience members. We move around the theatre, choosing different seats for each play.

We follow the actors as they move through different roles, catching echoes and tensions across the casting: Paul Capsis tears it up as a series of wild-eyed clowns; Thomas Campbell finds pathos and subtle variations through a motley collection of blokes (and others).

Ursula Yovich is utterly compelling, first as young Lewis’ grandmother, then as an adoring psychiatric patient, and finally as a standover man. Her presence on stage gently but unmistakably alerts us to the absence of First Nations people in a play cycle so concerned with place, community and belonging.

Lynch is extraordinary as the young Lewis in the first two plays: a glorious portrait of a young man finding his feet.

Pitso, though, has the toughest gig: first as young Dulcie, then as a recovering junkie, and finally as a philosophy student working as a barmaid in the Rising Sun Hotel. The burden of Lewis’ yearning, regret and, yes, love, falls on these characters’ shoulders.

In a rewriting of the final scene, Nowra has crafted a more emphatic narrative arc, binding the trilogy all the more tightly together: Dulcie, old Lewis explains, was something like the one true love. It was always Dulcie for whom he was looking, who he needed to save.

A neat piece of dramaturgy, but, for me, something of a deflation after an otherwise deeply, resonatingly rich immersion.

The Lewis Trilogy is a Griffin Theatre Company until 21 April.

Read more:
A Fool in Love is delightfully ridiculous and sharp-witted: social satire at its finest

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

– ref. The Lewis Trilogy is ultimately about a love for theatre: the sharing of stories in a strange little room – https://theconversation.com/the-lewis-trilogy-is-ultimately-about-a-love-for-theatre-the-sharing-of-stories-in-a-strange-little-room-222153

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emily O’Hara, Senior Lecturer, Spatial Design + Temporary Practices, Auckland University of Technology

If you find it intriguing that February 28 will be followed this week by February 29, rather than March 1 as it usually is, spare a thought for those alive in 1582. Back then, Thursday October 4 was followed by Friday October 15.

Ten whole days were snatched from the present when Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull to “restore” the calendar from discrepancies that had crept into the Julian calendar, introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE.

The new Gregorian calendar returned the northern hemisphere’s vernal equinox to its “proper” place, around March 21. (The equinox is when the Earth’s axis is tilted neither toward nor away from the sun, and is used to determine the date of Easter.)

The Julian calendar had observed a leap year every four years, but this meant time had drifted out of alignment with the dates of celestial events and astronomical seasons.

In the Gregorian calendar, leap days were added only to years that were a multiple of four – like 2024 – with an exception for years that were evenly divisible by 100, but not 400 – like 1700.

Simply put, leap days exist because it doesn’t take a neat 365 days for Earth to orbit the Sun. It takes 365.2422 days. Tracking the movement of celestial objects through space in an orderly pattern doesn’t quite work, which is why we have February – time’s great mop.

Time and space

This is just part of the history of how February – the shortest month, and originally the last month in the Roman calendar – came to have the job of absorbing those inconsistencies in the temporal calculations of the world’s most commonly used calendar.

There is plenty of science, maths and astrophysics explaining the relationship between time and the planet we live on. But I like to think leap years and days offer something even more interesting to consider: why do we have calendars anyway?

And what have they got to do with how we understand the wonder and strangeness of our existence in the universe? Because calendars tell a story, not just about time, but also about space.

Our reckoning of time on Earth is through our spatial relationship to the Sun, Moon and stars. Time, and its place in our lives, sits somewhere between the scientific, the celestial and the spiritual.

Read more:
Why does a leap year have 366 days?

It is notoriously slippery, subjective and experiential. It is also marked, tracked and determined in myriad ways across different cultures, from tropical to solar to lunar calendars.

It is the Sun that measures a day and gives us our first reference point for understanding time. But it is the Moon, as a major celestial body, that extends our perception of time. By stretching a span of one day into something longer, it offers us a chance for philosophical reflection.

The Sun (or its effect at least) is either present or not present. The Moon, however, goes through phases of transformation. It appears and disappears, changing shape and hinting that one night is not exactly like the one before or after.

The Moon also has a distinct rhythm that can be tracked and understood as a pattern, giving us another sense of duration. Time is just that – overlapping durations: instants, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades, lifetimes, centuries, ages.

The elusive Moon

It is almost impossible to imagine how time might feel in the absence of all the tools and gadgets we use to track, control and corral it. But it’s also hard to know what we might do in the absence of time as a unit of productivity – a measurable, dispensable resource.

The closest we might come is simply to imagine what life might feel like in the absence of the Moon. Each day would rise and fall, in a rhythm of its own, but without visible reference to anything else. Just endless shifts from light to dark.

Nights would be almost completely dark without the light of the Moon. Only stars at a much further distance would puncture the inky sky. The world around us would change – trees would grow, mammals would age and die, land masses would shift and change – but all would happen in an endless cycle of sunrise to sunset.

Read more:
Scientists are hoping to redefine the second – here’s why

The light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth, so the sunlight we see is always eight minutes in the past.

I remember sitting outside when I first learned this, and wondering what the temporal delay might be between me and other objects: a plum tree, trees at the end of the street, hills in the distance, light on the horizon when looking out over the ocean, stars in the night sky.

Moonlight, for reference, takes about 1.3 seconds to get to Earth. Light always travels at the same speed, it is entirely constant. The differing duration between how long it takes for sunlight or moonlight to reach the Earth is determined by the space in between.

Time on the other hand, is anything but constant. There are countless ways we characterise it. The mere fact we have so many calendars and ways of describing perceptual time hints at our inability to pin it down.

Calendars give us the impression we can, and have, made time predictable and understandable. Leap years, days and seconds serve as a periodic reminder that we haven’t.

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

– ref. Leap of imagination: how February 29 reminds us of our mysterious relationship with time and space – https://theconversation.com/leap-of-imagination-how-february-29-reminds-us-of-our-mysterious-relationship-with-time-and-space-224503

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Orlando, Researcher: Digital Literacy and Digital Wellbeing, Western Sydney University

Smartphone ownership among younger children is increasing rapidly. Many primary school children now own smartphones and they have become the norm in high school.

Parents of younger children may occasionally (or routinely) look at their child’s phone to check it’s being used responsibly and safely.

But as children mature into teens, parental inspections will likely feel like an invasion of privacy. Many would not ask for a high schooler’s diary, yet phones hold even more personal information.

So, what do parents need to consider when making the “phone rules” for their children as they get older?

Read more:
School phone bans seem obvious but could make it harder for kids to use tech in healthy ways

Early smartphone ownership

Parents get their younger children phones for many reasons. Some feel it will help keep kids safe when, for example, travelling on their own to and from school. Others have bought one after intense pressure from their child or worry their child will be left out socially if all their friends have a phone.

In my own research with parents, some also tell me they are reluctant to let their child use the parents’ phone for fear of risking important work files or information stored on the phone.

But many parents also worry getting a phone early might encourage phone addiction, or that a child might be accessing adult content.

Parental guidance for this age group tends to focus on safety, which usually includes checking the child’s phone activity (with or without the child’s knowledge), restricting access through passwords or time limits.

Parents understandably want their children to be safe. Monitoring may be part of this, but it’s not the whole story. Most important is our role in equipping children to make good, independent and responsible decisions with their phone.

This means teaching children a broader set of skills about how to use phones safely and in a way that maximises potential for learning, connection and self-expression.

Education and open dialogue about phone safety should begin the day your child gets their phone and continue as they grow.

The focus should be on problem-solving together and respectfully. This is what will empower them to self-regulate appropriately as they grow.

A phased approach: laying the groundwork early

In the first year of a younger child owning a phone, the focus should be on safety.

This may include controls, restrictions and monitoring, but does not necessarily need to include phone checking. Establishing the rules on safety and wellbeing for using the phone is key.

This means talking to your children about how and when they use their phone, why they shouldn’t answer unknown texts and calls, beware of giving out personal information online, and about being kind online. Let your children know they can always talk to you if they have a weird or bad experience online.

Parents should also focus on bigger picture safety and digital habits education. This can include, for example:

• reviewing privacy and app settings together

• understanding screen time features and how to use them

• learning how routines such as reaching for the phone when you wake can have a negative impact.

Look for quality apps together that your child may enjoy or benefit from, such as productivity apps, creative or problem solving games, music or science-based games or other apps that will help develop their interests and life skills.

Trial and test apps or games together with your child to see how they work.

Adapting the approach as children mature

As children mature, parental guidance also needs to change alongside it.

After about 12 months of the child’s phone ownership (give or take), checking phones needs to fade, and ongoing open communication needs to become the mainstay.

At this older stage, parents should have frequent, open discussions with their children about online safety, respect and responsibility. Ask your child questions about their phone experiences and always encourage them to ask for help in difficult situations.

Parents may also trial new ways of using the phone or certain apps together with their child. For example, the child and parent can use the screentime feature to discuss, and be aware of, their developing phone habits. It may also include learning to use the camera and its features well or trying new apps (such as a creative drawing app) that allow them to explore a new interest.

Help your child work out which habits work for them and which ones seem to cause stress. For example, if your child is on a WhatsApp group with friends and classmates, is that causing stress or worry? Talk to them about how they can handle it if they or a classmate are being talked about in the group chat.

The risk of routinely checking a teen’s phone is that it may end up fostering mistrust between parent and child. Regular conversations about phone and online safety, and discussing news articles on the topic are two ways of keeping safety front and centre. This helps promote good communication and trust.

Alleviating fear and worry

Taking a phased approach helps your child develop the skills and values they need to be able to make good, independent decisions.

Some children may need more or less than 12 months in the stricter hands-on initial phase. Much depends on their maturity, the home environment and their social world.

But taking a broader and adaptable approach will also help a parent better understand their child as a phone user.

This can help alleviate the fear and worry many parents have about phones and kids.

Read more:
Kids’ screen time rose by 50% during the pandemic. 3 tips for the whole family to bring it back down

Joanne Orlando receives funding from Office of eSafety Commissioner for funded research on online safety for 10–13 year olds.

– ref. Should you be checking your kid’s phone? How to know when your child is ready for ‘phone privacy’ – https://theconversation.com/should-you-be-checking-your-kids-phone-how-to-know-when-your-child-is-ready-for-phone-privacy-223190

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Yee-Fui Ng, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Monash University

Independent MP for Indi Helen Haines has introduced a private member’s bill to crack down on pork-barrelling.

Haines has argued pork-barrelling is happening right now ahead of the Dunkley byelection on March 2, where Labor is splashing out money hoping to retain the seat.

Without government or opposition support, the bill is unlikely to pass. But it puts the issue of pork-barrelling in the public eye. So would the proposed measures work?

How common is pork-barrelling in Australia?

Pork-barrelling involves governments channelling public funds to seats they hold and wish to retain, or seats they would like to win from an opponent, as a way of winning voters’ favour. This means the money is used for political purposes, rather than proper allocation according to merit.

We have been inundated with pork-barrelling scandals in recent years. This includes the car park rorts scandal, where 77% of the commuter car park sites selected were in electorates held by the then Coalition government, rather than in areas of real need with congestion issues.

This followed close on the heels of the “sports rorts” scandal. Bridget McKenzie resigned from cabinet following allegations she had intervened in the sport grants program to benefit the Coalition government while in a position of conflict of interest.

Read more:
The ‘car park rorts’ story is scandalous. But it will keep happening unless we close grant loopholes

My journal article shows pork-barrelling is an intractable problem across multiple governments over many decades and takes different forms based on electoral systems.

Australia has a single-member electorate parliamentary system, which makes it more susceptible to pork-barrelling than multi-member electorates such as Norway or Spain.

The belief is that politicians who “bring home the bacon” for their constituents are electorally rewarded for doing so.

This means a government has an incentive to strategically apportion benefits to marginal electorates to increase prospects of electoral success. There is also an incentive to bias the apportionment of funds towards electorates held by the party in power.

In short, rorts scandals keep happening because governments believe channelling money to marginal and government electorates will win them elections.

Read more:
Pork-barrelling is unfair and wasteful. Here’s a plan to end it

What does the Haines bill do?

The Haines bill requires all grant programs to have clear and publicly available, merit-based selection criteria and guidelines.

Second, the bill ensures robust reporting to the parliament about what grants are awarded, to whom and why. This includes requirements for ministers to report to parliament in a timely manner when they’ve gone against official advice from government departments about who should receive grants.

Third, the bill creates a new Joint Parliamentary Committee on Grants Administration and Investment Mandates. This committee would oversee grants administration, including compliance with guidelines.

Will this bill fix our broken system?

My article has argued that stronger legal accountability is needed to hold ministers responsible for the biased allocation of grants.

The bill seeks to enhance transparency by requiring stronger parliamentary disclosure of the allocation of grants.

A joint parliamentary committee would also increase scrutiny and accountability over grants administration.

But the bill does not go far enough in terms of enforcement. There should be penalties for breaches of grant rules. And these should be enforceable by an external scrutineer, such as an independent commissioner.

Without strong enforcement, existing laws will be deficient in preventing, deterring and punishing governments that allocate grant funding in a partisan fashion, rather than on merit.

Ensuring proper use of public money is crucial to preserving public trust in Australian democratic institutions. To improve accountability for the use of public funding, we need stronger and legally enforceable rules and regulations.

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

– ref. Independent MP Helen Haines has a plan to stamp out pork-barrelling. Would it work? – https://theconversation.com/independent-mp-helen-haines-has-a-plan-to-stamp-out-pork-barrelling-would-it-work-224514

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Peterie, Research Fellow, Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, University of Sydney

Have you ever felt a sudden pang of sadness? A bird seems to stop and look you in the eye. A photo drops out of a messy drawer from long ago, in the mundanity of a weekend spring clean.

Your day is immediately derailed, unsettled. You are pulled into something you thought was past. And yet, in being pulled back, you are grateful, reconnected, and grief-stricken all over again.

“You’ll get over it”. “Give it time”. “You need time to move on”. These are common cultural refrains in the face of loss. But what if grief doesn’t play by the rules? What if grief is a different thing altogether?

We talked to 95 people about their experiences of grief surrounding the loss of a loved one, and their stories provided a fundamentally different account of grief to the one often presented to us culturally.

Read more:
Not all mourning happens after bereavement – for some, grief can start years before the death of a loved one

Disordered grief?

Grief is often imagined as a time-bound period in which one processes the pain of loss – that is, adjusts to absence and works toward “moving on”. The bereaved are expected to process their pain within the confines of what society deems “normal”.

The DSM-5 psychiatric manual says if grief drags on too long, in fact, it becomes a pathology (a condition with a medical diagnosis). “Prolonged grief disorder” is the name given to “persistent difficulties associated with bereavement that exceeded expected social, cultural, or religious expectations”.

While there can be value in clinical diagnostic categories such as this, the danger is they put artificial boundaries around emotions. The pathologisation of grief can be deeply alienating to those experiencing it, for whom the pressure to “move on” can be hurtful and counterproductive.

The stories we gathered in our research were raw, complex and often fraught. They did not sit comfortably with commonsense understandings of how grief “should” progress. As bereaved daughter Barbara told us:

Grief is not in the little box, it doesn’t even come close to a little box.

Grief starts early

The tendency is to think of grief as something that happens post death. The person we love dies, we have a funeral, and the grief sets in. Then it slowly subsides with the steady march of time.

In fact, grief often begins earlier, often in a clinical consultation where the words “terminal” or “nothing more we can do” are used. Or when a loved one is told “go home and get your life in order”. Grief can begin months or even years before bereavement.

Read more:
Friday essay: homesick for ourselves – the hidden grief of ageing

As the people we interviewed experienced it, loss was also cumulative. The gradual deterioration of a loved one’s health in the years or months before their death imposed other painful losses: the loss of chosen lifestyles, the loss of longstanding relational rhythms, the loss of shared hopes and anticipated futures.

Many participants felt their loved ones – and, indeed, the lives they shared with them – slipping away long before their physical deaths.

