Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Hurley, Director, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

The Australian government is aiming to rein in the growth of international students in its new migration policy, released on Monday.

This is in response to record levels of international students entering the country once COVID-related border closures were lifted. Current and former international students living in Australia already number 860,000 and are hurtling towards one million people.

As Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil told journalists:

[…] we do not want [the international student population] to grow as fast as it has been growing in the past few year.

The government is relying on tightening of visa regulations, greater integrity measures and increased entry requirements to reduce the number of students.

These reforms target the vocational education and training sector and students who remain in Australia following their course. But the number of international students is set to remain about the same, just with more sustainable levels of growth.

Meanwhile, universities – who are so reliant on international student income – are likely to be less affected.

Read more:
The government is bringing immigration back to ‘normal levels’ but cuts are not as dramatic as they seem

Towards 1 million

Over the past decade, the number of current and international students in Australia has more than doubled. In 2012, there were about 340,000 international students in Australia. The most recent data shows 650,000 are in Australia.

Enrolled international students are just one group of temporary migrants. Some former international students are eligible for post-study work visas of up to six years when they finish their course.

Thanks to border closures, the pandemic caused a major decline in the number of international students living in Australia. To encourage international students to return, the Australian government allowed international students to work more hours and increased post-study visa work rights.

But the rate at which international students have returned has been much quicker than many expected. There have also been several recent reviews into the migration system highlighting problems.

One review found Australia was creating a class of “permanently temporary” migrants in Australia. These are people who have lived in the country for an extended period but have no path to permanent residency or citizenship.

Another review found the migration system, including student visas, was the subject of major abuses.

A targeted clamp down

To lower the growth rate, the government is proposing a series of measures.

These include closing the COVID-related programs that uncapped working hours for international students.

They are also proposing strengthening the integrity and lifting standards in international education. This includes increasing minimum English language requirements for student and graduate visas.

The government is also promising to crack down on unscrupulous education providers who deliver cheap, poor quality courses but offer access to visas with work rights.

To halt the growth in former international students staying on in Australia, the government will shorten graduate visas.

They will also end settings that allow graduates to prolong their stay in Australia by cycling through courses to remain in the country. The number of international students staying in Australia on a second or subsequent student visa grew by more than 30% to more than 150,000 in 2022–23. Students will now need to demonstrate further study is part of career progression.

These are combined with other reforms aimed at making pathways to permanent migration clearer. The government forecast that this package will bring down the growth in net overseas migration.

Universities are set to be spared

This policy is aimed at a major reduction in the rate of growth rather than to reduce the total number of international students.

Of the 860,000 current and former international students in Australia, just under half are currently enrolled in higher education courses. But it is the non-university sector that will be most impacted.

The increase in English language requirements will impact students in the vocational education and training sector, which is dominated by private colleges, as English language requirements for university students are largely unchanged.

Tightening the criteria for enrolments in second and subsequent courses will also impact the vocational sector the most. In 2022–23 almost 69,000 students granted a subsequent student visa in Australia have been in vocational education and training courses where the government claims there is “a lower likelihood of a credible course progression”.

Read more:
Why unis and vocational colleges are key to Australia’s temporary migration challenge

We are not alone

Australia is not the only country winding back post-pandemic policies aimed at boosting international education.

The United Kingdom announced reforms last week aimed at cutting net overseas migration, including restricting some students from bringing family members.

Overall, the Australian? government’s aim is to deliver a more cohesive migration strategy that better aligns international education, labour market needs and pathways to permanent residency.

It is a welcome recognition we need significant improvements to Australia’s migration program if we are also going to make improvements to the international student sector.

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

– ref. We are hurtling towards a million international students in Australia – migration changes will only slow this growth, not stop it – https://theconversation.com/we-are-hurtling-towards-a-million-international-students-in-australia-migration-changes-will-only-slow-this-growth-not-stop-it-219590

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dion Kagan, Research Officer, Gender, Law and Drugs program, La Trobe University

Hepatitis C is a preventable but potentially life-threatening blood-borne virus. It primarily affects the liver and, if untreated, can lead to cirrhosis (scar damage) and cancer.

When direct-acting antivirals for hepatitis C arrived in 2016, they were described as a game changer. They cured chronic hepatitis C in more than 95% of cases. So Australia adopted the World Health Organization’s target to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030.

More than a billion dollars has been invested in adding direct-acting antivirals to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, making treatment accessible to anyone covered by Medicare. By the end of 2022, about 60% of people living with hepatitis C had been treated.

That’s a remarkable public health achievement. Life-changing for many and for some, literally life-saving. But what is life like for this growing group of people after they’ve been cured? And where are we still lagging in our efforts to combat hepatitis C?

Read more:
Explainer: the A, B, C, D and E of hepatitis

Cure doesn’t always eliminate stigma

The most common way of picking up hepatitis C in Australia is by sharing injecting equipment. As injecting drugs is widely disapproved of, and illegal in most parts of Australia, this has huge implications for people with hepatitis C.

The stigma associated with injecting drugs means people with hepatitis C can experience persistent discrimination – in relationships, at work, and other settings. Research suggests more than half of people with hepatitis C experienced discrimination in a 12-month period.

Such discrimination happens most commonly in health care, when doctors, nurses and others health-care professionals become aware of someone’s hepatitis C status. This can include withholding treatment, diagnostic overshadowing (when workers attribute physical symptoms of illness to mental health issues), rude or unwelcoming behaviour, and excessive infection control like double-gloving. This may lead some people to avoid seeking medical care entirely.

Our recent research found direct-acting antivirals do not necessarily cure these forms of stigma and discrimination. If medical records show a person has a history of hepatitis C, some health-care workers change the way they treat that person.

Their manner can change. The treatments they offer might change – for example, whether they will provide access to painkillers. Sometimes people are treated as if they are infectious, or as if they still have the virus when they don’t.

The law can reinforce stigma and discrimination

Laws and legal practices have been slow to respond to new treatments.

In insurance law, for instance, having once had hepatitis C has been considered a risk to insurance providers. This means affected people may not be approved for travel, health or life insurance. Or, their premiums may be much higher, potentially pricing them out of the market and limiting their ability to travel, access health care or plan for their financial futures.

We would expect to see practices change with more effective treatments. But insurance practices and the actuarial data that insurers use is lagging behind medical developments.

This is just one example of how laws and legal practices can exacerbate stigma and discrimination for people with a history of hepatitis C. Our research found this also occurs in criminal law, privacy law, social security and migration law.

People in prison are being left behind

Prisons have high rates of injecting and hepatitis C transmission has historically been high.

While Australia has had a good track record on reducing some harms associated with drug use in prisons, there is at least one glaring omission: prisons don’t have access to a needle and syringe programs to ensure that people who use drugs can access sterile equipment. This means it’s much harder to prevent the transmission of hepatitis C and other blood-borne viruses in prisons.

Read more:
Sterile needles can stop the spread of disease in prisons – here’s how

Yet current national hepatitis C policy says harm reduction should be available in prisons. And the Mandela Rules – which are a set of international human rights principles – state that prisoners should receive the same standard of health care as those in the wider community.

Without sterile injecting equipment for people in prisons, people who have been cured of hepatitis C are at risk of reinfection. And Australia is less likely to eliminate hepatitis C.

Elimination demands more than just treatment

The world is watching as Australia tries to be one of the first countries in the world to eliminate hepatitis C. The final national hepatitis C health strategy is expected to be released before the end of 2023.

But the number of people coming forward for treatment has dropped significantly. Resources are being marshalled into finding people, and keeping the momentum going on elimination.

It is increasingly clear that we also need to direct resources to what happens “post-cure”, assuring people that stigma-free health care is available to them. We also need to tackle the laws, policies and practices that allow stigma and discrimination to linger in people’s lives.

Finally, we need to ensure people in prisons have access to sterile injecting equipment so they aren’t reinfected.

Kate Seear receives funding from the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Scheme (DP200100941) and the Future Fellowship Scheme (FT200100099).

Dion Kagan, Emily Lenton, and Sean Mulcahy 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. We’re on track to eliminate hepatitis C, but stigma remains and reinfection is a risk – https://theconversation.com/were-on-track-to-eliminate-hepatitis-c-but-stigma-remains-and-reinfection-is-a-risk-216439

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wes Hill, Associate Professor, art history and visual culture, Southern Cross University

Fairy Tales, the latest exhibition at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), gives off the pleasurable hum of remix culture, artists riffing on a core theme in numerous ways.

Overseen by the gallery’s cinematheque curator Amanda Slack-Smith, Fairy Tales focuses on how artists, designers and filmmakers have taken inspiration from fantasy motifs, adapting the fairy tale vocabulary of extremes (light and dark, good and evil, rich and poor) to their own artistic needs.

Based in handed-down oral traditions, fairy tales share characteristics with all manner of fables, folk stories and mythological narratives throughout the world.

These stories, which were initially rarely intended for children (yet featured them as central characters in easy-to-understand plots), made their way into print from the 17th century.

After the coining of the word “folklore” in 1846, colonisation, advertising and the international spread of mass culture drove folklorists and creatives to praise the authenticity of localised oral traditions.

This seductively designed show at QAGOMA makes clear that, rather than fairy tales being simply preserved, the modern age revived them with new myths, new media and new individualistic quirks, from Hans Christian Andersen to Walt Disney and beyond.

Creatures in the night

Brazilian artist Henrique Oliveira sets the mood of the exhibition brilliantly with his gnarled and twisted woodland, Corupira (2023).

The sculpture builds slowly as you enter the corridors of the space and culminates in a meeting of massive tree branches that have burst through the gallery walls. Oliveira’s title refers to a Brazilian folk story about red-haired satyr-like creatures who, living in the Amazon forest, deceive hunters and loggers from the shadows, killing them – or at least putting any potential coloniser off course.

It is a great opener to the show because it metaphorically turns viewers into fairy tale wanderers, and artists into tricksters and spell-makers.

Oliveira’s work chimes perfectly with The Nightwatch (2004) by Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, consisting of surveillance video footage of a fox the artist released into London’s National Portrait Gallery (with the gallery’s permission) during the night. Alÿs’s fox continues the fairy tale tradition of depicting forest animals as actively engaging with human societies.

Alÿs self-consciously titled his work after a 17th century painting by Rembrandt van Rijn in which citizens are depicted serving as defenders and official volunteers for their city. Alÿs might be suggesting the contemporary artist is like a public servant whose job, like the fox in the video, is to intrude on the prized traditions supported by museums.

Australian artist Abdul Abdullah’s provocative photograph Troubling the Margins (from the Interloper series) (2022) follows a similar idea. Abdullah literally shows himself as a fox in a henhouse.

The artist-as-fox smiles maliciously at the viewer as if saying to the art world: “I can’t believe you let me in here.”

Read more:
The amazing NGV Triennial 2023 makes us question our world and forces us to see it differently

Uncanny images

One of many terrific sculptural works in the exhibition, Jana Sterbak’s Inside (1990) is an empty glass coffin seemingly pregnant with a smaller mirrored coffin inside.

A reversed imagining of life in death, the piece responds to the many glass coffins in fairy and folk tales (such as Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Grimm’s Brothers The Glass Coffin), exploring the uncanny idea of death being put on permanent display for the living.

It’s not a coffin but a caravan in Patricia Piccinini’s The Couple (2018), where two realistically rendered hybrid human-animal lovers are frozen in a serene moment cuddling on a fold-out bed, their clawed feet sticking out from under the sheets.

Piccinini’s works often centre on hyperreal figures that look genetically altered. These sculptures are at their most interesting when they make viewers aware of themselves. I felt stupid for it, but I couldn’t help feeling guilty for gawking too long at the sweet-looking couple’s physical deformations.

Projected behind a huge semi-transparent curtain, an exquisitely staged installation of Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film Beauty and the Beast is situated in relation to costumes and props from its production. This and other displays of material from fairy-tale-inspired films Where the Wild Things Are (2009) and The Labyrinth (1986) are among the most engaging cinema-themed pieces in the exhibition.

The capacity of anything to intrigue

In my 2015 publication about the relationship between folk art and fine art, I argued art critics and art historians in the 19th and 20th centuries narrowly discussed oral traditions and amateur cultural creations in anthropological terms.

By their reasoning, these were artefacts that failed to live up to the special insights and feelings expected of fine art.

This school of thought is no longer the case. Fairy Tales is a good example of the recent expansion of art-history-based curating into larger visual culture frameworks. Clothing, relics, paintings, literary documents, installations, videos and filmic props now all cohabit the museum in non-hierarchical ways, staging not the inherent value of specific material so much as the capacity of anything to intrigue.

For a show about timeless human fears and fantasies, Fairy Tales may be curiously timely.

Fairy Tales is at QAGOMA, Brisbane, until April 28, 2024.

Read more:
How the poetically-charged art of Tacita Dean gives its audience a moment for stillness and time

Wes Hill 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. Fairy Tales at QAGOMA: how we revived these stories with new myths, new media and new quirks – https://theconversation.com/fairy-tales-at-qagoma-how-we-revived-these-stories-with-new-myths-new-media-and-new-quirks-219228

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Xu Yi-chong, Professor of Governance and Public Policy, Griffith University

With an energy-hungry economy, an historic reliance on coal and vast manufacturing enterprises, China is the world’s single largest emitter, accounting for 27% of the world’s carbon dioxide and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

But China is also the world’s largest manufacturer of solar panels
and wind turbines. Domestically, it is installing green power at a rate the world has never seen. This year alone, China built enough solar, wind, hydro and nuclear capacity to cover the entire electricity consumption of France. Next year, we may see something even more remarkable – the population giant’s first ever drop in emissions from the power sector.

The COP28 climate talks began well, buoyed by November’s Sunnyland Statement between China and the United States, the second largest emitter. At previous climate talks, US-China cooperation has been lacking. But this time, they’re largely on the same page.

The statement outlined joint support for global tripling of renewable energy by 2030, tackling methane and plastic pollution, and a transition away from fossil fuels.

The urgency of now

China has been looking for better coordination with the US on climate since US President Joe Biden took office. Climate is an area where these competing major powers can cooperate.

The COP28 talks in Dubai – meant to finish tomorrow – offer a window for joint action. Next year, the US could elect a different president with very different views on climate. China’s well-regarded veteran special climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, is about to retire.

Read more:
Why renewed China-US cooperation bodes well for climate action

In these talks, China – the world’s top oil importer – is looking for a compromise solution on the tense debate over fossil fuels. The world’s cartel of oil producing countries, OPEC, has called for focusing on emissions reduction rather than fossil-fuel phase out in the declaration. Xie and his team are trying to find a middle ground to ensure a final deal.

China has long been criticised for its continuing coal-fired power plant expansion. It has the world’s largest coal power fleet, and approved another 106 gigawatts worth of new coal plants just last year – the equivalent of two a week. But the five major state-owned power companies are already burdened by heavy financial losses.

Why build dirty and clean? It’s a longstanding national policy: build sufficient baseload supply first while expanding renewable capacities. But at COP28, Xie said something new:

[China will] strive to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy in a gradual manner.

A country of engineers

In developed countries, much clean energy work is driven by energy economists, who use incentives to change behaviour.

China is a country of engineers, who see these challenges as technical rather than economic.

In 2007, China released a national action plan on climate, calling for technological solutions to the climate problem. Private and state-owned companies responded strongly.

Fifteen years later, China is in the lead in every low-carbon category. Its total installed renewable capacity is staggering, accounting for a third of the world’s total, and it is leading in electric vehicle production and sales.

In the first three quarters of 2023, over 53% of China’s electricity came from low-carbon sources: hydro, wind, solar, bioenergy and nuclear.

How did China boost clean energy so fast?

China’s huge domestic market and large-scale deployment of wind and solar contribute greatly to plummeting renewable costs. Steadily lowering costs means green energy becomes viable for developing countries.

In 2012, a large team from China Power Investment Corporation arrived in the high desert in Qinghai province and began building 15.7 GW worth of solar across 345 square kilometres.

It was here that China first figured out how to make intermittent power reliable. Excess power was sent to a hydropower station 40km away and used to pump water uphill. At night, the water would flow back down through the turbines. Technologies developed here are now being used in other large-scale hybrid projects, such as hydro-solar, wind-solar and wind-solar-hydro projects.

In 2022, the government announced plans to install 500 GW worth of solar, onshore and offshore wind projects in the Gobi Desert across Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Gansu provinces.

These are intended to not only supercharge China’s clean energy supply, but to tackle desert expansion. Solar panels stabilise the movement of sand and absorb sunlight, reducing evaporation of scarce water and giving plants a better chance at survival. This knowledge, too, came from the Qinghai solar farms, where plants began growing in the shade.

China’s focus on technology has given it combined solar and salt farms, floating solar power plants and energy storage ranging from batteries to compressed air to kinetic flywheels and hydrogen.

While the US and China cooperate at COP28, competition is not far away. China already dominates many clean energy technologies, but the US is trying to catch up through the massive green spend in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act.

According to the International Energy Agency, half of all emissions cuts needed to achieve net-zero by 2050 will come from technologies currently at demonstration or prototype phase. These include cheap green hydrogen, next generation nuclear, next generation solar and wind, and functioning carbon capture and storage for remaining fossil fuel use.

What has China achieved at COP28?

China is backing global calls to triple renewable capacity by 2030 and has agreed to tackle methane emissions, a particularly potent greenhouse gas.

China is far behind energy efficiency – it uses about 50% more per unit of GDP than in the US, and double that of Japan. It has not invested in energy efficiency as it has in other low-carbon areas.

This could change. US and China agreed in November to restart joint energy efficiency work on industry, buildings, transportation, and equipment, seen as harder areas to cut emissions.

At COP28, we will likely see states agree to double the rate of energy efficiency improvement from 2% to 4% a year by 2030. It remains to be seen whether China will join them.

Read more:
‘Matter of national destiny’: China’s energy crisis sees the world’s top emitter investing in more coal

Xu Yi-chong 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. COP28: Why China’s clean energy boom matters for global climate action – https://theconversation.com/cop28-why-chinas-clean-energy-boom-matters-for-global-climate-action-218825

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karin Hammarberg, Senior Research Fellow, Global and Women’s Health, School of Public Health & Preventive Medicine, Monash University

Infertility is often thought of as a female problem but one in three IVF cycles in Australia involve male infertility.

We recently published a review of the literature on whether men diagnosed with male factor infertility experience greater psychological distress than fertile men or men with an infertile partner. We found irrespective of the cause of infertility, men in couples with infertility have more symptoms of depression, anxiety and general psychological distress, worse quality of some aspects of life, and lower self-esteem than fertile men.

Research also shows sperm counts are declining worldwide, and that lifestyle and environmental factors can reduce male fertility.

While most male causes of infertility are not preventable, it’s important to know how to keep your sperm as healthy as possible. Here are five things men can do to boost their fertility.

1. Try to be in the healthy weight range

Obesity causes hormonal changes that have negative effects on semen, including the total number of sperm, the ability of the sperm to move, the number of live sperm, and the number of sperm with a normal shape.

These reduce the chance of both spontaneous and IVF conception.

The good news is the adverse effects on fertility caused by excess weight in men are reversible. Regular exercise and a healthy diet can help reduce weight and improve sperm quality.

There is strong evidence a healthy diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, low-fat dairy, and seafood, and low in red and processed meats, sweets, and sweetened beverages is linked to better sperm quality.

Read more:
Problems conceiving are not just about women. Male infertility is behind 1 in 3 IVF cycles

2. Avoid recreational drugs

Recreational drug use is associated with poorer reproductive health. Psychoactive drugs such as cocaine, benzodiazepines, heroin, methamphetamine, oxycodone and ecstasy negatively affect male reproductive functions including sexual urge, testosterone production, sperm production and sperm quality.

While research on the link between marijuana use and sperm quality is inconclusive, some evidence suggests frequent marijuana use can reduce sperm quality and is a risk factor for testicular cancer.

3. Stay clear of anabolic steroids

Some men use anabolic steroids to enhance their physical performance and appearance. Globally, it’s estimated about one in 16 men (6.4%) use anabolic steroids sometime during their life. Male weightlifters aged 20-39 years, fighters, and security personnel are among the most common users of anabolic steroids.

Anabolic steroids contribute to muscle growth and fat loss, but they also affect sexual function, including by reducing the size of testicles, reducing or stopping sperm production, and causing impotence and infertility.

Studies show most men start producing sperm again within a year of stopping anabolic steroids. But a recent study of men who became infertile as a result of anabolic steroids found that for some there is long-term damage to sperm production.

In this study of men who had stopped using anabolic steroids and had a six-month course of hormone treatment to improve sperm production, more than half still produced no sperm at all or very few sperm after six months.

Read more:
Science or Snake Oil: do men need sperm health supplements?

4. Quit smoking and vaping

We all know tobacco smoking is terrible for our general health but there is now evidence it’s also bad for male fertility and reproductive outcomes.

In the past decade, vaping has become increasingly popular, especially among young adults. More than 500 e-cigarette brands and 8,000 flavours have been commercialised. There is now growing evidence from animal studies that vaping can harm male reproductive health and experts recommend avoiding vaping when trying to conceive.

5. Reduce exposure to environmental chemicals

In our everyday lives we are exposed to many different environmental chemicals – through the products we use, the food we eat, and the air we breathe. So-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals can reduce the quality of sperm and cause problems with fertility because they can mimic or block male sex hormones.

It’s impossible to avoid these chemicals completely, because they are all around us. But you can take some simple steps to reduce your exposure, including:

• washing fruit and vegetables

• eating fewer processed, canned or pre-packaged foods

• drinking from glass or hard plastic bottles, rather than soft plastic bottles

• heating food in a china or glass bowl covered with paper towel or a plate rather than using plastic takeaway containers or those covered with cling wrap.

To inform men about how to look after their sperm, Your Fertility, a fertility health promotion program delivered by the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority, teamed up with Melbourne comedian Michael Shafar to create some helpful educational videos.

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

Karin Hammarberg works for the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority which manages the Your Fertility program.

– ref. Male infertility is more common than you may think. Here are 5 ways to protect your sperm – https://theconversation.com/male-infertility-is-more-common-than-you-may-think-here-are-5-ways-to-protect-your-sperm-217787

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Stevens, Research fellow, Australian Catholic University

On Monday, the federal government announced plans to fix Australia’s “broken migration system” and to “bring migration back to sustainable, normal levels”.

Its long-awaited migration strategy aims “to build a migration system that earns the trust and confidence of our citizens”, or what the government calls, “rebuilding the social licence”.

The government says these changes are the “biggest reforms in a generation”. It’s been reported the reforms will “dramatically cut”“ the immigration intake. But don’t be fooled by the hyperbole.

Instead of thinking of the strategy as a complete overhaul, the reforms are a number of long overdue remedies dealing with migrant worker exploitation, misuse of international student visas and an overly complex and inefficient bureaucracy.

The intake cuts are overstated and will largely be the result of a natural evening out of migration patterns in the post-pandemic world. Even the Department of Immigration acknowledges the spike in arrivals is “temporary”, a phenomenon labelled as “the catch-up effect” by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. If the current circumstances are only transitory, one wonders why the government is so keen to cut numbers.

It is important to look at how the department plans to reform immigration policy.

The policy document is 100 pages with much detail on the minutiae of immigration procedures. The broad areas covered are revising temporary skilled migration, cracking down on alleged rorting of the international education system, replacing annual migration plans with longer-term forecasting and getting the states and territories, which bear most of the resettling costs, more involved.

Temporary skilled migration

There are more than two million Australian residents on temporary visas, most of whom are New Zealand citizens, international students and graduates. Since coming to power the Albanese government has made no secret of its plan to end Australia’s reliance on temporary migrant workers and offer them achievable pathways to permanent residency.

It has already made a start: in April the government made it easier for eligible New Zealand nationals, to obtain Australian citizenship.

Last month, it introduced improved access to permanent residency for temporary skilled migrants and unveiled a Skills in Demand visa link?, to help obtain permanency.

These are all welcome – if overdue – reforms. Commentators have long criticised Australia’s over-reliance on temporary migrants who are denied the security to build a new life in Australia.

