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

The inquiry commissioned by the Berejiklian government into the Ruby Princess COVID-19 disaster has laid blame on NSW health officials, who made “inexcusable” and “inexplicable” mistakes. It also exonerated the Australian Border Force.

In the report, the federal government was sharply criticised for refusing to allow an official to appear before the inquiry, with commissioner Bret Walker SC saying this belied Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s promise of full cooperation.

Some 2,700 passengers from the Carnival Australia cruise ship were allowed to disembark on March 19 before the test results for COVID-19 had come back. The passengers, some of whom had displayed respiratory symptoms, scattered widely, spreading the virus. This led to hundreds of cases, with some 28 deaths linked to the cluster.

Walker found serious mistakes and misjudgements on the part of health officials. He said that in light of all the information the NSW health expert panel had, “the decision to assess the risk of the Ruby Princess as ‘low risk’ – meaning, in effect, ‘do nothing’ – is as inexplicable as it is unjustifiable. It was a serious mistake”.

It should have been assumed there were possible infected passengers “who could transmit the virus and perhaps spark an outbreak of infection, if no steps were taken to prevent or limit that outcome”.

Passengers should not have been allowed to spread through the community until test results were known.

“The delay in obtaining test results for the swabs taken from the Ruby Princess on the morning of 19 March is inexcusable. Those swabs should have been tested immediately,” Walker said.

“The failure to await test results on 19 March is a large factor in this commission’s findings as to the mistakes and misjudgements that caused the scattering of infected passengers.”

Walker criticised the cruise line for not having enough swabs aboard but said, given this, there should have been dockside swabbing.

There has been speculation about whether the Australian Border Force had any responsibility for the disaster, but Walker stressed “neither the ABF nor any ABF officers played any part in the mishap”.

“The relevant legislative provisions make it crystal clear that the Australian Border Force (ABF), despite its portentous title, has no relevant responsibility for the processes by which, by reference to health risks to the Australian community, passengers were permitted to disembark,” he said.

But Walker was blunt about the federal government’s attitude to the inquiry. “The one fly in the ointment so far as assistance to this commission goes, is the stance of the Commonwealth.

“A summons to a Commonwealth officer to attend and give evidence about the grant of pratique for the Ruby Princess was met with steps towards proceedings in the High Court of Australia.

“Quite how this met the prime minister’s early assurance of full cooperation with the commission escapes me.

“This waste of time and resources, when time, in particular, was always pressing, was most regrettable.

“It seems that this practical approach was swamped by a determination never to concede, apparently on constitutional grounds, the power of a state parliament to compel evidence to be provided to a state executive inquiry (such as a royal commission or a special commission of inquiry) by the Commonwealth or any of its officers, agencies or authorities.”

Labor’s shadow minister for home affairs, Kristina Keneally, said that on March 15, Morrison had said he was putting in place “bespoke arrangements” for arriving cruise ships.

“He promised cruise ships would be ‘directly under the command of the Australian Border Force’.

“What ‘bespoke arrangements’ did Scott Morrison put in place for arriving cruise ships? This report shows there were none,” Keneally said.

– ref. Ruby Princess inquiry blames NSW health officials for debacle – https://theconversation.com/ruby-princess-inquiry-blames-nsw-health-officials-for-debacle-144512

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Janak Rogers, Associate Lecturer, Broadcast Journalism, RMIT University

A Johannes Leak cartoon published in The Australian today, in which US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is depicted calling his vice-presidential running mate Kamala Harris a “little brown girl”, has drawn widespread condemnation.

Several Australian politicians, including former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, have described the cartoon as racist, as have a suite of journalists and media observers (ex-Labor leader Mark Latham said he loved it).

I am firmly in the camp that thinks this is a racist and sexist cartoon. As a journalism lecturer with an ongoing interest in the diversity of Australian media, I think today’s outrage shows there is still much work ahead in making newsrooms less overwhelmingly white.

Context matters

My own view is this cartoon should never have been published, and it has no place in Australian media. I’m glad to see Australian politicians and public figures coming forward and saying it’s unacceptable.

The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Chris Dore, told Guardian Australia that Leak’s cartoon “was quoting Biden’s words” from a tweet the US politician issued this week about young girls drawing inspiration from Harris.

“When Johannes used those words, expressed in a tweet by Biden yesterday, he was highlighting Biden’s language and apparent attitudes, not his own,” Dore told Guardian Australia. “The intention of the commentary in the cartoon was to ridicule racism, not perpetuate it.”

I think Dore’s explanation is unconvincing. Biden’s tweet is clearly referring to girls who look up to Harris. It’s a massive sidestep to say Biden is talking down to his recent vice-presidential pick. The contexts are totally different.

I cannot imagine The Australian published today’s cartoon without knowing it would provoke outrage – and that this outrage would delight parts of their audience. Part of the delight is in the outrage it provokes.

Read more: Australia’s media has been too white for too long. This is how to bring more diversity to newsrooms

Australia looks backward

It’s hardly the first time, either, that a racist cartoon published in our mainstream media makes us look backward and out of step as a country.

Think back to the embarrassing episode of blackface on Hey Hey It’s Saturday in 2009, or Johannes Leak’s father Bill’s cartoons in the past, and the Herald Sun’s widely condemned Mark Knight cartoon depiction of Serena Williams in 2018. (It should be noted, the Press Council ruled the latter “non-racist” and Knight defended it – unconvincingly – by saying he had “absolutely no knowledge” of the Jim Crow-era cartoons of African-Americans.)

These examples show the work of making sure Australian newsrooms are diverse is ongoing.

There’s still so much room for improvement when it comes to editorial decisions, reporting and making sure we have a range of stories told about who we are as a country. That hasn’t been done well so far in Australia and cannot be done well while the media is largely dominated by white men.

As I wrote in an earlier Conversation article, despite a quarter of Australians being born overseas and nearly half having at least one parent who was born overseas, our media organisations remain blindingly white.

A 2016 PriceWaterhouseCoopers report found 82.7% of Australia’s media workers speak just one language, and speak only English at home. There’s a high prevalence of media workers in the inner Sydney suburbs, it found, concluding that a lack of diversity – in ethnicity, gender and age – is holding back industry growth.

Unless these trends are addressed, we will continue to see work like Leak’s cartoon making it through the gate.

Read more: The Herald Sun’s Serena Williams cartoon draws on a long and damaging history of racist caricature

A long history

There’s a long history of racist cartoons in Australian media. What’s different is the response. Today’s cartoon has blown up on Twitter — and yes, I realise it is a place closely watched by Australian politicians and media people but largely ignored by most Australians — but at least the online outcry allows some kind of accountability.

In the past, the media could publish racist cartoons without being called to account. These days, the pushback is manifesting in real time.

Should we all have just shaken our heads and ignored it? I don’t think so. Once something like that is published, the horse has bolted and you have to respond. I think collectively ignoring a racist cartoon won’t remove its prominence or significance.

We are forced to revisit this debate every time a racist cartoon or article is published, or a racist comment put to air. I hope that by revisiting it forcefully enough and by making these points enough times, the conversation moves forward and we can make some progress. I also hope racist cartoons are never published in Australia’s mainstream media again. But I won’t be holding my breath.

Read more: Racist reporting still rife in Australian media

– ref. The Australian’s racist Kamala Harris cartoon shows why diversity in newsrooms matters – https://theconversation.com/the-australians-racist-kamala-harris-cartoon-shows-why-diversity-in-newsrooms-matters-144503

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Esterman, Professor of Biostatistics, University of South Australia

Security guards at Melbourne’s quarantine hotels have been widely blamed for Victoria’s current outbreak of COVID-19.

Reports have suggested they mixed inappropriately with people under quarantine, and did not properly follow instructions around infection control.

But late yesterday we heard the first positive case was in fact a night manager at Rydges on Swanston, one of the hotels at the centre of the quarantine bungle. We don’t know how this person became infected, but there’s no suggestion it was a result of any improper behaviour.

This night manager has now become known as “patient zero” in Victoria’s second wave of coronavirus infections. But what does this term actually mean?

The beginning of the chain of infections

The first case in a chain of infections is popularly called “patient zero”. However, “patient zero” is not a very precise term.

In epidemiological language, we call the first case in an outbreak to come to the attention of investigators the “index case”. The actual individual who introduced the disease at the start of the outbreak is called the “primary case”.

According to these definitions, because the night manager was the first person recorded as being infected at the hotel (apart from the guests, who of course were already under quarantine), he or she would be the index case. However, the night manager was also the person who started the chain of infections, so he or she was also the primary case.

The one thing the night manager is not, however, is “patient zero”. That expression should really be reserved for the first human ever to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 (the coronavirus that causes COVID-19).

Origins of patient zero

The expression “patient zero” originated from the HIV epidemic in the United States.

Reports emerged in early 1982 of sexual links between several gay men with AIDS in Los Angeles, and investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) interviewed these men for the names of their sexual contacts.

The CDC gave each of the cases pseudonyms, and the person they eventually identified as the first to have the disease had a moniker beginning with the letter “O”.

This was later mistakenly interpreted as a zero, and so we got the expression “patient zero” for the first known case of a disease.

Read more: Playing the COVID-19 blame game may feel good, but it could come at a cost — the government’s credibility

Why finding patient zero is important

It’s important for epidemiologists to find the first known case because it helps work out how the outbreak occurred, and gives us an idea of how to prevent further outbreaks in the future.

For example, scientists believe the COVID-19 pandemic started in the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. If this proves to be correct (an international investigation is underway to determine this), authorities may choose to close wet markets, or at least better regulate them to prevent future outbreaks.

Beyond “patient zero” in the sense of the first ever case of a disease, it’s also important to find the first case in each particular outbreak.

In the case of the Rydges hotel night manager, this person would clearly have been infected by one of the hotel’s quarantined guests. Authorities now need to determine exactly how, where and when this person became infected, so they can tighten procedures to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Read more: Melbourne’s hotel quarantine bungle is disappointing but not surprising. It was overseen by a flawed security industry

New Zealand is in a similar situation with its current COVID-19 outbreak. Until health authorities can work out who the primary case is, it will be very difficult to determine where the infection came from, and what actions they must take to ensure it’s not repeated.

Potentially, the primary case in this outbreak could have picked it up from a contaminated surface, a breakdown in quarantine regulations, or simply an asymptomatic person moving around in the community.

A political blame game

Unfortunately, finding out how Victoria’s second-wave outbreak started seems to have become a political blame game rather than a serious attempt to prevent it happening again.

The current finger-pointing is not only counterproductive — it could easily see the night manager designated as patient zero unfairly stigmatised, when that person is most likely blameless.

Richard McKay, a Cambridge academic who has written extensively on the concept of patient zero, captured the issue perfectly in an earlier Conversation article:

Writing of a patient zero is a damaging red herring that distracts from constructive efforts to contain the epidemic. Let’s wash our hands of this toxic phrase.

Read more: Patient zero: why it’s such a toxic term

– ref. Finding the source of an outbreak is important. But the term ‘patient zero’ is a problem – https://theconversation.com/finding-the-source-of-an-outbreak-is-important-but-the-term-patient-zero-is-a-problem-144493

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Adjunct Professor, School of Communications, La Trobe University

The normalisation of diplomatic ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates has variously been described as a “breakthrough” and an important staging moment towards a comprehensive Middle East peace.

These conclusions are, at best, premature.

Normalisation of relations between Israel and an important Gulf state is a highly significant development whose fallout is unpredictable. What seems clear is that the UAE initiative will further deepen a regional divide.

In the Middle East, historic shifts rarely take place without unforeseen consequences. Israel’s pledge not to go ahead with the annexation of one-third of the West Bank and the Jordan Valley for the time being will be cold comfort for the Palestinians.

What has been exposed by the normalisation agreement between Israel and the UAE, brokered by Washington, is acceptance of the arguments for a regional buffer to counter Iran’s growing power and influence.

This is a marriage of convenience.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

It should go without saying that absent Iran’s growing security threat to Gulf states, it’s doubtful such a normalisation of ties would have taken place outside a comprehensive Middle East peace.

The latest development bears out one of the Arab world’s stock standard sayings: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

In other words, an Iranian threat to the UAE and its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council members has brought about an accord with Israel that would previously have been unthinkable.

This is not to say this development is unexpected.

Israel has gradually broadened its informal diplomatic contacts with Gulf states in recent years to the point where little attempt has been made to disguise these contacts.

Read more: Israel suspends formal annexation of the West Bank, but its controversial settlements continue

These interactions included a visit by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Oman in 2018.

In all of this, a fault line in the Middle East is likely to deepen between Sunni Muslim states and Iran, as well as that country’s allies in Syria and in Lebanon.

These Sunni states, led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States in collaboration with Israel, are building a buffer against Iran.

It may be simplistic to say this, but a die has been cast.

What will other Gulf states do?

Of course, it remains to be seen whether regional friends and erstwhile enemies will remain steadfast in their new commitments.

In the shifting sands of Middle East power politics, today’s friends can be tomorrow’s enemies.

If Israel and the UAE are the betrothed in a marriage of convenience, the Trump White House is the matchmaker. Behind the scenes, Saudi Arabia, the dominant Sunni state in the Gulf, will have encouraged the Emiratis to take the first step

Time will tell how quickly other Gulf states will follow. These Arab fiefdoms will be assessing fallout before taking action themselves.

Among the principal aims of US Middle East policy since President Donald Trump came to power has been to broker improved ties between Israel and America’s Arab allies in the Gulf.

Read more: Israel’s proposed annexation of the West Bank could bring a ‘diplomatic tsunami’

This has been part of a wider Trump Middle East peace plan to bring about the “deal of the century”, as the president calls it, that would end decades of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Trump officials believe Gulf states could be more fully engaged in exerting pressure on Palestinians to make concessions that might enable progress towards such a deal.

The UAE and its fellow Gulf states have been among principal donors to the Palestinian movement over many years. Their funding, for example, helped establish and sustain the Palestine Liberation Organisation.

However, times change. Oil-producing Gulf states have much less money to splash around given the demands of their own expanding populations. The collapse in oil prices has not helped.

Where does this leave the Palestinians?

In any case, Arab states more generally have found the Palestinian issue increasingly a distraction from their immediate concern of keeping Iran at bay.

By and large, these states paid lip service in their criticism of the Trump “deal of the century” when it was unveiled in January. Previously, their reaction would have been one of outright rejection.

In summary, the peace plan demanded the Palestinians set aside their long-held dream of a Palestinian state. Instead, they were asked to accept semi-autonomous enclaves in Israeli-controlled territories more or less in perpetuity

Needless to say this was rejected.