Living with the dead

Yet the dead do not simply leave us. They remain with us, in memories, rituals and cultural events. From Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos to Japan’s Opon, festivals of the dead play a key role in cultures around the world. In that way, remembering the dead remains a critical aspect of living. So too does the ongoing experience of grief.

Events of this kind are not merely celebratory. They are critical forms through which life and death, joy and grief, are brought together and integrated. The absence of remembering can hold its own trouble, as our participants’ accounts revealed. As bereaved wife Anna explained:

I just find it really frustrating and I do get quite angry and upset sometimes. I know that life goes on. I’d be talking to girlfriends and stuff like that and it’s like they’ve forgotten that I’ve lost my husband. They haven’t, but nothing really changed in their life. But for me, and my family, it has.

Part of the problem, here, is the ambivalent role grief plays in advanced industrialised societies like ours. Many of our participants felt pressure to perform resilience or (in clinical terms) to “recover” quickly after loss.

But whose interests does a swift recovery serve? An employer’s? Friends who just want to get on with a death-free life? And, even more importantly, mightn’t ongoing connections with the dead enable better living? Might bringing the dead along with us actually make for better deaths and better lives?

Many of our participants felt their loved ones remained with them, and experienced their “absent presence” as a source of comfort. Grieving, in this context, involved spending time “with” the dead. Anna described her practice as follows:

I had a diary, so I just write stuff in it about how I’m feeling or something happened and I’ll say to [my deceased husband], it’s all to [my deceased husband], “Do you remember, blah, blah, blah.” I’ll just talk about that memory that I have of that particular time and I find that that helps.

Read more:
‘Why did he Leve Me?’ 5 things grieving children want to know about the death of a loved one

Caring for those who grieve

Grief does not begin at death, but neither do relationships end there.

To rush the bereaved through grief – to usher them towards “recovery” and the more comfortable territories of happiness and productivity – is to do them a disservice.

And, perhaps more critically, ridding our lives of the dead and grief may, in the end, make for more limited and muted emotional lives.

Michelle Peterie receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Alex Broom receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. We talked to dozens of people about their experience of grief. Here’s what we learned (and how it’s different from what you might think) – https://theconversation.com/we-talked-to-dozens-of-people-about-their-experience-of-grief-heres-what-we-learned-and-how-its-different-from-what-you-might-think-223848

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luke Smillie, Professor in Personality Psychology, The University of Melbourne

The war in Ukraine has had impacts around the world. Supply chains have been disrupted, the cost of living has soared and we’ve seen the fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War II. All of these are in addition to the devastating humanitarian and economic impacts within Ukraine.

Our international team was conducting a global study on wellbeing in the lead up to and after the Russian invasion. This provided a unique opportunity to examine the psychological impact of the outbreak of war.

As we explain in a new study published in Nature Communications, we learned the toll on people’s wellbeing was evident across nations, not just in Ukraine. These effects appear to have been temporary – at least for the average person.

But people with certain psychological vulnerabilities struggled to recover from the shock of the war.

Read more:
Food shortages, millions of refugees, and global price spikes: the knock-on effects of Russia’s Ukraine invasion

Tracking wellbeing during the outbreak of war

People who took part in our study completed a rigorous “experience-sampling” protocol. Specifically, we asked them to report their momentary wellbeing four times per day for a whole month.

Data collection began in October 2021 and continued throughout 2022. So we had been tracking wellbeing around the world during the weeks surrounding the outbreak of war in February 2022.

We also collected measures of personality, along with various sociodemographic variables (including age, gender, political views). This enabled us to assess whether different people responded differently to the crisis. We could also compare these effects across countries.

Our analyses focused primarily on 1,341 participants living in 17 European countries, excluding Ukraine itself (44,894 experience-sampling reports in total). We also expanded these analyses to capture the experiences of 1,735 people living in 43 countries around the world (54,851 experience-sampling reports) – including in Australia.

A global dip in wellbeing

On February 24 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, there was a sharp decline in wellbeing around the world. There was no decline in the month leading up to the outbreak of war, suggesting the change in wellbeing was not already occurring for some other reason.

However, there was a gradual increase in wellbeing during the month after the Russian invasion, suggestive of a “return to baseline” effect. Such effects are commonly reported in psychological research: situations and events that impact our wellbeing often (though not always) do so temporarily.

Unsurprisingly, people in Europe experienced a sharper dip in wellbeing compared to people living elsewhere around the world. Presumably the war was much more salient for those closest to the conflict, compared to those living on an entirely different continent.

Interestingly, day-to-day fluctuations in wellbeing mirrored the salience of the war on social media as events unfolded. Specifically, wellbeing was lower on days when there were more tweets mentioning Ukraine on Twitter/X.

Our results indicate that, on average, it took around two months for people to return to their baseline levels of wellbeing after the invasion.

Different people, different recoveries

There are strong links between our wellbeing and our individual personalities.

However, the dip in wellbeing following the Russian invasion was fairly uniform across individuals. None of the individual factors assessed in our study, including personality and sociodemographic factors, predicted people’s response to the outbreak of war.

On the other hand, personality did play a role in how quickly people recovered. Individual differences in people’s recovery were linked to a personality trait called “stability”. Stability is a broad dimension of personality that combines low neuroticism with high agreeableness and conscientiousness (three traits from the Big Five personality framework).

Read more:
Ukraine war: conflict-related PTSD is putting strain on an already underfunded mental health system

Stability is so named because it reflects the stability of one’s overall psychological functioning. This can be illustrated by breaking stability down into its three components:

1. low neuroticism describes emotional stability. People low in this trait experience less intense negative emotions such as anxiety, fear or anger, in response to negative events

2. high agreeableness describes social stability. People high in this trait are generally more cooperative, kind, and motivated to maintain social harmony

3. high conscientiousness describes motivational stability. People high in this trait show more effective patterns of goal-directed self-regulation.

So, our data show that people with less stable personalities fared worse in terms of recovering from the impact the war in Ukraine had on wellbeing.

In a supplementary analysis, we found the effect of stability was driven specifically by neuroticism and agreeableness. The fact that people higher in neuroticism recovered more slowly accords with a wealth of research linking this trait with coping difficulties and poor mental health.

These effects of personality on recovery were stronger than those of sociodemographic factors, such as age, gender or political views, which were not statistically significant.

Overall, our findings suggest that people with certain psychological vulnerabilities will often struggle to recover from the shock of global events such as the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

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

– ref. War in Ukraine affected wellbeing worldwide, but people’s speed of recovery depended on their personality – https://theconversation.com/war-in-ukraine-affected-wellbeing-worldwide-but-peoples-speed-of-recovery-depended-on-their-personality-224147

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Dowdy, Principal Research Scientist, The University of Melbourne

On February 13, six transmission line towers in Victoria were destroyed by extreme wind gusts from thunderstorms, leading to forced electricity outages affecting tens of thousands of people. The intense winds knocked trees onto local power lines or toppled the poles, which caused about 500,000 people to lose power. Some people went without electricity for more than a week. A month earlier, severe thunderstorms and wind took out five transmission towers in Western Australia and caused widespread outages.

Intense thunderstorm events have made news in recent years, including the January 2020 storms that caused the collapse of six transmission towers in Victoria. Perhaps the most far-reaching storms were those in 2016, when all of South Australia lost power for several hours after extreme winds damaged many transmission towers.

So are these thunderstorms with extreme winds getting worse as the climate changes? It’s possible, but we can’t yet say for sure. That’s partly because thunderstorms involve small-scale processes harder to study than bigger weather systems.

Read more:
A major blackout left 500,000 Victorian homes without power – but it shows our energy system is resilient

How can wind topple a giant transmission tower?

Many people saw the photos of transmission towers bent like thin wire and wondered how it was possible.

The reason is physics. When wind hits a structure, the force it applies is roughly proportional to the wind speed squared. When wind gusts are stronger than about 100 kilometres per hour, even just for a few seconds, there can be a risk of damage to infrastructure.

Direction matters too. Wind has greater force when it blows more directly towards a surface. If strong winds blow from an unusual direction, risk of damage can also increase. Old trees, for instance, may be more firmly braced against prevailing winds – but if storm winds blow from another direction, they might topple onto power lines.

On February 13, a strong cold front was approaching Victoria from the southeast, bringing thunderstorms with extreme wind gusts over 120 km/h after a period of extreme heat. Thunderstorms can create extremely strong and localised gusty winds, sometimes called “microbursts” due to cold heavy air falling rapidly out of the clouds. These winds were enough to bend towers and topple trees and poles.

Are these thunderstorm winds getting worse?

Scientific evidence clearly shows climate change is steadily worsening hazards such as extreme heatwaves and bushfires, which can damage our grid and energy systems.

On balance, evidence suggests tropical cyclones may become less frequent but more severe on average. All but one of Australia’s tropical cyclones this summer have been severe (Category 3 or higher).

But we aren’t yet certain what climate change does to extreme winds from thunderstorms.

This is because high-quality observations of past thunderstorms are relatively rare, with large variability in how often storms occur and their severity, and because climate models have difficulties simulating the small-scale processes which give rise to thunderstorms.

The evidence we do have suggests continued climate change may potentially increase the risk of extreme winds from thunderstorms. This is partly due to more moist and unstable air, which are essential for thunderstorms to form. We think these conditions could occur more often with climate change, in part because warmer air can hold more moisture.

We also know the severity of thunderstorms can be affected by vertical wind shear, which is the way the wind changes with height. To date, we’re less certain about how wind shear will change in the future.

Recent research by coauthor Andrew Brown and the lead author suggests climate change is likely causing more favourable conditions for thunderstorms with damaging winds, particularly in inland regions of Australia. But the methods used for these predictions are new, meaning more research needs to be done for further insight on what climate change will do to extreme winds.

We shouldn’t wait to find out

Modelling extreme wind gusts is still in its infancy. But given so much of our electricity grid is exposed to extreme winds, it’s important we try to address this gap in our knowledge.

It’s safe to say we should treat these storms as a warning. We should factor the risks from extreme winds into how we design our energy systems. It’s especially important as we build a grid able to handle clean energy that we anticipate these kinds of risks from extreme weather.

Hardening the grid by burying powerlines and removing vegetation isn’t the only option. We could build a smarter grid, with distributed renewables and energy storage including large as well as relatively smaller (e.g., community-level or household-level) batteries, giving the grid greater resilience including against extreme weather events.

In the wake of South Australia’s devastating 2016 grid outage, authorities moved to boost grid resilience in this way, building big batteries, more renewables and new interconnectors, while Australia’s energy market operator AEMO changed how it dealt with windfarms if grid issues occur.

Read more:
What caused South Australia’s state-wide blackout?

Power grids are the largest machines in the world. As we move to a clean energy grid, we face complex challenges – not just in building it, but in protecting it against extreme weather.

We would be well served if we work to better understand the risks of compound events, such as combinations of extreme winds, fires or floods hitting a region around the same time.

We also need accurate predictions of risks shortly before extreme winds or other disasters strike, as well as effective long-term planning for the risks likely to increase due to climate change or during different climate cycles such as El Niño and La Niña.

If we get this response wrong, our energy bills will rise too much and, worse, we still might not have a more resilient system. Since our energy networks are regulated by a complex set of government rules, reform is not just something for industry to address. It must ultimately be led by government – and guided by evidence.

Read more:
Victoria’s power outage could have been far worse. Can we harden the grid against extreme weather?

Andrew Dowdy receives funding from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Energy Institute and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

Andrew Brown receives funding from Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

Andrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Environmental Science Program.

Claire Vincent receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Michael Brear receives funding from several government organisations as well as several Australian and international companies. These companies include those that are responsible for energy networks, energy generation, energy retail and energy use.

Pierluigi Mancarella receives funding from several government organisations as well as several Australian and international companies, include those that are responsible for energy networks, generation, retail and use.

Todd Lane receives funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. We can’t say yet if grid-breaking thunderstorms are getting worse – but we shouldn’t wait to find out – https://theconversation.com/we-cant-say-yet-if-grid-breaking-thunderstorms-are-getting-worse-but-we-shouldnt-wait-to-find-out-224148

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Weber, Research Officer for School of Engineering, Australian National University

The world is rapidly moving towards a renewable energy future. To support the transition, we must prepare back-up energy supplies for times when solar panels and wind turbines are not producing enough electricity.

One solution is to build more pumped hydro energy storage. But where should this expansion happen?

Our new research identified more than 900 suitable locations around the world: at former and existing mining sites. Some 37 sites are in Australia.

Huge open-cut mining pits would be turned into reservoirs to hold water for renewable energy storage. It would give the sites a new lease on life and help shore up the world’s low-emissions future.

The benefits of pumped hydro storage

Pumped hydro energy storage has been demonstrated at scale for more than a century. Over the past few years, we have been identifying the best sites for “closed-loop” pumped hydro systems around the world.

Unlike conventional hydropower systems operating on rivers, closed-loop systems are located away from rivers. They require only two reservoirs, one higher than the other, between which water flows down a tunnel and through a turbine, producing electricity.

The water can be released – and power produced – to cover gaps in electricity supply when output from solar and wind is low (for example on cloudy or windless days). And when wind and solar are producing more electricity than is needed – such as on sunny or windy days – this cheap surplus power is used to pump the water back up the hill to the top reservoir, ready to be released again.

Off-river sites have very small environmental footprints and require very little water to operate. Pumped hydro energy storage is also generally cheaper than battery storage at large scales.

Batteries are the preferred method for energy storage over seconds to hours, while pumped hydro is preferred for overnight and longer storage.

Read more:
Batteries of gravity and water: we found 1,500 new pumped hydro sites next to existing reservoirs

Why mining sites?

There are big benefits to converting mining areas into pumped hydro plants.

For a start, the hole has already been dug, reducing construction costs. What’s more, mining sites are typically already serviced by roads and transmission infrastructure. The site usually has access to a water source for which the mine operators may have pumping rights. And the development takes place on land that is already cleared of vegetation, avoiding the need to disturb new areas.

Finally, community support may have already been obtained for the mining operations, which could easily be rolled over into a pumped hydro site.

In Australia, one pumped hydro energy storage project is already being built at a former gold mine site at Kidston in Far North Queensland.

The feasibility of two others is being assessed at Mount Rawdon near Bundaberg in Queensland, and at Muswellbrook in New South Wales. Both would repurpose old mining pits.

Read more:
Farmers are famously self-reliant. Why not use farm dams as mini-hydro plants?

What we found

Our previous research identified suitable locations in undeveloped areas (excluding protected land) and using existing reservoirs. Now, we have turned our attention to mine sites.

Our study used a computer algorithm to search the Earth’s surface for suitable sites. It looked for mining pits, pit lakes and tailings ponds in mining sites which were located near suitable land for a new upper reservoir. The idea is that the reservoir and mining site are “paired” and water pumped between them.

Globally, we identified 904 suitable mining sites across 77 countries.

Some 37 suitable sites are located in Australia. They include the Mount Rawdon and Muswellbrook mining pits already under investigation.

There are a number of potential options in Western Australia: in the iron-ore region of the Pilbara, south of Perth and around Kalgoorlie.

Options in Queensland and New South Wales are mostly located down the east coast, including the Coppabella Mine and the coal mining pits near the old Liddell Power Station. Possible sites also exist inland at Mount Isa in Queensland and at the Cadia Hill gold mine near Orange in NSW.

Potential sites in South Australia include the old Leigh Creek coal mine in the Flinders Ranges and the operating Prominent Hill mine northwest of Adelaide. Tasmania and Victoria also offer possible locations, although many other non-mining options exist in these states for pumped hydro storage.

We are not suggesting that operating mines be closed – rather, that pumped hydro storage be considered as part of site rehabilitation at the end of the mine’s life.

If old mining sites are to be converted into pumped hydro, several challenges must be addressed. For example, mine pits may contain contaminants that, if filled with water, could seep into groundwater. However, this could be overcome by lining reservoirs.

Looking ahead

Australia has set a readily achievable goal of reaching 82% renewable electricity by 2030.