The reforms will also decouple a migrant’s visa from their sponsoring employer, allowing the migrant 180 days to find a new visa sponsor (up from 60 days). Importantly, they can continue to work during these six months. Severing the visa link between migrant and employer, will empower more migrant workers to leave exploitative conditions without fear of deportation.

The government is committed to improving conditions and prospects for temporary migrants, yet the 38,000 Pacific Islanders entering each year on the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility Scheme will not benefit from these reforms.

Read more:
Government to toughen scrutiny of international students as it slashes net migration over two years

Despite worker exploitation, even workplace deaths, within the scheme, the program will continue and indeed be promoted as evidence of Australia’s commitment to the Indo-Pacific. The inherent contradiction between reforming the temporary migration system while sustaining the Pacific labour scheme seems lost on the government.

International education

Earlier this year the government committed to closing loopholes and cracking down on “unscrupulous” education providers. Home Affairs minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration minister Andrew Giles say would-be migrants are securing student visas to gain a back door entry into Australia.

The political rhetoric on international students and their alleged misuse of the visa system is incendiary and may foster a public backlash, as we witnessed in the 2009 violence against Indian students.

It is important to remember most of the recent growth in international enrolments is in the higher education sector not the vocational education and training sector that is so often maligned.

Measures to reduce the number of international students, such as increasing English language proficiency, have been overstated in the media. The new migration strategy will only increase the International English Language Testing System requirement for a student visa from a score of 5.5 to 6.0.

Besides, the government can’t have it both ways: for years it has been under funding universities. It cannot expect universities to turn off the revenue tap of international students when there are no alternative funding sources available.

For international students, the reforms listed in the strategy are troubling. The pandemic concession of uncapped hours of paid work is gone in favour of a 48 hour per fortnight limit. The argument here is that international students are in Australia to study, so they must study.

But during a cost-of-living crisis, international students may struggle to make ends meet with restrictions on the number of hours they can work. The government also plans to reduce the temporary graduate visa by one year for masters by coursework and PhD students. It will also reduce the maximum eligible age from 50 to 35.

Read more:
What is the government’s preventative detention bill? Here’s how the laws will work and what they mean for Australia’s detention system

It is important to remember our universities are in competition with many more prestigious universities in North America and Europe for international students. Restricting the duration and eligibility requirements of temporary graduate visas may reduce the appeal of studying in Australia, which will affect higher education funding.

Long-term planning and cooperation

Historically, the migration program is revised annually and done so by the federal bureaucracy. The migration strategy wants to change this and “plan migration over a longer-term horizon” yet it does not spell out the new time frame.

In a standard three-year election cycle, it is hard to imagine how longer-term planning would work. The scant details in this section of the policy document indicate the writers themselves were not sure of how to implement this reform.

Additionally, the migration strategy recommends including states and territories in information sharing and in the decision-making process. Again, in theory, this is a good idea. Even though the Commonwealth determines who can enter Australia, it is often left up to the states to bear the cost of resettlement and integration.

But if our experience of COVID is any indication, then collaboration across jurisdictions is far from guaranteed, particularly on a contentious and politicised issue such as immigration.

Read more:
High Court reasons on immigration ruling pave way for further legislation

While the policy blueprint may seem comprehensive, it is important to note what is not covered in any depth.

Family reunification is given four short paragraphs and includes no policy recommendations. This will be particularly heart breaking for those with elderly parents overseas. Discussion on humanitarian entrants is also brief. Again, it makes no new announcements and repeats an August statement that the government intends to increase the refugee intake from 17,875 to 20,000 places each year.

With the United Nations estimating there are more than 110 million people currently displaced across the world, Australia’s paltry humanitarian intake will continue to be a source of shame for this country.

Rachel Stevens 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 government is bringing immigration back to ‘normal levels’ but cuts are not as dramatic as they seem – https://theconversation.com/the-government-is-bringing-immigration-back-to-normal-levels-but-cuts-are-not-as-dramatic-as-they-seem-219501

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Donna West Brett, Associate Professor in Art History, University of Sydney

The first time I saw one of Tacita Dean’s monumental film-works it was by chance.

Soaring the heights of the Tate’s Turbine Hall, FILM 2011 was an entrancing visual elegy to art, nature and time.

My second chance encounter was in 2018 at the Royal Academy where Dean’s exhibition Landscape was on show. Cooling off on a rare London summer’s day watching the hour-long Antigone I drifted in out of a strange sense of euphoria.

The idea of coincidence and “chance” drove much of the Surrealists’ work from literature to the visual arts and is also at the centre of Dean’s artistic process. At the opening night of a new major exhibition of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Dean described the Surrealist concept of “objective chance” in action.

As an artist in residence at the Getty Research Centre across 2014 and 2015, she randomly pointed to a box from the centre’s archive. On opening the box, she found the key to the studio of 19th century French artist Auguste Rodin, famous for his sculpture The Thinker (1904).

This chance encounter was the start of an extensive project, Monet Hates Me (2021), an exhibition in a box that contains 50 objects and ephemera that reflect the history of art, produced during one of the long COVID-19 lockdowns with her collaborator Martyn Ridgewell.

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From Rodin to Dante

Born in Canterbury, the United Kingdom, in 1965, Dean works across film, photography, drawing, printmaking, immersive installations and more recently set designs and costumes created for The Dante Project, a ballet at the Royal Opera House, captured by Dean in the 35mm film Paradise (2021).

Paradise is a mesmeric, vibrantly coloured abstract film with an exquisite soundtrack, inspired by Dante Alighieri’s poem The Divine Comedy (1321) and the work of British artist William Blake, who created a series of watercolour illustrations based on the poem in 1824. Drawn from his bed during a fortnight of illness that led to Blake’s death, the drawings wield a fevered fascination with the grotesque.

Several works in the exhibition form conversations with artists. The film Buon Fresco (2014) shows exquisite details of Giotto’s Renaissance fresco (a wall painting) in the Upper Basilica of St Francis of Assisi in Italy.

One “film portrait” captures Claes Oldenburg, known for his enormous sculptures of everyday objects such as a clothes-peg, as he drew in his studio.

One Hundred and Fifty Years of Painting (2021) features Ethiopian-American contemporary painter Julie Mehretu in conversation with the 99-year-old Venezuelan-born artist Luchita Hurtado shortly before her death.

Born exactly 50 years apart, the two artists are captured here over the course of a day as the winter light caresses the scene as if bringing a still picture to life.

Dean’s films are poetically charged with impressions of stillness and time offering the viewer a deep sense of contemplation in stark contrast to the fervour of Circular Quay in the full swing of summer.

Nature and time

Another theme that runs through Dean’s prolific career is nature and deep time.

One room in the exhibition features two large-scale drawings and a photograph in conversation with each other to create a fragile rhythm as a reminder of the temporal nature of all things.

Chalk Fall (2018) and The Wreck of Hope (2022), referencing the romantic German painter Caspar David Friedrich, hang on opposing walls, as majestic drawings in chalk on blackboards.

One features a cliff face; the other a receding glacier. It is a stark reminder of our fragile environment, constantly subject to change. Time is embedded in these drawings both in the meticulous, laborious processes of drawing at such a scale, and in the sense of geological time that sits outside the feeble imaginings of our own mortality.

At the end of this gallery is a large, evocative photograph overdrawn in colour pencil, featuring a 2,000-year-old cherry blossom tree in the Japanese prefecture of Yamanashi.

There is an inherent tension in this nature-portrait between the efforts to support the tree’s ancient limbs with wooden crutches, and the persistence of its blossoms that sweep up in a jewel-like majesty against the subtle pink sky.

Known for using analogue film, Dean’s film installation Geography Biography (2023) characterises her methodical, material approach to artmaking.

Bringing together chance encounters, obsolete materials and old film footage, Dean considers this work to be an “accidental self-portrait”. Accompanied only by the machinic projector noise, this filmic collage over two screens provides a mesmerising insight into the artist’s life and ways of making art.

Dean’s works are incredibly labour intensive. From filming the frescoes of Giotto hovering on a scissor lift or drawing large-scale renditions of glaciers, to editing endless rolls of film, this exhibition gives us pause to embrace the ephemeral nature of time itself.

Tacita Dean is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until March 3.

Read more:
‘A deeply thoughtful and sensuous show’: a rarely experienced intimacy with Louise Bourgeois

Donna West Brett received funding from the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford as a Sloan Fellow in Photography 2024.

– ref. How the poetically-charged art of Tacita Dean gives its audience a moment for stillness and time – https://theconversation.com/how-the-poetically-charged-art-of-tacita-dean-gives-its-audience-a-moment-for-stillness-and-time-219485

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shaun Brooks, Fieldwork Coordinator/Research Technician, CSIRO

Scientific research in Antarctica has played a key role in many important discoveries of the past century. But it has also come at a considerable cost to the environment.

Science in Antarctica is typically based at one of the 77 research stations. While their role is to support science, their isolation means they need to provide the infrastructure of a town.

As well as the local impacts of these stations, the Antarctic environment is facing massive challenges from external pressures such as climate change. The loss of sea ice could mean some of the continent’s most iconic wildlife face extinction this century. For example, the early melting of sea ice recently led to complete breeding failure at several emperor penguin colonies.

So how can we keep doing research in Antarctica while minimising our impact on the environment? This question led to our new research published in the Journal of Environmental Management.

We found little evidence of conservation planning and few limits on permissible activities such as building new stations, despite Antarctica being declared a natural reserve. This has left plenty of room to improve planning, technology and research methods to reduce impacts on the fragile Antarctic environment.

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What are the impacts of all these stations?

The majority of stations were built before the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty took effect in the late 1990s. These older stations were established during an era when environmental protection was a lower priority.

As a result, some stations were located in the most rare and sensitive ice-free areas. They probably would not be built there today, but only a few have been removed. Most old stations continue to operate.

At the larger stations, in addition to living quarters and laboratories, facilities include sewage and power plants, bulk fuel tanks and handling, roads, workshops, helipads, runways, wharfs, quarries, fire stations and even one short-lived nuclear reactor.

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Adding to the impacts are ongoing demands to expand stations. This might be to provide new scientific apparatus to answer new questions, house more people, improve logistical capacity, or increase the safety of ageing infrastructure.

This background means research stations are often industrial-looking sites, with industrial-scale environmental impacts. It’s a stark contrast to the near-pristine natural reserve they are situated in.

The stations that support science to help understand Antarctica have created the most intense human impacts on the place. These impacts include:

• a growing disturbance footprint on rare but vital ice-free areas

• marine contamination that rivals the most polluted harbours in the world

• fuel spills

• non-native species introductions, including weeds and invertebrates

• disturbance to wildlife.

Many stations have displaced some of the best areas of habitat for plants and animals.

Environmental management and impact assessments are now routine practice in Antarctica, and do curtail impacts. However, these practices do not stop the footprint of stations from continuing to spread.

In a case study of a long-established Antarctic station, Australia’s Casey, we found the area of heavy disturbance expanded by 18% and the area of medium disturbance by 42% over a 16-year period. This growth has encroached on one of the most important areas of vegetation in Antarctica.

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So what are the answers?

Using better technology is one option. This can include installing cleaner sewage treatment to reduce contamination of the marine environment. And using passive design and renewable energy can reduce fuel handling and storage.

Similarly, substituting harmful research practices with techniques that have fewer impacts is another option. Researchers have, for example, determined the prey species of penguins from poo, rather than handling the birds.

As well as better technology and different research methods, a systematic approach to conservation planning, which identifies the best ways to protect the environment, will help.

Our international team looked into best-practice conservation planning for reserves elsewhere in the world. We adapted these approaches to the unique characteristics of each region of Antarctica and to the various ways in which stations operate.

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We deliberately designed our conservation planning approach to support station operators to continue to provide new science capabilities. However, we did it in a way that minimises long-term environmental impacts.

For conservation planning to work properly, we need more environmental monitoring data. And data collection must be sustained over a long time.

In the absence of legal limits, we also encourage station operators to set their own self-imposed limits on their footprint and restore degraded areas no longer used. The less area we impact, the more room it gives Antarctic species to shift and adapt to a changing climate.

This work was funded and supported by the Australian Antarctic Division, Australian Antarctic Science project 4565.

– ref. Doing science in Antarctica has harmed an environment under great pressure. Here’s how we can do better – https://theconversation.com/doing-science-in-antarctica-has-harmed-an-environment-under-great-pressure-heres-how-we-can-do-better-211616

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbara Allen, Senior Lecturer in Public Management, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

It has been clear that change is coming to the New Zealand public service since the election campaign. Just what impact that change will have is less easy to predict now the new government is installed.

As part of its hundred-day action plan, the National Party initially pledged to “start reducing public sector expenditure by 6.5% on average” by cutting “back-office spending not critical to frontline services”.

While the phrase “start reducing” was ambiguous, one estimate put likely losses at around 6,500 full-time jobs. ACT Party leader David Seymour was more forthright, declaring an “absolute top” figure of 15,000 public service jobs could be at risk.

The final coalition government plan seems to have changed considerably, however, with the policy being to “start reducing public sector expenditure, including consultant and contractor expenditure”.

While the scale is considerably less clear, now is the time to ask what the effects of these potentially drastic cuts might be. History and overseas experience suggests they will not necessarily lead to the outcomes the government intends, for a number of reasons.

Job cuts don’t cut costs

Firstly, there is no simple, direct correlation between numbers of public service jobs and the public purse. As one former senior civil servant and now expert guide to the British civil service has put it:

Changes in civil service numbers do not necessarily translate into parallel increases [or] decreases in public expenditure, nor in the size of the state.

Partly this is because job numbers are at the whim of other government policies. Brexit, for example, saw a massive increase in full-time equivalent (FTE) public service jobs from 375,000 in 2016 to 475,000 by 2021.

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More importantly, jobs can be reclassified rather than removed. For evidence of this we need look no further than Aotearoa New Zealand.

In 2009, John Key’s National-led government capped the growth in public service staffing. The then State Services Commission was tasked with monitoring this, and departmental chief executives were expected to actively keep numbers down.

The initial cap of 38,859 FTE positions set in 2009 was reset to 36,475 in 2012. There was also a special focus on reducing the number of communications and public relations advisers.

The Labour government removed the cap in 2018. This followed a review that concluded the policy had led to the “gaming” of jobs through reclassification, a massive loss of institutional knowledge, and too much focus by managers on staffing levels rather than service delivery.

Rise of the ‘consultocracy’

Perhaps most tellingly, while the Key government’s cap did reduce the number of public service jobs, it didn’t reduce the number of jobs being paid for by the public purse.

Instead, the cap simply contributed to a new “consultocracy” culture, a phenomenon well established in public policy research.

Between 2007 and 2017, shortly before the cap was lifted, the use of contractors and consultants increased by nearly 200%. This contributed to an overall wage and salary increase of 50%.

Cutting jobs did not cut public spending on salaries – quite the opposite. There is no reason to expect today’s proposed cuts will not simply create the same perverse incentives as before.

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We should also ask who and what the term “back-office spending” refers to. Does it include legal, finance and human resources professionals? These currently make up a mere 5% of the total public service. Or perhaps it refers to clerical and administrative staff. They comprise 9% of the public service.

Definitions of “back-room” or “administrative” staff often lean towards simplistic dichotomies between “real” frontline workers and “made-up” office jobs.

But no organisation, private or public, can operate without administrative support provided by office managers, accountants, call centre operators, cleaners and security staff, advisers and policy analysts.

There is a choice between keeping these functions in-house or outsourcing them. Either way, there is no point pretending they don’t exist.

High trust and low morale

We might also ask who (outside of the government) is calling for a cull of public servants.

New Zealanders have a high level of trust in their public service: “80% […] trust public services based on their personal experience”, according to September figures from the Public Service Commission.

Indeed, the New Zealand public service stands out globally for trust and integrity. It consistently ranks highly in Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

Read more:
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Finally, the effects of the cuts could have a chilling effect on public service motivation. People tend to join and remain in public service to contribute to society. Few enter for personal enrichment or even long-term career advancement.

There is no doubt the public service can be made more efficient, and that saving public money is a good idea. But drastic job cuts will almost certainly not achieve this.

History shows it has the opposite effect, increasing spending through the use of consultants and contractors while demoralising those who remain. It would serve the new government well to remember this, before it ends up paying the private sector to provide public services.

Karl Lofgren receives funding from the Swedish Research Council.

Barbara Allen and Michael Macaulay do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Return of the ‘consultocracy’ – how cutting public service jobs to save costs usually backfires – https://theconversation.com/return-of-the-consultocracy-how-cutting-public-service-jobs-to-save-costs-usually-backfires-218990

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Edward Santow, Professor & Co-Director, Human Technology Institute, University of Technology Sydney

In a world promising self-driving cars and artificial general intelligence, the prospect of a new form of digital identity verification can feel … less than exciting.

And yet digital identity is about to be unleashed in Australia and around the world. In 2024, many years before most of us experience the joy of commuting in our fully autonomous car, new forms of digital ID will profoundly change how we engage with government and business. For example, digital ID may remove the pain of handing over physical copies of your driver’s licence, passport and birth certificate when renewing your Working with Children Check or setting up a new bank account.

How can we gain the benefits of digital ID – convenience, efficiency, lower risk of cybercrime – while minimising the attendant risks, such as privacy leaks, data misuse, and reduced trust in government?

In a new paper released today by the Human Technology Institute, we propose legal and policy guardrails to improve user safeguards and build community trust for the rollout of digital ID in New South Wales. While the paper focuses on NSW, it contains ten principles to support the development of any safe, reliable and responsible digital identity system.

Across Australia, governments are kickstarting digital identity initiatives

Some forms of digital identification already operate in Australia at scale. For example, the Document Verification Service was introduced as early as 2009 to automate checking of important documents such as passports.

Last year this service was used more than 140 million times by roughly 2,700 government and private sector organisations. A limited form of facial verification technology was used well over a million times.

A key problem, however, is that Australia has not had an effective legal framework to govern even the existing digital ID system. This is starting to change.

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In June this year, the federal government released a national strategy for digital identity resilience. In its final sittings for 2023, the Australian Parliament passed the Identity Verification Services Bill 2023, which provides some important protections for privacy and other rights.

Also in December, the government proposed a second law, the Digital ID Bill 2023. This bill would provide rules for a major expansion of Australia’s system of digital identification.

Notwithstanding this recent flurry of activity in the federal government, NSW has long been Australia’s leading jurisdiction in this area. It announced its Digital ID program in April 2022 and has quietly worked to put in place the key elements of what could become a world-leading digital ID system, with strong community safeguards.

What is a ‘digital identity’, and what are the risks?

The technologies at the heart of digital ID are powerful and carry risks.

In particular, facial verification technology matches an individual’s face data against a recorded reference image. It may also incorporate “liveness detection”, which checks that the face to be verified belongs to a genuine individual requesting a service in real time (as opposed to a photograph, for example).

NSW’s digital identity initiative uses both these technologies.

Overall, digital identity should mean less of our personal information is collected and used by third parties. For example, when someone enters a pub and a bouncer asks for ID, the only information the bouncer needs to know is that the patron is over 18. The bouncer doesn’t need other personal information on their licence, such as their address or organ donor status.

Good design and regulation would ensure the digital ID service can verify someone’s age without disclosing other sensitive data.

On the other hand, these technologies use sensitive personal information and this brings risks when they are used to make decisions that affect people’s rights. Errors may result in an individual being denied an essential government service.

Because a digital ID system would by its nature collect sensitive personal information, it also poses risks of identity fraud or hacking of personal information.

Making digital ID safe

There must be robust safeguards in place to address these risks.

Accountable digital identity systems should be voluntary, not compulsory. They need to ensure citizens have options for choice and consent, and should be usable and accessible for everyone.

Digital ID also needs to be safe. It should protect the sensitive personal information of users and make sure this data is not used for other, unintended purposes like law enforcement.

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To achieve these aims, we recommend that NSW Digital ID be grounded in legislation that enshrines:

• user protections, including providing for privacy and data security of all users

• performance standards, ensuring that digital identity performs to a high standard of accuracy and be fit for purpose, with public reporting by the responsible government agency or department on relevant independent benchmarking and technical standards compliance

• oversight and accountability, with both internal and external monitoring, and clear redress mechanisms

• interoperability with other government systems.

These principles are not specific to NSW. They are relevant and transferable to other jurisdictions looking to develop digital identity systems.

Whether Australia’s digital identity transformation is a success depends on how digital identity systems are established in law and practice. It is crucial that robust governance mechanisms are in place to ensure digital identity systems are safe, secure and accountable. Only then will Australians embrace and trust the digital transformation that is afoot.

Edward Santow works for the UTS Human Technology Institute. The Institute has received a funding grant from the James Martin Institute for Public Policy to support the project mentioned in this article. Prof Santow also serves as an independent member of the NSW Government’s AI Review Committee, which has provided some advice on the NSW Government’s use of digital identification.

Lauren Perry works for the UTS Human Technology Institute. The Institute has received a funding grant from the James Martin Institute for Public Policy to support the project mentioned in this article

Sophie Farthing works for the UTS Human Technology Institute. The Institute has received a funding grant from the James Martin Institute for Public Policy to support the project mentioned in this article.

– ref. Digital ID will go mainstream across Australia in 2024. Here’s how it can work for everyone – https://theconversation.com/digital-id-will-go-mainstream-across-australia-in-2024-heres-how-it-can-work-for-everyone-219406

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonti Horner, Professor (Astrophysics), University of Southern Queensland

As an astronomer and meteor enthusiast, I’d say it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Each December sees the return of the Geminid meteor shower – the best natural fireworks display of the year – and people the world over head out to enjoy the show. This year promises to be extra special as the peak of the Geminids falls at new Moon.

The result? The night sky will be beautifully dark from the moment the Geminids first become visible, in the mid-to-late evening, right up until the light of dawn brightens the horizon. And the darker the sky, the better the show.

An appointment with shards of a ‘rock comet’

Each grain of dust that impacts Earth’s atmosphere produces a meteor, burning bright above 80 kilometres high. The bigger or faster the grain, the brighter the resulting flash.

As Earth makes its way around the Sun, it continually passes through streams of dust and debris left behind by asteroids and comets. When it runs into these meteor streams the amount of dust entering the atmosphere increases, and a meteor shower is born.

Read more:
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Every year in December, Earth passes through a stream of debris left behind by an asteroid called (3200) Phaethon.

Phaethon is an unusual object. It moves on a highly elongated orbit that takes it much closer to the Sun than Mercury and farther away than Mars. As a result it is alternately baked and frozen – its surface shattering, spewing dust into space.

The dust left behind has spread all around Phaethon’s orbit. Whenever Earth reaches a certain part of the orbit, it passes through the resulting tube of debris, giving birth to the Geminid meteor shower.

It takes Earth several weeks to pass through the debris left behind by Phaethon. For most of that period the Geminids remain a minor event. However, for two or three nights around mid-December, we pass through the densest part of the stream.

From the northern hemisphere, the Geminids produce more than 100 meteors per hour at their best. While the view from Australia isn’t quite as good, a keen-eyed observer can still see more than 50 meteors per hour at the peak – the most spectacular show of the year.

The best time to watch

A meteor shower can only be seen when the part of Earth you’re standing on is facing the stream. That means for the Geminids you won’t see any meteors until the constellation Gemini rises from your location.

The farther north you are, the earlier in the evening the “radiant” will rise. This is the point in the sky from which the meteors appear to radiate. The higher in the sky the radiant is, the further into the stream you’re facing and the more meteors you’ll see.

The best rates will come when the radiant is at its highest, which occurs when it’s due north. The table below indicates the time the radiant will rise on the evening of December 14, and when it will be at its highest (culmination) for all major cities in the early hours of December 15.

The “peak rate” is an estimate of how many meteors you might see in the hour the radiant is at its highest, assuming you have perfect eyesight and a dark, crystal-clear sky. Factors such as light pollution, imperfect eyesight and cloud cover will affect this.

The most meteors will be visible during the four-hour period centred on the culmination of the radiant. The more time passes from the culmination, the fewer meteors you’ll see.

That said, you still stand a chance of seeing some Geminids any time the radiant is above the horizon – with respectable rates as early as one hour after the radiant rises.

Where should I look?