All this leaves the much-weakened Palestinian movement in a bind. The UAE’s decisions will be viewed by its leaders as one more betrayal of their cause in a long list going back to the Balfour declaration of 1917. In that declaration, Britain promised the Jews a homeland in Palestine.

The question for the Palestinians in light of what is effectively and conspicuously a collapse in Arab solidarity in rejection of Israel is what options might be available to them.

Initially, Palestinian reaction has been to decry the UAE’s actions. The Palestinian ambassador to the UAE has been recalled.

However, these sorts of responses don’t amount to a sustainable long-term strategy for a movement that is both divided and tired. What would seem to be required is a closing of ranks among Palestinians under a younger, more dynamic leadership.

It is long past time for vestiges of the PLO’s historic leadership to move aside to be replaced by a new generation.

Read more: What constitutes fair and unfair criticism of Israel?

– ref. Marriage of convenience: what does the historic Israel-UAE agreement mean for Middle East peace? – https://theconversation.com/marriage-of-convenience-what-does-the-historic-israel-uae-agreement-mean-for-middle-east-peace-144495

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Hooker, Senior Lecturer and Coordinator, Health and Medical Humanities, University of Sydney

It could be a brother or sister. It could be a neighbour. It could be a person you work with. We probably all know someone who doesn’t wear a mask in public even though it’s compulsory or recommended where you live.

The media is quick to highlight people who think it’s their right not to wear a mask, such as #bunningskaren, or who become violent in expressing their objection.

But others can be persuaded, with the right approach.

So how do you know if it’s worth trying to convince someone to wear a mask? And what’s the best way to talk to them if you actually want to make a difference?

Yelling ‘Mask up!’ at them won’t work

People vary in how they perceive and tolerate risk, and how physically and psychologically vulnerable they are. So we may need to negotiate accepted behaviours, just as we did with HIV. Many of these conversations might be difficult.

We also need to watch our own emotions don’t cloud the message we want to convey. For instance, when we become angry, anxious, outraged or fearful, the person we are trying to communicate with might not hear the message we intended.

We might want to convey: “I want you to wear a mask when you catch the train to see our father.” But instead, the other person hears the message: “I think you are behaving badly and I’m angry with you.”

Ironically, the pandemic makes this type of miscommunication more likely. When we are stressed or emotional, we are more likely to activate our body’s “fight, flight, freeze” mechanisms. This affects how we communicate and how our communication is received.

Read more: How to cut through when talking to anti-vaxxers and anti-fluoriders

If refusing to wear a mask is about maintaining a sense of control or is connected to a sense of identity — for example, if someone considers themselves “not someone who fusses” — then telling them to mask up could make them defensive.

Becoming defensive makes people not only less willing to listen, but less able to take in information, and or to appraise it accurately.

As a result, criticising someone’s views — for example, that wearing a mask doesn’t work — may lead them to “switch off” from what you’re saying and stick more firmly to their beliefs.

Read more: Parents’ decisions about vaccination and the art of gentle persuasion

So, what does work?

To communicate well, we need to prepare. The authors of the book Crucial Conversations recommend asking yourself what you want to achieve as an outcome and what you want for the relationship between you.

The goal is to keep the relationship respectful and the lines of communication open, so negotiations can continue as new pandemic circumstances arise.

You won’t completely change someone’s beliefs or actions. A better aim is to negotiate a change in behaviour that minimises harm. This might be: “Do as you choose at other times of course, but could we agree that just for now, you wear a mask when you visit Dad?”

Read more: Why are older people more at risk of coronavirus?

Respect, empathy, appeal to values

Identifying and respecting another person’s values and finding values in common reduces defensiveness and provides grounds for negotiation.

For instance: “I can see how important it is to you to be sceptical, and I absolutely agree, especially since the evidence changes so often. But since the evidence definitely shows that even some young, healthy people can get seriously ill, could I ask you to wear a mask on our trip?”

Asking someone why they are not wearing a mask, instead of telling them to wear one, is another helpful tool. This is a chance for someone to be heard, which lowers any defensiveness.

There are many reasons why people don’t wear masks. And hearing someone explain could provide an opportunity to problem-solve (especially if we ask how we can help, and refrain from giving advice).

Read more: It’s easy to judge. But some people really can’t wear a mask

Compassion or empathy allows us to support another’s position while more strongly maintaining our own.

For example, acknowledgements such as “I can relate! All these controls over our lives make me crazy and a lot of them make no sense” or “I might be wrong, and I might be overreacting”, can help with negotiating “please humour me and wear a mask, just on the train”.

Empathy can also help preserve the relationship while insisting on a boundary, such as: “Our relationship is so important, I really want to see you, and I hate saying this, but I can’t accept you visiting without a mask, at least until there are fewer cases.”

How a non-judgemental approach can win people over

Evidence shows some groups of men — such as younger men, more politically conservative men, men with lower health literacy, and men who endorse more traditional notions of masculinity — are among the most likely to resist wearing a mask.

Read more: Young men are more likely to believe COVID-19 myths. So how do we actually reach them?

Non-judgemental communication is as effective with men as with everyone else.

When Harvard professor Julia Marcus wrote about male anti-maskers without shaming or judgement, many men contacted her, willing to listen to her views on masks.

In a nutshell

If we are non-judgemental, empathetic, and clear in what we want to achieve, we can rise above counterproductive reactions, such as jumping in to tell someone off or dismissing someone’s concerns.

This allows us to be brave enough to tailor our communication to what the other person is able to hear, and to make it safe for the other person to speak. This is when our communication will actually work.

– ref. How to talk to someone who doesn’t wear a mask, and actually change their mind – https://theconversation.com/how-to-talk-to-someone-who-doesnt-wear-a-mask-and-actually-change-their-mind-143995

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cecelia Cmielewski, Research Officer, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

This week the NSW government’s arts funding arm, Create NSW, removed or significantly reduced funding to arts service organisations including Writing NSW, Playwriting Australia, the National Association of Visual Artists (NAVA) and Ausdance NSW. This short-sighted trend of cutting funding to arts organisations began several years ago.

It is particularly objectionable at a time of a pandemic when support for creativity is needed more than ever. The arts are valued in their own right and as contributors to social and cultural inclusion, and should be recognised as part of an essential element in any COVID-19 recovery.

As research think-tank A New Approach reported recently, creative pursuits assist “individuals and communities to recover from disasters and trauma”. The Create NSW announcement also coincided with the Arts on the Hill campaign to actively connect artists with federal members of parliament.

The federal government’s policy since 2015 of reduced funding for the arts has wrought devastation across artforms in the small to medium sector and reduced funding to individual artists by an estimated 70%. The latest cuts to NSW arts service organisations indicate a more targeted approach to funding cuts.

Read more: Friday essay: the politics of dancing and thinking about cultural values beyond dollars

What are arts service organisations?

Arts service organisations have an incorporated, not-for-profit structure whose role is to advocate (or speak) on behalf of artists. Historically, they profile their artforms and artists, and promote standards for how artists should be treated. This includes due acknowledgement and remuneration in what is a substantially unregulated sector.

ArtsPeak, whose activities are currently on hold, is the “unincorporated federation” of 33 national arts service organisations such as Ausdance, Australian Writers Guild and Museums Australia. It defines arts service organisations as having a shared purpose to provide support including artform consultation and research, advocacy — such as changes to legislation, regulations and the adoption of “industry” standards — leadership, marketing and professional development. They protect and develop artists’ income generation capacity enabling them to sustain lifelong careers.

In 2017 the Australia Council for the Arts surveyed 111 arts service organisations. The report categorised their roles as encompassing public communication, maintaining industry standards, administering grants on behalf of the government or benefactors, and capacity building. As such, service organisations were recognised as filling gaps in artform development.

However, the scope to provide these services has diminished in NSW. This month, Arts NSW granted A$10 million to 58 key organisations over four years, a handful of which appear to be service organisations. In comparison, of the $45.4 million to 130 key organisations funded by Creative Victoria in 2018-19, 25 were dedicated industry and cultural development organisations. In the coming four years, Arts WA will support 37 arts organisations with $31 million, 11 of which are service organisations.

Read more: The problem with arts funding in Australia goes right back to its inception

NSW in the firing line

So, NSW arts service organisations appear to have borne the brunt of reduced state funding.

Diversity Arts Australia, the national advocacy organisation for artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, was a deserving but rare recipient of four-year organisational funding from the Australia Council, only to have Create NSW reduce its funding this year.

Writing NSW has lost all $175,000 of its annual funding in one fell swoop — a cut to one-third of its revenue, endangering the remaining two-thirds from income generating activities. It is that previously secure government funding that made it possible to generate the majority of its income from other sources.

Service organisations are perceived by some to be the least important component of the Australian arts system, and so less worthy of support in times of financial duress. This perception is misplaced, because the tailored professional development many offer increases the visibility, viability and inclusiveness of their artforms. This is particularly the case when professional arts training is under threat at the tertiary level.

Read more: Fee cuts for nursing and teaching but big hikes for law and humanities in package expanding university places

Writing NSW and Blacktown Arts Centre initiated the Boundless Festival in 2017 to bring emerging and professional writers from Indigenous and culturally diverse backgrounds together for the first time in Australia. Six additional organisational partners were also involved, highlighting the relationships between arts organisations that bring visions to reality. But it also highlights the domino effect after one falls, with others likely to falter as their burden increases.

An either/or approach

The role of arts service organisations has diversified beyond its historical role of political advocate. It now encompasses professional development and exposure to markets that otherwise would be outside the grasp of most individual artists and groups.

In the era of COVID-19, severe reductions in state or federal funding compounds the risk of losing these service organisations. This makes the positions of the artists and sector even more precarious.

Create NSW’s strategy in an already unsatisfactory arts funding environment is either to fund arts-producing organisations or service organisations. This binary approach favours arts production.

It does little to recognise the crucial place of arts service organisations in the value chain connecting creative and cultural activities that contributes at least $111.7 billion to the national economy.

– ref. State arts service organisations: effective, engaged but endangered – https://theconversation.com/state-arts-service-organisations-effective-engaged-but-endangered-144419

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Graham, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

At midday on August 12 2020, the hashtag #DanLiedPeopleDied started trending on Twitter. By evening it had attracted over 10,000 tweets.

The hashtag appeared to reflect widespread public distrust in Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’ handling of the coronavirus outbreak. In reality, however, it was driven by a small number of fringe, hyper-partisan accounts – and some that appear entirely inauthentic.

The success of this relatively small campaign is a symptom of Australia’s growing problem with “information disorder”.

What is #DanLiedPeopleDied and where did it come from?

The hashtag is a variation on #ChinaLiedPeopleDied, which has fuelled anti-Chinese sentiment and racism. The idea that “China lied” includes everything from criticism of the Chinese government’s handling of the outbreak to Sinophobia and racist hate speech.

Likewise, “Dan lied” conflates Victoria’s 289 coronavirus-related deaths with claims the premier acted or spoke falsely to cover up his administration’s culpability.

Against this backdrop, #DanLiedPeopleDied first appeared on Twitter on July 14, 2020, in a reply to academic and political commentator Peter van Onselen:

This account uses a profile photo of the fictional character Les Patterson (played by Barry Humphries) and mainly posts on three topics: criticism of the Victorian government, anti-China, and anti-police.

One slight problem, though: if you scroll back through the account’s timeline, you can see that prior to February 16, it only tweeted about Egyptian politics, in Arabic.

This sudden switch in personas and topics is a pattern often seen in fake accounts used in disinformation operations. We cannot know for sure if this account is part of an information operation, but it is certainly not typical behaviour.

Not much happened for several weeks after the initial #DanLiedPeopleDied tweet. Then, on the morning of August 12, a small group of mainly fringe, hyper-partisan accounts made a concerted effort to get the hashtag to trend.

This led to much more engagement. These fringe accounts were bolstered by newly created, suspicious accounts that helped to amplify their tweets.

Around midday, these efforts met some success: #DanLiedPeopleDied appeared on Twitter’s Australian “trending” list. This made it visible to a much larger audience.

Shortly after the hashtag started trending, controversial far-right influencer Avi Yemini (@OzraeliAvi) tweeted it to his 116,000 followers, inciting them to “keep it going”. The hashtag quickly climbed the trending list until it reached number one in Australia.

Throughout the afternoon, #DanLiedPeopleDied attracted a surge of tweets, retweets and likes – both supportive and critical. Attempts to criticise this divisive hashtag only served to amplify and spread it further.

Read more: Bushfires, bots and arson claims: Australia flung in the global disinformation spotlight

Amplification by ‘newborn’ and inauthentic accounts

I analysed 7,304 tweets containing #DanLiedPeopleDied and found a disproportionate number were from recently created accounts. Most had been created in 2020, followed by 2018 and 2019.

Newborn accounts created in the past few weeks particularly contributed to magnifying the attempts by fringe accounts to get the hashtag to trend. They may have tipped it over the line, though we cannot know exactly how much impact they had.

For comparison, I also looked at 31,393 tweets mentioning “DanielAndrewsMP” during the same period (representing the broader Twitter conversation about the Victorian premier). The creation dates of these accounts are spread more evenly over the past decade, as we might expect.

As further evidence, 17,937 recent tweets containing the hashtag #IStandWithDan (positive support for Daniel Andrews) show a similar pattern of account creation dates spread across the past decade.

Not bots, but not authentic

In the leadup to #DanLiedPeopleDied trending on Twitter, a small number of fringe and suspicious newborn accounts tweeted constantly to criticise Daniel Andrews. Many lack real profile photos, show no other interests, and in some cases tweet every few minutes about the same topic for hours at a time.

They do not appear to be automated (“bots”), but more like trolls or sockpuppet accounts (false identities used for deceptive purposes). For instance, before and after #DanLiedPeopleDied start trending, one account (created on July 21) spammed the hashtag more than 200 times in the space of seven hours – roughly one tweet every two minutes.

Many of the tweets were posts of low-effort memes and images criticising Daniel Andrews, with #DanLiedPeopleDied simply attached.

Information disorder and the future of Australian politics

It is hard to determine the exact nature of the #DanLiedPeopleDied campaign. It has elements of disinformation (false information knowingly spread to deceive or cause harm), misinformation (inadvertent sharing of false information), and possibly malinformation (genuine information with the context deliberately changed).

In various ways, it shows a mixed bag of symptoms relating to what has been described as information disorder.