The Australian Energy Market Operator suggests by 2050, this nation needs about 640 gigawatt-hours of dispatchable or “on demand” storage to support solar and wind capacity. We currently have about 17 gigawatt-hours of electricity storage, with more committed by Snowy 2.0 and other projects.

The 37 possible pumped hydro sites we’ve identified could deliver 540 gigawatt-hours of storage potential. Combined with other non-mining sites we’ve identified previously, the options are far more numerous than our needs.

This means we can afford to be picky, and develop only the very best sites. So what are we waiting for?

Andrew Blakers receives funding from ARENA and DFAT.

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

– ref. Researchers found 37 mine sites in Australia that could be converted into renewable energy storage. So what are we waiting for? – https://theconversation.com/researchers-found-37-mine-sites-in-australia-that-could-be-converted-into-renewable-energy-storage-so-what-are-we-waiting-for-223978

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gavin Moodie, Adjunct Professor, Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education, OISE, University of Toronto

The federal government has released the final report on a Universities Accord. Taking more than a year to prepare, it is billed as a “blueprint” for reform for the next decade and beyond. It contains 47 recommendations across student fees, wellbeing, funding, teaching, research and university governance. You can find the rest of our accord coverage here.

One of the most contentious recommendations so far from the Universities Accord final report is for a “Higher Education Future Fund”.

The fund would be established with money from both the federal government and universities, ultimately reaching A$10 billion in assets. The idea is the government would match funding from universities, which would provide money from their own “untied” revenue.

This means universities could not use any of the non-government funding they have gained that they currently spend on research, buildings and other institutional priorities.

So would a fund work and is it a good idea?

Why have a future fund?

The report says the federal government should set a target to more than double the number of government-supported university students in Australia by 2050. The future fund would help support this growth, by providing “built and digital infrastructure, including student housing”. It could also include spaces such as libraries and things like cyber-security.

The fund would be managed by the Board of Guardians of Australia’s Future Fund, Australia’s sovereign wealth fund. This board also manages the Medical Research Future Fund, the Future Drought Fund and four other funds.

Any grants paid by the higher education fund would be approved by an independent board.

How would it work?

The accord final report suggests wealthier universities would pay more as the fund would “recognise universities’ capacity to pay”. The report contains little detail on how this would be achieved, but it seems likely the fund would redistribute resources from universities with more “untied non-government revenue” (from sources such as international student fees and business ventures) to those with less.

This appears to be a development of the proposed levy on international student fee income floated in the accord interim report last year.

This was criticised by higher education experts as being “unhelpful and unworkable”. Wealthier universities also opposed the idea.

So the review panel may not be surprised to see the future fund is being similarly criticised.

As the Group of Eight chair Mark Scott (who is also chair of The Conversation’s board) noted in a statement:

This is extremely poor public policy, and taxing the very system the report identified as underfunded is not a solution.

Scott added it could also undermine Australia’s “successes in international education and damage our global reputation”.

But not all universities think alike. According to The Australian, Western Sydney University Vice-Chancellor Barney Glover (who was also a member of the accord review panel) thinks the fund is “important future proofing” for the sector, but there is work to do on the details.

Read more:
What would a levy on international student fees mean for Australian universities?

What about the impact on research funding?

Asking universities to surrender some of their own funds for a communal fund seems to be inconsistent with other areas of the report.

The report calls for increased targets for how much Australia spends on research and development as a proportion of GDP and for a “pathway” to fund the “full economic cost of research”. At the moment, Australia’s university research is significantly subsidised by international student fees.

If funds were taken away from individual universities for a future fund, this would likely take funds away from research. Universities would gain more direct funding for research, but would loose some of their international student fee income which they currently reallocate to research.

Monash University (which is also a member of the Group of Eight) said the fund would “blunt” the impact of its research. As Vice-Chancellor Sharon Pickering said:

[It will] diminish Monash’s ability to deliver on the Accord’s objectives and aspirations.

The fund’s proposed model stands in contrast to that of the Australian Government Future Fund, which was set up in 2006 to soak up big federal government surpluses generated from the mining boom. In other words, it was funded fully by the government.

Read more:
Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt’s big ideas for how Australia funds and uses research

But a fund has some merit

Yet there are reasons to support a future fund for higher education. It would be prudent to use some of the revenue from the current boom in international students to generate revenue long into the future.

Collective action from the sector to set itself up for the future could also be more powerful and better coordinated than separate actions of individual institutions. And it is progressive to redistribute resources from those with more to those with less.

We also know affordable housing is a crucial issue for many Australians, and students are among those with the fewest resources. The huge numbers of international students has also increased pressure on student housing.

While Australian universities have not been expected to provide student housing, we already have some structures set up via university colleges and student residences as well as housing services that seek to match good landlords with responsible students.

So it is not unreasonable to expect universities to be part of the solution of student accommodation pressures.

However, history suggests it will be politically difficult. In 1988, the federal government levied universities (or “clawed back” funds) to establish the Australian Research Council.

This was the subject of fraught and prolonged negotiations between universities and the then education minister John Dawkins. In the end, the clawback was largely implemented as planned. But the spread of research funding across universities remains highly disputed.

Read more:
Universities Accord: ‘Gonski-style’ funding is on the table for higher education. This will see some unis gain more than others

What now?

A future fund is not going to be set up anytime soon. The review panel advises it should not be established until after the full implementation of a recommended new needs-based funding model for universities.

This itself has many moving parts and is likely to involve extensive and intensive discussions and negotiations.

So there is plenty of scope for universities to offset what they consider to be disadvantages with other parts of the proposed accord.

In the meantime, the government is considering the report. When asked about the future fund by The Conversation’s Michelle Grattan, Education Minister Jason noted some universities “hate” the idea and others “like it”, before adding, “I’ve got an open mind”.

Gavin Moodie has received funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, and has worked at 6 Australian universities.

– ref. Universities Accord: there’s a push for a Higher Education Future Fund, but some unis ‘hate’ it – https://theconversation.com/universities-accord-theres-a-push-for-a-higher-education-future-fund-but-some-unis-hate-it-224395

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pearl Subban, Associate Professor, Faculty of Education, Monash University

The federal government has released the final report on a Universities Accord. Taking more than a year to prepare, it is billed as a “blueprint” for reform for the next decade and beyond. It contains 47 recommendations across student fees, wellbeing, funding, teaching, research and university governance. You can find the rest of our accord coverage here.

If you are a Year 12 student this year, you may be hoping to get an early offer for a university place before your final exams even begin.

While the bulk of students receive their university offers in January of the year they plan to start study, it is increasingly common for students to receive an offer while they are still at school. Offers have reportedly been made as early as March.

But this practice is set to change. While the federal government is still considering much of the Universities Accord final report, it has made a decision on its recommendation about early offers to Year 12 students.

Over the weekend, it announced university offers in all states and territories should not be made to school students before September.

What are early offers?

Most (though not all) Year 12 university applicants do their school exams, then their external exams and then apply to university with their ATAR (or Australian Tertiary Entrance Rank).

Universities use this to make an offer to students from January of the year they begin study.

But some universities and some subject areas take a different approach. They look at Year 11 results and factors such as portfolios of work, written responses to questions, demonstration of skills like resilience or motivation and/or letters of recommendation.

Students can apply under an early offer scheme. Then universities can make a provisional offer to Year 12 students before final exams and the release of ATARs.

Students are still required to complete Year 12 and may need to achieve a certain ATAR, have done certain subjects and received certain results in these subjects.

Early offers are not new to universities, particularly in areas such as visual and performing arts where measures beyond exam results are required. But the practice became more widespread during disruptions to learning and teaching during COVID.

Read more:
‘So many things to consider’: how to help school leavers decide what to do next

Why are early offers changing?

The Universities Accord review panel found early offers to students at school to be a “contentious practice”. It found there was no consistency or transparency around it and little data.

While they noted they can ease the stress of Year 12, the panel also heard early offers can lead to student disengagement “in the final and important weeks and months” of school.

The panel also noted they can favour students who already have personal or socioeconomic advantages, such as principals, careers counsellors or parents who can advocate for and write letters of recommendation on their behalf.

What will happen now?

At a meeting last week, federal and state education ministers agreed early offers to Year 12 students should change.

For this year and next, no early offers will be made before September. A national approach will be developed by 2027.

Students who suffer from exam anxiety and who are not as confident may lose out as a result of this move.

Some students who become overwhelmed by Year 12, may perform better in the internal Year 11 exams where the pressure is often reduced. Year 11 exams are still significant but they are scored by classroom teachers and likely to take in other dynamics, including the student’s circumstances and background.

Read more:
We can predict final school marks in year 11 – it’s time to replace stressful exams with more meaningful education

Is this change a good idea?

At the moment, the system is geared towards a year of assessments and exams the concludes with an ATAR, which is a student’s ticket into a university course. This sort of incentivisation may prepare students for future challenges in their academic and career journeys.

It does however favour the student who performs well under test conditions and whose life circumstances enable them to work consistently all year.

It may also disadvantage those who already face challenges such as poor mental health, or those who are the first in their family to attend to university.

Drawing more students from underrepresented backgrounds into university is a key goal of the Universities Accord final report. If equity is a priority, it may be wise to rethink early offers for some vulnerable students.

Conscientious students are not likely to reduce their commitment to their study program and will persevere through Year 12 anyway.

Pearl Subban is affiliated with Monash University Australia.

– ref. Universities Accord: early university offers won’t be made until later in Year 12. Is this a good idea? – https://theconversation.com/universities-accord-early-university-offers-wont-be-made-until-later-in-year-12-is-this-a-good-idea-224376

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charlotte Dunn, Lecturer in Classics, University of Tasmania

You might be surprised to learn the sex life of a long-dead conqueror is making headlines in 2024. Netflix documentary Alexander the Great: The Making of a God has provoked outrage for its portrayal of Alexander in a romantic relationship with his male companion Hephaestion.

Alexander the Great (356–323BC) spent his short life undertaking an enormous military campaign. He defeated the Persian king Darius III and created an empire that stretched from Europe into Egypt, Western and Central Asia, and all the way to India.

After dying at the young age of 32, he has remained the subject of intense fascination and speculation.

The six-episode series is the latest to tackle some interesting questions about the conqueror’s life through dramatised scenes and commentary from a range of experts. Although the show doesn’t try to cover everything – and there are several gaps – its portrayal of Alexander’s sexuality is what has caused the greatest stir.

Read more:
Romosexuality – embracing queer sex and love in Ancient times

Alexander, the great enigma

One of the first scenes depicts Alexander sparring with Hephaestion before the pair share several kisses. Hephaestion promises he will be by Alexander’s side “til the bitter end”. The experts then note the pair were likely more than just close friends.

Some viewers, however, have accused the show of pushing a supposed agenda. Others found it “too woke”.

Even Greece’s Minister for Culture, Lina Mendoni, has spoken on the topic, insisting that historical sources offer no evidence for the relationship going “beyond the limits of friendship”.

Mendoni’s comment was made in response to questions from Dimitris Natsiou, the president of a far-right Christian Orthodox political party. Natsiou has spoken out against the series for perceived inaccuracies. Along with other critics, he suggests the show’s portrayal of Alexander’s sexual identity is a historical distortion.

It’s true there is nothing written by Alexander himself that confirms how he viewed his own sexuality. But is it fair to call the show inaccurate for its interpretation of his relationship with Hephaestion?

The ancient evidence

While the ancient evidence suggests the pair were particularly close, reconstructing the past is not a straightforward matter. Most surviving ancient authors actually wrote centuries after Alexander’s death and often had their own interpretations of events. This makes it very challenging to uncover the truth.

Some sources do assume the pair were lovers, such as the Roman author Claudius Aelianus, or Aelian, because of the way they presented themselves in public.

This public presentation is probably the strongest evidence for how important Hephaestion was to Alexander. Alexander was an absolute master of propaganda. He took care to restrict how he appeared in art and sculpture, and controlled his campaign narrative through the use of his own historian, Callisthenes of Olynthus. Callisthenes was responsible for glorifying Alexander’s victories and presenting the version of events Alexander wanted.

Alexander also stage-managed a number of events at the start of his military campaign to make it seem like the beginning of another Trojan War. The tale of this war was incredibly important to the ancient Greeks, and especially Alexander, who claimed the mythological hero Achilles was his ancestor.

During the important opening act, Alexander laid a wreath on the tomb of Achilles. Some ancient accounts say Hephaestion did the same for the tomb of Patroclus, who many in the ancient world assumed was Achilles’ lover.

Hephaestion is the only companion of Alexander who is mentioned by name doing something important like this. Alexander was no doubt astute enough to understand the implication in his own day; he was therefore probably comfortable with his followers assuming he and Hephaestion were lovers, just as Achilles and Patroclus were thought to be.

Ancient author Diodorus Siculus reports that Alexander preferred Hephaestion above everyone else, even claiming that Hephaestion loved him as Alexander, while his other close friend Craterus loved him as the king. These are just some of the numerous anecdotes that demonstrate Hephaestion had a significant role in Alexander’s life – and one that was different to that of a friend.

After Hephaestion’s death in 324 BC, Alexander mourned him extravagantly, just as Achilles did for Patroclus.

These very public displays might be as close as we can get to understanding how Alexander wanted the pair to be perceived. And they suggest a romantic relationship is a strong possibility.

What does the scholarship say?

Perhaps a more important question is why a documentary exploring this angle might provoke such a strong reaction today.

It’s true that scholarship on Alexander’s sex life has not always been accessible. It wasn’t until 1978 that K. J. Dover’s work Greek Homosexuality paved the way for new insights into a more diverse interpretation of sexualities in the ancient world.

Before this, important scholars on Alexander, such as W. W. Tarn (1869–1957), had outright denied Alexander’s interest in men, asserting any such evidence was a result of “hostile” sources. Tarn even erased certain figures from history, including another possible male lover of Alexander’s, Bagoas. He was unable to accept Alexander as someone who didn’t fit with his own image of the conqueror.

The reality is that same-sex relationships were generally pretty common during the time of Alexander the Great, although there were also societal pressures on men, as they were expected to marry and have children with their legitimate wives.

Read more:
Friday essay: the myth of the ancient Greek ‘gay utopia’

Queer erasure has been all too common in scholarship, which has traditionally favoured hetero-normative interpretations, even when the evidence could clearly be interpreted in another way.

Media representations that explore these interpretations offer us a chance to understand ancient relationships in their own context. In doing so, they pave the way for a richer understanding of the possibilities of the past.

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

– ref. A new Netflix doco shows Alexander the Great as queer, and some viewers aren’t happy. An expert weighs in – https://theconversation.com/a-new-netflix-doco-shows-alexander-the-great-as-queer-and-some-viewers-arent-happy-an-expert-weighs-in-224262

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jan Dewar, Head of Nursing, Auckland University of Technology

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, policy was being made in crisis management mode. Decisions had to be made faster than usual, and there was limited ability to undertake wider consultation and impact analysis.

Now the worst of the pandemic is over, we have the luxury of being able to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t.

One of the more controversial policies implemented during the height of the pandemic was the vaccine mandates. Thousands of workers across a range of professions had to get vaccinated to keep their jobs.

This mandate presented a trade-off between public health considerations and the right of individuals to refuse medical treatment and earn a living in their chosen profession.

Our research looked at whether these vaccine mandates increased COVID-19 vaccination rates among these workers, and what their employment, earnings and workplace experiences were.

The stated purpose of the mandates was to increase vaccination rates among these workers to ensure the continuity of public services.

Read more:
COVID vaccines don’t violate the Nuremberg Code. Here’s how to convince the doubters

In reality, the mandates had limited effect on increasing vaccine uptake. But they had a substantive negative effect on the employment, earnings and wellbeing of unvaccinated health workers.

The importance of choice

Vaccination rates among healthcare, education and corrections workers were already high when the government announced the mandates in October 2021.

Almost 90% of healthcare workers and 86% of corrections workers had already received two doses of the vaccine. The share among education workers was somewhat lower (82%), but they also did not have early access to the vaccine. There were only six weeks between the vaccine becoming available to everyone over 12 years and the mandates being announced.