While Geminid meteors can appear anywhere in the night sky, you can always trace their movement back to the radiant in the constellation Gemini.

If you look directly at the radiant, you’ll see the meteors almost head-on; if you look away from it, you’ll see them entering the atmosphere above you, rushing to the horizon.

From experience, we’ve found the best way to spot meteors is to find and face the radiant, and then turn so you’re looking at a spot about 45 degrees to the radiant’s left or right.

What does this mean? In the few hours after the radiant rises, it will be in the northeastern part of the sky, so you’d be best served looking to the north or the east (45 degrees to the left or right of the radiant).

When the radiant is at its highest, it’ll be due north – so the best view for the shower will be to the northeast or northwest. Finally, as you move towards dawn, the radiant will be in the northwest, so you’d want to look to the west or north.

Ideally, you want to be looking up at about a 45 degree angle from the ground. Lying down is best, and standing is a sure recipe for a sore neck! Whether you look left or right is up to you, but we’d suggest looking at whichever side has a darker sky (less light pollution).

Location is key

The Geminids are a fantastic treat – and like most treats they’re more fun when shared! For the best experience, grab your friends or loved ones and head out somewhere nice and dark.

With summer in full swing in Australia, it may be the perfect time to take a camping trip. To find an ideal viewing spot, check out this amazing map of Australia’s most (and least) light-polluted locations.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Geminids: the year’s best meteor shower is upon us. And this one will be a true spectacle – https://theconversation.com/the-geminids-the-years-best-meteor-shower-is-upon-us-and-this-one-will-be-a-true-spectacle-218923

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Thomas, Lecturer in Middle East Studies, Deakin University

As the Israel-Hamas war continues, there’s been a lot of discussion around Zionism.

Put simply, Zionism is a nationalist movement that advocates for a homeland for the Jewish people in the Biblical Land of Israel. It is the organisation of ideas that actively sought and achieved the existence of the Israeli state in 1948.

Basically, political Zionism underpins the country we today call Israel.

It’s a movement that encompasses a broad spectrum of political beliefs with common objectives at its centre. But perhaps more than other political movements, Zionism has evolved over time.

So what is the history of Zionism, and what has that evolution looked like?

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Where did Zionism come from?

There are biblical underpinnings to Zionism, as religious Zionists often reference God promising the Land of Canaan to Abraham and his descendants – the Israelites – and renaming it the Land of Israel.

For various reasons, Jews decided to relocate to Ottoman Palestine towards the end of the 19th century. The first mass migration (known as the First Aliyah) occurred between 1882 and 1901. Between 15,000 and 25,000 Jews migrated, essentially doubling the region’s Jewish population at the time.

However, the beginnings of modern Zionism are secular and constructed through political philosophy.

Although many Zionist ideas predate his works, Theodore Herzl is considered the father of modern Zionism as he was the first to set out its political aims clearly.

Herzl was raised in a secular Jewish household in Hungary. In Vienna, he had a brief career as a lawyer before becoming a journalist and writer of plays and literature. Initially, he firmly believed European Jews should assimilate into European culture, and he held this view for much of his early life.

But his views changed after witnessing antisemitic riots in Paris in 1898. He decided antisemitism was not something that could ever be defeated. Instead, he encouraged European Jews to abandon the continent and create their own national home.

In his 1896 work Der Judenstaat: Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage (The Jewish State: Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question), he argues Jews possess a national identity that should be embraced.

However, he said, they would never be safe from antisemitism unless they lived in a community in which they were the majority.

A Jewish state in the Middle East

In his diaries, Herzl mused about many places a Jewish state could take shape. This homeland would be outside Europe, potentially in Latin America. But by 1904, Herzl began to focus on the Promised Land (Eretz Yisrael) in the Middle East “from the brook of Egypt to the Euphrates (in Iraq)”.

In the early 1900s, this area was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and Herzl met with Ottoman dignitaries multiple times to lobby the Zionist cause.

Herzl’s vision is considered by many as eurocentric and colonial with regard to the to the native Palestinian population.

But given that Jews are also originally native to this land, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) argues that the establishment of a Jewish state in Israel is not a form of settler colonialism.

It can be argued that political Zionism exhibits both anticolonial and colonial aspirations.

On one hand, it seeks to give self-determination to the Jewish people in a land to which they were once native. On the other, given early Zionists were trying to convince European colonial powers to create the Jewish national home, it adopted some colonial rationalisations and often saw the existing population, both Arabs and native Jews, as inferior.

Herzl rarely wrote about Arabs or other native populations, and when he did, he mused about how much their lives would be improved by the best of European and Jewish culture.

A growing political force

As Jewish migration began to gather steam, Zionism became more politically influential internationally.

But as the first world war drew to a close, there were large geopolitical shifts in the region. The Ottoman Empire’s power was waning, and the British would eventually end up in control of Jordan and Palestine in 1919.

In 1917, in an effort to undermine Ottoman control, the British implicitly supported the existence of a Jewish homeland in the Balfour Declaration:

His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.

The British would later renege on the declaration in 1939, saying it was no longer British government policy to support a Jewish homeland.

As British colonial rule continued, not all Zionist action was peaceful. Paramilitary organisations such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Irgun and the Lehi (also known as the “Stern Gang”) conducted bombings and attacks against the colonial British.

These groups would perpetrate the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948, killing more than 100 Palestinians near Jerusalem.

But it was the rise of Nazism in Europe and the Holocaust that solidified Zionism as a movement globally.

Jews fleeing Europe to settlements in Palestine (then under British rule) led to the Jewish population rising from 50,000 in the early 1900s to an estimated 650,000 by 1948.

Jewish calls for a “national home” turned into calls for a Jewish Commonwealth with full sovereign authority over its lands.

The central goal of Zionism was achieved on May 14 1948, with new Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion declaring the establishment of the state of Israel.

The war of independence followed within hours. Some 700,000 Palestinians fled to the West Bank (then belonging to Jordan), Gaza (a part of Egypt) and the neighbouring Arab states. This is known among Palestinians as the Nakba; the Arabic word for “catastrophe”, and the point at which Palestinians lost self-determination.

Read more:
A brief history of the US-Israel ‘special relationship’ shows how connections have shifted since long before the 1948 founding of the Jewish state

Zionism in the current world

Over the decades, Zionism has changed considerably as new political questions raised themselves. With the state of Israel established, what should the state look like and how should it protect itself from its foreign adversaries?

One of these questions is: how should Zionism respond to Palestinian self-determination?

The annexation of the West Bank by Jordan and Gaza by Egypt after the war of independence seemed to answer this question in the short term. Israel offered citizenship to some Palestinians, who make up just under 20% of Israel’s population today. They are Israel’s largest minority and have often struggled with political representation and socio-economic outcomes.

But Israel’s swift defeat of Jordan, Syria and Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War changed political realities again. Israel took control of the West Bank and Gaza, along with the millions of Palestinians living there – but they were not offered citizenship. This has left the Palestinians stateless.

This raised a question that has still not been adequately answered today: does an effective application of Zionism mean statelessness for Palestinians?

There are different schools of thought on this.

For liberal and modern Labor Zionists, factions that include members of the Yesh Atid party and the late former Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, the answer is no. They implicitly reject the idea that Palestinian and Jewish self-determination are at odds with one another.

For them, a political solution to the conflict is essential. For a long time they advocated for a two-state solution – the creation of a state of Palestine completely independent from Israel. The Palestinian Authority would transition into a state government with sovereignty over its land.

But some liberal Zionists have abandoned this idea, stating the only sustainable option is to offer Palestinians equal rights and citizenship in Israel, challenging the idea that the home of the Jewish people must be a Jewish state.

This is because of a combination of the failure to transition the West Bank and Gaza into a Palestinian state, and the contradiction of freedom for Israelis and statelessness for Palestinians.

Although the political power of liberal and Labor Zionism in the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament) has waned, it is certainly alive and well in Israeli civil society. For example, B’Tselem, the legacy of left wing Zionist Yossi Sarid, has been very active in documenting instances of apartheid and settler violence in the West Bank.

In short, Zionism does not preclude someone from being critical of the policies of the Israeli government.

However, for many nationalist, conservative religious and revisionist Zionists, Palestinian self-determination anywhere west of the River Jordan is a direct threat to the Jewish state. They, therefore, do not support Palestinian independence.

This form of Zionism has become the dominant form in Israeli politics today.

Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this approach has transcended rhetoric and become legislation in Israel’s Nation State Law of 2018, which legally enshrines unique Jewish sovereignty in the state of Israel and settlement as a “national value”.

It is this kind of Zionism that has informed Israel’s response to Palestinian action – both political and violent – for decades.

It has attempted to justify the blockade of Gaza, the forcible transfer of Palestinians in the West Bank, bans on political speech, mandatory detention without trial, and disproportionate violence as policy solutions to Israeli-Palestinian tensions.

Read more:
10 books to help you understand Israel and Palestine, recommended by experts

After the Hamas attacks on October 7, ultra-nationalist ministers have become loud and influential voices. With the help of the prime minister, their brand of Zionism has ensured that a political solution with the Palestinians is out of reach.

Notwithstanding his colonial aspirations and attitudes toward Palestinian natives, Herzl made at least some attempts to reconcile his views with liberal values and democracy. In his novel Altneuland (The Old New Land) he envisaged that non-Jews would have the same rights as Jews in a democracy.

Contrast that with today, where the most powerful Zionist voices see liberal democracy – and the Palestinians – as an obstacle to security of the Israeli state.

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

– ref. Israel-Hamas war: What is Zionism? A history of the political movement that created Israel as we know it – https://theconversation.com/israel-hamas-war-what-is-zionism-a-history-of-the-political-movement-that-created-israel-as-we-know-it-217788

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Fuller, Charles Perkins Centre Research Program Leader, University of Sydney

Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States, famously said nothing is certain except death and taxes. But I think we can include “you’ll feel hungry when you’re trying to lose weight” as another certainty.

The reason is basic biology. So how does this work – and what can you do about it?

Hormones control our feelings of hunger

Several hormones play an essential role in regulating our feelings of hunger and fullness. The most important are ghrelin – often called the hunger hormone – and leptin.

When we’re hungry, ghrelin is released by our stomach, lighting up a part of our brain called the hypothalamus to tell us to eat.

When it’s time to stop eating, hormones, including leptin, are released from different organs, such as our gut and fat tissue, to signal to the brain that we’re full.

Read more:
Chemical messengers: how hormones make us feel hungry and full

Dieting disrupts the process

But when we change our diet and start losing weight, we disrupt how these appetite hormones function.

This triggers a process that stems from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Their bodies developed this mechanism as a survival response to adapt to periods of deprivation and protect against starvation.

The levels of hormones managing our hunger increase, making us feel hungrier to tell us to eat more, while the ones responsible for signalling we’re full decrease their levels, intensifying our feelings of hunger.

We end up increasing our calorie consumption so we eat more to regain the weight we lost.

But worse, even after the kilos creep back on, our appetite hormones don’t restore to their normal levels – they keep telling us to eat more so we put on a little extra fat. This is our body’s way of preparing for the next bout of starvation we will impose through dieting.

Fortunately, there are things we can do to manage our appetite, including:

1. Eating a large, healthy breakfast every day

One of the easiest ways to manage our feelings of hunger throughout the day is to eat most of our food earlier in the day and taper our meal sizes so dinner is the smallest meal.

Research shows a low-calorie or small breakfast leads to increased feelings of hunger, specifically appetite for sweets, across the course of the day.

Another study found the same effect. Participants went on a calorie-controlled diet for two months, where they ate 45% of their calories for breakfast, 35% at lunch and 20% at dinner for the first month, before switching to eat their largest meal in the evening and their smallest in the morning. Eating the largest meal at breakfast resulted in decreased hunger throughout the day.

Research also shows we burn the calories from a meal 2.5-times more efficiently in the morning than the evening. So emphasising breakfast over dinner is good not just for hunger control, but also weight management.

Read more:
Should we eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper?

2. Prioritising protein

Protein helps contain feelings of hunger. This is because protein-rich foods such as lean meats, tofu and beans suppress the appetite-stimulating ghrelin and stimulate another hormone called peptide YY that makes you feel full.

And just as eating a breakfast is vital to managing our hunger, what we eat is important too, with research confirming a breakfast containing protein-rich foods, such as eggs, will leave us feeling fuller for longer.

But this doesn’t mean just eating foods with protein. Meals need to be balanced and include a source of protein, wholegrain carb and healthy fat to meet our dietary needs. For example, eggs on wholegrain toast with avocado.

3. Filling up with nuts and foods high in good fats and fibre

Nuts often get a bad rap – thanks to the misconception they cause weight gain – but nuts can help us manage our hunger and weight. The filling fibre and good fats found in nuts take longer to digest, meaning our hunger is satisfied for longer.

Studies suggest you can include up to 68 grams per day of nuts without affecting your weight.

Read more:
Health check: will eating nuts make you gain weight?

Avocados are also high in fibre and heart-healthy monounsaturated fats, making them another excellent food for managing feelings of fullness. This is backed by a study confirming participants who ate a breakfast incorporating avocado felt more satisfied and less hungry than participants who ate a meal containing the same calories but with lower fat and fibre content.

Similarly, eating foods that are high in soluble fibre – such as beans and vegetables – make us feel fuller. This type of fibre attracts water from our gut, forming a gel that slows digestion.

4. Eating mindfully

When we take time to really be aware of and enjoy the food we’re eating, we slow down and eat far less.

A review of 68 studies found eating mindfully helps us better recognise feelings of fullness. Mindful eating provides our brain enough time to recognise and adapt to the signals from our stomach telling us we’re full.

Slow down your food consumption by sitting at the dinner table and use smaller utensils to reduce the volume of food you eat with each mouthful.

5. Getting enough sleep

Sleep deprivation disturbs our appetite hormones, increasing our feelings of hunger and triggering cravings. So aim to get at least seven hours of uninterrupted sleep a night.

Try switching off your devices two hours before bed to boost your body’s secretion of sleep-inducing hormones like melatonin.

Read more:
Why our brain needs sleep, and what happens if we don’t get enough of it

6. Managing stress

Stress increases our body’s production of cortisol and triggers food cravings.

So take time out when you need it and set aside time for stress-relieving activities. This can be as simple as getting outdoors. A 2019 study found sitting or walking outdoors at least three times a week could reduce cortisol levels by 21%.

7. Avoiding depriving ourselves

When we change our diet to lose weight or eat healthier, we typically restrict certain foods or food groups.

However, this heightens activity in our mesocorticolimbic circuit – the reward system part of the brain – often resulting in us craving the foods we’re trying to avoid. Foods that give us pleasure release feel-good chemicals called endorphins and learning chemicals called dopamine, which enable us to remember – and give in to – that feel-good response.

When we change our diet, activity in our hypothalamus – the clever part of the brain that regulates emotions and food intake – also reduces, decreasing our control and judgement. It often triggers a psychological response dubbed the “what-the-hell effect”, when we indulge in something we think we shouldn’t feel guilty about and then go back for even more.

Don’t completely cut out your favourite foods when you go on a diet or deprive yourself if you’re hungry. It will take the pleasure out of eating and eventually you’ll give into your cravings.

At the Boden Group, Charles Perkins Centre, we are studying the science of obesity and running clinical trials for weight loss. You can register here to express your interest.

Dr Nick Fuller works for the University of Sydney and has received external funding for projects relating to the treatment of overweight and obesity. He is the author and founder of the Interval Weight Loss program.

– ref. I’m trying to lose weight and eat healthily. Why do I feel so hungry all the time? What can I do about it? – https://theconversation.com/im-trying-to-lose-weight-and-eat-healthily-why-do-i-feel-so-hungry-all-the-time-what-can-i-do-about-it-215808

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jim Stanford, Economist and Director, Centre for Future Work, Australia Institute; Honorary Professor of Political Economy, University of Sydney

One of the chief purposes of government payments and taxes is to redistribute income, which is why tax rates are higher on taxpayers with higher incomes and payments tend to get directed to people on lower incomes.

Australia’s tax rates range from a low of zero cents in the dollar to a high of 45 cents, and payments including JobSeeker, the age pension, and child benefits which are limited to recipients whose income is below certain thresholds.

In this way, every nation’s tax and transfer system cuts inequality, some more than others.

Which is why I was surprised when I used the latest Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data to calculate how much.

The OECD measures inequality using what’s known as a gini coefficient. This is a number on a scale between zero and 1 where zero represents complete equality (everyone receives the same income) and 1 represents complete inequality (one person has all the income).

The higher the number, the higher the higher the inequality.

Australia is far from the most equal of OECD nations – it is 21st out of the 37 countries for which the OECD collects data, but what really interested me is what Australia’s tax and transfer system does to equalise things.

And the answer is: surprisingly little compared to other OECD countries.

Australia’s system does little to temper inequality

The graph below displays the number of points by which each country’s tax and transfer system reduces its gini coefficient. The ranking indicates the extent to which the system equalises incomes.

The OECD country whose system most strongly redistributes incomes is Finland, whose tax and transfer rules cut its gini coefficient by 0.25 points.

The country with the weakest redistribution of incomes is Mexico which only cuts inequality by 0.02 points.

Australia is the 8th weakest, cutting inequality by only 0.12 points.

Apart from Mexico, among OECD members only Chile, Costa Rica, Korea, Switzerland, Türkiye and Iceland do a worse job of redistributing incomes.

What is really odd is that, before redistribution, Australia’s income distribution is pretty good compared to other OECD countries – the tenth best.

It’s not that Australia’s systems don’t reduce inequality, it’s that other country’s systems do it more.

Of the OECD members who do less than Australia, four are emerging economies: Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Türkiye. Like most developing countries, they have low taxes, weak social protections and poor tax-gathering systems.

Indeed, in Chile and Mexico, taxes and transfers do almost nothing to moderate extreme inequality.

The other three countries ranked below Australia – Iceland, Switzerland, and South Korea – boast unusually equal distributions of market incomes. Each is among the four most equal OECD countries by market income, and each is considerably more equal than Australia.

Australia ‘less developed’ when it comes to redistribution

This makes Australia’s weak redistribution system more typical of a low-income emerging economy than an advanced industrial democracy.

Even Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand do a better job of redistributing income than Australia.

This new data enhances concerns about the impact of planned Stage 3 tax cuts. By returning proportionately more to high earners than low earners these will further erode the redistributive impact of Australia’s tax system.

It also highlights the consequences of Australia’s relatively weak payments programs, including JobSeeker which on one measure is the second-weakest in the OECD. It’s an understatement to say we’ve room for improvement.

Read more:
We could make most Australians richer and still save billions – it’s not too late to fix the Stage 3 tax cuts

Jim Stanford is a member of the Australian Services Union.

– ref. Australia has one of the weakest tax systems for redistribution among industrial nations – the Stage 3 tax cuts will make it worse – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-one-of-the-weakest-tax-systems-for-redistribution-among-industrial-nations-the-stage-3-tax-cuts-will-make-it-worse-217820

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Smith, Adjunct Associate Professor, James Cook University

The widespread demise of coral reefs due to climate change is now a certainty. But what role does art have in our future for coral reefs?

Art is about feelings. One of the great challenges today is that we often feel untouched by the problems of others and by global issues like climate change. This is where art can make a difference.

Engaging with a thoughtful work of art can connect you to your senses, body and mind. Art can be used as a tool to raise awareness, promote conversation and rally behind a cause.

One way this is happening on the Great Barrier Reef is through an underwater sculpture trail. Here reef sculptures are drawing attention to inspirational scientists, the science of climate change, reef restoration, citizen science and traditional culture.

What are reef sculptures?

Reef sculptures are a form of artificial reef: man-made structures placed into an aquatic environment to mimic certain characteristics of a natural reef.

Artificial reefs were historically deployed for fishers and divers to concentrate marine life and to shift pressure from other popular locations.

Artificial reefs take many forms, such as reef balls, pods, concrete pipes, wrecks and sculptures. They can be sites of ecological research, conservation and arts and culture.

The first modern reef sculpture was created by Jason deCaires Taylor at Grenada in the West Indies in 2006. This sculpture aimed to provide a restorative response to a damaged marine ecosystem and enhance marine tourism.

The largest underwater sculpture in the world is the Museum of Underwater Art created with deCaires Taylor at John Brewer Reef, offshore from Townsville. The Coral Greenhouse is a skeletal building made from pH-neutral cement and corrosion-resistant stainless steel. It covers an area of 72 square metres and weights 165 tonnes, with eight human figures depicting scientists, conservationists and coral gardeners.

A recent report on this sculpture found statistically significant increases in fish abundance and diversity. There were no changes over time in invertebrate abundance, invertebrate diversity and tourist perceptions of aesthetic values.

Structural designs of underwater sculptures need to be able to adapt into the surrounding natural landscape, creating a transition point from the manufactured to natural.

Small intricate matrices provide protection for small fish. Textured planters encourage coral restoration efforts by scientists.

But there are still gaps in our knowledge in how effective artificial reefs are for potential local, regional or global impact by increasing awareness of coral reef decline and positive actions.

Government policy bans underwater sculptures

A new Reef Authority policy on fish-aggregating devices and artificial reefs has banned the creation of new underwater sculptures on the Great Barrier Reef.

Its report found artificial reefs are “not compatible” with the main objective of the Marine Park Act, which is “to provide for the long-term protection and conservation of the environment, biodiversity and heritage values of the Great Barrier Reef Region”.

Instead of artificial reefs, the authority recommends initiatives that include ramping up crown-of-thorns starfish control, strengthening compliance, enhanced protection of key species for reef recovery, and testing and deploying methods for reef restoration.

But since 2017, the community, artists, traditional owners, citizen scientists, the tourism industry and local, state and federal governments have supported the Museum of Underwater Art.

This museum has provided jobs and revenue, raised awareness and amplified important messages about reef conservation.

Read more:
Young crown-of-thorns starfish can survive heatwaves. That’s yet more bad news for the Great Barrier Reef

The positive impact of the reef sculpture

We have been surveying the life at the Museum of Underwater Art since 2018.

In 2018 (pre-installation), 2020 (post-installation), 2021 and 2022, divers recorded species and abundance of individuals sighted.

In 2018, 12 species and 65 individual creatures were recorded at the location of the museum. The 2022 survey found 46 species and 365 individuals.

The site has also become a reef restoration demonstration site. Planting corals on underwater sculptures is an innovative method of linking art, science, tourism, education and conservation.

Coral gardening is a reef-restoration technique modelled on terrestrial gardening. Small cuttings of coral colonies, called fragments, are transplanted from the surrounding reef to populate the new artificial reef. The corals help to rapidly transform the art installation into a biotic location.

In March 2020, 131 corals were transplanted onto Taylor’s sculptures. After one year, 91.6% of the coral survived.

Our research on planting corals in relatively deep water of 18 metres has been challenging and innovative. Interestingly, the results are better than for shallow-water coral projects, which average an 80% survival rate after one year.

We also assessed tourist attitudes to the artificial reef. We found high satisfaction with the art, coral and fish observed at the site.

Interestingly, tourists in the Whitsundays rated the beauty of underwater art higher than the beauty of natural reefs.

Reaching new hearts

Katharina Fabricious, a senior research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, says:

Conservation needs to be communicated in a whole range of different ways, and art is reaching people that scientists sometimes cannot reach.

The future of the Museum of Underwater Art is uncertain due to its classification as an artificial reef. The renewal or refusal of the many permits required for the artworks will be considered in the context of the new policy. It means this is the largest and possible the last underwater sculpture in the Great Barrier Reef.

Read more:
Concern for the Great Barrier Reef can inspire climate action – but the way we talk about it matters

Adam Smith through Reef Ecologic Pty Ltd receives funding for research from the Australian and Queensland Government. He is a voluntary Board member of the not for profit Museum of Underwater Art Pty Ltd

Nathan Cook through Reef Ecologic Pty Ltd receives funding for research from the Australian and Queensland Government.

– ref. How an underwater sculpture trail plays a role in the health – and beauty – of the Great Barrier Reef – https://theconversation.com/how-an-underwater-sculpture-trail-plays-a-role-in-the-health-and-beauty-of-the-great-barrier-reef-194335

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

Australia’s net-overseas migration levels will be cut dramatically over two years to bring the country’s exploding intake back to sustainable numbers.