In this way, the hashtag serves to pollute the national discussion of the Victorian COVID-19 outbreak. Among other things, it brings together highly emotive content, satire and parody, genuinely concerned but misinformed citizens, and suspicious activity from seemingly malicious actors.

However, as American social media expert Claire Wardle has argued, the key element may be the “weaponisation of context”:

The most effective disinformation has always been that which has a kernel of truth to it, and indeed most of the content being disseminated now is not fake — it is misleading.

While there may be a kernel of truth in #DanLiedPeopleDied — people have died, and there are legitimate questions about the government’s actions — it is misleading to call Andrews a liar. Like its progenitor, #ChinaLiedPeopleDied, the hashtag’s purpose is to sow division.

Even if getting #DanLiedPeopleDied to trend was not the result of a disinformation campaign, the outcome serves the goals of disinformation: to drive a wedge into pre-existing fractures in society, to confuse citizens and cultivate distrust in democratic institutions and authorities.

Australians have a right to ask questions about government handling of COVID-19 and to hold those in power accountable. But when genuine concerns become mixed up with “information voids” where facts are not established or available, where mainstream media pursues partisan agendas, and when social media make it quicker and easier than ever to uncritically share content, we find ourselves at risk of losing the information war.

That a handful of fringe and suspicious accounts could get #DanLiedPeopleDied to become the top trending hashtag on Twitter is a symptom of information disorder. It is a wake-up call for Australia to adopt a whole-of-society approach to safeguard its democracy against the coming tides of disinformation.

Read more: Disinformation campaigns are murky blends of truth, lies and sincere beliefs – lessons from the pandemic

– ref. The story of #DanLiedPeopleDied: how a hashtag reveals Australia’s ‘information disorder’ problem – https://theconversation.com/the-story-of-danliedpeopledied-how-a-hashtag-reveals-australias-information-disorder-problem-144403

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

With massive fronds creating a luxuriously green canopy in the understory of Australian forests, tree ferns are a familiar sight on many long drives or bushwalks. But how much do you really know about them?

First of all, tree ferns are ferns, but they are not really trees. To be a tree, a plant must be woody (undergo secondary plant growth, which thickens stems and roots) and grow to a height of at least three metres when mature. While tree ferns can have single, thick trunk-like stems and can grow to a height of more than 15 metres, they are never woody.

They’re also incredibly hardy — tree ferns are often the first plants to show signs of recovery in the early weeks after bushfires. The unfurling of an almost iridescent green tree fern fiddlehead amid the sombre black of the bushfire ash is almost symbolic of the potential for bushfire recovery.

Ancient family ties

Tree ferns are generally slow growing, at rates of just 25-50 millimetres height increase per year. This means the tall individuals you might spot in a mature forest may be several centuries old.

However, in the right environment they can grow faster, so guessing their real age can be tricky, especially if they’re growing outside their usual forest environment.

Read more: The coastal banksia has its roots in ancient Gondwana

As a plant group, tree ferns are ancient, dating back hundreds of millions of years and pre-dating dinosaurs.

They existed on earth long before the flowering or cone-bearing plants evolved, and were a significant element of the earth’s flora during the Carboniferous period 300-360 million years ago, when conditions for plant growth were near ideal. This explains why ferns don’t reproduce by flowers, fruits or cones, but by more primitive spores.

In fact, fossilised tree ferns and their relatives called the fern allies laid down during the carboniferous then have provided much of the earth’s fossil fuels dating from that period. And tree ferns were a great food source, with Indigenous people once eating the pulp that occurs in the centre of the tree fern stem either raw or roasted as a starch.

Until recent times, ferns were quiet achievers among plant groups with an expanding number of species and greater numbers. Today, human activities are limiting their success by the clearing of forests and agricultural practices. Climate change is also a more recent threat to many fern species.

Species you’ve probably seen

Two of the more common tree fern species of south eastern Australia are Cyathea australis and Dicksonia antarctica. Both species have a wide distribution, extending from Queensland down the Australian coast and into Tasmania.

They’re often found growing near each other along rivers and creeks. They look superficially alike and many people would be unaware that they are entirely different species at first glance. That is, until you look closely at the detail of their fronds and run your fingers down the stalks.

C. australis has a rough almost prickly frond, hence its common name of rough tree fern, and can grow to be 25 metres tall. While D. antarctica, as the soft tree fern, has a smooth and sometimes furry frond and rarely grows above 15 metres.

Both contribute to the lush green appearance of the understory of wet forests dominated by eucalypts, such as mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans).

Stems that host a tiny ecosystem

The way tree ferns grow is quite complex. That’s because growth, even of the roots, originates from part of the apex of the stem. If this crown is damaged, then the fern can die.

Read more: ‘Majestic, stunning, intriguing and bizarre’: New Guinea has 13,634 species of plants, and these are some of our favourites

At the right time of the year, the new fronds unfurl in the crown from a coil called a fiddlehead. The stem of the tree fern is made up of all of the retained leaf bases of the fronds from previous years.

The stems are very fibrous and quite strong, which means they tend to retain moisture. And this is one of the reasons why the stems of tree ferns don’t easily burn in bushfires — even when they’re dry or dead.

In some dense wet forest communities, the stems of tree ferns are a miniature ecosystem, with epiphytic plants — such as mosses, translucent filmy ferns, perhaps lichens and the seedlings of other plant species — growing on them.

These epiphytes are not bad for the tree ferns, they’re just looking for a place to live, and the fibrous, nutrient-rich, moist tree fern stems prove brilliantly suitable.

Engulfed by trees

Similarly, the spreading canopies of tree ferns, such as D. antarctica, provide an excellent place for trees and other species to germinate.

That’s because many plants need good light for their seedlings to establish and this may not be available on the forest floor. Seeds, such as those of the native (or myrtle) beech, Nothofagus cunninghamii, may germinate in the crowns of tree ferns, and its roots can grow down the tree fern trunks and into the soil.

Read more: People are ‘blind’ to plants, and that’s bad news for conservation

As time passes, the tree species may completely grow over the tree fern, engulfing the tree fern stem into its trunk. Decades, or even centuries later, it’s sometimes still possible to see the old tree fern stem embedded inside.

Still, tree ferns are wonderfully resilient and give a sense of permanence to our ever-changing fire-affected landscapes.

– ref. Tree ferns are older than dinosaurs. And that’s not even the most interesting thing about them – https://theconversation.com/tree-ferns-are-older-than-dinosaurs-and-thats-not-even-the-most-interesting-thing-about-them-138435

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

University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Paddy Nixon discuss the week in politics.

This week Michelle and Paddy discuss the week of hearings before the Royal Commission into Aged Care, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and his quarantine approach, and a report following an inquiry into the alleged killing, by Australian special force in Afghanistan of unarmed civilians and surrendered insurgents.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the Royal Commission into Aged Care and Melbourne’s ongoing quarantine – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-royal-commission-into-aged-care-and-melbournes-ongoing-quarantine-144501

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adele Marum, PhD Candidate in English, University of Melbourne

Review: Little Birds, Sky Atlantic, released on Stan August 5 2020

Little Birds adapts a 1979 collection of French-born diarist Anaïs Nin’s unsettling erotic short stories published two years after her death.

Nin maintained that she wrote these stories in the late 1930s and early 1940s to earn money to support her artistic endeavours. During this time, she says, her life became “something like the life of the prostitute”. The stories are tales of taboo and violence, involving brothel workers, domination, exhibitionism and voyeurism as well as incest and sexual assault.

These remain major topics of interest in the 2020 adaptation. The series, written by artist, filmmaker and writer Sophia Al-Maria and directed by Stacie Passon, is a sensitive example of the current interest in and celebration of the sex industry and kink across multiple art forms. (Think Cardi B’s WAP feat. Megan Thee Stallion or FKA twigs’ Cellophane). It also invests in a sometimes (too) loud symbolism that visualises some of the key themes of Nin’s writing.

Futurist Tangiers

Al-Maria’s adaptation of Nin’s erotica sees the stories transposed onto the emergent Moroccan independence movement in Tangiers in 1955. The streets and bars of Tangiers are made dreamlike with neon hues. The characters’ costumes – dresses and suits in the style of Christian Dior’s New Look – incorporate luxe fake eyelashes, gimp masks and glitter. The visuals are an exploration of what Al-Maria terms “Gulf Futurism”, which emphasises the almost dystopian realities of many contemporary Gulf countries.

The six episodes follow Lucy Savage (Juno Temple), a wealthy New York heiress. In the first episode, Lucy travels to Tangiers to marry broke British aristocrat Hugo Cavendish-Smyth (Hugh Skinner). Perhaps in a nod to Nin’s suggestion that something like writing erotica can be thought of as sex work, we are frequently unable to separate characters’ private lives from their capacity to earn money.

An example of this is that Hugo, now he is married, must deal weapons to Morocco’s French colonial regime for Lucy’s sociopath father (David Costabile). In episode three, Mr Savage makes clear that if Hugo wants the pretty life and wife, he (and Lucy) must arouse a buyer’s interest in his new Man Portable Air Defence System (MANPADS). The insinuation is that the closer we look, the more we see how the characters’ livelihoods depend on sex appeal. Hugo’s situation is made more poignant because he is actually gay and in love with exiled Egyptian prince Adham (Raphael Acloque).

The series replicates Nin’s “stories within stories” style, where multiple characters have erotic encounters, some of which include telling each other dirty stories. Interestingly, many of the more faithful adaptations of Nin’s erotica occur only as verbatim stories told by characters in the television series.

From awakening to submission

Unlike the collection, the series has an overall plot. This condenses Nin’s life story, specifically as narrated in Henry and June, an “unexpurgated” volume of Nin’s diary that details her latent sexual “awakening” after moving with her husband – Hugh “Hugo” Guiler – to Paris in the early 1930s. In the series, the naive Lucy quickly becomes disillusioned with her marriage to Hugo. Subsequent episodes follow her seduction by Tangiers.

Having established this historical connection with Nin, Al-Maria proceeds to rewrite the story. In the second episode, Lucy seduces the secretary of the French colonial regime (Jean-Marc Barr), who bears an uncanny resemblance to Nin’s long-time lover, author and misogynist Henry Miller.

In possibly my favourite scene (for big metaphors and set design), Lucy does a “trick” for the secretary, ordering him to sit still with a lit cigarette between his lips. She then blasts it away, shooting a tiny gun engraved with “Lucy Loves Daddy”.

Lucy is captivated by Moroccan mistress Cherifa Lamour (Yuma Marwun). Lucy’s submission to Cherifa (who steals Lucy’s gun in the midst of an orgy) echoes Nin’s obsession with June Miller, Henry Miller’s frequently estranged wife. However, Cherifa is not married to the secretary. Rather, she is stalked and prosecuted by him for her work and anti-colonial politics.

Read more: Violence dressed up as erotica: Fifty Shades of Grey and abuse

Rewriting the story

Cherifa remains a key character in Little Birds. Her relative autonomy revises Nin’s frequent marginalisation of sex workers as animalistic, exotic and dead on the inside.

These differences to Nin’s stories enable Al-Maria to insert stories of resistance to colonial power. However, the series amplifies Nin’s emasculation of brash men who are at the whim and fancy of women’s desires.

Little Birds is strikingly similar to the feature-length 1974 French soft-core Emmanuelle. In that film, a young wife travels to Bangkok to have lots of exhibitionist sex with her diplomat husband, while nameless Thai people look on.

While the 2020 series maintains the pastel, soft-edged scenes and white protagonists of Emmanuelle, it criticises the repeated use of non-white actors in late 20th-century “avant-garde” porn to amplify the sex appeal of its white leads.

Read more: Strippers on film: battlers, showgirls and hustlers

At times, Al-Maria’s commitment to disrupting Nin’s stories is overblown and this can lead to contradictory meanings. The secretary’s use of a Japanese shibari rope bondage technique to hold Cherifa captive conflates sex work and human trafficking in a way that I doubt was intended, given the series’ overall celebration of kink and prioritisation of oppressed communities.

Nonetheless, Little Birds aptly shows us how erotica and porn can simultaneously be art, work and a means of arousal.

Little Birds is now streaming on Stan.

– ref. Playing and paying the whore in Little Birds – https://theconversation.com/playing-and-paying-the-whore-in-little-birds-144345

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lorraine Finlay, Lecturer in Law, Murdoch University

The events of the past few days in Western Australia have been extraordinary as the protracted conflict between the government and mining billionaire Clive Palmer reached a fever pitch.

Premier Mark McGowan declared the state is “in a war” with Palmer, and, in turn, Palmer has called for the premier to be jailed.

While this war of words has become a feature of their ongoing dispute over the WA border closures, these comments are related to an entirely different disagreement — a legal battle Palmer is waging against the state, reported to be worth A$30 billion. But Palmer told reporters this week:

There isn’t any $30 billion claim against the Western Australian government […] It’s [their] assessment of what the damages are for what they’ve done.

Nevertheless, the Western Australian government late last night took the unprecedented step of passing a bill preventing Palmer from collecting damages from the state.

In essence, the government is seeking to legislate its way out of a legal dispute. There is no doubt that having to pay a potential $30 billion damages claim would be devastating for WA. But trying to circumvent the courts by instead legislating a preferred outcome is also not without its consequences.

Read more: WA border challenge: why states, not courts, need to make the hard calls during health emergencies

What is the current dispute about?

Late Tuesday, Attorney-General John Quigley introduced the bill and informed parliament the state was facing the massive damages claim related to the dispute with Palmer.

The dispute stretches back to 2012 and has a complicated history, including both arbitral awards and a Supreme Court decision in Palmer’s favour. It was recently listed for a 15-day arbitration hearing due to commence in November.

While WA has vigorously defended its legal position, Quigley acknowledged “a successful defence of the claim is not guaranteed”.

McGowan also warned losing the case would bankrupt the state and

would mean mass closures of hospitals, of schools, of police stations, mass sackings of public servants and child protection workers.

The bill was designed to prevent this outcome. And just two days later, it passed into law with the support of both government and opposition members.

What does the new law do?

Quigley has acknowledged this new law is unprecedented. It is directly and expressly targeting Palmer, his mining company Mineralogy Pty Ltd, and the ongoing dispute over the Balmoral South iron ore project.

It terminates the ongoing arbitration, invalidates existing arbtiration agreements, voids existing arbitral awards, prevents further legal proceedings or appeals, protects the state from any liability of any sort in relation to the dispute (including any criminal liability), and obliges Palmer and his companies to indemnify the state.

The rules of natural justice and freedom of information laws are expressly stated not to apply.