While vaccination rates among these mandated workers did increase after the mandates were announced, the data shows a continuation of an upward trend rather than a jump in uptake.

It won’t surprise anyone that people don’t like being told what to do. And this appears to have some bearing on mandatory vaccine uptake.

One German survey found just over 3% of people said they would not want the COVID-19 vaccination if it was voluntary. But more than 16% said they would not want to get vaccinated if it was mandatory.

A consequence of vaccine mandates is that they can erode trust in government and provoke more resistance. This erosion of trust could potentially strengthen anti-vaccination sentiment generally and reduce uptake, not just of COVID-19 vaccinations, but also other vaccines.

This outcome is especially concerning given research has found New Zealand’s routine childhood immunisation rates have decreased since the pandemic.

Earnings took a hit

In addition to not causing a noticeable increase in vaccination rates, the mandates also had negative consequences for the employment and earnings of unvaccinated health workers.

Their employment rate fell by 15% and their earnings fell by 19%, compared with vaccinated health workers and those not subject to the mandates.

Read more:
Parents were fine with sweeping school vaccination mandates five decades ago – but COVID-19 may be a different story

Even after the health worker mandates were lifted in September 2022, the employment and earnings of unvaccinated workers never fully recovered.

This exacerbated existing health worker shortages. Closed borders and a global shortage of healthcare workers meant fewer moved into the health sector compared with the number leaving.

The trauma of being branded ‘anti-vax’

The effect of the mandates on health workers also went beyond financial consequences.

Affected health workers talked to us about the loss and ongoing trauma they have experienced. Those opposed to mandates are often incorrectly labelled as “anti-vaxxers”, or even conspiracy theorists.

All health workers we spoke to were pro-vaccination, but had legitimate reasons for not completing, or struggling to complete, the required vaccinations. They had researched the vaccine and made informed decisions based on their circumstances.

Some health workers pointed out that the case for mandates was not strong based on available evidence. While the vaccine reduces symptom severity, its ability to prevent transmission is currently limited.

As one health worker said:

I looked at the Australian data and couldn’t see the logic of me potentially being exposed to another vaccine where my potential benefit was so low […] the evidence wasn’t really strong.

Some workers had health conditions that put them at elevated risk from the vaccine. Or they had a history of adverse reactions to vaccines. But the mandates meant they either had to get vaccinated, sometimes against their doctors’ advice, or lose their jobs. While some medical exemptions were available, the threshold for these was very high.

In addition, even those with medical exemptions faced stigma. One health worker who got an exemption after suffering a stroke following their vaccination, described people’s reaction upon showing them the exemption.

That look on people’s faces, it was disgust […] it was really, really awful.

As another health worker explained:

We’re supposed to be a caring profession. Nothing about this is caring […] Due to no fault of my own, I have now been labelled an anti-vaxxer and anti-science, and in some people’s opinion, not worthy of calling myself a nurse. This hurts me immensely. This is what mandates have done. There is no room for individual circumstances.

The people we spoke with said they lost their sense of control, and it eroded their trust in the health system and government.

The risk of mandates

What does this tell us about the use of vaccine mandates during future pandemics?

In the context of high voluntary compliance, mandates should be used judiciously. Mandating something is not always the most effective way to get people to do something for the greater good.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a strong motivator for vaccination was the “feel-good” factor of knowing you were protecting yourself and others.

Ironically, the increase in distrust that resulted from the use of mandates in the COVID-19 pandemic may actually lower voluntary vaccine uptake in future pandemics.

As one health worker summed it up:

Someone who’s been vaccinated badly, the trauma of that – it’s not just them, it’s their entire social circle, it’s their entire whānau. You’re seeding distrust in the health system, not just for COVID vaccinations, but the whole system, everything to do with medicine and the whole immunisation programme […] if there’s a policy that’s as big as a mandate for a whole population or health professionals, you really need to think about what are the unintended consequences.

This research received funding from the Ministry of Health.

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

– ref. Unintended consequences of NZ’s COVID vaccine mandates must inform future pandemic policy – new research – https://theconversation.com/unintended-consequences-of-nzs-covid-vaccine-mandates-must-inform-future-pandemic-policy-new-research-222989

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

Does it feel like you’re being charged more for all sorts of things these days, from groceries to banking? Turns out, you’re right.

While we might be more likely to remember prices that go up than prices that go down, the very best evidence – assembled by Australia’s Treasury, the federal government’s lead economic adviser – says your suspicions are right. We really are being charged more than we used to be two decades ago.

Coupled with the latest profit reports from Australia’s biggest supermarkets and banks, including Tuesday’s half-year results from Coles, it suggests we are contributing more to company profits than we used to.

Climbing price markups

The Treasury estimates show in the 13 years between 2003-04 and 2016-17, the average price markup – the difference between the cost of a product and its selling price – across all Australian industries climbed 6%.

That’s extra profit, taken from your wallet, going to the people selling you things.

Those Treasury estimates are contained in a background paper prepared for the competition inquiry being undertaken by a panel including Productivity Commission chair Danielle Wood, former Competition and Consumer Commission chief Rod Sims, and business leader David Gonski.

At the same time, the average share of each industry held by its biggest four firms edged up from 41% to 43%.

Read more:
See when Australia’s biggest banks stopped paying proper interest on your savings – and what you can do about it

Profit margins are also higher here than in more competitive markets overseas.

This is true in banking, where the big four have taken over St George, BankWest, and the Bank of Melbourne – and are about to take over Suncorp.

It’s also true in supermarkets, where the big two, Woolworths and Coles, have taken over or seen off Franklins, Bi-Lo and Safeway.

Bigger profit margins than overseas

Coles supermarkets reported earnings before adjustments of A$1.73 billion on sales of $19.778 billion in the half year to December – a profit margin of 8.7%.

Last week, Woolworths supermarkets reported earnings of $2.45 billion on sales of $25.648 billion – a margin of 9.6%.

By way of comparison, the dominant UK supermarket group, Sainsbury’s, has a profit margin of 6.13%.

In banking, the Commonwealth Bank has just reported a return on equity (profit as a proportion of shareholders’ funds) of 13.8%. National Australia Bank reported 12.9%.

While on a par with the big banks overseas, those recent returns are a good deal higher than CommBank’s 11.5% and NAB’s 10.7% reported two years ago.

Little hope for groceries

For supermarkets, there’s not a lot the government can do, apart from launching an inquiry, and perhaps giving Australian authorities the power to break up firms that abuse their market power.

But Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said he isn’t keen on giving Australian authorities the sort of powers available to authorities in the United States and the United Kingdom, saying (incongruously) Australia is “not the old Soviet Union”.

And doing anything short of that would be unlikely to have much effect. Australia’s two supermarket giants have invested a fortune in high-tech warehouses and distribution systems, which new rivals would be hard-pressed to match.

Hope for more competitive banking

But for banks it’s altogether different. Richard Denniss of the Australia Institute has come up with the idea, and it’s a beauty.

It’s for the government to provide a low-cost banking service – expanding on services it already offers.

The costs would be so low, other banks might decide to add features and resell them in the same way as resellers sell mobile phone and NBN services.

The primary function of any bank is to provide a numbered account into which Australians can deposit and withdraw funds.

The Australian Tax Office does this already, at an incredibly low cost.

The tax office gives every working Australian a tax file number. Employers deposit money into these accounts, and – should the tax office owe a refund – taxpayers withdraw them.

Some taxpayers ensure their tax is overpaid, so they withdraw later.

Denniss describes it as a bank account with the world’s clumsiest interface.

The government could offer bank loans

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch from improving that interface to offering government loans.

In fact, government loans are already provided in some circumstances: such as to retirees with home equity through the home equity access scheme, and to Centrelink recipients through advance payments.

It woudn’t be much more of stretch to provide loans more broadly, at an incredibly low administrative cost. The government already lends against the value of homes.

Back in the days when the federal government owned the Commonwealth Bank, it had to cover the high costs of running bricks and mortar branches.

Freed from those costs, the government could now offer a low-cost, technology-enabled basic banking service that would tempt us away from the big four banks – unless they offered better value.

Of course it would cost money, although a lot of it has already been spent setting up the system of tax file numbers and accounts. And of course the banks would hate the idea. That would be the point.

But doing what we can to stop Australians being overcharged is important, not only for wage earners but also for businesses.

The competition inquiry the government has launched is a good start. It shouldn’t be frightened about where it might lead.

Peter Martin is Economics Editor of The Conversation.

– ref. Worried about price gouging? For banks, there’s a simple solution – https://theconversation.com/worried-about-price-gouging-for-banks-theres-a-simple-solution-223821

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lydia Brown, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, The University of Melbourne

“I have to be hard on myself,” Sarah told me in a recent telehealth psychology session. “I would never reach my potential if I was kind and let myself off the hook.”

I could empathise with this fear of self-compassion from clients such as Sarah (not her real name). From a young age, we are taught to be kind to others, but self-kindness is never mentioned.

Instead, we are taught success hinges on self-sacrifice. And we need a healthy inner critic to bully us forward into becoming increasingly better versions of ourselves.

But research shows there doesn’t have to be a trade-off between self-compassion and success.

Self-compassion can help you reach your potential, while supporting you to face the inevitable stumbles and setbacks along the way.

Read more:
‘Self-love’ might seem selfish. But done right, it’s the opposite of narcissism

What is self-compassion?

Self-compassion has three key ingredients.

1. Self-kindness

This involves treating yourself with the same kindness you would extend towards a good friend – via your thoughts, feelings and actions – especially during life’s difficult moments.

For instance, if you find yourself fixating on a minor mistake you made at work, self-kindness might involve taking a ten-minute walk to shift focus, and reminding yourself it is OK to make mistakes sometimes, before moving on with your day.

2. Mindfulness

In this context, mindfulness involves being aware of your own experience of stress or suffering, rather than repressing or avoiding your feelings, or over-identifying with them.

Basically, you must see your stress with a clear (mindful) perspective before you can respond with kindness. If we avoid or are consumed by our suffering, we lose perspective.

3. Common humanity

Common humanity involves recognising our own experience of suffering as something that unites us as being human.

For instance, a sleep-deprived parent waking up (for the fourth time) to feed their newborn might choose to think about all the other parents around the world doing exactly the same thing – as opposed to feeling isolated and alone.

Read more:
I was an expert advisor on the documentary ‘How to Thrive’. Here’s what happened after this wellbeing experiment

It’s not about day spas, or booking a manicure

When Sarah voiced her fear that self-compassion would prevent her success, I explained self-compassion is distinct from self-indulgence.

“So is self-compassion just about booking in more mani/pedis?” Sarah asked.

Not really, I explained. A one-off trip to a day spa is unlikely to transform your mental health.

Instead, self-compassion is a flexible psychological resilience factor that shapes our thoughts, feelings and actions.

It’s associated with a suite of benefits to our wellbeing, relationships and health.

What does the science say?

Over the past 20 years, we’ve learned self-compassionate people enjoy a wide range of benefits. They tend to be happier and have fewer psychological symptoms of distress.

Those high on self-compassion persevere following a failure. They say they are more motivated to overcome a personal weakness than those low on self-compassion, who are more likely to give up.

So rather than feeling trapped by your inadequacies, self-compassion encourages a growth mindset, helping you reach your potential.

However, self-compassion is not a panacea. It will not change your life circumstances or somehow make life “easy”. It is based on the premise that life is hard, and provides practical tools to cope.

Read more:
Wellness is not women’s friend. It’s a distraction from what really ails us

It’s a factor in healthy ageing

I research menopause and healthy ageing and am especially interested in the value of self-compassion through menopause and in the second half of life.

Because self-compassion becomes important during life’s challenges, it can help people navigate physical symptoms (for instance, menopausal hot flushes), life transitions such as divorce, and promote healthy ageing.

I’ve also teamed up with researchers at Autism Spectrum Australia to explore self-compassion in autistic adults.

We found autistic adults report significantly lower levels of self-compassion than neurotypical adults. So we developed an online self-compassion training program for this at-risk population.

Read more:
TikTok is teaching the world about autism – but is it empowering autistic people or pigeonholing them?

Three tips for self-compassion

You can learn self-compassion with these three exercises.

1. What would you say to a friend?

Think back to the last time you made a mistake. What did you say to yourself?

If you notice you’re treating yourself more like an enemy than a friend, don’t beat yourself up about it. Instead, try to think about what you might tell a friend, and direct that same friendly language towards yourself.

2. Harness the power of touch

Soothing human touch activates the parasympathetic “relaxation” branch of our nervous system and counteracts the fight or flight response.

Specifically, self-soothing touch (for instance, by placing both hands on your heart, stroking your forearm or giving yourself a hug) reduces cortisol responses to psychosocial stress.

3. What do I need right now?

Sometimes, it can be hard to figure out exactly what self-compassion looks like in a given moment. The question “what do I need right now” helps clarify your true needs.

For example, when I was 37 weeks pregnant, I woke up bolt awake one morning at 3am.

Rather than beating myself up about it, or fretting about not getting enough sleep, I gently placed my hands on my heart and took a few deep breaths. By asking myself “what do I need right now?” it became clear that listening to a gentle podcast/meditation fitted the bill (even though I wanted to addictively scroll my phone).

Lydia Brown occasionally works as a clinical psychologist in private practice.

– ref. How to be kind to yourself (without going to a day spa) – https://theconversation.com/how-to-be-kind-to-yourself-without-going-to-a-day-spa-223194

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

Labor is not planning to contest the coming byelection in the Sydney seat of Cook, following the departure of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who delivered his parliamentary valedictory on Tuesday.

Cook is on a 12.4% margin and Labor – currently on tenterhooks over Saturday’s byelection in the Melbourne Labor seat of Dunkley – doesn’t want the political or financial pressure of running in a seat it could not win.

Labor sources said it was “highly unlikely” to field a candidate. No date has been yet set for the byelection.

The Morrison valedictory was heavy on saying “thank you” to many people in and out of politics, and emotional at times.

It had a riff on Taylor Swift. His daughters had suggested he should “play a type of Taylor Swift bingo [ … ] by trying to work the names of every single Taylor Swift album into my remarks”.

Morrison said he departed “having given all” and had “plenty of scars to show for it”. He reflected on “three things I have learned along the way that may help those dealing with the challenges of the future who continue in this place”.

The first was that “all good government must start with nurturing a strong, innovative, dynamic, entrepreneurial, market-based economy”.

In a warning against attempting to “reinstitutionalise” the
economy, he said “such an approach will only negate the
capacity we have as a nation to deliver on the essentials that Australians rely on”.

Secondly, Morrison warned about the threats to Australia’s security and the dangers posed by the “arc of autocracy”, to which he had referred when prime minister, ranging “from Pyongyang to Beijing to Tehran and Moscow.”

On China he said: “The 2022 election may have provided an
opportunity for Beijing to step back from their failed attempts at coercion. But we must not be deluded. Tactics change, but their strategy remains the same.”

Thirdly, Morrison highlighted the importance of “the Judaeo-Christian values upon which our liberty and society was founded. Even if you may not believe, it would be wise to respect and appreciate this important link and foundation.”

Morrison said he left parliament “appreciative and thankful, unburdened by offences, and released from any bitterness that can so often haunt post-political lives.

“This is due to my faith in Jesus Christ, which gives me the faith to both forgive but also to be honest about my own failings and shortcomings,” he said.

Speaking in response, Anthony Albanese described Morrison as “a truly formidable opponent”.

Earlier, at the Coalition parties meeting, Morrison told his soon-to-be-former colleagues to “work you arses off. That’s how you win an election.”

Meanwhile both sides are flat out trying to manage expectations ahead of the Dunkley outcome.

The PM told caucus the average swing against Labor governments was 7.1% “and we hold this seat by 6.3%”. The 7.1% is the figure senior Labor figures are using repeatedly. It is the average swing in byelections in government seats since 1984.

The opposition is choosing more modest figures.