In estimates to be released on Monday, net-overseas migration will be 375,000 this financial year, compared with 510,000 in 2022-23.

Changes to be announced by the government – in addition to some already made – will hit especially those seeking to come as students but who are primarily looking to enter the country’s temporary workforce.

The net-overseas migration numbers are projected to fall to 250,000 in 2024-25, 255,000 in 2025-26 and 235,000 in 2026-27, according to the projections, which will also be in the mid-year budget update released on Wednesday.

The dramatic escalation in the intake has compounded the country’s acute housing shortage, adding to pressure in the rental sector, and threatened to turn into a serious political issue for the Albanese government.

Read more:
What’s behind the recent surge in Australia’s net migration – and will it last?

The government’s migration strategy tackles both the size and the composition of the intake. It aims to re-skew the system towards high-skilled permanent migrants, reducing bureaucratic and other obstacles these people face, and away from low-skilled workers who are open to exploitation.

The net-overseas migration level is not a government “target”, but a figure reflecting the number of people coming into the country and remaining at least a year, including movement of Australian citizens in and out.

The biggest contributors to the forecast net-overseas migration in 2022-23 were 270,000 international students, which was 170,000 more than in 2018-19. There were also 180,000 other temporary migrants, including those on “pandemic event” visas, temporary skilled migrants and working holiday makers. This was 100,000 higher than in 2018-19.

To reduce the number of student visas being used as work visas, several steps are being taken:

• English language requirements for students will be raised

• visa applications from “high risk” providers will be scrutinised more carefully

• and the student visa integrity unit in the Home Affairs Department will be boosted with $19 million in new funding to assist its efforts to reduce misuse of the student visa system.

Graduate visas will also be shortened to stop people “visa hopping” while in Australia. The eligible age for these visas will be reduced from 50 to 35. Graduates will be prevented from shifting back to student visas.

A new “specialist skills pathway” will remove occupation lists for jobs that pay above $135,000, which the government says will add $3.4 billion to the budget bottom line over the next 10 years. The intake is 3,000 annually, and visas for this category are to be processed in around week.

Streamlined labour market testing, reforms to the points test, consideration of a new “talent and innovation visa”, and greater mobility for migrants are also designed to facilitate skilled migrants.

In measures to stop worker exploitation there will be a public register of employer sponsors, which will support migrant worker mobility.

The temporary skilled migration income threshold, which is the salary level for employers to nominate a worker, has already been lifted from July this year to $70,000 and is indexed annually.

The government is still grappling with how best to regulate migration for lower-paid workers with essential skills. Consultations are to begin early to mid next year.

Visa processing for regional Australia is to be given the highest-processing priority. Regional migration settings and the working holiday maker program will be evaluated to ensure they meet their objectives and do not exploit migrant workers.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said: “The increase in net overseas migration in 2022-23 was mostly driven by international students.

“This is in part due to catch-up post-pandemic and in part the result of settings we inherited when we came into government that have led to loopholes and rorts in international education – this is why student visa refusals tripled in 2022-23.

“The government’s targeted reforms are already putting downward pressure on net overseas migration, and will further contribute to this expected decline.

“If we kept the settings we inherited from the Coalition, we would not expect to see the same reductions in migration levels this financial year and next.”

She said the government’s migration strategy was about getting “the right settings to ease workforce shortages that are holding our country back without putting undue stress on other parts of our economy”.

Read more:
Why unis and vocational colleges are key to Australia’s temporary migration challenge

Higher fees for foreign investors in housing

Foreign investors will also face increased fees when they buy established homes and higher penalties if they leave them vacant, under changes announced by the government at the weekend.

The foreign investment fees for the purchase of established homes will be tripled. Vacancy fees will be doubled for all foreign-owned dwellings purchased since May 9, 2017. (Together this means a sixfold increase in vacancy fees for future purchases of established dwellings.)

The Australian Taxation Office’s compliance regime will also be boosted, including to ensure foreign investors sell their residence when required.

Foreign nationals generally can’t buy existing properties except, for example, when they come for work or study. When they leave, they have to sell if they have not become a permanent resident.

The government also announced it will make sure foreign investment application fees for “build to rent” projects are at the lowest commercial level regardless of the kind of land involved, which currently is not always the case.

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. Government to toughen scrutiny of international students as it slashes net migration over two years – https://theconversation.com/government-to-toughen-scrutiny-of-international-students-as-it-slashes-net-migration-over-two-years-219574

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Williams, Associate Professor, Griffith University, Griffith University

Democracies are, by nature, systems of stability and change.

But, north of the Tweed River, Queensland politics is very much about stability, and only a little about change. Where, for example, New South Wales has seen nine premiers over the past 20 years, Queensland has seen just four.

Yet a changing of the guard is now occurring after Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk – the daughter of a Labor cabinet minister and the last of the “COVID-19 era” premiers – tearfully announced her resignation as the state’s 39th (and second woman) premier. With the coming of the “silly season”, this is the perfect time for leadership transition: Labor can begin 2024 with a clean page.

When Palaszczuk departs on Friday, she will have served eight years and 305 days, becoming Queensland’s fifth-longest – and Labor’s third-longest – serving premier. She has represented the very safe Labor seat of Inala in Brisbane’s southwest since 2006.

Palaszczuk was elected Labor leader in 2012 to head a Labor rump of just seven MPs after Campbell Newman’s Liberal-National Party routed the Bligh Labor government. With the aid of a trade union campaign against an LNP plan to privatise state assets, Labor fell into minority government just three years later. It was the most remarkable turnaround in political fortunes in modern Australian history.

But Palaszczuk – who became the first woman to lead an opposition into government in an Australian federal or state (but not territory) election, the first woman to attain three successive election victories, and the first to lead a majority-female cabinet in Australia – was no “accidental premier”; she was a popular leader in her own right.

In carving out a new style of leadership – positioned somewhere between the amiable Peter Beattie and the administrative Anna Bligh – Palaszczuk blended a “next door neighbour” folksiness with a Queensland-first populism to forge a new type of “strong” yet accessible leader. That model of leadership was writ large via hard border closures during the early days of COVID-19, which saw Palaszczuk rewarded at the 2020 election with an increased parliamentary majority.

Read more:
Even if her leadership is now doomed, Annastacia Palaszczuk will still be a Labor legend in Queensland

More than a year after that victory, Labor – according to a February YouGov survey – was still polling 39% of the primary vote (compared to 38% for the LNP), leading the LNP after preferences by 52% to 48%.

Moreover, Palaszczuk still enjoyed a net satisfaction rating of plus-14 points.

Fast forward to late 2023, a Resolve-Strategic Poll pegged Labor’s primary vote at a mere at 33% (compared to 37% for the LNP).

With an October YouGov poll previously finding Labor trailing the LNP after preferences, 48% to 52% – a swing of five points from 2020 – Labor was set to lose 10 seats to the LNP (mostly in the regions) and at least two seats in Brisbane to the Greens.

Resolve-Strategic also found 39% preferring LNP leader David Crisafulli as premier, compared to 34% for Palaszczuk. Crisafulli also enjoyed a net approval rating of plus-nine points, while Palaszczuk had a net approval of minus-17. Rarely have we seen a once-widely admired leader become so widely disparaged.

So what went wrong for Palaszczuk?

Palaszczuk’s most serious challenge emerged in early 2022, when questions of integrity were raised, including allegations of a partisan Crime and Corruption Commission, of ministerial staff bullying public servants, of too-cosy relationships with lobbyists, and alleged interference in the work of the integrity commissioner.

The ordering of three inquiries stabilised Labor’s stocks. But, by late 2022, clever attacks by the LNP opposition (led by a moderate Crisafulli, who was by then building a high media profile) on Palaszczuk as a “part-time”, “checked-out” and “red carpet” premier proved stunningly successful. Coupled with crises in the cost of living, youth crime, housing and hospital ramping, Palaszczuk and Labor appeared directionless by 2023.

In August 2023, while the premier enjoyed an overseas holiday, speculation mounted that her decline in the polls meant a departure was imminent. But, on her return, Palaszczuk stood in the parliament, dug in her heels and reminded Queenslanders she was the boss. The fact Palaszczuk has only now succumbed to pressure suggests Labor’s internal power dynamics have changed during the past three months.

Read more:
Labor down but still has large lead in federal Resolve poll; it’s close in Queensland

Palaszczuk insists her poor approval ratings have nothing to do with the timing of her departure. Instead, she says, she decided to make way for change after seeing “new faces” at last week’s National Cabinet meeting. But it’s more likely party chieftains, especially those leading trade unions affiliated with the now-dominant Left faction, last week gave the premier a gentle “shoulder tap” and suggested her leadership was no longer tenable.

Palaszczuk has already endorsed her deputy (and Left faction leader) Steven Miles as the next premier, despite her factional colleague and treasurer, Cameron Dick, often being touted for succession. Given the Left has controlled the Labor parliamentary party since 2015, Miles will inevitably become premier, although there is emerging caucus support for another Left star, Health Minister Shannon Fentiman.

There will, however, be no ballot. Given Queensland Labor rule changes in 2015 – where ballots for leadership contests are shared equally among caucus, rank and file members and trade union representatives – a drawn-out public brawl with a Labor Party in limbo will be avoided at all costs.

If victorious, the more softly-spoken Miles will bring a change of pace to a Queensland premiership where loud voices are the norm. Miles, 46, is a former small businessman who holds a doctorate in political science. The married father of three, who worked for the public sector Together Union, won the leafy Brisbane seat of Mt Coot-tha in 2015, then switched to the outer-Brisbane seat of Murrumba in 2017. He has previously served as minister for the environment and minister for health.

That Miles is poised to take the premiership today is arguably an accident of history. First, it is unusual for Queensland Labor to be dominated by the Left. Second, Miles was promoted to the deputy position in May 2020 only because former deputy premier and Left leader, Jacqui Trad, resigned from cabinet following an investigation by the state’s corruption watchdog. Trad lost her seat to the Greens on LNP preferences in 2020.

Miles was not initially well-received as deputy premier, with voters anecdotally disliking him, and especially his attempts at the “attack dog” role deputies so often assume.

But, serving as acting premier during numerous Palaszczuk absences, other anecdotal evidence suggests Miles has garnered a degree of respect.

So we can expect a business-as-usual approach from a Miles cabinet. There will be heavy investment in infrastructure, especially in the lead-up to the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, and in the regions; major strides toward clean energy (although coal, with recent royalty hikes, will still loom large); and a deep commitment to social justice, especially First Nations peoples, in the wake of the Voice to Parliament referendum’s defeat.

The final question, whether Miles can turn a certain Labor defeat in the 2024 state election into a Labor victory, is as yet unanswerable. A fourth Labor term, even if in minority government with the Greens, is still possible, but far from probable. The LNP requires a 6.1% after-preference swing to snare the 14 seats it needs for majority government.

Until yesterday, Palaszczuk’s increasingly unpopular leadership was the biggest impediment to a Labor victory on October 26, 2024. That hurdle has now been removed. If inflation, as expected, cools next year, and if Miles can demonstrate some traditionally “strong” leadership and law and order populism – and mitigate hospital ramping and social housing shortages with immediate and tangible results – then Labor has a real chance.

Queensland politics just got interesting again.

Assoc. Prof. Paul Williams is an associate with the T. J. Ryan Foundation

– ref. With Annastacia Palaszczuk gone, can Labor achieve the unachievable in Queensland? – https://theconversation.com/with-annastacia-palaszczuk-gone-can-labor-achieve-the-unachievable-in-queensland-219573

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bianca Baggiarini, Lecturer, Australian National University

Last week, reports emerged that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are using an artificial intelligence (AI) system called Habsora (Hebrew for “The Gospel”) to select targets in the war on Hamas in Gaza. The system has reportedly been used to find more targets for bombing, to link locations to Hamas operatives, and to estimate likely numbers of civilian deaths in advance.

What does it mean for AI targeting systems like this to be used in conflict? My research into the social, political and ethical implications of military use of remote and autonomous systems shows AI is already altering the character of war.

Militaries use remote and autonomous systems as “force multipliers” to increase the impact of their troops and protect their soldiers’ lives. AI systems can make soldiers more efficient, and are likely to enhance the speed and lethality of warfare – even as humans become less visible on the battlefield, instead gathering intelligence and targeting from afar.

When militaries can kill at will, with little risk to their own soldiers, will the current ethical thinking about war prevail? Or will the increasing use of AI also increase the dehumanisation of adversaries and the disconnect between wars and the societies in whose names they are fought?

AI in war

AI is having an impact at all levels of war, from “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” support, like the IDF’s Habsora system, through to “lethal autonomous weapons systems” that can choose and attack targets without human intervention.

These systems have the potential to reshape the character of war, making it easier to enter into a conflict. As complex and distributed systems, they may also make it more difficult to signal one’s intentions – or interpret those of an adversary – in the context of an escalating conflict.

To this end, AI can contribute to mis- or disinformation, creating and amplifying dangerous misunderstandings in times of war.

AI systems may increase the human tendency to trust suggestions from machines (this is highlighted by the Habsora system, named after the infallible word of God), opening up uncertainty over how far to trust autonomous systems. The boundaries of an AI system that interacts with other technologies and with people may not be clear, and there may be no way to know who or what has “authored” its outputs, no matter how objective and rational they may seem.

High-speed machine learning

Perhaps one of the most basic and important changes we are likely to see driven by AI is an increase in the speed of warfare. This may change how we understand military deterrence, which assumes humans are the primary actors and sources of intelligence and interaction in war.

Militaries and soldiers frame their decision-making through what is called the “OODA loop” (for observe, orient, decide, act). A faster OODA loop can help you outmanoeuvre your enemy. The goal is to avoid slowing down decisions through excessive deliberation, and instead to match the accelerating tempo of war.

So the use of AI is potentially justified on the basis it can interpret and synthesise huge amounts of data, processing it and delivering outputs at rates that far surpass human cognition.

But where is the space for ethical deliberation in an increasingly fast and data-centric OODA loop cycle happening at a safe distance from battle?

Israel’s targeting software is an example of this acceleration. A former head of the IDF has said that human intelligence analysts might produce 50 bombing targets in Gaza each year, but the Habsora system can produce 100 targets a day, along with real-time recommendations for which ones to attack.

How does the system produce these targets? It does so through probabilistic reasoning offered by machine learning algorithms.

Machine learning algorithms learn through data. They learn by seeking patterns in huge piles of data, and their success is contingent on the data’s quality and quantity. They make recommendations based on probabilities.

The probabilities are based on pattern-matching. If a person has enough similarities to other people labelled as an enemy combatant, they too may be labelled a combatant themselves.

The problem of AI enabled targeting at a distance

Some claim machine learning enables greater precision in targeting, which makes it easier to avoid harming innocent people and using a proportional amount of force. However, the idea of more precise targeting of airstrikes has not been successful in the past, as the high toll of declared and undeclared civilian casualties from the global war on terror shows.

Moreover, the difference between a combatant and a civilian is rarely self-evident. Even humans frequently cannot tell who is and is not a combatant.

Technology does not change this fundamental truth. Often social categories and concepts are not objective, but are contested or specific to time and place. But computer vision together with algorithms are more effective in predictable environments where concepts are objective, reasonably stable, and internally consistent.

Will AI make war worse?

We live in a time of unjust wars and military occupations, egregious violations of the rules of engagement, and an incipient arms race in the face of US–China rivalry. In this context, the inclusion of AI in war may add new complexities that exacerbate, rather than prevent, harm.

AI systems make it easier for actors in war to remain anonymous, and can render invisible the source of violence or the decisions which lead to it. In turn, we may see increasing disconnection between militaries, soldiers, and civilians, and the wars being fought in the name of the nation they serve.

And as AI grows more common in war, militaries will develop countermeasures to undermine it, creating a loop of escalating militarisation.

What now?

Can we control AI systems to head off a future in which warfare is driven by increasing reliance on technology underpinned by learning algorithms? Controlling AI development in any area, particularly via laws and regulations, has proven difficult.

Many suggest we need better laws to account for systems underpinned by machine learning, but even this is not straightforward. Machine learning algorithms are difficult to regulate.

Read more:
US military plans to unleash thousands of autonomous war robots over next two years

AI-enabled weapons may program and update themselves, evading legal requirements for certainty. The engineering maxim “software is never done” implies that the law may never match the speed of technological change.

The quantitative act of estimating likely numbers of civilian deaths in advance, which the Habsora system does, does not tell us much about the qualitative dimensions of targeting. Systems like Habsora in isolation cannot really tell us much about whether a strike would be ethical or legal (that is, whether it is proportionate, discriminate and necessary, among other considerations).

AI should support democratic ideals, not undermine them. Trust in governments, institutions, and militaries is eroding and needs to be restored if we plan to apply AI across a range of military practices. We need to deploy critical ethical and political analysis to interrogate emerging technologies and their effects so any form of military violence is considered to be the last resort.

Until then, machine learning algorithms are best kept separate from targeting practices. Unfortunately, the world’s armies are heading in the opposite direction.

Bianca Baggiarini 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. Israel’s AI can produce 100 bombing targets a day in Gaza. Is this the future of war? – https://theconversation.com/israels-ai-can-produce-100-bombing-targets-a-day-in-gaza-is-this-the-future-of-war-219302

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Johan Lidberg, Associate Professor, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University

The most significant recommendation in the Senate inquiry report on the functionality of the Commonwealth FOI system is this: move the federal Freedom of Information (FOI) function from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s Office (OAIC) to the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s Office.

The inquiry was triggered by the resignation of the then FOI commissioner, Leo Hardiman, in March 2023, less than a year into a five-year term.

Hardiman cited severe governance and culture issues in the OAIC as the reasons for his resignation. In his detailed submission to the inquiry, he made it clear the FOI section was starved of funds and not able to do its job. Hardiman was also critical of the current Information Commissioner, Angelene Falk, pointing out, among other issues, that Falk prioritised the privacy fuctions over FOI.

Falk strongly disagrees with Hardiman’s points. However, in the report, the committee members accept Hardiman’s integrity reasons for resigning.

When the OAIC was created in 2010, hopes were high for a better-functioning federal access-to-information system. This was on the back of Kevin Rudd’s 2007 election promise of significant reforms.

Labor elder John Faulkner led the reform process. The reforms were indeed some of the most far-reaching we have seen since Australia’s first FOI Act was passed in 1982. At their core was the idea to co-locate the functions of the privacy commissioner and the FOI commissioner in one office, led by a third information commissioner.

Read more:
It’s time for the government to walk the talk on media freedom in Australia

Under inaugural Information Commissioner John McMillan, the OAIC got off to a good start. There were indications the information access culture had started to shift towards more openness and away from the secrecy that had been the norm until 2010.

When Tony Abbott was elected prime minister in 2013, he swiftly attempted to close down the OAIC. When this failed, the office was starved of funds to the point where there was no FOI commissioner appointed between 2014 to 2022. These eight years without an FOI commissioner clearly shifted the balance between privacy and FOI in the OAIC.

When Hardiman became FOI commissioner in March 2022, the damage to information access was apparent. The backlog of FOI reviews was huge. In his submission, Hardiman pointed out that, with the current funding, he saw no way of clearing the backlog.

Overall, the Senate inquiry report is surprisingly frank and far-reaching. In the recommendation section, the report concludes:

It is clear that the Commonwealth Freedom of Information (FOI) system is not working effectively and for some time has not functioned as it was intended.

The report makes 15 recommendations. Of these, in my view, the most important are:

• there should be an independent external review of the functionality of the OAIC
• funding to the FOI commissioner should be increased to clear the review backlog and enable the commissioner to function as intended
• there should be increased focus on access to personal information without having to use FOI requests.

These are all important points. Some of the legal tweaks to the act would, based on my research, have less effect on the overall functionality of the FOI system. My research team has shown time and again that a focus on information access culture is much more effective than legal changes.

In mid-2024 my team will publish a report comparing FOI culture in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. The project is large in scope, involving 96 government agencies in the three states, and based on interviews with 257 FOI officers and government agency executives. Our findings show, unequivocally, that lack of funding and resourcing of FOI teams in agencies is the greatest obstacle to functionality.

The Senate report does mention both resourcing and the culture of implementing FOI but does not, based on our research, pay enough attention to these crucial issues.

That said, the report should be commended for pointing to some immediate action that is badly needed, such as the external review of the OAIC. It’s disappointing the three-commissioner model appears to not work as intended. There are merits in co-locating privacy and FOI in the same office, but, for this to work, there needs to be a balance between these functions.

Read more:
Politics with Michelle Grattan: Rex Patrick on Freedom of Information and Australia’s submarines

The research is in on how to make access to information work well in Australia. It’s not rocket science, but it requires political will (which can at times be more complex than rocket science).

Based on our research, these are the three overarching areas to address when it comes to FOI:

• proper funding of FOI teams in government agencies
• creating proactive information release policies tailored to individual government agencies (that is, information should be released without the need for FOI requests)
• update records management in government agencies. This sounds boring, but it’s the base for both good governance and information access.

It will be interesting to see if the Albanese government will act on any of the recommendations in the Senate report. History shows that demanding far-reaching FOI in opposition is easy. Implementing it in government can be very hard.

Johan Lidberg receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Frank and far-reaching: Senate report recommends shake-up of the way freedom of information is handled – https://theconversation.com/frank-and-far-reaching-senate-report-recommends-shake-up-of-the-way-freedom-of-information-is-handled-219331

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Di Winkler, Adjunct Associate Professor, La Trobe University

A home – in the physical and emotional sense – is foundational to living an ordinary life with a feeling of inclusion. National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) participants with the highest support needs require housing and living services. Disability can make living in mainstream housing impossible for some people, or they may need housing where support can be efficiently and safely provided.

Nearly 41,000 NDIS participants receive seven-day, around-the-clock support. At an annual cost of A$8.8 billion and increasing at a rate of 7% each year, these supports represent one-quarter of the annual cost of the scheme.

Given the federal government’s 8% cost growth target, transforming disability housing and support in Australia is critical to the future of the NDIS.

Both the recent disability royal commission and NDIS review recommendations say big changes are needed so people with disability can choose from a range of quality housing and living services where they are free from abuse, neglect and exploitation.

Read more:
Recommendations to reboot the NDIS have finally been released. 5 experts react

Problems with group homes

The original intent of the NDIS market-based approach was to drive innovation and the design of new user-led models of support.

Group homes are still the predominant model of disability housing in Australia. The disability royal commission and a recent government report found people living in group homes are at significant risk of harm.

The NDIS review reported many NDIS participants receiving 24/7 supports have limited choice in where, how and with whom they live. Group homes do not deliver good outcomes and are not cost effective. In addition to the human toll, the yearly cost of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of Australians with disability is estimated to be $46 billion.

Pointing to a way forward

The NDIS review builds on earlier recommendations and outlines a suite of actions with the potential to transform disability housing in Australia. Central to this is the implementation of independent housing and living navigators for participants receiving 24/7 supports.

Most of these participants are currently on providers’ books. But in the current system there are no drivers for providing high quality or efficient support. And change is urgently needed for people living in old housing stock.

Proactive planning is needed to support people with disability who want to live in supported accommodation with peers, rather than ageing family members or carers.

A skilled and independent national workforce of housing navigators would systematically support NDIS participants to realise their human right to make an informed choice on where and with whom they live.

And if the NDIS partners with existing organisations and expertise to train and establish this network, it could be a quick win for government.

Timely implementation of an independent national workforce of housing navigators is also critical because they will support the collation of much-needed quality data on the housing and support needs and preferences of NDIS participants. Without it, the specialist disability accommodation market is building social infrastructure that is not fit for purpose and will be with us for the next 30 years.

What home looks like

Better quality data along with more flexible pricing could see new housing built in locations that help participants maintain their informal support networks. Friends, family and neighbours are critical for keeping people safe, quality outcomes and minimising lifetime care costs. NDIS participants are most at risk of harm when they live in closed settings and mostly only interact with people who are all paid by the one provider.

For some people with cognitive impairments, the opportunity to trial new living arrangements before they commit is essential.

Given the annual average investment of nearly $400,000 in 24/7 support, getting the match between the person and their living arrangement right is well worth the investment.