Read more: Mineral wealth, Clive Palmer, and the corruption of Australian politics

There are a number of concerns with the government’s actions. First, this approach undermines both the rule of law and separation of powers, which are foundational pillars of our Westminster system of government.

It also creates sovereign risk. The premier has sought to downplay this by reassuring the resources sector this is a one-time-only exceptional case.

But how could it realistically not change the risk calculation made by potential investors? If the government shows it is prepared to intervene in this way once, how could anybody be 100% sure that they wouldn’t be prepared to do it again?

Another concern is the singling out of Palmer by the law. While he is clearly a wildly unpopular figure in WA and an enthusiastic litigant, drafting specific laws to target named individuals is never a good idea and undermines the principle of equality before the law.

Laws should not be drafted to target specific individuals, no matter who they are.

A rushed debate

The fact that such extraordinary legislation has been rushed into the parliament with no prior consultation or warning, and passed with only two days of debate is also concerning.

The government rejected a proposal to have the legislation considered in more detail by a parliamentary committee, even if done within an expedited timeframe. Quigley claimed

there is too much at risk for all Western Australians for namby-pamby inquiries.

While the premier has claimed the urgency was necessary given the unique circumstances, it means an extraordinary law that negates foundational Westminster principles has been passed with minimal scrutiny or debate.

The significance of this is perhaps best captured by comments made by McGowan himself in 2013. The view from opposition gave him a somewhat different perspective:

It has been part of the standing orders and the time-honoured process of parliament in the Westminster system for a long period that we do not rush legislation through without time to consider it because doing so does not allow proper debate in its consideration and mistakes are made in the legislation.

The unprecedented nature of this particular law must surely amplify these concerns.

What happens next?

Palmer has already indicated he will challenge the validity of the new law in the High Court. He has also taken steps in the past two days to try to prevent the law from taking effect by registering the existing arbitral awards in the Queensland Supreme Court and applying for an injunction in the Federal Court.

While the WA government has tried to remove the dispute from the courts, it now looks as though the matter will end up in court one way or another — and the legal fight will likely be protracted.

By trying to legislate itself a win in this legal dispute, the government has tried to place itself above the law. This may or may not end up saving WA from a catastrophic damages claim.

But there is still a significant cost in the collateral damage that has been done to the rule of law.

Read more: These young Queenslanders are taking on Clive Palmer’s coal company and making history for human rights

– ref. The WA government legislated itself a win in its dispute with Clive Palmer — and put itself above the law – https://theconversation.com/the-wa-government-legislated-itself-a-win-in-its-dispute-with-clive-palmer-and-put-itself-above-the-law-144360

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Office of the Chief Scientist

Following the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20, many people throughout Australia, and across the world, wanted to know how they could help in response to the environmental disaster.

Hundreds contacted the Australian Citizen Science Association (ACSA), Australia’s peak citizen science body, for guidance on how to participate in relevant scientific projects.

It was a golden opportunity to show that science can be, and is, done by all kinds of people – not just those working in labs with years of training and access to high-powered instruments. A scientist can be you, your children or your parents.

And this recognition led to the establishment of the Citizen Science Bushfire Project Finder, a key outcome from the bushfire science roundtable, which was convened in January by Federal Science Minister Karen Andrews.

To establish the project finder database, ACSA partnered with the CSIRO and the Atlas of Living Australia to assist the search for vetted projects that could contribute to our understanding of post-bushfire recovery.

Five months on, the value is evident.

Science as a way of thinking

In response to the bushfires, one citizen science project set up was the Kangaroo Island Dunnart Survey. A record number of citizen scientists answered the call to assist in recovery efforts for this small marsupial.

The Kangaroo Island dunnart was already listed as endangered before the fires, with population estimates between 300-500 individuals. And initial post-fire assessments indicated a significant further decline in its population, highlighting the importance of tracking the species’ recovery.

Meanwhile, nearly 1,500 kilometres away from Kangaroo Island, a local resident set up “Mallacoota After Fires” in the small community of Mallacoota, Victoria – a region hit hard by the bushfires.

This has enabled the community to record and validate (via an app and website) how the fires impacted the region’s plants and animals.

So far, the project has documented the existence of a range of flora and fauna, from common wombats to the vulnerable green and golden bell frog. It has also captured some amazing images of bush regeneration after fire.

Science does not just belong to professionals. As eminent US astronomer Carl Sagan noted, “science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge”.

This suggests that, when properly enabled, anyone can actively participate. And the output goes beyond the rewards of personal involvement. It contributes to better science.

Read more: Citizen science: how you can contribute to coronavirus research without leaving the house

The need for ongoing engagement

Citizen science is significantly contributing observations and expertise to bushfire research. Across southeast New South Wales and the ACT, several hundred citizen scientists have:

• conducted targeted landscape-wide surveys of threatened species, or new weed or pest incursions
• collected specified data from plot locations stratified against fire history
• assessed whether wildlife actually use water and feed stations established by communities after a fire has been through. (Data suggests the use of the stations is limited).

And it’s not just in local communities. Platforms such as DigiVol have enabled citizen scientists from around the world to review thousands of camera trap images deployed post-fire to monitor species survival and recovery.

Still, there is much more to do. Australia is a vast continent and as we saw last summer, the fire footprint is immense.

But there is also a huge community out there that can help support the implementation of science and technology, as we adapt to our changing climate.

Reaching out at the right time

In January, Prime Minister Scott Morrison asked the CSIRO, supported by an expert advisory panel chaired by one of us (Alan Finkel), to develop recommendations for practical measures that would increase Australia’s disaster and climate resilience.

The report on Climate and Disaster Resilience gives due emphasis to the importance of citizen science in complementing traditional research-led monitoring campaigns and sharing locally specific advice. One component of the response also brought together national stakeholders, to develop a series of more detailed recommendations regarding the critical role of citizen science.

Citizen scientists can be involved in important data collection and knowledge building. They can collaborate with disaster response agencies and research agencies, to develop additional science-based community education and training programs.

Also, citizen science is a way to collect distributed data beyond the affordability and resources of conventional science.

With that in mind, the task now is to better marry the “professional” scientific effort with the citizen science effort, to truly harness the potential of citizen science. In doing so, we can ensure environmental and societal approaches to disaster recovery represent a diversity of voices.

The role of the community, particularly in developing resilience against environmental disaster, can be a most useful mechanism for empowering people who may otherwise feel at a loss from the impact of disaster. Furthermore, by working with communities directly affected by bushfires, we can help measure the extent of the impact.

We call on our professional scientist colleagues to actively collaborate with citizen science groups. In doing so, we can identify priority areas with critical data needs, while also informing, enriching and engaging with diverse communities in science.

Equally, we encourage citizen scientists to share and tell their stories across social and political settings to demonstrate the impact they continue to have.

The beneficiary will be science.

Read more: Chief Scientist: we need to transform our world into a sustainable ‘electric planet’

– ref. From Kangaroo Island to Mallacoota, citizen scientists proved vital to Australia’s bushfire recovery – https://theconversation.com/from-kangaroo-island-to-mallacoota-citizen-scientists-proved-vital-to-australias-bushfire-recovery-48230

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Greg Barton, Chair in Global Islamic Politics, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University

Have we flattened the curve of global terrorism? In our COVID-19-obsessed news cycle stories about terrorism and terrorist attacks have largely disappeared. We now, though, understand a little more about how pandemics work.

And ironically, long before the current pandemic, the language of epidemiology proved helpful in understanding by analogy the way in which terrorism works as a phenomenon that depends on social contact and exchange, and expands rapidly in an opportunistic fashion when defences are lowered.

Terrorism goes quiet – but we’ve seen this before

In this pandemic year, it appears one piece of good news is that the curve of international terrorist attacks has indeed been flattened. Having lost its physical caliphate, Islamic State also appears to have lost its capacity, if not its willingness, to launch attacks around the world well beyond conflict zones.

We have seen this happen before. The September 11 attacks in 2001 were followed by a wave of attacks around the world. Bali in October 2002, Riyadh, Casablanca, Jakarta and Istanbul in 2003, Madrid in March 2004, followed by Khobar in May, then London in July 2005 and Bali in October, not to mention numerous other attacks in the Middle East and West Asia.

Since 2005, with the exception of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris in January 2015, al-Qaeda has been prevented from launching any major attacks in western capitals.

The September 11 attacks precipitated enormous investment in police counterterrorism capacity around the world, particularly in intelligence. The result has been that al-Qaeda has struggled to put together large-scale coordinated attacks in Western capitals without being detected and stopped.

Then in 2013, Islamic State emerged. This brought a new wave of attacks from 2014 in cities around the world, outside of conflict zones in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Nigeria.

This wave of IS international terror attacks now appears to have reached an end. The hopeful rhetoric of the collapse of the IS caliphate leading to an end of the global campaign of terror attacks appears to have been borne out. Although, as the sophisticated and coordinated suicide bombings in Colombo in Easter 2019 reminded us, further attacks by previously unknown cells cannot ever be ruled out.

While it’s tempting to conclude that the ending of the current wave of international terrorist attacks by IS is due largely to the ending of the physical caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and a concomitant collapse of capacity, the reality is more complex. Just as the wave of al-Qaeda attacks in the first half of the 2000s was curtailed primarily by massive investments in counterterrorism, so too it appears to be the case with IS international terror plots in the second half of this decade.

Read more: Why we need to stay alert to the terror threat as the UK reopens

The 2019 attacks in Sri Lanka illustrate dramatically what happens when there is a failure of intelligence, whether due to capacity or, as appears to be the case in Sri Lanka, a lack of political will. The rise of IS in 2013-14 should not have caught us by surprise, but it did, and in 2014 and 2015 we were scrambling to get up to speed with the intelligence challenge.

Epidemiology of terror

The parallels with the epidemiology of viruses are striking. Reasoning by analogy is imperfect, but it can be a powerful way of prompting reflection. The importance of this cannot be underestimated as intelligence failures in counterterrorism, like poor political responses to pandemics, are in large part failures of imagination.

We don’t see what we don’t want to see, and we set ourselves up to become victims of our own wishful thinking. So, with two waves of international terrorist attacks over the past two decades largely brought under control, what can we say about the underlying threat of global terrorism?

There are four key lessons we need to learn.

First, we are ultimately seeking to counter the viral spread of ideas and narratives embodied in social networks and spread person-to-person through relationships, whether in person or online. Effective policing and intelligence built on strong community relations can dramatically limit the likelihood of terrorist networks successfully executing large-scale attacks. Effective intelligence can also go a long way to diminishing the frequency and intensity of lone-actor attacks. But this sort of intelligence is even more dependent on strong community relations, built on trust that emboldens people to speak out.

Second, terrorist movements, being opportunistic and parasitic, achieve potency in inverse relation to the level of good governance. In other words, as good governance breaks down, terrorist movements find opportunity to embed themselves. In failing states, the capacity of the state to protect its citizens, and the trust between citizen and authorities, provides ample opportunities for terrorist groups to exploit grievances and needs. This is the reason around 75% of all deaths due to terrorist activity in recent years have occurred in just five nations: Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria (followed by Somalia, Libya, and Yemen).

The third lesson is directly linked to state failure, and is that military methods dramatically overpromise and under-deliver when it comes to countering terrorism. In fact, more than that, the use of military force tends to generate more problems than it solves. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than what has been so wrongly framed as the Global War on Terror.

Beginning in October 2001 in the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks, the war on terror began with a barrage of attacks on al-Qaeda positions in Afghanistan. It was spurred by understandable anger, but it led to two decades of tremendously expensive military campaigns they have completely failed to deliver the hoped-for end in terrorism to justify the massive toll of violence and loss of life.

The military campaign in Afghanistan began, and has continued for almost 19 years, without any strategic endpoints being defined and indeed with no real strategy vision at all. After almost two decades of continuous conflict, any American administration would understandably want to end the military campaign and withdraw.

Obama talked of doing this but was unable to do so. Trump campaigned on it as one of the few consistent features of his foreign policy thinking. Hence the current negotiations to dramatically reduce American troop numbers, and in the process trigger a reduction in allied coalition troops while releasing thousands of detained militants in response to poorly defined and completely un-guaranteed promises of a reduction in violence by the Taliban.

This is America’s way of ending decades of stalemate in which it is has proven impossible to defeat the Taliban, which even now controls almost one half of Afghanistan. But even as the peace negotiations have been going on the violence has continued unabated. The only reason for withdrawing and allowing the Taliban to formally take a part in governing Afghanistan is fatigue.

Not just Afghanistan

If the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan were the main story, the situation would already be far more dire then we would care to accept. But the problem is not limited to Afghanistan and West Asia. The invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the “coalition of the willing” was justified largely on the grounds it was necessary to stop al-Qaeda from establishing a presence in Iraq. It achieved, of course, the exact opposite.

Al-Qaeda had little, if any, presence in Iraq prior to the invasion. But the ensuring collapse of not just the regime of Saddam Hussein but the dismantling of the Baath party and the Iraqi military, led largely by a Sunni minority in a Shia majority country, created perfect storm conditions for multiple Sunni insurgencies.

These in turn came to be dominated by the group that styled itself first as Al Qaeda in Iraq, then as the Islamic State in Iraq, and then as the Islamic state in Iraq and Syria. This powerful insurgency was almost completely destroyed in the late 2000s when Sunni tribes were paid and equipped to fight the al-Qaeda insurgency.

The toxic sectarian politics of Iraq, followed by the withdrawal of US troops at the end of 2011, coinciding with the outbreak of civil war in Syria, saw the almost extinguished insurgency quickly rebuild. We only really began to pay attention when IS led a blitzkrieg across northern Iraq, seized Mosul, and declared a caliphate in June 2014.

Defeating this quasi-state took years of extraordinarily costly military engagement. But even as IS was deprived of the last of its safe havens on the ground, analysts were warning it continued to have tens of thousands of insurgent militants in Syria and northern Iraq and was successfully returning to its earlier mode of insurgency.

Read more: US retreat from Syria could see Islamic State roar back to life

As the Iraqi security forces have been forced to pull back in the face of a steadily building COVID-19 pandemic, there are signs the IS insurgent forces have continued to seize the spaces left open to them. Even without the pandemic, the insurgency was always going to steadily build strength, but the events of 2020 have provided it with fresh opportunities.

The fourth and final lesson we need to come to terms with is that we are dealing with a viral movement of ideas embodied in social networks. We are not dealing with a singular unchanging enemy but rather an amorphous, agile, threat able to constantly evolve and adapt itself to circumstances.