In the Coalition party room Peter Dutton said Dunkley was not a marginal seat.

Dutton said the average swing against governments in byelections since the second world war was 3.6%. The average byelection swing against a first-term government was 1.5% and no first-term government had lost a seat in a byelection since WWII.

In Aston last year, Labor achieved a 6.4% swing to win the Liberal seat.

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

– ref. View from The Hill: Labor ‘highly unlikely’ to contest the Cook byelection, as Morrison bows out with ‘plenty of scars’ – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-labor-highly-unlikely-to-contest-the-cook-byelection-as-morrison-bows-out-with-plenty-of-scars-224504

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

Labor is not planning to contest the coming byelection in the Sydney seat of Cook, following the departure of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who delivered his parliamentary valedictory on Tuesday.

Cook is on a 12.4% margin and Labor – currently on tenterhooks over Saturday’s byelection in the Melbourne Labor seat of Dunkley – doesn’t want the political or financial pressure of running in a seat it could not win.

Labor sources said it was “highly unlikely” to field a candidate. No date has been yet set for the byelection.

The Morrison valedictory was heavy on saying “thank you” to many people in and out of politics, and emotional at times.

It had a riff on Taylor Swift. His daughters had suggested he should “play a type of Taylor Swift bingo [ … ] by trying to work the names of every single Taylor Swift album into my remarks”.

Morrison said he departed “having given all” and had “plenty of scars to show for it”. He reflected on “three things I have learned along the way that may help those dealing with the challenges of the future who continue in this place”.

The first was that “all good government must start with nurturing a strong, innovative, dynamic, entrepreneurial, market-based economy”.

In a warning against attempting to “reinstitutionalise” the
economy, he said “such an approach will only negate the
capacity we have as a nation to deliver on the essentials that Australians rely on”.

Secondly, Morrison warned about the threats to Australia’s security and the dangers posed by the “arc of autocracy”, to which he had referred when prime minister, ranging “from Pyongyang to Beijing to Tehran and Moscow.”

On China he said: “The 2022 election may have provided an
opportunity for Beijing to step back from their failed attempts at coercion. But we must not be deluded. Tactics change, but their strategy remains the same.”

Thirdly, Morrison highlighted the importance of “the Judaeo-Christian values upon which our liberty and society was founded. Even if you may not believe, it would be wise to respect and appreciate this important link and foundation.”

Morrison said he left parliament “appreciative and thankful, unburdened by offences, and released from any bitterness that can so often haunt post-political lives.

“This is due to my faith in Jesus Christ, which gives me the faith to both forgive but also to be honest about my own failings and shortcomings,” he said.

Speaking in response, Anthony Albanese described Morrison as “a truly formidable opponent”.

Earlier, at the Coalition parties meeting, Morrison told his soon-to-be-former colleagues to “work you arses off. That’s how you win an election.”

Meanwhile both sides are flat out trying to manage expectations ahead of the Dunkley outcome.

The PM told caucus the average swing against Labor governments was 7.1% “and we hold this seat by 6.3%”. The 7.1% is the figure senior Labor figures are using repeatedly. It is the average swing in byelections in government seats since 1984.

The opposition is choosing more modest figures.

In the Coalition party room Peter Dutton said Dunkley was not a marginal seat.

Dutton said the average swing against governments in byelections since the second world war was 3.6%. The average byelection swing against a first-term government was 1.5% and no first-term government had lost a seat in a byelection since WWII.

In Aston last year, Labor achieved a 6.4% swing to win the Liberal seat.

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

– ref. View from The Hill: Labor ‘highly unlikely’ to contest the Cook byelection – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-labor-highly-unlikely-to-contest-the-cook-byelection-224504

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Hurley, Lecturer in Criminology. Police and policing. Dept of Security Studies & Criminology, Macquarie University

As New South Wales police continue to investigate the alleged murders of Luke Davies and Jesse Baird, much attention has been paid to the alleged murder weapon – a police handgun.

Police allege the couple was murdered by Senior Constable Beau Lamarre-Condon last week, which has in turn provoked debate around the protocols around how, why and when police are able to use firearms.

How and when do officers have access to a gun?

Police firearms are stored in a standalone firearms room in a police station. Any time an officer enters the firearms room, their identity is recorded along with the time and date.

The room can also have CCTV in it, depending on the age of the building and its electronic infrastructure. In the room is an industrial-made firearms safe that is specifically made to store firearms.

Once in the room, officers have a key to the safe so they can access their firearm. Each firearm within the safe is individually locked and secured so no police can access anyone else’s firearm. This is due to the design of the gun safe, which must meet Australian Standards in safe storage of firearms and NSW legislation on the safe storage of firearms.

Police access their firearm and carry out a set of drills to ensure it is in working order. They then place the weapon in their holster while in the room, and then leave. At the end of the shift, they return their firearm, going through the same procedure.

Are they ever able to access a weapon off-duty?

Police do not, generally speaking, have access to their firearms when off-duty. In rare circumstances, an officer may be allowed to store their weapon at home, but the threshold to obtain permission for this is very high. It will only be granted when there is credible evidence an officer’s life is in danger, generally from organised crime syndicates or criminals with a history of extreme violence towards police. Any request must be supported by several senior police.

There are jobs police can undertake called “user pays” events. These have been around for over 25 years, and it simply means that outside organisations pay police to be at an event that requires extra security. Police have the same legislative powers when working at a user-pays event as they do with their regular duties, and also routinely carry a firearm.

If police are working “user pays”, they access their firearm in exactly the same manner as for a standard shift. However, when they complete their user-pays shift, they can return their firearm to the closest police station to where they live. They must follow the same procedure to secure their firearm.

Because the officer’s firearm is not being returned to their usual police station, the local officer in charge, usually an inspector of police, needs to give access to that police station’s gun safe as an additional layer of accountability. The officer’s firearm can also be double locked.

There will be a record made at that police station that an officer has placed his/her firearm in that station’s safe. Police firearms are not always checked to see if it has been discharged. This is due to the massive amount of administrative and policing time this would take.

Read more:
Police body cameras may provide the best evidence – but need much better regulation

How do police have to account for the weapons and the bullets?

Each officer is allocated a firearm from the day they finish their police academy training. That firearm is the responsibility of that officer for the duration of their career.

Police can voluntarily surrender their firearm or have their firearm taken from them if, for example, they are on restricted duties such as administrative jobs or if they have been found to have misused it. If it is surrendered, the firearm is taken to the ballistics unit. The officer will then never have access to that firearm again.

Pre-planned audits are carried out on police firearms several times a year, along with random audits that are not necessarily known to police. These spot checks are undertaken by officers who are senior to the individual police officer to whom that firearm is allocated.

All audits include checking firearm serial numbers, the number of bullets and the number of magazines each officer has in their organisational records. So any missing bullets would be noticed, but perhaps not right away.

Read more:
Australia had a record number of police shootings in the past year. Should we be concerned?

Should there be tighter controls on police access to firearms?

The process to gain access to an officer’s firearm is time-consuming, not only due to accessing the firearm itself but complying with the policies and procedures around it. It can take up to 15 minutes per officer to access and holster their firearm in a busy police station, given only one officer can access their firearm at any one time.

Any idea that an officer’s access to their firearm is easy, quick and they are not accountable for it is incorrect. But there may be ways to improve the procedures, and depending on the outcome of the investigation, police may need to review these.

Vincent Hurley is a former NSW police officer who was attached to police internal affairs (now called professional standards command) during his career.

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

– ref. Explainer: what are the protocols around the use of a firearm for NSW police? – https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-are-the-protocols-around-the-use-of-a-firearm-for-nsw-police-224499

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Baird, Senior Lecturer , University of Tasmania

All humanity benefits from Antarctica and the Southern Ocean that surrounds it. To some, these benefits may seem priceless. But in our market-driven world, calculating the economic value of the environment can be a useful tool in garnering support for its protection.

That was the intention of our new research. We crunched the numbers on the value of services Antarctica and the Southern Ocean provide in terms of fisheries, tourism and various natural processes that support Earth’s functioning.

And the result? We calculate the economic value at a whopping US$180 billion (A$276 billion) each year. We hope our findings will help prioritise conservation actions in Antarctica and galvanise international support to protect the region from the ravages of climate change.

Benefits seen, and unseen

The many benefits nature provides to humans are known as “ecosystem services”.

Some services provided by Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are invisible to most people. For example, the Southern Ocean absorbs carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere, and ice in the region reflects heat. These processes help regulate Earth’s climate

The Southern Ocean also helps transport water around the globe, which helps distribute heat, fresh water, carbon and nutrients. These are known as “regulating” services.

We can think about the value of these services in terms of the cost that would accrue if it was not provided. For example, the Antarctic ice sheet contains 30 million cubic kilometres of ice. If that ice melted as a result of global warming, the effects on coastal communities around the world would be catastrophic.

Other benefits provided by the Antarctic region are more visible. For example, humans rely on toothfish and krill for food, pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements. A warmer and more acidic Southern Ocean would affect fish stocks – both in the region and elsewhere – and some species may become extinct.

The Antarctic region also provides cultural services such as hosting vital scientific research. And in recent years, Antarctica has experienced a surge in tourist numbers.

So how much are these services actually worth to humanity? Our research examined that question.

Read more:
Antarctica is the only continent without a permanent human population, but it has inspired a wealth of imaginative literature

Crunching the numbers

We used various methods to estimate the value of each service. Some, such as the provision of food, can be easily calculated by looking at what the market is willing to pay. Others, such as the avoidance of harm due to CO₂ absorption, are more complicated to ascribe value to.

Let’s start with tourism. Visitor numbers to Antarctica – mostly by ship – have increased markedly in recent decades, from about 8,000 a year in 1993–1994 to 105,000 in 2022–2023. We estimate the annual value of the Antarctic tourism industry at about US$820 million.

And what about the benefits of fisheries? Considering the tonnes of toothfish and krill caught in the region, we estimate the value at about US$370 million per year.

Finally, we estimated the economic value of “regulating services” such as carbon storage, sea level regulation and light reflection. We did this by multiplying estimates of the value of carbon stored in the Southern Ocean by estimates of the social cost of carbon.

This was a complex calculation, which we explain in greater detail in our paper. Overall, we estimate the value of the region’s regulating services at about US$179.3 billion a year.

All up, this brings the total value of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean’s ecosystem services to about US$180 billion a year. This is a conservative estimate which excludes some ecosystem services.

For example, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and neighbouring ocean gyres – which distribute Antarctic nutrients around the world – are thought to help boost the value of global fisheries by about US$2.8 billion. We did not include this in the calculation above to avoid double-counting with other regulating services.

And due to a lack of data, we could not even roughly estimate the value of scientific work in Antarctica, so this is also excluded. But Antarctic research may have prevented significant damage to livelihoods and infrastructure across the world – for example, by monitoring changes in ice and sea levels – and we can expect this contribution to increase in future.

And the region provides other important services that we don’t have enough information to estimate, such as medicinal ingredients yet to be discovered.

Read more:
A heatwave in Antarctica totally blew the minds of scientists. They set out to decipher it – and here are the results

What role for the Antarctic Treaty?

As the Southern Ocean becomes warmer and more acidic, its natural systems will undergo huge changes. This will reduce the many benefits the Antarctic region provides, at great cost to the world. So how should the global community respond?

The Antarctic and Southern Ocean is governed by the Antarctic Treaty, which was adopted in 1959. The threats we’ve outlined were not anticipated at the time, and the treaty does not address them.

Treaty parties have the authority to safeguard some ecosystem services, such as tourism, fishing and science. But are unable to effectively safeguard others, such as regulating services when the threat comes from outside the Antartctic area.

The treaty has evolved over the years. Now it must go further, to safeguard the huge benefits – economic and otherwise – the region provides to the world.

Read more:
The Antarctic Treaty is turning 60 years old. In a changed world, is it still fit for purpose?

Natalie Stoeckl is on the Scientific Expert Panel for Queensland’s sustainable fisheries strategy and was a member of the Reef 2050 Expert panel, and the Wet Tropics Scientific Advisory Board.

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

– ref. Antarctica provides at least $276 billion a year in economic benefits to the world, new research finds – https://theconversation.com/antarctica-provides-at-least-276-billion-a-year-in-economic-benefits-to-the-world-new-research-finds-223355

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Polyakov, Medical Director, Genea Fertility Melbourne; Clinical Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne

In December 2020 in Alabama, a hospital patient gained unauthorised access to an adjoining IVF storage facility, which was not adequately secured. The patient is said to have removed several frozen embryos, which they then dropped on the floor, owing to a freeze-burn to their hand. The embryos were destroyed.

In Alabama, the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act allows parents of a deceased child to recover punitive damages for their child’s death, and three couples affected by the incident subsequently brought lawsuits against the clinic under this legislation.

When this case was heard recently in the Supreme Court of Alabama, the majority of justices opined this statute applies to frozen embryos because:

an unborn child is a genetically unique human being whose life begins at fertilization and ends at death.

This essentially means frozen embryos are protected under Alabama law to the same extent as any living child. While this was a civil matter, it’s not inconceivable that, based on this interpretation, anyone who destroys a frozen embryo in Alabama – accidentally or on purpose – could face criminal penalties, such as manslaughter or even murder charges.

Likely for fear it’s too risky, clinics in the state are now limiting their IVF services, leaving patients having to seek treatment elsewhere.

Read more:
Considering using IVF to have a baby? Here’s what you need to know

Ascribing personhood to frozen embryos is not a novel idea, but such a conviction is held only by the very fringes of the religious and conservative spectrum. There are clear political dimensions to this ruling, which appears to be an extension of a radical agenda on the altar of which the Supreme Court of the United States recently sacrificed the right to abortion.

This ruling from the Supreme Court of Alabama reflects a profound ignorance about how the process of IVF works.

Creating multiple embryos is essential for overall IVF success

The process of in vitro fertilisation, or IVF, begins with a “stimulated” cycle, where hormones are injected into a woman to stimulate an ovary to produce multiple eggs. These eggs are then collected and combined with sperm, forming embryos that are placed in an incubator to grow.

Five days later, the embryos are assessed. Some develop into “good quality” embryos suitable for transfer into a woman’s uterus. The hope is that following the transfer, the embryo will implant and result in a viable pregnancy, ultimately leading to the birth of a healthy child. Any good-quality embryos not used in a stimulated cycle are usually frozen for future attempts.

Unfortunately, IVF is somewhat inefficient, with attrition a prominent feature at every stage. Not all collected eggs are suitable for fertilisation, not all fertilise, not all embryos fertilise normally, and not all normally-fertilised embryos are of good quality. Poor-quality eggs, abnormally-fertilised embryos and poor-quality embryos are routinely discarded.

The practical implications of this process and the heartbreaking reality for individuals and couples undergoing IVF is that it takes, on average, three to five eggs to produce one good-quality embryo. However, this number is age-dependent and significantly higher for older women.

The chance of achieving pregnancy from one embryo transfer is also significantly influenced by the woman’s age, being as high as 50% in younger women but decreasing exponentially as a woman gets older. At the age of 46, it can be as low as 1-2%.

So it’s vital to be able to safely produce as many good-quality embryos as possible from one stimulated IVF cycle in case multiple sequential embryo transfers are needed to achieve a healthy pregnancy.

Read more:
The business of IVF: how human eggs went from simple cells to a valuable commodity

Should the initial embryo transfer fail to produce a viable pregnancy, and frozen embryos are available, those can be thawed and transferred into a woman’s uterus in a “thaw” cycle. These cycles usually don’t require the use of injectable hormones or an egg collection and, in most instances, require only monitoring (including ultrasounds and blood tests), and timed embryo transfer.

The risks associated with IVF, such as bleeding and infections, are mostly confined to the stimulated cycles, while thaw cycles pose minimal risk. Notably, the most labour-intensive, and, therefore, costly portion is the stimulated cycle, while a thaw cycle can be around three to four times cheaper.

Should embryo freezing become unavailable, all people undergoing IVF would have to rely solely on stimulated cycles to achieve pregnancy, significantly increasing the risks and radically escalating the costs.