New housing and living solutions need to be both evidence-based and co-designed. Like government, people with disability want to get good value out of their NDIS plans and are frustrated by inefficiency and waste in the scheme.

We await detail on how housing and living support will be determined in a clear, fair and consistent way.

Success will see less segregation and more inclusive housing for people with disability. Some of the people currently receiving 24/7 support have the potential to move to mainstream housing if more accessible housing is made available. The NDIS review recommends a commitment from the remaining jurisdictions (New South Wales and Western Australia) to sign up to the Livable Housing Design Standards in the National Construction Code.

Read more:
What’s the difference between ‘reasonable and necessary’ and ‘foundational’ supports? Here’s what the NDIS review says

What to watch for

Innovative and individualised housing

The review builds on the royal commission findings and recommends an urgent shift away from group homes. No one should be forced to enter a living arrangement that is not of their choosing, including young people living in aged care.

How this might work in practice is unclear. The NDIS review recommendations state shared funding does not necessarily equate to living with others. It would be a missed opportunity if new NDIS legislation merely results in the proliferation of three-bedroom houses where NDIS participants are forced to live with two other people.

We hope to see innovative and individualised housing solutions that foster new cost-effective models of high quality and efficient shared support, including mobile attendant care and a diverse range of individualised living options.

New regulation

Practice standards that hold support providers accountable are urgently needed. The recommendation to separate housing providers from providers of support is critical to stop the commodification of some of the most vulnerable NDIS participants.

But we should also watch out for additional layers of regulation that add cost and complexity but do little to improve the lives of people with disability.

Read more:
‘It’s shown me how independent I can be’ – housing designed for people with disabilities reduces the help needed

Change is coming

The government has laid the foundations for change with new National Cabinet funding agreements and says it will start announcing reforms based on review recommendations in 2024. Smart implementation will see people with disability who are dependent on providers for their basic needs live free from abuse, neglect and violence.

New models of housing that foster independence and enable the delivery of efficient support are critical to containing rising costs and ensuring scheme sustainability.

Adequate housing is fundamental to unlocking the potential of people with disability who want to work, contribute to society and be part of the community.

Read more:
States agree to do more heavy lifting on disability, in exchange for extra health and GST funding

Dr Di Winkler is the CEO and Founder of the Summer Foundation. Summer Foundation is an industry partner on a La Trobe University led ARC Linkage Grant about measuring the outcomes of tenants who move to new SDA. Dr Winkler is also a volunteer director of a not for profit Specialist Disability Accommodation provider called Liverty Housing (formerly known as Summer Housing)

– ref. Taken together, the NDIS review and the royal commission recommendations could transform disability housing – https://theconversation.com/taken-together-the-ndis-review-and-the-royal-commission-recommendations-could-transform-disability-housing-216267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Darren Roberts, Conjoint Associate Professor in clinical pharmacology and toxicology, St Vincent’s Healthcare Clinical Campus, UNSW Sydney

Red imported fire ants are a particularly nasty type of ant because they are aggressive, and inflict painful stings that may be life threatening. That’s in addition to being a serious threat to agriculture and biosecurity.

In recent weeks, we heard these ants had spread from Queensland, south into northern New South Wales.

Although their stings are rare in Australia, they can lead to a serious allergic reaction. Here’s what to do if you’ve been stung.

Read more:
Why red fire ants and yellow crazy ants have given themselves a green light to invade Australia

Which ants are we talking about?

Red imported fire ants (Solenopsis invicta) are native to South America but have been spreading across the world in contaminated soil.

The ants are 2-6 millimetres long and are a dark red-brown colour. They live in nests in the ground.

When a nest is disturbed, hundreds of ants come out and attack. Their jaws lock onto the skin and they arch their body to inject venom through a stinger on their abdomen. Each ant stings an average seven to eight times.

These ants sting millions of people a year in the United States.

Anyone who disturbs their nest is at risk of being stung. Even minor disturbances will cause the ants to surface and attack.

Overseas, people have been stung by ants that have formed rafts during heavy rainfall and flooding.

Read more:
From deadly jaws and enormous strength to mushroom farming, Ant-Man is only tapping into a portion of the real superpowers of ants

What happens when this ant stings you?

Fortunately, red imported fire ant stings have been uncommon in Australia, and we hope it stays this way.

Their sting is painful, with a fire-like burning character, and is associated with swelling and redness. Over the following hours or days, sting sites develop blisters or pustules that are itchy and take days to improve.

A person can easily be stung hundreds of times, which can cause a lot of distress.

What’s the treatment? Do I need to go to hospital?

Many people with a smaller number of stings can be safely managed at home. Usual treatments include:

• gently washing the area with soap and water

• using cold compresses on red and swollen stings. If you use an ice pack or ice, avoid direct contact with the skin

• taking antihistamines, which you can buy from your local pharmacy.

Do not break the blisters that form at sting sites, and see your local doctor if the stings become more red and painful a few days later, to exclude infection.

Read more:
Bzzz, slap! How to treat insect bites (home remedies included)

When to seek medical care

Uncommonly, red imported fire ant stings can be life threatening. About 2% of people who are stung develop a severe and life-threatening allergic reaction known as anaphylaxis. This has also been reported in Australia.

Many stinging animals in Australia can cause anaphylaxis, including bees, wasps, and other ants such as jack jumper ants.

People allergic to some wasps may also be allergic to venom from the red fire ants.

Symptoms of anaphylaxis after being stung by a fire ant are similar to those after being stung by other animals. Symptoms include:

• difficulty talking or breathing

• noisy breathing

• swelling of the face (including lips, eyes or tongue)

• tightness in the throat, with difficulty swallowing

• dizziness

• collapsing.

There may also be a spreading red rash (hives or welts).

If you have any of these symptoms, seek immediate medical assistance. This may including calling 000.

Rarely, the ant venom can cause other toxic effects, which may be more likely in people who have been stung hundreds of times. So seek medical advice if you have unexplained or unusual symptoms after you’ve been stung.

Read more:
Ants, bees and wasps: the venomous Australians with a sting in their tails

Avoid these ants if you can

Avoid exposing yourself to imported red fire ants. Report nests to authorities. Do not handle the nests yourself as this is more likely to spread the ants. This is also when you’re most likely to be stung.

If this article raises health concerns for you or for someone you know about insect stings call the Poisons Information Centre from anywhere in Australia on 131 126. This evidence-based advice is available 24 hours a day. For life-threatening symptoms, call 000.

Darren Roberts is the Medical Director of the NSW Poisons Information Centre

– ref. Fire ants are on the march. Here’s what happens when they sting – https://theconversation.com/fire-ants-are-on-the-march-heres-what-happens-when-they-sting-218908

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Pavlovich, Senior lecturer in the School of Accounting and Commercial Law, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

The new coalition government has announced a suite of tax reforms, including reintroducing the ability for property investors to deduct the interest costs on their mortgages against their rental income.

Early criticism of the proposed changes has focused on its retrospective nature (it will be backdated to April 1, 2023), potential windfalls to landlords (at the expense of tenants), and the fiscal cost of the measure.

Missing from much of the coverage was mention of the previous Labour government’s policy being extremely punitive to some landlords, without necessarily bringing the claimed benefit of improving housing affordability. In fact, it is likely to have put upward pressure on rents.

Alongside the reinstatement of interest deductions, National’s plan to reduce the applicable period of the brightline test – which requires property owners to pay income tax on property sold within a certain time frame – from ten years back to two years.

While property investors will benefit from the proposed changes, there have been some real issues with Labour’s earlier tax reforms. We should be glad to see them gone.

Denying deductions on residential properties

In 2021, the Labour government announced plans to phase out the deduction of interest against income derived by residential landlords.

These changes meant landlords couldn’t offset interest payments against their rental income. If the property was later sold, the accumulated interest costs would then become deductible against any taxable gains.

Read more:
Why a proposed capital gains tax could mean tax cuts for most New Zealanders

Much like the extension of the brightline test from five to ten years, proponents of this law change said it would address housing affordability by reducing investor demand.

As it happens, investor demand in the property market has reduced significantly since 2021. But whether denial of interest deductibility has caused or even contributed to this will never be known.

During the past two years, the property market has experienced a slowdown due to rising interest rates, stricter lending rules, and a general reduction in economic confidence in New Zealand.

End of a flawed law

Some criticisms of the new government policy are valid. It is retroactive, benefits property investors, and is expensive for the government to implement. But on the flip side, the policy removes a fundamentally flawed law.

When the government proposed the denial of interest deductibility in 2021, Inland Revenue advised against it on the basis that the change was unlikely to improve housing affordability.

According to this analysis, while the measure might put downward pressure on house prices, it was also likely to result in upward pressure on rent. The policy also had the potential to reduce the supply of new housing developments in the longer term.

An incoherent tax system

More broadly, Inland Revenue said it was concerned the measure added to the compliance and administrative burden on affected taxpayers, and eroded the coherence of the tax system overall.

This last point is important.

A good tax system should be coherent and comprehensive. The introduction of the denial of interest deductibility reduced the coherence of the tax system.

There is a fundamental (and long-standing) principle in tax law: the costs associated with producing taxable income can be offset against that income – with employees being the one major exception to this rule. But in most other cases, expenditure incurred in producing taxable income is deductible.

Removing the deduction of interest expenditure, an often substantial and very real cost to property owners, is a significant departure from this principle. It was likely to cause financial hardship for some landlords.

Read more:
New Zealand’s tax system is under the spotlight (again). What needs to change to make it fair?

Furthermore, this incoherent measure was introduced, at least in part, to compensate for the obvious hole in the current tax system – the lack of a comprehensive capital gains tax.

The then revenue minister, David Parker, acknowledged the tax system benefits residential landlords by exempting many from tax on any capital gain upon sale of the property.

But rather than introducing a tax on capital gains – widely accepted as part of a comprehensive tax system and supported by the Working Tax Group in 2019 – the government chose to implement a distortionary measure in an attempt to address the problem of tax advantages for residential property investors.

Still no capital gains tax

The government may well be winding back the measures introduced by the previous government to appease its property investor constituents.

And there is no real chance the new government will introduce a comprehensive capital gains tax, which would improve the coherence and comprehensiveness of New Zealand’s tax system.

In fact, by reducing the application of the brightline test to two years, quite the opposite is intended.

But the interest deduction denial was unlikely to achieve a great deal more than an increase in rents. It was a bad law, and there are good reasons for it to be gone.

Alison Pavlovich 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. Yes, landlords gain from the repeal of interest deductibility rules – but it was a flawed law from the outset – https://theconversation.com/yes-landlords-gain-from-the-repeal-of-interest-deductibility-rules-but-it-was-a-flawed-law-from-the-outset-218818

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kimberley Reid, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Atmospheric Sciences, Monash University

You’ve probably heard El Niño brings hot and dry weather to the eastern states, but what about the rest of Australia? Are we all in for a scorcher this summer?

El Niño is what scientists call a climate driver. But it’s just one of many.

These climate drivers control year-to-year variations in the weather. Some years are hotter and drier, while others are cooler and wetter.

Australia is particularly prone to weather whiplash because our continent is buffeted by climate drivers to our north, south, east and west. The dominant driver in your state may be one of the lesser-known influences.

East: El Niño Southern Oscillation

The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the resident climate driver in the Pacific Ocean and the driver with the biggest influence over Australian weather. Differences in sea surface temperatures and winds across the Pacific determine whether we swing towards El Niño (the boy) or La Niña (the girl).

During the El Niño phase, sea surface temperatures near South America are warmer than normal and they are cooler than normal off the coast of eastern Australia. Additionally, trade winds that blow from east to west across the Pacific weaken.

El Niño brings hotter daytime temperatures, but often cooler nights. That’s because reduced cloud cover allows more heat to escape into space overnight. So the same process that increases the chances of heatwaves can also raise the risk of frost in Western Australia, New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria.

Australia as a whole is typically drier during an El Niño event. In the tropical regions, El Niño can delay the onset of the monsoon and reduce the likelihood of tropical cyclones. In the southern states, the hot and dry conditions increase the chance of intense bushfires.

La Niña is the opposite phase. Waters off eastern Australia are warmer than usual, increasing the chance of tropical cyclones and an earlier start to the monsoon for WA, the Northern Territory and Queensland.

So what does El Niño do to the weather in your state? Hover over your state in the interactive map to find out.

Read more:
We’re in an El Niño – so why has Australia been so wet?

West: Indian Ocean Dipole

The Indian Ocean Dipole is like ENSO’s Indian Ocean cousin. A positive Indian Ocean Dipole is declared when ocean temperatures near Africa are warmer than normal and ocean temperatures off the coast of Sumatra are cooler than usual.

A positive dipole tends to bring warmer and drier conditions, particularly to western and central Australia. A negative Indian Ocean Dipole is the reverse and is associated with wetter than normal weather and an increase in northwest cloudbands.

North: Madden-Julian Oscillation

The Madden-Julian Oscillation is a pulse of storms that start in the Indian Ocean, travel over Northern Australia and Indonesia and die in the Pacific Ocean. Ahead of the pulse, the air sinks, causing sunny and dry weather. Under the pulse is high storm activity and typically heavy rainfall.

We describe the Madden-Julian Oscillation based on whether the pulse of storms is active or inactive and where the storm activity is located on its path between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. As well as causing rainfall, the Madden-Julian Oscillation can control the timing of the monsoon onset and tropical cyclone formation.

South: Southern Annular Mode

The Southern Annular Mode controls the north and south position of the westerly winds that whizz around the globe in the Southern Ocean. When the winds are further north than usual, we call this the negative phase. But when the westerly wind move towards Antarctica, we call this the positive phase.

The phase of the Southern Annular Mode affects how many weather systems, like cold fronts, make landfall over southern Australia. A positive mode may also draw tropical moist air south, which happened in 2022 during the extensive flooding over eastern Australia.

Climate drivers control the odds, but not the result

These four key climate drivers affect the weather on average (over months and seasons), but they do not dictate the exact day-to-day weather we experience. As the Gippsland region of Victoria saw in October, heavy rainfall can still occur during an El Niño.

Climate drivers are like a football coach. They can select the best players and develop ingenious strategies, but that doesn’t guarantee a win every time.

Players can get injured on the field or simply have a bad game. These uncontrollable factors are challenging to predict and may change the result from what we would expect. Scientists call this stochasticity. The climate drivers are the football coach, but the day-to-day weather systems are the players.

The Bureau of Meteorology releases an update on all of these drivers every two weeks. The update explains which drivers are currently active and the forecast for the next few weeks.

So, if you are wondering why the weather is cooler during summer, or it’s raining in the middle of the dry season, perhaps take a look at which driver is steering Australia’s weather at the moment.

Read more:
Why are so many climate records breaking all at once?

Kimberley Reid receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. What does El Niño do to the weather in your state? – https://theconversation.com/what-does-el-nino-do-to-the-weather-in-your-state-218257

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane Currie, Professor of Nursing, Queensland University of Technology

Heatwaves are a major public health hazard. Socially disadvantaged people are especially exposed to extreme heat and other impacts of climate change. Many people experiencing homelessness – more than 120,000 on any given day in Australia – are exposed to extreme temperatures sleeping on the street, in cars or tents, or in overcrowded and substandard housing.

Researchers are working with people experiencing homelessness, St Vincent’s Hospital and the City of Sydney to design, deliver and evaluate a mobile “cooling hub” this summer. The Bureau of Meteorology is predicting an unusually hot summer. The pilot project in Surry Hills will use low-cost strategies, including misting fans, to keep 54 people at a time cool on the hottest of days.

We’ll use the HeatWatch app, developed by the University of Sydney, to know when to set up the cooling hub. It’s the first time the app, as a preparedness tool, and a mobile hub like this have been deployed in Australia. Renewable energy will power the hub, so this response isn’t itself contributing to climate change.

Read more:
Cruel summer ahead – why is Australia so unprepared?

Homelessness increases heat risks

Climate change represents a health emergency. The extremes of climate change can be devastating for the health of people experiencing homelessness. They are more exposed to heat as it can be very hard for them to find cool spaces, particularly in cities.

People in this situation are also more likely to be vulnerable to the impacts of heat, as many have chronic health conditions, such as heart disease. Some medications, for both physical and mental health conditions, can reduce a person’s ability to regulate their body temperature.

Extreme heat places enormous strain on a person’s body, including their heart. It can lead to serious illness and even death.

Severe heat also creates significant costs. In a 2020 Sydney heatwave, the cost of treating heat illness in just two people who were homeless was A$70,184.

The World Health Organization estimates climate change will cause 250,000 deaths a year from 2030, at a cost of US$2-4 billion ($A3-6 billion).

Read more:
Homelessness today sees workers and families with nowhere stable to live. No wonder their health is suffering

Ensuring the hub meets people’s needs

Our team plans to help hundreds of people stay cooler and safer in Sydney this summer. The cooling hub has been co-designed with people experiencing homelessness. This process will help ensure the hub meets the needs of the people it’s meant to assist at times of extreme heat.

People with experience of homelessness worked with researchers and health workers to determine where to set up the cooling hub, what to include inside, how to make the community aware of the service, and how to reach out from the hub and bring people to it. For example, for many people experiencing homelessness, being able to access health care, connect with others, bring their pets and store belongings are all important.

The cooling hub will be set up at Ward Park, Surry Hills, and will be open in the daytime during extreme heat. It will comprise a marquee and low-tech equipment that maximises cooling and health support. The hub can be set up quickly and easily and relocated as required.

Nurses, doctors and peer support workers of St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney, Homeless Health Service and City of Sydney public liaison officers will staff the hub. They will provide evidence-based cooling strategies and monitor body temperature, blood pressure and heart and breathing rates to identify early signs of heat illness.

People who are at high risk of heat illness will leave the hub with a pedestal or handheld fan and water spray bottle. All will receive information on how best to stay cool.

Hub users will be advised to stay hydrated and in the shade, limit activity in the heat of the day and remove heavy clothing. Each of these measures can be very effective in keeping cool.

The hub will also offer food and opportunities to access social and housing supports.

Read more:
Melbourne now has chief heat officers. Here’s why we need them and what they can do

Creating a blueprint for others

In 2021, St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney and others set up a vaccination hub for people experiencing homelessness during the COVID pandemic. The lessons from that initiative were written into a blueprint for others to use.

Our evaluation of the cooling hub will include satisfaction and experience surveys along with environmental and health data to estimate its acceptability, effectiveness and cost efficiency. This will include its impact on attendances for heat illness at St Vincent’s Hospital emergency department.

Drawing on what is learned, we will write a cooling hub blueprint for other services to apply.

Read more:
Efforts to find safe housing for homeless youth have gone backwards. Here’s what the new national plan must do differently

Climate justice in action

People experiencing homelessness are poorly represented in disaster planning. The consequences can be devastating. Yet simple preventive strategies, carefully applied with communities, are likely to reduce the health impact of heatwaves.

Heat is one of the many impacts of climate change that are not felt equally. People who are most disadvantaged bear the greatest cost.

A climate justice response to climate change is essential, one that works with the most disadvantaged people in our community to meet their needs. Our initiative will provide a blueprint for co-designing a cooling hub with disadvantaged people and responding to their needs in the climate crisis.

Professor Jane Currie holds an honorary appointment with St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney for the purposes of research. For this cooling hub pilot project, she received funding from the City of Sydney, St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney and Queensland University of Technology.

Associate Professor Jo River, UTS and Northern Sydney Local Health District, has expertise in co-design research and received funding from the City of Sydney and St. Vincent’s Hospital Sydney for the cooling hub co-design pilot project.

Dr. Timothy English is the Humanitarian Settings Co-lead for the Heat and Health Research Incubator at the University of Sydney and received funding from the City of Sydney and St Vincent’s Hospital Sydney for this cooling hub pilot project.

– ref. Australia’s first mobile cooling hub is ready for searing heat this summer – and people who are homeless helped design it – https://theconversation.com/australias-first-mobile-cooling-hub-is-ready-for-searing-heat-this-summer-and-people-who-are-homeless-helped-design-it-218829

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hunter Fujak, Lecturer in Sport Management, Deakin University

While 2023 was a watershed year for Australian women’s sport due to the Matildas’ stirring run at the Women’s World Cup, netball is going through its worst period ever.

Netball Australia and the sport’s players have reportedly agreed to a new pay deal following a period of bruising negotiations, which is expected to modestly increase pay and introduce a revenue-sharing component.

But the good news comes as the federal government has indicated it will withdraw nearly $18 million in funding to netball to reallocate to other sports. The reason: a failure by Netball Australia to deliver a “sufficiently robust” plan for its use.

The loss of federal funding would come as a huge blow to an organisation saddled with $4.2 million in debt.

In addition, it’s been reported that netball’s broadcast partner, Foxtel, is concerned about the sport’s lack of strategic direction. This has some concerned it may not renew its broadcast rights at the end of its current deal.

For a sport that has historically boasted the highest rate of female team sport participation in Australia, and with a national league predating nearly all other women’s sports, how has netball fallen into such a precarious position?

COVID funding hole

Many of netball’s current financial woes can be traced back to the onset of the COVID pandemic four years ago.

Due to the waiving of membership contributions and higher operational costs related to running Super Netball hubs during the pandemic, the sport lost $2.8 million in 2020. The next year was even worse: a loss of $4.4 million.

This saw Netball Australia’s net available funds diminish 98% from $7.3 million in 2019 to just over $158,000 by the end of 2021.

By June 2022, Netball Australia had to publicly deny it was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Netball’s financial precariousness became more acute in October 2022 after billionaire Gina Rinehart withdrew her $15 million sponsorship from the sport. This came after concerns were raised about the wearing of Rinehart’s company logo on the team’s uniform, stemming from comments her father had once made about Indigenous people.

Worse news was to come when Collingwood Football Club announced its shock withdrawal from the Super Netball competition during the 2023 season.

An erosion of player trust

A key challenge over the past few years has been a significant erosion in trust between players and management.

Just last month, for example, players publicly blamed Netball Australia for being responsible for the implosion of the sponsorship deal with Rinehart – not them.

But the relationship had started to sour back in 2020 when Netball Australia introduced the two-goal “super shot” to the Super Netball competition only six weeks prior to the start of the season, which players roundly criticised.

Netball Australia made a similarly unilateral decision to sell grand final hosting rights to Western Australia two weeks prior to the conclusion of the 2022 season. The players’ association decried the move, saying players were “devastated”.

Then came the bruising negotiations over the new collective playing agreement, which seemed to receive more headlines than any on-court exploits in 2023.

Prior to the Netball World Cup in June, for instance, Netball Australia initially refused to announce its squad until players had signed agreements, which was described by former head coach Lisa Alexandra as a “ransom”.

In recent weeks, Netball Australia issued legal notices reminding players of their obligation to attend an awards function. Stories also emerged of netballers being forced to sleep in their cars, retiring to play other sports and being brought to tears over their financial insecurity.

Thankfully, an in-principle agreement appears to have reached. Now, the hard work of rebuilding the sport’s public image can hopefully begin.

Read more:
Australia just won the netball world cup. Why isn’t there room for multiple women’s world cups in our sports media?

Increasing competition among women’s leagues

Netball has been the centre of women’s sport in Australia for over a century. Today, however, it must compete with a number of other women’s sports for prominence.

My research has estimated a staggering 17 million Australians watched the Matildas semifinal fixture in the World Cup, for instance. When the Diamonds went on to win the Netball World Cup, however, it went largely unnoticed and uncelebrated.

The AFLW and NRLW continue to grow, too. This year’s NRLW grand final attracted a national audience of more than one million viewers. And the AFLW, which has historically poached netball talent to develop its league, was able to expand to an 18-team competition for the 2022-23 season.

So, where does this leave netball? While the recent news may appear grim, there are reasons for optimism.

The 2023 Super Netball season broke attendance records, for example, while broadcast viewership was also slightly up.

Netball participation has also remained robust across the country, despite the widening of sport choices for women and girls.

What netball must do now

Netball Australia faces two immediate challenges it must address.

First is achieving unity across the game following such a fractious period. Unity with players is particularly vital, as they represent Super Netball’s best marketing asset to achieve desperately needed growth.