Al-Qaeda and IS share a common set of ideas built around Salafi-jihadi violent extremism. But this is not the only violent extremism we have to worry about.

In America today, as has been the case for more than a decade, the prime terrorist threat comes from far-right violent extremism rather than from Salafi-jihadi extremism. The same is not true in Australia, although ASIO and our police forces have been warning us far-right extremism represents an emerging secondary threat.

But the potent violence of an Australian far-right terrorist in the attack in Christchurch in March 2019 serves to remind us this form of violent extremism, feeding on toxic identity politics and hate, represents a growing threat in our southern hemisphere.

Read more: ASIO chief’s assessment shows the need to do more, and better, to prevent terrorism

Fighting the terrorist pandemic

In this year in which we have been, understandably, so preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic, another pandemic has been continuing unabated. It is true we have successfully dealt with two waves of global terrorist attacks over the past two decades, but we have not dealt successfully the underlying source of infections.

In fact, we have contributed, through military campaigns, to weakening the body politic of host countries in which groups like al-Qaeda, IS and other violent extremist groups have a parasitic presence.

We now need to face the inconvenient truth that toxic identity politics and the tribal dynamics of hate have infected western democracies. Limiting the scope for terrorist attacks is difficult. Eliminating the viral spread of hateful extremism is much harder, but ultimately even more important.

– ref. In COVID’s shadow, global terrorism goes quiet. But we have seen this before, and should be wary – https://theconversation.com/in-covids-shadow-global-terrorism-goes-quiet-but-we-have-seen-this-before-and-should-be-wary-144286

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Hall, Senior Researcher in Politics, Auckland University of Technology

It isn’t easy being a political opposition in the midst of a crisis. The volatility within New Zealand’s National Party – which has had three leaders in as many months – is a case in point.

Some argue this is circumstantial. The COVID-19 crisis has benefited the incumbent government – or, more precisely, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party. Of course, that public support could easily vanish in the event of a mismanaged outbreak, because voters don’t respond to a crisis itself, but to the competency of its handling.

Yet the government appears to have won public confidence – and so, for now, the electoral advantage.

But there is more going on. Under pressure, the opposition risks sabotaging itself by failing in its role as opposition – that is, failing in the duties and responsibilities that accompany this office.

Formally, this role is titled “Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition”. Her Majesty, of course, refers to Queen Elizabeth II, still officially the sovereign of New Zealand.

The meaning of “opposition” is also intuitive to grasp. As the largest party that isn’t in government, its job is to oppose – to challenge, to test, to needle, to inquire. The opposition ought to hold the government to account.

Opposition is a recent invention

This role hasn’t always existed in parliamentary systems – it was a 19th century innovation. But it enriched democracy by guaranteeing a space for dissent, for formal disagreement with the government of the day.

It meant the losers of the political competition would not be turfed into the wilderness, bitter and disenfranchised. Rather, they would remain in the fold, able to contribute to the political process through confrontation, critique and even collaboration.

This gets us closer to the odd word “loyal”. It implies that the opposition should be loyal to the democratic institutions that protect its right to criticise. It need not take the government line on any issue, but it should be loyal to the rules of the game, precisely so that it can continue playing.

Read more: By delaying the dissolution of parliament Jacinda Ardern buys time on the election date – but only a little

Consider, by contrast, the one-party state, where the losers in the political competition are shut out of public decision-making. In such circumstances, loyalty is pointless. The ruling party only wants to expel or silence detractors, to cancel their voice.

Consequently, the opposition has no duty of loyalty, and instead a strong incentive to influence public decisions by seizing power – by coup, revolt or revolution.

Constructive opposition is the point

In this we see the distinction that political theorist Chantal Mouffe makes between “antagonistic” and “agonistic” politics.

Antagonistic politics are where opposing parties treat each other as enemies, to be vanquished or exiled. With agonistic politics, on the other hand, parties treat each other as noble adversaries, worthy of challenge but also respect.

The institution of the loyal opposition facilitates a constructive agonism. As the New Zealand-born political philosopher Jeremy Waldron argues, it instructs the government to assume the loyalty of the opposition, to not treat it as treasonous merely because it voices disagreement.

Meanwhile, the opposition must oppose – but it must do so without burning down the house. Yet the COVID-19 crisis is seriously straining this loyalty.

Read more: Voting is an essential service too. New Zealand can’t be afraid to go to the polls, even in lockdown

A dangerous game

It started out well with New Zealand’s Epidemic Response Committee, a cross-party vehicle of agonistic democracy, where the opposition could openly hold the government to account, even under a state of emergency.

But the subsequent leaking of sensitive information for political gain by National Party members betrayed a lack of loyalty to government institutions, and to New Zealanders who entrust them with private information.

Now, the opposition is insinuating that the government publicly withheld information about the present outbreak.

Given how swiftly this coronavirus spreads, and how much the government has to lose from its spreading, it isn’t politically rational for the government to cover it up. It is a cynical suggestion – and the opposition risks that many voters will see it as such.

This is a dangerous game. The opposition is undermining trust at a time when trust is incredibly important. New Zealand’s strong levels of social and institutional trust are a key factor in our relatively successful pandemic response.

Its degradation – a loss of trust in official medical advice, for example, or the authority of lockdowns – diminishes the country’s capacity to fend off COVID-19. It further diverts attention away from more credible shortcomings in New Zealand’s pandemic response, such as contact tracing and quarantine protocol.

A noble calling

And it feeds into the paranoia that crises conjure up. Social media platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are revealing themselves as effective engines of conspiracy and indoctrination – with implications we’re still coming to understand.

Read more: Rogue poll or not, all the signs point to a tectonic shift in New Zealand politics

The opposition’s appeals to paranoia only add more fuel to the online inferno. Yet the electoral gains, if there are any, are liable to spill toward minor parties, such as the New Zealand Public Party, which make conspiracies their forte.

Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition has a noble function, all the more important in this volatile political moment. Upholding rather than denigrating that office is what will reinvigorate the loyalties of voters.

– ref. The COVID-19 crisis tests oppositions as well as governments. Ahead of New Zealand’s election, National risks failing that test – https://theconversation.com/the-covid-19-crisis-tests-oppositions-as-well-as-governments-ahead-of-new-zealands-election-national-risks-failing-that-test-144415

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Elshaug, Visiting Fellow, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, Professor of Health Policy and Co-Director, Menzies Centre for Health Policy, University of Sydney

This is one of our occasional Essays on Health, this time from an Australian visiting fellow in Washington, DC. Adam Elshaug, professor of health policy, asks how one of the world’s most inequitable health-care systems has coped with COVID-19. The short answer, he says, is that it provides a wake-up call for us all. It’s a long read.

We all hoped for a rapid and effective COVID-19 response. For the United States, that has not occurred. It is now host to more documented COVID-19 cases and deaths than any other country.

With about 4% of the world’s population, the US accounts for about 25% of all cases and about 20% of all deaths — more than 169,000 deaths so far.

Yes, it’s a large country, but that is about 500 deaths per million population, compared with Australia’s about 12 per million.

Australia’s state of Victoria is amid its second wave, recording 723 new cases and 13 deaths on July 30. The same day, the US recorded 68,585 new cases and 1,465 deaths.

I write this from my temporary base in Washington, DC.

I have experienced first hand, and since the outset of the pandemic, how deficiencies in the organisation of the US social, political and health-care systems have become more vivid and their consequences intensified.

Given its status as a world superpower, and its stratospheric per capita health care spend, the situation in the US is truly alarming.

Entire books will be written on this woeful epoch in US history. But I want to focus on some key observations of the country’s failed COVID-19 response, and the lessons.

Transitioning to failure

It would be unfair to blame President Donald Trump and his administration for the systemic failures in the US social and health-care systems. Those have been decades in the making.

But his pre-COVID-19 dismantling of the pandemic preparedness system, disregard for scientists, and hyper-partisanship have clearly worsened the US response.

I agree with the political commentator David Frum, who wrote:

That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault.

President Barack Obama left the Trump administration with pandemic-ready infrastructure. This was motivated by outbreaks of Ebola and previous novel coronaviruses (responsible for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, and SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome), and an appreciation of their ever-present threat.

Then, Trump took critical steps before COVID-19 that weakened its preparedness to the point of catastrophe. Here are just a few.

Read more: Explainer: what Donald Trump’s funding cuts to WHO mean for the world

The Trump administration dismantled the (Obama-instituted) White House team in charge of pandemic response, dismissing its leadership and staff in early 2018. This team had also laid out a detailed dossier for a pandemic response plan. Trump ignored it.

Since coming to office, the Trump administration has also cut funding to key agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). These cuts directly impacted domestic projects and international collaborations (including with China) on pandemic preparedness.

Too little, too late

Even into February as the severity of the pandemic was realised worldwide, Trump was downplaying the threat, openly stating it was like the common flu.

He called growing concerns about COVID-19 a “hoax” and had a “hunch” expert assessments of the potential toll were wrong.

As cases and deaths, particularly in New York began to rise steeply, the real evidence of unpreparedness became apparent.

Critically, at no point through the pandemic has the US had in place a sincere strategy of public health 101: test, trace, isolate.

Trump has repeatedly claimed anyone who wants a test can get a test, but this has been a farce. Shortages of testing supplies and poor coordination have hamstrung containment strategies.

Even though testing has increased, it has not kept up with demand. The time to receive results as of July ranged from 1 to 14 days, averaging 7 days.

This is inadequate to manage spread via active but undiagnosed cases. That is just the beginning of the current troubles.

The Disunited States of America

The limited availability of masks, personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators revealed significant cracks in US preparedness. It also put on full display the caustic political divisions that are a modern feature of US politics and society.

Despite the first cases being recorded in Washington state, its deadly potential was initially felt most in the Democratic state of New York. Trump used this to avenge old scores and fuel competition between red (Republican) versus blue (Democratic) states.

When the New York health-care system buckled as a result of its fragmented structure (another failing) and enormous caseload, the state’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo, called for urgent assistance, such as supplies from the national stockpile.

Trump tweeted Governor Cuomo “should spend more time ‘doing’ and less time ‘complaining’.”

The fierce competition between states for limited mask and PPE supplies led to suppliers price-gouging.

Frustration led governors to place clandestine international orders. Illinois and Maryland, for example, received plane-loads of supplies under the cloak of darkness and protected by state police. They did this “out of fear the Trump administration would seize the cargo for the federal stockpile”, as occurred in Massachusetts.

There has also been tension across the country about stay-at-home orders, school closures, schools and retail reopenings, data transparency and sharing – the list goes on.

Wearing a mask has become a political act. Now, concerningly, Trump has ordered COVID-related hospital data bypass the CDC and be fed directly to the White House, raising concerns about transparency.

Read more: US coronavirus data will now go straight to the White House. Here’s what this means for the world

Despite Trump threatening his absolute authority over the states, much responsibility rests with state governors (equivalent to Australian premiers). And yet counties (equivalent to local councils) have enacted policies independent of, and often contradicting, state policies.

This could be sensible in reflecting local conditions as the rolling wave moves on. However, it has confused any singular messaging and exemplified the red/blue political divide.

The southern (primarily red) states that were late to institute control measures and early to re-open are now the epicentre of this rolling wave.

Read more: Coronavirus is spreading through rural South’s high-risk population – reopening economies will make it worse

Systemic inequality

Among OECD countries, the level of structural inequality in the US is extreme. The collision of three problems — uncontrolled pandemic, recession, uninsured people — is disproportionately impacting the most vulnerable.

Pre-pandemic, about 32 million Americans (around 10% of population) lacked health insurance. A further 150 million (around 50% of the population) held employer-sponsored health insurance.

Up to July 18, about 32 million Americans had filed for unemployment as a direct result of the pandemic, pushing the unemployment rate well into teen figures.

This number is rising weekly and millions of those have, or will, lose their employer-sponsored health insurance at a time they may need it most.

The US has the unenviable first place position for the highest health-care costs in the OECD yet some the worst health outcomes among similar countries.

COVID-19 has placed millions more Americans further away from accessing needed health care.

The country was already experiencing a decline in life expectancy and the fear now is this will be exacerbated further.

A stark warning

There is a political rallying cry in the US that the country represents a shining light on the hill, a “beacon of hope” for the world.

We must admit the US population size and current political climate make its pandemic response more complex than countries like Australia’s. But that doesn’t mean we can be apathetic.

The US, through COVID-19, offers the starkest of warnings. Underlying gross structural inequality, under-investment and unpreparedness in public health, and socio-political tensions have met in a dizzying, tragic outcome for the richest country in the world.

All Americans have suffered but their most vulnerable have, and will continue to, suffer disproportionately.

It is a shining light for what we must avoid, what we must stand up for and protect against.

This is a co-publication with Pursuit.

– ref. Pandemic letter from America: how the US handling of COVID-19 provides the starkest warning for us all – https://theconversation.com/pandemic-letter-from-america-how-the-us-handling-of-covid-19-provides-the-starkest-warning-for-us-all-144357

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patrick D. Nunn, Professor of Geography, School of Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine Coast

Sea level rise is a serious threat to the low-lying islands of the Republic of Kiribati in the central Pacific Ocean. To fight it, their president recently announced he plans to raise the islands to make them habitable as long as possible.

President Taneti Maamau will seek support from China for this ambitious strategy, and recently switched his nation’s allegiance from Taiwan to China to make this happen. It’s a bold move, considering China’s sights are set on military and economic expansion across the Pacific region, yet Maamau insists on maintaining Kiribati’s independence.

Read more: As Australia’s soft power in the Pacific fades, China’s voice gets louder

Maamau’s response to the looming climate crisis in Kiribati shows he is a president determined not to capitulate to western narratives of vulnerability.

Unlike President Anote Tong before him, who held the widely commended policy of migration, the Maamau viewpoint is not simply a difference of opinion – it’s a culturally grounded expression of human dignity.

Demeaning narratives

Kiribati is made up of atolls – the sinking summits of volcanic islands from the flanks of which coral reefs grow upwards. Unconsolidated sands and gravels tossed up onto these reefs by storm waves form the atoll islands, which are typically narrow, sinuous and low.

Most of us cannot imagine the everyday challenges of life there. The ocean is omnipresent, impossible to ignore, and a threat that could extinguish life on the island with just a short-lived flourish.

But for too long, the people of Kiribati have been pummelled and demeaned by global narratives that treat them as vulnerable.

This view ignores the fact that proud peoples have lived on atolls in the equatorial Pacific for millennia, surviving countless disasters.