The judge’s error in interpreting Australian practice

Tom Parker, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, made the following statement in his judgement:

in Australia and New Zealand, prevailing ethical standards dictate that physicians usually create only one embryo at a time.

He implied that in Australia, the only IVF cycles ethically permitted are stimulated cycles, where just one embryo is created and transferred, with no embryos being frozen.

However, this assertion is demonstrably false. There are no guidelines or regulations in Australia that discourage the creation of multiple embryos, as this practice enhances overall pregnancy rates, while making IVF safer and more cost-effective.

What is discouraged is the transfer of multiple embryos at one time, as this increases the likelihood of multiple births, which carry heightened medical risks for both mothers and babies.

It seems the Chief Justice has fundamentally misunderstood the Australian regulatory framework. Ironically, the excellent IVF outcomes and very low rates of multiple births in Australia are largely attributable to the widespread use of frozen embryo transfer cycles – a practice now under threat in Alabama.

I am a fertility specialist and a Medical Director of Genea Fertility Melbourne, a private IVF unit.

– ref. Alabama ruling frozen embryos are equivalent to living children has worrying implications for IVF – https://theconversation.com/alabama-ruling-frozen-embryos-are-equivalent-to-living-children-has-worrying-implications-for-ivf-224365

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Flannery, Planetary Scientist, Queensland University of Technology

In the few short years since the COVID pandemic changed our world, China, Japan and India have all successfully landed on the Moon.

Many more robotic missions have flown past the Moon, entered lunar orbit, or crashed into it in the past five years. This includes spacecraft developed by South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and an Israeli not-for-profit organisation.

Late last week, the American company Intuitive Machines, in collaboration with NASA, celebrated “America’s return to the Moon” with a successful landing of its Odysseus spacecraft.

Recent Chinese-built sample return missions are far more complex than this project. And didn’t NASA ferry a dozen humans to the Moon back when microwaves were cutting-edge technology? So what is different about this mission developed by a US company?

Back to the Moon

The recent Odysseus landing stands out for two reasons. For starters, this is the first time a US-built spacecraft has landed – not crashed – on the Moon for over 50 years.

Secondly, and far more significantly, this is the first time a private company has pulled off a successful delivery of cargo to the Moon’s surface.

NASA has lately focused on destinations beyond the Earth–Moon system, including Mars. But with its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, it has also funded US private industry to develop Moon landing concepts, hoping to reduce the delivery costs of lunar payloads and allow NASA engineers to focus on other challenges.

Read more:
US Moon landing marks new active phase of lunar science, with commercial launches of landers that will study solar wind and peer into the universe’s dark ages

Working with NASA, Intuitive Machines selected a landing site about 300 kilometres from the lunar south pole. Among other challenges, landing here requires entering a polar orbit around the Moon, which consumes additional fuel.

At this latitude, the land is heavily cratered and dotted with long shadows. This makes it challenging for autonomous landing systems to find a safe spot for a touchdown.

NASA spent about US$118 million (A$180 million) to land six scientific payloads on Odysseus. This is relatively cheap. Using low-cost lunar landers, NASA will have an efficient way to test new space hardware that may then be flown on other Moon missions or farther afield.

Ten minutes of silence

One of the technology tests on the Odysseus lander, NASA’s Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment or NDL, appears to have proved crucial to the lander’s success.

As the lander neared the surface, the company realised its navigation systems had a problem. NASA’s NDL experiment is serendipitously designed to test precision landing techniques for future missions. It seems that at the last second, engineers bodged together a solution that involved feeding necessary data from NDL to the lander.

Ten minutes of silence followed before a weak signal was detected from Odysseus. Applause thundered through the mission control room. NASA’s administrator released a video congratulating everyone for returning America to the Moon.

It has since become clear the lander is not oriented perfectly upright. The solar panels are generating sufficient power and the team is slowly receiving the first images from the surface.

However, it’s likely Odysseus partially toppled over upon landing. Fortunately, at the time of writing, it seems most of the science payload may yet be deployed as it’s on the side of the lander facing upwards. The unlucky payload element facing downwards is a privately contributed artwork connected to NFTs.

The lander is now likely to survive for at least a week before the Sun sets on the landing site and a dark, frigid lunar night turns it into another museum piece of human technology frozen in the lunar regolith.

Read more:
Scientists and space agencies are shooting for the Moon – 5 essential reads on modern lunar missions

Win some, lose some

NASA’s commercial approach to stimulating low-cost payload services all but guarantees some failures. But eventually NASA hopes that several commercial launch and landing providers will emerge from the program, along with a few learning experiences.

The know-how accumulated at organisations operating hardware in space is at least as important as the development of the hardware itself.

The market for commercial lunar payloads remains unclear. Possibly, once the novelty wears off and brands are no longer able to generate buzz by, for example, sending a piece of outdoor clothing to the Moon, this source of funding may dwindle.

However, just as today, civil space agencies and taxpayers will continue to fund space exploration to address shared science goals.

Ideally, commercial providers will offer NASA an efficient method for testing key technologies needed for its schedule of upcoming scientific robotic missions, as well as human spaceflight in the Artemis program. Australia would also have the opportunity to test hardware at a reduced price.

It’s worth noting that US budgetary issues, funding cuts and subsequent lay-offs do threaten these ambitions.

Meanwhile, in Australia, we may have nothing to launch anyway. We continue to spend less than the OECD average on scientific research, and only a few Australian universities – who traditionally lead such efforts – have received funding provided by the Australian Space Agency.

If we do support planetary science and space exploration in the future, Australians will need to decide if we want to allocate our limited resources, competing with NASA and US private industry, to supply launch, landing and robotic services to the global space industry.

Alternatively, we could leverage these lower-cost payload providers to develop our own scientific space program, and locally developed space technologies associated with benefits to the knowledge economy, education and national security.

Read more:
Australia wants a space industry. So why won’t we pay for the basic research to drive it?

David Flannery receives funding from the Australian Research Council and NASA.

– ref. The US just returned to the Moon after more than 50 years. How big a deal is it, really? – https://theconversation.com/the-us-just-returned-to-the-moon-after-more-than-50-years-how-big-a-deal-is-it-really-224276

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Golebiowska, Senior Research Fellow, Charles Darwin University

Two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the European landscape has been completely transformed by Ukrainian migrants fleeing their homeland.

According to the European Union, around 4.2 million Ukrainians currently receive temporary protection in EU countries, which entitles them to residence permits, working rights and access to health care and education.

The largest number are in Germany, where 1.2 million Ukrainians were living as of November 2023. Surprisingly, the second-largest number of refugees (960,000) are in Poland, a country with no significant history of accepting forced migrants.

In the weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Poland immediately opened its borders and became the primary recipient of Ukrainian refugees. By May 2022, 3.5 million Ukrainians – or 53% of all people who fled the country – had crossed the border into Poland.

Many have since returned to Ukraine or settled elsewhere, but many have stayed. Why has Poland been so open to this large number of migrants – and how long will they be able to stay?

Why Poland?

The large number of refugees was no doubt facilitated by the 530-kilometre border shared by the two countries. But Ukraine and Poland have much more in common. They share a complex, intertwined history marked by territorial wars, mutual antagonisms and historical disagreements, as well as linguistic and cultural similarities and first-hand experience of communist rule.

During Poland’s post-1989 transition to democracy, migrants from Ukraine became an important part of the labour force. Then, in 2014, conflict sparked by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine drove more Ukrainian migrants to Poland.

Before the 2022 Russian invasion, roughly 2 million foreigners lived in Poland – some 1.35 million of them Ukrainians. These Ukrainians were largely male workers, benefiting from the huge demand for labour in a country with an ageing and shrinking workforce.

Given this history of migration, it stands to reason Poland would show solidarity with Ukrainians after the invasion. And the large Ukrainian migrant population already familiar with living in Poland volunteered to help the refugees when they arrived – mostly women with children.

This spontaneous welcome and support was also offered by ordinary Polish citizens and local NGOs. They even opened their homes to refugees and helped them find (or offered) employment. The level of support from the public was unprecedented.

What drove this huge swell of public empathy? While some were motivated by their previous contact with migrants, the collective memory of Soviet invasion and occupation was also important.

As the war has dragged on, some Poles have begun to worry about the impact of refugees on the country’s finances and health care. While public support was nearly universal (94%) for admitting Ukrainian refugees in March 2022, it slipped to 65% in September 2023.

Read more:
Polish generosity risks hardening anti-immigrant sentiments towards Ukrainian refugees in the long term

A notable shift from the government

The Polish government also swiftly adopted a special-purpose law that gave Ukrainians temporary protection status and access to the same publicly funded services as Poles, such as welfare and employment rights, including business ownership. This law is rooted in the 2001 EU Temporary Protection Directive, which was activated after the invasion for the first time.

By December 2023, more than 1.64 million Ukrainians had applied for asylum or temporary protection in Poland – by far the highest number in eastern Europe. Their protection status was recently extended until June 30 of this year, with a further extension expected.

This was a startling move for the right-wing, anti-immigration, populist government led by the Law and Justice party. After all, this is the same Polish government that did not implement the EU relocation scheme in response to the 2015–16 European migration crisis. It also responded with force when neighbouring Belarus manufactured another crisis in 2021 by sending hundreds of migrants from the Middle East and Africa to the Polish border.

We believe this paradox can be explained by the Ukrainian refugees being aligned with the government’s then-criteria for acceptance. They were perceived as being “genuine” refugees (for example, women, children and elderly people fleeing war) and shared cultural traits with Poles.

This open-door response contrasted with the earlier rhetoric of right-wing politicians and media, who presented non-European refugees as a security risk and a threatening “other” forced on the government by EU quotas.

Better opportunities beyond Poland

Because Ukrainian refugees now hold various residency permits, thanks to their EU-mandated temporary protection status, they can cross borders easily. There have been more than 17 million crossings from Ukraine to Poland since the invasion, and nearly 14.7 million crossings in the other direction.

Between August 2022 and June 2023, some 350,000 Ukrainian refugees also left Poland for other countries. About 100,000 resettled in Germany, lured by stories of better wages and welfare benefits.

Given their high mobility, it remains to be seen how many Ukrainian migrants decide to stay in Poland. The ability to work is key. In 2022, one survey showed the employment rate of Ukrainian refugees in Poland to be 65% – the highest for displaced Ukrainians in Europe. A year later, it had only dipped slightly to 62%.

According to other Polish surveys, between 48% and 70% of Ukrainian refugees also hold tertiary qualifications.

However, just like in other OECD countries, many Ukrainians in Poland have been working below their qualifications.

About half the refugees in one survey said they couldn’t find a job in 2023, double the rate the year before. And only 7.7% said they wouldn’t take a job below their qualifications, compared with 20% the year before.

Read more:
Ukraine: The good, bad and ideal refugees

Will they return home?

Whether refugees ultimately return to Ukraine, however, depends on several factors. Surveys show upwards of 39% of migrants intend to remain in Poland permanently or for the long term. The main reasons include the ability to work and provide for themselves and their families, job satisfaction, the opinions of their children, and better housing.

Although more Ukrainians are gaining Polish language skills, about a third report needing formal language training and assistance in finding employment.

How Poland responds to these needs will influence whether Ukrainian refugees feel welcome to stay and further integrate into Polish society, particularly under the newly elected, more liberal Polish government.

Marta Pachocka is an expert of the Team Europe Direct Poland.

Sabina Kubiciel-Lodzińska has collaborated academically (without financial reward) with the research company Openfield on a research report comparing pre-war Ukrainian migrants and refugees in Poland.

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

– ref. Poland has opened its arms to nearly 1 million Ukrainian refugees, but will they be able to stay for the long term? – https://theconversation.com/poland-has-opened-its-arms-to-nearly-1-million-ukrainian-refugees-but-will-they-be-able-to-stay-for-the-long-term-219481

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Mikheyev, Professor, ANU Bee lab, Australian National University

A tiny foe threatens Australian beekeepers’ livelihood, our food supply and the national economy. First detected in New South Wales in 2022, the Varroa mite is now established in Australia.

The parasitic mite, which feeds on honey bees and transmits bee viruses, has since spread across New South Wales.

It is expected to kill virtually all unmanaged honey bees living in the bush (also known as “feral” honey bees), which provide ecosystem-wide pollination. Honey bees managed by beekeepers will survive only with constant and costly use of pesticides.

As the last holdout against Varroa, Australia has a key advantage – we can still take action that was impossible elsewhere. We know Varroa-resistant bees would be the silver bullet.
Despite decades of research, no fully resistant strains exist, largely because the genetics of Varroa resistance are complex and remain poorly understood.

A recently released national management plan places a heavy focus on beekeeper education, aiming to transition the industry to self-management in two years. This leaves research gaps that need to be urgently filled – and we can all work together to help tackle these.

Read more:
Australia has officially given up on eradicating the Varroa mite. Now what?

Unlocking the genetic key to resistance

Without human intervention, Varroa kills around 95% of the honey bees it infects, but the survivors can evolve resistance. However, losing almost all bees would decimate Australia’s agriculture.

Our feral honey bees will have no choice but to evolve resistance, as they have in other countries. However, feral honey bees are not suited for beekeeping as they are too aggressive, don’t stay with the hive and don’t produce enough honey.

In principle, we could breed for a combination of feral resistance and domestic docility. But figuring out the genetics of how feral bees resist Varroa has been a challenge. As most bees exposed to the parasite will die, the survivors will be genetically different.

Some of these differences will be due to natural selection, but most will be due to chance. Identifying the genes responsible for resistance in this scenario is difficult. The best way to find them is to measure genetic changes before and after Varroa infestation. But to do that, we need bee populations largely unaffected by Varroa.

This is where our unique Australian opportunity comes in. We have a small and vanishing window to collect bees before the inevitable rapid spread of the mites, and the mass die-offs, occur.

We are collecting information… and bees

My lab at the Australian National University’s Research School of Biology has started collecting data on feral bee populations around New South Wales to identify pre-Varroa genetic diversity.

We will also monitor changes in bee population size and the spread of viruses and mites.

The most efficient way to collect bees is to go to a local clearing, such as a sports oval surrounded by forest. Unbeknownst to the cricket players, honey bee males (that is, drones) congregate at these sites by the thousands on sunny afternoons looking for mates.

You can lure them with some queen pheromone suspended from a balloon, and sweep them up with a butterfly net. Bee drones have no stinger and only come out for a couple of hours when the weather is fantastic, making collecting them literally a walk in the park, suitable for nature enthusiasts of all ages.

Anyone can help

You can help this effort by collecting some drones in your local area – this would save us time and carbon emissions from driving all over the country. We will provide pheromone lures, instructions, and materials for sending the bees back via mail. By sacrificing a few drones for the research now, we might save millions of bees in the future.

If you can spare just a couple of summer afternoons, this would give two timepoints at your location, and we can monitor any changes as the Varroa infestation progresses. More information can be found on our website.

Apart from our project, there are also other urgent research questions. For example, how will native forests respond to the loss of their dominant pollinators? Will honey bee viruses spread into other insects?

Work on these and other projects also requires pre-Varroa data. Unfortunately, Varroa falls through our research infrastructure net. Most of Australia’s agricultural funding is industry-led, however, the beekeeping industry is small and lacks the resources to tackle Varroa research while also reeling from its impacts.

Other industries that rely on honey bees for pollination, including most fruit, nut and berry growers, have diverse research needs and are one step removed from the actual problem.

Together, we can take action to save Australia’s honey bees and assure security for our key pollinators.

Read more:
Hear me out – we could use the varroa mite to wipe out feral honey bees, and help Australia’s environment

Alexander Mikheyev receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. As Varroa spreads, now is the time to fight for Australia’s honey bees – and you can help – https://theconversation.com/as-varroa-spreads-now-is-the-time-to-fight-for-australias-honey-bees-and-you-can-help-223204

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Maree Patsouras, La Trobe University

The new Mean Girls is a fresh take on a classic teen comedy, this time appealing to a new audience: Gen Z. So how does the film paint the new generation? As one that loves to drink.