The apparent inclusion of revenue sharing in the new player agreement ensures athletes will be genuine partners with a vested interest in commercially growing the league.

Read more:
Is netball a feminist triumph? Let’s discuss

Unity would also help with netball’s second immediate challenge: breaking the perpetual cycle of negative sentiment surrounding the sport.

Negative sentiment causes fans and sponsors alike to disengage. Positive sentiment, by contrast, is a propellant. Look no further than the contrast between the Wallabies and Matildas at the moment.

At a strategic level, Netball Australia and its players need to properly assess whether the sport is heading in the right direction. That both the Australian Sports Commission chair and federal minister for sport have both publicly criticised Netball Australia should serve as a wake-up call.

A reevaluation of netball’s strategic direction must acknowledge that the cultural landscape has shifted. Women’s sport has gone mainstream and netball must find a way to broaden its audience, similar to the Matildas and football codes.

As Sports Minister Anika Wells put it, “netball is too important for it to not be successful”.

Deakin University is a sponsor of Super Netball’s Melbourne Vixens.

Hunter Fujak has previously been a board member of a NSW Premier League netball club.

– ref. Netballers may have a new pay deal, but the sport remains in a precarious position – https://theconversation.com/netballers-may-have-a-new-pay-deal-but-the-sport-remains-in-a-precarious-position-219230

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew H. Holden, Lecturer, School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland

We are biodiversity researchers – an ecologist, a mathematician and a taxonomist – who were locked down together during the COVID pandemic. Being restricted to the house, it didn’t take long before we began to wonder how many species of plants and animals we were sharing the space with. So we set to work counting them all.

We guessed we would find around 200–300, and many of our colleagues guessed the same.

There was nothing extraordinary about our 400 square metre block of land in Annerley, a suburb of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. Roughly half the block was occupied by a three-bedroom house.

What was extraordinary was the number of species we discovered there. As revealed in our just-published study, starting on the first day of lockdown and continuing over the course of a year, we catalogued 1,150 species on our inner-city property.

Familiar faces and rare recluses

Many of the species were what any east coast suburban Australian would expect: ibises, brush turkeys, kookaburras, possums and flying foxes. But, surprisingly, others had rarely been recorded.

In fact, three of the 1,150 species had never been documented in Australia’s leading biodiversity database at that point. This included a rare mosquito, a sandfly and an invasive flatworm that can cause populations of native snails to decline.

Read more:
The 39 endangered species in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and other Australian cities

We found common foes, but also many friends. That rare mosquito was just one of 13 mosquito species we found. The cupboards accommodated pantry moths and grain weevils, but also spiders to prey on them (we recorded 56 species).

Our lack of assiduous garden-tending meant weeds were prolific; of the 103 plant species we documented on the property, 100 were non-native.

Apart from weeds, however, the vast majority of species were actually native. Our two massive lilly-pilly trees provided shade, shelter and food, magnets for numerous pollinators and other species.

Bees and butterflies

The yard was filled with pollinators. For example, there were hoverflies which, at a quick glance, you’d think were wasps. We had ten species of those, a fraction of the more than 109 species of flies we found.

Native blue-banded bees and fluffy teddybear bees roosted in the hedges under our windows at night. They were just two of more than 70 bee and wasp species we observed.

We also counted a mindblowing 436 species of butterflies and moths. A few were as large as a human hand, but most were tiny and barely noticeable. Some were brightly coloured, while others – like the vampire moth Calyptra minuticornis – seemed boring until we began to study their behaviour.

The moth Scatochresis innumera is another interesting one: as a caterpillar, it lives inside a single possum poop before emerging as an adult.

The caterpillars of Parilyrgis concolor, yet another moth, live in spiderwebs, surviving on the spider’s food waste, while the adults can be found hanging bat-like from the spiderwebs. It is not known how they avoid getting eaten by the spiders.

Wasps and beetles

We recorded ten species of lycaenid “blue” butterflies, many of which use ants to protect their caterpillars from predators, including certain wasp species which would lay eggs in them if they got a chance.

These wasps are called parasitoids – meaning their young develop in other organisms, eventually killing them. Some of these wasps even parasitise other parasitoid wasps. Our urban homes are clearly complex ecosystems.

We were surprised to only find just under 100 beetle species (the fourth most common group of organisms in our study). Beetles are widely believed to be the most diverse order of insects on the planet.

Our finding may be a sign of declining beetle populations, which has been observed around the world. On the other hand, it may just have been a bad year for beetles in our neighbourhood.

An urban environment teeming with life

Overall, we found far more species than we expected, and we showed that even urban environments can be teeming with wildlife.

A big reason for that was surely the vegetation: the shrubs, trees and weeds in the yard. The monotony of perfectly tended lawn and heavily sprayed and manicured flowerbeds may be nice to look at and for the kids to play on but, as habitat for urban wildlife, it is lacking.

Read more:
Here’s how to design cities where people and nature can both flourish

Our own laziness meant we did little work in the garden. However, by giving the mower and pesticides a break, and by sacrificing some lawn for native trees, shrubs and flowering weeds, we ended up with something much more valuable.

But no matter what you do to maintain your home, definitely check your porch or balcony light tonight, and keep your eye out for urban wildlife around your home. You too can experience some pretty amazing nature, no matter how urban the environment you live in.

Matthew H. Holden receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Department of Environment and Science, Queensland

Andrew Rogers and Russell Q-Y Yong 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. We thought we’d find 200 species living in our house and yard. We were very wrong – https://theconversation.com/we-thought-wed-find-200-species-living-in-our-house-and-yard-we-were-very-wrong-217082

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sam Bennett, Disability Program Director, Grattan Institute

The long-awaited NDIS review has looked far beyond the National Disability Insurance Scheme, taking a bird’s eye view of disability services in Australia. Critical to the future of the NDIS are services for people with disability outside of the scheme.

More than 85% of the 4.4 million Australians with disability are not in the NDIS. As services to support them have shrunk in the ten years since the NDIS was introduced, they’ve been scrambling to join the scheme.

The very first of the NDIS review’s 26 recommendations is a separate tier of disability services, called “foundational supports”, outside the scheme and accessible to many more people with disability. This will sound familiar to those familiar with the scheme’s original design when it was proposed by the Productivity Commission.

What could this look like in practice? And has the review resolved the problem of woolly definitions around “reasonable and necessary” supports?

Read more:
Recommendations to reboot the NDIS have finally been released. 5 experts react

The states are on board

National Cabinet’s decision on Wednesday for the states and Commonwealth to split the funding of foundational supports promises some relief to the majority of disabled Australians who can’t get support from the NDIS.

Establishing foundational supports outside the scheme is the end of a long battle. The states have cried poor, while the Commonwealth has insisted the NDIS cannot be the only source of services to people with disability.

On the face of it, the states got a great deal at National Cabinet.

States and territories agreed to increase their NDIS funding cap by 4% and signed up to a capped contribution of A$10 billion over five years for foundational supports. The Commonwealth agreed to tip in billions to strengthen Medicare, which is itself a provider of foundational supports – another win for the states.

What that could look like

More foundational supports should mean all people with disability, including hundreds of thousands of children, can get the services they need. Many supports which have been sucked into the NDIS vortex and itemised at high cost, could be removed from the scheme and funded on a more sustainable basis.

For example, providing services through schools and early childhood centres means more children get early intervention. These children don’t need an NDIS plan but rather the reasonable adjustments these settings are already obligated to provide.

Making mainstream services available should curb escalating demand for the professional diagnoses and reports currently needed to get onto the NDIS.

It should mean allied health professionals can visit multiple children at one school, and children can spend more time in the classroom.

More foundational supports will help the NDIS budget, too. If more disability services are available to people outside the NDIS, fewer people with disability will have to join the scheme to get what they need. It should mean people with higher intensity needs will be directed into the NDIS where they can get specialised services.

Read more:
Australia’s rates of autism should be celebrated – but real-life impact, not diagnosis, should determine NDIS support

What about ‘reasonable and necessary’ supports?

The NDIS review found a lack of clarity about what supports should be considered “reasonable and necessary” was at the heart of many of the scheme’s problems. The review panel wrote:

It has contributed to a breakdown in trust between participants and the NDIA. It has also placed pressure on the sustainability of the scheme […] The criteria for reasonable and necessary supports were deliberately kept broad, to make sure supports can be tailored to the individual.

Foundational supports, for people outside the NDIS, are the sorts of services best funded through grants, contracts or government infrastructure. It would be neither practical nor cost effective to fund them on an individual fee-for-service basis.

In contrast, reasonable and necessary supports, for people in the NDIS, are more targeted, sometimes more specialised, and often more intensive. These are services such as attendant care at home, support with personal care, access to a range of therapies, and one-off costs such as assistive technology or home modification. These supports need to be tailored to the individual. This lends itself to individualised funding.

Having both foundational and NDIS supports should make life much better for Australians with disability – but only if the federal government announces reforms to create “NDIS 2.0” and foundational supports with ongoing funding, rather than an uncertain series of short-term project grants.

Read more:
‘I want to get bogged at a beach in my wheelchair and know people will help’. Micheline Lee on the way forward for the NDIS

Meaningful support

Exactly what is reasonable and necessary remains undefined after this year-long review, but a new landscape of disability services should imbue the phrase with fresh meaning. Instead of being an ambiguous and threatening concept, a well-implemented level of funding should provide what is necessary for an Australian with disability to pursue their life goals – taking into account the foundational supports available outside the NDIS.

Aside from outlawing certain expenditure (for example, rent, groceries and utilities) and ensuring NDIS funds do not duplicate costs within the scope of other systems, what is reasonable and necessary becomes a simpler matter of fairness and equity. It is not a dehumanising debate about what you can and can’t have.

That is a disability scheme worth fighting for.

The Grattan Institute receives funding support from the Summer Foundation.

Grattan Institute’s Disability Program has support from the Summer Foundation.

– ref. What’s the difference between ‘reasonable and necessary’ and ‘foundational’ supports? Here’s what the NDIS review says – https://theconversation.com/whats-the-difference-between-reasonable-and-necessary-and-foundational-supports-heres-what-the-ndis-review-says-216074

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca J McLeod, Senior Research Fellow in Marine Ecology, University of Otago

Climate change might not be high on its immediate agenda, but New Zealand’s new government does have one potentially significant and innovative policy.

Recognising the marine environment’s ability to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂), it has pledged to consider bringing wetlands into the emissions trading scheme, and to investigate the potential of kelp farms to sequester CO₂.

New Zealand’s current sequestration plans rely heavily on planting forests and buying international carbon credits to offset emissions.

Emissions reduction and the removal of atmospheric CO₂ are both needed to keep global temperature increase to less than 1.5°C. But the country is still far from on track to meet its obligations under the Paris Agreement, and the national goal of net zero by 2050.

At the same time, New Zealand has the world’s sixth largest exclusive economic zone, with unique oceanographic features for CO₂ removal that are attracting international interest. The ocean is Earth’s largest carbon sink, having removed around 30% of global CO₂ emissions to date.

New Zealand also has the scientific expertise to research the potential for harnessing its seas to help achieve national net zero ambitions. But it lacks a clear strategy for assessing risk and developing the most beneficial solutions.

Benefits and risks of marine CO₂ removal

Around the world, projects are under way to restore coastal wetlands by “re-wetting” drained land and planting mangroves, seagrass and other coastal plants. These “blue carbon” projects aim to restore the carbon burial properties of wetlands, with related benefits for biodiversity and coastal resilience.

A growing number of countries are including coastal wetlands in their climate accounting and reporting. Increasingly, these projects are tied to carbon credit schemes – which seems to be what New Zealand’s new government is also signalling.

Read more:
Blue carbon: could a solution to the climate challenge be buried in the depths of fiords?

But the ways in which the nation’s marine environment could help lower atmospheric CO₂ extend far beyond coastal wetlands. There is great interest in enhancing natural oceanic processes, known as “marine carbon dioxide removal”, or mCDR.

In the open ocean, mCDR aims to increase CO₂ uptake via giant seaweed farms, enhancing seawater alkalinity, and fertilising areas of the ocean to promote algal blooms.

The appeal of mCDR lies in the ocean’s potential capacity to draw down enormous amounts of carbon. But while the potential gains are large, there are gaps in our knowledge. More investment is needed to determine the net carbon benefits – and potential ecological risks – of intervening in nature in these ways.

Carbon burial at sea

Plants in the sea – mangroves, seaweed, and microscopic phytoplankton – capture CO₂ through photosynthesis, just like their counterparts on land. But permanently removing that carbon from the atmosphere means burying it in the deep sea or the seafloor.

This presents challenges. It is relatively easy to measure the carbon uptake by a seaweed farm, for example, but much harder to track the path of that carbon into a permanent reservoir.

Read more:
New Zealand’s maritime territory is 15 times its landmass – here’s why we need a ministry for the ocean

Similarly, we need more accurate accounting for increased CO₂ uptake from ocean fertilisation or alkalinity enhancement, and the ultimate fate of that carbon in the vast and remote ocean environment. This will be crucial for ensuring the integrity and credibility of such approaches.

A recent seafloor carbon map has highlighted the parts of New Zealand’s marine environment, such as the deep ocean and fiords, that are important carbon reservoirs.

But we also need to consider the vulnerability of these reservoirs. If disturbed, they may store less carbon, or even release it.

Lessons and opportunities

There are already well-established projects focused on the blue carbon potential of coastal wetlands in New Zealand. But overall the country lacks a clear plan for marine carbon removal, or indeed for its oceans in general.

A comprehensive approach to evaluating marine CO₂ removal has to be informed by scientific research. And while major funding of research and development is happening elsewhere, New Zealand’s limited resources mean it must be strategic about where it invests.

The many blue carbon and mCDR solutions being considered internationally are a good place to start. Applying this knowledge to New Zealand’s unique environmental and cultural settings will involve weighing up each solution before committing to a strategy.

Read more:
NZ’s vital kelp forests are in peril from ocean warming – threatening the important species that rely on them

Importantly, international climate policy and governance needs to be developed in parallel with scientific advances. Right now, coastal wetlands are the only marine environment included in the International Panel for Climate Change guidelines for greenhouse gas inventories. More work will be needed to apply those guidelines to New Zealand’s coastal wetlands.

There are good working models already in the blue carbon forums established in Scotland and the United Kingdom. These distil scientific information, develop strategies and plans, and act as conduits between scientists, policy makers and politicians.

A similar approach in New Zealand would help advance a nationally coordinated framework of research, policy and environmental management that strategically considers all blue carbon and mCDR options.

Such a strategy will consider the net carbon benefit versus the risks and possible ecological side effects, particularly for mCDR.

But the country is well positioned to explore how the ocean might contribute to its climate goals. The scientists are ready, the government has pledged action – it’s time to get moving.

Rebecca J McLeod receives funding from the MBIE Endeavour Fund. She is the Chair of the Fiordland Marine Guardians.

Cliff Law receives funding from the NZ Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment for determining the role of the ocean in the climate system.

– ref. Harnessing the oceans to ‘bury’ carbon has huge potential – and risk – so NZ needs to move with caution – https://theconversation.com/harnessing-the-oceans-to-bury-carbon-has-huge-potential-and-risk-so-nz-needs-to-move-with-caution-217553

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hing-Wah Chau, Course Chair in Building Design & Senior Lecturer in Built Environment, Victoria University

Soaring rents and home prices, increasing mortgage stress, record immigration and a growing population are fuelling a housing crisis and increasing homelessness. In the face of this pressing need, tiny houses offer an alternative housing option.

Tiny houses have become popular in the United States. Their popularity is growing in other developed countries such as the UK and Canada. In Australia, however, planning and housing regulations present many barriers to using tiny houses as permanent homes.

Dire statistics highlight the need to find homes for Australians quickly and cheaply. The unmet need for social housing has been estimated at 437,000 households. The 2021 census counted 122,494 people as homeless. By 2022, more than 640,000 households’ housing needs were not being met.

Some local councils now see tiny houses as part of the solution to these problems. They are taking steps to make it easier for people to live in them.

Read more:
Tiny and alternate houses can help ease Australia’s rental affordability crisis

Australia is trailing a global movement

The tiny house movement is built on several values. These include a preference for smaller homes, the pursuit of minimalism, the desire to live more sustainably and a rejection of the prevailing consumer culture.

The 2018 International Housing Code defines tiny houses as dwellings of 400 square feet (37 square metres) in area or less. In Australia, dwellings under 50 square metres are commonly regarded as tiny houses.

The two main types are tiny houses on foundations and tiny houses on wheels. The latter is built on a trailer and must comply with road-legal dimensions and vehicle regulations.

Tiny houses have long been used as dwellings overseas. Faced with high property prices and land scarcity, those who enjoy the convenience of city life with a minimalist lifestyle have embraced tiny homes.

Examples include micro-homes in Tokyo. Japanese micro-homes are often sited on irregular leftover pieces of land.

In the US, the Occupy Madison Village is a tiny house commune in Madison, Wisconsin. It provides housing, communal living and community-based decision-making for homeless people to promote their sense of belonging and social participation.

Read more:
3 innovations helping the homeless in Eugene, Oregon

What’s happening in Australia?

In Australia, the various barriers to tiny house living include local government planning schemes, time limits and other restrictions on occupancy and connection to utilities. Over the past year, local councils have begun to make it easier to live in a tiny house.

The Shire of Esperance in Western Australia was the first local council in the country to recognise tiny houses as permanent dwellings in December 2022.

Mount Alexander Shire Council in Victoria removed the permit requirement for residents to park tiny houses on wheels on properties with existing dwellings in June 2023.

The Shire of Capel in Western Australia adopted a tiny house policy to allow ancillary dwellings and tiny house communities in August 2023.

The Surf Coast Shire in Victoria is starting a two-year trial of domestic use of tiny houses on wheels in 2024.

These changes are likely to help people who are struggling to find an affordable home and those on long waiting lists for social housing.

Read more:
Tiny houses and alternative homes are gaining councils’ approval as they wrestle with the housing crisis

A cheaper and faster way to house people

Tiny houses offer a cost-effective and prompt solution to the issues of affordable housing and homelessness. Their small size means they can be built more quickly and cheaply.

The construction cost of a tiny house is typically A$80,000-$160,000. The median house price for Australian capital cities is now more than $900,000 – and around $650,000 for units.

On average, it takes four to 12 months to build a house in Australia after the purchase of land and design approval. It takes only about four weeks to build a tiny house commercially.

The average new house size in Australia is the biggest in the world. Average floor area has been between 230 and 246 square metres for the past 20 years. Large houses use more materials and energy to build and run, adding to living costs.

Shrinking our environmental footprints

Tiny houses promote liveable space downsizing and simpler lifestyles. They also demonstrate a stronger responsibility for environmental stewardship. Some have rainwater tanks, composting toilets, solar panels and batteries and can operate completely off-grid.

Because tiny houses use fewer resources, their occupants’ environmental footprint is smaller. They represent a shift towards more sustainable living by prioritising lower energy use (heating, cooling and lighting) and greenhouse gas emissions. These signify a commitment to limit climate change and global warming by moving towards Australia’s net-zero carbon emission target by 2050.

Read more:
When people downsize to tiny houses, they adopt more environmentally friendly lifestyles

The global tiny house movement represents a concerted effort to reduce the huge environmental footprint of the building and construction industry. At the same time, high-performing, energy-efficient tiny houses cut occupants’ living costs.

Tiny houses do not cater for all households. They suit certain demographics, especially single and partnered people with no children or retirees.

Tiny houses can add much-needed diversity to Australians’ housing options. As councils are recognising, they’re a way of quickly expanding the affordable housing supply in a community. Lower running costs and a smaller environmental footprint are added bonuses.

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

– ref. Councils are opening the door to tiny houses as a quick, affordable and green solution – https://theconversation.com/councils-are-opening-the-door-to-tiny-houses-as-a-quick-affordable-and-green-solution-217267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Samantha Happé, Graduate researcher in art history and material culture studies, The University of Melbourne

As we get closer to Christmas, your family will probably have some kind of gathering. You will reunite with people who you might not see any other time. There will be some awkward small talk, everyone will start off on their best behaviour, there will be too much food, and presents will be exchanged.

Sometimes, despite our best intentions, there are mismatched or underwhelming gifts that can lead to subtle tensions, which persist throughout the day.

But there is a field of academic research that can help with your gift giving. “Diplomatic gift studies” blends material culture studies with history and sociology. It considers gifts being “lost in translation” as they move across cultural spheres. It can explain everything – after all, what is a Christmas gathering if not a type of diplomatic mission?

Here are five things you can keep in mind to smooth things out and help you have the best gift-giving experience this Christmas.

Read more:
The science of gift wrapping explains why sloppy is better

1. Understand the group’s traditions

Picture this: it’s the first time at your in-laws’ Christmas. You bought a playful Secret Santa gift just perfect for your own family – a large box filled with a packet of prunes, toilet paper rolls and yesterday’s news.

Turns out, the gathering you’ve just walked into plays by a whole different set of rules. Awkward, right?

This happened to a friend of mine who was unaware of his in-laws’ tradition of thoughtful heartfelt gifts. Instead, he had chosen something that worked with his family custom of joke presents.

These situations are the most common with people who are – like my friend – newcomers to a gathering. They didn’t grow up with the same kind of Christmas you had and don’t have the same traditions.

Make sure you brief anyone who is new to your gathering about what your family generally does. If you are the newcomer, ask what they typically do for presents.

Read more:
How to play and win the gift-stealing game Bad Santa, according to a mathematician

2. Don’t assume presents based on someone’s age

Navigating the gifting landscape across different generations is like cracking a complex code. This is made more difficult if you don’t know the person well. To solve this, you might end up buying something you think someone their age typically likes.

As a teenager, a close friend once received a mini handbag from a distant aunt – a few years after they were popular. By the time the “cool” gift idea traversed the generational gap and reached the aunt, it was outdated.

Sometimes, our assumptions about different age groups can go awry. Ask someone who knows the person about what they specifically like.

3. Give a gift they want – not what you want

We’ve all unwrapped that one present where we’ve wondered where on earth it fits into our lives. I once received a large, ceramic bowl for Christmas. I had nowhere to put it – my husband and I didn’t entertain or hold dinner parties. It was way too large for the two of us and not suited to our tastes.

I thought about the person who gave it to me – did it match their own interests and preferences? In this case, they’d shopped from their heart, forgetting their taste didn’t necessarily align with mine, and had bought something that they personally liked and wanted. They meant well.

Read more:
How to choose the right Christmas gift: tips from psychological research

4. Think about value in the long term

Gift giving is ideally an equal exchange: you give and receive presents of the same approximate value. At the end of the day, when it’s time to go home, there is balance.

But sometimes the balance tips. You receive something more expensive than what you gave. It can make you feel like you are in that person’s debt, and you feel pressured to match their present the next time.

Before stressing, consider the bigger picture. What did you gift them last year? Or did you help them out in another way and they’re showing their appreciation now?

Sometimes, it’s about evening out the scales over time.

5. Reflect on the intentions behind a gift

One year, when I was 15, I received a set of shower products from a relative. Was this a subtle hint about my personal hygiene? Perhaps. Or was it a well-meaning attempt from someone who just didn’t know my style and bought something smelling nice, which a teenage girl could use?

It’s important to peel back the layers and understand the intentions behind a gift. Think about the person who is giving it, not just the present itself. That way, you avoid jumping to conclusions and appreciate the gesture for what it is.

End-of-year family gatherings can be a wonderful time, where we slow down and relax. We eat, drink and make merry with people who we care about. We give presents with the best of intentions, but some will probably miss the mark.

If this happens, remember it’s the thought behind them that truly counts.

Read more:
The hidden psychology of the Christmas ‘poker face’

This piece is for my late husband, Christopher Lee, who suggested my research could apply to Christmas gift giving. Miss you.

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

– ref. I’m an expert in diplomatic gift giving. Here are my 5 top tips for the best Christmas present exchange – https://theconversation.com/im-an-expert-in-diplomatic-gift-giving-here-are-my-5-top-tips-for-the-best-christmas-present-exchange-218819

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wesley Morgan, Research Fellow, Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

The federal government has announced an extra A$150 million for climate finance – including $100 million for the Pacific to help protect its people, housing and infrastructure from the escalating impacts of global warming.