For example, the people of Pukapuka Atoll in the northern Cook Islands speak of a night about 400 years ago as “te mate wolo” (the great death). Then, a giant wave washed over the island, destroying all the houses and food gardens, and killing everyone save two women and 17 men who were left to rebuild Pukapukan society.

Fight or flight

By the end of this century, the average global sea level may be over a metre higher than today. The highest point of most atolls in Kiribati (and elsewhere) is less than three metres.

Such stark figures might ring alarm bells for those pondering atoll life, but many atoll islands show few signs of shrinking. That said, no scientists studying this unexpected resilience believe the situation will last indefinitely.

Read more: Dynamic atolls give hope that Pacific Islands can defy sea rise

Like sprawling low-lying river deltas and low-lying coasts in every part of the world, the effect of rising sea level for the remainder of the 21st century and beyond will force profound changes to coastal geographies – atoll islands included.

There are two ways to respond. One is to agree with the Western narrative and accept that the rapidly rising sea level will progressively eat away at the fabric of your islands until they become uninhabitable, and eventually submerged. This idea of moving elsewhere – to a less fragile place – is a natural response, and the view former Kiribati president Anote Tong held.

But Tong is no longer in charge. Taneti Maamau has been elected president of Kiribati in the last two elections. His response, which clearly has popular appeal given his latest resounding win, 26,053 to 17,866, is quite different.

He is confronting the overwhelmingly negative international rhetoric about atoll futures, designing and driving a way forward that will ensure livelihoods can be sustained in Kiribati for the foreseeable future.

He needs help, a role China appears willing to assume, but on his own terms – no large loans and no military bases.

Whether this position proves realistic is uncertain. Like many smaller Pacific Island countries, Kiribati has exhibited a growing dependence on foreign aid for the provision of basic services over the past few decades.

However, such dependence is unsustainable given the likely soaring costs of domestic adaptation to climate change in donor countries.

Read more: Pacific Islands must stop relying on foreign aid to adapt to climate change, because the money won’t last

Yet Kiribati is a special case. Its Exclusive Economic Zone (where it claims exclusive rights for economic activities such as fishing or drilling) covers a huge area of almost 3.5 million square kilometres, giving it a bargaining chip with more affluent yet less well-endowed nations.

Raising the islands

Today, raised causeways connect many atoll islands rising from the same reef for people and vehicles to cross.

Causeways are relatively cheap to construct but also inhibit water movements between atoll lagoons and the surrounding ocean, focusing wave attack on particular parts of islands.

Maamau’s plan is to replace these causeways with bridges, to improve lagoon-ocean water exchange and perhaps help restore island coasts to their natural state. It’s an expensive and engineeringly-challenging solution the Chinese are likely to relish given their construction of lengthy bridges at home.

In addition, Maamau’s government will deploy dredgers to suck up vast quantities of sand from lagoon floors and dump it along exposed island coasts, not just for protection but also to build up more land for planting crops.

Read more: Unwelcome sea change: new research finds coastal flooding may cost up to 20% of global economy by 2100

This is a short-term low-cost solution, but one likely to prove sustainable for only a few decades at most, given the expected increases in prolonged island inundation in this region.

It would be a tragedy if Pacific Island countries, their people and their cultures, became lost a century or more from now.

But as the pandemic has reminded us, we in developed countries are much like the people of the atolls: we’re living on the edge and want to believe life is indefinitely sustainable where we are. The truth is, we have to adjust to survive.

– ref. Pacific people have been ‘pummelled and demeaned’ for too long – now they’re fighting back – https://theconversation.com/pacific-people-have-been-pummelled-and-demeaned-for-too-long-now-theyre-fighting-back-144278

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Lintermans, Associate professor, University of Canberra

The tragic fish kills in the lower Darling River drew attention to the plight of Australia’s freshwater fish, but they’ve been in trouble for a long time.

Many species have declined sharply in recent decades, and as many as 90 of Australia’s 315 freshwater fish species may now meet international criteria as threatened.

Read more: We wrote the report for the minister on fish deaths in the lower Darling – here’s why it could happen again

No Australian fish species is yet listed officially as extinct, but some have almost certainly been lost before scientists even knew they existed. With so many species at risk, understanding which are in greatest peril is a vital first step in preventing extinctions.

This is what our new research has done. We’ve identified 20 freshwater fish species with a 50% or greater probability of extinction within the next two decades, and a further two with a 40-50% chance – unless there’s new targeted conservation action.

Slipping through the conservation cracks

Many small-bodied species, including Australia’s smallest fish the red-finned blue-eye, look likely to be lost within a single human generation. These fish have evolved over millions of years.

Twelve of the species identified have only been formally described in the past decade, and seven are still awaiting description.

This highlights the urgent need to act before species are listed under the national legislation that gives fishes their conservation status, and even before they’re formally described.

These processes can take many years, at which point it may be too late for some species.

More than half the species on our list are galaxiids – small, scaleless fish, that live in cooler, upland streams and lakes. Trout, an introduced, predatory species, also favour these habitats, and the trout have taken a heavy toll on galaxiids and many other small species in southern Australia.

For example, the Victorian Shaw galaxias has been eaten out of much of its former range. Now just 80 individuals survive, protected by a waterfall from the trout below. We estimate the Shaw galaxias has an 80% chance or more of extinction within the next 20 years.

Read more: Double trouble: this plucky little fish survived Black Summer, but there’s worse to come

Many galaxiids do not thrive or readily breed in captivity, so suitable trout-free streams are essential for their survival.

Improving trout management requires an urgent, sustained conservation effort, including collaborations with recreational fishers, increased awareness and changing values among government and key sectors of society.

Without this, trout will almost certainly cause many native galaxiids to go extinct.

Native fish out of their natural place can also be a problem. For example, sooty and khaki grunters – native fishing species people in northern Australia have widely moved – threatening the ancient Bloomfield River cod.

One disaster can lead to extinction

All of the most imperilled species are now highly localised, which means they’re restricted to very small areas. Their distributions range from only four to 44 square kilometres.

A single catastrophic event could completely wipe out these species, such as a large bushfire that fills their streams with ash and robs them of oxygen.

For example, until 2019 the Yalmy galaxias had survived in the cool creeks of the Snowy River National Park. But after the devastating Black Summer fires, just two individuals survived, one male and one female, in separate areas.

Millions of years of evolution could be lost if a planned reunion is too late.

One of the key steps to reduce this risk is moving fish to new safe locations so there are more populations. Researchers choose these new locations carefully to make sure they’re suitable for different species.

Climate change is another threat to all identified species, as it’s likely to reduce flows and water quality, or increase fires, storms and flooding. Many species have been forced to the edge of their range and a prolonged drought could dry their remaining habitat.

The short-tail galaxias existed in two small separated populations in creeks of the upper Tuross River Catchment, in the south coast of NSW. One stream dried in the recent drought, and the other was burnt in the subsequent fires.

Luckily the species is still hanging on in the burnt catchment, but only a single individual has been found in the drought-affected creek.

Unlisted, unprotected

Our study is part of a larger project to identify plants and animals at high risk of extinction.

We found the extinction risks of the 22 freshwater fish species are much higher than those of the top 20 birds or mammals, yet receive far less conservation effort.

Only three of the highly imperilled fish species are currently listed as threatened under national environmental legislation: the red-finned blue-eye, Swan galaxias and little pygmy perch.

Listing species is vital to provide protection to survivors and can prompt recovery action. Given our research, 19 fish species should urgently be added to the national threatened species list, but conservation action should start now.

Small native freshwater fishes are worth saving. They play a vital role in our aquatic ecosystems, such as predating on pest insect larvae, and are part of our natural heritage.

By identifying and drawing attention to their plight, we are aiming to change their fates. We cannot continue with business as usual if we want to prevent their extinctions.

– ref. Australia’s smallest fish among 22 at risk of extinction within two decades – https://theconversation.com/australias-smallest-fish-among-22-at-risk-of-extinction-within-two-decades-144115

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Somayeh Parvazian, Survey Methodologist, National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER)

The Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) unpack the lives of young Australians as they leave school, enter further study or the workforce and make the transition into adulthood.

The latest findings are now available for the group of young people who completed their first questionnaire back in 2009 at age 15. This group’s 11th and final survey shows young people are completing university at higher rates than ever before, while participation in apprenticeships and traineeships is taking a dive.

Read more: Most young people who do VET after school are in full-time work by the age of 25

The information collected from these groups of students, or “cohorts”, is used to better understand what helps or hinders this transition. This includes things like the effect of schools on year 12 completion, whether government benefits like Youth Allowance help students complete their studies, and the factors that help a young person find full-time work sooner.

Each cohort starts with about 14,000 students in the first survey, or “wave”. From the age of 15 to 25, they complete a 20-minute survey once a year to share what’s been happening in their lives. LSAY asks about their experiences at school, their post-school study and work, as well as their health and home life.

Six cohorts have taken part so far. The recent release of findings from the fifth cohort’s final survey is a milestone, with LSAY data now available across three decades. This means we can study generational changes in transition patterns.

To capture the many changing events or factors that affect young peoples’ transition, the survey has added questions about caring responsibilities, volunteering activities, participation in the gig economy, their personality traits and whether they have access to social support.

Read more: Students’ own low expectations can reinforce their disadvantage

Data dating back to the ’70s

LSAY is one of Australia’s biggest and longest-running panel surveys. More than 60,000 young people have been surveyed since 1995. It’s recognised as one of eight core longitudinal data assets in Australia.

The surveys grew out of the Youth in Transition (YIT) studies in the 1970s. The decade’s oil price shocks caused unemployment to soar, with young people hit the hardest. This created a need to better understand their school-to-work transition in the face of global technological and economic change.

Then came the Australian Longitudinal Surveys (ALS) and Australian Youth Surveys (AYS) in the 1980s. One of the more prominent pieces of research using these data found the aptitude of new teachers fell substantially as teacher pay declined compared to other salaries.

These three longitudinal studies were combined to create the LSAY program.

Read more: If you have a low ATAR, you could earn more doing a VET course than a uni degree – if you’re a man

Researchers mine LSAY for insights

More than 300 published research papers have used LSAY data. The report 25 years of LSAY: Research from the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth showcases some of the highlights.

LSAY research has shown working just a few hours a week while at school improves prospects of getting a full-time job. But working long hours has a slightly negative effect on school completion. The research also found females are better at balancing school and work than their male peers.

Research has also shown that students participating in school-based vocational education and training (VET) had higher rates of school completion, full-time employment and incomes in their first year after school than non-VET students with similar characteristics. Ex-VET students were also more likely to be in a job they liked as a career. These benefits were associated with school-based VET programs with a workplace learning component.

The Productivity Commission used LSAY data to investigate the demand-driven university system. Many disadvantaged students successfully attended university as a result of the expansion of the system. However, those with lower literacy and numeracy were more likely to drop out. The study recognised schools and universities need to do more to prepare and support students, and that university might not always be the best option.

Read more: More students are going to university than before, but those at risk of dropping out need more help

LSAY has been an important source of evidence for policy. National reviews and inquiries informed by LSAY data include the COAG Reform Council’s reporting on youth transitions (2009), the Bradley Review of Higher Education (2008) and the House of Representatives inquiry into combining school and work (2008-2009).

The recent Education Council Review of Senior Secondary Pathways, released in July, draws heavily on LSAY to establish how students can choose the best pathway for their transition from school.

LSAY has a high degree of comparability with international youth surveys. These include the Transition from Education to Employment (TREE) study in Switzerland, the Youth in Transition Survey (YITS) in Canada, the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) in the United States, and Next Steps in the UK.

Most of these have a starting sample of about 9,000 individuals. Next Steps has 16,000. LSAY’s starting sample of 14,000 young Australians makes it one of the largest surveys of its kind in the world.

Tracking lives through the GFC and COVID-19

These datasets enable us to transform a snapshot of a person’s life into a moving picture. Compared with cross-sectional studies, these longitudinal datasets provide a much clearer picture by accounting for personalities, life events and pathways.

Combining a longitudinal study with cohort studies sheds more light on this picture by controlling for inter-generational differences, or crises such as wars, financial downturns or natural disasters.

For example, using data from four LSAY cohorts, one study found the well-being of those whose transitions occurred during the global financial crisis (GFC) was much worse on several measures, including standard of living, home life, career prospects, social life and independence.

The extraordinary challenges Australian youth face as a result of the coronavirus pandemic will be documented when the sixth LSAY cohort, now aged 20, complete their sixth survey in 2020 and further surveys in the years thereafter.

By providing a valuable resource to explore the longer-term effects of this crisis, LSAY continues to stand the test of time.

– ref. A 3-decade ‘moving picture’ of young Australians’ study, work and life, thanks to LSAY – https://theconversation.com/a-3-decade-moving-picture-of-young-australians-study-work-and-life-thanks-to-lsay-141134

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

In the early 1930s a 21-year-old undergraduate at the London School of Economics asked a great question during his summer research project: “if my economics professors are right that markets are an efficient way to allocate resources, then why do firms exist?”

To put it another way, why would an entrepreneur go to the effort of building a company and buying things “in house” rather than just buying them in the market?

That student, Ronald Coase, would go on to win a Nobel prize for his contribution to answering this question.

He suggested markets have the great virtue of the price mechanism, which communicate information about economic fundamentals (like what consumers value) and balances supply and demand. But there are “transaction costs”, and sometimes haggling in the market can be less efficient than, say, a manager simply telling her employees what she wants done.

These insights point to the fundamental problems with Austalia’s university sector in 2020.

We have about 40 “firms” that, as far as domestic undergraduates are concerned, don’t set their own prices, don’t set their own quantities (i.e. the number of students they accept) and are regulated not by the invisible hand of the market but the federal government’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency.

At the same time universities compete in an international marketplace for both students and staff.

This leads to the worst of all worlds. The sector has many of the downsides but none of the benefits of market competition. They are not in control of their own destiny.

The recent round of federal government reform attempts – encouraging students to pursue “job-ready” qualifications by slashing the price of courses such as mathematics, agriculture and nursing while doubling those such as humanities and communications – is incrementalism likely doomed to failure.

There is pressing need for more significant reform.

A crisis that was always coming

Perhaps the place to begin is to acknowledge that both the university sector and the government have legitimate gripes with the current funding model.

Universities can point to a host of perverse incentives – creating unintended negative consequences contrary to what was intended – embedded in the system. In particular, it has encouraged universities to chase full fee-paying international students to cross-subsidise Australian students.