Mean Girls is filled with references to and depictions of alcohol. There’s drinking at parties, a scene where Cady gets drunk, and even a joke about a vodka-filled inhaler.

On-screen alcohol exposure is an important issue, particularly when underage drinking is shown. Greater on-screen exposure to alcohol is associated with an increased risk of beginning to drink alcohol at a younger age, and increased likelihood of weekly drinking and binge drinking among young people.

But despite the attempts to appeal to a young audience, the new Mean Girls film doesn’t reflect most of Gen Z’s attitudes towards drinking. In fact, research shows young people are increasingly rejecting alcohol, especially when compared to older generations. So why does alcohol retain a chokehold on our screens?

Drinks all round?

A 2023 Cancer Council report found in 1996, 90% of Australian secondary school students aged 16–17 reported drinking alcohol in the past year. By 2023, this had dropped to 64%.

The report also found recent risky drinking – that is, consuming five or more alcoholic drinks on any day within the past week – among 16- and 17-year-olds has particularly declined, dropping from 22% in 1996 to 9% in 2023.

This trend isn’t unique to Australia. Gen Z-ers across the world are drinking much less alcohol than previous generations.

Read more:
Youth drinking is declining – myths about the trend, busted

But we’re yet to see this decline reflected in films and television targeting young people.

A 2019 analysis found alcohol remains the most frequently portrayed substance in films, and substance use (including alcohol) on screen was more often portrayed as having either neutral or rewarding consequences (such as increased popularity), in comparison to unrewarding consequences (such as vomiting or headaches).

One-fifth of teenage characters in PG-13 (roughly equivalent to an Australia M rating) and R-rated films are shown drinking alcohol, and nearly half of G-rated animated films show alcohol use.

One prime example is Ratatouille (2007). This Disney-Pixar film is so beloved by Gen Z it got turned into a TikTok musical. The film shows alcohol a whopping 60 times, even though it’s rated PG and aimed at children.

Alcohol imagery isn’t limited to film or broadcast TV. Recent research found more alcohol in streaming content from Amazon and Netflix than in broadcast television.

And despite the sheer volume of on-screen alcohol depictions, our research shows films depict alcohol exposure nearly five times more frequently than the average Australian adult thinks they do.

Lack of regulation – and young filmmakers

Locally, alcohol exposure in films is governed by the Australian Classification Board. The board considers six classifiable elements, such as sex and violence, when deciding on a rating.

Currently, alcohol is not explicitly represented among these, although excessive consumption and alcohol dependency is considered under the element of “themes”.

This has an impact: alcohol brand placements have nearly doubled in the last two decades, and alcohol brands appear in 41% of children’s films.

When we consider why young people are so often shown drinking in films, it’s not just a matter of what can be shown under Australian regulations. Film and television is largely not yet directed, written or created by Gen Z-ers. A lack of representation can lead to young people’s perspectives not being understood, or unaccounted for.

The mismatch between Gen Z’s drinking habits and the overexposure of alcohol in films is also surprising when we consider most adults in our research were supportive of a range of policies restricting alcohol exposure in films. A significant number of adult Australians support policies de-glorifying alcohol consumption and beverages in films – especially in films aimed at children.

Australia intends to reform its National Classification Scheme. Perhaps these changes – along with Gen Z entering the film industry themselves – will allow for young people’s actual drinking habits to be reflected more accurately on screen.

Read more:
Australians are embracing ‘mindful drinking’ — and the alcohol industry is also getting sober curious

Maree Patsouras receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.

Amy Pennay receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation and the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation.

Benjamin Riordan’s research is funded by La Trobe University, the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), the Australian Research Council (ARC), the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA; US).

Emmanuel Kuntsche receives funding from La Trobe University, the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth), the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), the Australian Research Council (ARC), and the University of Bayreuth Centre of International Excellence “Alexander von Humboldt”. Emmanuel Kuntsche serves as that Secretary of the Australasian Professional Society on Alcohol and other Drugs (APSAD).

– ref. Young people are drinking less in real life. But film and TV paints a different picture – https://theconversation.com/young-people-are-drinking-less-in-real-life-but-film-and-tv-paints-a-different-picture-223854

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharine Kemp, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney

Australian consumers don’t understand how companies – including data brokers – track, target and profile them. This is revealed in new research on consumer understanding of privacy terms, released by the non-profit Consumer Policy Research Centre and UNSW Sydney today.

Our report also reveals 70% of Australians feel they have little or no control over how their data is disclosed between companies. Many expressed anger, frustration and distrust.

These findings are particularly important as the government considers long-overdue reforms to our privacy legislation, and the consumer watchdog finalises its upcoming report on data brokers.

If Australians are to have any hope of fair and trustworthy data handling, the government must stop companies from hiding their practices behind confusing and misleading privacy terms and mandate fairness in data handling.

We are all being tracked

Our activities online and offline are constantly tracked by various companies, including data brokers that trade in our personal information.

This includes data about our activity and purchases on websites and apps, relationship status, children, financial circumstances, life events, health concerns, search history and location.

Many businesses focus their efforts on finding new ways to track and profile us, despite repeated evidence that consumers view this as misuse of their personal information.

Companies describe the data they collect in confusing and unfamiliar terms. Much of this wording seems designed to prevent us from understanding or objecting to the use and disclosure of our personal information, often collected in surreptitious ways.

Businesses can use your data to make more profit at your expense. This includes

• charging you a higher price
• preventing you from seeing better offers
• micro-targeting political messages or ads based on your health information
• reducing the priority you’re given in customer service
• creating a profile (which you’ll never see) to share with a prospective employer, insurer or landlord.

Read more:
This law makes it illegal for companies to collect third-party data to profile you. But they do anyway

Anonymised, pseudonymised, hashed

Businesses commonly try to argue this information is “de-identified” or not “personal”, to avoid running afoul of the federal Privacy Act in which these terms are defined.

But many privacy policies muddy the waters by using other, undefined terms. They create the impression data can’t be used to single out the consumer or influence what they’re shown online – even when it can.

Read more:
How the shady world of the data industry strips away our freedoms

Privacy policies commonly refer to:

• anonymised data
• pseudonymised information
• hashed emails
• audience data
• aggregated information.

These terms have no legal definition and no fixed meaning in practice.

Data brokers and other companies may use “pseudonymised information” or “hashed email addresses” (essentially, encrypted addresses) to create detailed profiles. These will be shared with other businesses without our knowledge. They do this by matching the information collected about us by various companies in different parts of our lives.

“Anonymised information” – not a legal term in Australia – may sound like it wouldn’t reveal anything about an individual consumer. Some companies use it when only a person’s name and email have been removed, but we can still be identified by other unique or rare characteristics.

What did our survey find?

Our survey showed Australians do not feel in control of their personal information. More than 70% of consumers believe they have very little or no control over what personal information online businesses share with other companies.

Only a third of consumers feel they have at least moderate control over whether businesses use their personal information to create a profile about them.

Most consumers have no understanding of common terms in privacy notices, such as “hashed email address” or “advertising ID” (a unique ID usually assigned to one’s device).

And it’s likely to be worse than these statistics suggest, since some consumers may overestimate their knowledge.

The terms refer to data widely used to track and influence us without our knowledge. However, when consumers don’t recognise descriptions of personal information, they’re less likely to know whether that data could be used to single them out for tracking, influencing, profiling, discrimination or exclusion.

Most consumers either don’t know, or think it unlikely, that “pseudonymised information”, a “hashed email address” or “advertising ID” can be used to single them out from the crowd. They can.

Most consumers think it’s unacceptable for businesses they have no direct relationship with to use their email address, IP address, device information, search history or location data. However, data brokers and other “data partners” not in direct contact with consumers commonly use such data.

Consumers are understandably frustrated, anxious and angry about the unfair and untrustworthy ways organisations make use of their personal information and expose them to increased risk of data misuse.

Fairness, not ‘education’

Simply educating consumers about the terms used by companies and the ways their data is shared may seem an obvious solution.

However, we don’t recommend this for three reasons. Firstly, we can’t be sure of the meaning of undefined terms. Companies will likely keep coming up with new ones.

Secondly, it’s unreasonable to place the burden of understanding complex data ecosystems on consumers who naturally lack expertise in these areas.

Thirdly, “education” is pointless when consumers are not given real choices about the use of their data.

Urgent law reform is needed to make Australian privacy protections fit for the digital era. This should include clarifying that information that singles an individual out from the crowd is “personal information”.

We also need a “fair and reasonable” test for data handling, instead of take-it-or-leave-it privacy “consents”.

Most of us can’t avoid participating in the digital economy. These changes would help ensure that instead of confusing privacy terms, there are substantial, meaningful legal requirements for how our personal information is handled.

Read more:
Proposed privacy reforms could help Australia play catch-up with other nations. But they fail to tackle targeted ads

Katharine Kemp receives funding from the UNSW Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation. She is a Member of the Expert Panel of the Consumer Policy Research Centre, and the Australian Privacy Foundation.

– ref. 70% of Australians don’t feel in control of their data as companies hide behind meaningless privacy terms – https://theconversation.com/70-of-australians-dont-feel-in-control-of-their-data-as-companies-hide-behind-meaningless-privacy-terms-224072

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lester Munson, Non-resident fellow, United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney

Should American allies be worried that if Donald Trump returns to the White House next year, he will tear apart treaties, recast decades-old international arrangements and adopt a go-it-alone approach to global affairs?

Recent comments from Trump disparaging NATO allies have put this question on the front burner in Washington and other world capitals.

Trump is, of course, in the middle of a presidential campaign and is seeking to show he would be a very different president from Joe Biden. Given Biden’s difficulties on foreign policy, it is easy to see why.

Biden’s mixed foreign policy record

Biden’s approval numbers are near historic lows – just under 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing. In particular, Biden’s foreign policy has been a problem. His plunge in popularity began around the time of the catastrophically mismanaged US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan two and a half years ago.

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza – and the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and Iranian proxy attacks against American forces in Iraq and Syria that followed – have only made Biden look weaker. In fact, recent polls show only a third of American voters approve of his foreign policy.

Read more:
Some truths are self-evident: Joe Biden is too old. But who could possibly replace him?

A resurgent Iran reminds older Americans of the more than 50 Americans taken hostage in Tehran in 1979 and then-President Jimmy Carter’s failure to free them – one of the main reasons why Carter lost the 1980 presidential election to Ronald Reagan. The hostages were freed the day Reagan took office.

Today, Biden faces the same potential election-year problem with the Gaza war. Younger, progressive Americans, as well as Arab-Americans, are more likely to be aghast at Biden’s support for Israel’s assault on Hamas in Gaza and the consequent civilian deaths. Many Biden supporters are concerned this could affect his chances against Trump in November’s election, particularly in swing states like Michigan, which has a large number of Arab-American voters.

Also working against Biden is the war fatigue felt by many Americans. After 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, many Americans are ready to take a break from global leadership responsibilities.

A long tradition of placing America first

Biden’s foreign policy weaknesses opens the door for Trump to show voters he will take a different approach.

Over the past four decades, starting with Reagan, successful presidential candidates have criticised foreign adventures, instead emphasising domestic investment. Political scientists use the term “strategic retrenchment” to describe this, but politicians are more likely to use a phrase like “America First.”

In 1984, for instance, Reagan ran one of the most effective presidential campaign ads in history called “Morning in America”, which depicted a return to domestic tranquillity and prosperity.

In 1992, Democratic strategist James Carville coined another famous phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid”, which then-candidate Bill Clinton’s campaign evoked successfully to focus on domestic economic issues in his race against President George H.W. Bush.

Then, in 2000, then-Republican challenger George W. Bush sharply criticised the Clinton administration’s focus on “nation building”, comparing it to “international social work”.

When it comes to Trump, bombast is a feature, not a bug. When he ran for the White House for the first time in 2016, he outlined his isolationist, “America first” approach, criticising President Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, for their “reckless, rudderless and aimless foreign policy”. He said, if elected,

I will return us to a timeless principle. Always put the interest of the American people and American security above all else.

He has returned to this rhetoric in the current campaign, even encouraging Russia to invade NATO countries that don’t spend the required 2% of their GDP on defence. While offensive at first blush, these comments serve the very useful purpose of showing a huge difference from Biden.

A 19th century, populist world view

It is also important to understand a deeper truth about these comments. In his bones, Trump does not truly value any formal alliances formed before his ascent to power. Call it narcissism or isolationism if you must (and neither is entirely inaccurate), the former president sees formal alliances as a lower priority than fair play and power politics.

In this, Trump is a prime example of the Jacksonian tradition in American politics. Described best by the scholar and columnist Walter Russell Mead, the Jacksonian tradition is based on the political beliefs of former President Andrew Jackson, who was president from 1829 to 1837.

Jacksonians, like Trump and his most ardent supporters today, have a highly sceptical view of America’s involvement in global affairs. As Mead writes:

They prefer the rule of custom to the written law, and that is as true in the international sphere as it is in personal relations at home. Jacksonians believe that there is an honour code in international life […] and those who live by the code will be treated under it. But those who violate the code – who commit terrorist acts in peacetime, for example – forfeit its protection and deserve no consideration.

For Jacksonians, when a country welches on its obligations (such as, in Trump’s view, the level of defence spending of many European NATO nations), it is morally right to punish them by calling into question treaty obligations.

Seen as a liar and fabulist by his opponents, Trump embodies this Jacksonian tradition of “customary honour” for his supporters, whose contempt for global elites and international institutions is deep and profound. (Trump was so enamoured with Jackson, in fact, he had a portrait of the former president hanging in the Oval Office.)

This means, if Trump becomes president again, America’s allies, whether in NATO or the Indo-Pacific or elsewhere, will have to de-emphasise lawyerly arguments about international obligations and adapt quickly to the Trump-Jacksonian customary honour approach to diplomacy.

Read more:
Donald Trump is already flustering foreign leaders who are trying to prepare for a possible presidency

Superficially, this will mean global leaders offering praise for Trump’s various political performances. Going deeper, it also means finding a way to demonstrate that their relationship with the US is congruent with his sense of customary honour (and is also materially beneficial to the US, and maybe even to Trump himself).

The model for this is the late prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe. Within days of Trump’s surprising election win over Hillary Clinton in 2016, Abe visited him at Trump Tower in New York and gave him a gold-plated golf club worth almost US$4,000. Trump immediately identified Abe as “friend.”

After then-Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had an unpleasant phone call with Trump in 2017, the Australian ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, took to the links with Trump.

With good humour and some personal charm, Hockey helped restore the diplomatic relationship – not by emphasising legalistic constraints but by developing a personal relationship that was grounded in common sense and customary honour.

Lester Munson is a Non-Resident Fellow at the U.S. Studies Centre. Lester Munson has worked for President George W. Bush and congressional Republicans during his public service career in Washington.

– ref. Should world leaders worry about another Trump presidency? – https://theconversation.com/should-world-leaders-worry-about-another-trump-presidency-224245

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Baker, Professor of Public Health, University of Otago

February 28 marks four years since COVID-19 was first reported in Aotearoa New Zealand. Many of us are probably surprised this virus is still causing a pandemic.

The World Health Organization refers to COVID-19 as a continuing pandemic. As Scientific American put it recently, it “has been the elephant in every room — sometimes confronted and sometimes ignored but always present”.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. The 1918 influenza pandemic swept through New Zealand in eight weeks, killing 9,000 people – almost 1% of the population. Then it was gone, returning as a new seasonal flu virus.

In doing so, it defined how pandemics were expected to behave. This model was written into pandemic plans and collective thinking across the globe.

But COVID is still circulating four years after New Zealand reported its first case, and more than two years after the Omicron variant arrived and infection became widespread.

Constantly present, it is also occurring in waves. Unexpectedly, the current fifth wave was larger than the fourth, suggesting we can’t rely on the comforting assumption that COVID will get less severe over time.