It comes as Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen lands in Dubai for international negotiations at the 28th United Nations climate summit. At the end of the hottest year on record, these talks focus on accelerating climate action in line with the Paris Agreement.

While new funding is undoubtedly important and can go a long way to supporting community-led resilience-building efforts in the region, Australia will be under growing pressure to do more.

A growing number of countries, including the European Union and Pacific island nations, want to see global agreement at COP28 for a managed phase-out of fossil fuels.

Many observers are sceptical that COP28 can deliver consensus on shifting away from coal, oil and gas, because host nation the United Arab Emirates is a major oil exporter. This is a problem Australia also faces – having volunteered to host UN climate talks in 2026, in partnership with Pacific island countries. Today, Australia exports almost three times as much fossil fuels as the UAE. Dozens of new coal and gas projects are lining up for approval.

Today’s announcement must not be a substitute for addressing the root causes of the climate crisis. Australia must stop approving new coal, oil and gas projects. And we must back agreement at COP28 for the phase-out of fossil fuels.

Read more:
After decades putting the brakes on global action, does Australia deserve to host UN climate talks with Pacific nations?

What’s in today’s announcement?

Australia will kickstart the Pacific’s first resilience financing facility with $100 million, and rejoin the Green Climate Fund with a $50 million contribution. As the government says in today’s joint statement:

Climate change is the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of climate vulnerable countries and regions, including the peoples of the Pacific.

Sea-level rise, stronger cyclones, marine heatwaves and increasingly acidic oceans pose existential threats to many Pacific islands. Low-lying atoll nations such as Kiribati and Tuvalu are especially vulnerable.

Australia certainly has a responsibility to help Pacific communities adapt. Supporting the Pacific-led, owned and managed Pacific Resilience Facility is an important step.

The facility was proposed by island leaders as a regional fund that would help island communities build resilience to climate impacts, and would be driven by Pacific priorities.

It was established partly in response to concerns that other large multilateral funds are difficult for Pacific island countries to access, and are not geared to support community-scale projects. These locally driven solutions and community projects deserve our support.

The Australian government says it will support locally led, small-scale projects:

This includes grants for climate adaptation, disaster preparedness, nature-based solutions and projects which respond to loss and damage.

Note the words “loss and damage” – the sole mention of those words in today’s announcement. Bowen has so far been hesitant to make any commitment to the new global Loss and Damage Fund, to be administered by the World Bank.

Read more:
Politics with Michelle Grattan: Chris Bowen’s struggle to promote consensus on climate action at COP28

Rejoining the Green Climate Fund

The world’s largest global climate fund, the Green Climate Fund, was set up in 2015 as part of the Paris Agreement. It has approved projects across 128 countries.

Australian diplomat Howard Bamsey was previously Executive Director of the Green Climate Fund and Australia was able to direct the multilateral fund to support initiatives in our region.

But the Morrison government withdrew Australia from the fund in 2018. We should never have left. It was a rash decision, announced by the then Prime Minister Scott Morrison live on air while talking to radio host Alan Jones.

Rejoining the Green Climate Fund makes good sense for Australian diplomacy and relations with countries in our region. By rejoining the fund, Australia can effectively advocate for funding to meet Pacific needs.

Australia should contribute to the new Loss and Damage Fund

Providing finance to help Pacific communities deal with growing climate impacts is a positive step, but Australia also needs to contribute to the newly established fund to address loss and damage that is now unavoidable.

The establishment of the global Loss and Damage Fund at the beginning of COP28 last week was a major breakthrough, and a real win for Pacific island countries.

Vanuatu first proposed a global fund in the early 1990s. The idea was polluters would pay for the damage they were causing.

This is different to climate finance for adaptation. It is meant to deal with things you really can’t adapt to, such as loss of lives after a major cyclone, or damage to crucial infrastructure after coastal inundation.

Finalising such a fund means wealthy nations and major emitters must now allocate funds to address these forms of loss and damage in the Pacific.

With other nations – including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, the UAE and Germany – already making announcements to contribute to this new Loss and Damage Fund, Australia must also do its part.

Australia should be supporting our Pacific neighbours by actively contributing to this global fund and recognising our responsibilities as a major fossil fuel producer.

Read more:
COP28 climate summit just approved a ‘loss and damage’ fund. What does this mean?

Committing to fossil fuel phase out key to winning Pacific support

The only way to actually stop harming communities in the Pacific is to stop adding fuel to the fire. That means stopping the approval of new coal, oil and gas projects and committing to a managed phase-out of fossil fuels.

Australia has put up its hand to host COP31 with Pacific island countries in 2026.
To be a successful host of the UN climate talks, Australia will need to actively support the Pacific’s fight for survival. We can’t just keep throwing money at the problem. We need to be part of the solution.

Wesley Morgan is a senior researcher with the Climate Council

– ref. Helping the Pacific financially is a great start – but Australia must act on the root cause of the climate crisis – https://theconversation.com/helping-the-pacific-financially-is-a-great-start-but-australia-must-act-on-the-root-cause-of-the-climate-crisis-219399

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

Bill Shorten, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme and Government Services, has released the review of the NDIS, which recommends sweeping changes to the scheme. The reforms to come will see the states take up much of the responsibility for providing services for people with more minor issues, especially children with developmental delays.

Shorten joined the podcast to talk about the way ahead for a scheme that has run off the rails and become financially unsustainable.

At the centre of the changes is that:

We want to make sure that it’s not just diagnosis which puts you in the scheme – that we look at your disability and then we look at how it affects your daily living and see if the scheme is the right thing to assist you.

But Shorten is quick to reassure that everyone who needs it will be cared for. He points out that disability is universal, in the sense that

You can get it at birth, you can get it through the DNA lottery code you have. Or in the blink of an eye, you know, in a swimming injury or on a country road. So it’s a universal challenge and people shouldn’t be written off because they have an impairment. So it’s on all of us to improve the game.

When pressed on whether the reforms will bring losers, Shorten homes on those doing the wrong thing:

Some of the bad businesses are going to be losers. Some of the people who are not value adding the system, they’re going to be losers. But going to participants, this system will mean that if you need support, that’s what you’re going to get.

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. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Bill Shorten on making the NDIS fit for purpose – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-bill-shorten-on-making-the-ndis-fit-for-purpose-219401

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

It’s not just kids who get report cards (PDFs these days) as school breaks up. So do government ministers, when parliament rises at year’s end.

Judgments about how members of the team have performed, often public but also private, are made by stakeholders, the media, colleagues and ultimately the prime minister.

As Christmas looms, the Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Bill Shorten, and Workplace Relations Minister, Tony Burke will be reckoning they deserve As.

Shorten this week has not only launched his review of the NDIS, but seen national cabinet agree to a deal to curb the scheme’s cost explosion, shifting (with the way smoothed by generous Commonwealth funding) some of the responsibility for disability services onto the states.

Shorten can claim to be the original “father” of the NDIS in the days of the former Labor goverrnment; having to reshape it to make it sustainable is the classic poisoned chalice, but he was the best person in the government for the task.

We won’t know for several years how well the changes of the NDIS itself and the federal-state agreement for more service-sharing are actually working. It will be a long reform process, and much will depend on whether the states meet their obligations. But a direction has been set.

Burke this week will be receiving high marks from the unions. Right at the end of the parliamentary sitting he clinched a deal with Senate crossbenchers, notably David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie, to pass key parts of his industrial relations legislation, dealing with labour hire misuse and wage theft. This followed the crossbench earlier wanting the passage before Christmas of several non-controversial measures in the omnibus bill.

Parts of the legislation, covering protections for gig economy and casual workers, remain held up until next year, but Burke has secured more of it this year than seemed likely only a few days ago.

For some other ministers, their end-of-year assessments say “substantial improvement needed”.

Most recently, Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles have struggled with the confronting test thrown at them by the High Court, forcing the release of people from immigration detention.

The government should have been prepared for all eventualities, even if it thought this particular outcome was unlikely. It should have had legislation ready to go. That it did not is as much (or more) the fault of the public servants as of the ministers, but it’s the ministers who have to carry the responsibility.

The sprawling Home Affairs Department appears dysfunctional, with long-term problems and low morale. One of O’Neil’s priorities in coming months has to be to demand it is put into more effective shape. After the sacking of former departmental head Mike Pezzullo for breaching the Public Service Code, O’Neil will be relying on the new secretary, Stephanie Foster (whose appointment was not without some controversy), to drive the bureaucratic changes.

O’Neil, whose vast empire ranges from cyber security to migration and border security, has plenty of potential but a style that usually defaults to the politics. It’s a better look when a minister rations their attacks on their opponents. This government in general and O’Neil in particular too often seem preoccupied with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

O’Neil is about to have another late-year test, when the government releases its migration policy. She’ll be glad of a respite from the ex-detainees imbroglio, but migration is an inherently fraught area. The policy, many months in the making, will have to be well-pitched, with answers to whatever criticisms emerge.

Giles, meanwhile, is in charge of administering the preventative detention scheme the parliament approved on Wednesday – making applications to court for the re-detention of people who previously committed major crimes and are considered to pose high risks of doing so again.

That will apply to only a limited number of the former detainees. If others, who are still in the community, are arrested, Giles will have to deal with bouts of bad publicity. (So far, five have been arrested.)

For a couple of other ministers, it’s been a very difficult year. Minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney found the referendum campaign a constant battle and the defeat shattering. Burney must put that behind her and turn her efforts to beefing up measures for closing the gap, an enormously hard task.

Infrastructure and Transport Minister Catherine King has been on the back foot on two fronts. Her handling of the bid by Qatar Airways for more flights saw her produce an increasing number of explanations for rejecting it but not any of them convincing.

More seriously, her announcement of the government’s cuts to parts of the infrastructure program (though not the total value of the program) has produced blowback from the states. There will be ongoing arguments about the details that will put further pressure on King.

In contrast, ministers such as Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Foreign Minister Penny Wong have travelled well this year. Chalmers has pushed into other areas (especially energy) and is visibly broadening and grooming himself as heir apparent.

As Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister, Richard Marles presents better in government than he did in opposition, although some experts question the adequacy and implementation of his defence policy and his excessive use of VIP planes has brought criticism.

Education Minister Jason Clare performs convincingly but his tests are still to come, especially as Australia grapples with how to improve school outcomes (this week’s PISA results reinforced how imperative this is).

The jury will be out for a long time on the performance of Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, who is wrangling the early stages of the transition to a clean energy economy. The government has the targets and framework in place, but delivery is not straightforward and Bowen can be slow to admit when things are not on track.

Some commentators suggest a reshuffle is needed, but that would seem premature. However, more active prime ministerial and cabinet oversight is certainly required to sharpen the performance of the team.

What about the boss? Anthony Albanese is receiving poor marks just now. But things can change quickly.

This week parliamentarians mourned the death of Peta Murphy, a popular and effective Labor MP who lost a long battle with cancer. A byelection will be held early next year in her Victorian seat of Dunkley, which is on a margin of more than 6%. This real-time electoral test for both Albanese and Dutton could set the political mood in the days leading up to the government’s next budget.

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. Grattan on Friday: winners and losers in end-of-year report card on Albanese ministers – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-winners-and-losers-in-end-of-year-report-card-on-albanese-ministers-219393

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bradley Smith, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, CQUniversity Australia

For many of us, dogs are our best friends. But have you wondered what would happen to your dog if we suddenly disappeared? Can domestic dogs make do without people?

At least 80% of the world’s one billion or so dogs actually live independent, free-ranging lives – and they offer some clues. Who would our dogs be if we weren’t around to influence and care for them?

What are dogs?

Dogs hold the title of the most successful domesticated species on Earth. For millennia they have evolved under our watchful eye. More recently, selective breeding has led to people-driven diversity, resulting in unique breeds ranging from the towering Great Dane to the tiny Chihuahua.

Humanity’s quest for the perfect canine companion has resulted in more than 400 modern dog breeds with unique blends of physical and behavioural traits. Initially, dogs were bred primarily for functional roles that benefited us, such as herding, hunting and guarding. This practice only emerged prominently over the past 200 years.

Some experts suggest companionship is just another type of work humans selected dogs for, while placing a greater emphasis on looks. Breeders play a crucial role in this, making deliberate choices about which traits are desirable, thereby influencing the future direction of breeds.

Are we good for dogs?

We know certain features that appeal to people have serious impacts on health and happiness. For instance, flat-faced dogs struggle with breathing due to constricted nasal passages and shortened airways. This “air hunger” has been likened to experiencing an asthma attack. These dogs are also prone to higher rates of skin, eye and dental problems compared with dogs with longer muzzles.

Many modern dogs depend on human medical intervention to reproduce. For instance, French Bulldogs and Chihuahuas frequently require a caesarean section to give birth, as the puppies’ heads are very large compared with the mother’s pelvic width. This reliance on surgery to breed highlights the profound impact intensive selective breeding has on dogs.

And while domestic dogs can benefit from being part of human families, some live highly isolated and controlled lives in which they have little agency to make choices – a factor that’s important to their happiness.

Read more:
In an Australian first, the ACT may legally recognise animals’ feelings

Dogs without us

Now imagine a world where dogs are free from the guiding hand of human selection and care. The immediate impact would be stark. Breeds that are heavily dependent on us for basic needs such as food, shelter and healthcare wouldn’t do well. They would struggle to adapt, and many would succumb to the harsh realities of a life without human support.

That said, this would probably impact fewer than 20% of all dogs (roughly the percentage living in our homes). Most of the world’s dogs are free-ranging and prevalent across Europe, Africa and Asia.

But while these dogs aren’t domesticated in a traditional sense, they still coexist with humans. As such, their survival depends almost exclusively on human-made resources such as garbage dumps and food handouts. Without people, natural selection would swiftly come into play. Dogs that lack essential survival traits such as adaptability, hunting skills, disease resistance, parental instincts and sociability would gradually decline.

Dogs that are either extremely large or extremely small would also be at a disadvantage, because a dog’s size will impact its caloric needs, body temperature regulation across environments, and susceptibility to predators.

Limited behavioural strategies, such as being too shy to explore new areas, would also be detrimental. And although sterilised dogs might have advantageous survival traits, they would be unable to pass their genes on to future generations.

No more designer breeds

Ultimately, a different type of dog would emerge, shaped by health and behavioural success rather than human desires.

Dogs don’t select mates based on breed, and will readily mate with others that look very different to them when given the opportunity. Over time, distinct dog breeds would fade and unrestricted mating would lead to a uniform “village dog” appearance, similar to “camp dogs” in remote Indigenous Australian communities and dogs seen in South-East Asia.

These dogs typically have a medium size, balanced build, short coats in various colours, and upright ears and tails. However, regional variations such as a shaggier coat could arise due to factors such as climate.

In the long term, dogs would return to a wild canid lifestyle. These “re-wilded” dogs would likely adopt social and dietary behaviours similar to those of their current wild counterparts, such as Australia’s dingoes. This might include living in small family units within defined territories, reverting to an annual breeding season, engaging in social hunting, and attentive parental care (especially from dads).

This transition would be more feasible for certain breeds, particularly herding types and those already living independently in the wild or as village dogs.

What makes a good life for dogs?

In their book A Dog’s World, Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff explore the idea of “doomsday prepping” our dogs for a future without people. They encourage us to give our dogs more agency, and consequently more happiness. This could be as simple as letting them pick which direction to walk in, or letting them take their time when sniffing a tree.

As we reflect on a possible future without dogs, an important question arises: are our actions towards dogs sustainable, in their best interests, and true to their nature? Or are they more aligned with our own desires?

By considering how dogs might live without us, perhaps we can find ways to improve their lives with us.

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

– ref. If humans disappeared, what would happen to our dogs? – https://theconversation.com/if-humans-disappeared-what-would-happen-to-our-dogs-218703

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christian Downie, Associate Professor, Australian National University

Until recently, financing fossil fuel projects has been relatively easy.

But that is slowly changing. At the COP28 climate negotiations yesterday, Australia announced it will sign the Glasgow Statement and will no longer finance international oil, gas and coal projects. Domestic projects are not part of the agreement.

Major Australian allies such as the United States and United Kingdom, as well as 32 other nations and five public banks, made this commitment in 2021. It’s an agreement between governments and public financial agencies such as development banks and export credit agencies to end all new public financing for unabated fossil fuel projects.

By joining, Australia will make it harder to mobilise finance for fossil fuel projects that produce millions of tonnes of emissions, and make it easier to fund renewable energy projects that produce very little.

It’s the latest in a welcome series of signals that the international community is slowly turning off the tap for new fossil fuels.

Phasing down or phasing out?

Australia’s decision to join the agreement comes amid intense negotiations at COP28 in Dubai this week over whether governments will commit to “phasing out” or “phasing down” fossil fuel use.

It might sound like quibbling, but this linguistic distinction carries major implications for global climate change. Phasing out means ending the routine burning of fossil fuels entirely. Phasing down means we will keep burning them but at a reduced rate – and that means some level of fossil fuel investment will continue.

Under the International Energy Agency’s 2050 net zero plan, there are no new oil, natural gas or coal projects beyond those already approved in 2021.

Even reduced levels of fossil fuel investment will derail the possibility of averting global warming’s worst consequences.

Read more:
As disasters and heat intensify, can the world meet the urgency of the moment at the COP28 climate talks?

Why does international public finance for energy matter?

If the world is to limit global average temperature rise to 2°C, we will need financial institutions on board. That’s because current estimates suggest we need A$2.3 trillion every year to 2030 to meet existing targets to build low-carbon and climate-resilient infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries alone.

To source that kind of finance means we need all financial institutions – including state-backed banks which often favour new coal, gas or oil projects – to pull finance out of new fossil fuels and pump it into clean energy.

Australia is a relatively small player when it comes to public energy finance. Our research shows Australia’s official export credit agency, Export Finance Australia, invested $11.45 billion in fossil fuel projects from 2009 to 2021. That sounds like a lot, but it’s peanuts compared with the US and Canadian equivalents, which shelled out A$348 billion and A$560 billion respectively over the same period. Japan, South Korea and China’s agencies each spent more than $100 billion in that period – and show no indication of ending their fossil fuel investments.

Even so, Australia’s commitment is significant because it adds to the growing number of public and private banks internationally that are reconsidering their investment in fossil fuel infrastructure such as new oil pipelines, gas platforms and coal-fired power plants. The move also places greater pressure on Japan and South Korea, the other wealthy democracies in the Asia-Pacific yet to sign the agreement.

Read more:
COP28 president is wrong – science clearly shows fossil fuels must go (and fast)

This is welcome – but long overdue

As climate change damage has intensified over the past two decades, export credit agencies and development banks have been busy pouring tens of billions of dollars a year into fossil fuel projects. It’s not small change – from 2006 to 2022, these funds amount to more than $1.5 trillion. That money has directly led to the construction of countless dirty energy projects around the globe.

In 2020, for instance, the US, UK, Japan, Italy and other nations financially backed Total’s controversial multibillion-dollar liquefied natural gas project in Mozambique, including long-term infrastructure such as offshore drilling wells, offshore pipelines, and port facilities.

Once built, these fossil fuel infrastructure projects can lock in carbon-intensive futures for developing nations. As scientific research has shown, international public finance for coal-fired power plants early in a country’s energy development leads directly to a long-term reliance on fossil fuels.

Worse, as global population growth is heavily concentrated in less developed countries, these are the countries that will have to dramatically increase energy production to meet the needs of their societies. They cannot be locked in to fossil fuels.

To avoid this, green investment must accelerate and displace brown (fossil fuel) investment to avoid a rapid escalation of fossil fuel dependency across the Global South.

In better news, every dollar public banks turn away from fossil fuel projects is a dollar towards the trillions we need invested every year to meet the world’s global clean energy infrastructure goals.

Publicly backed banks play a crucial role in attracting private investment by taking on riskier debts than the market will, especially in developing countries where risk insurance is often needed to help get projects across the line.

Australia’s commitment will be welcomed by our acutely climate-exposed neighbours in the Pacific and give us a stronger position to lead on climate in our region.

The next step will be much harder, but also more significant: making the same commitment at home and actually drying up the pipeline of new gas and coal projects.

Read more:
Vast subsidies keeping the fossil fuel industry afloat should be put to better use

Christian Downie receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Maxfield Peterson receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. COP28: Turning the tap off slowly – why Australia’s decision to end overseas fossil fuel finance matters – https://theconversation.com/cop28-turning-the-tap-off-slowly-why-australias-decision-to-end-overseas-fossil-fuel-finance-matters-219318

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Brown, Senior Research Fellow, La Trobe University

Findings from an extensive review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) have been released with ideas on how to transform it. Led by co-chairs Bruce Bonyhady and Lisa Paul, the review heard from around 10,000 people before making 26 recommendations with 139 supporting actions. Presenting their findings, co-chairs wrote:

We must return to the principle that NDIS eligibility is based first and foremost on functional impairment rather than medical diagnosis.

The review identified challenges including greater than expected growth and unclear criteria for reasonable and necessary supports, “which create complexity, stress, inconsistency and mistrust”.

Key recommendations include:

• National Cabinet to jointly design and fund foundational disability support outside the NDIS
• navigators to help participants get the services they need
• providers to be registered and compliant with new standards
• needs assessments to gauge the impact of disability rather than lists of diagnoses for access
• more consistent housing supports for people with disability
• disability support access for older Australians.

The recommendations follow yesterday’s National Cabinet cost-sharing deal and take in findings from the disability royal commission. The government says it will announce reforms based on the recommendations in 2024. It hopes to constrain annual growth to 8% by 2026.

Read more:
States agree to do more heavy lifting on disability, in exchange for extra health and GST funding

We asked five experts for their initial reaction to the recommendations:

Mark Brown – social researcher

The NDIS review found while the scheme has transformed the lives of thousands of people with disability, it is not efficient or fair. Design flaws in the way the scheme operates mean the NDIS is on its way to being the most expensive disability system in the world.

The idea that disability supports are an ecosystem, and that multiple governments, departments, service sectors, and communities must share responsibility reflects the reality that people with disability are diverse and live in the real world, with all its complexities.

There will be some fears the review panel is recommending a more complicated and confusing system. People with the most complex needs may rightly wonder whether they will fall through the cracks in the interfaces between systems. (Unclear responsibilities have been a major cause of young people becoming needlessly stranded in aged care.) But the current approach, which relies almost solely on individualised funding, has proven to be very complicated in practice.

The panel’s recommendations seem like a reasonable framework for change, but they aren’t a precise blueprint. The effect on people with disability, families, and support workers will depend on the detail and implementation. There are still many difficult conversations to have.

Read more:
What the NDIS needs to do to rebuild trust, in the words of the people who use it

Anne Kavanagh – disability and health

The NDIS review offers a new vision on how to move to a sustainable NDIS that will serve Australians into the future. The establishment of a new Disability Intergovernmental Agreement to provide supports within the NDIS and outside it is welcome. Many people with disability not on the NDIS are missing out on essential supports.

The establishment of national councils and committees to enable people with disability to advise government and people with disability and other experts to monitor performance and assess evidence should lead to greater accountability and access to better quality support.

After ten years we would expect an evidence base on what works. The proposed Disability Research and Evaluation fund must be adequately resourced to address this evidence gap and implement innovative practice.

The focus on the regulation of unregistered providers will be of concern to many people with disability. This has been the way many of us have been able to access the supports we want. It needs to be remembered regulation does not equate to safety. We have seen many registered providers who have perpetrated abuse and neglect on people with disability.

I welcome the increased flexibility in relation home and living supports but it will be important to make sure the requirement to share home and living supports with two other people does not continue the segregated living environments we have been fighting to prevent for so long. Instead I hope this flexibility enables people with disability to make real choices around who they live with and where.

Ensuring people with disability are part of community, often facilitated by independent support workers, provides natural safeguarding against abuse and neglect.

Read more:
NDIS cost scrutiny is intensifying again – the past shows this can harm health and wellbeing for people with disability

Libby Callaway – rehabilitation, ageing and independent living

There is general agreement the NDIS has become the “oasis in the desert” of disability services.