The funding universities receive for domestic undergraduates is insufficient to provide them a world-class education. Research is also underfunded. This has left universities with no choice but to enrol large numbers of foreign students, paying market prices for their education.

The government argues universities might not be preparing students as well as they could for the job market – with too few graduating with the skills the economy demands and too many pursuing degrees in fields they are unlikely to find employment.

To all these points there are responses. I could tell you, for instance, that in nine years at UNSW Sydney I have seen the quality of undergraduates I teach get even better, not worse. But this back and forth rather misses the point.

Read more: Australian universities could lose $19 billion in the next 3 years. Our economy will suffer with them

Warning bells

COVID-19 has simply accelerated a crisis in university funding that was always coming.

There has always been the risk of the Chinese government simply turning off the tap. China has done so to other countries, such as Taiwan in 2017, when it halved the number of students permitted to study there to just 1,000.

In February 2018, Clive Hamilton and others warned about dependence on Chinese students after China issued a “Study Abroad Alert” about Australia being unsafe for Chinese students.

Read more: Without international students, Australia’s universities will downsize – and some might collapse altogether

Two major reforms needed

We need two things.

First, removing the perverse incentives of cross-subsidies in the system.

This will require domestic students paying more for their education through the HECS-HELP loan system. Our “Group of Eight” universities can’t keep charging a quarter of what institutions like Boston University or the University of California San Diego charge and deliver a world-class undergraduate experience. It will also require funding research properly, in part by linking universities and industry more closely.

Read more: Australia can do a better job of commercialising research – here’s how

Second, we need to allow and encourage universities to specialise more. Not every institution needs to be doing research in particle physics, for example. Indeed, not every university needs to being doing research at all.

Universities focusing more on their comparative advantage, in research or teaching, would enable research dollars to be better targeted.

Nor should we continue to insist that all universities charge the same price to students for the same subject matter. Students should be allowed to be the arbiters of what good education looks like, rather than an Excel spreadsheet in Canberra making that determination.

When we come out of COVID-19, economic growth will be at more of a premium than ever before, and harder to come by. Economists have long emphasised the crucial role of human capital and “ideas” developed through research in driving economic growth. We need a high-quality, well-functioning university sector.

Rather than bicker about incremental changes to the system, we need a grand bargain between universities and government that fundamentally reforms the sector. The future of young Australians, and our economy, depends on it.

– ref. Vital Signs: this university funding crisis was always coming – COVID-19 just accelerated it – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-this-university-funding-crisis-was-always-coming-covid-19-just-accelerated-it-144365

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Linden, Sessional Lecturer, PhD (Management) Candidate, School of Management, RMIT University

In this recession, unlike in previous ones, governments have chosen to help pay salaries to keep workers in work rather than pay unemployment benefits when they laid off.

It means that the July unemployment rate revealed on Thursday was 7.5% instead of the 8.3% it would have been had those working zero hours but being paid by JobKeeper been counted as out of work.

This approach has kept employees and firms ready for work at a time when it is far from clear when things will improve.

Implicit in the deal was that firms in need of JobKeeper would behave as if they were in times of immense uncertainty and not pay big dividends to shareholders on the assumption that things were rosy.

It is early in the company reporting season but already there are signs that millions of dollars in increased dividends are being paid out by companies that received millions of dollars of JobKeeper.

As The Guardian’s Ben Butler puts it

what we are seeing is a transfer of millions of dollars from taxpayers – the community at large – to shareholders, some of whom are already quite rich

By supporting the wages of employees in companies at risk, the government freed up money the companies could use to pay shareholders increased dividends rather than fortify themselves against that risk.

It enabled them to shovel out of the door the money the government was shovelling in, leaving themselves no better prepared than before.

And they need to be prepared.

The last thing we need is big dividends

In April the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority wrote to banks and insurers asking them to “seriously consider deferring decisions on the appropriate level of dividends until the outlook is clearer”.

Even where they were confident they had the resources they needed, their dividends should be at a “materially reduced level”.

Perhaps precipitously, it relaxed the guidance on July 29, noting that uncertainty had “reduced somewhat”. A few days later Victoria went into Stage 4 lockdown.

Its new guideline was for banks to retain at least half of their earnings when making decisions on dividends, an instruction the Commonwealth Bank followed to the letter on Wednesday paying out 49.95% of its earnings as dividends.

That night on ABC’s The Business the bank’s chief executive Matt Comyn conceded the outlook was “highly uncertain”.

Earlier that day we learnt that the private sector wage index had stopped for the first time in its 27 year history.

A graph presented to Commonwealth Bank shareholders on Wednesday shows that almost all of the increase in deposits in its accounts comes from government benefits rather than wages and salaries.

Some 10% of all bank loan books are now made up of loans on which borrowers have been granted deferred payments.

Among small businesses, 17% of repayments have been deferred, a proportion set to climb from September as Job keeper subsidies are reduced and withdrawn.

In March the government gave companies temporary relief from rules that prevent them from trading while insolvent.

Read more: The last thing companies should be doing right now is paying dividends

For the moment the change has pushed insolvencies down to an all time low, creating an unknown amount of zombie companies not fully alive but not yet dead.

When the temporary relief expires (September, unless it is extended) there’s talk of an tidal wave of insolvencies.

It raises concerns that for now many companies are announcing dividends that shouldn’t and ordinarily wouldn’t be paid.

Some (not the Commonwealth Bank) are using JobKeeper to pay them.

Why dividends, now of all times?

There is a relationship between dividends, share prices and executive pay. Australian companies that pay out big dividends keep their share prices high.

Many Australians receiving dividend imputation cheques, including many retirees, hold shares because of them.

Without them, share prices would fall and executives would be denied their bonuses.

One way to ensure that there is money available for dividends is to rule out new investments that can’t achieve a high rate of return, meaning money can be paid out to shareholders instead.

Read more: High hurdle rates are holding back businesses, but perhaps they should be

Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe has complained that hurdle rates of 13% to 14% seem to be “hard-wired into the corporate culture in some companies” notwithstanding the record low rates at which they can obtain funds.

In January the head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission Rod Sims warned that unless companies lowered their hurdle rates they would “risk missing investment opportunities to foreign raiders”.

It’s something akin to an undeclared investment strike by corporate Australia, something akin to “heads, shareholders win; tails, employee, creditors and the rest of us lose”.

– ref. For some companies, JobKeeper has become DividendKeeper. They are paying out, even though the future looks awful – https://theconversation.com/for-some-companies-jobkeeper-has-become-dividendkeeper-they-are-paying-out-even-though-the-future-looks-awful-144289

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin John Brophy, Emeritus Professor of Creative writing, University of Melbourne

A friend is sending me documents needed to make me the executor of his will. He does not expect to die from this pandemic but he has enough weaknesses in his body to be fairly sure he would not survive the virus if it gets to him. He is not as old as I am but he is not young either. He is clear-sighted enough to know what he must do now: stay at home. He is also clear-sighted enough to admit into his thinking the common fact of death.

And common fact it is — about 160,000 Australians die in the course of each year —though every death is a particular death and no single death can be quite like another. From a certain distance, it looks as if we must all enter this darkness or this blinding light by the same gate when we die, and from that point of view our common destination is undeniable.

But from another point of view, the one taken in Kafka’s famous parable, Before the Law, each of us stands at a particular gate made for us, a gate no other person can go through. Making a similar point, “Death is a black camel that kneels at every person’s gate”, goes a Turkish proverb.

I am a little shocked by my friend’s matter-of-fact approach to the idea of his death; and I am comforted by his attitude as well. At least he is not leaving matters to bureaucrats or stolid workers who might think his death is much the same as all other deaths.

As a friend, I have always valued him for the no-nonsense realism he brings to bear on our lives, and for the creativity with which he has approached every experience of his life. I tell him I will be happy to sign the documents and, if needed, to act as his executor. He says it will be simple. He has everything in labelled boxes and files.

When I talk to another friend who is a doctor at a Melbourne hospital, she speaks of the bruise on her nose from wearing a tight mask all day every day, of the sweating inside her protective plastic garments, of washing and disinfecting her hands after taking off each item of protective clothing at the end of a shift.

She says she thinks it is only a matter of time before she will be infected with the virus. She is young and her chances of survival are high, she says. I am shocked all over again by the way she thinks — or must think if she is to continue to do this work.

Read more: When life is coming to a close: three common myths about dying

This fearful companion

Another day and there are nearly 2,000 people from aged care homes sick with the virus, and a record number of deaths reported for two days running. Grieving families are interviewed on television and on the radio.

I am living at home now with my death a definite shadow in my mind. I am 70, which makes me vulnerable. Many of us, I know, are in our homes with this fearful companion so full of its own patience and fierce focus.

One mercy is that I don’t have to be worrying about my parents, who both died three years ago after reaching their nineties. Their deaths followed the familiar pattern: a series of falls, an illness that brings pneumonia with it, a descent into morphine assisted sleep, then days of dragging in those last breaths as though they are being counted down.

But their deaths were particular too. My father was exhausted, I believe, and my mother was not ready to go. She fought through to those last breaths with all the fight she had in her.

In 1944 Carl Jung suffered a heart attack after breaking his foot, and was in a coma for three weeks. In a brief memoir of this experience, he describes floating out into near space where he could look down on the planet, then entering a light-filled rock that seemed to be a temple with a room inside where he was sure he would meet all the people who had been important to him, and where he would finally understand what kind of life he had lived.

At the entrance to this room, his doctor called him back to earth where there seemed to be a continuing need for his presence. He had to forego the experience of death, he wrote. He was 69 and he would live for another 17 years. For those who were caring for him, he might have looked like any patient in a coma and near death, but for him this was a particular moment of reckoning and even joyous anticipation.

Watching my parents die was its own shock after witnessing the deterioration in their bodies and minds as they aged, the reduction of their lives to a hospital bed, closed eyes, machines attached, the days-long struggle to breathe. It was almost unbearable to be near this and almost impossible to keep away as the time left became shorter.

Now in the time of this virus a painful new imposition bears down upon the families of the dying for they cannot even stand by the bed of a dying parent or grandparent or partner. The sadness of this immeasurable.

In an essay about death, called On Practice, Michel Montaigne mentioned that “practice is no help in the greatest task we have to perform: dying.”

In this matter we are all apprentices. But is there some way of breaking ourselves in for death, or must we always work and work to keep both death and the thought of death at bay?

Read more: Guide to the classics: Michel de Montaigne’s Essays

When my sister died of cancer at 49, I remember her patting our young daughter’s hand the day before she died, saying to her, “Don’t cry, I’ll be all right. I promise you I will be all right.”

At the time I thought she was in denial, or that perhaps she thought that she needed to protect us from the heavy presence of death.

But now I think she might have been looking past us and even past herself: we do die and it is all right — and every living thing that moves only moves under the condition of its coming death. She might have been seeing this well enough to embrace its truth. I don’t know.

‘A second, a minute, longer’

Today the sun was out, a low winter sun sparkling through the twisted branches of our back yard ornamental pear trees, and I could not resist going out into the sunshine to weed around the carrots and beetroot, and take up the last of the autumn leaves from under the parsley bushes. I felt lucky to have these few minutes with the warmth of the sun on the back of my neck.

I have been reading Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer, and somewhere near the end she records the words of a physicist dying of cancer from the Chernobyl fallout. He said,

I thought I only had days, a very few days, left to live, and I desperately wanted not to die. I was suddenly seeing every leaf, bright colours, a bright sky, the vivid grey of tarmac, the cracks in it with ants clambering about in them. ‘No,’ I thought to myself, ‘I need to walk round them.’ I pitied them. I did not want them to die. The aroma of the forest made me feel dizzy. I perceived smell more vividly than colour. Light birch trees, ponderous firs. Was I never to see this anymore? I wanted to live a second, a minute longer!

This reaction is deeply understandable, and each of us shares this feeling, even if only faintly, every morning that we find we have the world in our world again — for perhaps a whole day. Each time I read that paragraph I misread “I desperately wanted not to die” as “I desperately wanted to die”.

This urge to stay at home is almost matched by the urge to be out in the world rubbing shoulders with crowds. The desire to save my own life is mixed somehow with a desire to have it over with. My misreading troubles me, but it keeps happening.

A woman I know who is 30 years old answers, when I ask her how she feels about the growing numbers of aged victims to this pandemic, that there need to be more public “death-positive” campaigns in order to make death a more natural part of life in our culture — to make of it something we need not fear so much or become so angry over.

Though she speaks as if death belongs to other kinds of being than her, she makes some good sense because this is the other side of our attitude to death. Sometimes I lie in bed and count the likely number of days I might have left to me, and it always seems both a lot and not enough. And then I forget what the number was because after all, how can there even be a world without me in it?

Some years ago our dear neighbour Anna said she had decided it was time for her to die. There was nothing else she wanted. We had watched her nurse her husband through dementia for a decade, we had many afternoon teas with her as she fussed over our children and showed us the latest thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle she was completing. She talked about the books she was reading. And then one day she was ready to go.

Not long after that I visited her, more or less unconscious in a hospital bed. My amazement at her decision to go. But now, as I inch closer to old age, I imagine I might be able to understand how her decision was as much a matter of the mind as the body.

An American news service has reported that across 24 hours one person every minute died in the United States from Covid-19. I am not sure how to understand this kind of counting. It conjures images of queues of bodies, of frantic funeral directors and grieving families. It speeds up the mind and produces in me a feeling of panic.

Every minute across each day of the year about seven babies are born in the USA. A lot happens in a minute across a whole nation. Numbers tell a certain kind of story, the heart tells another, but sometimes the numbers are aimed at the heart.

If not death-positive, then perhaps we could be death-realistic. Svetlana Alexievich talked to children in cancer wards. A dying child named Oxana spoke of what she desired: “When I die, don’t bury me in a graveyard. I’m afraid of cemeteries. There are only dead people there, and crows. Bury me in open countryside.”

It is possible to know we are afraid, and know at the same time that this fear is a fear up to the brink of death, and beyond that we can go with our imaginations into an open countryside.

I am afraid, as we all are. When my daughter asks what she should do with my ashes after I am gone, the fiction we play at is that I will care what happens to “my” ashes, that it will make a difference to me, and that “I” will still be somewhere when she makes that decision.

I can never compose a clear set of instructions for her, though I know that putting those ashes somewhere in nature, perhaps out on water or under a tree, would fit with an idea I have of how the journey is best completed.

Intense light

With a state of disaster formally declared and a curfew at night for all the citizens of our city, the word, “disaster”, might seem to mark an endpoint. But it has become the sign for a new beginning and a new campaign.