Unpredictable evolutionary shifts

These waves are driven by the interaction of the organism (SARS CoV-2 virus), the host (human characteristics such as immunity and behaviour), and environmental factors (such as indoor ventilation).

Continuing viral evolution is a major contributor to the changing dynamic. The virus has demonstrated an ability for large, unpredictable evolutionary shifts that dramatically alter its genome and spike protein.

The result is an enhanced ability to evade prior immunity and infect more people. This jump was seen with the highly mutated BA.2.86 subvariant in mid-2023.

Its offspring, JN.1, has acquired additional changes and is causing such a wave of new infections it could potentially be the next variant of concern, with its own Greek letter. It is now driving epidemic increases across the globe, including in New Zealand. This dominance by a single subvariant takes us back to the first year of Omicron in 2022.

Read more:
I have COVID. How likely am I to get long COVID?

Under-counting the pandemic impact

The pandemic continues to have a large, visible health impact. It is a leading cause of serious illness and death, mainly in older populations and those with existing long-term health conditions.

In 2023, it caused more than 12,000 hospitalisations and 1,000 deaths in New Zealand.

But COVID-19 also has an important and largely unmeasured burden of disease as the cause of long COVID, which may become its biggest health impact. A growing number of studies are describing an estimated incidence of long COVID of 5% to 15% of all infections.

For example, a recent large study of almost 200,000 Scottish adults reported that, after adjustment for factors that might confuse the results, long COVID prevalence following an infection was 6.6% at six months, 6.5% at 12 months, and 10.4% at 18 months.

These findings illustrate an important feature of long COVID: recovery can take two years or more, with symptoms that fluctuate over time.

An integrated respiratory disease strategy

New Zealand now needs a strong, integrated response to COVID-19 and other respiratory infections.

The major pandemic interventions have not changed: vaccination, public health and social measures to prevent infection, and antivirals for more vulnerable groups. The evidence has firmed up that long COVID risk is reduced by vaccination, but research is less certain for antivirals.

Read more:
Vaccination, testing, clean air: COVID hasn’t gone away – here’s where Australia needs to do better

But growing pandemic complacency from political leaders and the public has changed things. Some of this apparent indifference can be put down to understandable fatigue with response measures. But it remains dangerous in the face of a continuing pandemic.

One way to keep a focus on prevention and control would be to include these measures in an integrated respiratory infectious disease strategy. This would combine COVID-19 control measures with those used to protect against influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and other respiratory infections.

Measles could be added to the list, given the rising threat to New Zealand from a global resurgence of the disease.

This integrated strategy would include vaccination, promoting testing and self-isolation when sick, and measures to reduce transmission in critical indoor environments such as healthcare, public transport and education settings.

Read more:
Long COVID stemmed from mild cases of COVID-19 in most people, according to a new multicountry study

Such a programme would need to be supported with community engagement, education, surveillance and research.

Structural inequalities mean Māori, Pacific peoples, and those living in relative deprivation, are less vaccinated, less protected from infection, less tested and less likely to have antivirals.

Consequently, they are more likely to be hospitalised and die from COVID-19. These inequities are currently not being systematically tracked and acted on.

Read more:
COVID: there’s a strong current of pandemic revisionism in the mainstream media, and it’s dangerous

Ignoring it won’t make it go away

As we enter the fifth pandemic year, we need a change in thinking about COVID-19. This infection has pathological features in common with the other severe coronaviruses (SARS and MERS).

It is wishful thinking to imagine it will suddenly transform into a common cold coronavirus. As a recent review article concluded:

Transition from a pandemic to future endemic existence of SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be long and erratic […] endemic SARS-CoV-2 is by far not a synonym for safe infections, mild COVID-19 or a low population mortality and morbidity burden.

In the face of this continuing pandemic threat, we need a response that is evidence-informed rather than evidence-ignored.

Michael Baker is a member of the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 Technical Advisory Group (TAG). The University of Otago receives funding from the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the New Zealand Ministry of Health for his research on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

The University of Otago receives funding from the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the New Zealand Ministry of Health for research on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.

Matire Harwood was a member of the Ministry of Health COVID-19 TAG. She receives research funding from Health Research Council, National Heart Foundation and National Science Challenge-Healthier Lives. She also works at Papakura Marae which received funding for COVID-19 testing, vaccination and management.

– ref. A pandemic that won’t go away – as COVID enters its 5th year, NZ needs a realistic strategy – https://theconversation.com/a-pandemic-that-wont-go-away-as-covid-enters-its-5th-year-nz-needs-a-realistic-strategy-224047

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela Jackson, Lead Economist, Monash University

Men continue to outstrip women in the salary stakes, with men’s median annual salary $11,542 greater than women’s, according to newly released data for Australian private companies. It’s a gap of 14.5%, down from last year’s 15.4%.

Men’s median annual base salary in 2022-23 of $79,613 compares to $68,071 for women.

When bonuses and overtime are added – common for high-paying jobs mostly held by men – the gap in total remuneration widens to $18,461, equivalent to 19% and hardly budging from the previous year’s 19.8%).

This is the first time that the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, which annually reports gender pay gaps by industry, has released the names of actual companies and the differences in what they pay male and female employees.

In this year’s snapshot released on Tuesday, the difference is largest in male-dominated industries (including mining, construction and utilities), with a gender gap in base salaries of 17.5%.

The WGEA data is based on the median of workers’ annual salaries in all large private companies in Australia. The agency includes all workers and converts the numbers into full-time equivalent earnings.

The gap, highlighted in these figures, is the difference between what men and women in each company earn overall, as opposed to the differences between what they are paid for doing the same job.

While the latest ABS figures for average weekly earnings released last week show women’s wages are improving, they are still lagging behind men.

Which industries and companies?

Companies have been required to report their gender pay gap to the WGEA for the past decade, but until now, these statistics relating to individual businesses have not been made public.

New laws mandating the publication of numbers mean we can now dive deeper into company spreadsheets and find out the size of the gender pay gap for every private organisation in Australia with more than 100 employees.

This data reveals that we can’t typify companies by industry. There are bad performing companies – as well as good performers – across all industries.

Among Australia’s biggest employers, the retailers had relatively low gaps in total remuneration, with Woolworths reporting 5.7%, Coles 5.6%, and Wesfarmers 3.5%.

The mining companies had much bigger gaps, with BHP Group reporting 20.3%, and Rio Tinto 13.5%.

Qantas reported 37% and Telstra Group 20.2%.

This new transparency is part of reforms passed last year to the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012, designed to spur companies to take more action on gender equity.

Of the almost 5,000 companies included in the WGEA report, almost 1,000 have a gender pay gap in median base earnings exceeding 20%.

About 350 of these have a gap of over 30% and for about 100, the gap is greater than 40%.

At the other end of the scale, there are about 1,000 companies where the pay gap favours women. These companies deal mainly in health, education and disability services where the high concentration of women means that senior roles are likely to be held by women.

Who does this data empower?

Pay gap transparency places public pressure on employers to do something about their gender pay inequities.

It equips employees with more information to take into their salary negotiations. This tackles the problem of “asymmetric information” where employers know where each worker sits on the pay scale, but employees don’t.

Read more:
Now you’re able to look up individual companies’ gender pay gaps

Transparency gives customers and investors more information about whether a company is an equitable employer. They can use this new knowledge to make decisions about which companies to do business with.

This data empowers the whole Australian community. Any member of the public can go to the WGEA data explorer and search for any large private sector company to see the magnitude of their gender pay gap.

Supermarkets, banks, telecommunication companies, retailers, airlines, builders and energy providers are all on the list.

But new knowledge needs to be followed by action

While evidence on the benefits of transparency for closing the gender pay gap is promising, it’s not a silver bullet.

Firstly, while this public outing aims to spark stronger pressure on companies to take action, some companies will be more driven by public perceptions than others.

Evidence of how widespread these gender pay gaps are could even normalise them, leading companies to reason they are not that out of step with others in their sector.

Secondly, there are risks in expecting individual women to use this new information try to negotiate more strongly for a pay rise.

Women still face the risk of backlash for showing assertiveness in bargaining. Being armed with extra data does not necessarily shield against these other gender biases.

Thirdly, even if women can bargain successfully, studies suggest pay transparency mostly empowers senior women. This was the outcome in UK universities where transparency led to more senior women securing a pay rise or switching to another higher-paying employer. Junior women with weaker bargaining power could not leverage this data in the same way.

Research shows that pay transparency can even worsen morale, productivity and perceptions of fairness if not also matched by clear explanations from employers on what actions they are taking to rectify inequities.

Employers and governments now have to act

With their gender pay gaps now in full view, the onus is on employers to adopt more equitable hiring, promotion and pay-setting practices.

This can even bring cost savings.

After Denmark mandated pay transparency, the gender pay gap narrowed. Not because women’s wage growth accelerated, but because men’s faster wage growth slowed down. It means pay transparency can moderate employers’ wage bill.

Read more:
‘Benevolent sexism’ in startups widens the gender gap by advantaging men over women

While greater transparency of information is empowering, it alone will not be enough. It needs to be accompanied by actions.

The fact Australia’s gender pay gap has endured, even over 50 years since equal pay was enshrined in law, reflects a combination of society-wide factors, family dynamics, organisational culture and practices, and policy settings.

Actions also need to include evidence-informed policy, such as increasing access to affordable child care and expanding paid parental leave, to close the gender pay gap for good.

Angela Jackson undertakes research consulting projects for state governments and non-for profits focused on achieving gender equity in Australia including closing the gender pay gap. Angela is currently a member of the Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee which will make recommendations to the Australian Government on measures to improve economic inclusion, including gender equity, ahead of the Commonwealth Budget.

Leonora Risse has undertaken research for WGEA and made a submission to the review of the Workplace Gender Equality Act. She serves as an Expert Panel Member on gender pay equity for the Fair Work Commission. She receives research funding from the Trawalla Foundation and the Women’s Leadership Institute Australia. She is a member of the Economic Society of Australia and the Women in Economics Network.

– ref. QANTAS pays women 37% less, Telstra and BHP 20%. Fifty years after equal pay laws, we still have a long way to go – https://theconversation.com/qantas-pays-women-37-less-telstra-and-bhp-20-fifty-years-after-equal-pay-laws-we-still-have-a-long-way-to-go-223870

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sonja Klebe, Associare Professor, College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University

Asbestos is making national news once again after being found in contaminated mulch used in hundreds of locations, including schools and hospitals, across Sydney and regional New South Wales.

With headlines featuring terms such as “crisis”, “nightmare” and “deadly”, it’s hard to believe the toxic mineral was once hailed for its supposedly “magical” properties.

In fact, the history of asbestos goes back at least 6,700 years. Its prevalence in our built environment means it’s (unfortunately) here to stay for a long time.

Before it became a ‘killer dust’

Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral found in rock formations across the globe, including in some national parks in Australia.

It gets its name from the Greek word for inextinguishable (ásvestos), alluding to its resistance to fire and corrosion. It was these characteristics, along with its insulating properties, that made asbestos seem like a “magic mineral” in centuries prior.

Researchers have found ancient clay pottery from East Finland, dated to 2500 BC, with asbestos fibres mixed into it – likely added for extra strength and resilience. Some of the earliest asbestos pottery, also found in Finland, has been dated to 4700 BC. Asbestos use has also been recorded at other neolithic sites, including in Central Russia and Norway.

In (Western) literature, the first known reference to what might have been asbestos comes from Theophrastus (circa 372-287 BC), a student of Greek philosopher Aristotle and his successor at the Lyceum. In his book On Stones, Theophrastus writes:

In the mines at Scapte Hyle a stone was once found which was like rotten wood in appearance. Whenever oil was poured on it, it burnt, but when the oil had been used up, the stone stopped burning, as if it were itself unaffected.

In the 10th century, Christian pilgrims travelling to Jerusalem were sold pieces of asbestos as fragments of the True Cross – their divinity supposedly evidenced by their incombustibility. By the medieval ages, trading asbestos-containing items had become common. This fascination continued for millennia.

In 1725, a young Benjamin Franklin found himself broke and living in London. In need of cash to pay his bills, he sold a purse made of fibrous mineral asbestos that he’d brought from North America. The recipient was Hans Sloane, whose collections would later be used to establish the British Museum.

A class I carcinogen

The carcinogenic effect of asbestos – even at brief, transient and “low” doses (such as bystander exposure) – has been recognised since at least 1965. Today, it is classified as a class I carcinogen and considered a deadly threat to humans.

Asbestos is the main cause of mesothelioma, a cancer of the surface of the lung. It can also cause lung cancer and is implicated in other cancers, including throat and stomach cancers.

In Australia, there are more than 700 cases of mesothelioma each year. We don’t know how many of the roughly 6,000 yearly cases of lung cancer are caused, wholly or partially, by asbestos.

Although asbestos use has been banned in Australia since 2003, people the world over continue to deal with its harmful effects.

The spread of ‘fibro houses’

Australia started using asbestos goods from around the 1880s, largely for steam-driven machines that benefited from its insulating properties. Only small local mines operated at the time.

Eventually, the world wars increased demand and active exploration led to larger-scale mining, especially at Wittenoom in Western Australia. Even then, local production wasn’t meeting demand.

Read more:
More than 2,000 people from Wittenoom died of asbestos-related diseases. A powerful and compelling requiem brings their story to the stage

It was initially miners who presented with the disease, followed by workers in industries manufacturing asbestos-containing products, as well as builders, plumbers and fitters. The Wittenoom miners and their families are still being followed by researchers to determine the effects of exposure.

The economic boom that followed WWII further drove demand for asbestos. In addition to local production, more than 50,000 tons of asbestos were imported to Australia each year throughout the 1950s and into the late 1970s.

Asbestos afforded many Australians a home. Timber-framed houses clad in flat asbestos cement sheeting (called “fibro houses”) were favoured by people who built or legally supervised the building of their own home.

In the mid-1960s, nearly 20% of Australia’s housing stock was made up of fibro houses – with the highest uptake (more than 50%) in the Northern Territory. It’s impossible to say exactly what percentage of existing buildings contain asbestos.

When cyclone Tracy swept through Darwin in 1974, the death and disease that resulted from the uncoordinated cleanup served as a warning of the possible dangers of asbestos removal.

Read more:
Asbestos still haunts those exposed as kids in mining towns

Asbestos is here to stay

Asbestos-related cancers have a long lag time between exposure and detectable disease. Although this lag is typically about 30 years, it can range anywhere between 10 and 70 years. As such, it can be difficult to trace exposure retrospectively.

Many buildings constructed before the mid-1980s contain asbestos. It’s often inseparably bound to other materials, such as tiles, vinyl and cement.

Regulations demand specialist removal for asbestos-affected areas of more than 10 square metres. In reality, whether this happens comes down to how effectively it can be detected, and whether the people affected can afford removals. Without specialised assessment and analysis, asbestos can be difficult to recognise.

Since there is no recognised “safe” dose – a dose below which there’s no risk of developing asbestos-related cancer – workplace standards can only minimise risk, not eliminate it.

Only time will tell what the long-term outcomes are from the latest exposure in NSW. The risk from asbestos depends on several factors, including the overall amount inhaled, the type of asbestos and the number of years since exposure.

Among the most heavily exposed Wittenoom miners, about 20% have developed mesothelioma so far.

Documenting cases

Since July 2010, the Australian Mesothelioma Registry has collected information on new mesothelioma cases diagnosed in Australia. The national Asbestos Exposure Register also allows any person to register a documented or suspected case of exposure.

If you’re worried about your neighbourhood, the Asbestos and Silica Eradication Agency has produced a national heat map showing the probability of asbestos presence in buildings by geographic area.

Sonja Klebe works for SA Pathology and gets called as a paid expert to court. She has received funding from NHMRC, MRFF, AstraZeneca, Roche and Ventana.

– ref. From a ‘magic mineral’ to the stuff of nightmares: a 6,700-year history of asbestos – https://theconversation.com/from-a-magic-mineral-to-the-stuff-of-nightmares-a-6-700-year-history-of-asbestos-223972