The NDIS review final report recommends a strong focus on strengthening other mainstream systems or “foundational supports” – like the early childhood, education and health systems – for all people with disability. This is encouraging but it will be important to monitor how the funding agreements negotiated via National Cabinet actually deliver enhanced services for people with disability and their families.

Past redirection of disability funding into the NDIS has left large service gaps. People of all ages and abilities lost programs that benefited them, such as state-based aids and equipment libraries or independent living centres. To address this, the NDIS review highlights the need to increase information and capacity building supports across key areas, including assistive technology and housing options.

It will be important to understand more about the vision for “preferred provider” arrangements referred to in the report. The review makes it clear reforms should be implemented in a staged process over five years. Further engagement and co-design with people with disability and their families will be vital to this.

Read more:
Government plans to use NDIS purchasing power to help save billions – but they shouldn’t put products before people

David Trembath – autism and public health

The review has a lot to say about supports for the 20% of Australian children with developmental differences, delay, and disability. It recommends bolstering mainstream services and supports, such as inclusive childcare. That means the majority of these children could have their needs met outside the NDIS in the coming years. This seems like a sensible approach – meeting children and families where they are at and building more inclusive communities. It will require substantial investment, a big shift in thinking, and a strong focus on community-driven solutions.

Funding for individual supports will still be available, but the review recommends access be determined through a more rigorous assessment of children’s functional needs, not simply diagnoses. The focus is on supports for children with the most complex disability needs. Removing the link between diagnosis and access should return attention to what is most important for planning – children’s functional strengths and support needs. It should reduce the challenges many parents face in accessing timely, affordable and appropriate assessment.

Overall, the recommendations are a step in the right direction, provided children and families are at the centre of every decision and change that affects them.

Read more:
New national autism guideline will finally give families a roadmap for therapy decisions

Scott Avery – Indigenous disability research

The barometer for judging the NDIS review is the extent to which it advances a vision for a disability services sector that is anti-ableist and anti-racist, and accommodates a First Nations culture inclusive of people with disability in both word and action.

There is one overarching recommendation that is specific to First Nations people with disability which is for the establishment of an alternative commissioning process to be creating in partnership with First Nations representatives, communities, participants and relevant government agencies. This can be read alongside the recommendations of the disability royal commission to make the NDIS more inclusive of First Nations decision-making in its governance and leadership.

What is understated in this report and others is the extent of the organisational change the NDIS and other organisations in the disability sector need to own to give meaningful effect to the dream of an authentically inclusive scheme.

First Nations people with disability have been lending their wisdom and voice to one inquiry or another for what has seemed like a generation. Each inquiry has delved deeply into the trauma stories from our community, but at the same time has placed decision-making on implementation into a holding pattern. Disability community leadership and self-determination seems to be the consensus recommendation both the NDIS review and the disability royal commission have landed on. Can we now just get on with it please?

Read more:
Indigenous people with disability have a double disadvantage and the NDIS can’t handle that

Mark Brown is an Honorary Research Fellow at La Trobe University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Summer Foundation. He is also an NDIS participant.

Anne Kavanagh receives funding from NHMRC, ARC, MRFF and the Commonwealth government,

David Trembath receives research funding from Autism CRC for research focused on assessing children’s functional strengths and support needs, as well as from the Commonwealth Department of Health, Medical Research Future Fund, and Playgroup NSW Inc. His position at Griffith University is co-funded by CliniKids, Telethon Kids Institute. David has family members who access the NDIS.

Libby Callaway receives funding from the Commonwealth Government Department of Health and Ageing and Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. She is the voluntary President of the Australian Rehabilitation and Assistive Technology Association and a voluntary Board Member of the Homer Hack.

Scott Avery is a profoundly deaf Aboriginal educator and researcher from the Worimi people. This commentary are provide in am independent capacity and are not intended to represent the views of any other person or organisation in any official capacity. Dr Scott Avery receives research funding from the First Peoples Disability Network under the First Nations Disability Sector Strengthening initiative under the National Agreement for Closing the Gap, that is administered by the National Indigenous Insurance Agency. He is a member of the First Nations Advisory Group of the National Disability Insurance Agency. He is a Director on the Board of disability service provider Achieve Australia.

– ref. Recommendations to reboot the NDIS have finally been released. 5 experts react – https://theconversation.com/recommendations-to-reboot-the-ndis-have-finally-been-released-5-experts-react-215805

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Plum, Senior Research Fellow in Applied Labour Economics, Auckland University of Technology

New Zealand has made substantial progress on promoting LGBTQ+ rights over the past 20 years, including legalising same-sex civil unions in 2004, legalising same-sex marriage in 2013, and banning conversion practices in 2022.

One thing missing, however, is a clear view of the employment prospects and experiences of the LGBTQ+ population.

Most studies from overseas show varying income patterns, with gay men generally earning less than heterosexual men, and lesbian women paid more than heterosexual women.

Our new research provides the first empirical evidence of the relationship between minority sexual orientation and the labour market earnings of New Zealand adults. And it looks like the patterns seen overseas are being replicated locally.

Identifying LGBTQ+ couples

One of the biggest challenges for empirical research such as ours is the lack of relevant data on the LGBTQ+ population. Barring a few nationally representative surveys, there aren’t many sources of economic data that allow identification of individuals belonging to the Rainbow+ community.

To address this information gap, we used various administrative data sets in Stats NZ’s Integrated Data Infrastructure. Specifically, we used data from the 2013 and 2018 Censuses, which included a household roster with detailed information on relationships among individuals.

Read more:
We asked same-gender couples how they share the ‘mental load’ at home. The results might surprise you

This allowed us to identify households with two adults of the same sex, where the second adult is described as the spouse or de-facto partner of the person completing the forms. We compared this with individuals in different-sex relationships (as opposed to heterosexual, as some partners may identify as bisexual).

Additionally, our analysis focused on full-time working adults aged between 25 and 64, who were unlikely to be pursuing further education during the period of our analysis.

Earning profile by sexual orientation

We linked our sample to the Inland Revenue’s individual tax records, which have detailed information on labour market earnings.

Individuals in same-sex couples appeared to be younger, more likely to have a bachelor’s degree, more likely to live in the urban areas of Auckland or Wellington, and less likely to be married than individuals in different-sex couples. We accounted for these differences in our main analysis.

We found that women in same-sex couples earn 6-7% more than similarly situated women in different-sex couples. For men, the opposite pattern emerged. Men in same-sex couples earned significantly less than otherwise similar men in different-sex couples by an average difference of 6-7%.

We also looked into different sub-groups, such as the marital status of the couple, the duration of cohabitation, or the location of residence and so on.

Importantly, there was no meaningful change in the earnings differences from 2013 to 2018, despite continued improvement in societal attitudes toward sexual minorities.

We also found the earnings differences were larger for married individuals than for people in de-facto relationships for both men and women in same-sex couples.

The earnings differences were smaller for younger individuals (under 45 years old) for both men and women in same-sex couples, compared to their counterparts in different-sex couples. The earnings deficit for men in same-sex couples was also significantly smaller in major cities like Auckland and Wellington, than in the rest of the country.

Gaps in the data

The gaps in available data mean our study has some limitations. Firstly, we do not have direct information about people’s sexual orientation.

Also, we were unable to identify single or non-partnered sexual minorities whose labour market experiences may differ. Hopefully, results from the 2023 Census will provide new insights. For the first time, this year’s census included questions about gender and sexual identity.

Finally, the data used to identify same-sex couples depends on individuals reporting they are in a same-sex romantic relationship, which may be under-reported due to stigma.

The road ahead

Empirical research documenting the wellbeing of Aotearoa’s LGBTQ+ population is important from a policy perspective. For example, there is ample evidence of significant disparities in the mental health and wellbeing of Aotearoa’s Rainbow+ youth. There have been recent efforts to address the common data-related challenges that will help inform these policies.

Read more:
How parenthood continues to cost women more than men

Our study is part of a much wider ongoing international collaboration with the LGBTQ+ Policy Lab at Vanderbilt University.

The aim is to understand the experiences and life outcomes of individuals belonging to the Rainbow+ community. We hope to develop a knowledge base that taps into the social, economic, physical and mental wellbeing of sexual and gender minorities in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Understanding the experiences of this community will help us build on the progress of the past two decades to create a more inclusive Aotearoa New Zealand.

Alexander Plum received funding from the Health Research Council (HRC).

The views here are the authors’ own and do not reflect those of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Federal
Reserve System, or Statistics New Zealand.

– ref. Sexual orientation and earnings appear to be linked – but patterns differ for NZ men and women – https://theconversation.com/sexual-orientation-and-earnings-appear-to-be-linked-but-patterns-differ-for-nz-men-and-women-218507

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James D Metzger, Senior Lecturer in Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney

How many times have you booked travel – like a cruise or a tour – and simply clicked that you’ve read and agreed to the terms and conditions for your trip without actually reading them?

What if something went wrong on your trip and it turned out the terms you didn’t read prevented you from suing in certain courts?

This was just one problem faced by some of the passengers on the now infamous Ruby Princess cruise ship, which was supposed to be making a pleasant trip from Sydney to New Zealand and back in March 2020, but instead became the location for one of the most well-known early outbreaks of COVID.

Now, the High Court has found that consumers can be protected even if they haven’t fully read their terms and even if they were outside Australia when they accepted them.

Read more:
Stormy seas ahead: confidence in the cruise industry has plummeted due to COVID-19

Class action against cruise lines

As a result of the outbreak, Susan Karpik brought a class action suit in the Federal Court of Australia against Carnival plc and Princess Cruise Lines Ltd, the owners and operators of the ship.

The suit alleged that Princess had not taken appropriate safety precautions to best ensure passengers did not get COVID while on board. Karpik won her suit on her own claims, with the Federal Court finding Princess was liable to her, including for damages related to her husband’s death from COVID.

This was also a win for the other 2,600 passengers, who can now rely on the Federal Court’s ruling that safety precautions were not taken.

Read more:
If you want to avoid ‘giving away your first born’ make sure you read the terms and conditions before signing contracts

Karpik and most of the Ruby Princess passengers were subject to Australian terms and conditions for their travel. However, nearly 700 passengers were subject to US terms and conditions.

These terms stated that any lawsuit related to travel on the Ruby Princess could only be brought in US Federal Court in Los Angeles, California, and that passengers were not allowed to sue in a class action – known as a class action waiver.

This means any lawsuit could only be brought individually, something that could be very expensive for each of the passengers. Princess argued that these passengers were bound by the US terms and therefore could not be part of the Australian class action.

International complications

The 700 passengers were represented by Patrick Ho, a Canadian citizen who had booked his cruise through a Canadian travel agent. He argued he was not made sufficiently aware of the US terms for them to apply. He also argued the class action waiver was unfair under Australian law and so could not be enforced.

Judge Stewart of the Federal Court agreed with some of these arguments and found the class action waiver was unfair under the Australian consumer law and that Ho could remain in the class.

But Princess then appealed to the Full Federal Court, which disagreed with Judge Stewart and found Ho had sufficient notice of the US terms before taking his trip and had agreed to them.

The court also found no unfairness in any of the terms under Australian law. This meant that Ho – and the 700 other passengers – could not be part of the Australian class, or any other class action.

The passengers then appealed that decision in the High Court.

What did the High Court decide?

Yesterday, the High Court unanimously ruled in favour of the passengers. In so doing, it put companies doing business in Australia on notice that Australia’s consumer protection laws apply both inside and outside the country’s borders.

It decided the class action waiver was unfair to the passengers. This was because Australian consumer law prohibits unfair consumer contracts and because the express terms of that law apply to companies doing business in Australia, regardless of whether they are headquartered in Australia or overseas.

As the High Court explained, a price of a company doing business in Australia is that it must adhere to Australia’s consumer protection laws.

As the High Court made clear, the consumer laws exist for the protection of people who enter into contracts with companies.

Parts of those contracts may be considered unfair where there are terms that are one-sidedly beneficial for the company, where that benefit is not necessary to protect a legitimate interest of the company, and where the consumer is harmed in some way by the existence of the benefit.

All these elements were present in the US terms as applied to Ho.

As the High Court found, the class action waiver was only beneficial to Princess. The only interest served was to reduce passengers’ ability to sue as a class (and therefore Princess’s need to defend itself against such a suit) and that Ho would be harmed by not being able to be a part of a legitimate Australian class action.

The High Court further found that since the class action waiver was unfair, there were good reasons not to enforce the additional term that all suits had to be brought in US courts in California.

This decision stands as a strong protection for consumers entering into agreements with companies doing business in Australia. It also makes class actions in Australian courts more available for consumers who might benefit from the protections the Australian consumer laws offer.

It is still a good idea to read your terms and conditions before agreeing to anything. But as the High Court has just ruled, you may not be completely out of luck if you don’t.

James D Metzger 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. Nobody reads T&C’s – but the High Court’s Ruby Princess decision shows consumer law may protect us anyway – https://theconversation.com/nobody-reads-tandcs-but-the-high-courts-ruby-princess-decision-shows-consumer-law-may-protect-us-anyway-219229

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pauline McGuirk, Senior Professor of Urban Geography, University of Wollongong

Heavyweight international players from the OECD to Bloomberg Philanthropies and the United Nations have in recent years prescribed “innovation” as a solution for the many challenges city governments face.

Innovation is a notoriously slippery term. For city government it generally involves deliberately questioning how things are done, leading to new and hopefully better ways of working. Innovation is meant to help resolve the world’s thorniest public policy challenges — from housing affordability to the climate crisis — but also to make cities more liveable through more effective, responsive and efficient city government.

But what do these innovations involve? Who do they involve? How do they work? Indeed, do they work? And what are the implications for city government?

Our research team has investigated these questions in conversation with practitioners from around the world. We present these conversations in a new podcast mini-series (transcripts are here).

Read more:
Australia, we need to talk about who governs our city-states

3 keys to successful innovation

Our research identified three dimensions as critical for city government innovation:

• new institutions that are “licensed to innovate”
• approaches based in design thinking
• nurturing more creative bureaucracies.

First, urban innovation units have become a poster child for innovative city government. Examples include the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) and Bologna’s Office of Civic Imagination.

These units are usually modestly sized teams within city government. They are licensed to experiment with new processes, new services or new ways of developing urban policy.

These units generally aim to unsettle “business as usual” and work across habitual divisions of labour between departments and functions. They tend to draw in new partners, whether in the private, community or philanthropic sector. The emphasis is on collaborating to get things done, rather than following well-established rules and routines to deliver public services.

Such approaches challenge city government norms. They work with an explicit tolerance of failure and learning until a version of a policy, or a way of delivering a service, begins to work better. As one of our interviewees said:

Our return on investment here is [… ]so much greater if we fail and then change ‘fail’ to ‘learn’.

There’s an emphasis on building trust between the various partners, within and beyond government. As another interviewee said:

Trust and social networks turn out to be the greatest lubricant for innovation.

Creating a narrative about what innovative approaches can achieve is also important. “Showcasing the wins” demands new storytelling resources and skills for city staff.

There is no predictable template that transfers smoothly across all locations. These units need to navigate unique local circumstances, conflicting priorities and political sticking points that crop up in different ways in different places.

The bigger question, then, is how effectively can the wider “warts and all” lessons from these units be scaled up across the full scope of city government functions?

Read more:
All the signs point to our big cities’ need for democratic, metro-scale governance

Design thinking that goes beyond ‘usual suspects’

While we may not traditionally associate city government with design, our participants often described their work in terms such as human-centred design, co-design, co-creation and prototyping.

Experimental and iterative practices underpinned their work: that is, testing a policy or service-design idea, seeing what works and what doesn’t, tweaking and testing again, and so on. Learning from the process is a priority.

And that learning was derived from input from more than “the usual suspects”. At its best, design thinking is unashamedly focused on people, whether they work in city departments or are citizens impacted by the problem in focus.

This type of thinking, one participant said, is

about new ways of including and engaging people in program design and policy design […] folks who I think traditionally are either not involved in the design process or haven’t been engaged in a way that feels really authentic.

Read more:
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Developing a creative bureaucracy

Our research revealed practitioners commonly understand innovation in city government as being about creative problem-solving. This is some way from the stereotype of the rule-bound city government bureaucrat.

In response to perceptions that city governments aren’t adaptable, effective or open enough, we see efforts to unleash the creativity of their workers to solve problems. Berlin even has an annual Creative Bureaucracy Festival.

We found evidence of a wider shift towards a creative problem-solving mindset. One interviewee described her job as:

always just solving problems and putting yourself in the shoes of whoever you are dealing with […] They have a problem and our obligation is to solve it, by whatever means necessary.

The desire for adaptive, responsive, open city government is changing recruitment priorities. Our interviewees told us about seeking staff with qualities like empathy, persuasion, charisma, agility and a history of enabling teams to create solutions. Recruiting for so-called soft skills, not the hard skills of domain-specific expertise, is part of an effort to change the culture and bureaucratic capacities of city government.

As the saying goes, personnel is policy. Who city government employs largely dictates what it can do.

Read more:
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Beware ‘innovation washing’

Much remains to be learned about the long-term implications of city governments working in “innovation mode”. Clear-eyed evaluation is needed to avoid “innovation washing”: the notion that innovation is always a good thing and always delivers improvement.

Our research has found city government innovation most often concerns changes to the everyday business of running the city. This includes more efficient processes, new ways to gather ideas from the community, new collaborations that allow resource sharing.

These innovations may not be a silver bullet for intractable urban problems or save the planet, but they matter for everyday life in the city.

Pauline McGuirk receives funding from the Australian Research Council, DP200100176 Innovating Urban Governance: Practices for Enhanced Urban Futures, the study on which this article is based.

Laura Goh receives funding from the Australian Research Council, DP200100176.

Robyn Dowling receives funding from the Australian Research Council, DP200100176.

Sophia Maalsen receives funding from the Australian Research Council, DP200100176.

Tom Baker receives funding from the Australian Research Council, DP200100176.

– ref. Creative bureacracy is possible. Here are 3 things cities do to foster innovative local government – https://theconversation.com/creative-bureacracy-is-possible-here-are-3-things-cities-do-to-foster-innovative-local-government-218997

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karleen Gribble, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Western Sydney University

Extreme heat events are becoming more frequent and intense in Australia. This can cause illness or worsen existing conditions. During hot weather, hospital admissions and deaths increase.

Babies are among those particularly vulnerable.

Looking after a baby during extreme heat takes a little planning and a lot of patience. Here are five practical tips.

Read more:
Extreme weather is landing more Australians in hospital – and heat is the biggest culprit

Why are babies particularly at risk?

Babies are more vulnerable to extreme heat for several reasons.

They have a higher metabolic rate than older children and adults, so their body generates more internal heat.

They also have a larger surface area compared with the volume of their body. So they adsorb heat more easily from the environment.

Their sweat glands are not fully developed. So they cannot lose heat by sweating as easily as older children and adults.

Babies also have to rely on adults to keep them safe when the weather is hot. They cannot move to a cooler place or drink more fluids without help from their parents or caregivers.

1. Plan ahead

Knowing if hot weather is coming allows you to prepare and avoid, or reduce, your baby’s exposure to heat.

So keep an eye on forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology (including its heatwave warning service). Your local ABC radio station broadcasts emergency information, and you can search for emergency conditions on the ABC website.

Read more:
Worried about heat and fire this summer? Here’s how to prepare

2. Keep your home cool

On hot days, close windows, blinds and curtains early in the day and keep outside doors shut. If you live in a multi-storey building, stay downstairs where the air will be cooler.

Air conditioning will keep you cool if you have it. Staying in one part of the house and closing doors to the rest, can make air conditioning more effective and reduce your energy use. Take care to ensure rooms do not become too cold and ensure air flow from air conditioners or fans is not directed at your baby. That’s because babies also have difficulty regulating their temperature in the cold and their temperature can quickly drop.

Power blackouts are common during extreme heat events. So, think about what you’ll do if you can’t use air conditioning because of a blackout.

If you cannot keep cool at home, try to find somewhere you can go that is air conditioned. This could be a public building, such as a library or shopping centre, or the home of a friend or relative.

Some communities have “heat havens” or “heat shelters” where vulnerable people, including pregnant women and families with babies, can go during extreme heat.

Read more:
Evacuating with a baby? Here’s what to put in your emergency kit

3. Take care if you need to go out

If you do have to go out, ensure your baby is sheltered from the sun and heat as much as possible.

Use a sunshade on car windows to protect you baby from direct sunlight. Never leave a baby or young child in a parked car.

You can help keep your baby cool in their pram by covering it with a light, damp cloth and spraying it with water every 15-20 minutes. Don’t let the cloth dry out completely because this can increase the temperature in the pram.

Once the day starts to cool down, playing with water in a shady spot outside is a great way to cool down. Always supervise babies in or near water.

4. Offer babies extra fluids

Babies need extra fluids during hot weather, but their pattern of feeding can change when it’s hot.

For breastfed babies this often means they start fussing or crying at the breast after just a few minutes, then want to breastfeed again as soon as 30-40 minutes later.

Mothers may worry their breasts have run out of milk, but they haven’t. These short feeds provide milk that is higher in water than a longer breastfeed.

Just like adults, babies don’t want to eat a full meal when they’re hot. Once the day starts to cool down, most babies will have several longer, more satisfying feeds.

Similarly, formula-fed babies will often take less milk at a feed during the heat of the day but look for another feed sooner than usual.

Instead of trying to make a baby finish a whole bottle, try splitting their usual feed into two. If the baby finishes the first bottle, you can top it up from the second bottle or keep it in the fridge and warm it up again when they start looking hungry again. Just like breastfed babies, they will usually be looking for slightly bigger feeds as the day starts to cool.

Do NOT give babies under six months old water as this can make them very ill. Their kidneys are not mature and cannot handle the extra water.

You can tell your baby is getting enough fluids if they have five heavy, wet disposable nappies in 24 hours, their urine is pale yellow and doesn’t have a strong smell.

If this isn’t happening, your baby needs more fluids and you need to offer more frequent feeds.

From six months, babies can be given small amounts of cooled boiled water in addition to breastmilk or formula. You can also offer foods containing lots of water, such as watermelon or strawberries, or iceblocks made with breastmilk, formula or diluted fruit juice. Chewing on a cold, wet face washer is another way older babies can get extra fluids.

Remember to look after yourself when the weather gets hot. Have a glass of water at least every time your baby feeds. If you are breastfeeding and the heat makes skin contact uncomfortable for you and your baby, you can put a light cloth or damp hand-towel between you, or you can lie down to feed so your baby is next to your body instead of on it.

Read more:
Health Check: how do I tell if I’m dehydrated?

5. Prepare for sleep

Everyone struggles to sleep in hot weather. A lukewarm bath may help your baby cool off enough to fall asleep. However, avoid cold baths as your baby’s temperature may drop too much.

Nobody sleeps well on hot nights and we all need to catch up on sleep when the weather cools.

In extreme heat, if your baby won’t feed well, is limp or floppy, has dull sunken eyes and a sunken soft spot in the skull (fontanelle), seek medical treatment straight away. In an emergency, call 000.

Karleen Gribble is project lead on the Australian Breastfeeding Association’s Community Protection for Infants and Young Children in Bushfire Emergencies Project and is an Australian Breastfeeding Association Educator and Counsellor. Karleen is also on the steering committee of the international interagency collaboration the Infant and Young Child Feeding in Emergencies Core Group and has been involved in the development of international guidance and training on infant and young child feeding in emergencies for over a decade.

Michelle Hamrosi is the community engagement officer on the Australian Breastfeeding Association’s Community Protection for Infants and Young Children in Bushfire Emergencies Project. Michelle is also a general practitioner and an international board certified lactation consultant. Michelle volunteers as a breastfeeding counsellor and group leader for the Australian Breastfeeding Association Eurobodalla group. She is also a member of Doctors for the Environment, Climate and Health Alliance and Australian Parents for Climate Action.

Nina Chad is an infant and young child feeding consultant for the World Health Organization. She is a member of the Public Health Association of Australia, the World Public Health Nutrition Association, and the Australian Breastfeeding Association.

– ref. 5 expert tips on how to look after your baby in a heatwave – https://theconversation.com/5-expert-tips-on-how-to-look-after-your-baby-in-a-heatwave-216906