With these new plans in place, drastic though they are, the possibility opens for believing, perhaps naively, that there will be a time when death does not dominate our thinking, that the virus will be a memory of a time we negotiated, a dark passage of intense narrowness before coming out of it into an open countryside. Perhaps as faltering human beings we must live this way: repeatedly imagining in hope of further scenes of rebirth.

When we know as fully as it can be known that we are each on a sure way to our own particular death, perhaps then we are already in that open countryside. My partner Andrea and I walked in the sunshine today to a park where we met, briefly, with our son, who stood well away from us, all of us in masks.

We talked about everything that is small, inconsequential, funny and ordinary in our lives. Two of us will have birthdays under this extended lockdown. We did not mention death, but everything we said was bathed in its intense light.

Our duties

I receive emails offering support and good wishes from friends interstate and around the world for the six weeks of lockdown. There is a shift in attitude and mood away from blame and towards support. We have a difficult time ahead of us. The street falls still and silent at night. I have a list of books to read, old papers to go through and throw out, but before that I find I wake up ill.

When I ring a doctor friend for advice he tells me he is COVID-19 positive himself, contracted in one of Melbourne’s aged care homes, and is in quarantine at home for two weeks. So far, into day six, he is feeling not too bad. In anticipation of this he says he has been keeping fit, eating well, and taking zinc tablets. My friend advises me to go to an emergency ward at a nearby hospital, and I do, though with much nervousness.

I am the only person in the emergency waiting area when I arrive, and am soon inside with a nurse in a cubicle, having urine and blood tests. Everyone is in plastic, masked, and across the aisle from me there are three police officers guarding a prisoner with shackles at his ankles and one arm pinned by a padlock to a wide leather belt. All three police are masked and one wears bright orange ocean swimming goggles as well.

In the emergency centre, I feel that I am both in the midst of an unfolding crisis and present at a theatre-in-the-round performance. A woman in a wheelchair asks loudly what everyone’s name is and what their job is. When one man says he is the director of the emergency centre she laughs loud and long, as though she has somehow caught the biggest fish in the river and doesn’t believe it.

Someone asks her if she wants some lunch, and she announces that she is starving and could they make up a bacon and fried egg sandwich for her followed by a crunchy peanut butter sandwich.

I am released from the emergency ward with blood and urine samples left for analysis, but without being tested for COVID-19 because I showed no specific symptoms.

Read more: ‘I want to stare death in the eye’: why dying inspires so many writers and artists

My time in the hospital is a reminder to me of how far I am from the world now. A workplace, I realise afresh, can be dizzyingly busy, chaotic, packed with humanity and with unpredictable moments of basic care for fellow humans, of suffering, and those bizarre sights worthy of a circus or an opera. I have become so used to moving between two or three rooms at home and going outside only to go into the garden, that I am in a panic here in the hospital over doorknobs, sheets, chairs or curtains that I’m touching — and at the same time I feel that this closeness to others is what being alive is really about.

Returning home I have to keep reminding myself that it is in this quiet, almost passive way of living that I am doing something needed. It might be that this social isolation, one from another, is a plague response from the middle ages, but without it, we are told, modern hospitals, ventilators and ICUs will be overwhelmed. There is an intimate, human response needed to this virus. It forces an honesty upon us.

If this social isolation is now one of life’s duties, it goes along beside all the other duties, and among them is the fact that dying is one of our duties. This is an old thought, and perhaps a pagan thought.

Seneca the Younger wrote of this duty in the first century of the Christian era. Would it be too heartless to say that in the presence of so much death and illness we might now be capable of being driven into a new and eerie awareness of what it is like to be alive?

I can envy the vivid, raw consciousness of the man Alexievich quoted, the man who “desperately wanted not to die”, while feeling something desperately hopeless for him too. Perhaps a part of this being alive to dying is being able to hold and carry more than one feeling at once, and especially the contradictory feelings.

This morning Andrea called me to come and look at our second yellow poppy bursting out from her planter box in the back yard. It stands slender on its hairy stalk, its papery petals a shocking splash of colour against its perfect background, a winter sky.

– ref. Friday essay: on reckoning with the fact of one’s death – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-on-reckoning-with-the-fact-of-ones-death-143822

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

The state of aged care preparation in the era of COVID is, it seems, in the eye of the beholder.

Vastly different claims emerged this week, when the royal commission examining the sector turned its attention to the handling of the pandemic.

According to senior counsel assisting the commission, Peter Rozen, QC, federal authorities had no COVID plan specifically for aged care, always potentially a major risk area. And, Rozen noted, compared with many countries, a very high proportion of Australia’s deaths have been residents of facilities.

The government disputes the lack-of-plan allegation and has a different take on the statistics.

Brendan Murphy, secretary of the health department and until recently Australia’s chief medical officer, appearing before the commission, insisted there had been proper planning, and said the death proportion reflected not a failure in aged care but the low number of fatalities in the general community.

If you were taking a bet on who most people would believe, Rozen would be short odds.

Morrison knows the government is highly vulnerable on the issue. Aged care is a federal responsibility. It affects millions of Australians, counting those with relatives in homes. People’s anger buttons are easily triggered when things go wrong.

Some around the government might like to discount Rozen’s attack as being what counsels-assisting do at royal commissions. But his claims were backed by witnesses, from highly-regarded geriatrician Joseph Ibrahim, of Monash University, to union officials with members on the front line.

They also resonated after the numerous first hand accounts in the media from families as the virus has ripped through well over a hundred facilities in Victoria. Currently, there are more than 1000 cases among residents and over 1000 among staff, linked to these homes.

Politicians have been congratulated during COVID for listening to experts, but according to Ibrahim there was not enough aged care expertise applied in the preparations to firewall the sector.

It’s hard if not impossible, anyway, to build adequate safeguards when the structure itself is so compromised, due to bad decisions and neglect over many years.

Read more: Royal Commission into Aged Care reminds Health Department Secretary Brendan Murphy it sets the rules

A sector operating with low paid, often short term, casuals who pick up work across facilities and often have inadequate English (complicating even basic training) was always inviting disaster.

Health minister Greg Hunt declared recently, after Dan Andrews said he wouldn’t want his mother to be in some of these places: “The idea that our carers, that our nurses are not providing that care, I think, is a dangerous statement to make. They are wonderful human beings and I won’t hear a word against them.”

This misses the point. No one doubts the commitment the majority of the carers have to their work. But the nature of the workforce brings dangers for residents.

Many facilities run on narrow financial margins. The rules allow them to keep their staffing to a minimum, in terms of numbers and skill.

Nor has regulatory oversight been adequate. Often it is families and the media that have exposed neglect and abuses. Morrison announced the royal commission in September 2018 a day before an ABC Four Corners investigation was to air.

The for-profit system emphasises the idea of facilities being “home-like”, which sounds great but can mean inadequate specialised care and challenges for inflection control.

The word “tragic” is thrown around too much by politicians and media. But what’s happened in aged care during COVID has indeed been a tragedy.

It’s just possible if the pandemic had come two years later, after next year’s final report of the royal commission had forced some reform, that fewer lives would have been lost. But even with the system as it is, the evidence indicates better planning could have saved lives.

That’s certainly Ibrahim’s view. In his precis of evidence, he argued “hundreds of residents will die prematurely because people failed to act”.

“We had enough knowledge to do better. We failed because when residents are treated as second class citizens there is an absence of accountability and consequences for those responsible for aged care in Australia,” he said.

There was “failure to provide the same health response to residential aged care that was delivered to the rest of Australia.”

The government has been playing catchup on aged care all through the pandemic. It had to put substantial money in to help with staffing; it was slow to acknowledge the importance of masks; it set up a co-ordinated response in Victoria belatedly; national cabinet only a week ago stepped up preparations in other parts of the country.

Morrison is now confronted at two levels: there must be root and branch reform after the royal commission, and his government is under immediate pressure over this week’s indictment.

The government’s tactic of inserting Murphy into the commission’s witness list was a miscalculation.

It seemed to assume the commission would defer to Murphy when he sought to make a statement to reject Rozen’s claims. But he was refused permission to commence with the statement (which he delivered at the end of the session) and all his appearance did was highlight the government’s sensitivity.

When he summed up the COVID hearings on Thursday, Rozen did not resile from his initial criticisms. He concluded the problems in aged care had been foreseeable; “not all that could be done was done”; and the challenge remained.

Picking up a recommendation from Ibrahim, Rozen urged an “age-care specific national co-ordinating body to advise government”. It would bring together expertise in aged care, infection control and emergency preparedness.

With such a body, “a national aged care plan for COVID could still be put in place,” Rozen said.

Read more: Government rejects Royal Commission’s claim of no aged care plan, as commission set to grill regulator

Although the advisory body is not a formal recommendation, commissioner Tony Pagone endorsed it among “practical things that perhaps should not wait.”

“The virus doesn’t wait and nor should the measures that need to be implemented to deal with the virus wait either”, Pagone said.

The government, which has previously signalled more assistance for aged care in the budget, should stop insisting it has done everything well and act immediately on this and some of the other suggestions made in the COVID hearings.

Morrison said this week in a Facebook message, “I want to assure that where there are shortcomings in these areas they’ll be acknowledged. And the lessons will be learned.”

The government likes to talk about wanting a reform agenda, but this should not be just an economic one. Aged care must be near the top of any serious “reform” to-do list, and vested interests should not be allowed to limit necessary changes.

In his end-of-year ministerial reshuffle, prompted by Mathias Cormann deciding to quit parliament, Morrison should elevate the aged care portfolio from the outer ministry to cabinet.

Having the post in cabinet would send a positive signal but, more importantly, it would encourage a wider range of ministerial eyes on an issue that’s been mishandled for as long as anyone can remember.

Veterans’ affairs is in cabinet, and most families would think aged care is just as worthy of a place.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Morrison government needs to improve, rather than defend, its poor COVID aged care performance – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-morrison-government-needs-to-improve-rather-than-defend-its-poor-covid-aged-care-performance-144447

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Welch, Senior lecturer, University of Auckland

Genetic surveillance — a technology that uses the genetic fingerprint of a virus to track its spread — is part of the public health response to New Zealand’s new COVID-19 community outbreak and could help pinpoint its source.

There are now 17 cases of community transmission, all in Auckland, and health officials are treating the group as a single cluster, with an expectation that case numbers will grow.

Ideally, we should be sequencing all positive test swabs, regardless of whether they are found at the border or in the community. The community cases could then be compared to all other cases to find a close match. This would suggest a likely chain of transmission, help with contact tracing and reveal the sequence of the outbreak.

But not all samples are currently sequenced. In total, New Zealand had 1225 confirmed cases of COVID-19, and about 700 of the positive samples have been sequenced.

I argue the Ministry of Health should now make genetic sequencing mandatory. Here’s why.

Tracking epidemics using genomes

Genetic surveillance of infectious diseases is a maturing technology that has played a major role in the effort to control the Ebola and Zika epidemics, and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

We can now obtain a complete viral genome quickly and cheaply to identify mutations that provide clues about transmission chains.

Cases that are part of the same transmission chain will have genomes that look very similar: they share the same mutations compared to a reference genome. Cases from different transmission chains have genomes with differing patterns of mutations.

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, does not have a particularly high mutation rate. It acquires mutations at about half the rate of seasonal influenza, but it mutates fast enough to leave a signal of where it has come from.

Read more: ‘Genomic fingerprinting’ helps us trace coronavirus outbreaks. What is it and how does it work?

This brings us to how this is helping in our efforts to control the current community outbreak.

There are four main theories about where the new cases could have come from:

Read more: Masking the outbreak: despite New Zealand’s growing COVID-19 cases, there are more ways to get back to elimination faster

The genomes of the new cases could identify the first scenario of a quarantine leak if we found a match between viral genomes from people in quarantine and in the new cluster. This relies on comprehensive sequencing of all cases in quarantine, but currently, there are still gaps.

Similarly, in the unlikely scenario of a transmission chain that has persisted since New Zealand’s first wave, we’d expect a match with one of the cases sequenced during the first outbreak, although the genomes would have diverged somewhat over that period of time.

The scenarios of transmission through goods or an undetected border case are more difficult to decipher using genomic methods. We would be looking to match the viral genome from the new local cases to one of more than 80,000 publicly available genomes that have been sampled worldwide. This would point to a country of origin but not necessarily distinguish between the scenarios.

Early results from sequencing of the first four cases from the new Auckland cluster suggest no link to a known (sequenced) New Zealand case, and the UK as the closest match. For now, this leaves all possibilities still open.

Ongoing surveillance

With widespread testing now underway, new cases will be identified in the community over the coming weeks. It is important that they are rapidly sequenced to determine whether they belong to the same transmission chain.

Genomic analysis will tell us whether we are dealing with a single or multiple clusters. Even the best contact tracing cannot be sure of the origin of an infection, and supplementing it with genomic data is crucial.

But genomic analysis is not limited to establishing transmission chains. It can also tell us about the overall size of an outbreak, which is directly related to the genomic diversity of the virus. We can also date events to establish when transmission started within a cluster, provided there is sufficient diversity in the cluster.

The genomes we have so far in New Zealand show a huge diversity of cases, with many introductions from around the globe. Indeed, the diversity of early samples largely reflects the diversity of the virus globally, with most cases that led to further transmission coming from North America and Australia in line with travel patterns to New Zealand.

Most introductions did not result in further community transmission. This shows how effective New Zealand’s first lockdown was, when transmission rates declined dramatically soon after level 3 and 4 measures were put in place.

Genomes were also used in real time during the first outbreak to help attribute cases to clusters. Retrospectively, this has shown that contact tracing was effective, with relatively few cases being wrongly attributed.

But genome analysis is neither foolproof nor a panacea. Sometimes positive samples are found that cannot be sequenced because they contain only a small amount of viral material. The rather slow rate of mutation of Sars-COV-2 means many cases are essentially carrying identical copies of the virus, even across different countries.

This greatly reduces our ability to attribute an infection to a particular outbreak. There are also real computational bottlenecks – data is generated faster than we can sensibly analyse it.

Despite these limitations, genomic surveillance gives us near real-time insights into the spread of COVID-19 that were not possible in any previous pandemic. That’s why I argue it’s time for the Ministry of Health to now make immediate genetic sequencing mandatory for all positive test swabs in New Zealand, not just some.

– ref. Why New Zealand needs to focus on genome sequencing to trace the source of its new COVID-19 outbreak – https://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-needs-to-focus-on-genome-sequencing-to-trace-the-source-of-its-new-covid-19-outbreak-144402